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garish
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  • To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate.†   (source)
  • I find a particularly fat clan dressed in garish yellow silk and awful feathers, all enjoying a massive cake.†   (source)
  • We did, and he swept the light over Martin's body, a landscape of garish ruin.†   (source)
  • Adri was standing with one hand on the mantel of the holographic fireplace, wearing a chrysanthemum-embroidered bathrobe that blended in with the collection of garish paper fans that covered the wall behind her—reproductions made to look antique.†   (source)
  • Putting her hands on her hips, barely covering the garish flowers on the red print dress, she smiled mockingly.†   (source)
  • But even so, the three children were eager to leave the Anxious Clown, and not just because the garish restaurant—the word "garish" here means "filled with balloons, neon lights, and obnoxious waiters"—was filled with balloons, neon lights, and obnoxious waiters.†   (source)
  • The troubadours' four tents were garishly decorated.†   (source)
  • She wore a muu-muu and a garish wig that Leigh Anne assumed she had thrown on when they'd called to tell her they were on their way.†   (source)
  • Anything approaching a gorgeous, garish or gaudy display of flowers is to be avoided.†   (source)
  • Outwardly, Annie showed no signs of garish ambition, but Mae was sure that there was something within Annie that insisted upon this, that she would have been here, in this position, no matter where she'd come from.†   (source)
  • Because of the preponderance of Americans, the crowd has a garish and surreal look about it.†   (source)
  • During the daytime the gabachos put on phony sombreros, rode rhinestone-garished horses, and applauded one Hat Dance after another.†   (source)
  • Next they got the old wallpaper off the living-room wall—all five garish layers of it.†   (source)
  • Garish red bloodstains cover his clothing.†   (source)
  • There were still men in garishly painted demon masks skulking about the city, making mischief.†   (source)
  • They were covered with gold and painted in garish colors.†   (source)
  • Her skin looked pale, almost gray—though perhaps it was only because she wore a kimono of garish yellows and reds.†   (source)
  • Judging by the garish purple background and abundance of animated gifs on the page, it was a "homemade" website, to put it nicely.†   (source)
  • The colors and shapes and words and pictures are so garish, so abundant, that they are mesmerizing.†   (source)
  • It had a garish print made up of dying heroes, horrible tortures, and lions eating slaves in the Colosseum.†   (source)
  • Working rapidly, she dressed me in the heavy, garish Kurdish fashion.†   (source)
  • "Oh, one more thing before I leave it in your hands tonight, Miss Pilbow; that new man sitting over there, the one with the garish red sideburns and facial lacerations-I've reason to believe he is a sex maniac.†   (source)
  • The hoes had tried to sexy themselves up, hiking sweatshorts high and T-shirt necklines low, but mostly relying on makeup that was garish even by prison standards.†   (source)
  • For a pittance, people could ride nearly anywhere they wanted on a modern, safe, garishly decorated electric railway system.†   (source)
  • The peaks were painted in garish, sugary colors—all pinks and violets and baby blues—and the sky, just before sunrise, was windless and clear.†   (source)
  • These kids had shown up with a garishly painted plastic robot that was partially assembled from scrap parts.†   (source)
  • He took a number of photostats out of a large red expansion envelope he had been hiding conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket painted garishly with pictures of airplanes flying through orange bursts of flak and with orderly rows of little bombs signifying fifty-five combat missions flown.†   (source)
  • Now, in what I guessed must have been her late sixties, she no longer had to hide behind powder and garish silk.†   (source)
  • I only assumed those dresses were costumes, based on the garish nature of the plumage.†   (source)
  • Another garish store sign, eight-foot-high cowboy boots, framed her windblown hair.†   (source)
  • I thought them too garish for their sad purpose and wished I had the soft English flowers Mother longed for.†   (source)
  • He kicked hard at the door, shouting; it was painted a bright, almost garish, red, a single rune splashed across it in gold.†   (source)
  • The blood on her chest was garish.†   (source)
  • My eyes adjusted quickly; the world took on a dark-green intensity, the lights of cars glowed like stars, faces were a mysterious blur; the garish signs of movie houses muted down to a soft sinister glowing.†   (source)
  • I smiled every time I passed a particularly garish neon garden, happy and proud that my people had not given in to the pretension popular among people in town, who called such displays tacky.†   (source)
  • The garishly colored, manically blinking lights along the midway were joined by the grating sounds of emphatic music metallically erupting out of an excess of loudspeakers-calliopes presto, marches prestissimo.†   (source)
