felicity

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

It is important to her future felicity.

...my best wishes for your felicity ...  (source) Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted, 1997

Professing myself, moreover, convinced that the General's unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern.... Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey  (source) Richard Adams, Watership Down, 1972

The real issue is how to find felicity within limits.  (source) Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato, 1978

Later at Gage & Tollner's, as Leslie and I dined beneath gaslight on littleneck clams and crabmeat imperial, I came as near to experiencing a pure amalgam of sensual and spiritual felicities as I ever would in my life.†  (source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976

Let us break the fatal charm that has seduced us from the paths of felicity and prosperity.  (source) James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, & John Jay, The Federalist Papers -- Modern English Edition 2, 2008

The suggestion that she was a limited artist and that certain felicities would be forever closed to her never failed to make Camila frantic.†  (source) Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927

For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally.  (source) Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

It was one of the days when she was so handsome that to be handsome was enough, and all the rest—her grace, her quickness, her social felicities—seemed the overflow of a bounteous nature.†  (source) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, 1905

Till the next morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity of her contrivance.  (source) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

She retired to rest with a sense of good fortune, with a quickened consciousness of possible felicities.†  (source) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2, 1881

He has chosen his partner, indeed, with rare felicity. He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.  (source) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814

to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,—few felicities equal this.†  (source) Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

With her usual felicity of phrase, she said...

I remember a particularly felicitous rhyme between 'flaky bereft' and 'bakery theft.'  (source) Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society, 2007

She had even commissioned someone to write felicitous messages on red banners, as if my parents themselves had draped these decorations to congratulate me on my good luck.  (source) Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 1989

I gave them companionship and felicitous union.  (source) Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted, 1997

On one level this was natural and something to which Ned had become accustomed, for both women were great beauties, Gertie slim and dark, Julia tall and felicitously proportioned.  (source) Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City, 2003

He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream.  (source) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

Although of course I made no deliberate attempt to overhear, I could not help but get the gist of what was being said, and was surprised by the extent of my employer's knowledge, which, despite the occasional infelicity, betrayed a deep enthusiasm for English ways.  (source) Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989

This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.†  (source) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1891

He has traveled many hours from the south, from the mangroves, to be with us, to cleanse you of your infelicities.†  (source) Christina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban, 1992

With an American pencil, she wrote a word, a felicitous word such as "longevity" or "double joy," which is symmetrical.†  (source) Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 1975

Thus I was ready to bide my time and discover what might felicitously happen, see what Sundays like this—entwined amid the other promising days of the onrushing summer—would bring.†  (source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976

Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.  (source) Nicole Krauss, The History of Love, 2005

I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms.†  (source) Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

"Of all the nights to see Rosewood's hottest boys without their shirts on ...They're all so gorgeous," murmured Felicity McDowell, who was mixing tequila with Fanta Grape, next to her.  (source) Sara Shepard, Pretty Little Liars, 2006

"She's obviously never seen some of those men after a few brandies," Felicity whispers, waltzing by.  (source) Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty, 2003

Dear St. Felicity, patron saint of those who've suffered the death of a child, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will help this woman find peace ....  (source) Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart, 2008

'We find mutual felicity in soaring together.†  (source) Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, 2005

Existence becomes a grinding effort, guided by belly-hunger and the almost desperate need to divert awareness from the squalors to the pleasures, to lose oneself in sex or drink or dope or gut-religion or gluttony or the incoherence of falsity; and in some instances in the higher pleasures of music, art, literature, though these usually deepen perceptions rather than dull them, and can be unbearable; they present a world that is ordered, sane, disciplined to felicity, and the contrast of that world to theirs increases the pain of theirs.†  (source) John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, 1961

MORE If it is felicity to be busy in the night.†  (source) Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, 1960

She was unable, in her terror, to utter anything more than some desperate commonplace, but for her small pains, received a compliment on the felicity of her German.†  (source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976

There was absolutely no sense of felicity or horseplay in thedark official room, with its formal leather chairs, its immaculately polished mahogany table, and its deeply grained walnut paneling.†  (source) Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline, 1980

For the wanderers who will tell it-it's where they must find their strange felicity.†  (source) Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1955

From this broken state I passed into an almost abject felicity.†  (source) Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941

After Man had been expelled from the Garden, some of these angels communicated the lessons to Adam, thinking to help him back to felicity thereby.†  (source) Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949

Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while—in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat......One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance.†  (source) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 1925

Chere Madame, It is with infinite pleasure that I look forward to the felicity of meeting you again.†  (source) Agatha Christie, Early Cases Of Hercule Poirot, 1935