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invert
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  • I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.†   (source)
  • His eye was trained not just on the massive inverted pyramid, but on what lay directly beneath it.†   (source)
  • Etienne sees soldiers with hollows in their cheeks like inverted cups.†   (source)
  • Time on Camazotz seems to be inverted, turned in on itself.†   (source)
  • For a brief moment, she felt like she was on some body of water on the moon itself, everything cast in a strange inverted palette.†   (source)
  • She put this word into inverted commas by making the wiggly quotation sign with her first and second fingers.†   (source)
  • He had on a pair of shorts and those expensive sneakers with soles like inverted soup plates.†   (source)
  • But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn't get the opposite of happiness.†   (source)
  • So we stealthily crept into my mother's room, crawling on our bellies like snipers in search of cover, until the whole picture of her bed— her body in an inverted question mark, and the dummy standing beside her—was visible.†   (source)
  • A red sash covered the waist, forming an inverted peak that separated the bodice from the explosion of skirts beneath.†   (source)
  • The hole was a perfectly symmetrical inverted cone whose sides were smooth, as though finely sieved and raked.†   (source)
  • He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it.†   (source)
  • Estha's hair was plastered down in clumps, like the inverted petals of a flower.†   (source)
  • Three tiny scars, an inverted triangle.†   (source)
  • The wind pummeled the balloon as if it were an inverted punching bag, then tore it to pieces and cast shreds of its nine thousand yards of silk as far as half a mile away.†   (source)
  • The bridge spanned the Euphrates, which flowed in an inverted V just south of my position.†   (source)
  • Hodge hesitated, then offered a short, inverted nod.†   (source)
  • Six months later he emerged a different shape; he went in a square and came out an inverted triangle.†   (source)
  • By this time the Tomcat was in an inverted spin.†   (source)
  • The narrow sheath of the shimmering white dress flared out subtly at the train almost like an inverted calla lily, cut so skillfully that her body looked elegant and graceful—while it was motionless, at least.†   (source)
  • I open and close my eyes a few times, but the world remains inverted.†   (source)
  • He shook his head and lifted the torch, then inverted it and extinguished it against the ground, leaving everyone to find their way home in the moonlight.†   (source)
  • Here's another insight puzzle: A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point.†   (source)
  • He saw a giant inverted funnel snout poked into dark sand in front of it.†   (source)
  • Sherman put on his cap shield and put an inverted Auk casement on the table.†   (source)
  • Irony means taking an objective or inverted view of oneself or of something belonging to oneself and discovering oddness in that.†   (source)
  • As he inverted the net, the fish dropped onto the dock, flopping as it hit the surface.†   (source)
  • She drew a sharp breath that inverted her mask against her lips because she could see the problem.†   (source)
  • And when he died, whatever the circumstances, they would suddenly, all those elements that despised his unchecked power—they would invert their distrust and begin to float rumors that the Director himself was the victim of a wry homicide planned and carried out by unknown parties in the vast and layered webwork of the state.†   (source)
  • After every two words he gasped and dragged the air over his vocal chords, making a sound like an inverted grunt.†   (source)
  • Here and there beggars stood on the banks of the road, rubbing concave bellies with one hand while holding out inverted straw hats.†   (source)
  • Hungry Joe's inverted set of responses was a curious phenomenon to everyone but Hungry Joe, who denied the whole thing stubbornly.†   (source)
  • The words were written in careful, graceful script: Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me.†   (source)
  • Three of them were cloaked and walked a bit awkwardly, due to the inverted joint in their lower legs that made them walk as if they were dogs, striding upright on two legs.†   (source)
  • The move was simply an inverted bicycle kick, but he hadn't executed it in half a dozen years, and this time his eyes weren't on a soccer ball tossed up by one of his Filipino friends in Manila.†   (source)
  • A final set of wheels keeps the coaster on the track even if it's inverted.†   (source)
  • Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet.†   (source)
  • The funny inverted name he had called her for several weeks!†   (source)
  • All over the world, she thought-those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth.†   (source)
  • A final set of wheels keeps the coaster on the track even if it's inverted.†   (source)
  • Due south is the CN Tower, lifting up like a huge inverted icicle.†   (source)
  • He was a stocky man with an angular mustache, like a messy inverted U. Sleepy-eyed, he saluted.†   (source)
  • Red inverted the grocery bag over the table.†   (source)
  • When he came round again to The Slide he saw that the shambles at the corner had involved two cars only; the Thunderbird lay inverted fifty yards from the track and the Bentley stood with its rear end crushed and a great pool of petrol on the road.†   (source)
  • These barren land eskers are the inverted beds of long-vanished rivers which once flowed through and over the glaciers that, ten thousand years ago, covered the Keewatin Barrens to a depth of several thousand feet.†   (source)
  • I sat on an inverted washtub and trembled as its metallic coldness seeped through my pants.†   (source)
  • The stone-work rose thirty feet, without a crack or ledge, to overhanging courses like inverted steps.†   (source)
