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devious
in a sentence

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  • We went down accordingly into the waste, and began to make our toilsome and devious travel towards the eastern verge.   (source)
    devious = not straightforward, indirect, or circuitous
  • It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfway round—a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by a path choked with overgrowth—I paused to give her breath.   (source)
    devious = not straightforward
  • A lifetime of deviousness came to his aid.†   (source)
  • Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic's deviousness and tragic charm.†   (source)
  • This deviousness, the quick shuffle out the philosophy door seemed to indicate that the Chairman for some reason was unable to throw him out the front door of the committee, even with that outrageous letter in hand, and that gave Phaedrus some confidence.†   (source)
  • Here the road, gleaming faintly, passed over the stream in the midst of the valley, and went on, winding deviously up towards the city's gate: a black mouth opening in the outer circle of the northward walls.†   (source)
  • He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese; that news came deviously from Australia, relayed from Kenya.†   (source)
  • The keystone was a devious dead end.   (source)
    devious = intentionally misleading
  • Or did Crake have a deviousness that outdid Jimmy's own?†   (source)
  • So deviously simple.†   (source)
  • She had walked straight through McGarrity's front door disdaining the deviousness of the side door marked "Ladies' Entrance.†   (source)
  • He was perpetually slinking away; whenever seen he was seen moving off deviously, his face over his shoulder, with either a mistrustful snarl or a woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal some monstrous deformity of the body.†   (source)
  • Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with her head up, making no effort to dry them away even.   (source)
    devious = not straight
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • It makes people think they are devious.†   (source)
  • Look at that devious expression.†   (source)
  • But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death.†   (source)
  • You brilliant, sly, devious dog!†   (source)
  • Lucy was looking more excited than I'd seen her since the moment I'd walked in the first day, and Anne seemed quietly devious.†   (source)
  • Krum, who is openly smitten with the devious Miss Granger, has already invited her to visit him in Bulgaria over the summer holidays, and insists that he has "never felt this way about any other girl."†   (source)
  • "If you're worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you can just pull my plug out."†   (source)
  • A devious ploy.†   (source)
  • It makes us look devious.†   (source)
  • The Baudelaire parents had left behind an enormous fortune, which would go to the children when Violet came of age, and Count Olaf was so obsessed with getting his filthy hands on the money that he hatched a devious plan that gives me nightmares to this day.†   (source)
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show 134 more examples with any meaning
  • Why hadn't she remembered that ever since he was eight years old Nat had been finding his way to Blackbird Pond through devious meadow routes?†   (source)
  • She seems …. devious.†   (source)
  • Littlefinger is the second most devious man in the Seven Kingdoms.†   (source)
  • This girl's crimes of insolence, property destruction, and running away from her rightful owner are not devious enough to warrant a sentence of death.†   (source)
  • He would have to completely disappear of course, but a plan was already forming in his devious mind.†   (source)
  • "Your devious little mind has given me an idea," I said.†   (source)
  • Sam's face twists into a devious smile.†   (source)
  • Unfortunately her brain was devious.†   (source)
  • After the doctor finished, she looked at me with a devious glint in her eye.†   (source)
  • There were plot potentials in this situation, chances for people to make devious maneuvers, secret plans.†   (source)
  • Magicians are devious creatures.†   (source)
  • He is many things dangerous and devious, cunning and deadly, a good friend and an implacable enemy but he comes from an age when a man's word was indeed precious.†   (source)
  • What's on your devious little minds?†   (source)
  • I call Patricia Lopez when I get back to my office and ask if she'll go in with me on my devious little plan.†   (source)
  • But the Bene Gesserit ways were devious and compelling.†   (source)
  • "Sure," I agreed, feeling quite devious as I wound my fingers through his.†   (source)
  • "We've both gotten good at being devious."†   (source)
  • Inside sat Al-berto, laying his devious plans.†   (source)
  • She might make an excellent queen, Eragon admitted to himself,but she's so devious, it's impossible to know whether she would support the Varden once she was enthroned .†   (source)
