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recede
in a sentence

show 187 more with this conextual meaning
  • It would be so hard for him to recede into the background . . .   (source)
    recede = to diminish or move away
  • The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.   (source)
    receded = diminished
  • Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… and one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.   (source)
    recedes = moves away; or retreats from
  • Sudden, subtle, and silent all at once, it stretched into the mouth of the dark receding forest.†   (source)
  • The storm blew itself out, the surge waters receded, and there, sticking halfway above the surface, was the lost crab boat.†   (source)
  • He could hear Dobby's squeals of pain receding around the corner.†   (source)
  • I watched her face flare with light, then recede into the dimness.†   (source)
  • The heat receded, the cold advanced.†   (source)
  • He felt something recede inside him.†   (source)
  • No, but I see a receding hairline.†   (source)
  • I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now I walked along the whole edge of the island until I found Daisy sitting on an uprooted barkless tree that had beached here as some flood receded.†   (source)
  • Minors were not allowed in the gambling area, so like moons orbiting the earth, we circled the perimeter of the casino, looking for my father's signature receding hairline.†   (source)
  • The sense of unreality grew stronger, and I felt like I was receding, pulling away.†   (source)
  • Only when the last sound of voices had receded down the stairs did the woman approach.†   (source)
  • Slowly, the heat receded.†   (source)
  • Lilian rang the doorbell and a man in his fifties with receding blond hair and a long nose answered.†   (source)
  • Then it would settle, seeming to gather its bearings, the spikes receding back through the moist skin with a sick slurping sound.†   (source)
  • When it receded, my eyes focused back on the castle.†   (source)
  • Early that afternoon, they came across the first evidence that the desert was receding a few stunted trees near a shallow pool of muddy water.†   (source)
  • The head is broad and too massive, with a high forehead, like that of a bear, but suffering from a receding hairline, and with ears that look ridiculously mouselike, large and round, when they haven't been torn off in battle.†   (source)
  • When the waves receded, he yanked Mickey forward with a final surge, then collapsed on the shore, his mouth open, filling with wet sand.†   (source)
  • She caught one last glimpse of New Pretty Town receding behind them.†   (source)
  • While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.†   (source)
  • Framed in the doorway was a bespectacled man with receding grey hair, who blinked at them, then stuck out his hand at Bod, and smiled nervously, and said, "You must be Miss Perkins's mysterious friend.†   (source)
  • If her chin was bigger, it might balance out her nose, but it is weak and almost recedes into her neck.†   (source)
  • He knew that tides repeated themselves every twelve hours, which meant the next receding tide would be late tonight, then another this time tomorrow.†   (source)
  • And the water behind me seemed to recede.†   (source)
  • The terrible isolation and loneliness that had plagued me receded.†   (source)
  • The farther we walked from the Meany Granite Company truck, the more the engine noise receded—but it seemed deeper, too, as if it were the motor at the core of the earth, the one that turned the earth and changed day to night.†   (source)
  • The squatting fields of Hasnapur receded fast.†   (source)
  • But I turned back around anyway, and I looked west down our street at the receding line of black mailboxes.†   (source)
  • A lightship with twin beacons glides past as America recedes; ahead wait the great glittering prairies of the Atlantic.†   (source)
  • The ward recedes behind the red curtain.†   (source)
  • I insisted on keeping the door to the trailer open so that I could watch as Mai and Quang-ha receded into the distance.†   (source)
  • I went into uniform at the time when our enemies began to recede so fast that there had to be a hurried telescoping of military training plans.†   (source)
  • The sound of wheels and hooves receding over the second bridge proved, she supposed, that her brother knew the meaning of distance and professional respect.†   (source)
  • As Lighthouse receded into the distance, the rim of Hamelin crater came into view.†   (source)
  • But the wall of ice recedes, melting as his gaze softens.†   (source)
  • From there, she'd recede back to dorky, seventh-grade Hanna in reverse evolution.†   (source)
  • "Yite," he says softly as the city recedes into the distance.†   (source)
  • As I watched her receding form I had a brainstorm—I would run into the backyard, where I could see her with no barriers.†   (source)
  • And they turned and began to trudge back the way we'd come, receding into the fog.†   (source)
  • The voices receded down the pathway, rising again in the darkness beyond.†   (source)
  • The bubbling foam quickly recedes to the power of the surf.†   (source)
  • Ever since that day, the day he became a father, the memory of his accident has receded, diminishing over the years.†   (source)
  • Arya listened at the door until she heard the sound of the septa's receding footsteps.†   (source)
  • Finally I'm back in the arena, my own tongue as dry as sandpaper, while I try to reach a pool of water that recedes every time I'm about to touch it.†   (source)
