dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

propriety
in a sentence

show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • Most had dressed with the same communal propriety they felt on Sundays before attending church services, and since the courtroom, however stark, mirrored in their hearts the dignity of their prayer houses, they conducted themselves with churchgoing solemnity.†   (source)
  • I could tell he was exhausted and angry, but even so, I couldn't give up the cool propriety of our behavior.†   (source)
  • These Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans were conservative; "conservative"—about certain matters of propriety, especially— is perfectly all right with us Wheelwrights.†   (source)
  • We have long since passed propriety, commander.†   (source)
  • Now she is all worry and apprehension and propriety.†   (source)
  • Then Mom, abandoning her usual propriety, joined us, and we all held one another in a heap on the palace floor.†   (source)
  • Dussel comes in, goes toward the window with an air of propriety, sniffs ...coughs, sneezes and clears his throat.†   (source)
  • In a few seconds this woman had breached pretty much every social propriety behind which he had so safely entrenched himself.†   (source)
  • There had been no time for the usual proprieties that exist between neighbors; no time to establish boundaries.†   (source)
  • Folk with less curiosity or more propriety stayed outside, peering through the wide windows and gossiping over what they'd heard.†   (source)
  • She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first.†   (source)
  • In that case, our revulsion at theact of murder is reinforced by our sense that a very important propriety, namely that one should not do evil to one's dinner companions, is being violated.†   (source)
  • And was angry enough at it to address Seivarden in a way that was less formal than propriety demanded.†   (source)
  • Even during time of war, we must follow the rules of propriety and civilization.†   (source)
  • The first week we were there she had added extra hooks to the neck of her overalls so that she could fasten the collar high around her throat and, this propriety taken care of, I had the feeling she was as content to be reading the Bible here in Vught to those who had never heard it as she'd been serving soup to hungry people in the hallway of the Beje.†   (source)
  • You must assume his position despite any outcry, any talk of convention, any talk of propriety or common sense.†   (source)
  • The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather then outraged propriety.†   (source)
  • She walked in with the husband she had won back, the son she had raised with propriety, the daughter who was born four months after their return and whom they baptized Ofelia.†   (source)
  • She'd be like that matronly grandmother who'd once worked as a spy in the war—the picture of propriety with a shocking past.†   (source)
  • Upon arrival in the Himalaya, Pittman appeared to adhere as closely as possible to the proprieties of high society.†   (source)
  • One had to be guided by the judgement of 'the true ladies and gentlemen', argued the Society, or else 'we may as well adopt the proprieties of Bolshevik Russia'.†   (source)
  • Where has propriety gone?†   (source)
  • The probationer hurried off to find my mother, not pausing to question the propriety of the message she carried to Sister Mary Joseph Praise.†   (source)
  • Finally, realizing that I was stretching the bounds of propriety, I rose to my feet and addressed the motley assemblage.†   (source)
  • As the screaming from outside the gate burst all bounds of propriety, the Prince interrupted the Archdean with gentlest manner and said, "Holiness, my love is simply overpowering my ability to wait—please skip on down to the end of the service."†   (source)
  • Pea, indeed, had always been a little doubtful of the propriety of talking to Negroes, although he liked and respected Deets and was grateful to him now for trimming the horse's feet.†   (source)
  • So far, Johnnie had conducted her affairs with a judgment and propriety extraordinary, clinging as it were to the skirts of Lydia Sessions, keeping that not unwilling lady between her and Stoddard always.†   (source)
  • Heaven hath decreed that tottering empire Britain to irretrievable ruin and thanks to God, since Providence hath so determined, America must raise an empire of permanent duration, supported upon the grand pillars of Truth, Freedom, and Religion, encouraged by the smiles of Justice and defended by her own patriotic sons....Permit me then to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in my country's cause, a Declaration of Independence, and call upon the world and the great God who governs it to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof.†   (source)
  • She wiped her cheeks with a tiny, polite smile and gave the handkerchief back, murmuring 'Grazie, grazie' with meek, maidenly propriety, and then, without any warning whatsoever of a change in mood, clawed suddenly at his eyes with both hands.†   (source)
  • It was difficult for me to comprehend this insistence upon propriety.†   (source)
