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precipice
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  • All I wanted to do was turn around, go home, and never find myself at this precipice again for such a stupid reason.†   (source)
  • They stand on the precipice of adulthood, and it is now up to them to decide what kind of people they will be.†   (source)
  • "Everyone and everything," he'd written, "is teetering on the precipice."†   (source)
  • A precipice opened before her.†   (source)
  • Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before and After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind—my parents, my town, my once-best-and-only friend—and I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight.†   (source)
  • If I were back at the Eyrie, I'd be dancing on a precipice in hopes of a boiled bean.†   (source)
  • As the camerlegno arrived at the top of the Royal Staircase, he felt as though he were standing on the precipice of his life.†   (source)
  • Reynie had a panicky feeling in his belly, the kind he always got when he dreamed he'd fallen from a precipice.†   (source)
  • I picked up a blue chair and threw it against the concrete wall, and the clang of plastic on concrete echoed beneath the bridge as the chair fell limply on its side, and then I lay on my back with my knees hanging over the precipice and screamed.†   (source)
  • It skirted the precipice of the deep pit from which laterite had been quarried, and was now a still lake with steep orange banks, the thick, viscous water covered with a luminous film of green scum.†   (source)
  • Above them, growing larger with every step, loomed Utgard, its craggy precipices deeply furrowed with snowy canyons.†   (source)
  • We were hurtling toward the precipice with absolutely no way to stop.†   (source)
  • After what felt to Alyss like a lifetime, the Whispering Woods opened onto a wide expanse and they came to a precipice.†   (source)
  • He had already been perched precariously on the precipice of emotion, and now the flooding scent and attendant memories staggered him.†   (source)
  • I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea.†   (source)
  • It had already happened so many times in my life (my wedding day comes to mind) that I thought I was out of the woods, not realizing I'd merely paused on the edge of another narrow precipice in the midst of a long, long fall.†   (source)
  • She felt as if she were edging toward a precipice, some terrible hurtling fall into nothing and nowhere.†   (source)
  • As always happened when he was playing alongside a precipice, someone stronger than himself had risen up beside him to take charge of things— just like the times at school when he would taunt the other boys until they jumped on top of him and then, at the very last possible minute, when he was paralyzed with terror, Jaime would appear and stand in front of him, changing his panic to euphoria and allowing him to run for cover behind the pillars of the courtyard and shout insults from his refuge, while his brother bled from his nose and delivered punches with the silent tenacity of a machine.†   (source)
  • And once more all four of us clutched our rifles, stood up, braved the flying bullets, and headed for the precipice.†   (source)
  • At last, gasping with exhaustion, the couple stopped short at a precipice.†   (source)
  • Behind the houses, reaching to the sky, rose a promontory of uncultivated highland with a wrought-iron cornice at the edge of the precipice.†   (source)
  • They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.†   (source)
  • I gripped the chain-link fence and edged down the mountain until I stood on the precipice of the ditch.†   (source)
  • "Are you content, Stevens," he said finally, "to watch his lordship go over the precipice just like that?"†   (source)
  • There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.†   (source)
  • Now the air thickened between them, as though they were on opposite sides of a chasm in the mountains, trying to discern each other through the cloud and the fog, but terribly frightened of the precipice at their feet.†   (source)
  • She was already in appalling shape, pale and clammy, her pulse so thready that he believed anything he did would send her over the precipice.†   (source)
  • It made me feel a little bit dizzy, like I was standing on an edge, a precipice somewhere much too high.†   (source)
  • And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?†   (source)
  • Yes, well, there's the precipice, too," he argued, gesturing impatiently at the nearby bluff.†   (source)
  • At the left of this high range rose three peaks; the tallest and nearest stood up like a tooth tipped with snow; its great, bare, northern precipice was still largely in the shadow, but where the sunlight slanted upon it, it glowed red.†   (source)
  • The threat of embroilment in the European war continued, America at the "precipice," as Adams said, and still there was no word from John Jay in London.†   (source)
  • He was waiting there on the precipice for my directions.†   (source)
  • After lunch, they followed the trail for another three hours on horseback, sometimes on tracks that ran to the edge of steep precipices, the danger heightening Sophia's senses.†   (source)
