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chimera
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  • Mercy is a chimera.†   (source)
  • For obligations were palpable, soundly rooted in reciprocal deeds; possibilities on the other hand were chimeras, flimsy and worthless, dangerous even.†   (source)
  • Mum galloped away, skidding around a gleaming exhibit of a half-grown chimera.†   (source)
  • …young associate, Dr. Seymour Katz (who came in after office hours to help take care of the prodigious overflow of sufferers), had worked; suppose the chain of events that led from the vandalizing finger to the sacral vertebra to the compressed fifth lumbar nerve not only had proved not to be a chiropractic chimera but had been terminated in triumph, radiantly, healthfully, as a result of Blackstock's and Katz's fortnight of thumping and stretching and drubbing of her tormented spine.†   (source)
  • His captivity, his dependence, were not different from other forms of compulsion in life, which are often equally invisible and intangible, and seem to be nonexistent and merely a figment of the imagination, a chimera.†   (source)
  • I don't remember the purpose of the chimeras.   (source)
  • To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?   (source)
  • Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again   (source)
  • I wrote to Albus, describing, perhaps insensitively, the wonders of my journey, from narrow escapes from chimaeras in Greece to the experiments of the Egyptian alchemists.†   (source)
  • Now the fire was mutating, forming a gigantic pack of fiery beasts: Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again, and the detritus of centuries on which they were feeding was thrown up into the air into their fanged mouths, tossed high on clawed feet, before being con-sumed by the inferno.†   (source)
  • I think it is where his wildness went, for every tale was filled with outlandish creatures: griffins and leviathans and chimeras who came to feed from his hands, whom he led on adventures or else bested with clever stratagems.†   (source)
  • The Chimera turned faster than I would've thought possible.†   (source)
  • The Chimaera, the ones I watched being loaded into the rocket—did they make it to Earth after all?†   (source)
  • She felt the chimerical angel of the past flying overhead, and she tried to elude it.†   (source)
  • Against a thing like the Chimera, I had never stood a chance.†   (source)
  • The Chimera might still be up there with its snaky, fat mother, waiting to finish me off.†   (source)
  • I couldn't even feel the Chimera poison boiling in my veins anymore.†   (source)
  • The Chimera was now so tall its back rubbed against the roof.†   (source)
  • "Chimera, dear," the fat lady corrected.†   (source)
  • "Die, faithless one," Echidna rasped, and the Chimera sent a column of flame toward my face.†   (source)
  • The Chimera advanced, growling, smoke curling from its lips.†   (source)
  • The Chimera's mouth glowed red, heating up for another blast.†   (source)
  • He kept saying nobody in their right mind would rather study Knarls than Chimaeras — oh, I don't think he's got a Chimaera,' she added at the appalled look on Harry and Ron's faces, 'but that's not for lack of trying, from what he said about how hard it is to get eggs.†   (source)
  • They were called Chimera.†   (source)
  • Goyle was too heavy and Malfoy's hand, covered in sweat, slid instantly out of Harry's — "IF WE DIE FOR THEM, I'LL KILL YOU, HARRY!" roared Ron's voice, and, as a great flaming chimaera bore down upon them, he and Hermione dragged Goyle onto their broom and rose, rolling and pitching, into the air once more as Malfoy clambered up behind Harry.†   (source)
  • Like the chimera gallery, there's a protective wire structure to keep people from falling or jumping.†   (source)
  • Chimera.†   (source)
  • The chimera.†   (source)
  • Chimera.†   (source)
  • I was ten feet away from the Chimera's bloody maw, and I knew that as soon as I moved, the creature would lunge.†   (source)
  • Riptide was now a shining bronze blade in my hands, and as the Chimera turned, I slashed at its neck.†   (source)
  • I told them the whole story of the Chimera, Echidna, my high-dive act, and the underwater lady's message.†   (source)
  • The rhinestone dog collar still hung around its neck, and the plate-sized dog tag was now easy to read: CHIMERA-RABID, FIRE-BREATHING, POISONOUS-IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL TARTARUS-EXT.†   (source)
  • Grinning skeletons in Greek armor crowded around me, draping me with silk robes, wreathing my head with laurels that smoked with Chimera poison, burning into my scalp.†   (source)
  • I tried to jab Riptide into the Chimera's mouth, but the serpent tail wrapped around my ankles and pulled me off balance, and my blade flew out of my hand, spinning out of the hole in the Arch and down toward the Mississippi River.†   (source)
  • You ran from the Chimera.†   (source)
  • The new house was almost finished when Ursula drew him out of his chimerical world in order to inform him that she had an order to paint the front blue and not white as they had wanted.†   (source)
  • …postcards that he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem: the chimerical Negroes in the cotton fields of Louisiana, the winged horses in the bluegrass of Kentucky, the Greek lovers in the infernal sunsets of Arizona, the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a lake in Michigan who waved at him with…†   (source)
  • Outside Victor's, the drab little café where my gonads had been so chimerically agitated by Leslie Lapidus and her hollow lewdness, I paused, went on, then returned; with its reminder of defeat it seemed as good a place as any to let myself drown.†   (source)
  • With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness.†   (source)
  • …the one spot on earth where he had ever seen his mother weep; —returned, crossed that strange threshold, that irrevocable demarcation, not led, not dragged, but driven and herded by that stern implacable presence, into that gaunt and barren household where his very silken remaining clothes, his delicate shirt and stockings and shoes which still remained to remind him of what he had once been, vanished, fled from arms and body and legs as if they had been woven of chimaeras or of smoke.†   (source)
  • I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.†   (source)
  • Legends, chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for them to swallow.†   (source)
  • Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us.†   (source)
  • The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.†   (source)
  • These sad fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain—led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby.†   (source)
  • He preserved this opinion even after the feast, with the remnants of which he repaired his own long abstinence; but when in the evening he made his master's bed, the chimeras of Planchet faded away.†   (source)
