debauchery

in a sentence

Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.  (source) George Orwell, 1984, 1949

And then because of his memories and his shame, he was glad when others joined them, men and women; and they had more drink and spent the night in wild rioting and debauchery.  (source) Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

...he had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery.  (source) Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877

...but you will admit that debauchery, drunkenness, and the captain's widow, all these together may lead him very far.  (source) Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 1900

When reason returned with the morning--when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch--I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.  (source) Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat, 1850

He gives it a wistful sniff, then tosses it and the Sveltana can onto his middenheap of empty containers, where a whole crowd of debauched flies is making merry Sometimes at night he can hear the rakunks pawing through this private dump of his, searching for a free meal among the leavings of catastrophe, as he himself has often done, and is about to do again.†  (source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

But of course a tiny part of the woman in me fears another truth altogether, as that part of town is known for its debaucheries.†  (source) Stephen King, Rose Red, 2002

They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.†  (source) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

I never went out a fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauch'd me from my work, but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal; and, to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchas'd at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow.†  (source) Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 1791

And if I am my dead grandfather on the instant of his death, then my wife, his grandson's wife ...the debaucher and murderer of my grandson's wife, since I could neither let my grandson live or die ...†  (source) William Faulkner, Light in August, 1932

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard.†  (source) Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

He stopped at the crossing; and repeated—being simple by nature, and undebauched, because he had tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and dogged, having championed the downtrodden and followed his instincts in the House of Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the same time grown rather speechless, rather stiff—he repeated that it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a miracle—his life had been a miracle, he thought; hesitating to cross.†  (source) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925

And so the developments became havens of debauchery.†  (source) James Dashner, The Death Cure, 2011