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tenuous
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show 148 more with this conextual meaning
  • I knew that there was something small and tenuous between us, and I didn't want to deal with anything that might change it.†   (source)
  • The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another.†   (source)
  • Its link to the rest of France is tenuous: a causeway, a bridge, a spit of sand.†   (source)
  • Your own position is very tenuous, you know.†   (source)
  • Two, she has a place however tense and tenuous at the moment—to live.†   (source)
  • A tenuous and sudden memory.†   (source)
  • Our relationship is so tenuous.†   (source)
  • I mooned about looking at her things, wondering where she was and what she was doing and trying hard to feel connected to her by such tenuous threads as a red hair in the bathtub drain or a balled-up sock under the sofa.†   (source)
  • On May 28, following two and a half months of prodigious effort, a high camp was dug tenuously into the Southeast Ridge at 27,900 feet.†   (source)
  • A vigil to which no one had been invited, and no one knew if anyone else would be there; a vigil born of pure friendship and concern, which started with such melancholy prophesies of doom and tenuous hopes, but ended on the sunlit uplands of answered prayers.†   (source)
  • There's an episode in a newspaper office, for instance, which parallels Odysseus's visit to Aeolus, the god of the winds, but the parallel may seem pretty tenuous.†   (source)
  • Nasser had had no luck explaining that legions of immigrants kept their money in cash, that trust in banks was tenuous.†   (source)
  • Most of them I had rarely seen at the house, and I understood that they were clocking in an appearance more to pay respect to Mr. Wandati's matronly mother than to see the reclusive sick man with whom they had but a tenuous connection.†   (source)
  • Either one would provide only the most tenuous sympathetic link to my lute string: one percent at best, perhaps only a tenth of that.†   (source)
  • She seemed ghostly, her sculptured profile softened by a tenuous blue light, and he realized that she was crying in silence.†   (source)
  • When you live for the fight, for the blood, the relationships you form are tenuous and easily broken.†   (source)
  • His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.†   (source)
  • We didn't know then that all these places had only the most tenuous links with Hailsham.†   (source)
  • Marley dangled fully outside the moving car, suspended upside down by his tail, which I had by the most tenuous of grips.†   (source)
  • This was too tenuous a basis for Kant.†   (source)
  • Her last tie, however tenuous, to her mother.†   (source)
  • Serena had sent him this e-mail: "John's condition is growing more tenuous.†   (source)
  • He balked around for a while, said it was all a question of balancin' the equities or something, that I was in an interesting but tenuous position.†   (source)
  • Unfortunately, my power is tenuous.†   (source)
  • I needed to know if he had a connection to the guy in the ski mask, no matter how tenuous.†   (source)
  • I was sick, enervated, depressed, losing my tenuous hold on reality.†   (source)
  • Is it every guy's dream to take something so tenuous and make it totally, solidly his?†   (source)
  • His link with Saphira grew ever more tenuous the farther apart they became, until only a wisp of thought connected them.†   (source)
  • I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave.†   (source)
  • Kathy Jean Gross, who spoke some Farsi, said she struck up a tenuous relationship with one of her female guards and wondered whether that led to her release.†   (source)
  • Maybe it's all the small things— like being guided slowly forward, surely, day after day-that stretch out to strengthen even the most tenuous bond.†   (source)
  • But Jake hadn't been able to hide the wildness in his eyes, which were white and starey, the eyes of a horse scenting water and held back from bolting only by the tenuous chain of its master's mind; like a horse at the point where only understanding, not the spur, could hold it steady.†   (source)
  • Your armchair political theory is tenuous, Monsieur Song.†   (source)
  • She hadn't moved from the couch even after she'd stopped crying, feeling somehow that the slightest movement would shatter her tenuous composure.†   (source)
  • There was something of the fish to her (if she had had a scaly tail, she would have been a mermaid), but her two legs placed her squarely on the tenuous line between a human being and a creature of myth.†   (source)
  • Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and higher until they tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky that was sunny and pure everywhere and laced in the distance with long white veils of tenuous fluff.†   (source)
  • Saintly Amma had identified a Belgian nun who had broken away from her order, and who had made a most tenuous foothold in Yemen, in Aden, a foothold that was in jeopardy because of the nun's ill health.†   (source)
