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ecstasy
in a sentence

ecstasy as in:  ecstasy of love

show 75 more with this conextual meaning
  • She reports on the agony and the ecstasy of intense sports competition.
  • The sculpture is called "The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa."
  • At best, Ecstasy users are in danger of neurotoxicity and overheating. Additionally, Ecstasy pills are notoriously impure.
  • she stopped in ecstasy to shut her eyes that she might the better fancy herself one of that heroic ring.   (source)
    ecstasy = a state of intense happiness
  • Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.   (source)
    ecstasy = intense happiness
  • The pigs were in ecstasies over Napoleon's cunning.†   (source)
  • He had become rather frail, but still kept energy to fulfill the major ceremonial of his office; the rest of the tranquil days he spent with his books, his memories, and the mild ecstasies of the narcotic.†   (source)
  • Maria talked to me about the handsome saxophone player, Pablo, and spoke of an American song that he had sung them sometimes, and she was so carried away with admiration and love as she spoke of it that I was far more moved and impressed than by the ecstasies of any highly cultured person over artistic pleasures of the rarest and most distinguished quality.†   (source)
  • In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land.†   (source)
  • Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my own body.†   (source)
  • And I—I always heard from women that I didn't have the pro-founder knowledge of life, that I didn't know its damage or its suffering or its stupendous ecstasies and glories.†   (source)
  • Mama went into ecstasies.†   (source)
  • And Plutarch numbers the ecstasies of the orgiastic rites of Pan along with the ecstasy of Cybele, the Bacchic frenzy of Dionysos, the poetic frenzy inspired by the Muses, the warrior frenzy of the god Ares (= Mars), and, fiercest of all, the frenzy of love, as illustrations of that divine "enthusiasm" that overturns the reason and releases the forces of the destructive-creative dark.†   (source)
  • Mr. Seigler went into ecstasies.†   (source)
  • When, with their fervent over-emphasis, they went through long ecstasies of admiration, embroidering their thanks with florid decorations, he would jerk his head sideways to some imaginary listener, laughing softly and irritably, as he said: "Oh for God's sake!†   (source)
  • I will not try to describe the association that sprang up between the two; the one gave utmost adoration, while the other shared his knowledge, his ecstasies, and the wild dream that had now become the only reality left for him in the world.†   (source)
  • That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow—all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected.†   (source)
  • Oh, they are accustomed to these sudden ecstasies of piety.†   (source)
  • In such ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was silent.†   (source)
  • Elssler was dancing in the 'Diable Boiteux;' the Greek princess was in ecstasies.†   (source)
  • Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:— "Here's the street in its low-necked dress!†   (source)
  • he'll be in ecstasies, you may depend upon it!†   (source)
  • Natasha was in ecstasies over "Uncle's" singing.†   (source)
  • Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or heard anything.†   (source)
  • Farther on, in another place, she wrote: "Do not consider my words as the sickly ecstasies of a diseased mind, but you are, in my opinion—perfection!†   (source)
  • A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life.†   (source)
  • The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest of reasons—in St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the holy ecstasies of Negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood chapels—but they voted only to "give the matter their consideration," while still men died by the score each day, and in Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest from the ancient clawing pain.†   (source)
  • She was in ecstasies over some answer the tailor had made, saying to Mamma: "Sevigne would not have said it better!" and, by way of contrast, of a nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house: "My dear, he is so common!"†   (source)
  • His fellowassistant, Doctor Panna Lal, was in ecstasies at the prospect, and was urgent that they should attend it together in his new tumtum.†   (source)
  • One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.†   (source)
  • There was a thing—something about a faun in French—which Helen went into ecstasies over, but I thought it most tinkling and superficial, and said so, and I held to my opinion too.†   (source)
  • The general was in ecstasies, for the prince's remarks, made, as they evidently were, in all seriousness and simplicity, quite dissipated the last relics of his suspicion.†   (source)
