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abstract
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abstract as in:  abstract thought

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  • She struggles with abstract reasoning.
  • He loved her only in the abstract--not in person.
  • So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you." If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.   (source)
    abstraction = a concept not associated with any specific instance
  • The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to sine, cosine and tangent. I couldn't grasp such abstractions.   (source)
    abstractions = general concepts not associated with a specific instance of something that can be touched
  • We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.   (source)
    abstracted = of a concept or idea that does not have physical existence
  • At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept not associated with any specific instance
  • Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.'   (source)
    abstractions = concepts not associated with any specific instance
  • Astrogation and military history he absorbed like water; abstract mathematics was more difficult, but whenever he was given a problem that involved patterns in space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation — he often saw at once a solution that he could only prove after minutes or hours of manipulating numbers.   (source)
    abstract = unassociated with specific instances
  • ...touching her had nearly overwhelmed him. His memory of her had grown abstract while he'd been gone; the details of her face, the way she smelled, the vast, charismatic aura of her.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept that does not have physical existence
  • What you call 'Western civilization.' Do you think it's just an abstract concept? No, it's a living force.   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
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show 89 more with this conextual meaning
  • These were abstract speculations for the first month of her stay, as she had little to say to Jem or me, and we saw her only at mealtimes and at night before we went to bed.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instances
  • But the thought is abstract and far less alarming than the current agonies of my body.   (source)
    abstract = not associated with any specific instance
  • He thought about girls a lot in the abstract, as it were girls without heads — and about Wakulla Price with her head on, though she wouldn't hang out with him.   (source)
    abstract = unassociated with specific instances
  • He examined his eternal matchbox, the lid of which said GUARANTEED: ONE MILLION LIGHTS IN THIS IGNITER, and began to strike the chemical match abstractedly, blow out, strike, blow out, strike, speak a few words, blow out.   (source)
    abstractedly = without thinking about it
  • In the beginning the idea seemed purely abstract, the word Canada printing itself out in my head; but after a time I could see particular shapes and images, the sorry details of my own future-a hotel room in Winnipeg, a...   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • It was different from considering murder in the abstract, reading those names.   (source)
    abstract = unfelt (not associated with any specific instance)
  • We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • And even though I loved my sister had accepted her eccentricities I found it hard to listen to detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, hers and mine.   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • Beyond the glass, however, there is no scenery, only an uncolored space like a pure abstract idea.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • "The vision is still too abstract," Neferet told me quickly,   (source)
  • That is too abstract a problem for our present dilemma.   (source)
  • I'm not religious but I get the feeling that it's the simplest rituals, the ones that are integrated with the earth and its seasons, that are the most profound. It makes more sense to me than the more abstract forms of worship.   (source)
  • Cristian tended to think in abstract, idealized solutions.   (source)
  • MARTHA: [comparing the subject of biology to that of math] ... Biology's even better. It's less . . . abstruse.
    GEORGE: Abstract.
    MARTHA: ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don't you tell me words.   (source)
  • Some Union soldiers avowed a more abstract motive of revenge for Confederate atrocities elsewhere, even the Fort Pillow massacre.   (source)
  • Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind.   (source)
    abstract = unfelt (not associated with any specific instance)
  • My desire might be to make this boy ... a worshipper of abstract and unifying God.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • ...stipulates and brushes aside the concept that identity is a meaningless abstraction—is this the sword you actually used, in the everyday meaning, and don't kid me, soldier.   (source)
    abstraction = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.   (source)
    abstract = not associated with any specific thing
  • We knew Blore-and he was not the man that you'd ever accuse of a desire for abstract justice.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • He wrote letters full of symbolic, abstract images -- especially butterflies -- evidently trying to express his trembling uncertainty and, probably, guilt.   (source)
  • My notions on the subject were purely abstract, and I'd never given it serious thought.   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • Marilla was not to be drawn from the safe concrete into dubious paths of the abstract.   (source)
    abstract = of general concepts or ideas that are not associated with any specific instance
  • abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow   (source)
    abstract = conceptual (not associated with any specific instance)
  • It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the 'no' of it.   (source)
    abstract = conceptual
  • She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • If he could have kissed her in abstract purity he would have done so.   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract;   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • but he was ... not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.   (source)
  • In the resolute readiness with which you cut your wealth into four shares, keeping but one to yourself, and relinquishing the three others to the claim of abstract justice, I recognised a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice.   (source)
    abstract = theoretical
  • It was occasioned, I suppose, by the reverend nature of respectability in the abstract, but I felt particularly young in this man's presence.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • From the top of the peak, the clouds appeared as a silver-white sea, and the rise and fall of the waves seemed like abstractions of the Greater Khingan Mountains below.†   (source)
  • Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.†   (source)
  • These abstractions were necessary under the Hayes Code, which controlled content in Hollywood films from around 1935 until 1965, more or less, throughout the height of the studio system.†   (source)
  • These were not academic abstractions, these were real.†   (source)
  • Three young men and two young girls, scrubbed and milky, gleaming with their passion for improvement and the ease with which they moved among abstractions, were surrendering their tickets and passing through the barrier.†   (source)
  • It was a fourteen-line treatise on the nature of love, but the whole time I was writing down my abstractions, I was thinking about how Rudy listened, looking at my mouth, so that it was hard for me to pay attention to what I was saying.†   (source)
  • The train of his abstractions became so long and so involved he had to have the surroundings of silence and space here to hold it straight.†   (source)