  • She hadn't known the older woman well, but Madeleine had been a tenuous connection to her mother—her real mother, the tough, fighting Shadowhunter that Clary had never known.†   (source)
  • "That would be because you've still got a tenuous grasp of sanity."†   (source)
  • They were meddling with a tenuous balance.†   (source)
  • He hovered tenuously between life and death for three days.†   (source)
  • The truce with pessimism-bordering-on-nihilism was a very tenuous one.†   (source)
  • I had spent the past nineteen years following the most tenuous of threads, weeks and months of searching or waiting, punctuated by moments like this, when success or even life hung on the toss of a coin.†   (source)
  • Hall viewed his own association with Wildfire as tenuous at best.†   (source)
  • As children, we never knew how tenuous our existence was.†   (source)
  • His status was as clean as it could be under the tenuous circumstances.†   (source)
  • I wonder if it is indifference, or whether, like me, others are so brimful of endings that they cannot bear to wrench even a scrawny sapling from its tenuous grip on life.†   (source)
  • By the time Celia restores a tenuous calm, she has come to a decision.†   (source)
  • Beyond Meereen's walls of many-colored brick, Dany's rule was tenuous at best.†   (source)
  • One taste of Bryan and he realized just how tenuous control could be.†   (source)
  • From his eyes I could tell that Pearce recognized the subtlety and tenuousness of both our connection and our enmity.†   (source)
  • Not with my mind so tenuous.†   (source)
  • But Singbe knew their position was tenuous.†   (source)
  • A WINDOW ON THE WORLD Max held Connor's contract tenuously between his fingertips.†   (source)
  • The Hickeys were both new to the business, not just to selling medical supplies but to selling anything, and their one tenuous qualification for the work was that they were formerly EMS workers, partners in fact, driving an ambulance together down in the city.†   (source)
  • However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously.†   (source)
  • You have to understand the business is in a tenuous position at the moment.†   (source)
  • Huge and tenuous at one moment, it would slowly shrink, brightening at the same time as if new fuel was being fed to its internal fires.†   (source)
  • She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long.†   (source)
  • My lips are stricken to silence, underneath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses; nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are muted in thunder.†   (source)
  • You could hear their embroidering movements in the weeds outside, which somehow gave the effect of some tenuous voice in the night, telling a story.†   (source)
  • NORFOLK (Sneering) A tenuous link.†   (source)
  • My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.†   (source)
  • That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women.   (source)
  • a tenuous thread
  • To see them together was like a tenuous belief made real.†   (source)
  • Our household was being held together by the most tenuous of threads.†   (source)
  • She'll burn all her bridges except the bridge to him, even though the bridge to him is so tenuous.†   (source)
  • More than ever I was aware how tenuous my situation was.†   (source)
  • With that, he broke with the tenuous existence that he had created in the village.†   (source)
  • Was there a foundation for the tenuous, instinctive fears that I couldn't seem to shake?†   (source)
  • A dwarf enjoyed at best a tenuous hold on dignity.†   (source)
  • Having Seth there would be nice—a link, however tenuous, to my missing best man.†   (source)
  • Melanie strained against my control, and my control was tenuous anyway.†   (source)
  • Shade saw the tenuous, inescapable dependence of man on nature.†   (source)
  • But I know I'm on tenuous ground, and I accept it."†   (source)
  • He frowned and straightened, trying to better hear the tenuous whisper.†   (source)
  • I now had some freedom, tenuous though it was.†   (source)
  • A lone taste out there in the suddenly empty world, as tenuous as an imaginary friend.†   (source)
  • But she had only a tenuous grasp on the roof tiles.†   (source)
  • Our conditions more tenuous.†   (source)
  • Now the connections were more tenuous.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza spoke in a most tenuous voice, but with the most imperious resolution of which he was capable: "Be that as it may, I cannot answer without knowing what she thinks.†   (source)
  • I started tenuously down the fixed lines, stiff with dread. just below the step, Anatoli and Martin scooted around me and hurried down.†   (source)
  • The jolt of anger unbalanced my tenuous hold on self-control; his unexpected, ecstatic response overthrew it entirely.†   (source)
