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infinitesimal
in a sentence

show 104 more with this conextual meaning
  • His eyes seemed to narrow infinitesimally.†   (source)
  • Sharmak just sat there, and then Gulab nodded to the Taliban boss, who I noticed made an infinitesimal incline of his head, like a pitcher acknowledging a catcher's signal.†   (source)
  • Father, his jeweler's glass in his eye, was bent over the shoulder of the newest apprentice, deftly selecting an infinitesimal part from the array before them on the workbench.†   (source)
  • His smile gets infinitesimally narrower, and he hesitates for a moment.†   (source)
  • The quality that people seek most of all in a food, its flavor, is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured by any traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons.†   (source)
  • He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness.†   (source)
  • Once it is accepted that nothing can change, that nothing can come out of nothing, and that nothing is ever lost, then nature must consist of infinitesimal blocks that can join and separate again.†   (source)
  • In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odors.†   (source)
  • So maybe I had the teeniest, tiniest, most infinitesimal amount of auburn in my hair.†   (source)
  • First, she walked down the block by heart, noting the infinitesimal differences between the lookalike houses: different color drapes, an azalea bush on the left side of the door instead of on the right, a mailbox or door with a doodad of some kind.†   (source)
  • She shakes her head, an infinitesimal gesture.†   (source)
  • An infinitesimal change.†   (source)
  • Then a blade of thought, honed to an infinitesimal point, pierced Eragon's consciousness and sheathed itself in the marrow of his being.†   (source)
  • There were a couple of other nuns, they came and went, and there was the Filipino janitor, Miguel, who scrubbed the hall floors even when they were untrod upon for days, a practice Sister admired of course, because you could never clean a thing so infinitesimally that it didn't need to be cleaned again the instant you were done.†   (source)
  • If he had been his old self, if the system hadn't crashed, he would have seen the blur of the blade as it came around, heard the infinitesimally small whistle of it cutting through the air.†   (source)
  • Infinitesimal.†   (source)
  • His shrinking was so infinitesimal, so slow and so sly, that no one other than himself had noticed it.†   (source)
  • Yossarian shook his head and explained that deja vu was just a momentary infinitesimal lag in the operation of two coactive sensory nerve centers that commonly functioned simultaneously.†   (source)
  • The odds of seeing it were infinitesimal, but she stayed out anyway, growing chilled as the evening deepened.†   (source)
  • In my heart I knew the chance was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might end it all.†   (source)
  • He had always seen this as his minor penance, infinitesimally small when compared to the trials of Moses or Job.†   (source)
  • A fleck, a flash, an infinitesimal streak of deep red light from the darkness outside!†   (source)
  • So there simply are no odds whatsoever that two could have come through it, none, not even an infinitesimal chance.†   (source)
  • Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally.†   (source)
  • The two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth Have turned completely about one another, their join A slowly twisted scar … that I recognize…… A quick arc flashes sidewise in the air, A heavy blade in flight.†   (source)
  • Yuga eclipsed anything Max had ever seen by such a stupefying margin that a mountain would have seemed infinitesimal by comparison.†   (source)
  • They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history.†   (source)
  • If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value.†   (source)
  • I see the girls moving so very slowly, their hair ribbons defying gravity as they turn their heads by infinitesimal degrees.†   (source)
  • Here is the winged thunbergia, the large snouted justicia, the mustard tree of Scripture with its succulent leaves and infinitesimal berries.†   (source)
  • Tiny things, infinitesimal things.†   (source)
  • Their little sounds, as they approached his father, vanished upon it like the infinitesimal whisperings of snow, falling on open water.†   (source)
  • In the moment that these words filled the room, and hung in the room like the infinitesimal moment of hanging, jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other's eyes.†   (source)
  • Later it was logic: a delay in recall of a week might be a power failure, a few weeks could be a technical difficulty— but months on months was cosmic disaster; each day added a cipher to the infinitesimal probability that they would ever be in touch again.†   (source)
  • Everything is due to infinitesimal changes that have taken effect over countless generations.†   (source)
  • She shook her head infinitesimally, and then composed her features.†   (source)
  • Edward's body shifted — only infinitesimally, but it told me where to look.†   (source)
  • His eyebrows moved an infinitesimal bit, then his lips.†   (source)
  • A tiny circle of green, an infinitesimal glow of green light.†   (source)
  • His weight shifted infinitesimally, and I could see that he was preparing to fight.†   (source)
  • Max felt a tiny pressure, an infinitesimal squeeze from his mother's hand as the poem ended.†   (source)
  • And that infinitesimal change ripples outward—ever smaller but everlasting.†   (source)
  • His head shook infinitesimally.†   (source)
  • He crouched down beside Harry, who saw, through the infinitesimal gap left between his swollen eyelids, a face covered in matted gray hair and whiskers, with pointed brown teeth and sores in the corners of his mouth.†   (source)
  • Alone, staring into the void, I became an infinitesimal dot of existence floating by itself in the universe.†   (source)
  • Lapses and failures could carelessly accrue over several days: a broom improperly stowed, a blanket folded with its label facing up, a starched collar in infinitesimal disarray, the bed castors not lined up and pointing inward, walking back down the ward empty-handed—all silently noted, until capacity was reached and then, if you had not read the signs, the wrath would come down as a shock.†   (source)
  • What a monstrous thing, what an infinitesimal thing, is the taking of a human life; for the second time in three months, I was in a room with a slain man, my body bloodied.†   (source)
  • Behind a fourth-floor window on the rue des Patriarches, a miniature version of her father sits at a miniature workbench in their miniature apartment, just as he does in real life, sanding away at some infinitesimal piece of wood; across the room is a miniature girl, skinny, quick-witted, an open book in her lap; inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.†   (source)
  • "killed while trying to save himself — " But Voldemort broke off: Harry heard a scuffle and a shout, then another bang, a flash of light, and grunt of pain; he opened his eyes an infinitesimal amount.†   (source)
  • The puncture was too small to release even a single drop of blood, but an infinitesimal red meniscus colored the needle's point.†   (source)
  • But occasionally, infinitesimal errors occur in the process, so that the copied cell is not exactly the same as the mother cell.†   (source)