  • Tom was in ecstasies.†   (source)
  • If, at half-past ten, some one absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, "I say, an hour-and-a-half still before luncheon," everyone else would be in ecstasies over being able to retort at once: "Why, what are you thinking about?†   (source)
  • " My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or a trap," but Miss Celine—the name of Saint-Simon, a 'man of letters,' having arrested the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing—had grown angry.†   (source)
  • To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of that she trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded of creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc!†   (source)
  • Had it pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Bute happened to be in ecstasies with the poodle, and was calling him a little darling, and a sweet little zoggy, and a pretty pet.†   (source)
  • And in the fourth or fifth century she would have walked away into the Egyptian desert and would have stayed there thirty years living on roots and ecstasies and visions.†   (source)
  • They were both in ecstasies.†   (source)
  • O, you need not be afraid of being one too many, either: it is just what these birds in a nest like, to have a good convenient friend to turn to, so that they may relieve the ecstasies of love with the solid commonplace of friendship.†   (source)
  • In short, we heard of a great many missions of various sorts among this set of people, but nothing respecting them was half so clear to us as that it was Mr. Quale's mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else's mission and that it was the most popular mission of all.†   (source)
  • The ecstasies consequent upon the effort had not yet subsided, and Newman (who had not been thoroughly sober at so late an hour for a long long time,) had not yet been able to put in a word of announcement, that the punch was ready, when a hasty knock was heard at the room-door, which elicited a shriek from Mrs Kenwigs, who immediately divined that the baby had fallen out of bed.†   (source)
  • Many people were amused, many were pleased and happy, many were in ecstasies, many were disgusted and unhappy.†   (source)
  • Is that you, Mr. Bumble, sir?' said Mrs. Mann, thrusting her head out of the window in well-affected ecstasies of joy.†   (source)
  • The crowd was again ecstasied, and gave another lurch in which Coggan and Poorgrass were again thrust by those behind upon the women in front.†   (source)
  • It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.†   (source)
  • Adele ran quite wild in the midst of it: the preparations for company and the prospect of their arrival, seemed to throw her into ecstasies.†   (source)
  • It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies—a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the other.†   (source)
  • In his epistolary communication, as in his dialogues and discourses on the great question to which it related, Mr Dorrit surrounded the subject with flourishes, as writing-masters embellish copy-books and ciphering-books: where the titles of the elementary rules of arithmetic diverge into swans, eagles, griffins, and other calligraphic recreations, and where the capital letters go out of their minds and bodies into ecstasies of pen and ink.†   (source)
  • One other singularity was that nobody with a mission—except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's mission— cared at all for anybody's mission.†   (source)
  • But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.†   (source)
  • These gentlemen had not yet quite recovered the jest, when dinner was announced, and then they were thrown into fresh ecstasies by a similar cause; for Sir Mulberry Hawk, in an excess of humour, shot dexterously past Lord Frederick Verisopht who was about to lead Kate downstairs, and drew her arm through his up to the elbow.†   (source)
  • He had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived through with that picture when for several months it had been the one thought haunting him day and night.†   (source)
  • Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled by it.†   (source)
  • Poor Mrs Nickleby, who had listened in a state of enviable complacency at first, became at length quite overpowered by these tokens of regard for, and attachment to, the family; and even the servant girl, who had peeped in at the door, remained rooted to the spot in astonishment at the ecstasies of the two friendly visitors.†   (source)
  • Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?†   (source)
  • Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss.†   (source)
  • Since we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing, we ought to say that once, nevertheless, in spite of his ecstasies, "his Ursule" caused him very serious grief.†   (source)
