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Definition
growth by addition — especially naturally and gradually- "We both know the figure for storm accretion," Hawat said.Frank Herbert -- Dune
- If its process of accretion is never halted, if the balancing stage is never reached, there will be no toppling.Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie
- Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence.Eudora Welty -- One Writer's Beginnings
- By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1
- By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
- They passed into a slightly more overgrown stretch of road, the kind that existed between two commercial areas and that gradually, by accretion, would be eliminated by another strip mall or auto parts store.Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones
- She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, tie distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.William Faulkner -- As I Lay Dying
- Like all the older children of Major Pentland she had, since her twentieth year, begun the slow accretion of land: from the savings of her small wage as teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased one or two pieces of earth.Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- In other words, was there some original master story for any particular myth from which all subsequent stories—pallid imitations—are "displacements," or does the myth take shape by slow accretion as variant story versions are told and retold over time?Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor
- They are all represented heavily, but they indicate neither the earliest nor the most formidable accretion, for underlying them are many Dutch [Pg270] names, /e. g./, /Zeeman/ and /Zuurmond/, and over them are a large number of Slavic, Italian and Jewish names.Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language
- The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence
- I was sure that mine about Everest was not mine alone; the highest point on earth, unattainable, foreign to all experience, was there for many boys and grown men to aspire toward, Thomas F Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge The actual particulars of the event are unclear, obscured by the accretion of myth.Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air
- The house shows its centuries of accretion: a jade tower on the east courtyard catching the first light of dawn, a series of gables on the south wing throwing triangles of shadow on the crystal conservatory at teatime, the balconies and maze of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher games with afternoon's shadows.Dan Simmons -- Hyperion
- ...in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say to there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat...William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!
- The mass would be likely to remain nearly the same, assimilating constantly to itself its gradual accretions.Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay -- The Federalist Papers
- Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts.Virginia Woolf -- The Waves
- Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped.E.M. Forster -- Howards End
- She says if we laundered the term properly she'd put it on, but it's too covered with cultural accretions for comfort.Joy Kogawa -- Obasan
- His knuckle tattoos, I was pretty sure, had jailhouse significance: inked bands indicating time sentenced, time served, time marked in accretions like rings on a tree.Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch