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transient
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  • The church's strength was its tradition, not its transience.†   (source)
  • Everything transient and aching; everything tentative.†   (source)
  • I hit my head on the elephant-shaped coffee table when I experienced syncope, or a transient loss of consciousness, more commonly known as passing out.†   (source)
  • He wore a rain hat and dark glasses and what appeared to be several jackets layered on top of one another, which made him look both fat and vaguely transient.†   (source)
  • Any marriage bond would be too superficial, too transient.†   (source)
  • At my school, the sense of transience was unsettling.†   (source)
  • I've been as transient in my adult life as anyone in our cooperative.†   (source)
  • I could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience.†   (source)
  • The possession he craved was a transient thing, like the scent of a fresh-cut hyacinth.†   (source)
  • Since then, it had been gradually expanded until it had dozens of rooms for single miners or transient families.†   (source)
  • Many workers were transient, intending only to spend a few months in the country before returning to their families.†   (source)
  • These changes have made meatpacking — once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation — into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated.†   (source)
  • He wasn't Joe Blow from Kokomo, just some transient blowing through.†   (source)
  • Transient pleasures, drastic measures.†   (source)
  • Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life.†   (source)
  • But I still remember what she said to me about my transience in Tobias's life.†   (source)
  • At least once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors.†   (source)
  • At seventy-nine, Nels was blind in his left eye and could distinguish only shades of light and darkness through its transient, shadowy pupil.†   (source)
  • His name was King; he was a transient.†   (source)
  • The sound of Vivaldo's typewriter, the sound of Ida's voice, the sound of the record player, attracted the attention of people coming up and down the stairs and the glimpse the open door afforded of Ida inflamed the transient imagination.†   (source)
  • For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.†   (source)
  • The restaurant was small; barely a restaurant, more like a quick-lunch diner, a place for truck drivers, transients. like us, Artkin said.†   (source)
  • The Pogy The Pogy's sonar chief was the only man to hear the transient noise.†   (source)
  • Generally speaking, Japanese evacuees have developed into most efficient beet workers, many of them being better than the transient workers who cared for beets in southern Alberta before Pearl Harbor…… Facts about evacuees in Alberta?†   (source)
  • I believed it was better to have dead parents, whom you could worship and honor as ancestors, than parents who had disappeared into the transient life of beggars.†   (source)
  • SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE moved her head, and Matron believed that she was at least transiently aware that Matron held her hand.†   (source)
  • As usual, Monterrey Industrial arrived at their host city before the league-provided accomodations were available, so the team was obliged to spend their first two nights at a local YMCA that seemed to be sheltering the dregs of Louisville transient population.†   (source)
  • Now they had a transient serial killer.†   (source)
  • Transients wearing their uniform of blue coveralls were looking for a handout or a day's labor.†   (source)
  • Fame without honor, in her view, would be "like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light."†   (source)
  • Had I ever really been a part of the community that was meant to be my own, or was that the reason behind my long line of lives lived in transience?†   (source)
  • I'm just transient labor.†   (source)
  • The English were seen as transients, snobs and racists, and were quite separate from those who had intermarried and who lived here permanently.†   (source)
  • Casual transient?†   (source)
  • Now and then Orfeo would lean over to check his transient apprentice.†   (source)
  • However, I'm more interested in the extremely high, transient accelerations I am going to experience from shock waves when Terra starts bombing us.†   (source)
  • It was the precise moment he would have used to gain the advantage, however transient, for it would have given him the seconds he needed to race away into the darkness.†   (source)
  • And each of those transient sparks was a sun, with who knew how many circling worlds….†   (source)
  • She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay—any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark.†   (source)
  • "Merck" informs me that this is a transient state, becoming palliated after a number of hours of the tongue's gentle rest, which is a great relief to know, since it is sheer murder to eat anything or to take more than a few sips of beer.†   (source)
  • Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.†   (source)
  • The owner of the inn kept three rooms on his top floor for transients, which he rented to girls for two-week periods.†   (source)
  • And it isn't a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies are not put down on paper but forgotten.†   (source)
  • He denied the duty of elected representatives "to be palsied by the will of their constituents"; and he refused to achieve success by becoming what he termed a "patriot by profession," by pretending "extraordinary solicitude for the people, by flattering their prejudices, by ministering to their passions, and by humoring their transient and changeable opinions."†   (source)
  • Nadia, who watched and smiled and usually said little in these gatherings, thought the couple a bit like the queen and king of a domain populated otherwise solely by women, a transient domain that would last only a few short seasons, and she wondered if perhaps they thought the same and had decided, nonetheless, to savor it.   (source)
  • It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.   (source)
    transient = lasting a short time
  • There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees.   (source)
    transients = people who stay for only a short time
  • Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) is a "warning stroke" or "mini-stroke" that produces stroke-like symptoms but no lasting damage.
