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carnal
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  • But maybe it was my whiny Holden Caulfield imitationof a boy in need of carnal therapy that got me nowhere.†   (source)
  • Bound to be something carnal here.†   (source)
  • He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent in that mechanized noun, the death of the romantic and its sterile, carnal revenant, living only a forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of courtship during the Easter-night dance at the Great Hall which had replaced the mad scribble of love which he could only intuit dimly-hollow grandeur in the place of mean and sweeping passions which might once have erased souls.†   (source)
  • He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away.†   (source)
  • "Your gaze encompasses all men, makes your most ordinary glance seem intimate, carnal," Dr. Ghosh had told her, "as though you are ravishing me with your eyes!"†   (source)
  • She gave him a look he guessed was supposed to convey in equal measure a religious wonder at his great profundity and something rather more carnal.†   (source)
  • How many of them did you have carnal knowledge of?†   (source)
  • Last time I checked three hundred girls from Sweet Briar had carnal designs on my body.†   (source)
  • Oh, my cup turned into a spillway flooding across the spotless carpet, out the door down Pierrepont Street, across all the twilit carnal reaches of Brooklyn.†   (source)
  • My appetite for her was not carnal but pure.†   (source)
  • Now mine own affairs, which are of a spiritual kind and much more important than yours which are carnal, lie on the other side of this stream.   (source)
  • an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims   (source)
  • But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts;   (source)
  • The human spirit craves mastery over its carnal shell.†   (source)
  • In another life, this heavy shaft of flesh had been his source of carnal pleasure.†   (source)
  • But my days are just this: food and carnal pleasure.†   (source)
  • Pippa shrieks, invoking the phrase that every English mother tells her daughter about carnal acts.†   (source)
  • There could be no possibility of anything carnal with her.†   (source)
  • Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere.†   (source)
  • I despised myself for having once thought of carnal riot with this girl.†   (source)
  • As he sat on the plush divan and positioned the photo album on his lap, he felt a carnal hunger stir.†   (source)
  • A deep, carnal hunger.†   (source)
  • Today, the fact that President Kennedy enjoyed carnal knowledge of Marilyn Monroe and "countless others"—even during his presidency—seems only moderately improper, and even stylish, in comparison to the willful secrecy and deception, and the unlawful policies, so broadly practiced by the entire Reagan administration.†   (source)
  • The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine.†   (source)
  • Custom would have dictated that she only pick at her food while in company: chewing and swallowing were such blatantly carnal activities.†   (source)
  • Hard to fathom, in my opinion: as carnality goes it's old hat, the foul language nothing you can't hear any day on the street corners, the sex as decorous as fan dancers — whimsical almost, like garter belts.†   (source)
  • Lord Mace Tyrell and his entourage had been housed behind the royal sept, in the long slate-roofed keep that had been called the Maidenvault since King Baelor the Blessed had confined his sisters therein, so the sight of them might not tempt him into carnal thoughts.†   (source)
  • They could be bought and sold, whipped and branded, used for the carnal pleasure of their owners, bred to make more slaves.†   (source)
  • "Ser Osney," said the High Septon, in a firm, clear voice, "did you have carnal knowledge of the queen?"†   (source)
  • It is carnal and awful, and I give myself to him only reluctantly and with great displeasure for fear of suffering badly should I do otherwise.†   (source)
  • It seemed prompted not so much by guilt as by fear, fear that the comfort or companionship that women seemed often to want, after a night spent more carnally, was somehow too committing.†   (source)
  • He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights.†   (source)
  • They are an augury to a terrible end because this carnal pleasure will doom Mary, though she does not know it as yet, but he, watching the scene, does.†   (source)
  • Bo Maybank stroked my arms and neck with a clean towel, and the pressure of his small hands felt almost sexual as I closed my eyes and listened to the masculine chant of the Corps in all its primitiveness and lawless carnality.†   (source)
  • Their bodies barely touched but her hair tickled his chin and gave off a sweet, dry odor and suggested, as did everything about this girl, a deep, slow-burning, carnal heat.†   (source)
  • An anointed knight has sworn upon his sword to having carnal knowledge of her and two of her three cousins.†   (source)
  • When her husband and his white lover were on her bed, seeking carnal knowledge of each other in a noisy, effortful way, Genet debated whether to announce her presence.†   (source)
  • Ser Osney Kettleblack has confessed his carnal knowledge of the queen to the High Septon himself, before the altar of the Father.†   (source)
  • But she had; she was he,re; she preferred, then, to hear him preach the gospel than to linger with others in carnal delight.†   (source)
  • And a few days later I took up residence there, warmly anticipating a summer of carnal fulfillment, philosophical ripening and steady achievement in the creative task I had cut out for myself.†   (source)
  • "You got to remember," Elisha said, turning now to look at him, "that you think about it with a carnal mind.†   (source)