  • I give the word decent an extra push, hoping to appeal to some maternal sense of shame and propriety.†   (source)
  • The Rooms, so close by the guard's station, were bastions of propriety.†   (source)
  • She had cut the last thread of propriety.†   (source)
  • Because she picked propriety over passion.†   (source)
  • When several creatures—men or animals—have worked together to overcome something offering resistance and have at last succeeded, there follows often a pause—as though they felt the propriety of paying respect to the adversary who has put up so good a fight.†   (source)
  • So I left the rectory in haste, thinking that the matter of the dress and its propriety could be raised with Mrs. Mompellion at some later time.†   (source)
  • I hope he doesn't lose his sense of propriety or they will have to shut him up.†   (source)
  • "If I recall correctly," I say with crisp propriety, "I was a perfect gentleman that night."†   (source)
  • In at least some cases, the menfolk's notions of propriety were markedly more European than the surrounding Yankee Puritan norm.†   (source)
  • In her literal incarnation she was a strong cultural force as the nation expanded to the west, but a metaphorical schoolmarm was congenial to the American yearning for propriety and gentility, for a homegrown culture that would not be derided by the older cultures of Europe.†   (source)
  • He would, I was sure—he and his tight little sense of propriety.†   (source)
  • There was no doubt that he was the essence of propriety.†   (source)
  • One did not have to admire the celebrated legal giant to grant him just about the cleanest record for propriety in the Bar Association.†   (source)
  • Suddenly elevated into the world of the rich, she moved with an easy, charming propriety, yet had the rare grace and aplomb to make her frequent departures from convention seem amusing instead ofscandalous.†   (source)
  • And the sight of blood would offend his sense of propriety.†   (source)
  • Propriety had been abandoned.†   (source)
  • He thought that conversations repeatedly nipped in the bud, microscopic chatter, people who stood talking to each other with their eyes scanning the room like hunters looking for birds, and the overwhelming weight of hierarchy, propriety, and manners necessary for an evening without unpleasant incident, were as exhausting and terrifying as a battle.†   (source)
  • Somewhere outside of him and apart, as if he were reading it in a brain not his own, he observed the thought that there was some flaw in the scheme of the punishment she wanted him to bear, something wrong by its own terms, aside from its propriety or justice, some practical miscalculation that would demolish it all if discovered.†   (source)
  • The landscape continued to be disturbing and alarming to one brought up in respect for the propriety of forms.†   (source)
  • I remember thinking of her, What's she afraid of, what could be so bad that we had to be that careful of what people thought of us, as if we ought to mince delicately about in pained feet through our immaculate neighborhood, we silent partners of the bordering WASPs and Jews, never rubbing them except with a smile, as if everything with us were always all right, in our great sham of propriety, as if nothing could touch us or wreak anger or sadness upon us.†   (source)
  • It's as if the couple is daring the innkeeper to question their propriety.†   (source)
  • The Greatjon, no respecter of proprieties, lifted her off her feet and squeezed her arms with his huge hairy hands.†   (source)
  • Yet it is always justifiable to reason from the practice of a government, until its propriety has been constitutionally questioned.†   (source)
  • Frederic spoke with stiff propriety.†   (source)
  • But this was still a time of worshipful wedlock and cold, marmoreal legitimacy, and besides, it was Flatbush, a place as disposed to the extremes of propriety and to neighborly snooping as the most arrested small town in the American heartland.†   (source)
  • In spite of all this, Antonina Alexandrovna kept within the rules of propriety in the presence of strangers.†   (source)
  • On one occasion, a film was the fuse for an explosion of enthusiasm for the whole class in which eighteen children momentarily forgot the prison of the classroom, forgot about the ironclad rules of propriety, forgot about the frowning Mrs. Brown in the next room, and danced maniacally in the pure joy of group sharing and identification.†   (source)
  • He began to realize that she had not meant our place in mere propriety.†   (source)
  • We have noted the pressures that make political courage a difficult course—let us turn now to those Constitutional and more theoretical obligations which cast doubt upon the propriety of such a course—obligations to our state and section, to our party and, above all, to our constituents.†   (source)
  • "You may even say, My Lord," replied Athos, who stickled for propriety.   (source)
  • After this, you must behave with the utmost propriety.†   (source)
  • Such trespass of propriety was beyond me by nature.†   (source)
  • The word was weighted in Radchaai, part of a triad of justice, propriety, and benefit.†   (source)