  • As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it's beginning to recede from me somehow.†   (source)
  • The creek and I. Flowing, ebbing, receding.†   (source)
  • Then we heard a can fall, and the footsteps receded.†   (source)
  • Xandra turned in her seat to look at the road receding behind us.†   (source)
  • The light receded.†   (source)
  • Everything seems to zoom back, recede away at once.†   (source)
  • "Because she lied to me," Tamar said, watching the receding bike.†   (source)
  • Overhead, the stars are receding, and he can see the first light of dawn.†   (source)
  • The walls are much too close and Carla recedes away from me, a small figure at the end of a very long hallway.†   (source)
  • The confusion had receded a little bit in her mind, but she now discovered something even worse behind it.†   (source)
  • But as soon as her long tapered back had receded down the hall and out the double-locked double doors, we were overcome by gloom shot through with anxiety: Now Mrs. McWeeney was in power.†   (source)
  • As the city receded into the distance, Eragon asked, "What are werecats?"†   (source)
  • And to the east of us, behind the river, a rising rumple of dark green hills folded on each other like a great old tablecloth, receding to pale hazy blue.†   (source)
  • When had the baby fat in her face started to recede?†   (source)
  • A slow methodical march, twenty-five guys in costume receding in the distance.†   (source)
  • For ten seconds she willed herself to be absolutely still, not even listening, merely waiting for the panic to recede.†   (source)
  • His hairline had receded but not quite to the point where you could call him bald and his stomach had expanded but not quite to the point where you could call him fat.†   (source)
  • I picked the line I would run, right along the high point of the tide, where the waters first receded and left a slim strip of hard sand.†   (source)
  • Soon the street sounds receded, leaving only the rumble of trains and the hollow clip-clop of an occasional horse.†   (source)
  • Then his father's footsteps receded, the light spilled into the room again, and the boy felt brave and clever, knowing he had fooled his father.†   (source)
  • He watched the boys recede in his rearview mirror.†   (source)
  • By that evening, the water had receded completely.†   (source)
  • Many people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for New Yorkers.†   (source)
  • Heinrich's hairline is beginning to recede.†   (source)
  • The other was small and thin, with a goatee beard on his receding chin.†   (source)
  • Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance.†   (source)
  • Foreheads sloped down to a ridge over their eyes, their noses were short and splayed, their cheekbones pronounced, and their chins receded sharply.†   (source)
  • Word must have gotten out because Sarah Madison showed up with burn first aid, and within minutes of having his fingers slathered in the whitish liquid, he felt the sting recede.†   (source)
  • In the side mirror, I track the skyline (the receding skyline—isn't that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?†   (source)
  • And then there was only the sound of his footsteps rapidly receding and face's own ragged breathing as he slumped against the bars.†   (source)
  • She felt very well: the time of iron corsets, bound waists, and bustles that exaggerated buttocks was receding into the past.†   (source)
  • She chewed her lip as the tears in her eyes receded, leaving a haunting emptiness in their wake.†   (source)
  • Consciousness had receded, sinking her into a black bin of terror.†   (source)
  • They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.†   (source)
  • I remember that the crowd of kids faded away and the reverend's voice receded into the background.†   (source)
  • And I can recall now, as fresh as anything, Tommy's own face, the anger receding for the moment, being replaced by an expression almost of wonder, like I was a rare butterfly he'd come across on a fencepost.†   (source)
  • On every night that he did not catch fish he felt his dream recede before him and the strawberry farm he coveted moved further into the distance.†   (source)
  • During his travels in Egypt he must have observed how the crops began to grow as soon as the floods of the Nile receded from the land areas in the Nile Delta.†   (source)
  • It does not recede into its background of leaden sky, nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone poles around it.†   (source)
  • I fixed the woman's receding back with a vengeful stare.†   (source)
  • …in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.†   (source)
  • When the chaos of feelings receded, and I slowly became aware of myself again, Mameha was kneeling above me.†   (source)
  • When the water receded, it would tug at us, and Timothy's strength would fight against it.†   (source)
  • Perhaps his hair had receded slightly since I'd last seen him, five years ago.†   (source)
  • Gradually, the cool air receded and it was stifling again.†   (source)
  • It was even further away, a purple carriage receding as I approached.†   (source)
  • He looked about ten years older than me and had receding brown hair that he wore shaved close.†   (source)
  • But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises-on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles.†   (source)
  • It was an unequal battle, because Moody's threshold for confrontation had receded to almost nothing.†   (source)
  • I hold my breath, waiting for the stinging to recede.†   (source)
  • The old pain receded into the home it had made in him.†   (source)
  • Her mouth is open, her chin receding as though she were snoring.†   (source)
