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decadent
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  • These habits of former times appear to me now lavish, decadent almost; immoral, like the orgies of barbarian regimes.†   (source)
  • It occurred to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its forefathers' bourgeois decadence.†   (source)
  • "Although I can't quite picture General Herkimer lounging on that decadent old Grecian-looking article.†   (source)
  • So, sitting on the couch by myself, not talking, felt decadent.†   (source)
  • And somehow, Sarah had been able to whip up a chocolate dessert, with layers of whipped cream, mousse, brownies, and other delights that had everyone feeling decadent and satisfied.†   (source)
  • But first I spent some time, nine years at least, carrying out a community service by providing the one thing new Hyperion lacked: decadence.†   (source)
  • To be fair, it should be mentioned that the University had a vague contempt for Imre's populace, too, viewing them as self-indulgent and decadent.†   (source)
  • 'They reflect the age in cynicism which cannot comprehend the death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a mannered helplessness.†   (source)
  • A beautiful Soviet agent, trained in the ways of the decadent West, too skinny, the way the imperialists like their women, blond hair...†   (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)
  • Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery precipitated the conditions of honorable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised.†   (source)
  • It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.†   (source)
  • If the people of this decadent garrison city could only see the Emperor's private note to his "Noble Duke"—the disdainful allusions to veiled men and women: " ....but what else is one to expect of barbarians whose dearest dream is to live outside the ordered security of the faufreluches?"†   (source)
  • She's not used to your decadent ways.†   (source)
  • It was a decadent atmosphere for me whose previous experience of dating had been mixers and parlor calls from boys at prep school.†   (source)
  • He might have been Cinderella's fairy godmother, and they might have been attending a ball, for they rode in a decadent, gilded coach that had been transformed from a cypress while four squirrels had been conscripted into serving as their team of sleek black horses.†   (source)
  • To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society.†   (source)
  • The softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent He returned to the camp and skinned the rabbit while water boiled over the fire.†   (source)
  • He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists.†   (source)
  • Or again, had he seen me and been silent out of sophistication, decadence, over-civilization?†   (source)
  • The absence of a strong ethic suited to our age, the rise of the machine, the decadence of Romanticism as it ended a long and fruitful existence...who knows?†   (source)
  • A decadent product of the machine age.†   (source)
  • It is redolent of the tawdry decadence of a far-flung but key imperial frontier.†   (source)
  • This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted ....and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.†   (source)
  • Men who work for the disgraced English crown, that enfeebled, decadent government that sold out the Motherland to our tormentors.†   (source)
  • The more "Western," and therefore decadent, portions were distributing aggressively.†   (source)
  • No one knew why, but everyone had an opinion, especially the foreign fighters, who boasted that decadent, infidel America was losing the stomach for the fight.†   (source)
  • PLAYER: Why, we grow rusty and you catch us at the very point of decadence-by this time tomorrow we might have forgotten everything we ever knew.†   (source)
  • The city has a smell, a fecund musk of aristocracy, with the wine and the history of the lowcountry aging beneath the verandahs, the sweetly decadent odors of lost causes.†   (source)
  • Then, like decadent Romans at Petronius's board, we took a walk and retired for the necessary and inevitable nap.†   (source)
  • This is not the first time that a revanchist plot has been uncovered through the decadence of its architects.†   (source)
  • Give them a few more years of decadent glory.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was such mitigating qualities (permitting Sophie to perfect her French, which he considered a decadent language; allowing her mother to indulge her love for composers other than Wagner, triflers like Faure and Debussy and Scarlatti) that caused Sophie to accept without any conscious resentment his complete domination of her life even after she was married.†   (source)
  • He knew good food from bad, expensive from cheap, and he could use his knowledge to impress his business associates, as he called them, when necessary; but he had no respect for what is known as fine food—meats cooked with wines and spices brought in flaming, as though they would look and taste of decay in their natural state; vegetables chopped or diced or shredded in the decadent French manner, as if for the toothless gums of superannuated uncles and aunts of the royal house.†   (source)
  • He considered Randy an insolent young loafer, an example of decadence in what once might have been a good family, and a sadly scrambled egghead, and had so informed his daughter.†   (source)
  • So you've become a Decadent?†   (source)
  • He was searching for 9 Park South, looking for the Beaumont Mansion, the site of D'Courtney's death...and Maria Beaumont, shrill, decadent, reassuring.†   (source)
  • Just to have that thirty minutes of solitude during the drive—it was decadent but essential.†   (source)
  • My father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era.†   (source)