  • Only the jade-green Indus—sometimes tumbling into a dazzle of white foam—relieves the gray-brown of crags and sheer precipices and steep slopes.†   (source)
  • You are a maiden fair on the precipice of death!†   (source)
  • With them, she could take him to that trembling precipice.†   (source)
  • The guard scrambled away along the vine-tangled precipice and disappeared into the dense foliage beyond.†   (source)
  • Angel stared up at the precipice from which they had just descended.†   (source)
  • They struggled into oilskins as the first lightning bolt snaked down the precipice and raised their hair on end.†   (source)
  • PRAISE-SINGER Elesin, we placed the reins of the world in your hands yet you watched it plunge over the edge of the bitter precipice.†   (source)
  • From the true trail branched many false trails that sometimes looked easier and more attractive; all these really led to the edges of precipices, beneath which lay the abyss of eternity.†   (source)
  • And then he saw the blurred form of the wizard, leaning out over the southern precipice, trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the battlefield below.†   (source)
  • Now Westwood was struggling back from the precipice.†   (source)
  • If one was to be blind drunk in the twenties and thirties, one somehow managed it on public transport, or on roads that would terrify a sober man with mountain passes, rock cuts, and precipices.†   (source)
  • After leading us to the brink of a precipice, they seem resolved to plunge us into the abyss.†   (source)
  • But all I seem to think of doing is to stop, or turn around, or else dig in for a sprint, a stiffened, perambling, old-man leap off the precipice.†   (source)
  • Gabriel moved cautiously toward the edge of the precipice and looked down.†   (source)
  • I saw everybody on the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • They camped early, close to a patch of pink-tinted pipe-clay, agreeing to explore the precipice the following morning.†   (source)
  • It grew under an overhanging cliff, on a narrow ledge above another precipice.†   (source)
  • I moved to the lip of the precipice and looked down.†   (source)
  • But it was his extraordinary head that contemporaries found so memorable, with the features Carlyle described for all to remember: "The tanned complexion, the amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed."†   (source)
  • We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country--its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.   (source)
    precipices = steep cliffs
  • Goblins had scaled the Mountain from the other side and already many were on the slopes above the Gate, and others were streaming down recklessly, heedless of those that fell screaming from cliff and precipice, to attack the spurs from above.   (source)
    precipice = a very steep cliff face
  • There was no path down on to it save by flying; and no path down off it except by jumping over a precipice.   (source)
  • They it was who dislodged the goblins from the mountain-slopes, casting them over precipices, or driving them down shrieking and bewildered among their foes.   (source)
    precipices = steep cliffs
  • She was very near to the precipice now, so close she could almost look down.†   (source)
  • I know we were both blown out of the hole by the RPG, because I went over the precipice.†   (source)
  • Langdon immediately sensed the precipice behind him-a hundred-foot drop to the courtyard below.†   (source)
  • "Tonight we are perched on a precipice," the camerlegno said.†   (source)
  • Finally I stopped on the edge of yet another precipice, which I sensed rather than saw.†   (source)
  • She tied the horse to a tree and edged as close to the precipice as she dared.†   (source)
  • Eragon looked up and saw flashes of light atop the wall that guarded the lip of the precipice.†   (source)
  • About halfway down the precipice, Annabeth said, "Stop, okay?†   (source)
  • Bourne stood at the edge of the precipice looking down through the trees at the gathering below.†   (source)
  • A dozen jars of lamp oil had been lined up on the precipice.†   (source)
  • She didn't mind in the least standing on the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • Step by step, events were moving toward the precipice, as Adams said.†   (source)
  • Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa's Tears fell in summer.†   (source)
  • For the longest moment, we all wait on the precipice.†   (source)
  • That was when I noticed four figures standing on a rocky ledge, much too close to the precipice.†   (source)
  • Could the eagle have hurt Ghost, or knocked him off the precipice?†   (source)
  • His gaze, I was sure, was fixed on the approaching precipice.†   (source)
  • For a long way Aslan went along the top of the precipices.†   (source)
  • Presently they came to another steep path, up the face of the farther precipices.†   (source)
  • Grenn was rolling a second barrel to the precipice by then, and Kegs had one as well.†   (source)
  • He stepped to the edge of the precipice.†   (source)
  • Without knowing it, you are walking on the brink of a precipice.†   (source)
  • Running his hands through his hair, he walked to the room's precipice and leaned against one side, bark rough against his shoulder.†   (source)