  • Have you any idea what thunder in the mind abstractions provoke?†   (source)
  • To think of them in their flesh, not as abstractions.†   (source)
  • The other kind of half is the man whom people call practical, the man who despises principles, abstractions, art, philosophy and his own mind.†   (source)
  • He helmeted himself in abstractions.†   (source)
  • Noncommittal abstractions, she called them.†   (source)
  • They could talk, if they talked of such things at all, only in wearisome abstractions, not of neighbors but of what neighbors in general are like—the coffee klatches, the crabgrass business, the children in the yard.†   (source)
  • MR. BENTON: Mr. President, we have some business to transact, and I do not intend to avoid business for a string of abstractions.†   (source)
  • Because he had never yet earned his own living, he thought entirely in abstractions.†   (source)
  • Now, Henry, are we going to have another one of those abstract discussions?   (source)
  • All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept that does not have physical existence
  • Such considerations were not so abstract and academic as they seemed at first.   (source)
    abstract = unassociated with specific instances
  • It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • "It's curious," he said, the voice clinical, abstract, "these headaches."   (source)
  • The White River is beautiful in the abstract—blue herons and geese and deer and all that stuff—but the actual water itself smells like human sewage.   (source)
  • The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical….   (source)
    abstract = conceptual (not associated with specific instances)
  • While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.   (source)
    abstract = of concepts not associated with any specific instance
  • I wasn't not a threat, but couldn't say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down.   (source)
    abstraction = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • The entries in McCandless's journal contain few abstractions about wilderness or, for that matter, few ruminations of any kind.   (source)
    abstractions = general ideas not associated with any specific instance
  • While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.   (source)
    abstractions = concepts not associated with any specific instance
  • [H]is life is so profoundly in transaction with nature that there is no place for abstraction or esthetics or a "nature philosophy" which can be separated from the rest of his life.   (source)
    abstraction = considering general concepts separated from contextual circumstances
  • At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.   (source)
    abstraction = concepts not associated with specific instances
  • Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief—nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • Mission, for Lieutenant Corson, was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations, and it was this that most separated him from other officers. Lieutenant Corson did not order his men into the tunnels. He simply ordered the tunnels blown, or blew them himself, and he saw no incompatibility between this and his mission as a soldier.   (source)
  • Every reflecting child will glance at the darkey who waits on him & laugh at the idea of such an 'abstract right.'   (source)
  • It is insulting to the English common sense of race [to say that we] are battling for an abstract right common to all humanity.   (source)
  • This was particularly true for Union soldiers fighting far from home for seemingly more abstract goals than defense of home and hearth.   (source)
  • "We are fighting for matters real and tangible …. our property and our homes," wrote a Texas private in 1864, "they for matters abstract and intangible."   (source)
  • The concepts of southern nationalism, liberty, self-government, resistance to tyranny, and other ideological purposes I quoted earlier all have a rather abstract quality.   (source)
  • The only flaw to the illusion was the open door through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.   (source)
    abstractedly = in a distracted manner
  • "So you believe in Christ the Redeemer?" the doctor said in a thick-tongued but oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer examining the delicately shaded facet of a proposition in logic.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Hoss might appreciate the venom of the Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind's more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama.   (source)
  • She had not meant to, it was simple reflex; the reason she had shut music out during these days of malignant depression was that she had found she could not bear the contrast between the abstract yet immeasurable beauty of music and the almost touchable dimensions of her own aching despair.   (source)
  • But at my age, with a snootful of English Lit. that made me as savagely demanding as Matthew Arnold in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers' lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial, abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt.   (source)
  • If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seem, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie and the others were helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war's end.   (source)
  • There are in the lives of all of us odd instances where one later crosses the path of someone associated with what one regarded as an abstract public event; that spring I had with a small shudder read the Daily Mirror headline RIVER SEARCH CONTINUES FOR WOMAN'S HEAD, scarcely realizing that I would soon have at least a distant connection with the victim's spouse.   (source)
  • Peter Keating had never felt the need to formulate abstract convictions.   (source)
    abstract = a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.   (source)
    abstractedly = in a distracted manner
  • He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking.   (source)
  • 'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.   (source)
  • It was that abstraction I stabbed.   (source)
    abstraction = a concept not associated with any specific instance
  • He had read so much lately and thought so much that his mind was full of ideas which he wanted to discuss, and he knew nobody who was willing to interest himself in abstract things.   (source)
    abstract = of general concepts or ideas that are not associated with any specific instance
  • To be less abstract—Let us suppose...   (source)
    abstract = conceptual (dealing in concepts or ideas that are not associated with any specific instance)
  • ...mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. ... Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth.   (source)
    abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
  • A difference of opinion had arisen between herself and Mrs. Crupp, on an abstract question (the propriety of chambers being inhabited by the gentler sex); and my aunt, utterly indifferent to spasms on the part of Mrs. Crupp, had cut the dispute short, by informing that lady that she smelt of my brandy, and that she would trouble her to walk out.   (source)
  • Her paintings feel organic to me, like breathing abstractions of color.†   (source)
  • Possibilities, probabilities, abstractions-it's all we had to work with.†   (source)
  • Equality is just another one of her abstractions.†   (source)
  • The land and the water are one, and it is the will of the spirit that determines how man will use the land and the water — again without regard for such abstractions as useless freedom or escapable confinement.†   (source)
  • There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, th†   (source)
  • At two you have entered the realm of abstraction, and are by necessity thinking and talking in abstractions.†   (source)
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abstract as in:  read the abstract

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  • A statistical abstract is published each year.
  • Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts.   (source)
    abstracts = summaries
  • She wondered if those were the same abstracts, files, and professional impedimenta on his desk that were there when she would run in, out of breath, desperate for an ice cream cone, and request a nickel.   (source)
  • I recognized neither language nor script—and the only sense I could abstract from it was...   (source)
    abstract = pull in summary
  • "I suppose, now," said Miss Ingram, curling her lip sarcastically, "we shall have an abstract of the memoirs of all the governesses extant:"   (source)
    abstract = summary
  • As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach.†   (source)
  • Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job.†   (source)
  • As it was they watched, benumbed, as their portrait pictures, the vital stuffs of their mortal greed, rancor, and poisonous guilt, the emerald abstracts of their self-blinded eyes, self-wounded mouths, self-trapped bodies melted one by one from this insignificant mound of snow.†   (source)
  • I realized all those times I'd felt people stare at me, their faces had been pictures, abstracts.†   (source)
  • He rummaged through the chest, rearranging old legal documents, abstracts, bundles of letters, a packet of Confederate currency, peeling photograph albums.†   (source)
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show 7 more with this conextual meaning
  • That didn't answer very well; and then I began to state cases for them, and make abstracts, and that sort of work.   (source)
    abstracts = summaries
  • It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings.†   (source)
  • My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention.†   (source)
  • They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of 'Hop o' my Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since.†   (source)
  • An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!†   (source)
  • they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time   (source)
  • There are some other articles; but these are the most important, of which I have read you an abstract.   (source)
    abstract = summary
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abstract as in:  abstract art

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  • The room is decorated with abstract art.
  • Tally remembered growing up surrounded by Sol's woodwork, abstract shapes fashioned from fallen branches she would collect from parks as a littlie.   (source)
  • And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating nature
  • The next was an abstract image of curious porpoises circling the boat, with the words of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" drifting in the clouds.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature like a photograph or realistic painting
  • She didn't have any particular style; some of her paintings were what she called primitive, some were impressionistic and abstract, some were realistic.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature
  • "It was like an abstract painting," Louie said later.   (source)
  • The law office itself had a reception area that might as well have been that of a five-star hotel: a flower arrangement of eighteenth-century density and ostentation, thick mushroom-coloured wall-to-wall, an abstract painting composed of pricey smudges.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature like a photograph or realistic painting
  • The rest of the art was cool, too—big abstract paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, an assemblage of old wooden chairs precariously stacked to the ceiling, a huge photograph of a kid jumping on a trampoline alone in a vast harvested cornfield—but Mychal's was my favorite, and not just because I knew him.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature
  • ...several rusted metal sculptures—one an abstract, plated mammoth,   (source)
    abstract = of art:  not accurately imitating objects of nature
  • Also there was art everywhere:  abstract paintings on the walls, several ceramic pieces, and two of Wes's smaller sculptures on display on either side of the fireplace.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature
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show 8 more with this conextual meaning
  • Abstract painting is more up my alley.   (source)
  • It's just another piece of the puzzle she is. But the more she gives me, the more abstract she gets. It's like pieces to three different puzzles. You try to put them together but they never fit, and when you force them, the picture comes out all wrong.   (source)
    abstract = not clearly imitating an object of nature
  • NICK: (Indicating the abstract painting) Who . . . who did the . . . ?   (source)
    abstract = not imitating external reality or objects of nature
  • It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature
  • ...a full cotton skirt of a dull blue-green with abstract black swirls and squares on it,   (source)
  • They have abstract art earrings, hair arrangements.   (source)
  • ...the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it's only color and all abstract.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating nature
  • On its surface are arranged, seemingly at random, several bright pink objects not unlike those to be found in abstract paintings.   (source)
    abstract = not imitating objects of nature
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abstracted as in:  abstracted, so didn't notice

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  • She had an abstracted look.