  • Sophie's lust was as boundless as my own, I'm sure, but for more complex reasons; it had to do, of course, with her good raw natural animal passion, but it was also both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief.†   (source)
  • In addition, the carnal, raw-nerved discomfort of my hangover had become a crucifixion, my thirst was unquenchable, and by the time the bus nosed its way through the clotted traffic of Arlington, I was suffering from an anxiety attack which each one of my psychic monitors had begun to regard gravely, flashing alerts all through my flesh.†   (source)
  • How wonderful it was, I thought, to happen upon Sophie and Nathan—these warm and bright and lively new companions—and the urge I had to reach out and hug both of them close to me was (for the moment at least, despite my desperate crush on Sophie) freighted with the mellowest brotherhood, cleanly, practically devoid of carnal accents.†   (source)
  • It is perhaps a reflection on the severe morality of that period that despite Yetta's relatively tolerant attitude toward sex, Sophie and Nathan felt constrained to live technically apart—separated by a mere few yards of linoleum-covered hallway—rather than moving in together into either one of their commodious rooms, where they would no longer have to enact their formal charade of devoted companions lacking any carnal interests.†   (source)
  • But I had not been in the least dismayed by the fact that these coolie wages were dispensed by one of the most powerful and wealthy publishers in the world; young and resilient, I approached my job—at least at the very beginning—with a sense of lofty purpose; and besides, in compensation, the work bore intimations of glamour: lunch at "21," dinner with John O'Hara, poised and brilliant but carnal-minded lady writers melting at my editorial acumen, and so on.†   (source)
  • It occurs to me that compared to the reptilian Sodom into which it later evolved, Times Square that summer offered scarcely more in the way of carnal corruption than some dull beige plaza in a Christly town like Omaha or Salt Lake City; nonetheless, it had its share of sleazy hustlers and garish freaks strutting through the rainbows and whirlpools of neon, even then, and it helped a little in the way of distracting me from my deep gloom to hear his whispered expletives—he could still…†   (source)
  • Only when the wretched flyboy formally declared his intentions to marry and then produced the ring (Mary Alice continues to tell me in vapid innocence) did she yield up her darling honey pot, for in the Baptist faith of her upbringing, woe as certain as death would alight upon those who would engage in carnal congress without at least the prospect of matrimony.†   (source)
  • It would take Nathan, she told me later, Nathan with his liberated and passionate carnality, to unlock the eroticism in her which she never dreamed she possessed.†   (source)
  • Slaying the carnal soul in the holy war.†   (source)
  • And those lips which are— well, I mustn't let my carnal lusts obtrude.†   (source)
  • So I am only capable of carnal lusts?†   (source)
  • Instead of the soaring lines reaching for heaven, demanded by the very nature of a temple, as a symbol of man's quest for something higher than his little ego, this building is flauntingly horizontal, its belly in the mud, thus declaring its allegiance to the carnal, glorifying the gross pleasures of the flesh above those of the spirit.†   (source)
  • Carnal commerce with the Indian women would have been very easy indeed, and the Friar was at the hardy age of ripe manhood when such temptations are peculiarly sharp.†   (source)
  • I felt no qualms about my first lust for the flesh being born on holy ground; the contrast betweenbudding carnal desires and the aching loneliness of the hymns never evoked any sense of guilt in me.†   (source)
  • The consequences of carnal indulgence were perhaps more serious here than in Spain, and Friar Baltazar seems never to have given his flock an opportunity to exult over his frailty.†   (source)
  • When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel.†   (source)
  • The wretchedness of such a mind as that—the ungoverned and carnal desires!†   (source)
  • We women can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men.†   (source)
  • Armed against ghostly as well as carnal attack?†   (source)
  • They have dissolved the carnal family, and constituted in their community a spiritual family.†   (source)
  • The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal.†   (source)
  • To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims….†   (source)
  • She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there, the pointed teeth, the blood stained, voluptuous mouth, which made one shudder to see, the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity.†   (source)
  • Because the body is sickness and depravity, it is what produces death, yes, both of them, love and death, are carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic!†   (source)
  • These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also.†   (source)
  • This rapid recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one whom we knew.†   (source)
  • The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal desire to "peep" and went back to his own house praising God.†   (source)
  • that, though people are important, the relations between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man.†   (source)
  • She trolled out with the others the hymn: How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch.†   (source)
  • There were moments when, as you "played king," you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body.†   (source)
  • I will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will live then for my lusts.†   (source)