  • He began seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes about him from time to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire, harnessed to two-winged chimeras, which alone could have so rapidly transported him from Tartarus to Paradise, were still there.†   (source)
  • There were only chimeras and illusions; but for real love, for true jealousy, is there any reality except illusions and chimeras?†   (source)
  • Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras without object or bottom.†   (source)
  • No roof to the iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender columns spreading out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves and flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on carved woodwork, no fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.†   (source)
  • It seemed to her, at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to herself: "Is this reality?"†   (source)
  • At the first moment there had arisen from his poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms.†   (source)
  • He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said.†   (source)
  • Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions.†   (source)
  • These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other.†   (source)
  • O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyes, I am all illusion; but she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras! as for the rest, everything about her is freshness, suavity, youth, sweet morning light.†   (source)
  • …against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in…†   (source)
  • Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.†   (source)
  • They are chimeras.†   (source)
  • Or not expect perhaps, not even hope; not even dream since dreams don't come in pairs, and had I not come twelve miles drawn not by mortal mule but by some chimaera-foal of nightmare's very self?†   (source)
  • And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book.†   (source)
  • Besides, were not those riches chimerical?†   (source)
  • The form of government which is usually termed mixed has always appeared to me to be a mere chimera.†   (source)
  • A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depths.†   (source)
  • He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors.†   (source)
  • His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxiety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health.†   (source)
  • It would have been inconsistent with her character if in these visits she had been pursuing a chimera; her project was not chimerical at all; she was building on a firm basis—on her knowledge of the character of the Epanchin family, especially Aglaya, whom she studied closely.†   (source)
  • Deep repose, mysterious refreshment for Swann,—for him whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life,—to feel himself transformed into a creature foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears alone.†   (source)
  • President Truscott said, "Really, I'm too engrossed to consider chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.†   (source)
  • Although it took all his energy to climb against the wind, he made for that chimerical something, which often vanished entirely in the gloom, and when he finally arrived he realized—in dizzy outrage, amazement, and terror—that it was the familiar hut, the hayshed with its roof weighted down by stones, which he had now reconquered after many a detour and so much upright exertion.†   (source)
  • It would have been inconsistent with her character if in these visits she had been pursuing a chimera; her project was not chimerical at all; she was building on a firm basis—on her knowledge of the character of the Epanchin family, especially Aglaya, whom she studied closely.†   (source)
  • Jude almost tore his hair at having missed this letter till it was too late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition to Kennetbridge really did seem to have been another special intervention of Providence to keep him away from temptation.†   (source)
  • With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe's plan chimerical.†   (source)
  • As I groped out the door, and knocked at it hesitatingly, I felt that last idea to be a mere chimera.†   (source)
  • The aerial being which was dimly outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see.†   (source)
  • ] It is therefore chimerical to suppose that the spirit of association, when it is repressed on some one point, will nevertheless display the same vigor on all others; and that if men be allowed to prosecute certain undertakings in common, that is quite enough for them eagerly to set about them.†   (source)
  • It was past a question now that Faria was not a lunatic, and the way in which he had achieved the discovery, which had given rise to the suspicion of his madness, increased Edmond's admiration of him; but at the same time Dantes could not believe that the deposit, supposing it had ever existed, still existed; and though he considered the treasure as by no means chimerical, he yet believed it was no longer there.†   (source)
  • The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles.†   (source)
  • …father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies.†   (source)
  • To have you as long as possible near me, to hear your eloquent speech,—which embellishes my mind, strengthens my soul, and makes my whole frame capable of great and terrible things, if I should ever be free,—so fills my whole existence, that the despair to which I was just on the point of yielding when I knew you, has no longer any hold over me; and this—this is my fortune—not chimerical, but actual.†   (source)
  • They never overtook the chimerical friend, yet Andrea frequently inquired of people on foot whom he passed and at the inns which were not yet closed, for a green cabriolet and bay horse; and as there are a great many cabriolets to be seen on the road to the Low Countries, and as nine-tenths of them are green, the inquiries increased at every step.†   (source)
  • "But tell me now, count," exclaimed Albert, delighted at the idea of having to chaperon so distinguished a person as Monte Cristo; "tell me truly whether you are in earnest, or if this project of visiting Paris is merely one of the chimerical and uncertain air castles of which we make so many in the course of our lives, but which, like a house built on the sand, is liable to be blown over by the first puff of wind?"†   (source)
  • Again, in some obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought.†   (source)
  • Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street, where no one dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did the mere chimera of Quasimodo gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.†   (source)
  • This central mother church is, among the ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the haunches of another, something of all.†   (source)
  • But when, at length, the dragon-fly alighted on the tip of a reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able to examine the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the two globes of crystal, what astonishment you felt, and what fear lest you should again behold the form disappear into a shade, and the creature into a chimera!†   (source)