    abstracted = distracted
  • If he left the room for a minute she'd look around uneasily, and say: "Where's Tom gone?" and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted (thinking about something outside of the immediate conversation or circumstances)
  • His wrecked, still-handsome face had the same abstracted air it often had in the mornings, at the breakfast table, as if he were listening to a song, or a distant explosion.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted
  • Even John Holbrook's farewells were abstracted.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted (not getting his full attention)
  • Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted
  • They weren't rude; they were simply abstracted, like people who had lost a role.   (source)
  • Anne gave herself up to a silent rapture over the shore road and Marilla guided the sorrel abstractedly while she pondered deeply.   (source)
    abstractedly = in a distracted manner
  • In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag.   (source)
    abstraction = distraction
  • As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it.   (source)
    abstracted = lost in thought
  • For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by post, hardly noticed that she was present at table.   (source)
    abstractedly = in a distracted manner
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show 24 more with this conextual meaning
  • Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted
  • This was said with a careless, abstracted indifference, which showed that my solicitude was, at least in his opinion, wholly superfluous.   (source)
  • That he laid his other hand upon the Doctor's arm, causing him to look up with an abstracted air.   (source)
  • Fanny was too well aware of it to have anything to say; and they walked on together some fifty yards in mutual silence and abstraction.   (source)
    abstraction = in a state of being lost in thought
  • "Rising of the sun!" slowly repeated the old man, lifting his tall person from its seat with a deliberate and abstracted air, while he kept his eye riveted on the changing, and certainly beautiful tints, that were garnishing the vault of Heaven.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted (not getting his full attention)
  • Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.   (source)
    abstraction = an instance of being lost in thought
  • Another short fit of abstraction followed, when, shaking it off, she thus attacked her companion.   (source)
    abstraction = being lost in thought
  • Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless and abstracted, going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not be onerous.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted
  • As it progressed Anne became more and more abstracted, eating mechanically, with her big eyes fixed unswervingly and unseeingly on the sky outside the window.   (source)
  • Sherlock Holmes welcomed her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and, having closed the door and bowed her into an armchair, he looked her over in the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was peculiar to him.   (source)
    abstracted = deep in thought
  • Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted
  • Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for audition, so that his sister's abstraction was of no account.   (source)
    abstraction = distraction
  • The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed— " 'tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead!"   (source)
    abstraction = state of being lost in thought
  • While the exterior of the naturalist was decidedly pacific, not to say abstracted, that of the new comer was distinguished by an air of vigour, and a front and step which it would not have been difficult to have at once pronounced to be military.   (source)
    abstracted = distracted (lost in thought)
  • This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in the wall bordering the orchard.   (source)
    abstracted = lost in thought
  • He replied not: he seemed serious — abstracted; he sighed; he half-opened his lips as if to speak: he closed them again.   (source)
  • But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even of a brooding nature.   (source)
    abstracted = absorbed in his own thoughts
  • Jumping over forms, and creeping under tables, I made my way to one of the fire-places; there, kneeling by the high wire fender, I found Burns, absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers.   (source)
    abstracted = lost in thought
  • There was much sense in your smile: it was very shrewd, and seemed to make light of your own abstraction.   (source)
    abstraction = being lost in thought about matters not at hand
  • I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject first broached: but he seemed to have entered another train of reflection: his look denoted abstraction from me and my business.   (source)
    abstraction = distraction
  • He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words "JANE EYRE" — the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction.   (source)
    abstraction = being lost in thought
  • I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow.   (source)
    abstraction = state of being lost in thought
  • One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes, raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just passing: I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline; and when, two minutes after, all the school, teachers included, rose en masse, it was not necessary for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance they thus greeted.   (source)
    abstraction = distraction
  • They were indeed excellent in two sciences for which I have great esteem, and wherein I am not unversed; but, at the same time, so abstracted and involved in speculation, that I never met with such disagreeable companions.   (source)
    abstracted = lost in thought
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abstracted as in:  abstracted his wallet

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • A water abstraction license is required.
    abstraction = removal
  • In the confusion attending the finding of Rogers' body I slipped into Lombard's room and abstracted his revolver.   (source)
    abstracted = removed
  • John Horner, 26, plumber, was brought up upon the charge of having upon the 22nd inst., abstracted from the jewel-case of the Countess of Morcar the valuable gem known as the blue carbuncle.   (source)
  • The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex.   (source)
  • She could not abstract her mind five minutes: she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme.   (source)
    abstract = remove
  • "Then Nelly has not done me credit for what I trust I deserve," returned the single-minded Doctor, "for I am not of the phlebotomising school at all; greatly preferring the practice which purifies the blood instead of abstracting it."   (source)
    abstracting = removing
  • At any rate, permit me to abstract its further contents.   (source)
    abstract = remove
