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tangible
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show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.   (source)
    tangible = touchable
  • ...every step he took made the thing more tangible.   (source)
    tangible = real
  • Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing — with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.   (source)
    tangible = a physical presence
  • It seemed as if I were drinking in the almost tangible pleasure of the morning like a rich, heavy malted milk that comes slow and thick through the straws.   (source)
    tangible = capable of being touched
  • When Mr. Huntington gave me the first two dollars, I did not blame him for not giving me more, but made up my mind that I was going to convince him by tangible results that we were worthy of larger gifts.   (source)
    tangible = easily recognized as valuable
  • Mr. Higinbotham, President of the World's Fair, kindly gave me permission to touch the exhibits, and .... I took in the glories of the Fair with my fingers. It was a sort of tangible kaleidoscope .... Everything fascinated me, especially the French bronzes.   (source)
    tangible = capable of being touched
  • ...a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask ... untenanted by any tangible form.   (source)
  • A hundred hands reach up to catch my kiss, as if it were a real and tangible thing.†   (source)
  • It was wanting something more, something tangible.†   (source)
  • Her love for us was a given — solid and tangible, like a cake.†   (source)
  • And that was the first thing to move her—the first tangible thing—since the stillbirth.†   (source)
  • They were proof, solid and tangible, that someone was thinking about her.†   (source)
  • But make no mistake: The advice had tangible economic value.†   (source)
  • Once again, he remembered a tangible thing from his past, but couldn't assign it to any specific time or place, couldn't associate it with any other person or event.†   (source)
  • I didn't dare step onto the floor of the boat for fear of leaving a tangible trace of my presence to Richard Parker, so the job had to be done with the gaff from the tarpaulin or from the side of the boat, standing in the water.†   (source)
  • The lift in the room was tangible.†   (source)
  • The pain in that trailer was tangible—I could feel it.†   (source)
  • He concentrated on the Fear, on raising the level of panic in the room, of making the Terror something tangible….†   (source)
  • The concentration within the room was almost tangible.†   (source)
  • I am astounded by all this, the American need to make intuition so tangible, to possess a vision so privately.†   (source)
  • Put your faith in something with tangible results.†   (source)
  • As I crossed the Far Common I saw that it was rapidly becoming unrecognizable, with huge green barrels placed at many strategic points, the ground punctuated by white markers identifying offices and areas, and also certain less tangible things: a kind of snap in the atmosphere, a professional optimism, a conscious maintenance of high morale.†   (source)
  • Her childhood was as tangible as the shot silk—a taste, a sound, a smell, all of these, blended into an entity that was surely more than a mood.†   (source)
  • Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.†   (source)
  • The sun pressed against her with an almost tangible weight.†   (source)
  • At the same time she's thankful that there's something tangible for her to be upset about.†   (source)
  • I know my mouth is agape and my eyes are wide, but I'm relieved that hope isn't a tangible thing, because everyone around me would see mine crumbling.†   (source)
  • Certain objects that passed through the shop—a Pleyel piano; a strange little scratched-up Russian cameo— seemed to be tangible artifacts of the life that she and I, by rights, ought to be living together.†   (source)
  • It was tangible and real, close enough to allow me to dream of moving back to North Carolina; on the other hand, it unfortunately made time slow down.†   (source)
  • Here was a tangible remnant of the Riders' glory, tarnished though it was by the relentless pull of time.†   (source)
  • Day after day I have tried to leave the Cleft area and day after day I have suffered pain so terrible that it has become a tangible part of my world, like the too small sun or the green and lapis sky.†   (source)
  • A movie day — the lift in the class atmosphere was almost tangible.†   (source)
  • This isn't a faith thing; this is a tangible thing."†   (source)
  • Nowhere was civic pride a more powerful force than in Chicago, where men spoke of the "Chicago spirit" as if it were a tangible force and prided themselves on the speed with which they had rebuilt the city after the Great Fire of 1871.†   (source)
  • A youngish woman, married but not particularly in love with her husband, has had an affair with another man, the only tangible result of which is a bowl the lover bought for her.†   (source)
  • The sweater was threadbare and stained with newsprint, but it was a tangible link with Betsie.†   (source)
  • At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war.†   (source)