  • Justice, propriety, and benefit, isn't it?†   (source)
  • The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action.†   (source)
  • In deference to Radchaai propriety, she wore gloves.†   (source)
  • But if I stray from the path of propriety and justice, I'm sure to hear about it from Awer.†   (source)
  • I should pretend propriety, pull my hand away.†   (source)
  • To an outsider, they are the picture of propriety.†   (source)
  • The propriety of this appellate jurisdiction has been rarely questioned.†   (source)
  • Composure and propriety are crucial for any effective fighting force.†   (source)
  • She had, towards the latter end of her stay, conducted herself with much propriety; whilst by her industry and general kindness towards the patients, she was found a profitable and useful inmate of the house.†   (source)
  • And despite my show of righteousness, for all my talk of propriety and discretion, I stayed within earshot.†   (source)
  • Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived in the same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatience that was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza.†   (source)
  • It is a messy sort of crying, for Harriet seems to be past caring about wiping away snot or tears, past even thinking about propriety or appearances.†   (source)
  • For the sake of propriety, Ivan Yakovlevich put his tailcoat on over his undershirt and, settling at the table, poured out some salt, prepared two onions, took a knife in his hands, and, assuming a significant air, began cutting the BREAD.†   (source)
  • He examined the rest of his body to find that light and color robed him completely; a clothing of purity that allowed him both freedom and propriety.†   (source)
  • In the gallery, with her sister on one side and her mother on the other, dressed in black from head to foot and with her eyes shrouded behind a chenille-dot veil, Susan Marie looked mournfully attractive: she exuded a blond, woeful distress that caused the reporters to turn in her direction and ponder the propriety of speaking intimately with her under the guise of professional necessity.†   (source)
  • She didn't want to know any of this about the adults who'd ruled her life, that beneath their veneer of propriety they might have been concealing a turmoil of emotions too.†   (source)
  • You see murder and destruction on an unimaginable scale, but they see the spread of civilization, of Justice and Propriety, of Benefit for the universe.†   (source)
  • Perhaps someone like Lieutenant Skaaiat would know how to draw Anaander Mianaai's attention to herself without breaching propriety, but Lieutenant Awn did not.†   (source)
  • Adams detested the idea of friends trying to use him, but he could readily have done something for the Warrens, and with perfect propriety.†   (source)
  • Fee says, abandoning all propriety.†   (source)
  • Stoddard himself was well aware that a factory girl could not with propriety accept a seat in his car; yet when once they were settled side by side, and the car resumed that swift, tireless climb which is the wonder and delight of the mechanical vehicle, it was characteristic that both put aside definitely and completely all hesitations and doubts.†   (source)
  • For a workman likes to know where he stands in the mastery of his craft, and if you learn on the morrow that you mayn't accept this gift in all propriety, at least you will have rewarded my pains and gratified my pride of workmanship by letting me see how I have done.†   (source)
  • Franklin apologized if he and his colleagues had been guilty of neglecting a point of "bienseance"(propriety), but this was from no want of respect for the King, "whom we all love and honor."†   (source)
  • Miss Moore pulls a dazzling blue sapphire from the basket, sad disappointment registering quickly in her eyes before she remembers herself and makes her face a mask of restraint and propriety.†   (source)
  • But I will also tell you that my decision will be based first and foremost on propriety under the law, party alliances notwithstanding.†   (source)
  • Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us, could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time.†   (source)
  • If anything, it was a shrewd ruling that walked a razor's edge between judicial propriety and political expedience.†   (source)
  • But if from inexperience or inadvertency, anything should ever escape me inconsistent with propriety, I must entreat you, by putting it to its true cause and not to any want of respect, to pardon and excuse me.†   (source)
  • Ruiz was smiling, but there was a slight tremble his voice, a tiny spark of anger being held back by an awareness of propriety and appearances in front of the press.†   (source)
  • Though he was accused by many anti-slavery proponents as "a Northerner with a Southern heart," he professed no strong opinion one way or the other to the holding of slaves, saying only that it was totally up to each state to decide the legality and propriety of the issue.†   (source)