  • His blind left pupil seemed especially transient and beyond his control this morning.†   (source)
  • There was something about evening perhaps that caused a transient sadness.†   (source)
  • I discussed my plans with the first sergeant of the transient company.†   (source)
  • A sculptor should not allow himself to be distracted by the transient charms of his model, but should regard her objectively, as merely the base material or clay from which his work of art was to be formed.†   (source)
  • I preferred to think that the rooms we searched were more haphazard and less revealing than Owen imagined—after all, they were supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness.†   (source)
  • And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.†   (source)
  • He knew them from the transient hotel.†   (source)
  • Drug dealers prey on recent immigrants, and the large, transient population usually brings more crime.†   (source)
  • Burnham was pressuring him to take all manner of shortcuts to get the Court of Honor into presentable shape, such as having his men fill pots with rhododendrons and palms to decorate terraces, precisely the kind of showy transient measures that Olmsted disdained.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza was in the transient hotel that night, playing cards with Lotario Thugut, when he was told he had an urgent telegram on the line.†   (source)
  • More and more he spent nights with Kotku and her mother at the Double R Apartments—a transient hotel really, a broken down motor court from the 1950s, on the highway between the airport and the Strip, where guys who looked like illegal immigrants stood around the courtyard by the empty swimming pool and argued over motorcycle parts.†   (source)
  • Ever since he had first heard the story of the treasure in the transient hotel, Florentino Ariza had learned all he could about the habits of galleons.†   (source)
  • It was only a snapshot but for a sense of foreshadowing, of transience and doom, no master of Dutch genre painting could have set up the composition more skillfully.†   (source)
  • In any event, his youthful adventures in the transient hotel were not limited to reading and composing feverish letters but also included his initiation into the secrets of loveless love.†   (source)
  • By that time his plans for the School of Telegraphy and Magnetism had failed, and the German dedicated his free time to the only thing he really enjoyed: going to the port to play the accordion and drink beer with the sailors, finishing the evening at the transient hotel.†   (source)
  • His visits to the transient hotel became less frequent, not only because his interests lay elsewhere but because he did not like them to see him there under circumstances that were different from the chaste domesticity of the past.†   (source)
  • With all his perseverance, he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes in the transient hotel, along with the theoretical formulations preached by Lotario Thugut on his nights of debauchery.†   (source)
  • Transients and nomads.†   (source)
  • She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love.†   (source)
  • Their griefs are transient …. their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.†   (source)
  • She'd taught a class in sculpture for some years and one of her young men went to abandoned buildings, to boatyards, glazieries, he scoured the outer boroughs, went to garages and bowling alleys and came back once with a dozen old pillows from a condemned hotel, stained gray by how many transient heads—such sad and eerie objects to have around.†   (source)
  • With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as dismal as the air of a flophouse.†   (source)
  • I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.†   (source)
  • I was beginning to form the opinion that Oklahomans were as transient a bunch as the people back home who slept on grass-flecked bedrolls in Roosevelt Park.†   (source)
  • She felt it more clearly than ever this morning: the certainty that the ugliness of the men in the city and the ugliness of her suffering were transient accidents-while the smiling sense of hope within her at the sight of a sun-flooded forest, the sense of an unlimited promise, was the permanent and the real.†   (source)
  • Lou Ann crossed the park in a hurry, skirting around an old wooden trellis where several transients were congregating.†   (source)
  • The ceiling lights were not steady but seemed to pulsate like a living and transient force, and made the young man in his preoccupation appear to tremble in the midst of his size and strength, "nd to fail to impress his exact outline upon the yellow walls.†   (source)
  • Not transients like me, but the colonists who live there, many of whom were born there, and whose descendants will live there, even into the umpteenth generation — what about those descendants?†   (source)
  • The billions of transient sparks of consciousness that had made up humanity would flicker no more like flreffies against the night.†   (source)
  • Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists—toward the transience as much as the artists.†   (source)
  • About half the population is transient, as its great beauty and unique cultural assets—focus of twenty universes—make it a tourist's paradise.†   (source)