  • Once you hit Academy Boulevard, you are surrounded by the hard, tangible evidence of what has happened in Colorado during the last twenty years.†   (source)
  • She'd always been an outward-looking woman with a bracing sense of particularity, a trust in the tangible and real.†   (source)
  • Since charity had not produced any tangible results, the distraught young Baby Kochamma invested all her hope in faith.†   (source)
  • It was a tangible gift, and it was perfect because it was an experience I could share with people I cared about.†   (source)
  • It was the last tangible piece of my past.†   (source)
  • He had sensed her before he saw her as he was going home on the trolley at five o'clock; it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger.†   (source)
  • It loomed like a tangible solid.†   (source)
  • Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court.†   (source)
  • It was a feeling that grew among us almost tangibly, and I could tell that Ruth, absorbed in a picture on the other side of the room, was feeling it as much as anyone.†   (source)
  • But ten years was not really such a long time at all, and how was he to leave his passion behind when it went on living its own independent life, as tangible as the phantom limb he'd refused for so long to have denervated?†   (source)
  • Plato believed that everything tangible in nature "flows."†   (source)
  • She had to feel it, he thought, had to feel that immediate and tangible link.†   (source)
  • The near-occult feeling: The fact of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things.†   (source)
  • But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the process, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible.†   (source)
  • The emotion has struck with great suddenness, and with no tangible connection to what has come before, but it is overwhelming.†   (source)
  • He'd tried to talk with Michelle about this, his deep sense of responsibility, how what he kept from this house of his childhood would become, in turn, what he passed down to his own children someday—all they would ever know, in a tangible way, of what had shaped him.†   (source)
  • It gave people something tangible to work for.†   (source)
  • After all, with so many tangibles socking my gut, a "might be, but probably nothing to worry about" didn't exactly top my list.†   (source)
  • Mogadishu smelled like urine and human excrement mixed with that tangible smell of starvation, disease, and hopelessness.†   (source)
  • The clear fall weather made the long days of work pleasant and Mortenson reveled in the tangible results every evening as he measured how many blocks they'd managed to set that day.†   (source)
  • Tangible progress was achieved in the opening hour and a half of combat.†   (source)
  • I opened my mouth to start explaining what I had in mind (even though I hadn't planned on announcing the changes I wanted to make until after I'd cast the ritualistic circle and given the "old" membership some tangible proof that I actually had been gifted by Nyx), but no one paid any attention to me.†   (source)
  • But there was nothing local or still outstanding, nothing tangible to give us a direction.†   (source)
  • And I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their tangibility promised to us, wrongly …. wrongly, an immortality.†   (source)
  • Maybe sixty missions were too many for the men to fly, Colonel Cathcart reasoned, if Yossarian objected to flying them, but he then remembered that forcing his men to fly more missions than everyone else was the most tangible achievement he had going for him.†   (source)
  • Cedric views this as one of his few tangible perks.†   (source)
  • There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.†   (source)
  • The world flared up around Clary in an almost tangible blur as Luke carried her over the threshold of the house and down a long hallway, Amatis hurrying ahead of them with her witchlight.†   (source)
  • Of course, he already knew it was real, but now, with this tangible evidence in his hand, it all felt doubly real.†   (source)
  • I liked working outdoors and the gritty feel of dirt was much more tangible than a bunch of flimsy words strung together.†   (source)
  • It burned in a fire in 1993, with just about everything else she owned, and the last tangible link to the boy she had met and fallen in love with was gone.†   (source)
  • Something tangible he can plug into, knowing its value.†   (source)
  • Within a few hours the Section had taken on tangible form.†   (source)
  • He loved the work, the tangible results, the feeling that he had not only returned home, but returned, if only for a while, to the ways of his father and generations of Adamses.†   (source)
  • You could see a change in the team that was tangible and inspirational.†   (source)
  • Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there.†   (source)
  • Tension saturated the air, that almost tangible, sickly calm that often preceded a fight.†   (source)
  • He will wear the ring of the Institute, the tangible symbol of his worth and sacrifice, a symbol that is recognized all over the world by the men whobelong to the brotherhood, to the proud intrepid fraternity of Institute men.†   (source)
  • Sweat runs with its own tangible life down a body as if a giant egg has been broken onto our shoulders.†   (source)
