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distort
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  • Then images appeared in my mind, weak and distorted, as if the transmission were being disrupted at the source.†   (source)
  • We see only their light, which can be distorted by the atmosphere.†   (source)
  • To distort an overused human expression, the girl had more immediate fish to fry: She had stolen a book.†   (source)
  • The laugh's distorted, but the fact that it registered at all means I must be regaining my hearing.†   (source)
  • My face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side, and there was a scar to the side of my left eye.†   (source)
  • The split-second jump cut in the feed would be masked by the momentary video distortion that occurred when the cameras switched into night-vision mode.†   (source)
  • I just stood there looking from one distorted face to another, listening to this babble of enraged squabbling as the members of the Walls family gave vent to all their years of hurt and anger, each unloading his or her own accumulated grievances and blaming the others for allowing the most fragile one of us to break into pieces.†   (source)
  • His face had a strange elasticity: It would be slack and expressionless one minute, only to twist suddenly into a gaping, oversize grin that distorted his features and exposed a mouthful of horsy teeth.†   (source)
  • Though the Japanese press covered the European theater accurately, it was notorious for distorting the news of the Pacific war, sometimes absurdly.†   (source)
  • Crow stiffened as she stared at her distorted reflection in the shining silver.†   (source)
  • None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces.†   (source)
  • He paged through the master litter book one last time, looking for names that could be abbreviated or distorted, but even as he ran his finger down the pages he knew it was hopeless.†   (source)
  • The surfaces of the geometric solids were completely reflective, and what the people saw were just distorted, reflected images of the surface of Trisolaris.†   (source)
  • She screams, but her voice is robotic and distorted, as if filtered through radio static.†   (source)
  • They are piled up on each other, their limbs distorted.†   (source)
  • He looked up in terror into the distorted faces of two brownshirts.†   (source)
  • In dreams her face tends to be distorted with terror as she shields herself from the muzzle pressed against her head.†   (source)
  • The green swirls of the gazing ball must be distorting it, making it look worse.†   (source)
  • He stared at me—we were so close that I could see my distorted reflection in his large Ray-Bans.†   (source)
  • In their afternoon fatigue, as they wiped their foreheads and the backs of their necks with their handkerchiefs, without meaning to offend or get a laugh, even teachers forgot the fresh aquatic promise of my name and distorted it in a shameful way.†   (source)
  • Absorbing these psychosocial realities created all kinds of distortions and difficulties that manifest themselves today in multiple ways.†   (source)
  • The car park had thinned out with the rain, and in the distance we could just hear the distorted sound of the loudspeaker as some other race thundered past.†   (source)
  • Tariq chuckles bitterly, and Laila hears in his chuckle that he is revolted by this distortion of an honorable Pashtun custom, this misrepresentation of his people's ways.†   (source)
  • The original feminine meaning is correct, but the symbolism of the pentacle has been distorted over the millennia.†   (source)
  • But I looked over at my mom, worried that she might be embarrassed by the distorting guitars and the gritty lyrics.†   (source)
  • As if the world had become horribly distorted while she was among the trees.†   (source)
  • We see her desperately clasping her hands before her, her face distorted with the tension of the moment, then suddenly, dramatically, she lifts her hands high and closes her eyes.†   (source)
  • Finally, he found a new route and started to jog along it, his wandlight waving, making his shadow flicker and distort on the hedge walls.†   (source)
  • A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it.†   (source)
  • White men had their fantasies of a passionate Japan—girls of burnished skin and willowy long legs going barefoot in the wet heat of rice paddies—and this distorted their sex drives.†   (source)
  • She looked out of the column, and there was Charles Wallace in the cell, an alien expression distorting his face.†   (source)
  • It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.†   (source)
  • The flames danced in front of his face, the heat distorted his features.†   (source)
  • One of them had something stuck in his teeth; he probed with his tongue and distorted his own face.†   (source)
  • "And the perfect word for me," he added in a distorted voice, as though his tongue had swollen, "psycho.†   (source)
  • The air ripples around him, distorted by the waves of heat rolling off his body.†   (source)
  • The television screen flickered; its picture grew distorted.†   (source)
  • I stare straight ahead at the reflective metal decorations lining the stairwell, at the distorted reflections of Ollie and me.†   (source)