  • And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey—strongly enough to last me as long as I lived.†   (source)
  • Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists—toward the transience as much as the artists.†   (source)
  • It honors our feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and divine.†   (source)
  • Rates Reasonable—Both Transient and Tourist.†   (source)
  • A transient mode, exhibitionists trying to attract attention.†   (source)
  • There's so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions," said Wynand.†   (source)
  • My people are all permanents, I don't want to fool with transients," she said loftily.†   (source)
  • It's more than something transient!†   (source)
  • The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy.†   (source)
  • Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very heavy.†   (source)
  • It seemed to him, in a phrase engraved on memory, that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, that the two worlds were finally beyond reconciliation, and that one of them hung, as always, by a thread.†   (source)
  • Now Dilcey occupied one, and the other two were in constant use by a stream of miserable and ragged transients.†   (source)
  • The whole air of the place was masculine, transient: a population even whose husbands were at home only at intervals and on holiday--a population of men who led esoteric lives whose actual scenes were removed and whose intermittent presence was pandered to like that of patrons in a theatre.†   (source)
  • If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor; silence closes over our transient passage.†   (source)
  • …feeling except at the cost of many days' enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human state is condemned—to its consuming despair.†   (source)
  • He looked back then on his long life, as I have already told you, and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, and that war, lust, and brutality might someday crush them until there were no more left in the world.†   (source)
  • I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead; I force myself to state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in the time of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers to the Nile.†   (source)
  • But since their conversation on that score went no further, he could only wonder in a vague and transient way what his mother had done, and hope that another time would reveal the meaning.†   (source)
  • He hated the jargon of the profession, which she had picked up somewhere long before, and which she used constantly with such satisfaction—smacking her lips as she spoke of "transients," or of "drumming up trade."†   (source)
  • The discovery would be made—and perhaps very soon—that there were floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise.†   (source)
  • Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions….†   (source)
  • For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions.†   (source)
  • The Water of Youth possessed merely a virtue more transient than that of wine.†   (source)
  • A glance at Hist, and the recollection of what might follow, checked any transient wish for revenge.†   (source)
  • Force is never more than a transient element of success; and after force comes the notion of right.†   (source)
  • The necessary consequence is a great number of transient and clandestine connections.†   (source)
  • Philip's heart was beating rapidly, and a transient flush passed over his face like a gleam.†   (source)
  • But the horror was transient; it passed away before the oncoming warehouses of St. Ogg's.†   (source)
  • They accuse us of treating them as a mere means to our pleasure; but how can so feeble and transient a folly as a man's selfish pleasure enslave a woman as the whole purpose of Nature embodied in a woman can enslave a man?†   (source)
  • Was Captain Vere suddenly affected in his mind, or was it but a transient excitement, brought about by so strange and extraordinary a happening?†   (source)
  • He knew too well the transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but presently he reentered the house and made his way through the deserted rooms to the door.†   (source)
  • Of these there was an army, the huge surplus labor army of society; called into being under the stern system of nature, to do the casual work of the world, the tasks which were transient and irregular, and yet which had to be done.†   (source)
  • Already I had had a transient impression of these, and the first nausea no longer obscured my observation.†   (source)
  • A pale red sunset that had enlivened the generally overcast sky faded now, leaving nature under the transient sway of the lackluster, lifeless, and mournful light that immediately precedes nightfall.†   (source)
  • One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth Willard had an adventure.†   (source)
  • And then she returned to her seat, thoughtful and sad, feeling that the West had mockingly flung at her one of its transient moments of loveliness.†   (source)
  • I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.†   (source)
  • His transient masters since he had come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could be permanent.†   (source)