  • By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his revery continued, as the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow less and vanish.†   (source)
  • In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in ecstasies over it.†   (source)
  • These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other.†   (source)
  • Although no absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.†   (source)
  • Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to "the federates":— Refoncez dans vos culottes[20] Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.†   (source)
  • His task finished, he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes in the mire; his head in the light.†   (source)
  • Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges.†   (source)
  • At every backward and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of cherubim.†   (source)
  • I am in such ecstasies at the thoughts of a little country air and quiet!†   (source)
  • A very short visit to Mrs. Allen, in which Henry talked at random, without sense or connection, and Catherine, rapt in the contemplation of her own unutterable happiness, scarcely opened her lips, dismissed them to the ecstasies of another tete-a-tete; and before it was suffered to close, she was enabled to judge how far he was sanctioned by parental authority in his present application.†   (source)
  • The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day
    or night?†   (source)
  • No tongue can express the ecstasies and transports that my soul felt at the happy deliverance.†   (source)
  • When our ecstasies were a little over, he told me he was gone about fifteen miles, but it was not in his power to go any farther without coming back to see me again, and to take his leave of me once more.†   (source)
  • And after uttering many ecstasies and raptures concerning Sophia, he took his leave and departed, but not before he had received the strongest charge to beware of Jones, and to lose no time in securing his person, where he should no longer be in a capacity of making any attempts to the ruin of the young lady.†   (source)
  • As I said above, they value not the pleasure, they are raised by no inclination to the man, the passive jade thinks of no pleasure but the money; and when he is, as it were, drunk in the ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his pockets searching for what she can find there, and of which he can no more be sensible in the moment of his folly that he can forethink of it when he goes about it.†   (source)
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  • On the other hand, he was also enjoying the ecstasy of an idea, not daring just yet to envision its complications, dangers, and vicious absurdities.†   (source)
  • The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables.†   (source)
  • "Harry Potter risks his own life for his friends!" moaned Dobby in a kind of miserable ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Overjoyed, the proud hunter took a photograph of himself kneeling over his trophy, rifle thrust triumphantly overhead, his features distorted in a rictus of ecstasy and amazement, like some unemployed janitor who'd gone to Reno and won a million-dollar jackpot.†   (source)
  • When gripped in the ecstasy of an assault, he wailed and howled, drooling and frothing, sometimes sobbing, tears running down his cheeks.†   (source)
  • Had all the ecstasy been a put-on show?†   (source)
  • The first report did not cause him to leap up in ecstasy, and the second report did not cause him to sink into depression.†   (source)
  • When the last of the brandy was dispensed, Emile—who given the hour was nearly in a state of ecstasy—suggested they all head downstairs for another round, a little more dancing, and to bring the festivities to Viktor Stepanovich, who was still on the bandstand in the Piazza.†   (source)
  • He seemed to be alone, and the absence of pain was pure ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Eventually he slept with his head lolled forward and stayed that way until Leo Lassen went shrill again in ecstasy about the game.†   (source)
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  • Though some thought it a masterpiece, Pope Urban VIII had rejected The Ecstasy of St. Teresa as too sexually explicit for the Vatican.†   (source)
  • They're nearly incoherent between the alcohol they've consumed and their ecstasy at being at such a grand affair.†   (source)
  • Mention of "a quiet corner in a library" was a code for sexual ecstasy.†   (source)
  • They stayed in this amorous ecstasy until Pedro lowered his eyes and stared steadily at Tita's breasts.†   (source)
  • It happened so fast, she didn't have time to die of ecstasy or embarrassment.†   (source)
