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detestable
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  • With totally shaking hands, I stuff the stupid card back into the envelope and shove both these detestable objects back into his lower desk drawer.†   (source)
  • Filthy, detestable pig!†   (source)
  • An individual worries more about his reputation than that of his group, because blame for the detestable action of a group is divided among a number of people.†   (source)
  • Wicked and detestable slave-owners since generations — yes everybody hate them in Jamaica and also in this beautiful island where I hope your stay will be long and pleasant in spite of all, for some not worth sorrow.†   (source)
  • Frederic couldn't decide if he hated Bonaparte for speaking so rudely to an aristocrat, or loved him for speaking so rudely to the detestable Marquis de La Fayette.†   (source)
  • Detestable scum that you are, you are no more civilized than a sewer rat!†   (source)
  • I an a friend of enemies, the enemy of friends; I an admired for my detestability.†   (source)
  • Well, what is this immediate grasp of a situation as a whole supposed to be if not the intuition they find so detestable?†   (source)
  • "I find him detestable, and I would have rather he'd stayed in Uppsala, but he owns this house.†   (source)
  • Even the detestable Mao Zedong gave permission for our police to purge it.†   (source)
  • After the meet was over we all piled our wet and smelly bodies into the detestable bus.†   (source)
  • Jack of Diamonds lurched out of the chair, massaging his bruised buttocks and cursing the detestable piece of furniture that had held him captive.†   (source)
  • So widespread and pervasive was such propaganda that even Martha Washington, who may have been smarting still from the "Mazzei Letter," remarked toa visiting clergyman that she thought Jefferson "one of the most detestable of mankind."†   (source)
  • Perhaps the consequences of the question now before the public may give us sad proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or detestable vice, in the human character.†   (source)
  • Detestable!†   (source)
  • They called him "Miss" Michalove; they badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of him.†   (source)
  • Oh, he was detestable!†   (source)
  • Detestable thought!†   (source)
  • Once you were Tolstoi's young man; now you are Byron's young man; perhaps you will be Meredith's young man; then you will visit Paris in the Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie, some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of.†   (source)
  • …think all was so poured in concrete and that there weren't occasions for happiness that weren't illusions of people still permitted to be forgetful of permanent disappointment, more or less permanent pain, death of children, lovers, friends, ends of causes, old age, loathsome breath, fallen faces, white hair, retreated breasts, dropped teeth; and maybe most intolerable the hardening of detestable character, like bone, similar to a second skeleton and creaking loudest before the end.†   (source)
  • Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable.†   (source)
  • It was unthinkable, it was detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again.†   (source)
  • Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven--a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us.†   (source)
  • Must, must, must—detestable word.†   (source)
  • Raoul was the small son of Maybelle and Rene Picard—a detestable little brat, Scarlett thought, more like an ape than a child.†   (source)
  • I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface.†   (source)
  • That name is familiar to us—and detestable.†   (source)
  • "Yes," answered Lord Henry, dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable.†   (source)
  • How detestable, how detestable they are!†   (source)
  • They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and flapped their arms and crowed.†   (source)
  • He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable specimen.†   (source)
  • He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.†   (source)
  • There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable.†   (source)
  • It was a detestable shanty near a low bazaar.†   (source)
  • It would be easy to lie to you; but the truth is I think it detestable.†   (source)
  • He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.†   (source)
  • I was glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet.†   (source)
  • I have a vague impression that they were detestable.†   (source)
  • At home, everybody, mother, my sisters, Prince S., even that detestable Colia!†   (source)
  • The universal response was, that the fare was detestable, and that they wanted to be set free.†   (source)
  • Kill me if thou wilt, detestable Huron; I will go no further.†   (source)
  • Anything to vary this detestable monotony.†   (source)
  • "What is detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy."†   (source)
  • What is passable in youth is detestable in later age.†   (source)
  • I assure you he is very detestable; the Admiral's lessons have quite spoiled him."†   (source)
  • I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife.†   (source)
  • "Detestable fury!" exclaimed Front-de-Boeuf, "that moment shalt thou never witness—Ho!†   (source)
  • Responsible or not, he was equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter.†   (source)
  • Oh, what a detestable crew they are, these mercenary speculators!†   (source)
  • I spat out, and affirmed it tasted detestably — I would not take it on any account.†   (source)
  • Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphs write detestable verses?†   (source)
  • It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice—that's what it is—they are all full of malice, malice!†   (source)
  • But this seemed to her to be a horror—a wantonness, all the more detestable to her, because she so detested Florence.†   (source)
  • …facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body.†   (source)