  • He did not look as big as he really was, and the fragrance of the flowers was so strong and the vitality of the mourners was so many-souled and so pervasive, and so permeated and compounded by propriety and restraint, and they felt so urgently the force of all the eyes upon them, that they saw their father almost as idly as if he had been a picture, or a substituted image, and felt little realization of his presence and little interest.†   (source)
  • Such Corybantic revels as envisioned by the first owners never took place, however, since through some incredible oversight the raunchy entrepreneurs failed to realize that they had located their establishment in a neighborhood substantially as devoted to order and propriety as a community of Hard Shell Baptists or Mennonites.†   (source)
  • One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now writing.†   (source)
  • It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained.†   (source)
  • Now, do you feel that you must slap me to preserve the proprieties?†   (source)
  • Then she could permit herself to be kind and gentle, as Ellen had been, and thoughtful of other people and of the proprieties, to.†   (source)
  • I shall call you 'dear' whether you like it or not, so no matter, but the proprieties must be observed.†   (source)
  • We can't think of the proprieties now.†   (source)
  • All of his life, Frank had been under the domination of the phrase "What will the neighbors say?" and he was defenseless against the shocks of his wife's repeated disregard of the proprieties.†   (source)
  • She did not realize that, with his encouragement, she had disregarded many of the sternest injunctions of her mother concerning the proprieties, forgotten the difficult lessons in being a lady.†   (source)
  • Melanie sat facing her, in a low chair, her feet firmly planted on an ottoman so high that her knees stuck up like a child's, a posture she would never have assumed had not rage possessed her to the point of forgetting proprieties.†   (source)
  • He always left her before they reached the town again but all Atlanta knew about their meetings, and it gave the gossips something new to add to the long list of Scarlett's affronts to the proprieties.†   (source)
  • Mrs Powys, with her rigid sense of the proprieties, almost wished to reject the proposal.†   (source)
  • You must be so excited;" and the proprieties compelled Babbitt and Paul to look excited.†   (source)
  • Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this?†   (source)
  • Certain little proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by Cosette.†   (source)
  • The disordered proprieties were somehow settling to rest.†   (source)
  • Mr. and Mrs. Elton appeared; and all the smiles and the proprieties passed.†   (source)
  • You've excellent principles; you observe the proprieties.†   (source)
  • Aziz upheld the proprieties, though he did not invest them with any moral halo, and it was here that he chiefly differed from an Englishman.†   (source)
  • Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete.†   (source)
  • With the result that, if she was now frequently away from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her; that she who, when she was in love with him, used to say, "I am always free" and "What can it matter to me, what other people think?" now, whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded some engagement.†   (source)
  • For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good.†   (source)
  • The occasion rested heavily upon Marija's broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself.†   (source)
  • The work was slow; it lacked the interest of novelty for me, because I had seen the ceremonies before; the thing soon became tedious, but the proprieties required me to stick it out.†   (source)
  • The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a bedroom with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.†   (source)
  • It was not that they distinguished themselves as a family by any particular originality, or that their excursions off the track led to any breach of the proprieties.†   (source)
  • a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!†   (source)
  • As Babbitt sneaked from Floral Heights down to the Bunch, so the young gallants sneaked from the proprieties of the Bunch off to "times" with bouncing young women whom they picked up in department stores and at hotel coatrooms.†   (source)
  • It was so unlike his usual timid self-constraint; so inconsistent with his usual taste and tact, and with his instinctive feeling for the higher proprieties.†   (source)
  • How dare they laugh at me in your house?" said Aglaya, turning sharply on her mother in that hysterical frame of mind that rides recklessly over every obstacle and plunges blindly through proprieties.†   (source)
  • On all the duties and proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code.†   (source)
  • With a few lessons, she had learned to do the proprieties of Miss Ophelia's chamber in a way with which even that particular lady could find no fault.†   (source)
  • Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the day.†   (source)