  • There, the slightest advantage—that is to say, the infinitesimal variation—truly comes into its own.†   (source)
  • When Max finally managed a nod—a mere infinitesimal dip of his head—the Agent's blue eyes blazed.†   (source)
  • He felt infinitesimal.†   (source)
  • The universe, he once thought, may well be made up of infinitesimal pieces of string, in thirty-two different colors.†   (source)
  • They go crazy, spinning around like infinitesimal Ping-Pong balls trying to find tiny tunnels to explode through, drawn by their own inherent compulsions.†   (source)
  • Jason kept his eyes on his watch, the infinitesimal jumps of the thin, delicate sweep hand too agonizingly slow.†   (source)
  • For as they passed beneath the central arch, every sound and footstep was suddenly echoed and amplified so that it seemed both louder and utterly infinitesimal.†   (source)
  • Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the infinitesimal virus to the distant Horse-head Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass… a blade that may have existed for only a day or two in an alien time-flow?†   (source)
  • Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way.†   (source)
  • Prissy quickened her gait infinitesimally and Scarlett went back into the house.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, after the most infinitesimal of pauses, she shook her head.†   (source)
  • For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that SHE shall be inferior as that HE shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted.†   (source)
  • It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road.†   (source)
  • She woke up from time to time in the night and whispered "Mary" and touched the doll's infinitesimal slipper with a light finger.†   (source)
  • From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface.†   (source)
  • She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.†   (source)
  • …which my aunt had left behind, keeping a fides: house, who was not spying, hiding, but waiting, watching, for no reward, no thanks, who did not love him in the sense we mean it because there is no love of that sort without hope; who (if it were love) loved with that sort beyond the compass of glib books: that love which gives up what it never had—that penny's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infinitesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved—and yet I gave it.†   (source)
  • I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by that absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it.†   (source)
  • He lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for all his treats—well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: 'It's no good.†   (source)
  • Chemises and nightgowns and petticoats of the finest linen trimmed with dainty embroidery and infinitesimal tucks.†   (source)
  • When she was awake, she put in the time lying quietly and trying to focus her berry brown eyes on her infinitesimal fist.†   (source)
  • This was a woman's room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care, so that each chair, each vase, each small, infinitesimal thing should be in harmony with one another, and with her own personality.†   (source)
  • After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.†   (source)
  • These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being.†   (source)
  • So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.†   (source)
  • You miss an infinitesimal line and you can build it into a pyramid of evidence!†   (source)
  • In point of fact the three actions of perceiving, determining, and responding were sequential; but so infinitesimal were the intervals of time between them that they appeared simultaneous.†   (source)
  • While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.†   (source)
  • The pause was infinitesimal, but before he could go on Fraulein Hedwig said: "Ach, Herr Carey, Sie mussen mir nicht du sagen, you mustn't talk to me in the second person singular.'†   (source)
  • She had been an infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life under the blazing magic of the sun.†   (source)
  • By infinitesimal degrees the dark cloud-line merged upward into the golden-red haze of the afterglow of sunset.†   (source)
  • He discovered nothing but shadows of what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.†   (source)
  • Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack.†   (source)
  • Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Wurtemburgers, Prussian Guards, Chasseurs Alpins, Manchester mill hands and old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris.†   (source)
  • The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops.†   (source)
  • …wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of refreshments.†   (source)
  • This Cambronne, this man spending his last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of it, he is offered this mockery,—life!†   (source)
  • When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond.†   (source)
  • It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.†   (source)
  • Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that the comparatively infinitesimal office of the Lord Chamberlain?†   (source)
  • Arriving at infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration of unknown, infinitely small, quantities.†   (source)
  • Being a woman not disinclined to philosophize she sometimes sat down under her umbrella to rest and to watch their happiness, for a certain hopefulness as to the result of her visit gave ease to her mind, and between important thoughts left it free to dwell on any infinitesimal matter which caught her eyes.†   (source)
  • Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws as its problem.†   (source)
  • And if history has for its object the study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the narration of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.†   (source)
  • Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.†   (source)
  • To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.†   (source)
  • Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.†   (source)
  • The cords stood out in his neck, and his face was suffused with dark blood, but I saw an infinitesimal nod in acknowledgment of my message.†   (source)
  • The knifepoint pricked infinitesimally harder, but otherwise Randall stood motionless as Jamie slowly crossed the few feet to the table, stooping carefully on the way to pick up the twine-wrapped mallet.†   (source)
  • As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised.†   (source)
  • The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.†   (source)
  • …and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.†   (source)
  • …to the tympans of temples held, Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity's music faint and far, Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim, strains for the soul of the prairies, Whisper'd reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding, Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable, Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life, (For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,) These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry, Wash'd on America's shores?†   (source)
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