  • Nevertheless, I was convinced that someone had gone to the chocolate box, opening the full one first by mistake, and had abstracted the contents of the last chocolate, cramming in instead as many little trinitrine tablets as it would hold.   (source)
    abstracted = removed
  • Mademoiselle Patricia's key, which M. Donovan Bailey abstracted from her bag some time during the evening.   (source)
  • John Horner, a plumber, was accused of having abstracted it from the lady's jewel-case.   (source)
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show 4 more with this conextual meaning
  • There was the same handsome unpleasantness of mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief in his identity.   (source)
    abstract = remove
  • The kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which sunlight might have revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal.   (source)
    abstracted = removed
  • And, abstracted from any experience on the subject, we can be at no loss to determine, that when the place of election is at an INCONVENIENT DISTANCE from the elector, the effect upon his conduct will be the same whether that distance be twenty miles or twenty thousand miles.   (source)
  • The objects of geometrical inquiry are so entirely abstracted from those pursuits which stir up and put in motion the unruly passions of the human heart, that mankind, without difficulty, adopt not only the more simple theorems of the science, but even those abstruse paradoxes which, however they may appear susceptible of demonstration, are at variance with the natural conceptions which the mind, without the aid of philosophy, would be led to entertain upon the subject.   (source)
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • When she first expressed an interest in abstract theory, I told her that field wasn't easy for women.†   (source)
  • Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider.†   (source)
  • I seemed to be floating in pure, abstract blackness.†   (source)
  • Law school had seemed abstract and disconnected before, but after meeting the desperate and imprisoned, it all became relevant and critically important.†   (source)
  • Langdon had lectured often enough on the Knights Templar to know that almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least abstractedly.†   (source)
  • The human brain works hard to abstract that out.†   (source)
  • You have to see it a bit more abstractly.†   (source)
  • It was a state of mind in which I "knew" many things, in which "conviction" was not an abstract, rather dry term referring to moral values or conscious beliefs, but a feeling of being drenched with insight, swollen with it like a wet sponge.†   (source)
  • The iron was contorting, twisting itself out of the abstract furls and coils into a frightening face, which spoke in a clanging, echoing voice.†   (source)
  • That night Finny began to talk abstractedly about it, as though it were a venerable, entrenched institution of the Devon School.†   (source)
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show 190 more examples with any meaning
  • After a few minutes of abstraction, she did a rough sketch of the street scene as seen from her room, amazed at how easily it came.†   (source)
  • The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.†   (source)
  • He was sitting, propped by several pillows, watching the commotion around him with a kind of abstracted childlike wonder.†   (source)
  • I. A green-glass beanstalk
    An abstract representation of a tree
    A greener, glassier, uglier Washington Monument
    The Jolly Green Giant's gigantic jolly green phallus†   (source)
  • Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme.†   (source)
  • It was like living in a 3-D abstract painting.†   (source)
  • Daubs and patches, very shaped and hand-worked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract.†   (source)
  • It's a measure of abstract reasoning skills.†   (source)
  • The whole concept of the Empire and Varden fighting over him was too abstract for him to grasp fully.†   (source)
  • They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.†   (source)
  • We talked about it before—God knows how long ago—but somehow, it was abstract then.†   (source)
  • One entered Tyrena's office through the five-faceted farcaster which shimmered in midair like an abstract hoiosculpture.†   (source)
  • Eventually, Fela headed back to the University for Abstract Maths.†   (source)
  • "Edward Cullen is staring at you again," Jessica said, finally breaking through my abstraction with his name.†   (source)
  • In the last month, Roshi has become something abstract to him, like a character in a play.†   (source)
  • Please provide an abstract.†   (source)
  • And if we associate even further, that constellation may lead us to more abstract concepts such as rebirth, fertility, renewal.†   (source)
  • But the difference between fifty meters a second and 150 was, at that moment, only large in the abstract.†   (source)
  • He would grow abstracted and silent, and a faraway look would come into his eyes, and the building was there before him—every stone.†   (source)
  • Danny hesitated, looking at his father's abstracted face.†   (source)
  • Plato's conception was of eternal and immutable patterns, spiritual and abstract in their nature that all things are fashioned after.†   (source)
  • It took a year of nagging from Mary and Margaret for George to publish anything about growing HeLa; in the end, he wrote a short abstract for a conference, and Margaret submitted it for publication.†   (source)
  • You can think that you are not safe and may die, and you can think of something very abstract and remote.†   (source)
  • The sight was as surreal as one of the abstract Magritte paintings Jocelyn had loved.†   (source)
  • The man was standing next to a colourful abstract painting: he was older, bearded, short, stocky.†   (source)
  • I was afraid he would kill Samirah and paint the walls with abstract swaths of dwarf, elf, and einherji.†   (source)
  • At the supermarket, for instance, my mother spent the full hour in the floral section, trying to get the perfect shot of the rows of cut flower bins, while Boo went for the abstract, selecting a round, bright, yellow squash and arranging it on the meat counter, right next to a freshly cut set of bloody steaks.†   (source)
  • What's the abstract policy goal in this case?†   (source)
  • What until then had been an abstraction, a mere flirtation with the possibility of death, suddenly materialized before her.†   (source)
  • Understanding this dynamic in abstract terms was useful, but it didn't necessarily help Cole get through to young men or their parents, because of the profound distrust many refugees had built up through the process that led to their flight in the first place.†   (source)
  • MCLean HOSPITAL HPJBLEBJI hum KAYSEN, Susanna N. 1967 April 27 ABSTRACT APPLICATION: Patient withdrew to her room, ate very little, did not work or study and contemplated jumping into the river.†   (source)
  • A talent for seeing patterns and understanding abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise.†   (source)
  • ABSTRACT†   (source)
