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whim
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  • While, as a rule, the Count always took the stairs, when he approached the second-floor landing that night, on some ghostly whim he called for the elevator, assuming he would have it to himself.†   (source)
  • You have exposed us to Zeus' wrath for some foolish whim."†   (source)
  • The warmer weather offers a ray of hope to everyone who has survived the elements, along with their captors' cruel whims.†   (source)
  • In the end, we were catering to her whims and wishes far more than we ever wanted to.†   (source)
  • Like a lazy parent who found it easier to acquiesce to the whims of a spoiled child than to stand firm and teach values, the Church just kept softening at every turn, trying to reinvent itself to accommodate a culture gone astray.†   (source)
  • On a whim, he called out to her with his mind.†   (source)
  • I had booked a cheap flight to Australia on a whim, and was trying to find someone who might come with me.†   (source)
  • Did you have any particular reason for doing so, or was it a mere whim?†   (source)
  • It didn't make him invincible to the whims of the Nazi occupiers, but it made him a lot less vulnerable than he had been when he was unemployed.†   (source)
  • You're the one who's always saying they've subordinated us to every passing principle and whim and desire!†   (source)
  • Perhaps the mother had come to Canada on a whim—I cannot claim to have come here for entirely sound reasons myself!†   (source)
  • The role of a national museum is to operate above the whims and fashions of collectors, to safeguard for future generations the—†   (source)
  • This looks like the kind of place where an unexpected exotic animal might appear—the illegal kind that people buy on a whim in the back rooms of pet stores, but then later set free in an alley because they can't control the razor-sharp claws or the eating demands.†   (source)
  • By then his cider, which he had apparently expected to dole out according to his own governing whim, was disappearing.†   (source)
  • If there is one thing she hates most about being in the foster care system, it's this dependence on people you barely know, your vulnerability to their whims.†   (source)
  • Our every whim was fulfilled with love and care.†   (source)
  • He had just about decided to forget his sudden whim and go to bed when the cage gave a jerk and began to ascend.†   (source)
  • The thought of being left to my prep team's fashion whims only adds to the miseries competing for my attention--my abused body, my lack of sleep, my mandatory marriage, and the terror of being unable to satisfy President Snow's demands.†   (source)
  • It was a reminder that much bigger things were happening in the world, and Cinder's yearning for freedom and Pearl's taunts and Adri's whims and even Kai's flirting with her did not fit into that bigger picture.†   (source)
  • He threatened to keep me from my husband if I did not submit to his whim and destroy a paper that might help me get free.†   (source)
  • I do not wish to be put out like the cat whenever some majority feels the whim.†   (source)
  • Nobody was going to be opening that package on a whim.†   (source)
  • Jack had seen Denker the teacher as not much different from the strutting South American little Caesars in their banana kingdoms, standing dissidents up against the wall of the handiest squash or handball court, a super-zealot in a comparatively small puddle, a man whose every whim becomes a crusade.†   (source)
  • This is no time to satisfy a whim and unravel everything you've accomplished.†   (source)
  • Dreams owned his consciousness, twisting and directing it to their whims.†   (source)
  • Beyond that, it might just give us enough i . nsight to save all of our lives if we are intelligent enough to find the common thread of experience which binds all our fates to the whim of the Shrike.†   (source)
  • And on the face of it, with the world the way it is now, with planes and computers and cars with brains and comfort-controlled environments and every single whim catered to by technology—with all of that, all that we have become—it doesn't somehow seem possible to do something so basic and elemental.†   (source)
  • One bright and fragrant spring day—as if on a wild equinoctial whim—Holmes suggested that Minnie invite her sister to Chicago to see the world's fair, at his expense.†   (source)
  • Somebody's whim, maybe.†   (source)
  • Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or three.†   (source)
  • His absence made the palace warmer, and now that he was home, we were all subject to his whims again.†   (source)