  • Before long, someone saw him in his blues, and that cemented his fate, that memorable but tenuous connection to Paul Bunyan, or rather, to his beast of burden: Babe the Blue Ox.†   (source)
  • Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.†   (source)
  • The room feels flimsy, tenuous.†   (source)
  • All of a sudden he looked different; he looked like someone I had never seen before — more tenuous, less solid somehow, but more detailed.†   (source)
  • At one point I was balanced on an unsteady ladder in the predawn gloaming, stepping tenuously from one bent rung to the next, when the ice supporting the ladder on either end began to quiver as if an earthquake had struck.†   (source)
  • I continued to reinforce it as best I could, and it continued to hold tenuously against Marley's full-bodied assaults.†   (source)
  • These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone.†   (source)
  • As the glacier moved, crevasses would sometimes compress, buckling ladders like toothpicks; other times a crevasse might expand, leaving a ladder dangling in the air, only tenuously supported, with neither end mounted on solid ice.†   (source)
  • Those tenuous, tentative first life-impressions have scattered like reflections in a pond under the swirling hand of an older brother or sister saying, I remember the day you ate the rat poison, Carlos, or, I remember the day you fell down the stairs….†   (source)
  • Both are constructed out of lies, the first connected to the second by tenuous speculation-public speculation-on a banking crisis that would never be made public, unless and until a thorough and private investigation proved the facts.†   (source)
  • By the time I went to live with the Beaches, I believed that life was entirely unfair and that love was tenuous and untrustworthy.†   (source)
  • For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.†   (source)
  • However, his connection with Glaedr was growing tenuous and Eragon could not hope to best Thorn and Murtagh alone and high above the ground, not when Murtagh had dozens or more Eldunari at his disposal.†   (source)
  • On the other hand, I didn't want to put her at risk, or threaten the tenuous relationship we were starting to reconstruct.†   (source)
  • Melissa could only move so fast without losing her way as she cautiously felt for the trembling threads in the tenuous psychic spiderweb of midnight.†   (source)
  • Ghada was from Lebanon but had lived in South America for many years and so was fluent in Spanish, with pretty tenuous English.†   (source)
  • We had filled our notebooks with names and dates, with information that would alter, transform, and ruin utterly the fragile, tenuous network of destinies and alliances that had begun in innocence when I first talked to Cadet Recruit Pearce in September.†   (source)
  • His connection with Saphira grew tenuous as the distancebetween them increased, but he could still sense the heat of her passion, which darkened the edges of her vision and blotted out all thoughts save those driven by the instinctual need that all creatures, even the elves, are subject to.†   (source)
  • Daylight could not come in, but he was able to recognize it by the tenuous change in the cracks of the blinds.†   (source)
  • Supposedly they were sworn to the Arryns of the Vale, but the Eyrie's grasp upon the islands was tenuous at best.†   (source)
  • Oh, God, the balance was tenuous!†   (source)
  • As the child of an earthly mother and an Irish deity, Max straddled a tenuous line between mortal and immortal.†   (source)
  • Even with your life so tenuous, you unscrewed that cap and hastened your death with that amber liquid.†   (source)
  • As if to emphasize the tenuousness of Levi Saunders' existence, he became violently ill the day following his bar mitzvah and was taken by ambulance to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital.†   (source)
  • Eight separate times Mortenson served as pack mule, hauling food, fuel, and oxygen bottles to several stashes on the way to the Japanese Couloir, a tenuous aerie the expedition carved out within six hundred meters of K2's summit, stocking the expedition's high camps so the lead climbers might have the supplies in place when they decided to dash to the top.†   (source)
  • Even when they finally settle down, the settling is tenuous, for when they close their eyes they see their comrades who have fallen.†   (source)
  • The chaplain's voice floated up to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible monotone, like a gaseous murmur.†   (source)
  • Their venture had always been tenuous at best, sustained in equal parts by fear, desperation, optimism, and last-minute improvisation.†   (source)
  • My understanding of the causes of these patterns of movement—meals, mail call, work call, pill line, commissary days, phone time—was still tenuous.†   (source)
  • It brought a tenuous peace, a strange existence that in its outward particulars was easier, calmer, safer, but where the tensions ran deeper.†   (source)
  • But as is your character, I'm afraid, you are satisfied with leaving things to tenuous chance and hope and faith in the arbitrary.†   (source)
