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primeval
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  • He was the way he was because billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet's virgin shores … when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and unfortunate mistake.†   (source)
  • Mikey was still firing, but suddenly I heard him scream my name, the most bone-chilling primeval scream: "Help me, Marcus!†   (source)
  • Kur was a primeval ocean-Chaos—that Enki conquered.†   (source)
  • They are powerful beings, primeval forces, but they are not divine in the sense one might think of God.†   (source)
  • That night the city of San Francisco echoed with the primeval howls of a hundred thousand dogs.†   (source)
  • Not by its rising is there light , Not by its sinking is there darkness Unceasing, continuous It cannot be defined And reverts again into the realm of nothingness That is why it is called the form of the formless The image of nothingness That is why it is called elusive Meet it and you do not see its face Follow it and you do not see its back He who holds fast to the quality of old Is able to know the primeval beginnings Which are the continuity of quality.†   (source)
  • You remember that the pre-Socratics discussed the question of primeval substance and change?†   (source)
  • Going primeval, no fear, no pain?†   (source)
  • As the eye moved from the lowlands to the uplands, the farms gave way to patches of shrubby trees, to fingers and clumps of larger trees, and then to an unbroken blanket of primeval East African rain forest, one of the rarest and most endangered tropical forests on the planet.†   (source)
  • Myrurgia for primeval woman who creates for him a world of tender privacy where the only occupant is you, mixed with Nina Ricci's L'Air du Temps.†   (source)
  • Inside was outside—the door didn't open into a room within the tower, as they had every reason to expect, but onto the broad expanse of a mist-laden forest primeval.†   (source)
  • Yossarian was alone in a ponderous, primeval lull in which everything green looked black and everything else was imbued with the color of pus.†   (source)
  • Maybe this is what keeps me in Addis all these years, Hema thought, this juxtaposition of culture and brutality, this molding of the new out of the crucible of primeval mud.†   (source)
  • There was too much else to think about, and the twenty-eight acres of General Norman Swayne's property were not the forest primeval of the Jing Shan sanctuary.†   (source)
  • Muscles and cramps and contractions, in and out of consciousness, screams of pain, cries of joy, and then that damp, pink creature laid atop my bosom and already moving for my breast, some primeval instinct overcoming him before the cord was even cut from our connection.†   (source)
  • Some time after that while Annie slept, he heard, like some distant echo, a high primeval call which made every creature of the night fall silent.†   (source)
  • A primeval scraping.†   (source)
  • Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services.†   (source)
  • The lights might have been such a place, thousands of fireflies hovering over some dark, primeval marsh.†   (source)
  • Primeval bubbles surfaced it with lethargical majesty as Billy Pilgrim stared.†   (source)
  • Maybe it's something that's evolved from our primeval days when your survival odds were better if you picked up on your buddy's fear without wasting time to discuss it.†   (source)
  • Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going-not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again-not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages-the power of a living mind —the power of thought and choice and purpose.†   (source)
  • He cursed, spit, and trembled, and, with a primeval growl, he slammed the grenade into the cradle.†   (source)
  • It was like something out of primeval times.†   (source)
  • I woke up in dire distress, staring at a pink ceiling stained with the shadows of the oncoming night, and let out a primeval groan—more nearly a howl—wrenched from the nethermost dungeons of my soul.†   (source)
  • For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east.†   (source)
  • As time eats from the tombstones of the past the epitaphs of primeval greatness, and covers the pyramids with the moss of forgetfulness, she directs the eye to the new temples of art and progress that make America the monumental beacon-light of the world.†   (source)
  • As it was the sun was setting as they clambered on to the rim of the hills, and saw the country to southward stretching away in front of them, bathed in golden light: a magnificent panorama: a scene of primeval desolation: mile after hundred mile of desert, sand and scrub.†   (source)
  • He sat shaking, with his fingertips pressed to his eyes, the sickness spreading all through him now, like something green and rotten, a primeval sea seeping up in a burnt-out field.†   (source)
  • We must get back to primeval integrity.†   (source)
  • Entanglement was at the core of primeval beliefs.†   (source)
  • This 'primeval atom' exploded because of the enormous gravitation.†   (source)
  • Sheng raised his face to the dark sky and screamed a primeval roar of protest.†   (source)
  • And at last they dared the centre: the heart of the primeval wonderland.†   (source)
  • , he made the friendly Indian runner his prisoner, and he moved farther north until his forces became hopelessly lost in the forest primeval, where they sat out the wars in considerable bewilderment.†   (source)
  • This moment had been predicted long ago, prophesied by the ancient texts, by the primeval calendars, and even by the stars themselves.†   (source)
  • A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table strewn with primeval magazines.†   (source)