  • Remedios the Beauty did not tell anyone that one of the men, taking advantage of the tumult, had managed to attack her stomach with a hand that was more like the claw of an eagle clinging to the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • Speaking became a matter of self-defense, since Mother seems to have gone mute, and with no one to testify to my place in the world I found myself at the same precipice I teetered upon when entering the first grade: gifted, or special education with the ear-pulling Crawleys?†   (source)
  • A bare path led from the precipice to the doorstep of a low hut grown between the trunks of four trees, one of which straddled a stream that emerged from the moody depths of the forest.†   (source)
  • He saw the clowns doing cartwheels at the end of the parade and once more he saw the face of his miserable solitude when everything had passed by and there was nothing but the bright expanse of the street and the air full of flying ants with a few onlookers peering into the precipice of uncertainty.†   (source)
  • He saw them round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby's cage, and soon afterward he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life.†   (source)
  • A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, whispering in their ear, in order not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street, that the shape lying across the sidewalk was a dead beggar, and with great difficulty helped them to cross the street as if it were the only ford across the last of life's rivers.†   (source)
  • J. C. The precipice opened before her.†   (source)
  • It was a place where a pilot could bring in an MH-47 without risking a collision with trees or rolling off a precipice or landing in the middle of a Taliban trap.†   (source)
  • The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleback in a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost always petrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices.†   (source)
  • So every time I reached one of those small precipices, I just threw myself straight off and hoped for a reasonable landing.†   (source)
  • Eragon felt as if he were hanging off the edge of a precipice and Orik was trying to convince him there was a ledge only a few feet below him, but Eragon could not bring himself to release his grip, for fear he would fall to his doom.†   (source)
  • He gave her a sloppy kiss and swung his legs clumsily over the precipice, kicking about until he found a foothold.†   (source)
  • But west would lead them only into more labour and delay, back towards the heart of the hills; east would take them to the outer precipice.†   (source)
  • Suffice it to say that [Everest] has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen, and that all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth...My darling, this is a thrilling business altogether, I can't tell you how it possesses me, and what a prospect it is.†   (source)
  • And suddenly he was back in the mountains, his paws sunk deep in a drift of snow as he stood upon the edge of a great precipice.†   (source)
  • Carlos had the advantage; ultimately he would risk everything, for, as Fontaine revealed, he was Jason slid down off the coastal wall to the slanting precipice at its base.†   (source)
  • On the far bank of the Braldu, Haji Ali stood, sculpted as always, to the highest point on the precipice.†   (source)
  • He felt that he had stepped off a precipice into an air which held him inexorably up, as the salt sea holds the swimmer: and seemed to see, vastly and horribly down, into the bottom of his heart, that heart which contained all the possibilities that he could name and yet others that he could not name.†   (source)
  • Even then, I sensed he thought of his son in the same way he did me: as a child who, on the precipice of adulthood, had lost it all.†   (source)
  • If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire.†   (source)
  • It canted toward a one-hundred-foot-high precipice without even a tree to slow the bus down if it went over.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile, the guides would sit with legs dangling over an infinite precipice; they would stand on tiny pinnacles, smoking their pipes, coiling ropes, and sorting the climbing hardware; and they would run up and down goat trails sometimes no less vertical and no more contoured than Trajan's Column.†   (source)
  • Though they had been gone for less than a month, this trip had accelerated their life experiences at a time when they stood on the precipice of manhood.†   (source)
  • In the end, worn out, they just cast themselves on the ground under the lee of a boulder lying not far from the foot of the precipice.†   (source)
  • Standing on the edge of a two-thousand-meter precipice becomes no less comfortable than sitting in a wicker chair on Capri, for it: is possible to acquire some of the self-possession that enables mountain goats to stand for hours on a tiny ledge above an abyss.†   (source)
  • He smiled—I bet mine's bigger than yours is—but remembered occasional nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable forests, came at him with a knife on the edge of precipices, threatened to hurl him down steep stairs to the sea.†   (source)