  • He leaned on the metal rail and looked down a thousand feet of yellow and pink striated limestone to the snaking, garish green water below.†   (source)
  • The houses are painted a garish yellow.†   (source)
  • The younger, no more than fifteen, had an even longer braid, dyed a garish green.†   (source)
  • In the garish stadium light, the box was revealed as worn and threadbare, a small wooden container that might have been a discarded jewelry box.†   (source)
  • The television series Dallas will one day be seen as a caricature of this fixation on garish wealth, but the real Dallas is not that different.†   (source)
  • But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week.†   (source)
  • Rasmussen was there amidst a pile of schematics, his face looking garish as he sipped a thermos of coffee by the light of a fluorescent lantern.†   (source)
  • The smell of the phosphorous plant hung over the fairgrounds as we bought our tickets for the next burlesque show A carousel circled nearby, the voices of small children calling to their parents above the loud, voluptuous music as they kicked their small heels against the wooden flanks of their garish, silent beasts.†   (source)
  • The pump organ's blast of missed notes calls us to sing, and I hope its garish tones can mask the frantic beating of my heart.†   (source)
  • Much of the furniture in our house was garish and oddly colored and overpriced.†   (source)
  • He had two windows and a door at the front of the cave, and the windows had garish yellow-and-purple curtains: irises and daffodils.†   (source)
  • Next to it was a large chopping block with a garish cleaver, rusty and jagged and apparently unwashed for weeks, buried into it.†   (source)
  • The image of myself in the white fake fur was ugly and garish; I was ugly and garish, and I was prepared to hear her say it.†   (source)
  • It was in garish letters but he couldn't read them so he wasn't even sure if he was in the right place.†   (source)
  • She might have seen it to be the garish shade that could bring a planned composition to life.†   (source)
  • A cartoon, Paul Berlin thought—garish colors and searchlights swaying through the night and a city full of sirens—just a cartoon—but he made himself believe.†   (source)
  • I walked past garish bars where hawkers urged me in to see the "gorgeous girls" do their hip-shaking; and they left the doors open sufficiently to show dim, smoke-blue interiors crossed by long rays of pink spotlights that turned the seminude girls' flesh rose.†   (source)
  • It must have been their commotion which called the Weasel's attention to my aerial display, for I heard his voice behind me just as the girls gave a final cheer and the balloons fled frantically eastward down the garish arroyo of Forty-second Street.†   (source)
  • This book was lacking its front cover, the back held on bystrips of pasted paper, now turned golden, in several layers, and the pages stained, flecked, and tattered around the edges; its garish illustrations had come unattached but were preserved, laid in.†   (source)
  • The guy was sitting there in a garish bathrobe, at a big shiny desk, going over some sort of ledger.†   (source)
  • Passing in and out of the house, I tried to avert my eyes from the garishly rouged bodies and hold my breath against inhaling the cloying odors of candle wax, tuberoses, and embalming fluid which suffused the hallway.†   (source)
  • At the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets an Italian was playing a very large and garish accordion, and playing it very well indeed.†   (source)
  • Here Sam Parkhill had flung up this riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with jukebox melody.†   (source)
  • She was in a garish pink petticoat, and her bony yellow shoulders stuck sharply out of it.†   (source)
  • They were white hands, sickly white hands that had never seen the sun, so white they stood out garishly against the dull cream wall in the dim light of Jem's room.   (source)
    garishly = tastelessly bright
  • She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won't indulge it.†   (source)
  • He saw Ku Klux Klan hoods, skeletons, harlequins in garish colors, painted faces.†   (source)
  • I wonder if maybe she'd chosen it, out of the others, because it was less garish.†   (source)
  • Cleans off the garish remains of the paint we so hastily applied to our faces and makes us up again.†   (source)
  • She was wearing a garish red skirt, an ice-blue cardigan, and a white kerchief round her head.†   (source)
  • Not the garish painted red so many women believe makes them desirable.†   (source)
  • A garish red abrasion colored his forehead.†   (source)
  • However, I suggest you not wear garish clothing or display expensive jewellery.'†   (source)
  • The sky was red and orange and garish green.†   (source)
  • It was garish and daunting, but Alan nodded cheerfully.†   (source)
  • The ridged shell of some immense turtle hung above its door, painted in garish colors.†   (source)
  • I dip my brush into the garish yellow and paint a big happy sun in the center of her muddy pink sky.†   (source)
