dissemble

Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in it;

William Shakespeare -- Twelfth Night

It must have been a self-preserving instinct which had made us keep the thing to ourselves, for we’d no active feeling of danger — I had so little, in fact, that when Uncle Axel found me sitting behind a rick chatting apparently to myself, I made very little effort to dissemble.

John Wyndham -- The Chrysalids

Dissembling villain, thou speak’st false in both.

William Shakespeare -- The Comedy of Errors

...Good now, play one scene
Of excellent dissembling, and let it look
Like perfect honor.

William Shakespeare -- Antony and Cleopatra

Think you my uncle did dissemble, grandam?

William Shakespeare -- The Life and Death of King Richard III

He was not good at dissembling and he was very well understood.

John Steinbeck -- The Pearl

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You can’t dissemble."

Harper Lee -- Go Set a Watchman

His judgments were strict and fair, and none could sway him through falsehood or dissembling.

Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind

Though I’d tried to stay away from them as much as I could (as skilled a dissembler as I was, I could barely be civil to him; everything about him, his pinkish skin, his nervous laugh, the hair sprouting out the cuffs of his shirt sleeves, made me want to jump on him and knock his horsey English teeth out; and wouldn’t that be a surprise, I thought grimly, glaring at him across the table, if old antique-dealing Specs hauled off and busted his eggs for him?

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

George Orwell -- 1984

Oh, enough of this dissembling.

Yann Martel -- Life of Pi

What wicked and dissembling glass of mine Made me compare with Hermia’s sphery eyne?

William Shakespeare -- A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Even under the greatest duress, my capability to dissemble was scarcely diminished.

Homer Hickam -- October Sky

When we had passed the castle, we fell a fishing; but though I knew there was a bite, I dissembled the matter, in order to put out further to sea.

Daniel Defoe -- Robinson Crusoe

You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken.

Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice

Monks cast a look of hate, which, even then, he could not dissemble, at the astonished boy, and sat down near the door.

Charles Dickens -- Oliver Twist

But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

Shall I dissemble what I feel?

Homer -- The Odyssey

Are you such a good dissembler?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- Crime and Punishment

And the sinner who heard dissembled not, but directed toward me his mind and his face, and was painted with dismal shame.

Dante Alighieri -- Dante’s Inferno

Of all thy suitors here I charge thee tell Whom thou lov’st best: see thou dissemble not.

William Shakespeare -- The Taming of the Shrew

"You arrive in good time, monsieur," said the king, who, when his passions were raised to a certain point, could not dissemble; "I have learned some fine things concerning your Musketeers."

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

That way she’ll dissemble her pleasure.

John Steinbeck -- East of Eden

She had lived too long among people who dissembled politely not to feel disturbed at hearing her own thoughts put into words.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

He could dissemble and resist no longer.

J.R.R. Tolkien -- The Two Towers

He was a dissembling prince, but one who understood far better how to hide his troubles than his joys.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Around here, nothing is exempt from dissembling questions and critical examination-not even religion itself.

Ron Suskind -- A Hope in the Unseen

"Perhaps," added the scout, losing his dissembled coolness exactly in proportion as the other manifested an indifference to the exchange, "if I should condition to teach your young men the real virtue of the we’pon, it would smoothe the little differences in our judgments."

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Last of the Mohicans

Now at the first broaching of the matter Captain Vere, taken by surprise, could not wholly dissemble his disquietude.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

Marry, thou dost wrong me; thou dissembler, thou.

William Shakespeare -- Much Ado About Nothing

His very hair is of the dissembling colour.

William Shakespeare -- As You Like It

She had not been much of a dissembler, until now her loneliness taught her to feign.

William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair

But in this, our last interview of friendship, I approached her with a sense of guilt that almost took from me the power of dissembling.

Jane Austen -- Sense and Sensibility

ROS leaps up, dissembling madly.

Tom Stoppard -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

He dissembled, and got quickly to bed.

D.H. Lawrence -- Sons and Lovers

The cup went round amid the well-dissembled applause of the courtiers, which, however, failed to make the impression on the mind of the Saxon that had been designed.

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

PENTASHIELD: a five-layer shield-generator field suitable for small areas such as doorways or passages (large reinforcing shields become increasingly unstable with each successive layer) and virtually impassable to anyone not wearing a dissembler tuned to the shield codes.

Frank Herbert -- Dune

Catherine answered, dissembling for the first time in her life.

Henry James -- Washington Square

It is better to dissemble your wrong and not give this wicked man the chance of entering the house now and finding us alone; consider, senora, we are weak women and he is a man, and determined, and as he comes with such a base purpose, blind and urged by passion, perhaps before you can put yours into execution he may do what will be worse for you than taking your life.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

Noting her dissembled distress Jude kissed her, and said it was time to go and see if the lodgings were ready.

Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure

Incorrigible, said Dr. Bannerling, a devious dissembler.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.

Nicolo Machiavelli -- The Prince

I dissembled.

Megan Whalen Turner -- The Thief

"Let us not trivialize or dissemble," he said.

Dan Simmons -- Hyperion

But all those thoughts lasted for no more than a second, the time that it took him to raise his hand to his heart, to draw breath again and to contrive to smile, so as to dissemble his torment.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage, appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper.

Edith Wharton -- The House of Mirth