  • When he was satisfied that he'd made his effect, Nuper raised his eyebrows into a long inverted V and opened his hands, the heels pointing inward.†   (source)
  • I held each match at its barest base, spat on my left thumb and forefinger, and when I could hold it no longer in my right I took hold of the blackened end and inverted it, letting the match burn away completely before I struck another.†   (source)
  • How many kinds of lenses are there, and when are the images real, reversed, natural, or inverted?†   (source)
  • Rhodes sat on an inverted bucket by a hole in the ground, dreaming of his home in England, and of the unconquered hinterland.†   (source)
  • The horns above each eye curved five feet into the air, looking almost like inverted elephant tusks.   (source)
  • their inverted power play, which sets up behind the goal instead of at the point
  • an inverted yield curve
  • The rain catcher looked like an inverted umbrella, an umbrella blown open by the wind.†   (source)
  • It was a strange shape: a small diamond with two inverted points protruding from either side.†   (source)
  • A funnel of mosquitoes, like an inverted dunce cap, whined over her head.†   (source)
  • The dispensers dangled empty on the wall where the inverted bottles had been wrenched away.†   (source)
  • A necklace of golden arcs curved at the base of her neck like an inverted rainbow.†   (source)
  • It was a vertical line with an inverted peak stretching upward from its middle.†   (source)
  • Its left eye was cloudy and a lower tooth protruded upward from his mouth, an inverted fang.†   (source)
  • The receptionist's eyes dropped to the Gucci purse with the inverted Gs.†   (source)
  • I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality-and that my sanction was its only power.†   (source)
  • Magnus's voice rose and fell, the Latin words like a prayer, but one that was inverted and sinister.†   (source)
  • Bewildered, Langdon looked at the screen, which displayed an inverted black-and-white photograph, like a ghostly film negative.†   (source)
  • Then your brain inverts the image and you realize the white part makes an entirely different picture, even though nothing has changed.†   (source)
  • The political officer's last conscious act was to yank at the disaster beacon handle, but it was to no avail: the sub was inverted, and the cable fouled on the sail.†   (source)
  • Directly before him, hanging down from above, gleamed the inverted pyramid—a breathtaking V-shaped contour of glass.†   (source)
  • At table six a wine glass that had a remnant of lipstick was whisked away, while at table seven the soap spots on a spoon were polished until the inverted image of the room could be clearly seen on the surface of the silver.†   (source)
  • Clary followed his gaze upward and saw the glass roof of the greenhouse shining above them like the surface of an inverted lake.†   (source)
  • Again he was wearing a snug longsleeve shirt, this one with narrow horizontal stripes in greens and reds and browns, and again he had maneuvered his way into very narrow black pants that gave his legs the look of an inverted V. "You do work here, right?" she asked.†   (source)
  • With a quick movement, he inverted the tube and planted the open end inside the crucible, removing his finger.†   (source)
  • The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile.†   (source)
  • There in the center, plunging into the earth like a crystal chasm, gaped the giant inverted pyramid of glass that he had seen a few nights ago when he entered the Louvre's subterranean entresol.†   (source)
  • To hold Orik in place when Saphira turned or inverted, Eragon loosened the thongs that were meant to secure his arms and had Orik put his legs through them.†   (source)
  • It was a device that looked like an inverted umbrella with a good-sized catchment pouch and a connecting rubber tube.†   (source)
  • As they walked, Langdon caught a glimpse of the Louvre's lesser-known pyramid—La Pyramide Inversée—a huge inverted skylight that hung from the ceiling like a stalactite in an adjoining section of the entresol.†   (source)
  • Part Two — That World Inverted†   (source)
  • Except for the fact that the colors were inverted, they looked exactly like the elevators in the Empire State Building, the entrance to Olympus.†   (source)
  • He set his feet, thought of how Rachelle would have laughed at the ease of this particular attempt, and sprang backward like an inverted frog.†   (source)
  • The first successful inverted coaster was introduced in 1992, and now you can find passengers riding in coasters with their feet dangling freely below them (and occasionally above them) as they circumnavigate the track.†   (source)
  • There were two hallways, one running the width of the building along the front with a staircase on the right leading down to the street; the other hallways bisected the first to form an inverted T leading to a door in the rear.†   (source)
  • The first successful inverted coaster was introduced in 1992, and now you can find passengers riding in coasters with their feet dangling freely below them (and occasionally above them) as they circumnavigate the track.†   (source)
  • The stove Orr was manufacturing out of an inverted metal drum stood in the middle of the smooth cement floor he had constructed.†   (source)
  • Chattering like children between peals of laughter, they flew to the inverted globe's highest crest and looked down on the village far below.†   (source)
  • When she crowned this with the winged nurse's cap, it looked as if she'd inverted an ice-cream cone on her head.†   (source)
  • All it took was a pole stuck in the ground with an empty can inverted over the top to say, This, too, is a buna-bet, and though we don't have an espresso machine, and though we sell homebrewed tej and talla instead of bottled St. George beer, we offer the same services as the other.†   (source)
  • It was strange how your world could shift on its axis and everything you trusted could invert itself in what seemed like no time at all.†   (source)
  • The faucets were inverted and she thought that soda water came out instead of plain water.†   (source)