  • Now the lights and the rides and the cotton-candy stand looked so garish, so tawdry.†   (source)
  • He was a moving, illuminated target in a garishly colored gallery.†   (source)
  • Annoyed, Harry uncorked the poison he had taken from Siughorn's desk, which was a garish shade of pink, tipped it into his cauldron and lit a fire underneath it.†   (source)
  • The reporter—Theodore Dreiser—was young and suffused with a garish self-confidence that drew the attention of the young women.†   (source)
  • It was a stone church, and there was a ground-floor or even underground mustiness to the place, which was overcrowded with dark wood bric-a-brac, somber with dull gold organ pipes, garish with confused configurations of stained glass—through which not a single branch of a tree was visible.†   (source)
  • She was heavy on the makeup, quite garish around the mouth and liberal with the smoothing cream and powder.†   (source)
  • I felt very flattered, even though in truth it wasn't a sophisticated robe—woven with a poor quality silk in somewhat garish colors, and with a commonplace design of flowers and butterflies.†   (source)
  • The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.†   (source)
  • Winifred was wearing her green alligator shoes, but I no longer judged them elegant; instead I judged them garish.†   (source)
  • The carpet was a garish pattern of green and brown swirls, and the molded plastic chairs were a faded orange color.†   (source)
  • I recognized the simulated wood-grain paneling, the burnt orange carpet, and garish furniture that looked like it had been scavenged from several disco-era yard sales.†   (source)
  • The colours are a garish orange, a flat purple, a lime green, printed on flimsy paper, with an awful drawing — a faux Cleopatra type with bulbous green breasts and kohl-rimmed eyes and purple necklaces from navel to chin and an enormous, pouting orange mouth, rising up like a genie from the writhing smoke of a purple cigarette.†   (source)
  • Darting through the moonlight were two small hairy shapes dressed in mismatched clothes and garish hats.†   (source)
  • It was late in the day, and the garish orange of noon had subsided into a dusky gold light that suffused the camp and battlefield, giving it a strange beauty.†   (source)
  • The comic books are drawn in great detail and garishly colored, with green and purple and sulfur-yellow prevailing.†   (source)
  • At the corner an empty cab had stopped by a garish newsstand, the driver shouting through an open window to the dealer.†   (source)
  • The imp's diminutive size and festive outfit seemed garishly out of place against the hellish backdrop of gnarled dvergar and vyes hammering steel and plunging their works into quenching tubs that sent up squealing plumes of steam into the air.†   (source)
  • The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality.†   (source)
  • I walk past a potted plant with a garish flower blossoming among its branches, and toward the dormitory that has become our temporary home here.†   (source)
  • They soon arrived at another large pavilion, this one white and yellow-although it was difficult to determine the exact hue of the colors, given the garish orange that glazed everything on the Burning Plains.†   (source)
  • Under a coverline that read "The Test of Wills," a garish painting of a scowling Ayatollah Khomeini loomed like a banshee over an inset photograph of a defeated-looking Jimmy Carter.†   (source)
  • We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking straw.†   (source)
  • As in Hong Kong, garish signs rose everywhere above the buildings, and everywhere people haggled with one another alongside stands and in store-front doorways.†   (source)
  • By and large Mo had won over most of the women; they still said that her house with her little mock Japanese yard was tasteless and garish, and that she really should wear her skirts longer and her hair shorter, and that she should use more discipline on Dean and Misty, both of whom were known for their outspoken sarcasm, and yet all of these things were said in amusement as if some part of them truly envied her differences.†   (source)
  • The factions are gone, but this part of the city has more Dauntless than any other, recognizable still by their pierced faces and tattooed skin, though no longer by the colors they wear, which are sometimes garish.†   (source)
  • The planes were decorated with flamboyant squadron emblems illustrating such laudable ideals as Courage, Might, Justice, Truth, Liberty, Love, Honor and Patriotism that were painted out at once by Milo's mechanics with a double coat of flat white and replaced in garish purple with the stenciled name M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE.†   (source)
  • Queen's Road, Hillier, Possession Street… the garish Wanchai, it all came back to him, in the sense that he had been there, been to those places, knew them, knew the streets, even the short-cuts to take going from one place to another.†   (source)
  • One so garish-albeit compiled with extreme conviction-it would be laughed out of our most rigidly doctrinaire courts.†   (source)
