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symmetry
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  • When Mr. Early, who was Marley's Ghost, began to hack and sniffle, Dan confided to me that it would be perfect symmetry—for the play—if all the ghosts came down with something.†   (source)
  • They had tumbled into their own symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect.†   (source)
  • I notice the way a piece of his hair curls around his scar, like a frame; I notice his large brown hands and the whiteness of his teeth and the perfect symmetry of his face.†   (source)
  • You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare.†   (source)
  • Although she was still difficult to look at directly, he could now make out symmetry and colors embedded within patterns, as if miniature diamonds, rubies, and sapphires of all colors had been sewn into a garment of light, which moved first in waves and then scattered as particulate.†   (source)
  • They admire its perfect symmetry and pose for photographs beneath the minarets from which tourists used to leap to their deaths.†   (source)
  • If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.†   (source)
  • Frozen roots had burst through the ground, destroying the perfect symmetry of the earth, cutting thick gouges in the soil.†   (source)
  • This symmetry appeals to me.†   (source)
  • I'd never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.†   (source)
  • Mikael made note of the strange symmetry in that particular branch of the family—grandfather, father, and daughter had all been struck by misfortune.†   (source)
  • "It has a certain symmetry," said Eragon.†   (source)
  • The room, the table, the Baron, a pair of terrified eyes—blue within blue, the eyes—all compressed around him in ruined symmetry.†   (source)
  • We were brothers all right, though his face respected symmetry.†   (source)
  • Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones.†   (source)
  • He held his hot tea to his lips, and patted delicately at his beard, his fingers slowly adjusting the symmetry after his nap.†   (source)
  • If he moved his head in the mirror to a certain place he could restore some symmetry to the two sides of his face and the pain was tolerable if he kept his mouth shut.†   (source)
  • The walkway was flagged in calculated disorder, hiding the cunning symmetry.†   (source)
  • You need symmetry in a wedding party.†   (source)
  • He cuffs his nuts for good measure, aligning for comfort and symmetry, placing them squarely at the center of the world.†   (source)
  • Some of the marks were painstakingly perfect in their symmetry; others were scrawled in haste upon thresholds or windows in a seeming mad dash for compliance.†   (source)
  • There's symmetry in the timing.†   (source)
  • "Remember, Gemma, you're to be cheerful and light," Tom—my older, yet sadly not wiser, brother—advises as we stroll down the great expanse of lawn past neatly trimmed hedges with nary a stray branch or errant weed to disturb their careful symmetry.†   (source)
  • Owned by Gladys Phipps and her brother Ogden Mills, operators of the East's legendary Wheatley Stable, Hard Tack was a copper-colored paragon of symmetry, grace, and blinding speed.†   (source)
  • He loved to watch her wintry eyes skip and slew in perfect symmetry across the field of battle on top of the fruit box.†   (source)
  • She'd been dressed in rough working clothes—trousers tucked into heavy boots, a frayed woollen jacket, a dark scarf up to her chin—which had made the lovely symmetry of her face more striking than ever.†   (source)
  • It's Miss Lumley's recipe for symmetry: everything has to be folded, everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical.†   (source)
  • Usually you get all flowery and descriptive talking about the curves of the wood and the symmetry of the lines and the marriage of form and function.†   (source)
  • The symmetry of the oval pleased him; he raised it high over his head and smashed it against the ground.†   (source)
  • Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard.†   (source)
  • The city, river-girt, has a tyrannical need for order and symmetry.†   (source)
  • Beyond them, spectacular in their symmetry, unending hills, heavy with trees, stretched into the distance.†   (source)
  • The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew.†   (source)
  • Bilateral symmetry, an apparently higher center of gravity ...One clear shot, black glove to brain compartment, was all that I needed.†   (source)
  • While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there .†   (source)
  • Having lost all sense of symmetry and pattern, slate-colored waves broke from every angle.   (source)
    symmetry = balance among the parts
  • Two stars, five gusts, ellipses, symmetry ....He felt hollow.†   (source)
  • The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense.†   (source)
  • You react to symmetry, skin tone, the shape of my eyes.†   (source)
  • In photos from this period I'm struck by the symmetry: I look like everyone else.†   (source)
  • Two fountains flanked the obelisk in perfect symmetry.†   (source)
  • Both science and religion rejoiced in God's symmetry ....the endless contest of light and dark.†   (source)
  • The camerlegno fell silent when he saw the symmetry.†   (source)
  • There is a cosmic symmetry at the subatomic level.†   (source)
  • On either side of the chapel, in perfect symmetry, were two ten-foot-high marble pyramids.†   (source)
