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ambiguous
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  • Mother began to muscle-test compulsively, unaware she was doing it, whenever she grew tired of a conversation, whenever the ambiguities of her memory, or even just those of normal life, left her unsatisfied.†   (source)
  • He'd got hold of his business through cheating the Jews, said Reenie in an ambiguous tone — was this something of a feat, in her books?†   (source)
  • To this outburst, my grandmother neither shook nor nodded her head; she looked at the ceiling, ambiguously—either seeking restraint or patience there, or seeking some possible sense, which Martha had found to be lacking.†   (source)
  • America keeps sending these ambiguous messages.†   (source)
  • Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty.†   (source)
  • "Not at all," he replied ambiguously, reaching for a pair of crutches which leaned against the desk.†   (source)
  • How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity?†   (source)
  • In 1999, President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) issued a report saying that federal oversight of tissue research was "inadequate" and "ambiguous."†   (source)
  • It seemed only the rankest luck that the letter to Hobie had been so ambiguous.†   (source)
  • His own uncertainty about his characters might add an appealing touch of ambiguity to his original ending.†   (source)
  • But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts had indicated the presence of a Christ-oriented culture there, six hundred light-years from Old Earth, almost three thousand years before man left the surface of the homeworld… Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which would have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our life-time?†   (source)
  • An added bonus here is the lack of ambiguity in fairy tales.†   (source)
  • She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Because Mylex is itself a suspect material, the results tended to be ambiguous and a second round of more rigorous detection had to be scheduled.†   (source)
  • An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said.†   (source)
  • And I followed this with a suitably modest smile to indicate without ambiguity that I had made a witticism, since I did not wish Mr Farraday to restrain any spontaneous mirth he felt out of a misplaced respectfulness.†   (source)
  • "You don't really have to eat, do you?" he asked, as he began to ladle something into his bowl that resembled a thin seafood soup, with squid and fish and other more ambiguous delicacies.†   (source)
  • "You're as safe as I can make you," I said ambiguously.†   (source)
  • The strangest of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with an ambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings.†   (source)
  • It was as though Jupiter in all his descendant forms retreated into the maternal darkness to be superseded by a female immanence filled with ambiguity and with a face of many terrors.†   (source)
  • He had been thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality.†   (source)
  • Everything else is ambiguous.†   (source)
  • Her answer would be so obscure or ambiguous that the priests would have to interpret it.†   (source)
  • Clinton," he had said, when Henry ventured to inquire about a particularly ambiguous examination, "you may write until doomsday for all I care, but if your answers do not coincide with my answers they are wrong.†   (source)
  • —had left her prey to ambiguities whose power she had never glimpsed before.†   (source)
  • I then added somewhat ambiguously, "Perhaps something good will come of this.†   (source)
  • Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead.†   (source)
  • Social scientists refer to the state of being between worlds as liminality, which the anthropologist Victor Turner described as the state in which a person "becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state."†   (source)
  • The time for ambiguity has passed,asserted Eragon.†   (source)
  • Hands on knees, he bent to study the face of the new-born, that countenance so ambiguous to our eyes, scarce stamped yet with the common seal of humanity.†   (source)
  • "Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming."†   (source)
  • Neth and Momm underscore that many prostitutes are neither acting freely nor enslaved, but living in a world etched in ambiguities somewhere between those two extremes.†   (source)
  • Unlike most mythical flights, which clearly imply triumph, in the attempt if not the success, Solomon's escape, the insurance man's jump, and Milkman's leap are ambiguous, disturbing.†   (source)
  • The count decorated it according to his personal taste, with a decadent, ambiguous refinement that startled Blanca, accustomed as she was to country life and her father's classical sobriety.†   (source)
  • Before meeting Yossarian, there was no one in the group with whom he felt at ease, and he was hardly at ease with Yossarian, whose frequent rash and insubordinate outbursts kept him almost constantly on edge and in an ambiguous state of enjoyable trepidation.†   (source)
  • The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.†   (source)
  • That was Shiva: he hated ambiguity, and he wanted things cut and dried.†   (source)
  • She's gone for a while, and as I wait the ambiguity she left in the booth curdles its way into the deepest part of me.†   (source)
  • I made an ambiguous gesture.†   (source)
  • And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk-creating another ambiguity to puzzle my groping mind: Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?†   (source)
  • Though in agreement that time was of the essence, Washington knew that congressional approval was needed and that there must be no ambiguity over whether his authority extended beyond the immediate theater of war.†   (source)