  • He walked for nearly ten minutes through the garish carnival, now and then acknowledging glances with a slight bow of his head, and twice shaking it while issuing commands to the same short muscular Zhongguo ren, who alternately followed him then passed him with quick, dance-like steps, turning to search the intense eyes for a sign.†   (source)
  • There were things to do; he could not willingly walk into the meeting ground of the enemy's choosing without some foreknowledge, some cards of his own to play… / suggest you do not wear garish clothing… It would not have been garish in any event, thought Webb, but now it would be something quite opposite — and unexpected.†   (source)
  • She released Panov and walked to a window, looking down at the crowds below in the congested, garishly lighted streets.†   (source)
  • The streets of Macao are almost as garishly lit as those of Hong Kong; what is lacking is the sense of too much humanity in too little space.†   (source)
  • Below, the blazing lights of human invention would garishly illuminate the earth — this part of the earth where the land and the water were anxious avenues of access and conflict.†   (source)
  • Our roses glared back at us as garish as anything living could be, almost like paper flowers, a magician's bouquet that had exploded out of a rifle to shock and amaze us.†   (source)
  • …Sodom into which it later evolved, Times Square that summer offered scarcely more in the way of carnal corruption than some dull beige plaza in a Christly town like Omaha or Salt Lake City; nonetheless, it had its share of sleazy hustlers and garish freaks strutting through the rainbows and whirlpools of neon, even then, and it helped a little in the way of distracting me from my deep gloom to hear his whispered expletives—he could still utter "Jerusalem!" with the rustic openness of a…†   (source)
  • They hung up the jewelry of garish glass and brass and copper, and she set them swinging and tinkling, with a tight-lipped smile, because of her memories of childhood, when it had been her greatest delight to watch the brilliant strings of beads swaying and shimmering.†   (source)
  • …have seemed to be a recurrent specialty—dreams within dreams of ludicrous pursuit, of a quest for some unnamable prize taking me to unknown destinations: up steep angular stairways, by rowboat down sluggish canals, through cockeyed bowling alleys and labyrinthine railroad yards (where I saw my adored English professor at Duke, fully clad in his tweeds, standing at the controls of a rapidly moving switch engine), across yawning acres of garishly lit basements, subbasements and tunnels.†   (source)
  • She had gone with him to help him sort out some papers in the auxiliary office he maintained at home, and there for the first time she had met the doctor's wife—a buxom dyed blonde named Sylvia, garishly clad in ballooning silk pants like a Turkish belly dancer, who showed Sophie around the house, the first she had entered in America.†   (source)
  • …noisy German backyard schmaltz, Tyrolean joke songs, yodelers, choirs of glockenspiels and accordions, all infused with recurring strains of treacly Trauer and lachrymal outpourings from Berlin cafés and music halls, notably such cries from the heart as "Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen," warbled by Hitler's favorite songbird Zarah Leander and played over and over again with merciless and monotonous obsession by the chatelaine of the manor—Hoss's garishly bejeweled and strident wife, Hedwig.†   (source)
  • After all, a Jew and a Catholic in a "suicide pact" (as the Daily News termed it, in a garishly illustrated story on page three), unmarried lovers dwelling in sin, suggestive beauty and good looks, the instigator of the tragedy a young man with a history of psychotic episodes, and so on—this was the stuff of superscandal in the year 1947.†   (source)
  • We were ushered into a long, low room with garish Oriental hangings.†   (source)
  • There was Minta, wreathed, tinted, garish on the stairs about three o'clock in the morning.†   (source)
  • There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading.†   (source)
  • To my left sunshine poured through a window, lighting up the rouge smears and making the factory look garish, violent, dangerous.†   (source)
  • He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice-hideous, witless justice.†   (source)
  • I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.†   (source)
  • There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish lights, and the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly.†   (source)
  • There were women in the mob near Decatur Street, garishly dressed women whose bright finery and painted faces gave a discordant note of holiday.†   (source)
  • They compassed the whole arc of the circle, merging towards the west in a horizon that was fierce, almost garish in coloring, like an impressionist backdrop done by some half-mad genius.†   (source)
  • A wild, garish clutter of Indian bonnets, notebooks, pencil boxes, pasteboard females, American flags, uncut strips of battleships and ball players-but no skates for his flitting eyes to light upon.†   (source)
  • It was an era that suited her, crude, garish, showy, full of over-dressed women, over-furnished houses, too many jewels, too many horses, too much food, too much whisky.†   (source)