  • And then imagine that the precipice goes on below that, as far again, ten times as far, twenty times as far.†   (source)
  • Just as I reached the place where the dirt path fanned out into the stone precipice, the first drops broke through and splattered on my face.†   (source)
  • In passing a caravan...my servant's horse was pushed over the precipice by a loaded mule and drowned.†   (source)
  • Mya staggered, and for half a heartbeat it seemed as if she would be blown over the precipice, but somehow she regained her balance and went on.†   (source)
  • It was walled in by precipices on the far side as well as on their own, and it was green and sunless, full of rapids and waterfalls.†   (source)
  • Down the face of a precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out.†   (source)
  • Then the Rush might go on deepening its course year after year till you get the little precipices this side.†   (source)
  • Living-quarters often were cantilevered out from precipices, or hung on heavy chains that had been carried up by teams of mountaineers.†   (source)
  • A landslide might have pulled off half the side of that hill, leaving bare rock, and there are your precipices beyond the gorge.†   (source)
  • All the years at high speed on the backs of dangerous horses, all the years clinging to precipices and ledges above the clouds, and all the bayonets, artillery shells, and machine-gun bullets that had been marvelously rerouted around him, were to be overshadowed by a microbe that felled him in a cheap hotel.†   (source)
  • It was a skyless world, in which his eye; through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist.†   (source)
  • Sam thought he saw a last fleeting glimpse of it, peering back over the edge of the eastward precipice, before it ducked and disappeared.†   (source)
  • That evening they came to a bend in the lagoon, and rounding this, saw ahead of them the valley-end: a sheer precipice of granite, and at its base a dark tunnel out of which an underground river flowed in a smooth pouring torrent.†   (source)
  • Then he thought this had carried him too far to the left — and as he came up he had seen precipices on that side.†   (source)
  • The Philadelphia Press said that in Ross "littleness" had "simply borne its legitimate fruit," and that he and his fellow recalcitrant Republicans had "plunged from a precipice of fame into the groveling depths of infamy and death."†   (source)
  • It was so narrow and deep, and the precipices which surrounded it so sheer, that it was like a huge pit or trench.†   (source)
  • The eastern faces of the Ephel Duath were sheer, falling in cliff and precipice to the black trough that lay between them and the inner ridge.†   (source)
  • Then the escort closed around them in a semicircle, rifle in hand, and advancing at a quick, jostling pace drove them to the edge of the platform, where there was no way out except over the precipice.†   (source)
  • Beyond it went a winding road that descended in many curves down to the narrow land under the shadow of Mindolluin's precipice where stood the mansions of the dead Kings and of their Stewards.†   (source)
  • And they went up by steep ways, until they came to a high field below the snows that clad the lofty peaks, and it looked down over the precipice that stood behind the City.†   (source)
  • But that shoulder, which rose to the height of the fifth wall, was hedged with great ramparts right up to the precipice that overhung its western end; and in that space stood the houses and domed tombs of bygone kings and lords, for ever silent between the mountain and the tower.†   (source)
  • Its gate, upon the near south-eastern side, opened on a broad road, the outer parapet of which ran upon the brink of a precipice, until it turned southward and went winding down into the darkness to join the road that came over the Morgul Pass.†   (source)
  • A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain.†   (source)
  • We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible.†   (source)
  • The sun is yet high in the heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind your snowy precipices and illuminate another world, you will have heard my story and can decide.†   (source)
  • Ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains, the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there peeping forth from among the trees formed a scene of singular beauty.†   (source)
  • In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene.†   (source)
  • His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations; a creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with.†   (source)
  • The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise.†   (source)
  • Guenever, in a dangerous frame of mind, began walking on the edge of a verbal precipice.†   (source)
  • When we climbed the hills and looked down over the precipice.†   (source)
  • Their path led them to the foot of the precipice.†   (source)
  • She made a bargain with me up there, on the side of the precipice,' he said.†   (source)
  • At the edge of the precipice he sat down.†   (source)
  • At their feet lay a straggle of low buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the precipices fell sheer into the plain.†   (source)