  • I had been afraid to let her out of my sight, fearing devious plots that Moody and his family might concoct to take her away from me.†   (source)
  • You devious, red-eyed devil.†   (source)
  • I should have known something was up when they both turned to me wearing identical devious looks.†   (source)
  • Not by the road Pap Himes pointed out; not by the devious path Mandy Meacham suggested; but by the rugged road of good, honest toil, to heights where was the power and the glory, she would certainly strive.†   (source)
  • He could have guided himself by the smell if the smell had not been all over the house, so devious and at the same time so definite, as it had always been on his skin.†   (source)
  • Who knew my sister could be so devious?†   (source)
  • But in time, something in Seabiscuit's demeanor—perhaps a conspicuous lack of sweating in the workouts, perhaps a gleam in the horse's eye that hinted at devious intelligence—made Fitzsimmons question his assumptions.†   (source)
  • There was always something devious and deceetfuf about her, although her father is such a charming, rich man.†   (source)
  • How could a girl horn under the sign of the horse ever triumph in battle against the devious monkey?†   (source)
  • Nor was there another legal mind as cunning and devious.†   (source)
  • Whatsoever, it was like entering a scene which, because of some devious circumstance, I had hitherto watched only from a distance.†   (source)
  • 8 P.M. I am told by Sukeena that the first part of our devious plan is now in place.†   (source)
  • Unless, I wondered, Mother was devious enough to concoct a story about her childhood in order to take the blame off her, transfer it to her mother, somehow freeing Mother from any accountability?†   (source)
  • The Friday-night crawl of traffic invariably made her crabby and impatient and she would compensate by taking charge, telling Robert, Grace's father, to slow down or speed up or take some devious route to avoid delays.†   (source)
  • "Something devious, I hope," said Max, breathing deep and letting the crisp air fill his lungs.†   (source)
  • The Cuban leader, in his own words, is "violent, given to tantrums, devious, manipulative, and defiant of all authority."†   (source)
  • If Justin wasn't innocent, then he was as devious and manipulating as they came.†   (source)
  • His methods are much more devious.†   (source)
  • In Mrs. Worthington's mind, Felicity and I are blameless, the victims of Ann's devious scheme.†   (source)
  • In his last years my father was a founding member of "The Ceylon Cactus and Succulent Society" and this interest began during his time in Kuttapitiya—all because of his devious and defensive nature.†   (source)
  • Some of the wizards, though, had even more devious gains in mind.†   (source)
  • Why, Colonel, bless your soul, there aint a devious bone in Robert Lee's body, don't you know that?†   (source)
  • "You're devious?' he said.†   (source)
  • The strategy's in place, a strategy so oblique and devious, so long in the making, they believe it can't fail.†   (source)
  • When she realizes what happened to her I'm going to have one very nasty and devious old lady with, apparently, access to exotic poisons, after my butt."†   (source)
  • My escort of the moment, all white-faced and trembling, immediately rushed me out of the Presence and took me by devious ways to the men's washroom.†   (source)
  • What devious motive, I wondered, caused such a goodwill gesture?†   (source)
  • The vanguard passed through the trenches of fire by many devious paths that had been left between them.†   (source)
  • What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg—then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnum's "This Way to the Egress.†   (source)
  • On a strange and devious way, Siddhartha had gotten into this final and most base of all dependencies, by means of the game of dice.†   (source)
  • MORE (Won't respond; with aesthetic distaste-not moral disapproval) It's devious.†   (source)
  • In some devious way, with his books and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he loved her.†   (source)
  • Incorrigible, said Dr. Bannerling, a devious dissembler.†   (source)
  • They're not very devious …. politically.†   (source)
  • Even Aimee had a bit of that in her, but in her it took a slower, more devious form.†   (source)
  • "I don't think it's devious," said Ishmael.†   (source)
  • The boy knew the devious ways of the Bene Gesserit and he looked supple and confident.†   (source)
  • The ways of the Harkonnen cruelty were devious.†   (source)
  • Gluttons are greedy men as a rule, and magisters are devious.†   (source)
  • The beginnings of a devious vision took shape in his mind.†   (source)
  • He never lies, but he is the most devious being I know.†   (source)
  • Moody was devious enough to coerce any number of his relatives to spy upon me.†   (source)
  • Bruenor's devious plan had endless potential for revenge with minimal risk.†   (source)
  • Delicate, even devious—but an invitation?†   (source)
