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virtuoso
in a sentence

show 67 more with this conextual meaning
  • Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit.   (source)
  • As much as I hate to admit it, in the here and now, there are other things we need before a virtuoso.†   (source)
  • In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of "telephoning the colonel" and boys who have baronesses for mothers.†   (source)
  • In addition to having a mental catalog of the place, the salesman was a virtuoso on the strengths and weaknesses of practically any brand of appliance, particularly brands no longer in existence.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Palmer was in Europe at the time, but her private secretary, Laura Hayes, a gossip of virtuosic scope, made sure her employer learned all the details.†   (source)
  • But lie played without feeling; he was always outside the music, drawing it out of the piano as if by magic, by the virtuosity of his vampire senses and control; the music did not come through him, was not drawn through him by himself.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, Aureliano Segundo became a virtuoso on the accordion and he still was after he had married and had children and was one of the most respected men in Macondo.†   (source)
  • She disturbed the balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part.†   (source)
  • Poker, hearts, gin rummy ...No matter the game, an undeniable truth was revealed: David and Cooper were virtuoso players and Max was not.†   (source)
  • Adams's argument for the defense, though unrecorded, was considered a virtuoso performance.†   (source)
  • A moment's pause, and the tone began again, this time in a rich, low bass deserving of the best virtuoso.†   (source)
  • As a twenty-year-old from Redlands, California, he was a virtuoso user of the word like.†   (source)
  • The voice rose and fell in a rhythmical, dreamlike recital-part enumeration of earthly trials undergone by the congregation, part rapt display of vocal virtuosity, part appeal to God.†   (source)
  • Cain's apparently a virtuoso at disguise.†   (source)
  • Diarrhea became the constant companion of many riders, some of whom became virtuosos of defecation.†   (source)
  • Every musician, however, was a virtuoso who followed an independent line.†   (source)
  • Oh, one or more of them did always accompany us on route marches and twice Captain Frankel had demonstrated his virtuosity at la savate.†   (source)
  • And the surest testament to the magnificent and horrifying level of my virtuosity was that neither had I. When I got to the flat Jack was waiting inside.†   (source)
  • There could be no doubt that its scholarship and virtuosity, its tantali7ing glimpses of knowledge still untapped were deliberately designed to convince mankind that it was in the presence of overwhelming intellectual power.†   (source)
  • a three-point shooting virtuoso
  • In the world of car salesmen, Golomb is a virtuoso.†   (source)
  • Stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak, for example, are virtuosos, because their infirmity has forced them to become far more sensitive to the information written on people's faces.†   (source)
  • Meme, his sister, dividing her time between Fernanda's rigidity and Amaranta's bitterness, at almost the same moment reached the age set for her to be sent to the nuns' school, where they would make a virtuoso on the clavichord of her.†   (source)
  • "The standard of an English laborer, hack driver or cad in respect to neatness, smugness and elegance of gardens and grounds and paths and ways is infinitely higher than that of a Chicago merchant prince or virtuoso," he wrote to Codman, "and we shall be disgraced if we fail to work up to a far higher level than our masters will be prepared to think suitable."†   (source)
  • She worked out the plan with such hatred that it made her tremble to think about the scheme, which she would have carried out in exactly the same way if it had been done out of love, but she would not allow herself to become upset by the confusion and went on perfecting the details so minutely that she came to be more than a specialist and was a virtuoso in the rites of death.†   (source)
  • Virtuosos.†   (source)
  • For Mystics, however, Bram was Stradivari—a virtuoso of magic whose results could not be duplicated by later generations despite every effort to divine his methods.†   (source)
  • I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society...At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box.†   (source)
  • Without bothering to turn his head, George could see a famous film producer, a minor poet, a mathematician, two actors, an atomic power engineer, a game warden, the editor of a weekly news magazine, a statistician from the World Bank, a violin virtuoso, a professor of arthrology and an astrophysicist.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue.†   (source)
  • The diploma that certified her as a concert clavichordist was ratified by the virtuosity with which she executed popular melodies of the seventeenth century at the gathering organized to celebrate the completion of her studies and with which the period of mourning came to in end.†   (source)
  • And yet in the end, she never attained the virtuosity the best young performers must have in order to be promoted to the next ranks.†   (source)
  • I would have thought that he was too drunk to recite a limerick but he sounded off endlessly, in perfect scansion with complex inner rhymes and rippling alliterations, an astounding feat of virtuosity in rhetoric.†   (source)
  • Sieveking assured me that if those two pieces were published, they would be in every virtuoso's repertoire within six months.†   (source)
  • THE DUENNA (pointing to the pages): How come these two virtuosi here?†   (source)
  • He made no pretense of becoming a virtuoso.†   (source)
  • He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.†   (source)
  • But, as I said to this artist, who, by the way, seems to be a most civil fellow, and is a regular virtuoso, it appears, with his brush; what on earth, I said to him, do you find so extraordinary in this window, which is, if anything, a little dingier than the rest?†   (source)
  • Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods—graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows.†   (source)