  • Ender could see the slug-like males clinging to the walls of a dark tunnel, and the large adults carrying the infant queen to the mating room; each male in turn penetrated the larval queen, shuddered in ecstasy, and died, dropping to the tunnel floor and shriveling.†   (source)
  • Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy.†   (source)
  • The ecstasy of that kiss.†   (source)
  • They are all peaks, no valleys—a single, infinite burst of marital ecstasy.†   (source)
  • While he spoke these words, I drank from a bowl of the most extraordinary soup I'd ever tasted; every briny sip was a kind of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • One by one the other kids had given a similar gasp, one little girl transported in near-ecstasy, crying out shrilly: "I see Him!†   (source)
  • Her head had been thrown back in ecstasy but now she had time to raise it, shock and anger already replacing the oddly similar expression of imminent orgasm.†   (source)
  • His mother was no more, and his father seemed not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so they proceeded in secret, and the fact that unmarried lovers such as they were now being made examples of and punished by death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each coupling that sometimes bordered on a strange sort of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • I was transported by ecstasy in Samuel's arms.†   (source)
  • All through nature there is a feeling of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • And then Edward hugged me tightly, because nothing pleased him more than my overwhelming ecstasy in this new life.†   (source)
  • He's in such a state of ecstasy, I can't bring myself to break the mood.†   (source)
  • I could feel again that ecstasy of being pressed to her, her little heart going and going.†   (source)
  • A boy with a lip piercing and a teddy bear backpack was handing out free tablets of herbal ecstasy, his parachute pants flapping in the breeze from the wind machine.†   (source)
  • Anyone who could have seen her in front of the mirror, in ecstasy over her own regal gestures, would have had reason to think that she was mad.†   (source)
  • The effect (described as timeless, sustained ecstasy) is elicited by certain atonal vibrations referred to as semuta music.†   (source)
  • That was a piece of cake next to guns and gangs and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the things parents had to be concerned about: pedophiles on the Web, designer drugs like ecstasy, school shootings, anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation, the ozone layer, superbacteria.†   (source)
  • We had been through the agony and now the ecstasy of Easter was just ahead.†   (source)
  • He stared at it in fascination for a long while, until he finally dared to pick up the long-handled spoon and, with a sigh of ecstasy, plunge it into the cream.†   (source)
  • Right before I told him he should go, I was pretty sure I'd made a sound that was a cross between a sigh of sheer bliss and a moan of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • The acolytes accompanied the throbbing of the bells with their own cries, groaning and shouting in an ecstasy of passion.†   (source)
  • But the last tiny tendrils of ecstasy, infiltrating me, somehow made it enjoyable.†   (source)
  • Vampyres have speculated for centuries that the ecstasy of blood drinking is the key reason humans have vilified our race.†   (source)
  • Some of her friends smoked pot, a few did cocaine or ecstasy, and one even had a nasty meth habit.†   (source)
  • It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe.†   (source)
  • The figure of St. Teresa lies limp, as if in a faint, her lips parted in ecstasy, her eyes unfocused, lids half closed.†   (source)
  • I've spent my entire senior year suffocating between lust and heartache, ecstasy and betrayal, and it's only getting harder to see the truth.†   (source)
  • Like a whirling dervish, she throws out her arms, spiraling faster into ecstasy.†   (source)
  • They swayed, for the rivulets of grief or of ecstasy must be rocked.†   (source)
  • Not ecstasy of the emotions but of the mind, the intellect.†   (source)
  • Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips?†   (source)
  • He recalled the enormous inner space of the Old Church in Amsterdam and felt the strange incomprehensible ecstasy that void had evoked in him.†   (source)
  • I exclaimed in ecstasy, seizing the Tumi.†   (source)
  • Immediately Moody was engulfed in a mob of robed veiled humanity that clawed at his business suit and wailed' in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her.†   (source)
  • I could hardly wait for all this ecstasy and once I prayed for a long time to be dead.†   (source)
  • All Britain was in "an ecstasy which I cannot express," a friend wrote to Henry Clinton.†   (source)