  • The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly distorted—her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance.†   (source)
  • Tita knew Chencha sometimes exaggerated and distorted things, so she held her aching heart in check.†   (source)
  • I stared at the empty asphalt, the heat distorting my vision.†   (source)
  • We're both sitting in front of the mirror, looking straight ahead at our distorted reflections in the broken glass.†   (source)
  • Wonderful perfect quadraphonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.†   (source)
  • Even on stealth-sensitive radar he would be no more than a barely perceptible distortion.†   (source)
  • With their distorted, lice-infested figures and captions of hate, they made it seem permissible, even proper, to attack a Jew even if he differed from the poster portrayal.†   (source)
  • She still occasionally dreamed of his distorted face and the guttural screams.†   (source)
  • Distorted reflections in the domed cover of the silver dish.†   (source)
  • Everything looks strange and grotesque and distorted, certain streets glittering with glass from smashed windows, the smell of burning in the air.†   (source)
  • Kerry the atheist curmudgeon, who hated how commercialized Christmas had become and so threw an annual Merry Anti-Christmas Celebration at the club, where he held a contest for which band could play the most distorted versions of Christmas carols.†   (source)
  • I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud and distorted with fury, then I reached for his flailing arms and held on tight.†   (source)
  • Everything was distorted: colors had weird, exotic tints; blues were more prominent now, while greens and reds were subdued.†   (source)
  • Tiny sounds get heightened and distorted.†   (source)
  • Her face is distorted by the liquid that's been sprayed on the windshield.†   (source)
  • It may have been the distorting properties of her anger, or the muck of this alien city, but when she imagined the soldiers' mouths sewn shut, their coats and breeches tore at the seams instead.†   (source)
  • "Look at the lunatic!" sneered Basta as Dustfinger stared at his hands, his face distorted with pain.†   (source)
  • Others said it began with one guy who happened to be crazy, but the rest followed suit as the attacks signified a distorted sense of power.†   (source)
  • Some part of me had apparently given up on time-distorted reality and smoothed things out.†   (source)
  • Her shoulders were distorted by the greased flannel under her dress to encourage the healing of her back.†   (source)
  • Even with her eyes closed and the covers pulled up to her head, she could picture the shadowy, distorted grin, the unblinking eyes.†   (source)
  • Panting hard but unable to take a breath, I saw my own reflection, face white and distorted, dancing across the surface of the thing's metallic shell and burning eyes.†   (source)
  • And I heard my own voice rising above the din and uncoiling in an oddly guttural, distorted, drawn-out scream: "Noooooooooooooooo!"†   (source)
  • Before they reached the zone protected by the porters' cudgels they warded off the crowd with sticks themselves, their faces distorted with anger.†   (source)
  • Words repeated, distorted, words recreated by those who might bear them a grudge, words stitched to words until they are the winding sheet the family will be buried in when their bodies are found dumped in a ditch, their tongues cut off for speaking too much.†   (source)
  • Still, we can see it as resembling the Homeric original only if we understand that resemblance in terms of a funhouse mirror, full of distortion and goofy correspondences—if we understand it, in other words, as an ironic parallel.†   (source)
  • In the case of schizophrenia, research points to a biological brain disorder involving any number of abnormalities—including irregular function of a neurotransmitter called dopamine—that could create hallucinations and distort reality.†   (source)
  • Dee focused on the young man and woman, trying to decide if one was older than the other, but the rat's vision was too clouded and distorted for him to be sure.†   (source)
  • Over the next week and a half telegrams shot from city to city, engineer to engineer, until the story became somewhat distorted.†   (source)
  • That machine ...the lens is distorted.†   (source)
  • Her face was distorted by rage.†   (source)
  • Political considerations, mostly driven by wildly distorted media reports and a lot of Arab propaganda, caused the Marines to back off their offensive soon after it was begun, and well before it achieved its aim of kicking the insurgents out of the city.†   (source)
  • And although this censorship, or repression mechanism, is considerably weaker when we are asleep than when we are awake, it is still strong enough to cause our dreams to distort the wishes we cannot acknowledge.†   (source)
  • Harris and Watkins wrote letters to editors complaining they'd been quoted out of context, their story sensationalized to "distort, misrepresent and terrify."†   (source)
  • The fire was the only light, and it threw distorting shadows on the still faces as they watched us.†   (source)
  • My voice distorted around the word.†   (source)