  • The curtains were almost always drawn, leaving the house in a tenuous darkness that kept the cruel desert light at bay.†   (source)
  • But I forget the usuals, who his friends might be, his associates; I forget even that he has a tenuous and fragile hold of family, this the only idea that dully rings of remembrance in his heart.†   (source)
  • She held her hand over the shelf of rock and watched as a drop gradually formed on the fingertip, wobbled tenuously for a moment, then fell into the little bowl of stone.†   (source)
  • Corporal Endo had no such physical problems, save his acne, and so I began to consider the possibility that his expressions were of a besieged mind, one perhaps innately tenuous and fragile and now—under duress—grown sickly and ornate.†   (source)
  • Viola Buckner, an island matriarch and an important bridge in the tenuous relationship between blacks and whites on the island, left home during the summer for an operation.†   (source)
  • MORE Oh, tenuous indeed.†   (source)
  • Yet I liked the feeling of being the only person in a vast stretch of water, the only index of civilization in the tenuous, light-flecked darkness of seven o'clock in the morning.†   (source)
  • But he did not expect his companions to share such a tenuous emotion.†   (source)
  • I raised my eyes and the tenuous nightmare dissolved.†   (source)
  • I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two essays a week, and attended an occasional lecture.†   (source)
  • A day when clouds played advocates for pavements, stemming the glare on tenuous bucklers, growing stainless with what they staunched.†   (source)
  • He faced me and in his hands he held a sheet of paper that had once been crimson, but was now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned.†   (source)
  • Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the glob, and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time…†   (source)
  • The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards—and is.†   (source)
  • …beyond galaxy, world beyond world of universes, coming into being out of the timeless pool of the void, bursting into life, and like a bubble therewith vanishing: time and time again: lives by the multitude: all suffering: each bounded in the tenuous, tight circle of itself—lashing, killing, hating, and desiring peace beyond victory: these all are the children, the mad figures of the transitory yet inexhaustible, long world dream of the All-Regarding, whose essence is the essence of…†   (source)
  • A vague, remote pity stirred within his breast like a wreathing, raveling smoke, tenuously dispersed within his being, a kind of torpid heart-break he had felt sometimes in winter awakened deep in the night and hearing that dull tread descend the stairs.†   (source)
  • That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women.†   (source)
  • Amory noticed his hands; they weren't fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous strength…. they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and closings.†   (source)
  • There was a tenuous mist in the distance, and it softened exquisitely the noble lines of the buildings.†   (source)
  • He felt that the real Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of helplessness.†   (source)
  • The air of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.†   (source)
  • A tenuous light surrounds them, almost as if irradiated by them — the faint breath of their fantastic reality.†   (source)
  • Without their even having realized it, their ears had picked it up, very tenuous at the start, but steadily increasing.†   (source)
  • The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead.†   (source)
  • Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breath or tenuity, stability or caprice.†   (source)
  • But the day, tender and pale, had broken now, and the mist was tenuous; it bathed everything in a soft radiance; and the Thames was gray, rosy, and green; gray like mother-of-pearl and green like the heart of a yellow rose.†   (source)
  • The shadow of a dove Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies; brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender tenuous thunder….†   (source)
  • A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters.†   (source)
  • The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches murmured insistently and the dark frail quivering bodies wheeling and fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the tenuous sky soothed his eyes which still saw the image of his mother's face.†   (source)
  • But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and He found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language.†   (source)
  • …liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.†   (source)
  • 7 It has been noted that a main concern of The Iliad is the difficulties of keeping together a massive but tenuously united coalition.†   (source)
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