  • He broke out the bottles of bourbon he had managed to buy on his four-day weekly circuits with the courier plane and laughed, sang, shuffled and shouted in a festival of inebriated ecstasy until he could no longer keep awake and receded peacefully into slumber.†   (source)
  • He smiles in closed-eyed ecstasy.†   (source)
  • I moaned and he moaned and my mind and soul and body stood on the edge of pure ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Ecstasy.†   (source)
  • He intoxicated us with his words, lifting and carrying us away into a strange ecstasy, taking each of us to that place where we kept our sweetest memories.†   (source)
  • bellows, my fountain, like bright-colored balls in a water spout-hear me, old matron, justify now this sound with your dear old nod of affirmation, your closed-eye smile and bow of recognition, who'll never be fooled with the mere content of words, not my words, not these pinfeathered flighters that stroke your lids till they flutter with ecstasy with but the mere echoed noise of the promise.†   (source)
  • The men around the tables were watching as if in ecstasy, their faces glowing with pride.†   (source)
  • By eight o'clock on a Tuesday night, you will experience the ecstasy of victory or you will endure the agony of defeat.†   (source)
  • She took him in, fast and deep, her hands pressed to her own breasts as the first wave of ecstasy swamped her.†   (source)
  • It has a tone of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • He stroked the cat's neck and sent him into ecstasy.†   (source)
  • The fire-hating scimitar rang in ecstasy, cleaving the charging beast in half as Drizzt brought it down.†   (source)
  • She stood in her cousins room, in tortured ecstasy, poised like one of the three little pigs in prayer, drinking-in the moonlight with her gloomy cow eyes.†   (source)
  • The ecstasy he found in her had illuminated the dead tissues and outlined the hollow of his spirit.†   (source)
  • A week later three photographs appeared in the newspapers of this blatantly sexual act with Sir John also in the picture chatting casually to the woman whose face was in the throes of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Which would have been masochistic ecstasy for me, probably.†   (source)
  • As we rolled in urine and vomit, in that hideous, stinking baptism, we rolled together as a class for the first time, as though controlled by a single, invincible will, and on that night, they could not hurt us, could not touch us, could not even approach us in the ecstasy and amplitude of our solidarity.†   (source)
  • Then a breeze would move her bright hair, or she would raise her eyes, and Adam would swell out in his stomach with a pressure of ecstasy that was close kin to grief.†   (source)
  • And I feel pretty safe saying that I rarely read anything for pleasure, although I've derived what I could call pure ecstasy obsessing over lines from T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins, my little Oxford English Dictionary, magnifying glass in hand, hellbent on getting at that one true meaning.†   (source)
  • Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.†   (source)
  • I'll take away his Field of Ha Ha, and give him Normal places for his ecstasy—multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities, extinguishing Place altogether, even the idea of Place!†   (source)
  • She cried out in ecstasy, with marvelous shrieks, all flowing out of some primitive source of rapture quite beyond normal sensations of sweet peril.†   (source)
  • Siddhartha spoke with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted him.†   (source)
  • Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south.†   (source)
  • She was a theosophist, but she was also an expert on the ritual of the Orthodox Church, and even when she was toute transports, in a state of utter ecstasy, could not refrain from prompting the officiating clergy.†   (source)
  • This question always filled her with an ecstasy of hatred.†   (source)
  • She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur.†   (source)
  • Lorenzo's despair had to be kindled as well as his ecstasy, and could not come without that kindling.†   (source)
  • When Steve Kemp got back to his shop, he was in a kind of furious ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Surely Pedro had died at the moment of ecstasy when he entered the luminous tunnel.†   (source)
  • Langdon moved past the firemen toward Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa.†   (source)
  • The relief she felt as her pain abated was so intense, it bordered on ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Rains down on me, showers me with ecstasy.†   (source)
  • She expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan.†   (source)
  • The audience stilled as if a cue had been given, frozen in their half-erotic poses of ecstasy.†   (source)