  • She met my eyes, and I could suddenly see the symmetry underlying her deformity.†   (source)
  • The symmetry is too perfect, the timing too perfect, and that means something is imperfect.†   (source)
  • A symmetry has evolved because the sap will not surrender.†   (source)
  • In my quest for symmetry I left my father a carriage resting on four empty hoops.†   (source)
  • It was not helping the gracious symmetry of the sap.†   (source)
  • —an intricate sweet trill of piercing nostalgia and miraculous symmetry.†   (source)
  • His heart pounded as he circled the body, reading the word upside down, reaffirming the genius of the symmetry.†   (source)
  • Well, yes ....and no. Langdon's experience with the rotational symmetry of ambigrams had taught him that symbols sometimes had meanings from multiple angles.†   (source)
  • Langdon had to admit, there existed an intriguing symmetry in the idea of the Templars building a modern Grail repository that echoed the Grail's original hiding place.†   (source)
  • They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not.†   (source)
  • In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry of Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves.†   (source)
  • She used the tape on both eyelids, she explained—even though the quarter had stayed in place by itself—because to tape one coin and not the other had not appealed to her sense of symmetry.†   (source)
  • It has symmetry, elegance, and grace — those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures.†   (source)
  • At the bottom of a kaleidoscope's cylinder lie shards of colored glass in random arrangement; but thanks to a glint of sunlight, the interplay of mirrors, and the magic of symmetry, when one peers inside what one finds is a pattern so colorful, so perfectly intricate, it seems certain to have been designed with the utmost care.†   (source)
  • Years later, I would remember her use of that word and conclude that Lydia and my grandmother had managed to educate Germaine, a little; "symmetry," I was sure, was not a word in Germaine's vocabulary before she came to live at 80 Front Street.†   (source)
  • Rosa rugosa, one of the oldest species of rose, had five petals and pentagonal symmetry, just like the guiding star of Venus, giving the Rose strong iconographic ties to womanhood.†   (source)
  • She stared at the two rivers in the darkness, one big and one small, and remembered Shay saying that pretty symmetry was silly, because she'd rather have a face with two different sides.†   (source)
  • Besides, this diamond was oblong-like a kite-hardly an example of the flawless symmetry for which the Illuminati Diamond was revered.†   (source)
  • Langdon feared the Illuminati unveiling would have a special symmetry to it that he had not yet mentioned.†   (source)
  • The only option to retain the symmetry was to place the fourth marker inside the triangle, at the center.†   (source)
  • The legend of the four ambigrammatic brands was as old as the Illuminati itself: earth, air, fire, water-four words crafted in perfect symmetry.†   (source)
  • The symbol itself was created by an anonymous sixteenth-century Illuminati artist as a tribute to Galileo's love of symmetry-a kind of sacred Illuminati logo.†   (source)
  • When all the food was eaten, Langdon retired to the edge of his bed where he sat alone, turning the Illuminati Diamond over and over in his hands, making repeated comments about the miracle of its symmetry.†   (source)
  • Look at the symmetry!†   (source)
  • Symmetry.†   (source)
  • You see the symmetry, don't you?†   (source)
  • Years of rain and wind had weathered away the adobe plaster, exposing the symmetry of the brown adobes which were beginning to lose their square shape, taking on the softer contours of the mesas and hills.†   (source)
  • Snapping into close formation, tap-dancing in a wash of iridescent arcs, all symmetry and drill precision, then fanning open in kaleidoscopic bursts, and she passed a question along the aisle to Miles, who sat at the far end of the foursome.†   (source)
  • A taipan's wife murdered in Macao — oh, the symmetry of it all, what an excuse to take another man's wife!†   (source)
  • Hardly a man came through, even those who were married, who was not as desperate for affection as was she, and, each time, the symmetry served to seal her heart.†   (source)
  • Consult your texts on symmetry.†   (source)
  • I asked myself, why do I love, and what is the power of beauty, and I understood that each and every instance of beauty is a promise and example, in miniature, of life that can end in balance, with symmetry, purpose, and hope-even if without explanation.†   (source)
  • The blood spread evenly across his face with a terrible symmetry, like a rose finger-painted by a child.†   (source)
  • Nor indeed could I. Here on Fourteenth Street in the frosty cider air of an early autumn night, with L'Enfant's stylish oblong spaces luminescent all around us, it was plain that Sophie and I could appreciate neither the symmetry of the city nor its air of wholesome and benevolent peace.†   (source)
  • There was a cold symmetry to General Durrell's office, a rigorous attention to detail that was both fastidious and obsessive.†   (source)
  • Its rooms were tall and narrow, but each one had a different shape, giving the house an odd imbalance yet, at the same time, an odd symmetry.†   (source)
  • For three years, I had felt the thumb of the city shaping me with a passion for marshes, for tidal creeks, for symmetry, and for the disciplined architecture of the eighteenth century.†   (source)
