DETESTABLE in sample sentences

Thomas Hickey, you have been court-martialed and found guilty of the capital crimes of mutiny and sedition, of holding a treacherous correspondence with, and receiving pay from, the enemy for the most horrid and detestable purposes, and you have been sentenced to hang from the neck until dead.

Laurie Halse Anderson -- Chains

Finalement, they leave that detestable apartment in Madrid!

Khaled Hosseini -- And The Mountains Echoed

Most detestable death, by thee beguil’d, By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown!

William Shakespeare -- Romeo and Juliet

The universal response was, that the fare was detestable, and that they wanted to be set free.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

J. is a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip who thinks she’s so grown-up.

Anne Frank -- The Diary of a Young Girl

Kill me if thou wilt, detestable Huron; I will go no further.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Last of the Mohicans

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They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and flapped their arms and crowed.

Jack London -- The Call of the Wild

Hindley is a detestable substitute — his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious — H. and I are going to rebel — we took our initiatory step this evening.

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights

He didn’t suffer, as many "honest men" do, from the detestable righteousness that diminishes their virtue.

Maya Angelou -- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable.

Robert Louis Stevenson -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.’

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

It was a tradition which my father’s father introduced and which generally turned into pretty detestable affairs.

Stieg Larsson -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

What is passable in youth is detestable in later age.

Jane Austen -- Emma

Oh, he was detestable!

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

Let him mind his own business and leave a poor girl— THE NOTE TAKER [explosively] Woman: cease this detestable boohooing instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship.

George Bernard Shaw -- Pygmalion

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a "detestable army."

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Now tell me, Anselmo, in which of these two art thou imperilled, that I should hazard myself to gratify thee, and do a thing so detestable as that thou seekest of me?

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi — were they not, mama?

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.

Joseph Conrad -- Heart of Darkness

I know thee not, nor ever saw till now Sight more detestable than him and thee.

John Milton -- Paradise Lost

Even so, your worship—for, as I said before, as to that detestable joint, the babe unborn is no whit more blameless than—

Mark Twain -- The Prince and The Pauper

"Yes," said the Abbe, "but it means nothing, for they complain of everything with great fits of laughter; they even do the most detestable things while laughing."

Voltaire -- Candide

As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation was so far from exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she considered it as the death warrant of all possibility of common sense for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her were it known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her go.

Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice

I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos’d, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor.

Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

If the room had suddenly been flooded with electric light, I couldn’t have seen more clearly the detestable bearded countenance that I knew was bending over me.

Willa Cather -- My Antonia

Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us.

C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror.

Robert Louis Stevenson -- Treasure Island

He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.

Henry James -- The Turn of the Screw

It would be easy to lie to you; but the truth is I think it detestable.

Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence

Further, the culinary wizard of such a place as the Overlook, which advertised in the resort section of the New York Sunday Times, should be small, rotund, and pasty-faced (rather like the Pillsbury Dough-Boy); he should have a thin pencilline mustache like a forties musical comedy star, dark eyes, a French accent, and a detestable personality.

Stephen King -- The Shining

Could anything be more detestable?

George Eliot -- The Mill on the Floss

The prince, on the contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself abroad less European than he was in reality.

Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina

Anything to vary this detestable monotony.

Charles Dickens -- Bleak House

"Vile murderous hag!" replied Front-de-Boeuf; "detestable screech-owl! it is then thou who art come to exult over the ruins thou hast assisted to lay low?"

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable specimen.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

It was unthinkable, it was detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again.

Virginia Woolf -- To the Lighthouse

It was a detestable shanty near a low bazaar.

E.M. Forster -- A Passage to India

You are to thank your brother and me for the scheme; it darted into our heads at breakfast-time, I verily believe at the same instant; and we should have been off two hours ago if it had not been for this detestable rain.

Jane Austen -- Northanger Abbey

I am robb’d, sir, and beaten; my money and apparel ta’en from me, and these detestable things put upon me.

William Shakespeare -- The Winter’s Tale

He was a detestable creature.

Stephen Crane -- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

I have a vague impression that they were detestable.

Oscar Wilde -- An Ideal Husband

Even the detestable Mao Zedong gave permission for our police to purge it.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy

But this seemed to her to be a horror—a wantonness, all the more detestable to her, because she so detested Florence.

Ford Madox Ford -- The Good Soldier