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prosaic
in a sentence

show 109 more with this conextual meaning
  • It was hard to believe that amongst so prosaic surroundings of neglect and dust and decay there was any ground for such fear as already we knew.   (source)
  • The approach is prosaic.   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging
  • She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were "so prosaic, so conventional..."   (source)
  • That sounded so prosaic; but to my surprise I found it true.   (source)
  • That signal object was the "Handsome Sailor" of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies.   (source)
  • Had the prosaic finding of the coroner not finally put an end to the romantic stories which have been whispered in connection with the affair, it might have been difficult to find a tenant for Baskerville Hall.   (source)
  • had been fool enough to suppose that the cleverest woman in Europe would settle down to the prosaic bonds of English matrimony.   (source)
  • He turned the folded sheet over and saw on the addressed side of it the postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic detail "2d. to pay."   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual or interesting
  • The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends:   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging
  • 'Just so,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'my dear Mr. Traddles, I wish to be as prosaic and literal as possible on a subject of so much importance.'   (source)
    prosaic = plain speaking (lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging)
  • No matter how historians and writers later tried to portray the scene, the reality at the time was completely prosaic.†   (source)
  • A bit prosaic to the modern taste.†   (source)
  • The world had been settled by no-nonsense Central Europeans in the first wave of the Hegira, and its two continents bore the prosaic names of North Bressia and South Bressia.†   (source)
  • Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy.†   (source)
  • Logs, donkeys, horses, cows, lumber, dung, sharks, whale fur — the most prosaic and the most exotic …. even our poor pundi rice from Caladan.†   (source)
  • But fact was a bit more prosaic.†   (source)
  • Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life's inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply.†   (source)
  • It was that simple, that prosaic.†   (source)
  • "Mundane education is regrettably prosaic," said Jace.†   (source)
  • I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home.†   (source)
  • La Chaumiere is not, however, a thatched cottage, but a prosaic, dowdy building like other Toronto buildings.†   (source)
  • They were ten thousand men, and they could not imagine that with their mass they could succumb to something as prosaic as the cold.†   (source)
  • To the white children the scene looked very prosaic: an anti-climax.†   (source)
  • An hour ago (he looks at his watch, prosaic) roughly (lyrical) after having poured forth even since (he hesitates, prosaic) say ten o'clock in the morning (lyrical) tirelessly torrents of red and white light it begins to lose its effulgence, to grow pale (gesture of the two hands lapsing by stages) pale, ever a little paler, a little paler until (dramatic pause, ample gesture of the two hands flung wide apart) pppfff! finished! it comes to rest.†   (source)
  • And the next day, having completed our more prosaic shopping, we set out for Mr. Haha's business address, a "sinful" (to quote public opinion) fish-fry and dancing cafe down by the river.†   (source)
  • I don't like their ironical whistling in the dark, their prosaic, limited outlook, the timidity of their imagination.†   (source)
  • -Come on," she added prosaically to the other two.†   (source)
  • There were no pictures in her head, no great white flashes of revelation, only prosaic knowledge; the way you know summer follows spring, that cancer can kill you,   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging
  • It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact business proposition.   (source)
  • They reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic.   (source)
  • "Well, they will do it," said Japp prosaically.   (source)
    prosaically = in a matter-of-fact manner (lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging)
  • It was as if his huge body were resigned to the conventions of a prosaic civilization and to its drab garments, but the oval of his chest and stomach sallied forth, flying the colors of his inner soul.   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging
  • Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be.   (source)
  • Sassburger telephoned for ice, and the bell-boy who brought it said, prosaically and unprompted, "Highball glasses or cocktail?"   (source)
    prosaically = in a matter-of-fact manner (lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging)
  • The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures—men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and...   (source)
    prosaic = lacking anything unusual, interesting, or challenging
  • The prosaic fact of the universe's existence single-handedly defeats the pragmatist and the cynic.†   (source)
  • But to the more prosaic: The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.†   (source)
  • No such vision could otherwise have entered into the prosaic drudgery of their lives, and it will be felt in their development into the third and fourth generation.†   (source)
  • Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano saved him from seriously wondering if the man in black might not have raised ghosts to inhabit a deserted town.†   (source)
  • As the warblers and finches filled the skies, people looked up at the weaving above them and felt their more prosaic burdens lighten.†   (source)