  • "It stinks of Sport," said Mordred in inverted commas, "and the Done Thing and the Best People.†   (source)
  • Thus, skillfully, Lincoln inverted the main issue of the war to suit his purpose.†   (source)
  • He opens his eyes, staring profoundly up at our inverted faces.†   (source)
  • Yet it would not be honest to pretend that it is solely an inverted selfishness that moves me.†   (source)
  • 'My dear,' I said, 'I may be inverted but I am not insatiable.†   (source)
  • His little mouth was shaped like a v in eternal good cheer; his eyebrows were tiny v's inverted over round, blue eyes; his hair, rich, white and waved, looked like a wig, but was real.†   (source)
  • In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her.†   (source)
  • itch which has no words to speak with other than 'This was called light; that 'smell; that 'touch; that other something which has bequeathed not even name for sound of bee or bird or flower's scent or light or sun or love; —yes, not even growing and developing, beloved by and loving light, but equipped only with that cunning, that inverted canker-growth of solitude which substitutes the omnivorous and unrational hearing-sense for all the others: so that instead of accomplishing the processional and measured milestones of the normal childhood's time I lurked, unapprehended as though, shod with the very damp and velvet silence of the womb, I displaced no air, gave off no betrayin†   (source)
  • He has been listening now, almost attentively, with that ability of his to flux instantaneously between complete attention that does not seem to hear, and that comalike bemusement in which the stare of his apparently inverted eye is as uncomfortable as though he held them with his hand.†   (source)
  • Yet who shall say that even now 'the novel' (I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the words' inadequacy), who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use?†   (source)
  • It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion—the word born to mean suffering—it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain—the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Francie saw practical black two-seaters drawn by a single high-stepping horse controlled by dandified young men in kid gloves with edges turned back to look like inverted cuffs.†   (source)
  • "5 "The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist.†   (source)
  • According to this variant, the Titan Kronos castrated his father with a sickle and pushed him up out of the way.38 In Egyptian iconography the position of the cosmic couple is inverted: the sky is the mother, the father is the vitality of the earth;" but the pattern of the myth remains: the two were pushed asunder by their child, the air god Shu.†   (source)
  • So I inverted a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it.†   (source)
  • Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white figure of May Welland—in New York.†   (source)
  • Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.†   (source)
  • The sky was an inverted cup of blue metal.†   (source)
  • But as she toiled over a rock that resembled an inverted saucer, she thought, "What about love?"†   (source)
  • The respective positions of the two arts will be inverted.†   (source)
  • The proportion which existed between the two races is soon inverted.†   (source)
  • I see a vast inverted cone rising from the surface.†   (source)
  • The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond.†   (source)
  • A ragged, sooty bunch of flimsy mat hovels was perched over its own inverted image upon a crooked multitude of high piles the colour of ebony.†   (source)
  • In the other hand he held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.†   (source)
  • At such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more.†   (source)
  • "All I meant was that she hardly struck me as 'distinguished,'" he went on, isolating the epithet in the inverted commas of his tone, "and, after all, that is something of a compliment."†   (source)
  • "I see no objection to its being old," the Princess answered dryly, "but whatever else it is it's not euphonious," she went on, isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affectation to which the Guermantes set were addicted.†   (source)
  • By crossing and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them in the air like an inverted "V," I could get a point above the deck to which to make fast my hoisting tackle.†   (source)
  • your greaves on your legs, and your cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate, and you begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down, and isn't any real improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, either for looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on; next you belt on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms, your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto your head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to hang over the back of your neck—and there you are, snug as a candle in†   (source)
  • The song became audible through much repetition; the choir was repeating and inverting the names of deities.†   (source)
  • As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it."†   (source)
  • For what other kind of existence did he reserve the duties of saying in all seriousness what he thought about things, of formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas; and when would he cease to give himself up to occupations of which at the same, time he made out that they were absurd?†   (source)
  • After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward.†   (source)
  • It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.†   (source)
  • There was, indeed, a narrow stripe of water, in the centre of the lake where the dim light that was still shed from the heavens, fell upon its surface in a line extending north and south; and along this faint track, a sort of inverted milky way, in which the obscurity was not quite as dense as in other places, the scow held her course, he who steered well knowing that it led in the direction he wished to go.†   (source)