  • But in the U.S., it wasn't just the prosperity—because New Orleans was not uniformly prosperous, to be sure—there was a sense that everything could be replaced, and on a whim.†   (source)
  • The stories say I chased her on a whim, that she was just another pretty dress.†   (source)
  • She was doing it on a whim.†   (source)
  • An Idaho potato farmer's annual income is now largely determined by the weather, the world market, and the whims of the giant processors.†   (source)
  • All day long, I'm subject to the whims of a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old and a woman who can barely speak English.†   (source)
  • There was always the possibility, of course, that his suggestion of a fortnight ago may have been a whim of the moment, and he would no longer be approving of the idea.†   (source)
  • On a whim, I get off the train at Whitney.†   (source)
  • On a whim, I pick up my artifact, twist the base, look inside.†   (source)
  • Finally, on a whim, I went to the back door of the nearby inn and spent my final penny on a mug of strong beer.†   (source)
  • I marveled at the genius of creations so universal and lasting that they can survive death and war, the clamor of invention, the whims of style, the turn of centuries.†   (source)
  • To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife.†   (source)
  • That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way, leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart.†   (source)
  • " "Indulge an old man's whim," Yueh said.†   (source)
  • This is so much more important than some whim to drop in on an old friend.†   (source)
  • I was in Blockbuster when on a whim I asked the clerk if he knew anything about a movie called The Last Home Run.†   (source)
  • There was nothing of charity in it and she did not step lightly around his heart or indulge his sorrow or his whims.†   (source)
  • I don't think he could face a world in which he was no longer free to act on his every whim.†   (source)
  • On a whim, he tried the doorknob.†   (source)
  • We were halfway through our trip, and on a whim we drove out to Springs, a hamlet near East Hampton on Long Island.†   (source)
  • On a whim, I decided to check it out.†   (source)
  • Our lives depended upon Moody's whim.†   (source)
  • My life is dictated by the whims of my parents and where they want to send my sister.†   (source)
  • Neither did Ida have the professional standing which would force them to accept him as the whim, the house pet, or husband of a star.†   (source)
  • I donned my new bikini, disguised the tattoo beneath a hot pink gauze cover-up, and on some lunatic whim called Sarah to come along.†   (source)
  • If you want to be free of him, then why go along with his every whim?†   (source)
  • The Goddess would not have granted you special powers on a whim.†   (source)
  • Once — and this would have been in the mid-1950s — Weisberg took the train to New York to attend, on a whim, the Science Fiction Writers Convention, where she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke.†   (source)
  • I'm pretty sure Lindsay wrote it on a whim—four measly letters, stupid, meaningless—probably to test out a new marker and see how much ink it had.†   (source)
  • If he had these kids following his every whim and order, it had to be because he was a good guy, right?†   (source)
  • These men had the power not only to end our visits but to lock me up in solitary on a whim; my word against theirs would count for little.†   (source)
  • Did the Party really think that physical laws could be overturned by the whim of some apparatchik with a heavy desk and a dacha in the Moscow suburbs?†   (source)
  • " "Don't I indulge your every whim?" he asked.†   (source)
  • He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim.†   (source)
  • The ones I liked and the ones I hated, they came and went at her whim with little or no explanation to the rest of us other than a slammed door or a muted sniffle that I could only hear late at night.†   (source)
  • I can change on a whim and be so many different girls and none of them has to be me.†   (source)
  • The room was two stories high, the only whim of the architect that Esteban Trueba had consented to.†   (source)
  • We live at the whim and pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so beyond.†   (source)
  • She was doomed now, if that was his desire, his wish, his slightest whim.†   (source)
  • He fills out a request letter for materials for Brown, and-on a whim-decides to send requests to Duke University and Dartmouth College as well and drops the envelopes on the teacher's desk at the end of class.†   (source)
  • You would have a God who forgives all, but when it comes to your personal whims you seek punishment for your vengeance.†   (source)