  • From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably cheerful "Time to get up, Georgie boy," and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.†   (source)
  • Even so, your worship—for, as I said before, as to that detestable joint, the babe unborn is no whit more blameless than—†   (source)
  • Let him mind his own business and leave a poor girl— THE NOTE TAKER [explosively] Woman: cease this detestable boohooing instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship.†   (source)
  • What a detestable boy Tibby was!†   (source)
  • He was a detestable creature.†   (source)
  • Get your mind clean and vigorous; and learn to enjoy a fast ride in a motor car instead of seeing nothing in it but an excuse for a detestable intrigue.†   (source)
  • ] Detestable girl!†   (source)
  • The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror.†   (source)
  • If the room had suddenly been flooded with electric light, I couldn't have seen more clearly the detestable bearded countenance that I knew was bending over me.†   (source)
  • One of the things he remembered best was an argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about women's rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally suddenly lost her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class life.†   (source)
  • It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.†   (source)
  • In the first place, the Grange is on clay, and built where the castle moat must have been; then there's that detestable little river, steaming all night like a kettle.†   (source)
  • Detestable.†   (source)
  • His hand was taken, and then he remembered how detestable he had been, and said gently, "Don't you think me unkind any more?†   (source)
  • It was a distinct victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by shaking his detestable hand.†   (source)
  • It was impossible for me to go on living when life was full of such detestable, strange, tormenting forms.†   (source)
  • She spoke more calmly and resumed her cards, saying as she turned them up, "A bad old woman, bad, bad, detestable.†   (source)
  • Indeed, he was collecting evidence of their malpractices; and those costermongers, not allowed to stand their barrows in the streets; and prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn't in them, nor in young men either, but in our detestable social system and so forth; all of which he considered, could be seen considering, grey, dogged, dapper, clean, as he walked across the Park to tell his wife that he loved her.†   (source)
  • I hate you, Gavrila Ardalionovitch, solely (this may seem curious to you, but I repeat)—solely because you are the type, and incarnation, and head, and crown of the most impudent, the most self-satisfied, the most vulgar and detestable form of commonplaceness.†   (source)
  • Here was Aziz all shoddy and odious, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested both silly, and he himself and Heaslop both decorous on the surface, but detestable really, and detesting each other.†   (source)
  • The first disagreeable impression experienced by Mrs. Epanchin was to find the prince surrounded by a whole assembly of other guests—not to mention the fact that some of those present were particularly detestable in her eyes.†   (source)
  • "I went into this detestable cave," she would say dryly, "and I remember scratching the wall with my finger-nail, to start the usual echo, and then as I was saying there was this shadow, or sort of shadow, down the entrance tunnel, bottling me up.†   (source)
  • You may add that I have surely enough to think of, on my own account, without him; and therefore it is all the more surprising that I cannot tear my eyes and thoughts away from his detestable physiognomy.†   (source)
  • Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.†   (source)
  • It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family.†   (source)
  • As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation was so far from exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother and Lydia, that she considered it as the death warrant of all possibility of common sense for the latter; and detestable as such a step must make her were it known, she could not help secretly advising her father not to let her go.†   (source)
  • Hindley is a detestable substitute — his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious — H. and I are going to rebel — we took our initiatory step this evening.†   (source)
  • A hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to himself—this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him.†   (source)
  • 'That I came over with the delayed mail, sir,' returned Mr Blandois, passing his white hand down his high-hooked nose, 'I know to the cost of my head and stomach: the detestable and intolerable weather having racked them both.†   (source)
  • Often the lama made the living pictures the matter of his text, bidding Kim—too ready—note how the flesh takes a thousand shapes, desirable or detestable as men reckon, but in truth of no account either way; and how the stupid spirit, bond-slave to the Hog, the Dove, and the Serpent—lusting after betel-nut, a new yoke of oxen, women, or the favour of kings—is bound to follow the body through all the Heavens and all the Hells, and strictly round again.†   (source)
  • The prince, on the contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself abroad less European than he was in reality.†   (source)
  • …extent; in an immense waistcoat, knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked hat; with nothing fitting him, and everything of coarse material, moth-eaten and full of holes; with seams in his black face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could by any other means have believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was.†   (source)
  • "Vile murderous hag!" replied Front-de-Boeuf; "detestable screech-owl! it is then thou who art come to exult over the ruins thou hast assisted to lay low?"†   (source)
  • How detestably fortunate!†   (source)
  • You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi — were they not, mama?†   (source)
  • Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a "detestable army."†   (source)
  • Could anything be more detestable?†   (source)
  • Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my concerns.†   (source)
  • She spent half her time in thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action: she held it must be detestable to be afraid or ashamed.†   (source)
  • I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.'†   (source)
  • As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch detestable.†   (source)
  • So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.†   (source)
  • The desire to have something or other to show for his "parts"—to show somehow or other—had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on the conditions attached to any marked proof of rarity had affected him more and more as gross and detestable; like the swallowing of mugs of beer to advertise what one could "stand."†   (source)
  • "No, as to that he's detestably sound.†   (source)
  • Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous.†   (source)
  • The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own.†   (source)
  • 'I suppose she was to be subdued and broken to their detestable mould, Heaven help her!' said I. 'And she has been.'†   (source)
  • The detestable maxim, Live on the enemy! produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline alone could heal.†   (source)
  • " 'We announce,' he read, in the same tone with which he would have read a newspaper, 'that to-day, the 23d of February, will be executed Andrea Rondolo, guilty of murder on the person of the respected and venerated Don Cesare Torlini, canon of the church of St. John Lateran, and Peppino, called Rocca Priori, convicted of complicity with the detestable bandit Luigi Vampa, and the men of his band.'†   (source)
  • You wouldn't think that I should cry at anything Joseph could say; but he and Hareton are detestable companions.†   (source)
  • 'I'll put my hand in no man's hand,' said Mr. Micawber, gasping, puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man fighting with cold water, 'until I have — blown to fragments — the — a — detestable — serpent — HEEP!†   (source)
  • …and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun—as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of their…†   (source)
  • So far as institution and formation with relation to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century, questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth.†   (source)
  • 'Will you shut the door, if you please? you left it open; and those — those DETESTABLE creatures won't bring coals to the fire.†   (source)
  • To save the transition, to soften the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are!†   (source)
  • I had no consolation in seeing how different she was from this detestable Rufus with the mulberry-coloured great-coat, for I felt that in the very difference between them, in the self-denial of her pure soul and the sordid baseness of his, the greatest danger lay.†   (source)
  • You'd hear of odd things if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face: the most ordinary would be painting on its white the colours of the rainbow, and turning the blue eyes black, every day or two: they detestably resemble Linton's.'†   (source)
  • The removal of North, or the whole detestable junto, is a matter unworthy the millions we have expended.†   (source)
  • Elinor would not contend, and only replied, "Whoever may have been so detestably your enemy, let them be cheated of their malignant triumph, my dear sister, by seeing how nobly the consciousness of your own innocence and good intentions supports your spirits.†   (source)
  • I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor.†   (source)
  • You are to thank your brother and me for the scheme; it darted into our heads at breakfast-time, I verily believe at the same instant; and we should have been off two hours ago if it had not been for this detestable rain.†   (source)
  • For the furtherance of human happiness, I have always maintained that it is necessary to prove that man is not even at present a vicious and detestable animal; and still more to prove that good management may greatly amend him; and it is for much the same reason, that I am anxious to see the opinion established, that there are fair characters existing among the individuals of the race; for the moment that all men, without exception, shall be conceived abandoned, good people will cease…†   (source)
  • Impatient to get rid of those hateful evidences of her folly, those detestable papers then scattered over the bed, she rose directly, and folding them up as nearly as possible in the same shape as before, returned them to the same spot within the cabinet, with a very hearty wish that no untoward accident might ever bring them forward again, to disgrace her even with herself.†   (source)
  • Most detestable death, by thee beguil'd,   (source)
    detestable = hated
  • [speaking to the tomb that holds Juliet]
    Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
    Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,   (source)
    detestable = hated or horrible
  • I know thee not, nor ever saw till now Sight more detestable than him and thee.†   (source)
  • Besides, to murder one's own reputation is a kind of suicide, a detestable and odious vice.†   (source)
  • "May evil islands choke thee, thou detestable Sancho," said the niece; "What are islands?†   (source)
  • I bewailed his misfortunes, and the ruin he was now come to, at such a rate, that I relished nothing now as I did before, and the first reflections I made upon the horrid, detestable life I had lived began to return upon me, and as these things returned, my abhorrence of the place I was in, and of the way of living in it, returned also; in a word, I was perfectly changed, and become another body.†   (source)
  • Now tell me, Anselmo, in which of these two art thou imperilled, that I should hazard myself to gratify thee, and do a thing so detestable as that thou seekest of me?†   (source)