  • The crater of Snaefell resembled an inverted cone, the opening of which might be half a league in diameter.†   (source)
  • The hide was soon drawn into the shape of an umbrella top, or an inverted parachute, by thongs of deer-skin, with which both the labourers were well provided.†   (source)
  • If I had not guessed this, on the way to the coffee-house, I could hardly have failed to know what was the matter when I followed him into an upstairs room, and found Miss Murdstone there, supported by a background of sideboard, on which were several inverted tumblers sustaining lemons, and two of those extraordinary boxes, all corners and flutings, for sticking knives and forks in, which, happily for mankind, are now obsolete.†   (source)
  • In point of fact, I did not by any means want to be 'amused' just then; and also I rather felt as if the old man, with his knowledge of past times, and even a kind of inverted sympathy for them caused by his active hatred of them, was as it were a blanket for me against the cold of this very new world, where I was, so to say, stripped bare of every habitual thought and way of acting; and I did not want to leave him too soon.†   (source)
  • You have only knowledge enough of the language to translate at sight these inverted, transposed, curtailed Italian lines, into clear, comprehensible, elegant English.†   (source)
  • They do not see how completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw its preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very play.†   (source)
  • On the tops of the columns was reared a dome or cupola, resembling in shape an inverted tea-cup without its bottom, from the centre of which projected a spire, or shaft of wood, transfixed with two iron rods, that bore on their ends the letters N. S. E. and W, in the same metal.†   (source)
  • To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.†   (source)
  • She looked thoughtfully round the room—at the little square piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table, and finally at the inverted face of Lucetta Templeman, whose large lustrous eyes had such an odd effect upside down.†   (source)
  • His head was covered with a scarlet cap, faced with fur—of that kind which the French call "mortier", from its resemblance to the shape of an inverted mortar.†   (source)
  • A dark space was plainly visible between the two, and the new illumination was placed beneath the other, the whole forming an appearance not unlike an inverted note of admiration.†   (source)
  • I am wrong, however, in saying all classes; for as in America the European scale of authority is inverted, the wealthy are there placed in a position analogous to that of the poor in the Old World, and it is the opulent classes which frequently look upon the law with suspicion.†   (source)
  • He looked at it, turning it round and round as if he had had really some hopes of coming at the meaning by inverting the position of the paper, and then handed it to De Bracy.†   (source)
  • Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.†   (source)
  • To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.†   (source)
  • Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be changed accordingly.†   (source)
  • Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.†   (source)
  • Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.†   (source)
  • Such men would not hesitate to invert the natural order of the conscience in order to give those virtues precedence before all others.†   (source)
  • When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.†   (source)
  • Miss Templeman deposited herself on the sofa in her former flexuous position, and throwing her arm above her brow—somewhat in the pose of a well-known conception of Titian's—talked up at Elizabeth-Jane invertedly across her forehead and arm.†   (source)
  • However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.†   (source)
  • Fitzgerald's pentameter is sparing of spondees and trochees (-v), of which he allows rarely more than one in a line; he will invert a verb to keep the straight pentameter: "Now slept the gods and those who fought at Troy.†   (source)
  • What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of the inverted volumes?†   (source)
  • The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles on the two bookshelves opposite.†   (source)
  • Moreover, on the free surface of the lake in Stephen's green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented spit, describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish (cf mousewatching cat).†   (source)
  • On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly copper, and a phial of aromatic (violet) comfits.†   (source)
  • On the other hand, the effect may be inverted.†   (source)
  • We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain.†   (source)
  • Some are lying; some stand erect, this on his head, and that on his soles; another like a bow inverts his face to his feet.†   (source)
  • Henceforward he saw every appearance of virtue in the youth through the magnifying end, and viewed all his faults with the glass inverted, so that they became scarce perceptible.†   (source)
  • But as the Inventions of men are woven, so also are they ravelled out; the way is the same, but the order is inverted: The web begins at the first Elements of Power, which are Wisdom, Humility, Sincerity, and other vertues of the Apostles, whom the people converted, obeyed, out of Reverence, not by Obligation: Their Consciences were free, and their Words and Actions subject to none but the Civill Power.†   (source)
  • Then Kate of the Mill tumbled unfortunately over a tombstone, which catching hold of her ungartered stocking inverted the order of nature, and gave her heels the superiority to her head.†   (source)
  • bear witness to this sound, And crown what I profess with kind event, If I speak true: if hollowly, invert What best is boded me to mischief!†   (source)
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