  • Doctor Quinn had an abstract quality that appealed to Joan, but it gave me the polar chills.†   (source)
  • These thoughts tumble in my mind, and I close my eyes briefly as I realize what this means, not in abstract, but for me, the girl in the green dress.†   (source)
  • Ursula was the only one who dared disturb his, abstraction.†   (source)
  • Of all things, there had to be something better to do than ruin our evening by inviting Patch, albeit abstractly, into it.†   (source)
  • Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract.†   (source)
  • Phoebe had been invisible to him all these years: an abstraction, not a girl.†   (source)
  • It's made of blue glass, an abstract shape that looks like falling water frozen in time.†   (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)
  • Or possibly something purely abstract.†   (source)
  • "Nature isn't an abstraction for me," he said.†   (source)
  • The other Villagers sat on benches, reading—Kierkegaard was the name shouting from the paper-covered volume held by a short-cropped girl in blue jeans—or talking distractedly of abstract matters, or gossiping or laughing; or sitting still, either with an immense, invisible effort which all but shattered the benches and the trees, or else with a limpness which indicated that they would never move again.†   (source)
  • The interior paint had peeled to form abstract patterns while the kitchen, blackened with smoke, resembled a darkroom.†   (source)
  • The word "chimney" here was not an abstraction; it floated in the air, mingled with the smoke.†   (source)
  • Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with—probably because it was abstract.†   (source)
  • On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.†   (source)
  • Too many abstract ideas.†   (source)
  • But the other, starving child wasn't an abstraction, like the pictures of starving children on tv.†   (source)
  • On the tube are gold circles crossed with seven red lines each—"joy" ideographs in abstract.†   (source)
  • Rowan's teachers spoke of Bram with such reverence that Max thought of him not as a man, but as an idea whose abstract benevolence was akin to St. Nick or the tooth fairy.†   (source)
  • Since business was conducted out of town, the reality of the drugs felt like a complete abstraction to me.†   (source)
  • But it had also been vivid proof that the war was no abstraction and could in fact come to Philadelphia in all its fury, a thought many had preferred not to face.†   (source)
  • Woundwort greeted Captain Chervil rather abstractedly and went on turning the problem over in his mind.†   (source)
  • When concentrating it was his practice to finger his watch-chain and rummage abstractedly in his watchpocket.†   (source)
  • Um ....actually it sounds a bit abstract.†   (source)
  • Commandments about killing were only an abstraction.†   (source)
  • Abstract expressionist?†   (source)
  • It was thrilling, after so much time spent in the abstraction of raising money and gathering support, to see the actual components of his school sitting arrayed all around him.†   (source)
  • We feel we cannot sum up better than with Whitman, who more than a century ago, in his famous tribute to "Slang in America," delivered this judgment: Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.†   (source)
  • But now, as a result of the growing impartiality of the Greeks to the world around them, there was an increasing power of abstraction which permitted them to regard the old Greek mythos not as revealed truth but as imaginative creations of art.†   (source)
  • I looked at him abstractedly, seeing how the light caught on his wrinkled forehead, his snowy hair.†   (source)
  • Three equal triangles, abstract renditions of chalet roofs in a valley of snow so deep the lower stories were obscured.†   (source)
  • He was capable of grasping the essentials of a problem and manipulating them to get the necessary result; though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.†   (source)
  • Was I sabotaging my academic career over an abstract moral principle that mattered very little?†   (source)
  • He went on: "Sovereignty is an abstract concept, one that has been redefined many times as mankind has learned to live in peace.†   (source)
  • If women wore shoes like these, she thinks, they wouldn't worry so much about more abstract equalities.†   (source)
  • We're too weak to feel the full import of such a loss, and so we continue on, or we reduce it to an abstraction, a principle.†   (source)
  • As he touched it, he realized suddenly that he had thought of an abstraction called "his wife"—not of the woman to whom he was married.†   (source)
  • When I am lying awake at night or, best of all out in the country on my ranch, perhaps going somewhere on a horse, then a wonderful sense of goodness and lightness comes into me, and I can think of life in the abstract.†   (source)
  • Yoyo took three pictures of it at different places along the dam Looking at them now, they're like abstract paintings—whorls and coils and long, drifting threads of pale blue, turquoise, white, and bottle green.†   (source)
  • Cassius knew that it would take more than an abstract warning to make them leave their homes.†   (source)
  • It's so abstract, so contemporary, and a really creative contrast against the antiquity.†   (source)
  • He would put on "I kiss your little hand, Madame" and mime great passion for an invisible partner, kissing the mythical hand, pleading to the stars and jungle around him to console him in an unrequited abstract love.†   (source)
  • MARTHA (Somewhat abstracted) Good for you.†   (source)
  • What started as an almost abstract hatred of Lincoln has now transformed itself into the actor's life's work.†   (source)
  • For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract — missing them more than he had liked them, the missing being simpler.†   (source)
  • As she took in the lines and planes of his uncommonly spare unclothed back, her gaze gradually de-abstracted.†   (source)
  • A flat screen TV, a fireplace, abstract art on the cream walls, black leather couches...it wasn't exactly how I would have imagined Castle Dracula.†   (source)
  • The abstraction defeated me, strangled me in its maddening inexpressibility.†   (source)
  • I had begun to like them, in an abstract sort of way, and wished to know them better.†   (source)
  • What I was getting at was something a little more abstract.†   (source)
  • Pushed remorselessly toward the end of the aisle in a crush of rubbery torsos and slick perspiring arms, she found herself tripping and side-stepping into the dank dim platform that connected cars, firmly sandwiched between two human shapes whose identity, in an abstracted way, she was trying to discern just as the train screeched to a slow and shuddering halt and the lights went out.†   (source)
  • Thus by abstraction he fought the urge to murder his father-in-law, because she loved him.†   (source)
  • Much of his department's work-the forwarding of statistical information, the abstracting of the world's press, and the like-had continued automatically.†   (source)