  • This was one of the few lies she had to put up with as a child; in everything else she was in direct contact with the prosaic truths of life.†   (source)
  • She began to run, breathing deep in her chest, running from Tommy, from the fires and explosions, from Carrie, but mostly from the final horror-that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.†   (source)
  • They may spend prosaic domestic evenings together, him reading the paper while she serves up a casserole.†   (source)
  • She fed it with fantasies, idealized it, savagely defended it, stripped it of its prosaic truth, and turned it into the kind of love one found in novels.†   (source)
  • In this prosaic, weekday aspect of her being, dishevelled, with her sleeves rolled and her skirts tucked up, she almost frightened him by her regal attractiveness, more breath-taking than if he had found her on the point of going to a ball, taller in high-heeled shoes and in a long, low-cut gown with a sweeping, rustling skirt.†   (source)
  • I refer to something much more prosaic-the colour of little Ronald Lemesurier's hair.†   (source)
  • We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open, and with him at her side and a guide book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendors of the place.†   (source)
  • She felt for Uncle Thoby, my father said, much more than she felt for her own father— "old Dr Jackson";"respectable"; but, for all his good looks and the amazing mane of white hair that stood out like a three-cornered hat round his head, he was a commonplace prosaic old man; boring people with his stories of a famous poison case in Calcutta; excluded from this poetical fairyland; and no doubt out of temper with it.†   (source)
  • The doorway that led into the cheder yard was too prosaic for most of them; they preferred to carve their own routes.†   (source)
  • Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour of snail's flesh, does not destroy you, western wind, whether she comes at midnight when the stars blaze or at the most prosaic hour of midday.†   (source)
  • She has told you how she reached the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.†   (source)
  • To be family surrounded; to go on exploring and adventuring privately while all the while the family as a whole continued its prosaic, rumbling progress; would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and sceptical of the family—?†   (source)
  • One observes that she is a little clumsy with her umbrella; but minded when the mole was caught in the trap; and finally, would not make the loaf at breakfast (I was thinking of the interminable breakfasts of married life as I shaved) altogether prosaic—it would not surprise one sitting opposite this girl to see a dragon-fly perched on the loaf at breakfast.†   (source)
  • What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually.†   (source)
  • But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling.†   (source)
  • She was a prosaic soul, this Protestant nurse.†   (source)
  • It was in hard prosaic tones that she said, "I withdraw everything."†   (source)
  • Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more extravagantly casual, more lonely.†   (source)
  • But relatively speaking it would be a little prosaic.†   (source)
  • "Husband!" said Marty, who was at the most prosaic and literal period of the boyish mind.†   (source)
  • 'I mean the real prosaic fact, you know —'†   (source)
  • It's a dismally prosaic one; there's no romance here but what you may have brought with you."†   (source)
  • Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly.†   (source)
  • There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes.†   (source)
  • But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway.†   (source)
  • She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.†   (source)
  • There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.†   (source)
  • Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word "mediocre" to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance.†   (source)
  • It reminded you not of Watteau, whose landscapes are so idyllic that they recall only the woodland glens seen in dreams, but of the more prosaic Jean-Baptiste Pater.†   (source)
  • He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread—but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.†   (source)
  • What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.†   (source)
  • And, an admirable contrast, the article ended with a description of the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been buried like a prince or like a pauper.†   (source)
  • There he sat, with his tweed suit and his American accent, in the corner of a prosaic railway-carriage, and yet as I looked at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men.†   (source)
  • Upon sailors as superstitious as those of the age preceding ours, men-of-war's-men too who had just beheld the prodigy of repose in the form suspended in air and now foundering in the deeps; to such mariners the action of the sea-fowl, tho' dictated by mere animal greed for prey, was big with no prosaic significance.†   (source)
  • "Ah," she said, "I envy Gerty that power she has of dressing up with romance all our ugly and prosaic arrangements!†   (source)
  • She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean—his face like a potato fresh from the earth.†   (source)
  • Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.†   (source)
  • If Lily's poetic enjoyment of the moment was undisturbed by the base thought that her gown and opera cloak had been indirectly paid for by Gus Trenor, the latter had not sufficient poetry in his composition to lose sight of these prosaic facts.†   (source)
  • I assume that the rituals of the lodges have gone through a rather pathetic adjustment to the more prosaic spirit of the modern bourgeoisie.†   (source)
  • Its first signs were prosaic and small.†   (source)