  • She is crying, Jaime had realized, but whether it was from grief or ecstasy he could not have said.†   (source)
  • There is a sense of both horror and ecstasy: the East Wing!†   (source)
  • A strange smile lights Bessie's broad face, a cross between ecstasy and fear.†   (source)
  • It was a day of firsts: giving myself willingly to ecstasy.†   (source)
  • No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred.†   (source)
  • Her cry might have been agony or ecstasy or both.†   (source)
  • The blue marble sculpture floating before me was Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa.†   (source)
  • None of the baroque ecstasy, none of the grotesque compulsion.†   (source)
  • Who cares for ecstasy nowadays?" said another.†   (source)
  • He closed his eyes, in either the ecstasy of relief or the rigors of concentration.†   (source)
  • By the end of the evening Moody was in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • The framed print of Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa looked slightly askew.†   (source)
  • Nately was in ecstasy; she had never smiled at him before.†   (source)
  • Out of the gray throbbing an ecstasy arose.†   (source)
  • The serenity of sailing alone on the ink-blue Aegean Sea became his new heroin trance; the sensuality of sucking moist arni souvlakia right off the skewer became his new Ecstasy; and the rush of cliff diving into the foam-filled ravines of Mykonos became his new cocaine.†   (source)
  • The ecstasy of abasement.†   (source)
  • Ron, an expression of ecstasy on his face, mounted the broom and zoomed off into the gathering darkness while Harry walked around the edge of the field, watching him.†   (source)
  • "Look at this!" said Malfoy in ecstasy, holding up Ron's robes and showing Crabbe and Goyle, "Weasley, you weren't thinking of wearing these, were you?†   (source)
  • Wave after wave of his beating heart passed into me as, weightless, I rocked with him, devouring him, his ecstasy, his conscious pleasure.†   (source)
  • But on other nights his father would only sweep him into a giggling ecstasy, through the zone of air where beer hung around his father's face like a mist of raindrops, to be twisted and turned and shaken like a laughing rag, and finally to be set down on his feet, hiccupping with reaction.†   (source)
  • Kassad grimaces, closes his eyes, sees......fireballs expanding, stars dying, suns exploding in great pulses of flame, star systems perishing in an ecstasy of destruction......he feels pain in his chest, his hips not stopping, moving faster, even as he opens his eyes and sees......the great thorn of steel rising from between Moneta's breasts, almost impaling him as he unconsciously pulls up and back, the thornblade drawing blood which drips on her flesh, her pale flesh, reflective now, flesh as col†   (source)
  • Then he lunged at Louie and began punching him in the face, alternating right and left fists in a violent ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Now the weight was off his feet, an ecstasy of relief spread upward through his knees and he knew he would not move again that night, however disappointed Nettle might be.†   (source)
  • An English critic had once condemned The Ecstasy of St. Teresa as "the most unfit ornament ever to be placed in a Christian Church."†   (source)
  • The note indicated that the famous Bernini sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, shortly after its unveiling, had been moved from its original location inside the Vatican.†   (source)
  • Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa rose up like some sort of pornographic still life ....the saint on her back, arched in pleasure, mouth open in a moan, and over her, an angel pointing his spear of fire.†   (source)
  • woman luxuriates under a refreshing shower, her head thrown back in seeming ecstasy, her mouth opened in a wordless cry.†   (source)
  • The exhilaration of the moment vanished and he sought it in vain, like seeking ecstasy's memory an instant after jacking off and encountering only shame and guilt.†   (source)
  • Clary thought of medieval paintings of saints consumed in the blaze of holy ecstasy—and the angel's wings flew wide and white before they, too, caught and blazed up, a lattice of shimmering fire.†   (source)
  • We ask from within your sacred circle that you give us the knowledge to speak the language of the wilds, to fly with the freedom of the bird, to live the power and grace of the feline, and to find an ecstasy and joy in life that would stir the very heights of our being.†   (source)
  • Maybe ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Dr. Urbino smiled at her from the far shore of ecstasy, and it was then that he began to think again about what she had feared.†   (source)
  • More probably it was the ecstasy that always seemed to be shining in Ruth's face when he bent to kiss her—an ecstasy he felt inappropriate to the occasion.†   (source)