  • My eyes grow heavy, and I close them again as the fire recedes.†   (source)
  • At dawn, Mount Elgon appeared as a slumped pile of gray ridges receding into haze, culminating in a summit with two peaks, which are opposed lips of the eroded cone.†   (source)
  • She liked the way the daily problems of the world seemed to recede once she took the field, the subtle psychological strategies one had to employ to get the best out of each player, and most of all the sense of satisfaction that came from forging something new out of disparate elements: an entity with its distinct identity, not a collection of individuals, but a new being, a team.†   (source)
  • Voices swelled as people drew near, then receded, scraps of conversation drifting like bits of paper borne on the wind.†   (source)
  • Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night.†   (source)
  • Johnnie felt as though the blood receded from her face and gathered all about a heart which beat to suffocation.†   (source)
  • Owen began to turn down the volume, and the static above us receded bit by bit.†   (source)
  • Prison certainly wasn't funny, but with each new day it was receding into my past.†   (source)
  • Always, always you recede through the evenings towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.†   (source)
  • My eyes opened wider and the pain of the thirst receded, shock taking its place.†   (source)
  • The panic receded, and I looked at the wall in front of me.†   (source)
  • He was probably glad to return to the warmth below, but took the time for one last look at the cloudy sky and receding cliffs.†   (source)
  • The waters were rapidly receding.†   (source)
  • Iraq receded from her life.†   (source)
  • Around two curves the land opened up as the trees receded and Puller eyed the sprawling two-story stucco and stone building.†   (source)
  • But even so, our niang's fever receded the very next day.†   (source)
  • But K2 had receded into the mists behind him and the necklace was still in his pocket.†   (source)
  • The hallway conversation Recedes and I tug myself out of bed.†   (source)
  • I drove through the dry, silent heat along flat pink desert land, a plain of mesquite bushes and deep green saguaro cactus that recedes until it hits the Santan Mountains.†   (source)
  • The cloud was receding.†   (source)
  • I don't know what I thought: that my ears, which stuck out at an undignified angle, would recede, that my head would somehow grow to fit them?†   (source)
  • The Riders seemed to sit upon their great steeds like threatening statues upon a hill, dark and solid, while all the woods and land about them receded as if into a mist.†   (source)
  • The Indigo Dragon continued to accelerate, and in moments the dock and their pursuers had receded into the dark behind them.†   (source)
  • The dream recedes like a tiny asterisk star at dawn, a footnote disappearing in the morning sky.†   (source)
  • Gradually, I felt the spell recede.†   (source)
  • The trickster was receding, becoming one of those patient, white faces, whose hunger and equanimity were strangely one.†   (source)
  • He was disappointed as he heard the peremptory crunch of Corporal Whitcomb's footsteps recede into silence.†   (source)
  • I fell back down on the bed, and the dream receded as it always did.†   (source)
  • Her frustrated desire receded and turned intoa troublesome question:Why did he fail to come?†   (source)
  • She gazed at Ghosh's receding back and was frightened.†   (source)
  • After the accident, it was like their voices were receding.†   (source)
  • Immediately red lumps of flesh began to recede and blend in with pink skin.†   (source)
  • It had receded considerably but was still very sore.†   (source)
  • As Justice of Toren receded in the aft view, the rising sense of panic that I had mostly held in check till now overtook me.†   (source)
  • I turned and watched it recede from the rear window; the sun caught its treetops, bathed its low-set buildings and ordered grounds.†   (source)
  • His last thought was: Perhaps who raised the mountains high would have been a better line in the circums— Captain Roberts went to Heaven, which wasn't everything that he'd expected, and as the receding water gently marooned the wreck of the Sweet Judy on the forest floor, only one soul was left alive.†   (source)
  • It was as if nothing had changed, thought Jason Bourne, knowing that his other self, the self-called David Webb, was receding.†   (source)
  • She waited until she heard the nurse's steps receding before she once again picked up her Palm.†   (source)
  • He felt, Adams wrote, as though he were receding slowly into the background, yet professed to mind not at all.†   (source)
  • I tried to manage my terrors by concentrating only on the work and not on the walls of slimy darkness that seemed to advance and recede with every movement of my candle, neither on the choke-damp air that tasted as if all the good had long ago been sucked out of it, nor on the weight of the soil and rock piled thick and heavy above me.†   (source)
  • The curtain drops, the shadow recedes.†   (source)
  • The scent of her hair receded like a balloon rising, and soon it was beyond his grasp.†   (source)
  • While not as severe as the storm of '33, which became a legend before its waters receded, the storm of '42 is the one I will never forget.†   (source)
  • All of the laughing and grumbling about the cover story receded, and the room was silent.†   (source)
  • The pattern was a little changed; the incisiveness of alarm had receded, but the bewilderment and distress were still overwhelming.†   (source)