  • To fling away your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple with a ghost may be an act of prosaic heroism.†   (source)
  • The artist is either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect his person.†   (source)
  • From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud.†   (source)
  • The gratification of being welcomed in high company, and of making her own ascendency felt there, so that she found herself figuring once more as the "beautiful Miss Bart" in the interesting journal devoted to recording the least movements of her cosmopolitan companions—all these experiences tended to throw into the extreme background of memory the prosaic and sordid difficulties from which she had escaped.†   (source)
  • With a few suggestive phrases, he could turn a prosaic everyday scene into stark reality, so that they all shivered when he now spoke of the ice-cold water in the sponge that you pressed to the back of your neck on such a morning—and called it holy.†   (source)
  • And yet we are not fabricating tales here, but are keeping exactly to our prosaic hero's personal experience— knowledge of which has been granted to us in ways that, to be sure, elude all investigation, but that plainly prove that under certain circumstances stupor can take on such character and instill such feelings.†   (source)
  • One may prosaically specify a group of hills dotted with villas, the Alhambra on the top of one of the hills, and a considerable town in the valley, approached by dusty white roads in which the children, no matter what they are doing or thinking about, automatically whine for halfpence and reach out little clutching brown palms for them; but there is nothing in this description except the Alhambra, the begging, and the color of the roads, that does not fit Surrey as well as Spain.†   (source)
  • We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.†   (source)
  • The only thing this prosaic young man had retrieved from his hour of adventure, however, had been the shadowy token of a pledge—the possibility, bordering on a probability, that Frau Chauchat would return here, sooner or later, for a fourth stay, just as the illness, which indeed gave her such freedom, might dispose.†   (source)
  • In the earlier stages of her existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse the child who had been born in the college.†   (source)
  • Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.†   (source)
  • Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.†   (source)
  • Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes.†   (source)
  • At the first moment there had arisen from his poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,—in those shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms.†   (source)
  • The very prosaic one of our landlord.†   (source)
  • In the prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny, and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds of Lowick churchyard.†   (source)
  • Now the people which is thus carried away by the illusions of glory is unquestionably the most cold and calculating, the most unmilitary (if I may use the expression), and the most prosaic of all the peoples of the earth.†   (source)
  • It suddenly seemed to me that this commonplace, prosaic tea was horribly undignified and paltry after all that had happened, and I blushed crimson.†   (source)
  • The sense thus remains prosaic.†   (source)
  • The respectable companion instantly knocks him down with the ruled account-book; tells him in a literal, prosaic way that he sees no such thing; shows him it's nothing but fees, fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns.†   (source)
  • It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria.†   (source)
  • France is so prosaic, and Paris so civilized a city, that you will not find in its eighty-five departments—I say eighty-five, because I do not include Corsica—you will not find, then, in these eighty-five departments a single hill on which there is not a telegraph, or a grotto in which the commissary of police has not put up a gaslamp.†   (source)
  • Others, however, may rather maintain that this very iteration is an original felicity, to which none but the most prosaic minds can be insensible.†   (source)
  • The peculiarities of his father and mother were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home; for Tom had very clear, prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination.†   (source)
  • The scene was just what Lucy expected, and her kind heart delighted in bringing Philip and Maggie together again; though, even with all her regard for Philip, she could not resist the impression that her cousin Tom had some excuse for feeling shocked at the physical incongruity between the two,—a prosaic person like cousin Tom, who didn't like poetry and fairy tales.†   (source)
  • Miss Anne, indeed, if her chronic headaches could have been accounted for by a pathetic story of disappointed love, might have had some romantic interest attached to her: but no such story had either been known or invented concerning her, and the general impression was quite in accordance with the fact, that both the sisters were old maids for the prosaic reason that they had never received an eligible offer.†   (source)
  • When he saw the little thing again as she really was, as Adam's wife, at work quite prosaically in her new home, he should perhaps wonder at the possibility of his past feelings.†   (source)
  • Something about the practical tone of the remark, so prosaic in the midst of these supernatural preparations, reminded me of someone.†   (source)
  • Surely it will be allowed that none could be more proper than the present, where we are about to introduce a considerable character on the scene; no less, indeed, than the heroine of this heroic, historical, prosaic poem.†   (source)
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