  • Through legal maneuvers, using ambiguous phrases in the military code regarding civilians, I saved him from a dishonorable discharge, but "Get on with your business," said the capo supremo named Louis, his voice low and flat and filled with hatred.†   (source)
  • Lourdes abhors ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Shade deliberately courted ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Ciphus clearly wasn't up to defying the people under such ambiguous circumstances.†   (source)
  • It seemed to Alessandro that the doctor was taking refuge in ambiguity, until De Roos said, "She's insanely beautiful.†   (source)
  • He experienced a few ambiguous symptoms on a job site, was all, and De'Ontay insisted on driving him to the emergency room.†   (source)
  • This ambiguity seems to result from the conflict between totally excluding them and the belief that an absolute exclusion would be unsafe.†   (source)
  • Eldeluc had used the ambiguity of his statement as a tease, but he didn't want to push Kessell into a dangerous state of doubt.†   (source)
  • But she drew Bloomberg slightly closer to her and gave him an odd, ambiguous little hug.†   (source)
  • Don't ask questions that have ambiguous answers.†   (source)
  • Its quiet ambiguity shifted over, in the months after the call, to what had been revived: memories of his face, body, things he'd given her, things she had now and then pretended not to've heard him say.†   (source)
  • It was an ambiguous question mark.†   (source)
  • The comment was ambiguous, and intended so,†   (source)
  • And it was with a peculiarly ambiguous effort, following a barely perceptible decision, that I twitched the fingers of my left hand sufficiently to bring them into the flame itself.†   (source)
  • He was well dressed, almost elegant, the beard neatly trimmed, the grayish blond hair curling around his ears like the locks of an angel of ambiguous allegiance.†   (source)
  • The big boy made some ambiguous noise and they turned and walked off toward the barn, leaving her there with a shocked look as if she had had a searchlight thrown on her in the: middle of the night.†   (source)
  • It is all treachery and ambiguity.†   (source)
  • This whole sudden errand was so uncertain, so ambiguous that it was hard for either of them to hold a focused state of mind about it.†   (source)
  • Sometimes he looked up in the town where he was young and said something strangely spiteful or ambiguous (he was never reconciled to his father, they said, was sarcastic to the old mart— all he loved was Miss Snowdie and flowers) but he bothered no one.†   (source)
  • But Deuteronomy— HENRY (Triumphant) Deuteronomy's ambiguous!†   (source)
  • What a way to behave: she, who was always in command of herself, and who dreaded nothing more than scenes and ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Inkblots are intentionally ambiguous.
  • Her answer was ambiguous.
    ambiguous = unclear because it could be interpreted in different ways
  • The Constitution of the United States is intentionally ambiguous -- requiring human judgment to interpret difficult questions.
  • Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.   (source)
    ambiguity = something that is unclear
  • You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.†   (source)
  • I remark that they lack nuance and ambiguity.†   (source)
  • There was no ambiguity in his presentation.†   (source)
  • "Of course not," said Lieutenant Issaaia, malice concealed in the ambiguity of her words.†   (source)
  • Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.†   (source)
  • With Jefferson there was nearly always a slight air of ambiguity.†   (source)
  • The Security officer gestured ambiguity.†   (source)
  • CROMWELL Some ambiguities of behavior I should like to clarify-hardly "charges."†   (source)
  • And I vaguely remember Lara smiling at me from the doorway, the glittering ambiguity of a girl's smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it.†   (source)
  • He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it aside.†   (source)
  • Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay Belgium The bottom five, that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity, are: 49.†   (source)
  • Not so long ago, if any such points of ambiguity arose regarding one's duties, one had the comfort of knowing that before long some fellow professional whose opinion one respected would be accompanying their employer to the house, and there would be ample opportunity to discuss the matter.†   (source)
  • I didn't want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents.†   (source)
  • If there is ambiguity or a lack of clarity regarding that one-to-one correspondence between the emblem—the figurative construct—and the thing it represents, then the allegory fails because the message is blurred.†   (source)
  • No ambiguity, no more doubt.†   (source)
  • Phalanxifor had introduced a measure of ambiguity to my cancer story, but I was different from Augustus: My final chapter was written upon diagnosis.†   (source)
  • I didn't know who "everyone" was, or when "always" was, and as much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying.†   (source)
  • Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them.†   (source)
  • In fact, Danes have more in common with Jamaicans when it comes to tolerating ambiguity than they do with some of their European peers.†   (source)
  • He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history-- the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.†   (source)
  • How could he give such an emotional object, whatever ambiguity throbbed in the ball's corked heart, to this aimless wayward aging kid, a displaced person in his own life?†   (source)
