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Definition
a medicine used to relieve painor:
something soothing, comforting or mild so as not to upset
- the anodyne properties of certain drugs
anodyne = soothing or comforting
- anodyne elevator music
- an anodyne to loneliness
- Would they not have supplied him, out of what was contained in their knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one potent anodyne for his pain?Marcel Proust -- Swann's Way
- I shall always be pointed at as the girl who flavored a cake with anodyne liniment.Lucy Maud Montgomery -- Anne Of Green Gables
- The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.Oscar Wilde -- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- With this he told Paieon to attend him, and sprinkling anodyne upon his wound Paieon undertook to treat and heal him who was not born for death.Homer -- The Iliad
- It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.George Orwell -- 1984
- They provided us deep pleasure, an anodyne to the squalor and clutter of the street.John Howard Griffin -- Black Like Me
- But now it entered Helen's mind to drop into the wine that they were drinking an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.Homer -- The Odyssey
- When Madam Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma.Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
- The anodyne of muddledom, by which most men blur and blend their mistakes, never passed Leonard's lips— "And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul."E.M. Forster -- Howards End
- Among Louie's friends, no one would remember what Sasaki studied at USC, but they all recalled his quiet, anodyne presence; saying almost nothing, he smiled without interruption.Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken
- You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive.C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters
- "But I don't know," Sophie said at last, gazing at me dry-eyed but sliding into the slurred diction which glass after glass of alcohol lent to her tongue, along with the merciful and grief-deadening anodyne it provided for her battered memory.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- So, with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand, I settled down with a notebook and a pencil to make what I could of Mary Carmichael's first novel, LIFE'S ADVENTURE.Virginia Woolf -- A Room of One's Own
- And she, whom he would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token of the world's remedy—the refuge from the one lost face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura—a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight.Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter addressed to him.George Eliot -- Middlemarch
- When they embraced she felt against her collarbone through the fabric of his jacket a thick fountain pen, and smelled pipe smoke in the folds of his clothes, prompting a moment's nostalgia for afternoon tea visits to rooms in men's colleges, rather polite and anodyne occasions mostly, but cheery too, especially in winter.Ian McEwan -- Atonement
- With whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might have discomforts, might contain oppressive, might contain narrowing elements, might prove really but a stupefying anodyne; but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would have accommodated themselves to it without a pang.Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1