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recalcitrant
in a sentence

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  • These recalcitrant views had time after time brought him into conflict with his peers.†   (source)
  • Father said no, she shouldn't encourage Sam in his recalcitrance.†   (source)
  • The typewriter keys moved sluggishly, striking with a dull, wet sound—moved, in fact, rather the way his novel moved, lifelessly, pushed forward, inch by inch by recalcitrant inch, almost entirely by the will.†   (source)
  • Any parent who has ever said to a recalcitrant child, "Okay, I'm going to count to ten and this time I'm really going to punish you,— knows the difference between deterrent and empty threat.†   (source)
  • Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old.†   (source)
  • On the few occasions when they couldn't make a particular movement, they went next door to the UCSF anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle.†   (source)
  • And when a girl showed any hint of resistance, all the girls would be summoned to watch as the recalcitrant one was tied up and savagely beaten.†   (source)
  • Hard Tack became a notorious rogue, inspiring turf writer John Hervey to dub him "the archexponent of recalcitrance."†   (source)
  • Now she sat resting in vacuous indolence, watching the card game with dull curiosity as she gathered her recalcitrant energies for the tedious chore of donning the rest of her clothing and going back to work.†   (source)
  • Yet interrogation specialists talk in dark corners, as often to relieve frustration as to impress a listener, and he had heard about a recalcitrant, unmanageable patient, an amnesiac they called "Davey" and sometimes just a short, sharp, hostile "Webb," formerly a member of Saigon's infamous Medusa, and a man they suspected of feigning his loss of memory.†   (source)
  • An old man was having a fight with a recalcitrant umbrella and two nuns were being swept like sailboats toward their car.†   (source)
  • Down with Downworlders, kill all recalcitrant Shadow-hunters, blab blab.†   (source)
  • The longer the siege dragged on, the more it would hearten other recalcitrants, like Tytos Blackwood.†   (source)
  • Would you say that his attitude is still what one might call recalcitrant?†   (source)
  • "I do not think he is being recalcitrant, your honor," Meade said.†   (source)
  • The master used it as a threat to recalcitrant slaves.†   (source)
  • Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with mace.†   (source)
  • This recalcitrant behavior seemed to mystify pilot and engineer alike, and it was not until some of the gentlemen from the beer parlor ran out, and stood shouting soundlessly against the roar and pointing at our skis, that we began to comprehend the nature of our dilemma.†   (source)
  • Only once had he taken any direct action against a recalcitrant government.†   (source)
  • These many years later I am able to see how Leslie's recalcitrance—indeed, her entire unassailable virginity—was a nice counterpoint to the larger narrative I have felt compelled to relate.†   (source)
  • Passionate, recalcitrant, stubbornly undefeated by failure or hurt or disgrace or bereavement, all the while heedlessly wasting of her gifts, she knows to the last that there is a world that remains out there, a world living and mysterious, and that she is of it.†   (source)
  • The handkerchief that she had tied round his thigh was now draped like a recalcitrant garter over his ankle.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Brown, who relented the day before the trip by canceling her classes and declaring it a state law that the principal of the school must accompany every school-sponsored trip, stood ponderously on the bank herding the children together as if she were shepherding a flock of recalcitrant sheep.†   (source)
  • Only small children hate a doctor when they require his ministries, and sometimes even the most recalcitrant children can be persuaded.†   (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)
  • The judge summoned the six recalcitrant jurors to his chambers and listened to their complaints.†   (source)
  • It sounds like someone's trying to shake up some of the more …. recalcitrant members of the Clave.†   (source)
  • The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs.†   (source)
  • That discourages a great many recalcitrants and helps to keep them in line.†   (source)
  • He was the undisciplined, recalcitrant, nonconformist, politically incorrect free spirit I had always wanted to be, had I been brave enough, and I took vicarious joy in his unbridled verve.†   (source)
  • I've been framed; the recalcitrant child before the piano recital, or, more like it, the bullet-scarred war horse, veteran of early, barely remembered battles, about to be presented with a gold watch and a handshake and a heartfelt vote of thanks.†   (source)
  • His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something—an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post—but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn.†   (source)
  • He did not look carefully at the outside of the envelope because his mind was entirely occupied by the recalcitrant check, and he was not expecting a check from America, which was where the letter came from; and he crumpled it up, unread, in his trench-coat pocket and crossed the courtyard and went upstairs to his room.†   (source)