  • The vye panted for several moments, examining every detail of Max's terrified face as her anger receded into smug composure.†   (source)
  • The panic and chaos that now define Dealey Plaza recede behind him.†   (source)
  • But I take it as a sign that the pain from the stinger must be receding if there's room for me to feel other sensations like smoke irritation.†   (source)
  • It was dark below, but an even, glowing light still remained in the diner, as in a small pool left behind by a receding tide.†   (source)
  • The first is a man with receding hair.†   (source)
  • Lighter knots, taken from the centers of rotted stumps, sputtered and flickered from the thick, red resin, throwing on the wall shadows that jumped and contracted, only to leap up again, making the walls come alive with fantastic etchings appearing and disappearing, growing and receding.†   (source)
  • I can feel the realms receding like a tide I'm helpless to pull to the shore.†   (source)
  • Fish were found captured in the badminton nets when the flood receded a week later.†   (source)
  • They were going down to the mouth of Shelt's Brook, which would be thick with birds of all kinds feeding on the aquatic life stranded in pools left by the receding tide.†   (source)
  • In the wake of these events, Murrow agreed to pay out of his pocket the necessary expenses to finish production on a handful of remaining essays, and in April 1955, This I Believe distributed its last program to stations and slowly receded into obscurity.†   (source)
  • Only when a friend of mine was over, after school or sports, would she mysteriously recede from the kitchen.†   (source)
  • Once the dream receded—the feeling of paralysis, the suffocating closeness of it—her body relaxed, and her mom came closer.†   (source)
  • At several thousand meters, the gradually receding forest seemed more appropriate to Northern Europe than to Sicily, and so dark and well watered that it looked like a wood in medieval France, or the Villa Borghese at the beginning of December.†   (source)
  • But it wasn't the water that was receding, the stream was getting shallower.†   (source)
  • The wave of anger recedes slowly, leaving a tightness, a burning sensation in his chest.†   (source)
  • We ran, the twisted universe receding with us, racing the wave of distortion.†   (source)
  • Which, I notice, is receding just a little.†   (source)
  • Manhattan receded to a pretty toy town of crisscrossing avenues and brightly colored vehicles.†   (source)
  • The men lay below him in a line below the crest, receding down into the trees, the dark.†   (source)
  • The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the late afternoon sun came from behind a cloud like a bad joke, illuminating, highlighting the most horrible of moments before receding once again.†   (source)
  • When the floodwaters finally receded, Noah and his family left the ark.†   (source)
  • In Raqqa, time had receded.†   (source)
  • A heart-shaped face that, with its large forehead, and small mouth, and slightly receding chin, seemed to tilt forward.†   (source)
  • The sickness had receded into a shadow behind him, something he saw only out of the corners of his eyes, over his shoulder.†   (source)
  • The hole turns into a pinprick as the baby recedes from me.†   (source)
  • The sound caught in the inlets, tossed from one steep mountain side to another, echoing and reverberating, and receding slowly to echo and re-echo far, far away.†   (source)
  • Swifter than any tide could ebb, the water was receding from the shore.†   (source)
  • When he opened the door of his apartment/office she saw him framed in a long succession or train of doorways, room after room receding in the general direct ion of Santa Monica, all soaked in rain-light.†   (source)
  • "I have a knack for poking my big schnoz into places where it has no business," he said, as she watched the rosy flush of embarrassment recede from his face.†   (source)
  • I thought their hair had receded a little more than mine.†   (source)
  • And the rebellion and Father Huismans's death receded fast.†   (source)
  • He could just make out the darker places on the wallpaper, the crooked trail of vines and the large gray smudges, diagonally receding, a foot apart.†   (source)
  • The countryside seemed to be receding from the little circle of noise around the shed.†   (source)
  • They kept jostling as they bided the outcome, Surging, receding.†   (source)
  • At last I went, cowed, but with the waters of panic receding.†   (source)
  • MARY Her bitterness receding into a resigned helplessness.†   (source)
  • It would only take one dawning look for the victim to see that all of this was another story and he himself had listened his way into it, and that he too was about to recede in time (to where the dread was forgotten) for some listener and to live for a listener in the long ago.†   (source)
  • The music begins to recede) Listen to this, Thomas.†   (source)
  • Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw.†   (source)
  • And he could smell the sharp odour of exposed kelp from the receding tide.   (source)
    receding = retreating (moving away)
  • Tom looked at the hawk nose and the high brown cheek bones and the slender receding chin.   (source)
    receding = sloping back (as contrasted to sticking out)
  • The motor droned along steadily and the sun receded down the sky in front of them.   (source)
    receded = move away or diminished
  • The old eyes looked up at Ma in pain and bewilderment for a moment before the awareness receded again.   (source)
    receded = diminished (decreased)
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