  • The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo.†   (source)
  • No one ever had trouble hearing what Adams had to say, nor was there ever the least ambiguity about what he meant.†   (source)
  • Three Sources of Ambiguity†   (source)
  • And as if to underscore the ambiguity of the admiral's mission, transports loaded with troops bore such names as Good Intent, Friendship, Amity's Admonition, and Father's Good Will.†   (source)
  • No ambiguity exists.†   (source)
  • He had agreed to take part in such an "interview," one senses, partly to show the British—and his own staff—that he could go through the motions quite as well as any officer and gentleman, but more importantly to send a message to the British command absent any ambiguity.†   (source)
  • She made a gesture of ambiguity.†   (source)
  • I made a gesture of ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Finally, he gave him his word that the ambiguity of his family's situation in Paris would be resolved.†   (source)
  • High in my glassed-in cubbyhole on the twentieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Building—an architecturally impressive but spiritually enervating green tower on West Forty-second Street—I leveled the scorn that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax.†   (source)
  • It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words.†   (source)
  • …and at last, because Luke had his father's eyes, his father's voice, something even of his father's plodding goodness (however bent, dented by the batterings of his mother's uncommon, unsensible wit and, worse yet, by experience too full of ambiguities for common sense to cope with)--because of all that but also because he could not endure the sight of such pain--he put down the pliers and turned around to lean on the workbench, folding his arms and lowering his bearded chin onto his…†   (source)
  • The times were wrong, not incorrupt and not out of joint but subtly mellowed, decayed to ambiguity: If right and wrong were as clear as ever, they were clear chiefly on a private scale, and though God was in his Heaven yet, He had somewhat altered, had become archetypal of a new, less awesome generation of fathers: Wisdom watching the world with half-averted eyes, chewing His ancient lip thoughtfully, mildly, venturing an occasional rueful smile.†   (source)
  • How does he feel, pimping in this ambiguous way for the Commander?†   (source)
  • Simon has not; he emits an ambiguous h'm, which he hopes will pass for agreement.†   (source)
  • What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable.†   (source)
  • Such a maddeningly ambiguous choice for that final directive—Travel securely.†   (source)
  • I said, careful to keep things ambiguous.†   (source)
  • But Socrates responds that this answer is ambiguous.†   (source)
  • And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phaedrus had ever read.†   (source)
  • In many cases the fragments are ambiguous; a number of different conclusions could be drawn.†   (source)
  • I find I have a minor, ambiguous reputation, from the show in Toronto, and I am invited to parties.†   (source)
  • Your words are ambiguous but your implied accusations appear dangerous.†   (source)
  • And the prose in the memoranda of other officers was always turgid, stilted, or ambiguous.†   (source)
  • This somewhat ambiguous statement of the case failed to bring any smile to his hearer's lips.†   (source)
  • As long as we remain ambiguous, he won't know what to do.†   (source)
  • It has been asked, why not just omit the ambiguous power and rely on State requisitions?†   (source)
  • The governor claims the right of nomination based on some ambiguous clauses in the constitution.†   (source)
  • The Security officer made that ambiguous gesture again, but said nothing.†   (source)
  • The replies were so trivial, so ambiguous.†   (source)
  • Because their meaning is ambiguous, I won't use them.†   (source)
  • She walked down the row past a 1939 Ford, a Chevrolet of ambiguous vintage, a Willys, and a robin's-egg blue hearse with the words HEAVENLY REST picked out in a chromium semicircle on its front door.†   (source)
  • Do you know what ambiguous means?†   (source)
  • The very fact that he was so enigmatic and ambiguous made it possible for widely differing schools of thought to claim him as their own.†   (source)
  • Fermina Daza came to the main altar of the Cathedral on the arm of her father, whose formal dress lent him, for the day, an ambiguous air of respectability.†   (source)
  • Are you saying the printout shows the first ambiguous signs of a barely perceptible condition deriving from minimal acceptable spillage exposure?†   (source)
  • Forced out of our homes, sent streaming into the bitter night, pursued by a toxic cloud, crammed together in makeshift quarters, ambiguously death-sentenced.†   (source)
  • Take, for example, Morrison's Song of Solomon and its highly ambiguous airborne ending, with Milkman suspended in mid-leap toward Guitar, each of them knowing only one can survive.†   (source)
  • Not only is it created by fanciful people who tire of repetition even more quickly than they tire of being told what to do, it is also vexingly ambiguous.†   (source)
  • Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony.†   (source)
  • So ten days later, Party Premier Malenkov was forced to pass his chairmanship of the Secretariat to the conservative Khrushchev, setting the stage for a duumvirate of antagonists—a delicate balance of authority between two men of contrary views and ambiguous alliances, which would keep the world guessing for a few years to come.†   (source)
  • The rest can be couched in ambiguous language, language that everyone we want to reach will understand.†   (source)
  • Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue.†   (source)
