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instantaneous
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  • From time to time, she would clench her fists and utter an oath that the desert wind, and my considerable distance from the family gathering, did not permit me to hear; yet the effect of the oath was instantaneous upon the boy and girl whom I guessed were the surviving siblings.   (source)
    instantaneous = immediate
  • I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously.   (source)
    instantaneously = immediately (in an instant)
  • When the doctor came he said that death had been instantaneous and probably painless, caused in all likelihood by some sudden shock.   (source)
    instantaneous = immediate (happening with no delay)
  • As soon as data was uploaded to my OASIS account I had immediate access to it and could also transfer it to other users instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Did you know that when you send a letter in the twenty-first century, it can be received almost instantaneously?†   (source)
  • To eliminate all costly elections, replaced by instantaneous ones, all of them nearly cost-free?†   (source)
  • His eyes fluttered open even before I felt the metal touch his throat, and his smile and panic were nearly instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The answer furnished by his brain was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • She could just see it: Everyone would find out, and she'd be instantaneously friendless and boyfriendless.†   (source)
  • The pain is blinding and instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The District Commissioner changed instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.†   (source)
  • I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.†   (source)
  • I wonder how many must die like this, unable to learn the air instantaneously.†   (source)
  • When the oxygen reached the top of the jar, where it encountered the melted phosphorus, an explosion occurred, brilliant, instantaneous, like a flash of lightning.†   (source)
  • Their communication, however they do it, is instantaneous.†   (source)
  • If Captain Short was being held in a building, the computer would be able to give him 3D blueprints instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Most spells take place instantaneously, which makes it impossible to react in time.†   (source)
  • It was amazing how instantaneously the choking fear vanished, amazing how suddenly the feeling of security washed over me — even before I was off the street — as soon as I heard his voice.†   (source)
  • When extremes of temperature collide, a hot and cold front, winds generate instantaneously behind a hill and crash upon you without warning.†   (source)
  • Death must have been instantaneous when he broke his neck, but it is where he fell that is important.†   (source)
  • Conrad doesn't perform a postmortem, but there is one and only one place in the chest where a shot results in instantaneous death, and we know where that place is.†   (source)
  • The result: an instantaneous crunch, boom, bam!†   (source)
  • She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously.†   (source)
  • The news didn't travel fast, it traveled instantaneously.†   (source)
  • she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled, and wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news, and how the newspaper could have published this image of her instantaneously, and she looked about for a photographer, and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias, and on†   (source)
  • Almost instantaneously, an image streaked through my head: opening night at a gallery, me dressed in something simple, black, and elegant, encircled by patrons and crinkle-browed critics, smiling and answering their questions, as clusters of admirers linger before my canvases and servers in white gloves float around the gallery pouring wine, offering little square bites of salmon with dill or asparagus spears wrapped in puff pastry.†   (source)
  • Billy's reflexes were very good and his reaction was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Death is virtually instantaneous—but also it is quite painless," the doctor added consolingly.†   (source)
  • She faced the attacker in a kind of instantaneous flash and saw the disconsolate eyes, which remained stamped on her heart like the hot coals of pity.†   (source)
  • I don't know if it was the adrenaline, the warm wishes from the LSU faithful directed my way, or the Lord's touch, but the pain was gone instantaneously.†   (source)
  • He must have died instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Almost instantaneously, tears rolled down Grandmere's cheeks.†   (source)
  • Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives—the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress.†   (source)
  • The change had seemed instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Yo quoted from Don Quijote in the original; she translated the passage on prisoners into instantaneous English.†   (source)
  • Instantaneously, then, they each seemed to become intent on carrying this moment, which belonged to them, as far as it could go.†   (source)
  • Mixed in with a lot of identical garbage bags, his bag loses its distinctiveness instantaneously.†   (source)
  • While his competitors use highly computerized operating systems that instantaneously display a customer's order on TV monitors in the kitchen, Feamster's restaurants remain firmly planted in the era of ballpoint pens and yellow paper receipts.†   (source)