  • To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing.†   (source)
  • "He was here all day," Williams said afterward, "trying his best to capture my 'decadence' on film.†   (source)
  • But he went too far when he attacked Paris fashion as a decadent bourgeois industry!†   (source)
  • The savor of meat braising in red wine and aromatics hung decadently in the air.†   (source)
  • "They made something decadent out of it," the gunslinger said.†   (source)
  • As long as we have men like that I can't believe we're so decadent.†   (source)
  • Instead of returning to Rome with the sudden fortune, which had been his dream maturing in misery, Jose Arcadio converted the house into a decadent paradise.†   (source)
  • His earlier incarnations—the decadent Capitol heartthrob I met before the Quell, the enigmatic ally in the arena, the broken young man who tried to help me hold it together—these have been replaced by someone who radiates life.†   (source)
  • There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence.†   (source)
  • He encouraged their differences in opinion, and inwardly rejoiced at her occasional outbursts of exasperation at his decadence.†   (source)
  • The editors of the photographic documentary A Day in the Life of America sent a photographer to Savannah with instructions to take a picture of Williams as an example of southern decadence.†   (source)
  • I have mixed up some martinis, I announce—Desi loves a decadent afternoon drink—and when he makes a move to put on his shirt and fetch them, I insist he stay in bed.†   (source)
  • Though it was now almost entirely dark, the sky was still a bright and decadent color that resembled the warm pink silk that often lined the interiors of ancient carriages.†   (source)
  • While Adams, on first arriving in Paris, had reported to Abigail how much he admired theFrenchwomen he met—for their accomplishments, education, their views on serious matters—Jefferson felt that the decadent state of government in France was owing in good part to the influence of such women.†   (source)
  • A company managed by a decadent playboy who doesn't give a damn, who'll let them use his property in any way they please and just continue to make money for them-automatically, as did his ancestors.†   (source)
  • OLUNDE Others would call it decadence.†   (source)
  • I held the bottle up to my mouth and drew a long messy swallow, as if I were some decadent wild woman who had just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover.†   (source)
  • Adams's objections stemmed not so much from a Puritan background—as often said—but from the ideal of republican virtue, the classic Roman stoic emphasis on simplicity and the view that decadence inevitably followed luxury, age-old themes replete in the writings of his favorite Romans.†   (source)
  • In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.†   (source)
  • It would be convenient to report that Judge Street was a gum-chewing illiterate ex-Klansman elevated to the judgeship by decadent politicians who wished to preserve the status quo.†   (source)
  • The lure of thefair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.†   (source)
  • And now I feel better for having exposed to the light of scrutiny the decadent practices of the rich Texans I know.†   (source)
  • Tim was a master of style and I was glad the kids could see him in his own domain, against the dark woodwork and faint whiff of southern decadence he loved to cultivate and discuss.†   (source)
  • When I'm in a mood for something decadent I'll probably meet him.†   (source)
  • We don't get much of the old fighting in these decadent days.†   (source)
  • I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.†   (source)
  • "You talk like a decadent bourgeois, Ellsworth," said Gus Webb.†   (source)
  • "Decadent!" protested his commander-in-chief.†   (source)
  • But when Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can't do business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man.†   (source)
  • Our civilization is decadent, and our language-so the argument runs-must inevitably share in the general collapse.†   (source)
  • In the unholy crimson glow that bathed them, his dark profile stood out as clearly as the head on an ancient coin, beautiful, cruel and decadent.†   (source)
  • I spent my nights reading Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic of death and decadence.†   (source)
  • how he did it—the calculation, the surgeon's alertness and cold detachment, the exposures brief, so brief as to be cryptic, almost staccato, the plate unaware of what the complete picture would show, scarce-seen yet ineradicable: —a trap, a riding horse standing before a closed and curiously monastic doorway in a neighborhood a little decadent, even a little sinister, and Bon mentioning the owner's name casually—this, corruption subtly anew by putting into Henry's mind the notion of one man of the world speaking to another, that Henry knew that Bon believed that Henry would know even from a disjointed word what Bon was talking about, and Henry the puritan who must show nothing at al†   (source)
  • He had expected to compete with Marcial and the other stars of the decadence of bull-fighting, and he knew that the sincerity of his own bullfighting would be so set off by the false aesthetics of the bull-fighters of the decadent period that he would only have to be in the ring.†   (source)
  • Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage.†   (source)
  • He had expected to compete with Marcial and the other stars of the decadence of bull-fighting, and he knew that the sincerity of his own bullfighting would be so set off by the false aesthetics of the bull-fighters of the decadent period that he would only have to be in the ring.†   (source)
  • He looked like the decadent, overperfected end product of a long line of exquisite breeding—and everybody knew that he came from the gutter.†   (source)
  • We're too cynical, too decadent.†   (source)