  • My temptation is to call upon my dear friend Tina Coleman and to arrange another consultation with Madame Lu, and to present this possibility to the Great Lady (in ambiguous terms, of course) in hopes of establishing her opinions and guidance.†   (source)
  • Life-style wanted him, wanted the strong, sometimes concise, sometimes ambiguous emotions his pictures could portray.†   (source)
  • It was the summer of blue-black nights, ambiguous thunder to the east, hoarse and false, and the city grid below—a guy beheads his lover, puts the object in a box and takes it on the train to Queens.†   (source)
  • Her results were ambiguous.†   (source)
  • "Some things are just too unjust for words," he said, expelling a plume of smoke, "and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.†   (source)
  • Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not, perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and a gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up.†   (source)
  • We agree that his sexually ambiguous days—when he wore white face and black nail polish—were his best.†   (source)
  • She loved the martial architecture of huge moving bodies, the armies and mobs in other Eisenstein films, and she felt she was in some ambiguous filmscape somewhere between the Soviet model and Hollywood's vaulted heaven of love, sex, crime and individual heroism, of scenery and luxury and gorgeous toilets.†   (source)
  • Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood-birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents?†   (source)
  • And John Adams's letter of January 6, describing New York as "a kind of key to the whole continent" and affirming that "no effort to secure it ought to be omitted," was anything but ambiguous.†   (source)
  • To what extent his brother the admiral would influence or even determine strategy henceforth was an open question, and important, since both the admiral and the general had been lately assigned by the King to serve in the oddly ambiguous, potentially conflicting, role of peace commissioners.†   (source)
  • If a zealous citizen wants to take on the task and if there is collusion between the parties involved, it would be easy to make each participant's part in the plan so ambiguous that no one could discover the precise conduct of each member of the council.†   (source)
  • "My response is ambiguous, I know," I said, making that placatory gesture Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat had already used.†   (source)
  • She made an ambiguous gesture.†   (source)
  • I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through nonRadchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people.†   (source)
  • Then he said, with a smile less barbed and ambiguous than his sister's remark: "Ain't no need to be afraid of me, sister.†   (source)
  • Perhaps that was what Vindarten bad meant when he gave Jan that ambiguous warning, just before his departure.†   (source)
  • The remark seems roguish, ambiguous.†   (source)
  • From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motleys Rise of the Dutch Republic, an 80-year-old pamphlet on the roots of modern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb's brother Augustine also among Bortz's Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb's original clues, Oedipa was able to fit together this account of how the organization began: In 1577, the northern provinces of the Low Countries, led by the Protestant noble William of Orange, had been…†   (source)
  • He went to Moscow at the beginning of the NEP, the most ambiguous and hypocritical of all Soviet periods.†   (source)
  • He would go to his father's study door and his mother would hurry toward him from the kitchen with an urgency she never showed at other times, her index finger over her lips, her left hand stretching out to him in a gesture strangely ambiguous, as though she were at once shooing him off and drawing him toward her.†   (source)
  • As the ambiguous smile lingered on his face, I was aware that this man posed riddles of personality more exasperating and mystifying than any I had ever encountered.†   (source)
  • If I really gave you cause to write in such a way, my behavior must have been ambiguous and I am at fault not only before you but before that other woman whom I am misleading.†   (source)
  • …at the bathroom door that night, calling to her through it, he saw the years stretched out before him like a cheap hall rug in a strange and unfriendly hotel, and he thought--with such violence that it made him shaky--how it had felt to be totally free, standing looking down at the prow of a ship dimly lighted at night, with the ocean stretching away on all sides ambiguous as an oracle and glinting with unearthly silver, as calm and steady in its rhythm as the blood in your veins.†   (source)
  • Ambiguous, tentative—but there.†   (source)
  • As he walked through the workshop on his way to their apartment, startling the fashionable ladies at their fittings so that they darted behind the screens playfully parrying his ambiguous jokes, the seamstresses, disapproving, muttered sneeringly: "Here comes his lordship," "Arnalia's heartache," "old goat," "lady-killer."†   (source)
  • Toward the end of 1938, in the full flood of his passion, he began working on his magnum opus, the aforementioned pamphlet, in which for the first time he broached the idea—very cautiously, backing and filling with a circumspection bordering on the ambiguous—of "total abolishment."†   (source)
  • …the brink of waking that morning of the day I have already begun to describe, the tenth day she had worked for the Commandant in his attic and the one upon which she had made up her mind to try to seduce him—or if not precisely to seduce him (ambiguous thought), then otherwise to bend him to her will and scheme—just before her eyes fluttered open in the cobwebbed gloom of the cellar, she was conscious of the harsh labor of Lotte's asthmatic breathing from her pallet against the…†   (source)