  • M. Nioche had brought Newman a message from his daughter, in acceptance of his magnificent commission, the young lady declaring herself his most devoted servant, promising her most zealous endeavor, and regretting that the proprieties forbade her coming to thank him in person.†   (source)
  • And though he was told she was an idiot, he pronounced that for a young woman of twenty to wander about in nothing but a smock was a breach of the proprieties, and must not occur again.†   (source)
  • Her men did not eye her directly when she addressed them, and thus the proprieties were more or less observed.†   (source)
  • In her view the aim of every religion was merely to preserve certain proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires.†   (source)
  • You call it cruelty for a husband to give his wife liberty, giving her the honorable protection of his name, simply on the condition of observing the proprieties: is that cruelty?†   (source)
  • "To see you," cried he, "in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers; to see your cousin close by you, conversing and smiling, and feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match!†   (source)
  • He looked at Mrs General, seated in her usual erect attitude on her coach-box behind the proprieties, and he said in a thoughtful manner, 'True, madam.'†   (source)
  • It is enough for me to point out to yourself that there are certain social fitnesses and proprieties which should hinder a somewhat near relative of mine from becoming any wise conspicuous in this vicinity in a status not only much beneath my own, but associated at best with the sciolism of literary or political adventurers.†   (source)
  • And here Mr Ralph Nickleby had reckoned without his host; for however fresh from the country a young lady (by nature) may be, and however unacquainted with conventional behaviour, the chances are, that she will have quite as strong an innate sense of the decencies and proprieties of life as if she had run the gauntlet of a dozen London seasons—possibly a stronger one, for such senses have been known to blunt in this improving process.†   (source)
  • Anna Sergyevna was not disposed to put any constraint on the young people, and only on account of the proprieties did not leave them by themselves for too long together.†   (source)
  • The feeling of furious anger with his wife, who would not observe the proprieties and keep to the one stipulation he had laid on her, not to receive her lover in her own home, gave him no peace.†   (source)
  • His proposal of marriage being accepted by the lady, the commissary took his seat behind the proprieties with great decorum, and Mrs General drove until the commissary died.†   (source)
  • The proprieties were observed and the Emperor was the first to set that example, but everybody understood that the old man was blameworthy and good-for-nothing.†   (source)
  • "She is a woman of conventions and proprieties," he said to himself as he looked at her; "her world is the world of things immutably decreed.†   (source)
  • In person, Mrs General, including her skirts which had much to do with it, was of a dignified and imposing appearance; ample, rustling, gravely voluminous; always upright behind the proprieties.†   (source)
  • So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and morose, paced up and down in front of the Kammer-Kollezski rampart, awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of the proprieties—a deputation.†   (source)
  • The marquis walked up and down in silence, like a sentinel at the door of some smooth-fronted citadel of the proprieties; his mother sat staring at the fire; young Madame de Bellegarde worked at an enormous band of tapestry.†   (source)
  • They are the feeling that, after all, though I AM a good fellow, I have been in business; the feeling that your mother's looks are law and your brother's words are gospel; that you all hang together, and that it's a part of the everlasting proprieties that they should have a hand in everything you do.†   (source)
  • In the course of their united journey, they ran over several people who came in the way of the proprieties; but always in a high style and with composure.†   (source)
  • But there mingled with it a certain mild audacity, born of the occasion and of a sense, probably, of Newman's unprecedented approachableness, and, beyond this, a vague indifference to the old proprieties; as if my lady's own woman had at last begun to reflect that, since my lady had taken another person, she had a slight reversionary property in herself.†   (source)
  • Or, that she might harness the proprieties to the carriage of some rich young heiress or widow, and become at once the driver and guard of such vehicle through the social mazes.†   (source)
  • Mrs General, always on her coach-box keeping the proprieties well together, took pains to form a surface on her very dear young friend, and Mrs General's very dear young friend tried hard to receive it.†   (source)
  • The commissary having been buried with all the decorations suitable to the service (the whole team of proprieties were harnessed to his hearse, and they all had feathers and black velvet housings with his coat of arms in the corner), Mrs General began to inquire what quantity of dust and ashes was deposited at the bankers'.†   (source)