  • But the inability of his left tackle to handle the Vikings' right end was, in Walsh's view, a difference maker: it created fantastically disproportionate distortions in the game.†   (source)
  • By sending out slightly distorted return echoes, he could create ghost targets.†   (source)
  • But Lenin's distorted face was even worse.†   (source)
  • That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.†   (source)
  • She could tell that her communiques were being distorted by influences beyond her control and that the message received never resembled the one she had sent.†   (source)
  • Psychologists have found that this process of distortion is nearly universal in the spread of rumors.†   (source)
  • Just the sight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearable boredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of that life distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty.†   (source)
  • How did I know that someday-at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere-the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?†   (source)
  • The rounded lid of the compact distorts my features a little, but it's still me.†   (source)
  • Surely Bella had misunderstood; surely Signora Luciano's voice was distorted by the strain of trying to make herself heard over the baby's wails.†   (source)
  • An Atreides guard stood beside it with bared sword and the faint air-distortion of a shield around him.†   (source)
  • "The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean.†   (source)
  • THROUGH the window, filmed with years of weather and faintly warped, the view of the street wavered, undulant and slightly distorted.†   (source)
  • The sound the bell made was nearly as excruciating as the White Noise, its pitch stretched and distorted by the dream.†   (source)
  • the picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion.†   (source)
  • Everything I hear is muffled and distorted.†   (source)
  • But the blurred mirror was giving her back a distorted, pink abstraction of herself, like a Francis Bacon painting, and Annie found it so disturbing that she turned off the light and went quickly back into the bedroom.†   (source)
  • Some might call it distorted reality, but it's exactly the place I need to be: no mom, Marie, ever more distant, in her midlife quest for fame no stepfather, Scott, stern and heavy-handed with unattainable expectations no big sister, Leigh, caught up in a tempest of uncertain sexuality no little brother, Jake, spoiled and shameless in his thievery of my niche.†   (source)
  • It distorts as if the TV's antenna is being blown by a strong wind.†   (source)
  • But the value meals, two-for-one deals, and free refills of soda give a distorted sense of how much fast food actually costs.†   (source)
  • No matter what you hear 20 years from now by elite media and historians, things get distorted....Just like Vietnam, I fear OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) will be abused in the same way.†   (source)
  • The light illumined and horribly distorted her face, so that her eyes looked like coals of fire and her mouth stretched joylessly back upon the gums.†   (source)
  • The connective tissue under the skin had been destroyed by the virus, causing a subtle distortion of the face.†   (source)
  • Your facts are distorted, Alejandro.†   (source)
  • Not to mention the massive blood clot shimmering in the light, growing before her eyes and gloating at her like a smiling Buddha, as if to say, Hema, I have completely distorted the anatomy, dissection is going to be bloody difficult, and your landmarks will all be gone.†   (source)
  • My own reflection was there as well, distorted by the bumps and ridges in the obsidian.†   (source)
  • He wanted to kill the man who had sneaked into his home and distorted the faith and trust he had in his child.†   (source)
  • But inside the quiet young scholar there existed a second, unsuspected personality, one with stunted emotions and a distorted mind through which cold thoughts flowed in cruel directions.†   (source)
  • Or catching that glimpse of my mother's face, distorted with mine, staring back from the mirror.†   (source)
  • Like so many inner-city kids, Cedric knows that his notions of the distant, white world-of two-car garages and dads home for dinner— have come largely through the television, with all of its vivid distortions and unintentional verities.†   (source)
  • "She seems so ill, Lucian," Amatis said, in a voice that was warped and distorted like an old recording.†   (source)
  • She blinked, thinking it was an illusion, a distortion created by the smoke and fear.†   (source)
  • Voices echoed down the passage ahead of them, but they were too distorted to understand.†   (source)
  • Their confidence was bolstered in large degree by distorted notions of their own strength.†   (source)
  • How would her face distort at the moment of orgasm?†   (source)
  • The terrific acceleration of the saucer as it left Earth twisted Billy's slumbering body, distorted his face, dislodged him m time, sent him back to the war.†   (source)
  • The windows and my grogginess had distorted their features.†   (source)
  • Yossarian was struck with a weird sense of distortion.†   (source)