  • Later, when Singbe got on the floor and got into the half-sitting position that he held for most of his time on the nearly fifty-day voyage of the Tecora, the silence in the courtroom was tangible.†   (source)
  • "We are fighting for matters real and tangible …. our property and our homes," wrote a Texas private in 1864, "they for matters abstract and intangible."†   (source)
  • More tangibly, there is a packet nestled in a small cubby of Lincoln's upright desk.†   (source)
  • Kessell remained against the wall, needing its tangible support, and continued to shake for long minutes.†   (source)
  • What I wanted was something I could feel, touch, and stand on—something tangible.†   (source)
  • Even though his pain was so tangible she could feel it herself, she couldn't help him.†   (source)
  • The distance between the whites and the blacks grew tangibly greater, even though we saw only the backs of their heads and shoulders, their hats and the cigarette smoke rising from them as night fell and bus lights switched on.†   (source)
  • Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of that estate, there might still be a chance of getting the whole thing to go away and disintegrate quietly.†   (source)
  • There was no mistaking it—the warmth for me that radiated from her almost immediately, a vibration, one of those swift and tangible feelings of rapport that one experiences so seldom in life.†   (source)
  • For a while she sat staring into the darkness; the darkness that was warm, thick and almost tangible; soon her mind became utterly blank.†   (source)
  • The Good became, in his presence, an aquastor, an ethereal form made as visible and tangible as an angel standing on a stone.†   (source)
  • People chanted or shouted prayers, mumbled verses from the Vedas, or stood, or knelt, or lay prostrate before huge stone images, which often were so heavily garlanded with flowers, smeared with red kumkum paste and surrounded by heaps of offerings that it was impossible to tell which deity was so immersed in tangible adoration.†   (source)
  • Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.†   (source)
  • The ugly craft of undertakers became real and tangible to her, but as if she touched them with frozen hands.†   (source)
  • Metallic and misty together, tangible and intangible, splendid and fairylike, the haze of his invisible wings mysterious, like the ring around the moon-had anyone ever tried to catch him?†   (source)
  • (As if offering tangible proof) Well-I don't think you find people "disrespectful" nowadays, do you, sir?†   (source)
  • Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.†   (source)
  • The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep."   (source)
    tangible = realistic (capable of being touched)
  • Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front.   (source)
    tangible = touchable
  • But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.†   (source)
  • Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete.†   (source)
  • It would make me belong to him in a tangible, quantifiable way.†   (source)
  • The man paused, his grief almost tangible.†   (source)
  • The second thing was less tangible—something about his eyes, the way the dog met his gaze.†   (source)
  • We do not perceive things as tangible objects.†   (source)
  • Edward's impatience was almost tangible as we moved at human speed to the forest edge.†   (source)
  • The darkness is absolute, almost tangible.†   (source)
  • Almost tangible — it burned against my skin like acid, a slow torture.†   (source)
  • We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things.†   (source)
  • At those times I felt a tension building between us, something almost tangible.†   (source)
  • I laughed and Simmon's relief was almost tangible.†   (source)
  • It's not tangible, she'd said, you can't mark it so clearly.†   (source)
  • What if there was no tangible proof at all?†   (source)
  • It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing.†   (source)
  • The darkness almost seemed a tangible thing, a cauldron of ink that permitted no light whatsoever.†   (source)
  • His only tangible connection to the person who holds his daughter.†   (source)
  • The emptiness before him was almost tangible, endless stretches of numbing blackness.†   (source)
  • Moving in tentatively, he searched for some tangible sign that would confirm his growing suspicions.†   (source)
  • It was the first tangible link between the two cases.†   (source)
  • The evil that radiated from the white-robed figure was nearly tangible.†   (source)
  • I could feel his surprise, tangible, which I guess shouldn't have been that shocking itself.†   (source)
  • … What's this marker of yours, this tangible item of value?†   (source)
  • That's why I invest in something tangible like land—no one can take it from me.†   (source)
  • There was electricity in the air, a tangible buzz of anticipation.†   (source)
  • His face was hard, lean, with the only tangible sensitivity around his mouth.†   (source)
  • The pain in his voice was nearly tangible.†   (source)
  • In the most tangible of ways, the boys' reputation had preceded them.†   (source)
  • The mood was set, secrets hinted at, doom tangible but unexplained.†   (source)