  • Franz threw up his chin, his eyebrows, the transient wrinkles of his forehead, his hands, his elbows, his shoulders; he strained up the muscles of his legs, so that the cloth of his trousers bulged, pushed up his heart into his throat and his voice into the roof of his mouth.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Manson Mingott had long since succeeded in untying her husband's fortune, and had lived in affluence for half a century; but memories of her early straits had made her excessively thrifty, and though, when she bought a dress or a piece of furniture, she took care that it should be of the best, she could not bring herself to spend much on the transient pleasures of the table.†   (source)
  • I saw pretty clearly this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want of sleep, and that either by drugs or rest it would be possible to recover my energies.†   (source)
  • The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient.†   (source)
  • …of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and transient fire—the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it…†   (source)
  • His last half-hour with her would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke, his day-time aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.†   (source)
  • Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but otherwise none the worse for wandering.†   (source)
  • …used to go with him to visit cathedrals—made the exploration of Tansonville, now for the first time permitted me, a matter of indifference to myself, seemed however to invest the property, in my grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm, and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction; I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle.†   (source)
  • …BOOK ONE THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS CHAPTER ONE THE EVE OF THE WAR No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.†   (source)
  • Then they would seek out the big lumber camps, where there was winter work; or failing in this, would drift to the cities, and live upon what they had managed to save, with the help of such transient work as was there the loading and unloading of steamships and drays, the digging of ditches and the shoveling of snow.†   (source)
  • It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction.†   (source)
  • Poverty simplifies book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium she had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired her slender balance.†   (source)
  • The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.†   (source)
  • Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week—of, let us say, four—is uncanny in its fleeting transience.†   (source)
  • But so far was she from being, in the words of Robert South, "in love with her own ruin," that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.†   (source)
  • The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession.†   (source)
  • Had she perceived this meeting's import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all respects—as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to him who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind, she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.†   (source)
  • The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things.†   (source)
  • One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record.†   (source)
  • At last the time had come for the fourth dance—longed for by the strong, grave Adam, as if he had been a delicate-handed youth of eighteen; for we are all very much alike when we are in our first love; and Adam had hardly ever touched Hetty's hand for more than a transient greeting—had never danced with her but once before.†   (source)
  • Her first flush came from anger, which gave her a transient power of defiance, and Tom thought she was braving it out, supported by the recent appearance of the pudding and custard.†   (source)
  • Her daughter endeavoured to convince her of what she did not believe herself, that his attentions to Jane had been merely the effect of a common and transient liking, which ceased when he saw her no more; but though the probability of the statement was admitted at the time, she had the same story to repeat every day.†   (source)
  • His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy.†   (source)
  • [*] The heavens were clothed in driving clouds, piled in vast masses one above the other, which whirled violently in the gusts; opening, occasionally, to admit transient glimpses of the bright and glorious sight of the heavens, dwelling in a magnificence by far too grand and durable to be disturbed by the fitful efforts of the lower world.†   (source)
  • Those belonging to the little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight; and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients."†   (source)
  • Catherine and Isabella were sitting in the library, on hostile terms, but silent: the latter alarmed at her recent indiscretion, and the disclosure she had made of her secret feelings in a transient fit of passion; the former, on mature consideration, really offended with her companion; and, if she laughed again at her pertness, inclined to make it no laughing matter to her.†   (source)