  • She took him on what she called "the grand tour," proudly showing off the multiple heat pumps insuring constant year-round temperature; the magnificent kitchen with electronic ovens and broilers operated from a central control panel; the cunning round holes in the ceiling which sprayed gentle light on dining-room table, bar, bridge table, and strategically located abstract statuary; the television screens faired into the walls of bedrooms, living room, dining room, and even kitchen; and the master bedroom's free form tub, which extended through the wall and into a tiny, shielding garden.†   (source)
  • (MORE is still abstracted) And with a young wife, sir, as you know ....MORE (Abstracted) I'll pay what I always pay you ....The river looks very black tonight†   (source)
  • Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.†   (source)
  • Let's hope it will, she said, in a peculiarly abstracted voice.†   (source)
  • The child stopped and only her face appeared over the footboard, abstracted, absent.†   (source)
  • When Hilda Ray Bowles' turn came and Miss Eckhart herself was to bend down and move the stool out twelve inches, she did it in a spirit of gentle, uninterrupted abstraction.†   (source)
  • He regarded every public measure that came before him, a fellow Senator observed, as though it were an abstract proposition from Euclid, unfettered by considerations of political appeal.†   (source)
  • It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.†   (source)
  • Edward seemed to realize I was only there in body; he didn't try to pull me out of my abstraction.†   (source)
  • Though I appeared to be, for the moment, freed of the zombie abstraction, I was just as distant.†   (source)
  • That is not nuclear abstraction, that is deterrence.†   (source)
  • Maybe the reading was a thin abstraction for her.†   (source)
  • Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.†   (source)
  • GEORGE: (A trifle abstracted) Oh, I've had it awhile.†   (source)
  • He watched them with abstracted fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching.†   (source)
  • It didn't represent any abstraction such as "valor" or "the American fighting spirit."†   (source)
  • If you can't drink them, they are an abstraction.†   (source)
  • He stood abstracted for a moment, then became aimlessly mobile.†   (source)
  • "Friendships," said Taggart in the tone of an idle abstraction, "are more valuable than gold."†   (source)
  • She was looking over his charcoal flannel shoulder at some abstraction across the dining room.†   (source)
  • Under the black brim her face had an abstracted look and once or twice her lips moved silently.†   (source)
  • CROMWELL (Abstracted) Yes ....RICH Sir Redvers Llewellyn has retired.†   (source)
  • Will bowed back, abstracted and polite.†   (source)
  • As always, he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.†   (source)
  • Holy Abstraction, catch us up as we fall!†   (source)
  • He too could be abstracted, sunk inward to his own considerations.†   (source)
  • The more you go to cartoon characters, the more of an abstraction Hector becomes, the less and less effective you are in perceptions of the taste and quality of the ravioli.†   (source)
  • It was abad idea to rustle or fidget during these pauses: Aunt Lydia might look abstracted but she was aware of every twitch.†   (source)
  • Quiet everybody, our Olympic candidate Gene Forrester, is now going to qualify," it wasn't cider which made me in this moment champion of everything he ordered, to run as though I were the abstraction of speed, to walk the half-circle of statues on my hands, to balance on my head on top of the icebox on top of the Prize Table, to jump if he had asked it across the Naguamsett and land crashing in the middle of Quackenbush's boathouse, to accept at the end of it amid a clatter of applause—for on this day even the schoolboy egotism of Devon was conjured away—a wreath made from the evergreen trees which Phineas placed on my head.†   (source)
  • She was prone to errors of deportment—in moments of abstraction she tended to shift her weight onto one foot in a way that particularly enraged her superior.†   (source)
  • The gray ground passed by underfoot, but it was only an abstraction behind the raw emotions now throbbing through his mind.†   (source)
  • He reposed in silence for several minutes, staring off into space with a blank, abstracted expression.†   (source)
  • And as he put on his bathrobe, his body tingled less from the effect of the towel and the toilet water than from his image, abruptly overwhelming, of Yves leaning back in the bathtub, whistling, the washrag in his hand, a peaceful, abstracted look on his face and his sex gleaming and bobbing in the soapy water like a limp, cylindrical fish; and from his memory, to which his image was somehow the gateway, of that moment, nearly fifteen years ago, when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun.†   (source)
  • There was something of David in her now, an abstracted quality that made Max feel as though his questions were intruding upon a mind feverishly preoccupied with weightier matters.†   (source)
  • The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers—perfectibility "abstracted from all divine authority"—was unacceptable, he declared.†   (source)
  • In an abstracted way he withdrew one of the bullets from his belt and began to twirl it between his fingers.†   (source)
  • It's not brutality, for that's only a descriptive abstraction; it's merely the custom of the trade we're all in.†   (source)
  • At two you have entered the realm of abstraction, and are by necessity thinking and talking in abstractions.†   (source)
  • A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.†   (source)
  • There was a timelessness to those Sundays: a greenness to its parks and private arbors; the quiet hum of well-dressed crowds gathering beneath the columns of its churches; then the sudden bloom of sails and the gestures of small crews far out in the river; the abstraction of the walkers along the Battery; the pleasant symmetry of eighteenth-century houses clustered along the narrow feminine streets; bells over the city; the shrill robust games of happy children and the healthy glow of those children; the movement of freighters into the harbor after trans-Atlantic voyages.†   (source)
  • She fell back into her trance and in this abstracted state sat down at her mother's dressing table, still in her pale mauve, almost white, lacetrimmed dress and long veil borrowed for the evening from the workshop, like a costume.†   (source)
  • Mary, amazed and even angry, saw that the brooding abstraction had gone from his face, for he had spent weeks of time and quite a lot of money.†   (source)
  • CROMWELL (Grunts, his face abstracted.†   (source)
  • MORE looks after him) MORE (Abstracted) ....spiritu tuo ....BOATMAN (Mournful; he is squatting on the ground) Some people think boats stay afloat on their own, sir, but they don't; they cost money.†   (source)
  • Poverty, which Dick had warned her of with a scrupulous humility, was another abstraction, nothing to do with her pinched childhood.†   (source)
  • One scheme after another passed idly through her mind, and she watched them pass like images in a dream but remained aloof from them, abstracted.†   (source)