  • For weeks he would go along scarcely thinking of the school teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to look at her body.†   (source)
  • —careless of dispensing the bread of life to their flocks, preaching at best but a carnal and soul-benumbing morality, and trafficking in the souls of men by receiving money for discharging the pastoral office in parishes where they did not so much as look on the faces of the people more than once a-year.†   (source)
  • Dorothea accused herself of some meanness in this timidity: it was always odious to her to have any small fears or contrivances about her actions, but at this moment she was seeking the highest aid possible that she might not dread the corrosiveness of Celia's pretty carnally minded prose.†   (source)
  • [He halts in his prowling; and the two look at one another, she steadfastly, with a sort of awe behind her contemptuous disgust: he stealthily, with a carnal gleam in his eye and a loose grin.†   (source)
  • "Friend wayfarer," replied the hermit, "be not importunate; if thou puttest me to use the carnal weapon in mine own defence, it will be e'en the worse for you."†   (source)
  • All the sins, Albert, of the noncarnal type.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "non-" in noncarnal means not and reverses the meaning of carnal. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
  • Yet they say, who was it told me, there is no carnal.†   (source)
  • Prima facie, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing.†   (source)
  • 8 October, and consummated on the same date with female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated on the lo September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last taken place 5 weeks previous, viz.†   (source)
  • 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29 December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894, aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ.†   (source)
  • To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (I January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.†   (source)
  • Laurent, lock up my hair shirt and my scourge, And pray for freedom from each carnal urge.†   (source)
  • CANTO V. The Second Circle: Carnal sinners.†   (source)
  • He swived* thee; I saw it with mine eyen; *enjoyed carnally And elles be I hanged by the halse.†   (source)
  • CANTO V. The Second Circle, that of Carnal Sinners.†   (source)
  • I understood that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners who subject reason to appetite.†   (source)
  • I have redressed injuries, righted wrongs, punished insolences, vanquished giants, and crushed monsters; I am in love, for no other reason than that it is incumbent on knights-errant to be so; but though I am, I am no carnal-minded lover, but one of the chaste, platonic sort.†   (source)
  • He erred not; for by this the heavenly bands Down from a sky of jasper lighted now In Paradise, and on a hill made halt; A glorious apparition, had not doubt And carnal fear that day dimmed Adam's eye.†   (source)
  • If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions: But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this, that you call love, to be a sect or scion.†   (source)
  • Carnally, she says.†   (source)
  • *enjoy carnally Some easement* has law y-shapen** us *satisfaction **provided For, John, there is a law that sayeth thus, That if a man in one point be aggriev'd, That in another he shall be relievd.†   (source)
  • …so jump upon this bloody question, You from the Polack wars, and you from England, Are here arriv'd, give order that these bodies High on a stage be placed to the view; And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts; Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I Truly deliver.†   (source)
  • Or can any carnal appetite so overpower your reason, or so totally lay it asleep, as to prevent your flying with affright and terror from a crime which carries such punishment always with it?†   (source)
  • — O upright, just, and true-disposing God, How do I thank Thee that this carnal cur Preys on the issue of his mother's body, And makes her pew-fellow with others' moan!†   (source)
  • Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names, Places, and titles, and with these to join Secular power; though feigning still to act By spiritual, to themselves appropriating The Spirit of God, promised alike and given To all believers; and, from that pretence, Spiritual laws by carnal power shall force On every conscience; laws which none shall find Left them inrolled, or what the Spirit within Shall on the heart engrave.†   (source)
  • And it is, perhaps, being too charitable to conclude that such persons mean anything more by their marriage than to please their carnal appetites; for the satisfaction of which, we are taught, it was not ordained.†   (source)
  • …thought, Eating his fill; nor Eve to iterate Her former trespass feared, the more to sooth Him with her loved society; that now, As with new wine intoxicated both, They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel Divinity within them breeding wings, Wherewith to scorn the earth: But that false fruit Far other operation first displayed, Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve Began to cast lascivious eyes; she him As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn: Till Adam thus 'gan Eve to dalliance move.†   (source)
  • What higher in her society thou findest Attractive, human, rational, love still; In loving thou dost well, in passion not, Wherein true love consists not: Love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges; hath his seat In reason, and is judicious; is the scale By which to heavenly love thou mayest ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure; for which cause, Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.†   (source)
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