  • A stiff commissariat officer of sixty, famous as a martinet, had then become enamoured of the gravity with which she drove the proprieties four-in-hand through the cathedral town society, and had solicited to be taken beside her on the box of the cool coach of ceremony to which that team was harnessed.†   (source)
  • "Two Christmases"—those bleak, annual excursions into propriety.†   (source)
  • Wyland's attitude as we made our farewells was still one of official propriety suffering in silence, but Sanders was very cordial and he said he hoped to meet us again sometime.†   (source)
  • But like all supernatural brides, the minutethe husband offends in the least their whimsical notions of marital propriety, they disappear without a trace.37 One more example, to illustrate the libidinous association of the dangerous impish ogre with the principle of seduction, is Dyedushka Vodyanoy, the Russian "Water Grandfather."†   (source)
  • For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning.†   (source)
  • There are however these two marriages; and they show that she was capable of falling in love with two very different men; one, to put it in a nutshell, the pink of propriety; the other, the pink of intellectuality.†   (source)
  • Thus, in this respect, the authorities still gave thought to propriety and it was only later that, by the force of things, this last remnant of decorum went by the board, and men and women were flung into the death-pits indiscriminately.†   (source)
  • I would have been ever so dutiful and affectionate a sister," so she wrote to him in the copybook hand, in brown ink, in a language not her own, a language of schoolroom propriety.†   (source)
  • When he came it was, of course, with perfect propriety; he apologized, sat in the empty place, and allowed Mr. Samgrass to resume his monologue, uninterrupted and, it seemed, unheard.†   (source)
  • This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle,94 and with equal propriety at the conclusion of thehero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.6s Tiresias, the blinded seer, was both male and female: his eyes were closed to the broken forms of the light-world of the pairs of opposites, yet he saw in his own interior darkness the destiny of Oedipus.†   (source)
  • When we broke it to her that Julia and I were to be married, she said: "Well, dear, I hope it's all for the best," for it was not part of her religion to question the propriety of Julia's actions.†   (source)
  • Oh, it wasn't fair that she should have to sit here primly and be the acme of widowed dignity and propriety when she was only seventeen.†   (source)
  • Ellen ignored all things contrary to her ideas of propriety and tried to teach Scarlett to do the same, but with poor success.†   (source)
  • The little presents he brought her from Nassau, little oddments that a lady could accept with propriety, were what mattered most to her.†   (source)
  • They do what they can; they tidy up Property and Propriety, reassure Theology and Family Pride.†   (source)
  • I only doubt—' " 'The propriety of my leaving it.†   (source)
  • Freedom of speech is all very well, but we must observe the limits of common propriety.†   (source)
  • Anyhow I am ready to trespass the laws of propriety if only I can get in somehow or other.†   (source)
  • Mildred's sense of propriety had suggested that Philip should pass himself off as her brother.†   (source)
  • I, who sacrificed all my inclinations to womanly virtue and propriety!†   (source)
  • Joachim behaved with perfect propriety and kept his eyes lowered.†   (source)
  • And he greeted his future stepmother with propriety.†   (source)
  • Mr. Darcy, with grave propriety, requested to be allowed the honor of her hand, but in vain.†   (source)
  • Yes, the propriety of leaving the place has occurred to me.†   (source)
  • Here she listened, as if she doubted the propriety of venturing further.†   (source)
  • At any rate, the propriety of returning to him, if he lived, was unquestionable.†   (source)
  • Mr. Thesiger's manner had so much quiet propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.†   (source)
  • Monsieur Langlois told me—" He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in.†   (source)
  • "I shall be sorry to amuse myself at such a time," said Henrietta with much propriety.†   (source)
  • There is no propriety in it—no reason for it.†   (source)
  • There was a beautiful propriety in that.†   (source)
  • "We should have been glad to see you at any time," Osmond observed with propriety.†   (source)
  • Are you lost to every feeling of propriety and delicacy?†   (source)
  • Would he be so lost to propriety as to marry her before the year was out?†   (source)
  • It is too late for propriety, and might injure me.†   (source)
  • Brooke will go to keep us boys steady, and Kate Vaughn will play propriety for the girls.†   (source)
  • But propriety has nothing to do with reasons.†   (source)
  • This is the end of all the privacy and propriety which was talked about at first.†   (source)
  • He could come and bid her good-bye to-morrow with perfect propriety.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)