  • Drizzt knew from the wizard's snicker that it was a barrier as tangible as one of stone.†   (source)
  • His fear turned to fury, tangibly enough that Bryan could see the latter even before he cursed her.†   (source)
  • Lee felt them every bit as tangibly as she saw them flickering around her.†   (source)
  • Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?†   (source)
  • From every side the external world pressed in on him, dense, indisputable, tangible as a forest.†   (source)
  • But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.†   (source)
  • Meaning …. if enough people begin thinking the same thing, then the gravitational force of that thought becomes tangible …. and it exerts actual force.†   (source)
  • My personal take on optimism is that as a mental state, it can enable you to do tangible things to improve your physical state.†   (source)
  • Of all the places he sensed the presence of God, out here surrounded by nature and under the stars was one of the most tangible.†   (source)
  • I returned to the dark interior and would have gladly attributed her appearance to my imagination, a waking dream after so many months of enforced cryogenic dreamlesshess, but for a single, tangible proof of her presence.†   (source)
  • In the broken world I saw around me—and for the people struggling in that world—religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.†   (source)
  • Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.†   (source)
  • It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope.†   (source)
  • I ran my fingers along these names, along the letters of them; despite their hardness, their tangibility, they appeared to soften under my touch, to fade, to waver.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was only the sunlight on boards that were scrubbed smooth and white, or perhaps it was the feeling of peace that lay across the room as tangibly as the bar of sunshine.†   (source)
  • The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits but yet it was as if I was seeing another Park beneath the tangible one, a map to the past, a ghost Park dark with memory, school outings and zoo visits of long ago.†   (source)
  • A tangible strength transferred in the touch, as if the man were magically infusing her with the calm she needed to do what they were about to do.†   (source)
  • Her appreciation was tangible, but then she leaned forward slightly, her tone still soft, but serious.†   (source)
  • It is a tangible connection with the past, something that was meant to be handed down to children and never sold.†   (source)
  • It was tangible and real.†   (source)
  • By the time the sun was halfway to its zenith the ordinariness of the day encroached from every direction, the concrete, tangible, undeniable world insisting that the preceding night had not happened.†   (source)
  • The vision seemed real, tangible.†   (source)
  • He had been gripping the edge of the table with both hands as if to hold on to something tangible in the face of such an onslaught of ideas and images.†   (source)
  • Plato believed that everything we see around us in nature, everything tangible, can be likened to a soap bubble, since nothing that exists in the world of the senses is lasting.†   (source)
  • More real, or tangible.†   (source)
  • Shortly after the summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy quilt.†   (source)
  • Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of her customers, who accepted as something certain an establishment that did not exist except in the imagination, because even the tangible things there were unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it, the disemboweled phonograph with a nesting hen inside, the garden of paper flowers, the calendars going back to the years before the arrival of the banana company, the frames with prints cut out of magazines…†   (source)
  • Emergency lights have come on in the tunnel as well, but they barely do anything to break the almost tangible darkness of a place so far underground.†   (source)
  • But somewhere between Wordsworth's nature poems and Kafka's existential short stories, I felt a need to study something tangible--something in the world of blood, bones, and cells.†   (source)
  • He gulped and gripped the hawthorn staff once more, striving to ignore the mead and to concentrate upon what was immediate and tangible, instead of wallowing in dismal introspection.†   (source)
  • It felt like I was wrestling to stretch an invisible rubber band—a band that would change from concrete tangibility into insubstantial smoke at any random moment.†   (source)
  • The rest of the Books-thousands of them-were in hiding, but he kept these two trunks with him at all times for the aura of mystery they lent him, if not for any tangible power.†   (source)
  • I thought back to how I'd felt as I started into Stella's garden earlier that night, that tangible, ripe feeling of everything around you somehow breathing as you did.†   (source)
  • Then, like a sudden change of wind, his dreams rippled and became harder and more substantial, as if they were tangible realities that he could reach out and touch.†   (source)
  • It was a tangible thing, like I was being held aloft by this idea, and now that I knew it was a lie, my body felt heavier.†   (source)