  • As she began to move down the steps toward her father waiting at the bottom, Ronnie made the instantaneous decision that Megan was without doubt the most dazzling bride she'd ever seen.†   (source)
  • The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill.†   (source)
  • And instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The effect on Raphael was both startling and instantaneous.†   (source)
  • With customers able to instantaneously find the cheapest policy, the more expensive companies had no choice but to lower their prices.†   (source)
  • He had brought the news of Aniel's death: instantaneous, almost accidental—a bullet had ricocheted and drilled into Aniel's forehead, between his eyes.†   (source)
  • The image in the mirror was instantaneously transformed: suddenly it was a woman in her undergarments, a beautiful, distant, indifferent woman with a terribly out-of-place bowler hat on her head, holding the hand of a man in a gray suit and a tie.†   (source)
  • But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.†   (source)
  • A deafening explosion numbed my ears, and I experienced an instantaneous, eerie sensation that a dark ghoSt.†   (source)
  • Clutching the telephone, I recalled Mother's instantaneous change of attitude whenever Grandmother dropped by.†   (source)
  • The energetic operation of this sanguine temper was never more remarkably exhibited than in the change instantaneously wrought in the minds of men, by the capture of Trenton at so unexpected a moment.†   (source)
  • He pricked up his ears and watched the blood drain from Aarfy's face as sirens mourned far away, police sirens, and then ascended almost instantaneously to a howling, strident, onrushing cacophony of overwhelming sound that seemed to crash into the room around them from every side.†   (source)
  • Almost instantaneously, the rocket pivoted, shot straight up into the air, and emitted a huge boom above the field.†   (source)
  • Max focused on the ball and the turf in front of him, taking instantaneous note of his teammates, his opponents, and their relative positions.†   (source)
  • The relief was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • A bullet in the head, instantaneous.†   (source)
  • ....and Johnson hit Jeffries at an angle of 45 degrees from his lower left lateral incisor, producing an instantaneous blocking of his entire thalamic rine, frosting it over like the freezing unit of a refrigerator, thus shattering his autonomous nervous system and rocking the big brick-laying creampuff with extreme hyperspasmic muscular tremors which dropped him dead on the extreme tip of his coccyx, which, in turn, produced a sharp traumatic reaction in his sphincter nerve and muscle, and then, my dear colleague, they swept him up, sprinkled him with quicklime and rolled him away in a barrow.†   (source)
  • The reaction on the part of the entire family was instantaneous; it was as though someone had thrown a match onto a pile of straw.†   (source)
  • And our eyes meet in a moment of mutual, instantaneous recognition.†   (source)
  • It's analogous to the kind of hang-up Sir Isaac Newton had when he wanted to solve problems of instantaneous rates of change.†   (source)
  • You hit that, death was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The sudden screech of the microphone jerked the crowd into an instantaneous attentiveness; people seemed to be a second's worth of self-control away from panic.†   (source)
  • Can you think of a better way to make jump than from peaceful sleep instantaneously into a cloud of radiant gas?†   (source)
  • Instantaneously with the lighting of the candle, three concentrated beams of light enclosed the drow in a triangular prison.†   (source)
  • It strained through their tea-colored mustaches, and the vapor from the vacuum flasks was instantaneously left behind to hang quietly in frigid sun-filled air several thousand meters above a snowy plateau.†   (source)
  • Instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Just ...doesn't have to be instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Most of the time, they were direct carry-overs from the five undoubtedly formative years he had spent as a regular panelist on "It's a Wise Child," when, rather than seem to flaunt his somewhat preposterous ability to quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything he had ever read, or even listened to, with genuine interest, he cultivated a habit of furrowing his brow and appearing to stall for time, the way the other children on the program did.†   (source)
  • As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.†   (source)
  • The others appeared in the doorway so instantaneously that it almost seemed they'd been lying in wait for this.†   (source)
  • One problem Otto did not have was how to deal with Will McLean because ol' Willie had made a swift and instantaneous decision that Otto would only face three-fourths of the occupants of room 4428.†   (source)
  • Cooper gave instantaneous chase.†   (source)
  • It was an instantaneous success.†   (source)
  • If the pressure was indeed diminished, the recovery should have been almost instantaneous.†   (source)
  • It was a swift, I should say almost instantaneous cerebral thrombosis.†   (source)
  • The first driver was killed instantaneously and both cars piled up into a heap by the roadside, the second driver being flung clear with a broken collarbone and internal injuries.†   (source)
  • By the standards of evolution, it will be cataclysmic-instantaneous.†   (source)