  • The dance seemed to him a declaration that her devotion, her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily bound to his person, that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to respond to the call of any other man she might have met instead.†   (source)
  • She went overseas on a whim.†   (source)
  • If I have to tie you up and sit on you until this insane whim of yours passes, you are not going to Idris.†   (source)
  • Only effortless song spun at the boy's whim.†   (source)
  • We know you'll listen carefully to the testimony, Your Honor, but the reality is that the Department of Corrections is not required to submit to the whim of every misguided prisoner that comes through its doors— especially one who has committed the monstrous torture and murders of two New Hampshire citizens, a child and a police officer.†   (source)
  • I don't believe in keeping my employees waiting on my whims."†   (source)
  • I have written mostly about people whose lives came and went on tides of whim, apathy and cruelty.†   (source)
  • She, on a whim, decided to let him seduce her.†   (source)
  • But to sit still and wait again as he had in France, to let circumstance rule, or the whims or priorities of others, were not in his nature.†   (source)
  • Her arms were laden with blossoms that she'd gathered, all on a whim, from her garden and from the overgrown hedges along the path from the rectory.†   (source)
  • More than anything, he was tormented by the possibility that the crash had not been an accident, that Michelle and Chrissie and Nina died not at the whim of fate but by the hand of man.†   (source)
  • I have set her aside--gently, picking her up by the armpits as I would a child--and so have proved that she has no power but the little I give her by momentary whim.†   (source)
  • There's no doubt that he could snap my wrist at the slightest whim.†   (source)
  • The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside-just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind.†   (source)
  • So far, she'd allowed him to set the rules and change them at his whim.†   (source)
  • …which, in essence, meant that students themselves became arbiters of what subjects were to be taught, and grammar, by jingo (or Ringo), was not one of them; (2) the notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities, especially if these happened to be black, Hispanic, and, later on, female or homosexual; (3) the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers, products…†   (source)
  • She married him on a whim, two months later.†   (source)
  • If one of your people should leave these borders, they are subject to the whims and fates of the world.†   (source)
  • And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications—whether happy or not—might simply overwhelm.†   (source)
  • I come out of a country where educated men are promoted at the whim of morons who recite Marxist litany by rote.†   (source)
  • He's supposed to copy orders and proclamations, but he changes them at will and composes new ones according to whim-always in the proper style and with the proper seals and codes.†   (source)
  • Booth is famous among the theatrical community for his unrehearsed gymnastics, sometimes inserting jumps and drops into Shakespeare plays on a whim.†   (source)
  • Kessell had been quite content with his life in Cryshal-Tirith, with all of his whims obediantly served by the first tribe of goblins that he had encountered.†   (source)
  • I liked to think there was a guardian angel, someone to look up to, someone I could imagine in a lofty protected part of the sky, who could on a whim simply look down and see me sitting out on the sleeping porch and somehow make sense of my placement in the world.†   (source)
  • Farmers live on the whim of the weather and the ground.†   (source)
  • It was clear that most of the work was being done by the humans, while the vampires strolled around the place or spent time with one another, a human or two trailing behind them, ready to cater to their slightest whim.†   (source)
  • These new giant farms would be operated by Lunar Authority, scientifically, and not left to whims of private owners.†   (source)
  • Kings ruled according to their whims and desires, and ordinary people enjoyed few rights.†   (source)
  • Christophine's whims and fancies, I was sure.†   (source)
  • Usually, the recruiter cloaks himself in a cover identity, an invented persona that he wears like a suit and tie and changes at a whim.†   (source)
  • The fact remains that, unless outright starvation sweeps the land, the nomadic winter wolf bands, moving at the whim of the equally nomadic caribou herds, somehow manage to avoid treading on one another's toes.†   (source)
  • They ate at whim, taking a bite here, a bite there.†   (source)
  • Spontaneity and whim are the order of the day.†   (source)