  • Barbara, so excited to hear Cedric's voice, begins jumping fast across subjects that are tangible to her-the room, the food, his clothes.†   (source)
  • Within a minute, the knot inside his gut loosened, his frown eased, and the presence of his fallen enemies no longer seemed quite so tangible…… The wolves howled again, and after an initial burst of trepidation, he listened without fear, for their baying had lost the power to unsettle him.†   (source)
  • It has moved tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace.†   (source)
  • Now it was tangible.†   (source)
  • I tracked down rumor after rumor, looking for some documentation, some specific, tangible proof that the organization existed.†   (source)
  • His major, meanwhile, is in applied math, a concentration that deals with the tangible applications of theorems, the type of highutility area with which he has always been most comfortable.†   (source)
  • Astaroth's presence before the assembled host became so great, so tangibly powerful, that many demons trembled and hid their faces.†   (source)
  • He flips forward to the chapter on series, an odd digression from the mostly tangible issues of calculus dealing with force or velocity or the trajectory of objects as they bump and bounce through the world.†   (source)
  • The wall remained a tangible barrier.†   (source)
  • Walking back to the dorm, flipping the pages, he feels himself shudder: it's filled with cryptology, systems of decoding numbers for use in a computer, and esoteric mathematical proofs that seem to have no connection with anything tangible.†   (source)
  • The normally effective watchmen were outmatched by an elf from a world that knew no light, one who could conjure a magical darkness that even the keenest eyes could not penetrate and carry it beside him like a tangible cloak.†   (source)
  • "Like this," he whispered, more determined than ever to capture that moment, make it tangible so that he could hold it in his hands and see it.†   (source)
  • In the fantasy of the races conceived in my mind, all blacks were noble people who had struggled against a repressive social order for years and who were finally reaping the tangible rewards of this struggle.†   (source)
  • And it becomes all the more ironic since it is plain that the Germans had unwittingly imprisoned and doomed a man whom later they might have considered a major prophet—the eccentric Slavic philosopher whose vision of the "final solution" antedated that of Eichmann and his confederates (even perhaps of Adolf Hitler, the dreamer and conceiver of it all), and who had the message tangibly in his possession.†   (source)
  • Again she repents in a terribly tangible way over her paist, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old, inveterate habits.†   (source)
  • In these hours when the silence, unaccompanied by any ceremony, became oppressive as if it were an almost tangible privation, only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and the chant.†   (source)
  • He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of persistent friends, almost saying to the lingering afterglow: "Thank you, thank you, I'll be all right.†   (source)
  • The cellar smelled of carbolic acid and formaldehyde, and the presence of mystery was tangible in everything, from the obscure fate of these spread-out bodies to the riddle of life and death itself-and death was dominant in the underground room as if it were its home or its headquarters.†   (source)
  • To the two old friends, as they sat by the window, it seemed that this freedom of the soul was already there, as if that very evening the future had tangibly moved into the streets below them, that they themselves had entered it and were now part of it.†   (source)
  • It was a tangible affirmation of his greatness.†   (source)
  • It would be preferable to give up something less tangible.†   (source)
  • Don't ask me how I came to feel it—it was nothing tangible, just little things you said.†   (source)
  • But when there's no tangible purpose, you'd better watch closely.†   (source)
  • They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.†   (source)
  • Yet I could but recognize that, from the moment the verdict was given, its effects became as cogent, as tangible, as, for example, this wall against which I was lying, pressing my back to it.†   (source)
  • And suddenly the thought of Lenina was a real presence, naked and tangible, saying "Sweet!" and "Put your arms round me!†   (source)
  • Suddenly the future loomed tangibly for me, as tangible as a future can loom for a black boy in Mississippi.†   (source)
  • Horizontal, soundless except for a peculiar boom, tangible, infinite, the astounding dimensional weight of it streamed across the mud.†   (source)
  • Some time had elapsed, but it seemed to him that if he turned his head he would still see the two of them, himself and the man, kneeling beside the bed, or anyway, in the rug the indentations of the twin pairs of knees without tangible substance.†   (source)
  • The night dragged on, as if each minute were something heavy and tangible that had to be pushed to make way for the next.†   (source)
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