  • With realization, rebellion, and perhaps murder of the guards, had been almost instantaneous.†   (source)
  • MORE (With instantaneous attention) An oath!†   (source)
  • It was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The assault upon the Senator in Mississippi was instantaneous and vigor-ous.†   (source)
  • Death instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Her sleep, once an instantaneous dropping of a black curtain, had become more real than her waking.†   (source)
  • Besides these they have brought up a number of those little French beasts with instantaneous fuses.   (source)
    instantaneous = immediately (in an instant)
  • May I never come back if he wasn't killed instantaneously.   (source)
  • …we teach them to fling themselves into holes as quick as lightning before the shells with instantaneous fuses;   (source)
  • The global outcry would be instantaneous and overwhelming.†   (source)
  • I'll feel better with Seth there, even without the instantaneous communication.†   (source)
  • I wish treating humans were this instantaneously gratifying.†   (source)
  • News traveled almost instantaneously through the megadatasphere of a hundred and sixty Web worlds.†   (source)
  • The reaction is instantaneous, quick-witted by Burb standards.†   (source)
  • When he saw the sketch, he felt an instantaneous and unexpected tingle of hope.†   (source)
  • They think to each other, and it's instantaneous like the philotic effect.†   (source)
  • Embarrassed, I half-stepped away in another instantaneous movement.†   (source)
  • But the effect on Finnick is instantaneous.†   (source)
  • His reaction was automatic, instantaneous, inbred.†   (source)
  • After a final, nearly instantaneous circuit through his body, the creature withdrew.†   (source)
  • The change was frightening and instantaneous.†   (source)
  • My reaction was instantaneous and unthinking.†   (source)
  • My life has been changed, soundlessly, instantaneously.†   (source)
  • "And arrived instantaneously," added David.†   (source)
  • In small towns, news is nearly instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The disappointment was nearly as instantaneous as the recognition.†   (source)
  • His words were barely audible, but the effect was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • It sobered me instantaneously, and everything was quiet again.†   (source)
  • I can remove it" The effect was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • No disrespect, Mr. Abbott, but our transmissions equipment is literally instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions.†   (source)
  • The chocolate stopped pooling on the street; it hardened instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Computer can solve that sort of problem almost instantaneously once you program it.†   (source)
  • Red was of the opinion that instantaneous death was a mercy, but Abby wanted goodbyes.†   (source)
  • Rapid, painless, almost instantaneous asphyxiation.†   (source)
  • Once instructions were fed in, the computer answered almost instantaneously.†   (source)
  • But I did not even catch a glimpse of her face, so instantaneous and urgent was that tongue.†   (source)
  • —accomplished with an instantaneousness so complete as to preclude even the onset of pain.†   (source)
  • Could women, then, so instantaneously turn off their lust like a light switch?†   (source)
  • The effect was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places.†   (source)
  • The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone—Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men—a better view as it tore the animal apart.†   (source)
  • It just exploded into an instantaneous universe of knowing looks and giggles and clothes and secrets.†   (source)
  • There was no brief fragment of time in which the action occurred; change was instantaneous, almost as if there was no movement at all.†   (source)
  • It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous invulnerability.†   (source)
  • The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, but somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere and it caught on.†   (source)
  • The two vampires were at his side instantaneously, looking precisely the same as the last time I'd met them.†   (source)
  • In the postcards that he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem: the chimerical Negroes in the cotton fields of Louisiana, the winged horses in the bluegrass of Kentucky, the Greek lovers in the infernal sunsets of Arizona, the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a lake in Michigan who waved at him with her brushes, not to say farewell but out of hope, because she did not know that she was watching a train with no return passing by.†   (source)
  • In a flash of seemingly instantaneous movement, she caught his wrist and twisted his arm behind his back, forcing him to stand hunched over, like a cripple.†   (source)
  • Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy.†   (source)
  • Maria was twenty-six years old, Jefferson forty-three, and the attraction of each to the other was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The second hearing, however, produced instantaneous concentration, engendered without question by the very pain they heard.†   (source)
  • Unless ...unless the weapon to be used had a sound level so low the rain would eliminate it...but even then the target's reaction could not be instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Death would have been instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Death was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • The effect was nearly instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Everyone did not die instantaneously.†   (source)