  • The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with, that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.†   (source)
  • The chorus, like a torrent jumping rocks, brutally assaulting old trees, pours with splendid abandonment headlong over precipices.†   (source)
  • Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, and I shan't fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me, she thought.†   (source)
  • With one sentence he had lifted out of the silent dark the race question and I stood on the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • They traveled in bamboo sedan chairs, swinging perilously over precipices while their bearers in front and to the rear picked a way nonchalantly down the steep track.†   (source)
  • She looked exactly like a rock poised to plunge over a precipice, and for an instant Hightower thought She has already killed him.†   (source)
  • Its original source was so high, indeed, that by merely laying a closed wooden trough up the face of the cliff, the Mexicans conveyed the water some hundreds of feet to an open ditch at the top of the precipice.†   (source)
  • Mallinson was nervous at the precipice, but Conway got him over in traditional mountaineering fashion, and when the trial was past, they leaned together over Mallinson's cigarettes.†   (source)
  • One approached over a sage-brush plain that appeared to run level and unbroken to the base of the distant mountains; then without warning, one suddenly found oneself upon the brink of a precipice, of a chasm in the earth over two hundred feet deep, the sides sheer cliffs, but cliffs of earth, not rock.†   (source)
  • We launch out now over the precipice.†   (source)
  • You remember the precipice.†   (source)
  • He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death.†   (source)
  • You know you are standing on the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • "Well?" said Margaret, with the precipice in sight.†   (source)
  • Each man stood on the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit at all he was done for.†   (source)
  • The castle is on the very edge of a terrific precipice.†   (source)
  • Films of heat, radiated from the Kawa Dol precipices, increased the confusion.†   (source)
  • Higher up, tall stone peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished.†   (source)
  • At their feet fell the precipice where the limestone was quarried away.†   (source)
  • Sheer above us rose the Spyglass, here dotted with single pines, there black with precipices.†   (source)
  • Rustlers could not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices.†   (source)
  • You have been walking for some months very near to the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • More than one of his leaps took him to the very edge of the precipice.†   (source)
  • Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding precipice.†   (source)
  • But he too was carried forward over the new precipice.†   (source)
  • They had tried not to go over the precipice, but perhaps the fall was inevitable.†   (source)
  • They rounded this precipice only to face a worse one.†   (source)
  • If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you tight and jump.†   (source)
  • So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.†   (source)
  • At least God's mercy is better than that of those monsters, and the precipice is steep and high.†   (source)
  • On the latter side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice.†   (source)
  • The brow of the precipice over the cave—†   (source)
  • Stay ...it's exciting talking to you ... one seems walking on the edge of a precipice.†   (source)
  • Have you ever felt, have you ever dreamt of falling down a precipice into a pit?†   (source)
  • You, Eustacia, stand on the edge of a precipice without knowing it.†   (source)
  • The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt herself, as it were, attending on the body.†   (source)
  • There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not traverse with you.†   (source)
  • A single bound would carry him to the brow of the precipice, and assure his safety.†   (source)
  • The intestines of Paris form a precipice.†   (source)
  • What precipices are idleness and pleasure!†   (source)
  • At certain points, there were precipices.†   (source)
  • Precipices are to be distinguished there.†   (source)
  • Among all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, which was his choice?†   (source)
  • —on their backs; circles traced round shillings and sixpences—the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be waves: the map of the world.†   (source)
  • When Shefford reached for the brown hand stretched forth to help him in a leap, when he felt its strong clasp, the youth and vitality and life of it, he had the fear of a man who was running towards a precipice and who could not draw back.†   (source)
  • But he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood.†   (source)
  • On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre precipice, I saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there ruinously—the remnants of Sherif Ali's impregnable camp.†   (source)
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