  • Ivan Ilych possessed this capacity to separate his real life from the official side of affairs and not mix the two, in the highest degree, and by long practice and natural aptitude had brought it to such a pitch that sometimes, in the manner of a virtuoso, he would even allow himself to let the human and official relations mingle.†   (source)
  • Filled with ironical melancholy, Swann watched them as they listened to the pianoforte inter, mezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds') which came after the flute, and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy flight; Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes starting from her head, as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing, a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn't possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all that!"†   (source)
  • Both doctors administered the drug, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, although the director was a virtuoso at it, inserting the needle and squeezing the syringe in one flourish.†   (source)
  • But a true original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make money for him, like fiddle playing.†   (source)
  • He was likewise a poet of distinction, who in his leisure hours penned narratives in the most elegant Tuscan prose—a virtuoso in the idioma gentile," Settembrini said, rocking his head back and forth and taking utmost pleasure in letting the native syllables melt on his tongue.†   (source)
  • A master of the irresistible effect, a virtuoso in his native aria da capo, he held the penultimate note before the resolution— moving downstage now, or so it seemed, one hand thrust into the air— held it so long that they broke into polite bravos before he had finished.†   (source)
  • Quite a bit of reading went on at the International Sanatorium Berghof, both in the common lounging areas and on private balconies—this was particularly true of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long since learned how to ravage time without diverting or employing their minds, had become virtuosi at putting time behind them, and declared openly that only clumsy bunglers in the art needed a book to hang on to.†   (source)
  • FROSCH
    Are you, perhaps, a virtuoso?†   (source)
  • Into this freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerable insight; she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketed and bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey.†   (source)
  • Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a certain pretentious virtuosity.†   (source)
  • In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters.†   (source)
  • He never said that art, as such, is wicked or meaningless, nor did he even say that technical virtuosity is unimportant.†   (source)
  • The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.†   (source)
  • More and more, too, there crept into the journal the comments of the professional soldier, between the prayers and the scruples—criticism of command (of Bragg after Chickamauga), satisfaction and an impersonal pride in maneuver or gunnery ("the practice of Marlowe's battery excellent"), and finally the admiration for the feints and delays executed by Johnston's virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buzzard's Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kenesaw Mountain ("there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in whatever man's hand does well, and General Johnston does well").†   (source)
  • It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly.†   (source)
  • Dazzled by the virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: "It's astonishing!†   (source)
  • My contempt for belles lettres, and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to communicate my bent to my fellows.†   (source)
  • On the whole, it was a relief to break away now and then from the Sabrina; and the Duchess's little breakfast, organized by Lord Hubert with all his usual virtuosity, was the pleasanter to Lily for not including her travelling-companions.†   (source)
  • This excitement about things reached an intensity out of proportion to their importance, generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with people.†   (source)
  • He, it appeared, had been that afternoon to an exhibition of the work of another artist, also a friend of Mme. Verdurin, who had recently died, and Swann wished to find out from him (for he valued his discrimination) whether there had really been anything more in this later work than the virtuosity which had struck people so forcibly in his earlier exhibitions.†   (source)
  • so with his virtuoso ease Odysseus strung his mighty bow.   (source)
  • Candide ... commended the virtuoso on his good taste.   (source)
  • g./, /sanatoria/, /appendices/, /virtuosi/, /formulae/ and /libretti/.†   (source)
  • He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini's Stabat Mater, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say, greatly adding to her other laureis and putting the others totally in the shade, in the jesuit fathers' church in upper Gardiner street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or virtuosi rather.†   (source)
  • He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini's Stabat Mater, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say, greatly adding to her other laureis and putting the others totally in the shade, in the jesuit fathers' church in upper Gardiner street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or virtuosi rather.†   (source)
  • Out of his confidence come the innumerable saws, axioms and /geflügelte Worte/ in the national arsenal, ranging from the "It won't hurt none to try" of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating confections of the wall-card virtuosi as "The elevator to success is not running; take the stairs."†   (source)
  • One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth.†   (source)
  • To say the truth, Jones himself was not a little surprized at what he saw; for, besides the extraordinary neatness of the room, it was adorned with a great number of nicknacks and curiosities, which might have engaged the attention of a virtuoso.†   (source)
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