carp

in a sentence

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She'd been carping about money lately — or not carping, but she'd inserted a few pointed remarks about pulling your own weight into the prolonged and intent silences that were her specialty — so he thought she'd be pleased.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

I may carp about feeling cornered by Nathaniel, as is my right as a curmudgeonly columnist, but there's nothing boring about the adventure I'm on.  (source) Steve Lopez, The Soloist, 1995

Another reason I welcome the change is that Mama's always carping at me, especially at the table.  (source) Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 1952

He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice.  (source) Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 1976

The Hiroshima players were at first called, in English, the Carps, until he pointed out to the public that the plural for that fish, and for those ballplayers, had no "s." He went often to watch games at the huge new stadium, not far from the A-Bomb Dome — the ruins of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Hall, which the city had kept as its only direct physical reminder of the bomb.†  (source) John Hersey, Hiroshima, 1946

Mr. Kinnear was a gentleman of a fine Scottish family, and easygoing in his habits, and was not married; so there was less work, and no mistress of the household to carp and criticize, and would I be interested in the position?  (source) Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace, 1996

Hall carped that the Americans were "violating the spirit of the hills" and practicing a shameful form of alpine extortion, but Jim Frush, the unsentimental attorney who was the leader of the American group , remained unmoved.  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 1997

The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the "amende honorable" that now clearly was due Chicago.  (source) Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City, 2003

His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though maligned.†  (source) James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

Barbara has always been most comfortable and settled when she felt like she was rescuing her Lavar-from infidel drug dealers or his intemperate father, from carping teachers or false idols of peer pressure.  (source) Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen, 1998

With him disappeared the secret of stuffed carps.†  (source) Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

For I would have you know, Sir Errant, that in these little villages everything is talked about and everything is carped at, and rest assured, as I am, that the priest must be over and above good who forces his parishioners to speak well of him, especially in villages.  (source) Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1615

Some notorious carpers and squeamish moralists might be sulky with Lord Steyne, but they were glad enough to come when he asked them.†  (source) William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1848

Licked all the shells clean and couldn't have cared less that Brian was thrashing around in the water like a dying carp.  (source) Gary Paulsen, Hatchet, 1987

In all it was a pitiful display of small bream and carp, falling apart at the seams.  (source) Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing, 2018

Japanese carp.  (source) Edward Bloor, Tangerine, 1997

There were no other fish in the lake except for perch and a few worthless carp.  (source) Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990

There was a tapering soot stain as high as a man on an outside wall where two tramps had once, outrageously, lit a bonfire to roast a carp that was not theirs.  (source) Ian McEwan, Atonement, 2001

My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan.  (source) Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, 2012

Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.  (source) Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992

The wives, homesick and bewildered, turn to Ashima for recipes and advice, and she tells them about the carp that's sold in Chinatown, that it's possible to make halwa from Cream of Wheat.  (source) Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, 2003

He talks on the phone for a bit, and then he comes back into the kitchen and sees that his little sister has a big hunk of raw Lake Michigan carp in her hand, and she's chewing, and she looks up at her brother and says, 'Sushi!'  (source) John Green, An Abundance of Katherines, 2006

Carp Cove, Chartreuse Island, Cloudy Cliffs, Condiment Bay, Curdled Cave—here it is!†  (source) Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window, 2000

O.K., it's called The Great Carp Escape.†  (source) Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, 1995

She had always had carp in a mossy pond in the back of her house, carp that her granddaughter called goldfish, and she had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort, for people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even t†  (source) Moshin Hamid, Exit West, 2017

Evergreen shrubs and twisted pine trees surrounded a decorative pond full of carp.†  (source) Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha, 1997