  • The deer were clearly reluctant to be driven, and several herds made determined efforts to buck the line; but on each occasion the two nearest wolves converged toward the recalcitrant caribou and forced them to continue north.†   (source)
  • You don't want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you?†   (source)
  • I had been recalcitrant, had not gone through the chain of command, had cheated the county out of gas money, had obtained the gas fraudulently, had lied, broken promises, and failed to live up to obligations and commitments.†   (source)
  • For the policemen, whom only small children love with a pure heart (and the recalcitrant among them are not quickly persuaded), there is no such pride and pleasure.†   (source)
  • At last, as if in rage against all the observers of his tongue's anguish, Ed Burlington would clap his hands or stamp his foot, and the word would burst into daylight, like spirit through recalcitrant clay.†   (source)
  • Evidently, they had repaid it for its recalcitrance.†   (source)
  • No longer do the forms of the world appear to move in the patterns of a living, growing, harmonious thing, but stand recalcitrant, or at best inert.†   (source)
  • The wasted years in which he had shown no ability in school, in which he had been known as lazy, recalcitrant, without ambition, were behind him, forgotten.†   (source)
  • He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.†   (source)
  • Another, passed around by little boys who had been victims, was that the lady principal, a hard-bitten, heavy, cruel woman of middle years who wore sequin-decorated dresses and smelled always of raw gin, got recalcitrant boys into her office and made them take down their pants so that she could flay their naked buttocks with a rattan cane.†   (source)
  • Timid Daisy, pale from fright, would have fled to the neighboring arms of Sudie Isaacs, or to the Tarkintons; Helen, aged ten, even then his delight, would master him, feeding spoonfuls of scalding soup into his mouth, and slapping him sharply with her small hand when he became recalcitrant.†   (source)
  • Behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott's.†   (source)
  • Rosemary's presence reminded her that she had been recalcitrant as a hostess and glancing about she said: "Have you met any one amusing, have you met Mr.—"†   (source)
  • That he had a score of Socialist arguments chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with this; on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant.†   (source)
  • A word, a wave of her whip sufficed for the dog to rout out the recalcitrant sheep and send him bleating to his fellows.†   (source)
  • Someone had asked Anton Karlovitch Ferge to entertain them with his tale of pleural shock, but he could not manage his recalcitrant tongue and frankly admitted his incapacity—which was unanimously greeted as cause for another drink.†   (source)
  • He had often thought of Arabella's remarks that he should have been more severe with Sue, that her recalcitrant spirit would soon have been broken.†   (source)
  • The artist nature is a sensitive and therefore a vindictive one; and masterful players have a way with recalcitrant audiences of rubbing a play into them instead of delighting them with it.†   (source)
  • After this catalog, if some recalcitrant listener confuses the argonaut, which is acetabuliferous (in other words, a bearer of suction tubes), with the nautilus, which is tentaculiferous (a bearer of tentacles), it will be simply unforgivable.†   (source)
  • The reddleman had been almost exasperated by the sight of Wildeve outside Clym's house, and he was prepared to go to any lengths short of absolutely shooting him, to terrify the young innkeeper out of his recalcitrant impulses.†   (source)
  • They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty.†   (source)
  • …had happened to his regiment, and the thought that he, an exemplary officer of many years' service who had never been to blame, might be held responsible at headquarters for negligence or inefficiency so staggered him that, forgetting the recalcitrant cavalry colonel, his own dignity as a general, and above all quite forgetting the danger and all regard for self-preservation, he clutched the crupper of his saddle and, spurring his horse, galloped to the regiment under a hail of…†   (source)
  • Dougal suppressed a sigh of impatience at my recalcitrance.†   (source)
  • After lunch I went to check on my recalcitrant patient.†   (source)
  • Dougal knitted his brows, concentrating fiercely on a recalcitrant hangnail.†   (source)
  • This generally had a good effect on recalcitrant orderlies and young interns, but appeared merely to amuse Captain Randall.†   (source)
  • A squat figure in leather breeks and rough shirt, the Master of Horse had an air of authority sufficient, I thought, to quell the most recalcitrant stallion.†   (source)
  • …solution), the upholding of the letter of the law (common, statute and law merchant) against all traversers in covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations, all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators of international persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality.†   (source)
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