  • The vye is larger, with a more distorted and hideous face—part wolf, part jackal, part human, with squinty eyes and a twisted snout.†   (source)
  • He's lost in his own reflection, the one staring back at him, bloated and distorted, in the shiny hollow of the teaspoon he's twirling between skeletal fingers.†   (source)
  • I began to wonder how much of all this was true, how much imagined, distorted.†   (source)
  • She was a madwoman with a distorted face and a gaping mouth.†   (source)
  • Everything looks distorted and unrecognizable.†   (source)
  • It simply happened that the attention I first gained as a majorette went hand in hand with a warm reception from the Boy Scouts and their fathers, and from that point on I knewintuitively that one resource I had to overcome the war-distorted limitations of my race would be my femininity.†   (source)
  • The accent was strange and guttural, the speech distorted.†   (source)
  • When she wasn't distorting her features to achieve "the look," she was cracking up.†   (source)
  • I held the cup to his parched mouth, and he drank greedily, his face distorted from the grief of the effort.†   (source)
  • They said he was reasonable in every respect until someone mentioned that president's name, then his face would become distorted, he would assume a whooping crane attitude and hold it for eight hours or more, and nothing or nobody could make him lower his leg until he forgot about that man.†   (source)
  • They ascended the scale and began to distort.†   (source)
  • Having badly distorted the facts of the ascent up Suribachi, and having fatally garbled the true story of the flagraisings from the safety of their distant ships, the gentlemen of the press—or most of them—withdrew.†   (source)
  • No. She was distorting my every word.†   (source)
  • He looked like he'd fallen off a cliff, with huge purple bruises distorting his face, the awful scratches Ari had left on his cheeks, the stiff, pained way he moved.†   (source)
  • Everyone's voices seemed very far away—the fragments of the Council members' questions and the Griffins' replies that reached his ears distorted, like sound waves from a distant galaxy.†   (source)
  • The ice was thick but clear, and in some places I could see twenty or thirty feet into it with only a slight waver of distortion.†   (source)
  • Plastic goggles get scratched upand distort vision.†   (source)
  • Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.†   (source)
  • If the images that came to his mind were not completely distorted, it was an enormous cemetery.†   (source)
  • The hair was completely burned off his head and body; the features were blackened and distorted with pain; the swollen lips were wide apart, disclosing the glistening teeth, and imparting a horrid grin, such only as agonizing death can stamp upon the face.†   (source)
  • In the distorted cosmology of the Afrikaner, the Nationalist victory was like the Israelites' journey to the Promised Land.†   (source)
  • In any case I am not troubled by your distortions—history will justify us.†   (source)
  • The street lamps shed their distorted lights.†   (source)
  • He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.†   (source)
  • He had great trouble breathing, and, to conceal his agony, he smiled until he seriously distorted his embouchure.†   (source)
  • But they marched up like a phantom company, grey distorted figures in a mist, only dreams of fear with pale flames in their hands.†   (source)
  • "I can see where such a distortion of the English language would make you furious," he said.†   (source)
  • Reticence or an itch to make public confession may distort or dramatize what is really there to be said, and public expressions of belief are so closely associated with inspirational activity, and in fact so often stem from someone's desire to buck up the downhearted and raise the general morale, that belief becomes an evangelical matter.†   (source)
  • Her eyes were just slits in a face cruelly distorted, but she looked at me with full understanding.†   (source)
  • Unendingly they work to distort the true image; through our weaker vessels they attempt to defile the race.†   (source)
  • We ran, the twisted universe receding with us, racing the wave of distortion.†   (source)
  • It had seen more than one unruly goblin put to a slow death for disobeying, or simply to appease the wizard's distorted taste for pleasure.†   (source)
  • The people who had concealed or distorted the exact circumstances of the crash of Flight 353.†   (source)
  • He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart.†   (source)
  • All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.†   (source)
  • Through the peephole I saw a white face, distorted and balloonish.†   (source)
  • Hordes marched past us, shrieking like crows into their phones, carrying small fortunes in big shopping bags, their faces distorted in the reflection of the hanging silver-and-gold decorations.†   (source)
  • Every day he punched cards, punched and punched, trying to avoid instability, divergence, distortion.†   (source)
  • My mother took great pride in the distortion of some of our windows; it meant they were the originals with all their impurities, the waves and tiny pinhead bubbles signs of imperfection.†   (source)