  • As he grew older and more devious, he found that on the days when he couldn't grab some approval, he could at least get a reaction.†   (source)
  • We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant.†   (source)
  • She could of course be insane, with the astonishingly devious plausibility of the experienced maniac.†   (source)
  • They were the most devious propaganda of all: fables in which evil is represented by collectives who rustle and rob; while virtue is a lone individual who risks his life to defend the sanctity of someone else's private property.†   (source)
  • His plans would have to be much more devious than usual if they were to escape his mother's attention.†   (source)
  • "What is this word, 'devious,' " I ask.†   (source)
  • …and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot.†   (source)
  • Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots?†   (source)
  • You're very devious yourself, Baron.†   (source)
  • Ah, Hawat, you are a devious one.†   (source)
  • He is dangerous, devious.†   (source)
  • Major-league devious.†   (source)
  • She was devious and mean.†   (source)
  • A devious thought crosses my mind.†   (source)
  • You are an ill-made, devious, disobedient, spiteful little creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning.†   (source)
  • The zombie overlords numb our brains with math so they can implant their devious consumer-culture agenda in us.†   (source)
  • Devious, jealous, traitorous, and evil.†   (source)
  • And prove to the jury that conniving her way into wills handwritten by her old and vulnerable bosses was a devious pattern.†   (source)
  • He is a devious man, and clever—†   (source)
  • And though what had happened was clearly more than a tumble, Grace had come to suspect Annie was playing some devious double-bluff, agreeing with Grace's decision only in order to prompt the opposite.†   (source)
  • Even now, several of our most accomplished spellcasters are attempting to reconstruct a pictorial facsimile of what occurred, but they have little hope of success, as those involved were wrapped about with such devious enchantments.†   (source)
  • One would not think of General Lee, now that one has met him, now that one has looked him, so to speak, in the eye, as it were, one would not think him, you known to be such a devious man.†   (source)
  • Wary of his sister's devious personality, but nevertheless concerned, Moody rushed us to her house by taxi.†   (source)
  • Devious?†   (source)
  • Devious?†   (source)
  • He understood now that he had been no more than a pawn in their devious designs to rid themselves of Morkai the Red.†   (source)
  • Devious.†   (source)
  • Devious?†   (source)
  • He thought: devious Lee.†   (source)
  • WOLSEY It's a devious situation!†   (source)
  • She was of course absurdly mistaken—just as she was mistaken or perhaps devious (and guilty of another lie to me) when she claimed that her father hated the despotic hand of Marshal Pilsudski, that quondam radical, because he brought a virtually totalitarian regime to Poland in the late twenties.†   (source)
  • They fell with slow simplicity if you watched them, swiftly and devious if you looked beyond.†   (source)
  • Without devious reasoning or complicated emotional processes, the boy became Katie's whole world.†   (source)
  • She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts.†   (source)
  • All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, as one does learn the former—as it seems at the time, the preparatory—life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as having been part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.†   (source)
  • Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both: —touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement.†   (source)
  • Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.†   (source)
  • Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters.†   (source)
  • I sought the Continent, and went devious through all its lands.†   (source)
  • Chapter 12 Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but she had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.†   (source)
  • Ah, she had hunted him down at last, she thought; and she was right proud, too, of the devious shrewdness and tact which had accomplished it.†   (source)
  • My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, till I lost it at last behind the miter-shaped hill of the great pagoda.†   (source)
  • They returned to the carriage by devious paths; when they were in, she said, "But couldn't you get it renewed?"†   (source)
  • She wanted to be on good terms with them but, while she strove to be polite, her eyes followed Mr. Holohan in his limping and devious courses.†   (source)
  • Sitting alone, she was now an illustration of the devious ways by which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit of beauty.†   (source)
  • He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner.†   (source)