  • It is said that her cry of anguish and ecstasy left a crack across the face of the moon, but her blood and her soul and her strength and her courage all went into the steel.†   (source)
  • After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a "blazing ocean" as far as she could see.†   (source)
  • The view from his window the morning after one of the worst March storms on record filled him with ecstasy, despite the damage done to his trees.†   (source)
  • to resist it, but resisted, constrained, deprived of an outlet, the ecstasy lingered all the longer in her body, flowing through her veins like a shot of morphine.†   (source)
  • As night became morning, it seemed that all the birds of central Italy began to sing and dance in a mounting ecstasy that soon covered the countryside with sound.†   (source)
  • She had never been a hotshot in the philosophy department, had never in fact been required to think, to go beyond what was written in textbooks, and thus the wonder of her thoughts and the new knowledge they had brought: her filled her with a kind of ecstasy she had never known before.†   (source)
  • Ecstasy.†   (source)
  • I crushed my mouth to his, soaking up the ecstasy of his mouth on mine, his hands on me, feeling on the verge of bursting out of my skin— The cell phone in my pocket rang to life.†   (source)
  • When the grotesque congregation finished, ending with another chorus of "As Tosk wrote, so shall it be," the three novitiates shook the bells in an ecstasy of religious fervor, and the resulting clamor seemed loud enough to bring down the ceiling.†   (source)
  • But on the edge of the abyss he came out of his ecstasy, moved her hand away, sat up, and said in a tremulous voice: "Be careful, we have no rubbers."†   (source)
  • A round-headed, apple-cheeked boy with a thickly freckled nose and Slavic eyes leaned over the fence of the park above, and now as he saw me turn, he shrilled something to someone behind him, his face lighting up with ecstasy ....What does it mean, I wondered, turning back to that to which I did not wish to turn.†   (source)
  • The dachshund gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard surrounding the tree and picked him up.†   (source)
  • Others, who understood the Spirit's touch which made them dance, who understood whole families bending their backs in a field while singing as from one throat, who understood the ecstasy of river baptisms under suns just like this one, did not understand this curious disorder, this headless display and so refused also to go.†   (source)
  • Suddenly ecstasy broken only by a galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse.†   (source)
  • Ecstasy Is Hard to Describe It's like falling softly into a pool of crystal mountain water floating on your back circular beneath vibrant sky deciphering codes in the clouds spinning dizzy fast.†   (source)
  • The dervishes turn in ecstasy, their palms raised toward heaven as if they could hold God briefly on their fingers but only if they do not stop turning.†   (source)
  • It means that, at the end, they're free to go to glory and beams of light and all that-because, you see, if they had a wife and children, all the ecstasy and beams of light would not be enough.†   (source)
  • His Excellency took a cup, after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco ....and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that [one of] the two secretaries ....cried out in ecstasy, "Monsieur, vous etes un Turk!"†   (source)
  • The moment the desk clerk and bellhop left us alone, Mahtob and I squeezed each other, sharing ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town to the fullest extent Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.†   (source)
  • Lena listened and experienced each phrase of her mother's emotion from religious ecstasy to innocent confidence to embarrassment.†   (source)
  • When I hung up I felt despair: I was back in the Bronx, my walls bare but for the framed Ecstasy of St. Teresa.†   (source)
  • They sigh in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Three days passed in religious ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Faces in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • I'll die in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it.†   (source)
  • But ecstasy dissolves all fear.†   (source)
  • Exiled to my private mauve island where pretty pink butterflies fluttered on my wall in a lovely E-enhanced butterfly dance, I tried to be angry, but the ecstasy wouldn't let me.†   (source)
  • The two nuns subjected each letter, each word, line, and phrase to dilatatio, elevatio, and excessus—contemplation, elevation, and ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Officers' clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses.†   (source)