  • Once in a primeval age all matter was gathered in a clump so enormously massive that a pinhead weighed many billions of tons.†   (source)
  • This primeval technology had once held the key to the portals of power, but it had been banished long ago, relegated to the shadows of occultism and magic.†   (source)
  • When radio telescopes can pick up light from distant galaxies billions of light-years away, they will be charting the universe as it looked in primeval times after the Big Bang.†   (source)
  • But even if this pyramid somehow did reveal the hiding place of ancient secrets, Katherine found it hard to believe that its promise of primeval mystical wisdom would interest the CIA.†   (source)
  • By way of fairy tales, this primeval battle of "good vs. evil" is ingrained into us as children through our stories: Merlin vs. Morgan le Fay, Saint George vs. the Dragon, David vs. Goliath, Snow White vs. the Witch, and even Luke Skywalker battling Darth Vader.†   (source)
  • Through the haze of snow, the shoreline of Boston morphed into something primeval—the way it might have looked when Skirnir's descendant first sailed his longship up the Charles.†   (source)
  • With his bitten leg, limping badly, Joe wasn't able to carry Nina any longer, but she took his hand, and they hurried as best they could toward the primeval darkness that seemed to well out of the ground and drown the ranks of conifers in the lower depths of the canyon.†   (source)
  • They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence-but an act o£ primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to see.†   (source)
  • The assassin grunted, his instincts roused to their primeval limits, his desire to kill equal to his desire to survive, the one dependent upon the other.†   (source)
  • Back there in the margins were worse-crawling hides you could not penetrate with bullets or quite believe, grins that had come down from the primeval mud.†   (source)
  • The unrealized life lurched and groped inside him like some primeval creature in an ancient jungle, and its presence inside him mocked and poisoned the life he had lived.†   (source)
  • The hills had a primeval grandeur.†   (source)
  • A wind ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees.†   (source)
  • In the Japanese "Records of Ancient Matters" appears another harrowing tale, but of very different import: that of the descent to the underworld of the primeval all-father Izanagi, to recover from the land of the Yellow Stream his deceased sister-spouse Izanami.†   (source)
  • Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity.†   (source)
  • For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them.†   (source)
  • That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.†   (source)
  • Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.†   (source)
  • This is the forest primeval.†   (source)
  • Instantly, with the force of some primeval gust (for really he could not restrain himself any longer), there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something, said something—all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid, presumably.†   (source)
  • In Runo I of the Kalevald it is told how the virgin daughter of the air descended from the sky mansions into the primeval sea, and there for centuries floated on the everlasting waters.†   (source)
  • Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions, and through malice or desperation these set themselves against the human community.†   (source)
  • Sprays of flaxen-haired corn lay on the hedges, brushed from the shaggy carts that came up from the meadows short legged and primeval looking.†   (source)
  • The Lord said: "By My grace, through My own yoga-power, 0 Arjuna, I have shown you this supreme form, resplendent, universal, infinite, and primeval, which none but you has ever seen….†   (source)
  • The Maoris, for example, from whom we have some of our finest cosmogonies, have the story of an egg dropped by a bird into the primeval sea; it burst, and out came aman, a woman, a boy, a girl, a pig, a dog, and a canoe.†   (source)
  • Again the image comes to us from the ancient cuneiform texts of the Sumerians, dating from the third and fourthFIGURE 60: The Separation of Sky and Earth (Egypt, date uncertain) millennia B.C. First was the primeval ocean; the primeval ocean generated the cosmic mountain, which consisted of heaven and earth united; An (the Heaven Father) and Ki (the Earth Mother) produced Enlil (the Air God), who presently separated An from Ki and then himself united with his mother to beget mankind.†   (source)
  • It straggled onward into the mystery of the primeval forest.†   (source)
  • Its thousands of windings formed an inextricable labyrinth through the primeval mass.†   (source)
  • Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips along the slippery sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night.†   (source)
  • We have them to thank that Germany, France, and Italy aren't covered with primeval forests and swamps, but provide us with grain, fruit, and wine.†   (source)
  • He was the Wild—the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and betrayed.†   (source)
  • The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek.†   (source)
  • Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested clayland of Westmoreland County, did he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.†   (source)
  • Looked at superficially, he appeared young, wild, silent, locked in his primeval apathy, just a healthy savage; but looked at more attentively, he appeared matured, even old, a strange, sad, brooding figure, with a burden on his shoulders.†   (source)
  • In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.†   (source)
  • It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction.†   (source)
  • The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of mush, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open un immense portal.†   (source)
  • Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, tho' this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King's officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural?†   (source)
  • Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares.†   (source)
  • With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, which once went tramping through the primeval forests, tearing down the branches of gigantic trees for food, and died in the dismal swamps of an unknown age.†   (source)
  • Helen loved this forest primeval.†   (source)
  • Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had loved her.†   (source)
  • So often this mood would come to Ona, in the nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of life.†   (source)
  • was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek.†   (source)
  • The austere devotee of military duty, letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity, may in the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest.†   (source)
  • And he began to talk about the cinchona, the china-bark tree, about the primeval forests of the Cordillera, where it grew at altitudes above ten thousand feet, which was why the bark, known as "Jesuits' powder," had been so late in coming to Spain— though the natives of South America had long known its powers.†   (source)
  • For she never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman was Millicent Bruton.†   (source)
  • The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth.†   (source)
  • Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas, not people) crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help.†   (source)
  • A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed.†   (source)
  • This was part of Bessy's weakness that stirred Mrs. Glegg's sisterly compassion: Bessy went far too well dressed, considering; and she was too proud to dress her child in the good clothing her sister Glegg gave her from the primeval strata of her wardrobe; it was a sin and a shame to buy anything to dress that child, if it wasn't a pair of shoes.†   (source)
  • As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.†   (source)
  • Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.†   (source)
  • Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture could make him.†   (source)
  • The dwelling is itself a little world—an ark of civilization amidst an ocean of foliage: a hundred steps beyond it the primeval forest spreads its shades, and solitude resumes its sway.†   (source)
  • The waters of the primeval ocean accumulated enormous beds of vegetable mould in the valley, which they levelled as they retired.†   (source)
  • Callers looking steadily into the eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off; people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see bottles; visitors with their heads against a partition of thin canvas, and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made believe to be sitting in a primeval silence.†   (source)
  • This primeval vestment reached from the throat to the knees, and served at once all the usual purposes of body-clothing; there was no wider opening at the collar, than was necessary to admit the passage of the head, from which it may be inferred, that it was put on by slipping it over the head and shoulders, in the manner of a modern shirt, or ancient hauberk.†   (source)
  • …centre of the earth, where the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmapootra rise to run their different courses; where mankind took up their first abode, and separated to replete the world, leaving Balk, the mother of cities, to attest the great fact; where Nature, gone back to its primeval condition, and secure in its immensities, invites the sage and the exile, with promise of safety to the one and solitude to the other—there I went to abide alone with God, praying, fasting, waiting for death.†   (source)
  • But his greatest trials were in the churchyard, which had the appearance of a primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other.†   (source)
  • That continent still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned.†   (source)
  • These treasures have been buried at such a profound depth by the convulsions of primeval times that they run no chance of ever being molested by the pickaxe or the spade.†   (source)
  • The lines and tufts of green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have acquired a gracious right to be.†   (source)
  • In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track.†   (source)
  • The line is more than a series of six dactyls (-v v); it is a flexible system of pauses that can be illustrated in the familiar, stress-based version of Longfellow's "'ine": This is the forest primeval.†   (source)
  • I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God!†   (source)
  • …and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic…†   (source)
  • We primeval forests felling, We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within, We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers!†   (source)
  • The most laborious task will be the proper inauguration of the government and the primeval formation of a federal code.†   (source)
  • The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.†   (source)
  • Far behind the corner of the house—which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows.†   (source)
    unconventional spelling: This is a British spelling option. The British more commonly use primeval which is also used by Americans.
  • Upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life.†   (source)
  • If thou wilt not unmask thy counterfeit, This earth will be the prey of strife once more, As when primaeval discord held its reign.†   (source)
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