  • Du Vrangr Gata has an arrangement with certain dwarf magicians that allows us to transfer messages instantaneously.†   (source)
  • And yet, because these failures are so instantaneous and so mysterious, we don't really know how to understand them.†   (source)
  • The hub's response is instantaneous.†   (source)
  • When a member of my squadron asked if I wanted a boy or a girl, my instantaneous response was "A healthy child with ten fingers and ten toes."†   (source)
  • Several thousand men had grouped around small fires: now and then sharp gusts of wind sprayed water on them, but the wind was cold and dry enough to take the water up in almost instantaneous transpiration.†   (source)
  • He was laboring to sound cynical, skeptical, superior and hysterical together, to sound like a man who sneers at the vanity of all human beliefs and thereby demands an instantaneous belief from his listeners.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, when the driver told him how he had died, his instantaneous hope vanished because he could not believe what he heard.†   (source)
  • Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby's hand.†   (source)
  • "Most of bird identification is based on a sort of subjective impression—the way a bird moves and little instantaneous appearances at different angles and sequences of different appearances, and as it turns its head and as it flies and as it turns around, you see sequences of different shapes and angles," Sibley says.†   (source)
  • To the rhythm of his body, with the scorching heat on his face and the winter night on his shoulder blades, he was seeing suddenly that this was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win.†   (source)
  • So what Newton did was say, in effect, 'We're going to presume there's such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.'†   (source)
  • However, whereas Brom taught you the crude mechanics of magic, I will teach you its finer applications, the secrets that were reserved for the wisest of the Riders: how you can kill with no more energy than moving your finger, the method by which you can instantaneously transport an item from one point to another, a spell that will allow you to identify poisons in your food and drink, a variation on scrying that allows you to hear as well as to see, how you can draw energy from your surroundings and thus preserve your own strength, and how you can maximize your strength in every possible way.†   (source)
  • While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her.†   (source)
  • Ordinarily, we have no difficulty at all distinguishing, in a blink, between someone who is suspicious and someone who is not, between someone brazen and someone curious, and, most easily of all, between someone terrified and someone dangerous; anyone who walks down a city street late at night makes those kinds of instantaneous calculations constantly.†   (source)
  • It was not a progression of words, but the instantaneous verdict of an emotion, a verdict that told him: This, then, was his nature, this was his depravity-that the shameful desire he had never been able to conquer, came to him in response to the only sight of beauty he had found, that it came with a violence he had not known to be possible, and that the only freedom now left to him was to hide it and to despise himself, but never to be rid of it so long as he and this woman were alive.†   (source)
  • It could be instantaneous.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza fell into instantaneous sleep in the main salon, where most of the passengers without cabins were sleeping as if it were midnight, and close to the spot where he had seen her disembark, he dreamed of Rosalba.†   (source)
  • But he doesn't follow the direction of Nick's arm, because interpreting a pointing gesture requires, if you think about it, that you instantaneously inhabit the mind of the person doing the pointing.†   (source)
  • It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself-it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life-from th†   (source)
  • At midnight the visitors left, the public fiesta scattered into smoldering embers, and Cousin Hildebranda lent Fermina Daza a madapollam nightgown and helped her to lie down in a bed with smooth sheets and feather pillows, and without warning she was filled with the instantaneous panic of happiness.†   (source)
  • She stood looking up at the structure, her consciousness surrendered to a single sight and a single, wordless emotion-but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind, and what she now felt was the instantaneous total of the thoughts she did not have to name, the final sum of a long progression, like a voice telling her by means of a feeling: If she had held onto Ouentin Daniels, with no hope of a chance to use the motor, for the sole sake of knowing that achievement had not died on earth-if, like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean of mediocrity, unde†   (source)
  • He closed the gap with instantaneous apportation which would have done credit to a Ramsbotham hyperfold.†   (source)
  • With my first letter I was instantaneously transformed from a number on a teacher-ratio chart to a labor problem.†   (source)