  • Hendrix had an incredible ability to manipulate a six-string guitar and distort it to make sounds no one would have believed possible.†   (source)
  • All distorted policies defeat themselves because they don't follow the way people behave.†   (source)
  • A pickup load is going to distort that price.†   (source)
  • And here also is another and perhaps the most serious distortion in the sample: whereas some 10 or 12 percent of all Confederate soldiers served as officers for at least half of their time in the army, 47 percent of my sample did so.†   (source)
  • Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation.†   (source)
  • A little resentment here, a little pride there, but that is nothing: the distortions of a tape recorder.†   (source)
  • On the way up in the pickup he had seen a dozen places that looked familiar, but distances were distorted, the pickup at: its slowest traveling two or three times as fast as a man would on foot.†   (source)
  • I was allowing for the distortion on these rigs, and then when they put it on tape.†   (source)
  • Light through the open transom fell on the ceiling fan, casting distorted shadows of the four motionless blades against the opposite wall.†   (source)
  • Now it was sinister, bringing a fear that was none the less real for my knowing it to be irrational, to the accompaniment of sensory distortions that must have caused me to reel as I ran.†   (source)
  • Nor did she fabricate something or distort anything important; it is easy to substantiate nearly everything she told Nathan that evening.†   (source)
  • Or at any rate—since he'd called, after all—he had only just now begun to distort it.†   (source)
  • Moonlight distorted distances; and the darkness, when it came, seemed to drop down to our heads.†   (source)
  • The generally accepted theory-and there seemed little doubt of its truth— was that the immense accelerations of the Stardrive caused a local distortion of space.†   (source)
  • His face is distorted—possessed.†   (source)
  • Randy sometimes allowed emotions to distort logic, Mark never did.†   (source)
  • Now what's the name of those distorted creatures you're all breeding at the moment?†   (source)
  • With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it.†   (source)
  • Suddenly her face was distorted with horror.†   (source)
  • While he broke ice and brought glasses and a pitcher of water, none of them spoke; Mary sat in a distorted kind of helplessness at once meek and curiously sullen, waiting.†   (source)
  • Tears ran down her bright, distorted cheeks every time one of the children coming into the studio picked the Billikin up.†   (source)
  • Every incident in his life was examined and distorted.†   (source)
  • He shaped his distorted face into a frozen smile and rejoined his hostess on a couch alongside one of the tables.†   (source)
  • It was a map of the World, and it wrinkled and distorted itself hotly and went—flimpf—and was gone like a warm, black butterfly.†   (source)
  • There seemed no connection between the distorted mirror of the screen and her own life; it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was offered.†   (source)
  • She is trying to distort her opponent's position on the issue.
  • Heat and vibration from the cutting process can distort the plastic.
  • face distorted by pain
  • He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.   (source)
  • Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.   (source)
  • Edna dabbed the powder upon her nose and cheeks as she looked at herself closely in the little distorted mirror which hung on the wall above the basin.   (source)
  • Instantly the flexible limbs of the child assumed the appearance of deformity and distortion, as, with his back humped up, and his master's stick in his hand, he hobbled about the room, his childish face drawn into a doleful pucker, and spitting from right to left, in imitation of an old man.   (source)
  • We recognise the smooth distorted faces, the helmets: they are French.   (source)
    distorted = altered in an unnatural or untrue way
  • A blubbered and distorted face confronted her; the creature was crying.   (source)
    distorted = altered in an unnatural way
  • Her face was horribly distorted, her lips blue.   (source)
    distorted = altered in an unnatural or untrue way
  • At forty-four, Linda seemed, by contrast, a monster of flaccid and distorted senility.   (source)
    distorted = altered in an unnatural way
  • Rumors of a wonderful farm, where the human beings had been turned out and the animals managed their own affairs, continued to circulate in vague and distorted forms, and throughout that year a wave of rebelliousness ran through the countryside.   (source)
    distorted = altered in an untrue way
  • The latrine poles are always densely crowded; the people at home ought to be shown these grey, yellow, miserable, wasted faces here, these bent figures from whose bodies the colic wrings out the blood, and who with lips trembling and distorted with pain, grin at one another and say: "It is not much sense pulling up one's trousers again—"   (source)
    distorted = altered in an unnatural or untrue way
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