  • Never cut back too radically, Abigail, I said to myself Grant to nature and to climate some freedom, some vivacity of form, some of the ancient symmetry that comes from wildness.†   (source)
  • There was a timelessness to those Sundays: a greenness to its parks and private arbors; the quiet hum of well-dressed crowds gathering beneath the columns of its churches; then the sudden bloom of sails and the gestures of small crews far out in the river; the abstraction of the walkers along the Battery; the pleasant symmetry of eighteenth-century houses clustered along the narrow feminine streets; bells over the city; the shrill robust games of happy children and the healthy glow of those children; the movement of freighters into the harbor after trans-Atlantic voyages.†   (source)
  • But yes, my friend, it is of a most pleasing symmetry, do you not find it so?†   (source)
  • The effect is bad-it spoils the symmetry of the otherwise charming garden.†   (source)
  • There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art.†   (source)
  • His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil.†   (source)
  • What is startling, what is unexpected, what we cannot account for, what turns symmetry to nonsense—that comes suddenly to my mind, thinking of him.†   (source)
  • Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.†   (source)
  • He had taken out a small comb from his pocket, also a microscopic mirror, and was carefully arranging his moustache, the symmetry of which had become slightly impaired during our brisk run.†   (source)
  • It lacks a sense of symmetry.†   (source)
  • He had all of them neatly stacked against the walls of the Shepperton basement with such regimented faultlessness that it almost seemed a pity to disturb their symmetry for the use for which they were intended.†   (source)
  • These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry.†   (source)
  • They topped the rise and the white house reared its perfect symmetry before her, tall of columns, wide of verandas, flat of roof, beautiful as a woman is beautiful who is so sure of her charm that she can be generous and gracious to all.†   (source)
  • He stood naked before a mirror, looking at his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the crooked toes and the terrible spot on his neck—lean, but moulded with delicate and powerful symmetry.†   (source)
  • The building had the skeleton of what Roark had designed, with the remnants of ten different breeds piled on the lovely symmetry of the bones.†   (source)
  • burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could shape thy fearful symmetry?†   (source)
  • We came round the sweep of the drive and Manderley was before us, serene and peaceful in the hollow of the lawns, surprising me as it always did, with its perfect symmetry and grace, its great simplicity.†   (source)
  • Fragments of words came back to her and she quoted parrot-like: "A glamor to it—a perfection, a symmetry like Grecian art."†   (source)
  • It was the painting of a house, crudely done of course and highly coloured, but even those faults could not destroy the symmetry of the building, the wide stone steps before the terrace, the green lawns stretching to the sea.†   (source)
  • And yet absolute symmetry and icy regularity characterized each item of cold inventory.†   (source)
  • There seemed a happy symmetry in this, and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should depart.†   (source)
  • But an inner strenuousness was preying upon an outer symmetry, and they rated his look as singular.†   (source)
  • Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry.†   (source)
  • —geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness.†   (source)
  • It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.†   (source)
  • It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry.†   (source)
  • And this not altogether because such craft are unsightly, unavoidably lacking the symmetry and grand lines of the old battle-ships, but equally for other reasons.†   (source)
  • The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it.†   (source)
  • There the body stood, leaning charmingly, turning to smile at him, its radiant elbows spread wide in the dual symmetry of its limbs, of its corporeality.†   (source)
  • Powerfully muscled though some of them were, there had been something wrong with all of them, an insufficient development here, an undue development there, a twist or a crook that destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too long, or too much sinew or bone exposed, or too little.†   (source)
  • Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality.†   (source)
  • There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled its symmetry—perhaps rendered its existence impossible.†   (source)
  • her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.†   (source)
  • It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants.†   (source)
  • That, if it were needed, was the concluding evidence of her femininity, for it went fittingly with her sun-tinted hair and darkened, dilated eyes, the sweetness of her mouth, and the striking symmetry of her slender shape.†   (source)
  • The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact.†   (source)
  • Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic symmetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt attention.†   (source)