  • But the fact of the matter is that at Auschwitz (and this she came gradually to confess to me that summer) she had been a victim, yes, but both victim and accomplice, accessory—however haphazard and ambiguous and uncalculating her design—to the mass slaughter whose sickening vaporous residue spiraled skyward from the chimneys of Birkenau whenever she peered out across the parched autumnal meadows from the windows of the mansard roof of the house of her captor, Rudolf Hoss.†   (source)
  • Well, life is too full of evasions and ambiguities, I think.†   (source)
  • Our half-loves and half-hates and ambiguities on these points were to him indefensible treacheries.†   (source)
  • …at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.†   (source)
  • All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with floating wings.†   (source)
  • Two vivid Oriental stories will serve to illuminate the ambiguities of this perplexing pass and show how, though the terrors will recede before a genuine psychological readiness, the overbold adventurer beyond his depth may be shamelessly undone.†   (source)
  • Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word "Love": let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment.†   (source)
  • And as the admission was made, albeit belatedly and with some ambiguity of inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy's brow was dissipated with no trace of rancor left behind.†   (source)
  • Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious—thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends. he following dream supplies a vivid example of the fusion of opposites in the unconsjous: "I dreamed that I had guile…†   (source)
  • What's this about "tidy" ' What's this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity?†   (source)
  • Lily was in fact becoming more and more aware of a certain ambiguity in her situation.†   (source)
  • To listen to his stories, to receive his confidences and laugh at his jokes, seemed for the moment all that was required of her, and the complacency with which her hostess regarded these attentions freed them of the least hint of ambiguity.†   (source)
  • The red cross was, of course, far too large to be a guide; and the terms of the note on the back, as you will hear, admitted of some ambiguity.†   (source)
  • Gerty had tried to veil her failure in tender ambiguities; but Carry, always the soul of candour, put the case squarely to her friend.†   (source)
  • The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly.†   (source)
  • What a strange feeling to watch this ambiguity coming from a king when the disputants began to speak of marriage and sin, the sacrament of indulgence, the guilt and innocence of lust.†   (source)
  • He spread his captain's hand, cautioning and restraining them, and from his painfully ragged lips came words whose discursive ambiguity had compelling power over their minds thanks to the personality behind them.†   (source)
  • What he meant by "everything would be fine" was not exactly clear— it became quite evident that his condition tended to create ambiguities, and he expressed himself equivocally more than once, seemed both to know and not to know, and at one point, apparently overcome by a wave of approaching devastation, he shook his head almost in remorse and declared that he had never felt this bad, never in all his life.†   (source)
  • He had seen no jest in ambiguities and roguery, as the Casterbridge toss-pots had done; and rightly not—there was none.†   (source)
  • In her secret soul, however, she decided that politics were as bad as mathematics, and that the mission of politicians seemed to be calling each other names, but she kept these feminine ideas to herself, and when John paused, shook her head and said with what she thought diplomatic ambiguity, "Well, I really don't see what we are coming to."†   (source)
  • She seldom schemed, but when she did scheme, her plans showed rather the comprehensive strategy of a general than the small arts called womanish, though she could utter oracles of Delphian ambiguity when she did not choose to be direct.†   (source)
  • Isabel could have smiled, in these days, to remember that her little companion had once been ambiguous, for she now perceived that Pansy's ambiguities were simply her own grossness of vision.†   (source)
  • But the phrase "living in the present" is ambiguous.†   (source)
  • Then the Eton boy-an accident with a gun is always ambiguous.†   (source)
  • And then again, your sentence is ambiguous to say the least of it.†   (source)
  • They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been immersed.†   (source)
  • There wasn't anything ambiguous now about her face.†   (source)
  • It was a very ambiguous contract.†   (source)
  • …least hoped he would not) and hence no man had a father, no one personal Porto Rico or Haiti, but all mother faces which ever bred swooping down at those almost calculable moments out of some obscure ancient general affronting and outraging which the actual living articulate meat had not even suffered but merely inherited; all boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark fatherhead and so brothered perennial and ubiquitous everywhere under the sun—†   (source)
  • ONCE HAVING TRAVERSED the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.†   (source)
  • Yet his voice held again that ambiguous quality, that quality hearty and completely empty and completely without pleasure or mirth, like a shell, like something he carried before his face and watched Joe through it, which in the past had caused Joe to look at Max with something between puzzlement and anger.†   (source)
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