  • I reminded them of the difference of the season; that the expedition had been made directly after the rains, when vegetation had clothed with transient beauty this region, which, possessing no source of moisture in itself, had become scathed and bare during the blazing heat of summer.†   (source)
  • Thus it came to pass that his movement of pity towards Sally Oates, which had given him a transient sense of brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.†   (source)
  • He is so pure and poetic that my relations with him, transient as they were, have been one of the sweetest comforts to my poor heart, which has already suffered so much.†   (source)
  • The scarlet of her lips had not had time to abate, and just now it appeared still more intense by the absence of the neighbouring and more transient colour of her cheek.†   (source)
  • And thus the land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.†   (source)
  • Prudence indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed.†   (source)
  • Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word BOOK acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels from the library.†   (source)
  • He tried to dispel these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace and love in his heart.†   (source)
  • But the tie which, through their common calamity, had united the feelings of these simple dwellers in the woods with the strangers who had thus transiently visited them, was not so easily broken.†   (source)
  • …at this speech, a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth, which convinced Anne, that instead of sharing in Mrs Musgrove's kind wishes, as to her son, he had probably been at some pains to get rid of him; but it was too transient an indulgence of self-amusement to be detected by any who understood him less than herself; in another moment he was perfectly collected and serious, and almost instantly afterwards coming up to the sofa, on which she and Mrs Musgrove…†   (source)
  • It may contribute admirably to the transient greatness of a man, but it cannot ensure the durable prosperity of a nation.†   (source)
  • The blood rushed in anger to the countenance of Richard; but it was the first transient emotion, and his sense of justice instantly subdued it.†   (source)
  • The harness, which was of a deep, dull black, differing from the glossy varnishing of the present day, was ornamented with enormous plates and buckles of brass, that shone like gold in those transient beams of the sun which found their way obliquely through the tops of the trees.†   (source)
  • Such epochs are transient, but very brilliant: they are fertile without exuberance, and animated without confusion.†   (source)
  • …possibility of my not being taught any more, or cared for any more; and growing up to be a shabby, moody man, lounging an idle life away, about the village; as well as on the feasibility of my getting rid of this picture by going away somewhere, like the hero in a story, to seek my fortune: but these were transient visions, daydreams I sat looking at sometimes, as if they were faintly painted or written on the wall of my room, and which, as they melted away, left the wall blank again.†   (source)
  • Now, there are some people who think it not too fantastic to connect this increase of beauty directly with our freedom and good sense in the matters we have been speaking of: they believe that a child born from the natural and healthy love between a man and a woman, even if that be transient, is likely to turn out better in all ways, and especially in bodily beauty, than the birth of the respectable commercial marriage bed, or of the dull despair of the drudge of that system.†   (source)
  • Once, it is true, the Pathfinder fancied he heard the howl of a distant wolf, of which a few prowled through these woods; but it was a transient and doubtful cry, that might possibly have been attributed to the imagination.†   (source)
  • He is a most extraordinary young man, and whatever be the event, you must feel that you have created an attachment of no common character; though, young as you are, and little acquainted with the transient, varying, unsteady nature of love, as it generally exists, you cannot be struck as I am with all that is wonderful in a perseverance of this sort against discouragement.†   (source)
  • But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though the eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence.†   (source)
  • He found a canoe and paddled down downstream, setting the canoe adrift as dawn approached, and making his way by land to the next village, where he kept out of sight till a transient steamer came along, and then took deck passage for St. Louis.†   (source)
  • But he had no hereditary constitutional craving after such transient escapes from the hauntings of misery.†   (source)
  • They rarely spoke to each other, and never looked at each other, even over their dish of cold potatoes; but then, as this was their usual mode of behaviour towards all mankind, it would be an unsafe conclusion that they had more than transient fits of unfriendliness.†   (source)
  • Don't cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects.†   (source)
  • Fires of the last-mentioned materials were rare, and though comparatively small in magnitude beside the transient blazes, now began to get the best of them by mere long continuance.†   (source)