  • He explained that the decadence of architecture had come when private property replaced the communal spirit of the Middle Ages, and that the selfishness of individual owners—who built for no purpose save to satisfy their own bad taste, "all claim to an individual taste is bad taste"—had ruined the planned effect of cities.†   (source)
  • A society woman wrote an article on the exotic shrines she had seen in her dangerous jungle travels, praised the touching faith of the savages and reproached modern man for cynicism; the Stoddard Temple, she said, was a symptom of softness and decadence; the illustration showed her in breeches, one slim foot on the neck of a dead lion.†   (source)
  • It had been her subjection to the decadence of feminine dress that had been unnatural.†   (source)
  • At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes.†   (source)
  • It is only in the days of their decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.†   (source)
  • At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity.†   (source)
  • Jazz—the discordant note of our decadence!†   (source)
  • In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth.†   (source)
  • It is this decadence which is called the Renaissance.†   (source)
  • Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei Caesari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence.†   (source)
  • He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadence—now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futile—a petty consummation of himself...and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray.†   (source)
  • 'I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure.†   (source)
  • He thought the city of the ancient Romans a little vulgar, finding distinction only in the decadence of the Empire; but the Rome of the Popes appealed to his sympathy, and in his chosen words, quite exquisitely, there appeared a rococo beauty.†   (source)
  • You talked again too much to-day in the restaurant, and it wasn't at all to the point—about the seventies and about decadents.†   (source)
  • If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?†   (source)
  • had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to either taste simultaneously; yielding to the seduction of works of art which grew more and more subtle as the women in whose company he enjoyed them grew more illiterate and common, he would take a little servant-girl to a screened box in a theatre where there was some decadent piece which he had wished to see performed, or to an exhibition of impressionist painting, with the conviction, moreover, that an educated, 'society' woman would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to keep quiet about them so prettily.†   (source)
  • Its Literature and Art have what one might call the kink of the unseen about them, and this persists even through decadence and affectation.†   (source)
  • The decadent and weird nature of some of the bogs and tarns on either side of the only comparatively passable dirt roads which here and there were festooned with funereal or viperous vines, and strewn like deserted battlefields with soggy and decayed piles of fallen and crisscrossed logs—in places as many as four deep—one above the other—in the green slime that an undrained depression in the earth had accumulated.†   (source)
  • It is another example of my decadence.†   (source)
  • It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.†   (source)
  • Talking to the waiters about decadents!†   (source)
  • The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan's wraith—at any rate, it was Tom's furniture that decided them to stay.†   (source)
  • Nicole glanced again at the woman across the deck—she was fragile, tubercular—it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire.†   (source)
  • Her conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard.†   (source)
  • "A regular Roman nose," he used to say, "with my goiter I've quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period."†   (source)
  • A magnificent decadence, however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.†   (source)
  • burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary decadence of architecture.†   (source)
  • Although you do get to lead a fairly decadent lifestyle, don't you.†   (source)
  • At one time I would have considered drinking wine in bed before brushing one's teeth to be the last word in decadence.†   (source)
  • During the decadence of the language the final /n/ was dropped in both cases before nouns—that is, in the conjoint form—but it was retained in the absolute form.†   (source)
  • [2] And so, in our own time, we have seen the Swedes and Norwegians shouldering the native from the wheat lands of the Northwest, and the Italians driving the decadent New Englanders from their farms, and the Jews gobbling New York, and the Slavs getting a firm foothold in the mining regions, and the French Canadians penetrating New Hampshire and Vermont, and the Japanese and Portuguese menacing Hawaii, and the awakened negroes gradually ousting the whites from the farms of the South†   (source)
  • mind,
    thy soaring spirit,
    Thee as another equally needed sun, radiant, ablaze, swift-moving,
    fructifying all,
    Thee risen in potent cheerfulness and joy, in endless great hilarity,
    Scattering for good the cloud that hung so long, that weigh'd so
    long upon the mind of man,
    The doubt, suspicion, dread, of gradual, certain decadence of man;
    Thee in thy larger, saner brood of female, male—thee in thy
    athletes, moral, spiritual, South, North, West, East,
    (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, son,
    endear'd alike, forever equal,)
    Thee in thy own musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain,
    Thee in thy moral wealth and civilization†   (source)
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