  • As a cousin of the bridegroom, Miss Bart had been asked to act as bridesmaid; but she had declined on the plea that, since she was much taller than the other attendant virgins, her presence might mar the symmetry of the group.†   (source)
  • But I have to do something, I can't just sit down and wait here until I'm covered beneath hexagonal symmetry.†   (source)
  • Consider the marvelous symmetry of the human frame, the shoulders and the hips and the breasts as they blossom at each side of the chest, and the ribs arranged in pairs, and the navel set amid the supple belly, and the dark sexual organs between the thighs!†   (source)
  • Life shuddered at such perfect precision, regarded it as something deadly, as the secret of death itself; and Hans Castorp thought he understood why the architects of ancient temples had intentionally and covertly built little deviations from symmetry into their rows of columns.†   (source)
  • For Hans Castorp understood that this living body—with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown Arm enough to suppor†   (source)
  • And so despite his disdain and outrage at the idea of being covered up by hexagonal symmetry, he began to babble away to himself, be it sense or nonsense: this feeling of duty that kept telling him to fight off any suspicious diminishing of his senses—it was mere ethics, just a shabby bourgeoisiosity of life, philistine irreligiosity.†   (source)
  • Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks.†   (source)
  • Pitt looked down with complacency at his legs, which had not, in truth, much more symmetry or swell than the lean Court sword which dangled by his side—looked down at his legs, and thought in his heart that he was killing.†   (source)
  • Pierre disturbed the symmetry by moving a chair for himself, and Berg and Vera immediately began their evening party, interrupting each other in their efforts to entertain their guest.†   (source)
  • One was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry, yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency.†   (source)
  • Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion.†   (source)
  • Mrs Squeers came in, still habited in the primitive night-jacket which had displayed the symmetry of her figure on the previous night, and further ornamented with a beaver bonnet of some antiquity, which she wore, with much ease and lightness, on the top of the nightcap before mentioned.†   (source)
  • She had drifted in the river-current to a distance a little exceeding a quarter of a mile from the land, and there she lay, beautiful in her symmetry and form, but like a fixture.†   (source)
  • The founder of the City of the Saints could not escape from the taste for symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons.†   (source)
  • Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society.†   (source)
  • Observing the seafloor, I saw that it swelled at certain points from low bulges that were encrusted with limestone deposits and arranged with a symmetry that betrayed the hand of man.†   (source)
  • Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.†   (source)
  • In 1812 it reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as the first movement had done, the nations of middle Europe.†   (source)
  • It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap.†   (source)
  • There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of British than of Continental grotesques of the period.†   (source)
  • Those piles of stones just mentioned were laid out on the ocean floor with a distinct but inexplicable symmetry.†   (source)
  • They received Pierre in their small, new drawing-room, where it was impossible to sit down anywhere without disturbing its symmetry, neatness, and order; so it was quite comprehensible and not strange that Berg, having generously offered to disturb the symmetry of an armchair or of the sofa for his dear guest, but being apparently painfully undecided on the matter himself, eventually left the visitor to settle the question of selection.†   (source)
  • This inclined plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die of thirst, but the eye is gratified.†   (source)
  • This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations, embarrassed the symmetry of the administration.†   (source)
  • In the afternoon she took Doris and me to the street corner where trees were piled high and searched through them until she found one that satisfied our taste for fullness and symmetry.†   (source)
  • Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.†   (source)
  • Marble could give the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry, all the rest.†   (source)
  • double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall.†   (source)
  • Symmetry under a cemetery wall.†   (source)
  • BLOOM: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other's possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint.†   (source)
  • In a word, such handsome features, and exact symmetry in every part, made me consider that I had saved the life of an Indian prince, no less graceful and accomplished than the great Oroonoko whose memorable behavior and unhappy contingencies of life have charmed the world, both to admiration of his person, and compassion to his sufferings.†   (source)
  • The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts.†   (source)
  • Her shape was not only exact, but extremely delicate: and the nice proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs.†   (source)
  • Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination?†   (source)
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