compel

in a sentence

As it was, we were compelled to hold our heads high and be, respectively, a gentleman and a lady.  (source) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him.  (source) Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903

So he compelled himself to read the last paragraph slowly—with his head, not his heart, so that he could understand it.  (source) Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, 1948

I am sorry, Madam, but I am compelled to ask you to show us his room.  (source) Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925

but as his wife — at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked — forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital — this would be unendurable.  (source) Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 1847

I'm here because I've got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness.†  (source) Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, 2014

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light—as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train;†  (source) Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

When she shopped (there were twenty stores in Jefferson now) she unbent without even getting out of the carriage, gracious and assured and talking the most complete nonsense, voluble, speaking her bright set meaningless phrases out of the part which she had written for herself, of the duchess peripatetic with property soups and medicines among a soilless and uncompelled peasantry—a woman who, if she had had the fortitude to bear sorrow and trouble, might have risen to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crone the pride and destiny of her family, instead of turning at the last to the youngest member of it and asking her to protect the others.†  (source) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936

No one was ever able to discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.†  (source) Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

At this point I was compelled to surrender.  (source) Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography, 1901

Reading it again, however, he realized that it didn't compel him to be rude; it simply allowed him the option.†  (source) Lois Lowry, The Giver, 1993

I whisper back, because something in the conspiracy compels it, "Bodies?"†  (source) Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine, 1989

She said: the cloud-compeller, overcome, Assents to fate, and ratifies the doom.†  (source) Homer, The Iliad, -850 B.C.