  • I am robb'd, sir, and beaten; my money and apparel ta'en from me, and these detestable things put upon me.†   (source)
  • * *detestable villainy* His tables Toletanes <19> forth he brought, Full well corrected, that there lacked nought, Neither his collect, nor his expanse years, Neither his rootes, nor his other gears, As be his centres, and his arguments, And his proportional convenients For his equations in everything.†   (source)
  • "Yes," said the Abbe, "but it means nothing, for they complain of everything with great fits of laughter; they even do the most detestable things while laughing."†   (source)
  • And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither.†   (source)
  • Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable vice, in the human character.†   (source)
  • My parents forced me at the age of fifteen to put on this detestable habit, to increase the fortune of a cursed elder brother, whom God confound.†   (source)
  • He knew the nature of that good man to be so averse to any baseness or treachery, that the least attempt of such a kind would make the sight of the guilty person for ever odious to his eyes, and his name a detestable sound in his ears.†   (source)
  • I had much ado to defend myself against these detestable animals, and could not forbear starting when they came on my face.†   (source)
  • My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it.†   (source)
  • …contemplating either, the mind of man is more likely to be overwhelmed with sorrow and shame than to draw any good uses from such patterns; for in the former instance he may be both concerned and ashamed to see a pattern of excellence in his nature, which he may reasonably despair of ever arriving at; and in contemplating the latter he may be no less affected with those uneasy sensations, at seeing the nature of which he is a partaker degraded into so odious and detestable a creature.†   (source)
  • I am so satiated with the great number of detestable books with which we are inundated that I am reduced to punting at faro.†   (source)
  • Here we entered, and I saw three of those detestable creatures, which I first met after my landing, feeding upon roots, and the flesh of some animals, which I afterwards found to be that of asses and dogs, and now and then a cow, dead by accident or disease.†   (source)
  • What helped to confirm Martin in his detestable principles, to stagger Candide more than ever, and to puzzle Pangloss, was that one day they saw Paquette and Friar Giroflee land at the farm in extreme misery.†   (source)
  • The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all excellences that can adorn a rational creature, have no name for this vice in their language, which has no terms to express any thing that is evil, except those whereby they describe the detestable qualities of their Yahoos, among which they were not able to distinguish this of pride, for want of thoroughly understanding human nature, as it shows itself in other countries where that animal presides.†   (source)
  • As the conversation of fellows of this kind is of all others the most detestable to men of any sense, the cloth was no sooner removed than Mr Jones withdrew, and a little barbarously left poor Mrs Whitefield to do a penance, which I have often heard Mr Timothy Harris, and other publicans of good taste, lament, as the severest lot annexed to their calling, namely, that of being obliged to keep company with their guests.†   (source)
  • By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, "I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly."†   (source)
  • And thus when I reflect on this, I am almost tempted to say that in my heart I repent of having adopted this profession of knight-errant in so detestable an age as we live in now; for though no peril can make me fear, still it gives me some uneasiness to think that powder and lead may rob me of the opportunity of making myself famous and renowned throughout the known earth by the might of my arm and the edge of my sword.†   (source)
  • …for this very identical bill, which is the property of my angel, and was once in her dear possession, I will not deliver it into any hands but her own, upon any consideration whatever, no, though I was as hungry as thou art, and had no other means to satisfy my craving appetite; this I hope to do before I sleep; but if it should happen otherwise, I charge thee, if thou would'st not incur my displeasure for ever, not to shock me any more by the bare mention of such detestable baseness."†   (source)
  • And indeed I now apprehended that I must absolutely starve, if I did not get to some of my own species; for as to those filthy Yahoos, although there were few greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them the more hateful they grew, while I stayed in that country.†   (source)
  • …gums, oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men's flesh and bones, birds, beasts, and fishes, to form a composition, for smell and taste, the most abominable, nauseous, and detestable, they can possibly contrive, which the stomach immediately rejects with loathing, and this they call a vomit; or else, from the same store-house, with some other poisonous additions, they command us to take in at the orifice above or below…†   (source)
  • , where superiority of birth breaks out; in which case, we should not think it very improperly applied by any husband whatever, if the application was not in itself so base, that, like certain applications of the physical kind which need not be mentioned, it so much degrades and contaminates the hand employed in it, that no gentleman should endure the thought of anything so low and detestable.†   (source)
  • But being arrived in this lonely place, where it was very improbable he should meet with any interruption, he suddenly slipped his garter from his leg, and, laying violent hands on the poor woman, endeavoured to perpetrate that dreadful and detestable fact which we have before commemorated, and which the providential appearance of Jones did so fortunately prevent.†   (source)
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