  • "Getting close to nature," which was sanctioned, after all, by the pleasant sentimentality of the sort of books she read, was a reassuring abstraction.†   (source)
  • In her abstracted state she hardly noticed, at first, the bearded man walking up the driveway out of the shadow of the trees into the sunlight of the yard.†   (source)
  • She did not put it to herself like that; but, after all, she was nothing if not a social being, though she had never thought of "society," the abstraction; and if her friends were thinking she should get married, then there might be something in it.†   (source)
  • He drove to the office instead of home, moved his station wagon in and out of the Sunday afternoon traffic with confidence as ample as his belly, jaw thrown forward with comfortable superiority, and he looked up with satisfaction at the towering buildings of darkening concrete and brick, their upper reaches bright where the falling sunlight struck, their lower windows full, like abstracted eyes, with the reflected glory of neon and blue-gray smoke and the shining roofs of passing cars.†   (source)
  • Children, in the abstract, had never appealed to me.†   (source)
  • It was an abstract painting and was meant to inspire thought.†   (source)
  • It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal.†   (source)
  • The IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes.†   (source)
  • Abstract concepts like "slope" and "undefined" clearly didn't come easily to her.†   (source)
  • That I had been born there was an abstract idea.†   (source)
  • Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels.†   (source)
  • Water stains formed brown abstract paintings between the store windows.†   (source)
  • But in, perhaps, a more abstract way than you do, at least these days.†   (source)
  • The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over.†   (source)
  • Being his daughter is all pretty abstract for her, and I'm sure she wants to keep it that way.†   (source)
  • It's an abstract question, except to people like Captain Vel.†   (source)
  • I exposed her too early to some very abstract, very extreme topics.†   (source)
  • And yet I could only feel the most abstract gratitude.†   (source)
  • What had been self-conscious was now impersonal, almost abstract.†   (source)
  • Of course, there was nothing abstract about a face.†   (source)
  • "I don't confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality," said Jen Shinnan.†   (source)
  • But these are not abstract things we're talking about here, this is life and death.†   (source)
  • It seemed like it might be a good idea, at least in the abstract, anyway.†   (source)
  • It had a swirling, almost abstract design of a floating guitar against clouds.†   (source)
  • A piece like this—an abstract sculpture—is what the gods are looking for.†   (source)
  • BECAUSE I HAVE AUTISM, I live by concrete rules instead of abstract beliefs.†   (source)
  • It had been an amusing intellectual game then, a kind of abstract test of wits.†   (source)
  • The dreams seemed distant and abstract in the face of their new surroundings.†   (source)
  • Of course we had heard of the Fascists, but it was all in the abstract.†   (source)
  • At one remove, the equations became abstract.†   (source)
  • I was only discussing the general political picture from an abstract sociological viewpoint which—†   (source)
  • The sovereignty of Free Luna is not the abstract matter you seem to feel it is.†   (source)
  • For me, Cuba posed a rather abstract question.†   (source)
  • To observe and report alliances, not to discuss abstract theories.†   (source)
  • It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art.†   (source)
  • I thought, looking at an abstract fish of polished brass mounted on a piece of ebony.†   (source)
  • Can't you see that they don't think in such abstract terms?†   (source)
  • He teaches fine arts at the college there, an abstract impressionist.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Glass looked over, abstractedly, at the blue bathmat, across the tiled floor.†   (source)
  • They are incapable of conceiving of such a thing as abstract science.†   (source)
  • If you want to see an abstract principle, such as moral action, in material form-there it is.†   (source)
  • It was as if something abstract had crept into this face and made it colorless.†   (source)
  • As I waited for Mark to question, an abstract, disjointed thought began troubling me.†   (source)
  • Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas.†   (source)
  • Very abstract, abstruse, or subtle: often used derogatorily of reasoning.†   (source)
  • He was trembling, but not with feeling; growing abstract.†   (source)
  • Hodge, like any man of sense, might scoff at such notions in the abstract.†   (source)
  • Eragon examined the walls on either side of the breach, running his hands over abstract patterns that had been coaxed from the tree by the elves' songs.†   (source)
  • As he rested against her quietly on the couch, he occasionally sent her an anxious glance, but she merely stroked his hair and smiled at him abstractedly, as if she were somewhere far away.†   (source)
  • She had spent hours on elaborate murals of events from the past, images from the future she'd seen in prophecies, favorite quotes from books and music, and abstract designs so good they would have given M. C. Escher vertigo.†   (source)
  • The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.†   (source)
  • At the teacher's desk Mr. Stephens, a tall man just beginning to run to fat, was folding papers abstractedly back into his ratty brown briefcase.†   (source)
  • I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis in my life.†   (source)
  • The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk — a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career — to a practical and personal piece of medical advice.†   (source)
  • So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember what I could of the Hart Crane poem, which wasn't much, although even isolated words like seagull and traffic and tumult and dawn carried something of its airborne distances, its sweeps from high to low; and just as I was nodding off, I fell into sort of an overpowering sensememory of the narrow, windy, exhaust-smelling park near our old apartment, by the East River, roar of traffic washing abstractly above as the river swirled with fast, confusing currents and sometimes appeared to flow in two different directions.†   (source)
  • Sometimes I stared at the abstract prints, randomly finding pictures in the shapes, like I'd found pictures in the clouds as a child.†   (source)
  • The walls were still bare but for a photograph of Bienvenue that he himself had hung with tape in the living room, as well as a large abstract drawing in black crayon on a wall leading into the kitchen—a mural young Ive had started and abandoned but that had not yet been washed away.†   (source)
  • The black hen lefr through the backdoor, and scratched abstractedly in the yard, where woodshavings blew about like blond curls.†   (source)
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