  • People could indulge in such whims, because they had both the time and the money.†   (source)
  • On a whim, she added, "Kirby sent me," this having been the name on the latrine wall.†   (source)
  • Some romantic whim of mine prompted me irresistibly to ask if she had fallen that swiftly in love.†   (source)
  • I thought it was the whim of our Lord to take him a noble page, after the manner of the kings of old, they say.†   (source)
  • The whole house turns on her whims, is there anything she wants she doesn't get?†   (source)
  • Those little things you always toy with and dismiss as frivolous whims, I did them then.†   (source)
  • Before, the plane had had a will of its own; now the plane seemed to be part of me, an extension of my hands and feet, obedient to my slightest whim.†   (source)
  • On a whim, he had once traveled to Florida with a group of friends, bought the boat which Humphrey Bogart captained in the film The African Queen, and brought it back to Yamacraw Island, where it survived a year then rotted slowly into oblivion.†   (source)
  • Those memories of days when I, a slave To the whims and quirks of males, Was but a demoniac fool and the street was all my shelter.†   (source)
  • (MARGARET spies chain o f office, brings it to MORE) NORFOLK What whim possessed you MORE "Twas not a whim!†   (source)
  • That was a childish whim.†   (source)
  • As I recall, your favorite… "There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.†   (source)
  • A schedule defends from chaos and whim.   (source)
  • This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.   (source)
  • Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one.   (source)
    whim = a sudden desire that arises without any logical explanation
  • And unless you have the proper components, it can't be done on a whim.†   (source)
  • Festering together in the debris of a realtor's whim.†   (source)
  • And then who would pay for her whims and whams, and for all the running and fetching she required?†   (source)
  • Videographers, however, were at the whim of the crazy reporters for whom they shot footage.†   (source)
  • His days of servitude to the whims of his flesh were behind him.†   (source)
  • As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim.†   (source)
  • Too old to switch schools, move to a new town, submit herself to yet another foster parent's whims.†   (source)
  • Towards me, angry, as if this wedding was a malicious whim at best, at worst a rejection of her.†   (source)
  • On a whim, Eragon reached out with his mind and touched the cat's consciousness.†   (source)
  • You didn't have me send that warning to Rabban as an idle whim," the Baron said.†   (source)
  • At a word and a whim from my father all my vaunted power blew away.†   (source)
  • Even the McDonald's Corporation is now vulnerable to the changing whims of consumers.†   (source)
  • For him, I must remember, I am only a whim.†   (source)
  • I will pass over the fact that you think me a mare to be bred at your whim.†   (source)
  • If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim.†   (source)
  • Even the Commander is subject to its whims.†   (source)
  • I was feeling burned out and I decided on a whim to move down here and retire.†   (source)
  • Not to mention my father, my conventional family, away from Marion with her whims and fancies.†   (source)
  • He bought a television on a whim, but he never unpacked it from the box and sold it a year later.†   (source)
  • Emmett had a whim to wrestle with an anaconda.†   (source)
  • After all those years of indecision, I simply acted on a whim.†   (source)
  • She brushed her hair and then put on a pair of dangly earrings she'd bought on a whim.†   (source)
  • We're puppets, all of us, dancing according to Galbatorix's whims.†   (source)
  • I have no time to grieve, nor wait upon the whims of Lord Too-Fat.†   (source)
  • Like that of all bottles left to the whim of the oceans, its course was unpredictable.†   (source)
  • My spur-of-the-moment whim hadn't come with a plan intact.†   (source)
  • "You are no longer slaves, doomed to die at a master's whim.†   (source)
  • I knew that I remained alive only at the whim of Moody and his ayatollah.†   (source)
  • They'll crucify you, going out on a whim like this."†   (source)
  • It seemed she would always choose the practical even if she had a whim for the fanciful.†   (source)
  • Destroyed at the whim of men whom he had never seen and who had never seen those tiers of metal ….†   (source)
  • Our art is not so common as to be employed for mere whims.†   (source)
  • Billy had not been her first lover, but he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim.†   (source)
  • On a whim, they'd driven to Atlantic Beach beneath a blue and cloudless sky.†   (source)