  • The elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man, or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"—all this had created a whirlwind in her imagination.†   (source)
  • Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own.†   (source)
  • A marriage should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.†   (source)
  • It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery.†   (source)
  • For if they had had another neighbor who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued!†   (source)
  • He admitted,—it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,—he admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes, and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing more than a conscience bathed in a mist.†   (source)
  • …M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude that was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated, to the great terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados; monarchy opposing an obstacle to progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89 roughly interrupted in the…†   (source)
  • It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a chimaera with a form.†   (source)
  • Matelote is a chimaera.†   (source)
  • Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit.†   (source)
  • On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods formerly were to him.†   (source)
  • …of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not maintained for truth."†   (source)
  • Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death— A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Obominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.†   (source)
  • They are so far from minding chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them of a man in the abstract as common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive him) and yet distinct from every one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant; yet, for all this ignorance of these empty notions, they knew astronomy, and…†   (source)
  • And there was Don Quixote observing all these strange proceedings attentively without uttering a word, and attributing the whole to chimeras of knight-errantry.†   (source)
  • Fictions Materiall Images And whereas a man can fancy Shapes he never saw; making up a Figure out of the parts of divers creatures; as the Poets make their Centaures, Chimaeras, and other Monsters never seen: So can he also give Matter to those Shapes, and make them in Wood, Clay or Metall.†   (source)
  • In reading many of the publications against the Constitution, a man is apt to imagine that he is perusing some ill-written tale or romance, which instead of natural and agreeable images, exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes "Gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire"; discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents, and transforming everything it touches into a monster.†   (source)
  • Like it were put to makeshift for enoughgreen to go around among the trees and even the blue of distance not that rich chimaera. told me the bone would have to be broken again andinside me itbegan to say AhAh Ah and I began tosweat.†   (source)
  • Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea.†   (source)
  • The attempt was unjust and unwise; but it was not in speculation absolutely chimerical.†   (source)
  • Of all chimerical suppositions, this seems to be the most chimerical.†   (source)
  • Hence those strange monsters in lace and embroidery, in silks and brocades, with vast wigs and hoops; which, under the name of lords and ladies, strut the stage, to the great delight of attorneys and their clerks in the pit, and of the citizens and their apprentices in the galleries; and which are no more to be found in real life than the centaur, the chimera, or any other creature of mere fiction.†   (source)
  • "There might be," said Pococurante, "if only one of those rakers of rubbish had shown how to make pins; but in all these volumes there is nothing but chimerical systems, and not a single useful thing."†   (source)
  • Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame.†   (source)
  • ], a chimera of wittol, fool, and knave: And, reverend fathers, since we all can hope Nought but a sentence, let's not now dispair it.†   (source)
  • Amid the troops, and like the leading god, High o'er the rest in arms the graceful Turnus rode: A triple of plumes his crest adorn'd, On which with belching flames Chimaera burn'd: The more the kindled combat rises high'r, The more with fury burns the blazing fire.†   (source)
  • I have never yet seen any book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure.†   (source)
  • The speedy Dolphin, that outstrips the wind, Bore Mnestheus, author of the Memmian kind: Gyas the vast Chimaera's bulk commands, Which rising, like a tow'ring city stands; Three Trojans tug at ev'ry lab'ring oar; Three banks in three degrees the sailors bore; Beneath their sturdy strokes the billows roar.†   (source)
  • I answer in the next place, that I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan.†   (source)
  • Nothing can be more chimerical than to imagine that in a trial of actual force, victory may be calculated by the rules which prevail in a census of the inhabitants, or which determine the event of an election!†   (source)
  • …they seem to amount to the most convincing evidence, that the powers proposed to be lodged in the federal government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation of the State governments, must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them.†   (source)
  • A failure in this delicate and important point is the great source of the inconveniences we experience, and if we are not cautious to avoid a repetition of the error, in our future attempts to rectify and ameliorate our system, we may travel from one chimerical project to another; we may try change after change; but we shall never be likely to make any material change for the better.†   (source)
  • This assertion will not appear chimerical to those who are able to appreciate the importance of the markets of three millions of people--increasing in rapid progression, for the most part exclusively addicted to agriculture, and likely from local circumstances to remain so--to any manufacturing nation; and the immense difference there would be to the trade and navigation of such a nation, between a direct communication in its own ships, and an indirect conveyance of its products and…†   (source)
  • Had they attempted to enumerate the particular powers or means not necessary or proper for carrying the general powers into execution, the task would have been no less chimerical; and would have been liable to this further objection, that every defect in the enumeration would have been equivalent to a positive grant of authority.†   (source)
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