  • others with hand uplifted as if to ward off an apprehended blow ....and each peering with an intensity that was almost tragic upon the face of him who was about to cast the fateful vote...Every fan was folded, not a foot moved, not the rustle of a garment, not a whisper was heard...Hope and fear seemed blended inevery face, instantaneously alternating, some with revengeful hate ....others lighted with hope...The Senators in their seats leaned over their desks, many with hand to ear...It was a tremendous responsibility, and it was not strange that he upon whom it had been imposed by a fateful combination of conditions should have sought to avoid it, to put it away from him as on†   (source)
  • She had sunk into almost instantaneous sleep, with only a moment's anticipation of the coming day when she would finally see her son.†   (source)
  • At any rate, he was surprised—no, really flabbergasted—to find that Sophie had returned; his mind jumped to an instantaneous connection with Nathan, and he alerted himself to the possibility that he might have to make that telephone call to Larry.†   (source)
  • Onto the sway-back bed she flung herself wordlessly, without removing her clothes, and was instantaneously asleep.†   (source)
  • She was sweating healthily in the hot sun and emitted a musky womanly odor that held me instantaneously captive like a bumblebee.†   (source)
  • Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her.†   (source)
  • I noticed that summer that under certain circumstances having to do with the mysterious vicissitudes of his mind and mood, Sophie was able to work upon Nathan such tricks of alchemy that he was almost instantaneously transformed—the ranting ogre become Prince Charming.†   (source)
  • All I knew, as the train rumbled up through the dripping catacombs beneath Eighth Avenue, was that with an instantaneousness I still could barely believe, I had been cut off from the two people in life I cared the most about, and that the primitive sensation of loss it produced was causing me anguish similar to that of being buried alive under a ton of cinders.†   (source)
  • It will come instantaneously with the explosion of the charge and it won't disperse it.†   (source)
  • Brown's mobile face performed one of those instantaneous changes which they knew.†   (source)
  • But one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning.†   (source)
  • I swear his death was instantaneous—a lightning stroke.†   (source)
  • For then instantaneously we became young ladies possessed of a certain manner.†   (source)
  • Blore had an instantaneous glimpse of a figure just passing out through the front door.†   (source)
  • Anthony Marston and Mrs. Rogers died first, the one instantaneously the other in a peaceful sleep.†   (source)
  • Death must have been instantaneous.†   (source)
  • It was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • It acts pretty well instantaneously.†   (source)
  • "King Pellinore," said Sir Palomides definitely, "unless some steps are taken pretty dam' quick, yours affectionately will be instantaneously martyred, R.I.P." But, my dear Palomides, I can't possibly kill the old Beast, don't you see, because my sword is blunt.†   (source)
  • He rode up the drive and into our lives again and left no ripple save those instantaneous and incredible tears.†   (source)
  • Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.†   (source)
  • No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation.†   (source)
  • I've known men who've killed half a dozen victims all broken up because one of their victims didn't die instantaneously and suffered pain.†   (source)
  • "Yeah," I said, "you shot Stanton—" and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me—"yeah, you shot him."†   (source)
  • I put my lips on the side of her face, exactly as she had done to me, and I flushed instantaneous as electricity.†   (source)
  • Looking about the scene her glance, her mind, her thought, went full and straight and instantaneous to the janitor sitting in the door of the furnace room.†   (source)
  • It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before and what day might it have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this lack: that be was not past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality.†   (source)
  • Their masterly circles, as they waited on—mere specks in the sky—and the bur-r-r with which they scythed on the grouse, and the way in which the wretched quarry, killed instantaneously, went end-over-tip into the heather—these were a temptation to which he yielded in the uncomfortable knowledge that it was sin.†   (source)
  • I visualise it as a little sensitive centre of acute life; of instantaneous sympathy, in the great echoing shell of Hyde Park Gate.†   (source)
  • Death must have been instantaneous.†   (source)
  • I can imagine him and Sutpen in the library that Christmas eve, the father and the brother, percussion and repercussion like a thunderclap and its echo and as close; the statement and the giving of the lie, the decision instantaneous and irrevocable between father and friend, between (so Henry must have believed) that where honor and love lay and this where blood and profit ran, even though at the instant of giving the lie he knew that it was the truth.†   (source)
  • A dual personality: the one the woman at first sight of whom in the lifted candle (or perhaps the very sound of the slippered approaching feet) there had opened before him, instantaneous as a landscape in a lightningflash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure; the other the mantrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking born of heritage and environment with which he had to fight up to the final instant.†   (source)
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