  • When you decide on a whim to visit the H-bomb home page, she begins to understand.†   (source)
  • But Dan decided, on a whim, to go rob the farmer, if he had anything worth being robbed of.†   (source)
  • Spirits can assume many different guises, dictated by their whim.†   (source)
  • No one passed through Hampton and decided to stay here on a whim.†   (source)
  • She practices blood sacrifice, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against her own on a whim.†   (source)
  • If not for the whims of fate, any one of us humans might be standing in their place.†   (source)
  • Destroyed at the whim of some men who sat and voted ….†   (source)
  • "Do you want to wager your throne upon a woman's whim?†   (source)
  • It's I who will depend on any whim of yours.†   (source)
  • We are not a country of vassals subject to the whims of foreign masters.†   (source)
  • But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.†   (source)
  • The men of the Windblown used what names they would, and changed them at a whim.†   (source)
  • You mean, physical facts are open to correction, but your whims are not?†   (source)
  • Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.†   (source)
  • But justice should not be subject to the whims of a dictator.†   (source)
  • "But would it be just," she gestured in circles with her hands, "just some whim?†   (source)
  • You argued that what we needed was laws, not a captain's whim.†   (source)
  • Our little movement, we were always too fragile, always too dependent on the whims of our supporters.†   (source)
  • But the walk may be a whim of hers, and they humor whims, when something has gone this far and there's been no miscarriage.†   (source)
  • It was fifteen thousand for a first-class ticket, but I'm sufficiently capitalized to indulge such whims.†   (source)
  • A little over a year ago, he was simply a fifty-five-year-old manservant living within the walls of Château Villette, catering to the whims of the insufferable cripple Sir Leigh Teabing.†   (source)
  • But there was a reason for my willingness to submit to the upheaval, and it angered me that Cassie could act as if we had done it on a whim.†   (source)
  • For example, she rejected an invitation from the Committee on Ceremonies and instead, on a whim, went to lunch at the German Village.†   (source)
  • On a whim I decided to check out the website of a magazine I had been subscribing to since not long after we bought our West Palm Beach house.†   (source)
  • It was not strictly on the way, but it seemed clear to Harry that this was a whim on which he should act, so he di-rected his feet immediately toward the vegetable patch, where he was pleased, but not altogether surprised, to find Professor Slughorn in conversation with Professor Sprout.†   (source)
  • Although I liked to think of my Davis great-grandparents seeking the American promise, which is only possibilities, and I enjoyed the family joke of my grandfather Cook finding possibilities where others saw a cheat, I was uncomfortably aware that my father always sought impossibility, and taught us, using the Ericsons as his example, to do the same—to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.†   (source)
  • It could simply be that a meaningless whim had suddenly overtaken me at that moment - but that is hardly a convincing way to account for such distinctly odd behaviour.†   (source)
  • She was encouraged by the certainty that he was there, still alive but without his masculine whims, his patriarchal demands, his consuming need for her to love him in the same ritual of inopportune kisses and tender words with which he loved her.†   (source)
  • Then, too, he had read several books and made the acquaintance of several great misanthropes of the ages, whose spiritual company soothed him and provided him with yardsticks for measuring his whims, his yearnings, and his antipathies.†   (source)
  • Rather, it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.†   (source)
  • I just saw you when I happened to be driving by, on a whim, just because you used to come down here during the strike.†   (source)
  • Suddenly Hauptsturmfahrer Goeth showed up and on a whim demanded that the guards lash each of us twenty-five times with their savage leather whips.†   (source)
  • At first I thought she picked it on a whim, but when I asked her how she felt about the music, she said that she could see in the music a giant building, a large, complex house.†   (source)
  • There was going to be no government, even by whim, even by Brinker's whim, on this Saturday at Devon.†   (source)
  • I was captured by a whim.†   (source)
  • But I'll not submit to your whim.†   (source)
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