  • But then, these images were so transient, and so much obscured in intellectual mists, as to leave no very strong impressions, and the tendency of the whole transaction, as we have already said, was rather to strengthen than to weaken the authority of Ishmael.†   (source)
  • Bathsheba never forgot that transient little picture of Liddy crossing the swamp to her there in the morning light.†   (source)
  • When he listened to, or himself took part in, trivial conversations, when he read or heard of human baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did not ask himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so transient and incomprehensible—but he remembered her as he had last seen her, and all his doubts vanished—not because she had answered the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of her transferred him instantly to another, a brighter,…†   (source)
  • But this emotion was as transient as it was sudden; for Mabel Dunham was a girl of too much pure and womanly feeling to view the marriage tie through anything so worldly as the mere advantages of station.†   (source)
  • Any one who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness of the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse features from that transient influence.†   (source)
  • It was transient: cleared away in an instant; but Anne could imagine she read there the consciousness of having, by some complication of mutual trick, or some overbearing authority of his, been obliged to attend (perhaps for half an hour) to his lectures and restrictions on her designs on Sir Walter.†   (source)
  • Catherine's face was just like the landscape — shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient; and her poor little heart reproached itself for even that passing forgetfulness of its cares.†   (source)
  • It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor.†   (source)
  • It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the important chief officer of his ship.†   (source)
  • And then she would pout like a disappointed child; a pensive cloud would soften her radiant vivacity; she would withdraw her hand hastily from his, and turn in transient petulance from his aspect, at once so heroic and so martyr-like.†   (source)
  • The transient fears of the company were now forgotten in their strong curiosity, and all faces were turned towards Silas, when the landlord, having seated himself again, said— "Now then, Master Marner, what's this you've got to say—as you've been robbed?†   (source)
  • Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with his heavy satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep of the unjust, which is serener and sounder than the other kind, as we know by the hanging-eve history of a million rascals.†   (source)
  • She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love.†   (source)
  • Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds of times, that he could not envy other people their condition, because the possession of that condition would have necessitated a different personality, when he desired no other than his own.†   (source)
  • …and Mr. Craig detained him to tell how all the servants were to collect at the gate of the courtyard to wish the young squire luck as he rode out; so that by the time Adam had got into the Chase, and was striding along with the basket of tools over his shoulder, the sun was on the point of setting, and was sending level crimson rays among the great trunks of the old oaks, and touching every bare patch of ground with a transient glory that made it look like a jewel dropt upon the grass.†   (source)
  • This arises from the circumstance that, amongst the moderns, the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united to the physical and permanent fact of color.†   (source)
  • We should be ascribing too much simplicity of character to our heroine, if we said that she had felt no distrust of the young man in consequence of his arrest; but we should also be doing injustice to her warmth of feeling and generosity of disposition, if we did not add, that this distrust was insignificant and transient.†   (source)
  • Since, thus, the prevision of his own unending bliss could not nullify the bitter savors of irritated jealousy and vindictiveness, it is the less surprising that the probability of a transient earthly bliss for other persons, when he himself should have entered into glory, had not a potently sweetening effect.†   (source)
  • It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature.†   (source)
  • Such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient; whereas the benefits which attend them remain.†   (source)
  • In the meanwhile the Pathfinder was far from being out of danger; for the first minute, admiration of his promptitude and daring, which are so high virtues in the mind of an Indian, kept his enemies motionless; but the desire of revenge, and the cravings for the much-prized trophy, soon overcame this transient feeling, and aroused them from their stupor.†   (source)
  • These pleasures, therefore, do not constitute the principal charm of their lives; but they are considered as a transient and necessary recreation amidst the serious labors of life.†   (source)
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