  • —the kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal confidences; as though, forsooth, I had no confidences to make to myself, as though—God help me!†   (source)
  • Light comes in devious ways to the groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of course, the likelihood of her distrusting him and perhaps trying to cheat him of his share of the spoils.†   (source)
  • He followed the pageant through all its devious windings about London, and all the way to Westminster and the Abbey.†   (source)
  • They followed this devious way, and finally lost the path; the valley proved very wild and rough, and their walk became rather a scramble.†   (source)
  • In a dreadful state of doubt and uncertainty, the agonised young woman staggered to the gate, and then, exchanging her faltering walk for a swift run, returned by the most devious and complicated route she could think of, to the domicile of the Jew.†   (source)
  • If, with a crushed heart and eyes half blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too-devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post.†   (source)
  • It is the judge who sums up the various arguments with which their memory has been wearied out, and who guides them through the devious course of the proceedings; he points their attention to the exact question of fact which they are called upon to solve, and he puts the answer to the question of law into their mouths.†   (source)
  • Isabel had an undefined conviction that to serve for another person than their proprietor traditions must be of a thoroughly superior kind; but she nevertheless assented to this intimation that she too must march to the stately music that floated down from unknown periods in her husband's past; she who of old had been so free of step, so desultory, so devious, so much the reverse of processional.†   (source)
  • When the travellers had pushed on at a rapid rate through many devious paths, the Palmer at length broke silence.†   (source)
  • The whole country was then a wilderness, and it was necessary to transport the bag gage of the troops by means of the rivers—a devious but practicable route.†   (source)
  • By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp (lighted now), and to the iron gate.†   (source)
  • All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of saying that Henrietta Stackpole was a good example, in "The Portrait," of the truth to which I just adverted—as good an example as I could name were it not that Maria Gostrey, in "The Ambassadors," then in the bosom of time, may be mentioned as a better.†   (source)
  • Renewed is Pain: with mournful repetition Life tracks his devious, labyrinthine chain, And names the Good, whose cheating fortune tore them From happy hours, and left me to deplore them.†   (source)
  • It involves a study of the human heart which leads us through devious mazes of passion, out of which it is difficult to find our way.†   (source)
  • So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.†   (source)
  • The moon had already sunk into an immense pile of black clouds, which lay impending above the western horizon, when they issued from the low and devious water-course to rise again to the light and level of the sandy but wooded plain.†   (source)
  • It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.†   (source)
  • So he walked with her through the devious ways of the west side of the town, and through the bustle of gathering nightfall in populous streets, to the quiet precinct of Washington Square.†   (source)
  • Yet his purpose was baffled by the devious paths through which he rode, so that when evening closed upon him, he only found himself on the frontiers of the West Riding of Yorkshire.†   (source)
  • The Palmer, to whom every path and outlet in the wood appeared to be familiar, led the way through the most devious paths, and more than once excited anew the suspicion of the Israelite, that he intended to betray him into some ambuscade of his enemies.†   (source)
  • As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin.†   (source)
  • The mourners moved away slowly without aim, by devious paths, staying at whiles to read a name on a tomb.†   (source)
  • Creusa kept behind; by choice we stray Thro' ev'ry dark and ev'ry devious way.†   (source)
  • …moved; And now Saint Peter at Heaven's wicket seems To wait them with his keys, and now at foot Of Heaven's ascent they lift their feet, when lo A violent cross wind from either coast Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry Into the devious air: Then might ye see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost And fluttered into rags; then reliques, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds: All these, upwhirled aloft, Fly o'er the backside of the…†   (source)
  • Nor yet content, she strains her malice more, And adds new ills to those contriv'd before: She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng Of madding matrons, bears the bride along, Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways, And with these arts the Trojan match delays.†   (source)
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