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miasma
in a sentence

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  • Their discourse went forward in a miasma of sweat and heat that suggested a kind of indolence.†   (source)
  • Jem, sitting beside him, was squint-eyed, miasmal, and mute, as he always was in the morning.†   (source)
  • It steamed out of them both, like the miasma rising from the Gare St. Lazare.†   (source)
  • In a terrible miasma of dog smell, which gripped him with fear and called "Run!†   (source)
  • A foul wind rushed across the land, bringing with it a sulfurous miasma that made Roran cough and gag.†   (source)
  • The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma.†   (source)
  • The multicultural miasma, with its fixation on group identity and loyalty and authenticity, still unsettles him, though not quite as much as when he arrived last fall.†   (source)
  • He was met by a miasma at once familiar and alarming, but he couldn't place it.†   (source)
  • Like headache, fatigue, chills, and hot flashes, a subsequent depression or "melancholia" is also characteristic of the disease, which was thought then to emanate from stagnant water or foul air, "miasma," but, in fact, as would be learned a century later, is transmitted by mosquitoes.†   (source)
  • She could smell the polluted miasma of the water, the dirt and diesel of the navy yard, the scent of small animals moving in the grass.†   (source)
  • People had their own way of preparing for what was to come, but most simply stared ahead, gazing mutely at the band of flickering orange that was approaching through the miasma of black smoke.†   (source)
  • You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions-you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker-you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted-the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive.†   (source)
  • I've never eaten oysters that taste like cigars," I said through a miasma of smoke.†   (source)
  • Again, he felt he moved in the miasma of a dream.†   (source)
  • Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa rolling around, trying to get back on her feet, amid a great sticky miasma of fragrant lacquer.†   (source)
  • The ogress lunged forward then and Sophie felt herself engulfed in pink flannel, rouged cheeks, henna hair—a reddish miasma stinking of French perfume.†   (source)
  • Some of his detractors likened his departure to that of Nirriti the Black, god of darkness and corruption, who had left Heaven filled with ill will and the miasma of many a dark curse.†   (source)
  • They would see Exum in the hat bobbing along the rim of the swamp like a fisherman's cork, elevated just a bit by the miasma and illusion of the landscape he moved in.†   (source)
  • For everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, was the rhythm, and as it continued to control the systole and diastole of her heart, the intake and outlet of her breath, the red miasma began to creep before her eyes again, and she was afraid that she was going to lose consciousness, and if she did that she would he completely in the power of IT.   (source)
  • I didn't run from the redcoats, and I won't run from a dockside miasma.†   (source)
  • But soon it will grow too hot, and the dank miasmas and summer diseases will be upon us, and I will complain about those in their turn.†   (source)
  • Later it gently separated at the seams and became vast billows traveling above the sea instead of a still white miasma.†   (source)
  • The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather.†   (source)
  • If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the one thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here.†   (source)
  • A miasma?†   (source)
  • Max retched as a miasma radiated from the golden carriage, a nauseating smell of death and disease and brimstone.†   (source)
  • The vials released clouds of green vapor when they broke, and any soldiers caught in the miasma fell to the ground, clutching their throats and thrashing as little brown mushrooms sprang up on every inch of exposed skin.†   (source)
  • Whether it was thin (a shama or nettala) or heavy as a blanket (in which case it was a gabby), it must keep the head warm and the mouth covered—no sun or wind should hit because these elements carried the mitch, the birrd, and other evil miasmas.†   (source)
  • Everybody: his sister and his brother-in-law, his brother and father and mother, the uncles and aunts and cousins, and the resulting miasma of piety and malice and suspicion and fear.†   (source)
  • On the bus rocking south through New Jersey to Manhattan, I sat cramped and exhausted in a nearly indescribable miasma of fright.†   (source)
  • The sexual memory in which I was drenched during that season in Brooklyn, whenever I forlornly unloosed the floodgates, was of uneasy darkness, sweat, reproving murmurs, bands and sinews of obdurate elastic, lacerating little hooks and snaps, whispered prohibitions, straining erections, stuck zippers and a warm miasmal odor of the secretions from inflamed and obstructed glands.†   (source)
  • Even in the miasma of her Gaelic mind, she had come to see that asses do not mate with pythons.†   (source)
  • It is poisonous-a miasma.†   (source)
  • Not just a patch of Koi, as he expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma.†   (source)
  • Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the glob, and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time…†   (source)
  • —and, in the minds of both women and men, irrespective of age or circumstance, there began to grow, almost visibly, almost tangibly, the enormous, the incalculable miasma which is the leading feature of the Gaelic brain.†   (source)
  • …that spark, that dream which, as the glob, and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew; and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing—but is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-been which is more true…†   (source)
  • The whole Gaelic miasma had faded like the mist it was— whether under the influence of love or of whisky or of its own nature as mist—and the three southerners found themselves accepted at last as individuals and guests, irrespective of the racial trauma, into the warm heart of the North.†   (source)
  • The steamer waited, rolling in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot miasma.†   (source)
  • There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air.†   (source)
  • Gone—like other miasmas of her narrow mind!†   (source)
  • He also carried a large jar full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata.†   (source)
  • The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him.†   (source)
  • Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth.†   (source)
  • But now it was night, and all the miasmatic ravine about me was black; and beyond, instead of a green, sunlit slope, I saw a red fire, before which hunched, grotesque figures moved to and fro.†   (source)
  • He thought no longer, "Can I get on with people?" but "Are they stronger than I?" breathing the prevalent miasma.†   (source)
  • Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces, while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark, quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet.†   (source)
  • The ideas diffused by the reading of Lucetta's letters at Peter's Finger had condensed into a scandal, which was spreading like a miasmatic fog through Mixen Lane, and thence up the back streets of Casterbridge.†   (source)
  • Miasmas still inhabit it.†   (source)
  • These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn.†   (source)
  • …between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.†   (source)
  • And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?"†   (source)
  • …mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata—this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—that is to say, the southern side—by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us…†   (source)
  • It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma, rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.†   (source)
  • All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.†   (source)
  • The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness.†   (source)
  • The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.†   (source)
  • The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon.†   (source)
  • After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer.†   (source)
  • …happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages battle VOLUME V. JEAN VALJEAN against, the people.†   (source)
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