  • Men in white moved slowly from bed to bed under the garish light flooding in from high, barred windows.†   (source)
  • He remarks on the "lightness" with which she moved from one room to the other; on her kindness-though no precise instances had come to his notice he discerned its gentle glow in all she said and did; on the gift she had of knowing everything without (apparently) taking thought; and lastly that, dim and silent though she was, she quailed before no light, even the garish light of the plague.†   (source)
  • He enlarged on the glories of the Rue de la Paix and the garish splendour of the Folies Bergeres.†   (source)
  • Buses swooped, settled, were off—garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish.†   (source)
  • A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void.†   (source)
  • Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence.†   (source)
  • Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all.†   (source)
  • XXVII An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.†   (source)
  • At this juncture, however, Frau Stohr displayed her poor upbringing in the most garish light, because—apparently out of some crude satisfaction that she was less ill than Blumenkohl—she accompanied his departure with a few half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous remarks.†   (source)
  • All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.†   (source)
  • But this, their oldest son, and the one who might have been expected to be deeply influenced by them, early turned from their world and took to a more garish life.†   (source)
  • He was alone at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scene-cloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage.†   (source)
  • Even Hans Castorp kept a glass plate framed in cardboard, which, when held up to the light, showed him standing in a garish green woodland meadow, between Frau Stohr and Fraulein Levi of the ivory complexion, the former in a sky-blue sweater, the latter in a blood-red one, his own face coppery against a field of pale yellow buttercups, one of which glowed in his buttonhole.†   (source)
  • Keeping his voice at a low whisper, while lines creased his raised brow, he described the ash-gray branches, the garishly shiny leaves, and the yellow-green blossoms of this tree, so that as young Hans Castorp pictured it in his mind's eye, the image was both dismal and hysterically garish, leaving him with a rather eerie feeling.†   (source)
  • Keeping his voice at a low whisper, while lines creased his raised brow, he described the ash-gray branches, the garishly shiny leaves, and the yellow-green blossoms of this tree, so that as young Hans Castorp pictured it in his mind's eye, the image was both dismal and hysterically garish, leaving him with a rather eerie feeling.†   (source)
  • Every gaudy colour that fluttered in the air from carriage seat and garish tent top, shone out in its gaudiest hues.†   (source)
  • But imbedded, as it was, in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true character.†   (source)
  • There is no city—except Bombay, the queen of all—more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow, whether you see her from the bridge over the river, or from the top of the Imambara looking down on the gilt umbrellas of the Chutter Munzil, and the trees in which the town is bedded.†   (source)
  • With the glance the calm fixity of her features sublimed itself to an expression of refinement and warmth: it was like garish noon rising to the dignity of sunset in a couple of seconds.†   (source)
  • The sun streamed garishly over the stony face of the famous locality, and under its influence Mary, the daughter of Joachim, dropped the wimple entirely, and bared her head.†   (source)
  • Throughout the length of this narrow and irksome inclined plane not a sign of life was visible on this garish afternoon.†   (source)
  • "Are you going in?" said Bathsheba; and there came from within the church as from a prompter— I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.†   (source)
  • In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky.†   (source)
  • And to that had destiny subjoined this reencounter to-night, which had, in Bathsheba's wild imagining, turned her companion's failure to success, her humiliation to triumph, her lucklessness to ascendency; it had thrown over herself a garish light of mockery, and set upon all things about her an ironical smile.†   (source)
  • Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.†   (source)
  • I call'd thee then, vain flourish of my fortune; I call'd thee then, poor shadow, painted queen; The presentation of but what I was, The flattering index of a direful pageant; One heav'd a-high to be hurl'd down below, A mother only mock'd with two fair babes; A dream of what thou wast; a garish flag, To be the aim of every dangerous shot; A sign of dignity, a breath, a bubble; A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.†   (source)
  • — Come, gentle night;—come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.†   (source)
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