  • The night passed, fitful sleep interrupted by the indescribable ecstasy of new life pulling at my breast and by periods of depression over Moody's infantile behavior.†   (source)
  • Together, ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Then I'd forgotten all that and found happiness, no, ecstasy, in the dance, a hint of what I wanted with Genet.†   (source)
  • I saw him linger on the framed print of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa—he must have recognized at once where that came from.†   (source)
  • If "ecstasy" meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.†   (source)
  • Seated, staring up at that print of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, seeing only faint outlines as I hadn't put on the light, I felt as if I were in a confessional, but with no desire to confess.†   (source)
  • Surely this was Ghosh announcing his presence, because Ghosh was the sort of man who could be counted on to know that Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa was minutes from our hotel, even if he'd never been to Rome before.†   (source)
  • the Lord, who had not seen her father, her brother, her lover, or her son cut down without mercy; who had not seen her sister become part of the white man's great whorehouse, who had not, all too narrowly, escaped that house herself; no man, preaching, or cursing, strumming his guitar in the lone, blue evening, or blowing in fury and ecstasy his golden horn at night, who had not been made to bend his head and drink white men's muddy water; no man whose manhood had not been, at the root, sickened, whose loins had not been dishonored, whose seed had not been scattered into oblivion and worse than oblivion, into living shame and rage, and into endless battle.†   (source)
  • Sorrow, standing for many hours on end, lack of sleep, the deep-toned singing and the dazzling candles by night and day as well as the cold he had caught, filled Yura's soul with a sweet confusion, a fever of grief and ecstasy.†   (source)
  • And the awful fact of the matter is that although what might in a clinical sense be termed full penetration had been achieved, I was utterly denied the terminal ecstasy I had so often rehearsed manually since age fourteen.†   (source)
  • There could be no night and day and love and despair and longing and satisfaction to make partitions in the single ecstasy of this alternation.†   (source)
  • I was able to extend the ecstasy a long time with Maria; we were still going at it like minks when my father with a primitive strangled sound aborted a snore, sprang up in his bed, then padded off to the bathroom.†   (source)
  • In the ecstasy of knowing the end of it ahead of time, Blackstone flew out in the open and sang it like a bird, and beat his pants.†   (source)
  • Kate's would rip the nerves to a sinful ecstasy and leave a man shaken and weak and frightened at himself.†   (source)
  • At the Montenegro the family lived in Room 23: Room 24, ever since the Montenegro had been founded, had been occupied by the cellist Tyshkevich, a bald, sweaty, kindly man in a wig who joined his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was trying to be persuasive, and who threw back his head and rolled his eyes in ecstasy when he played at fashionable parties and concert halls.†   (source)
  • And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.†   (source)
  • No, against all dictates of conscience and the Calvinist work ethic, and despite ,the fact that I was far from tired, I lay flat on my back in bed, immobilized like one near prostration, bemused in the realization that the fever which I had run for these recent days had caused my muscles to twitch, and that one could actually be taken ill, perhaps seriously so, with venereal ecstasy.†   (source)
  • But once inside, she took one step and was into a whole new ecstasy, an ecstasy of cleaning, to wash the river out.†   (source)
  • the circle of following children, their downcast looks of ecstasy, and for the cold imploring hand of the little monkey.†   (source)
  • "ecstasy," even "God."†   (source)
  • But the record had been on the top of the stack, and I could not help making this instinctive conjecture as I replaced it, assuming that in their final anguish—or ecstasy, or whatever engulfing revelation may have united them just before the darkness—the sound they heard was Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.†   (source)
  • In the cup of her hand, in her filling skin, in the fingers' bursting weight and stillness, Nina felt it: compassion and a kind of competing that were all one, a single ecstasy, a single longing.†   (source)
  • He wept, and Old Man McCaleb first felled the excited dog with the blunt end of his axe, and then he turned a fierce face toward him and lifted the blade in the air, in a kind of ecstasy of protecting the silence they were keeping.†   (source)
  • The doll's real eyelashes touched her cheek and she trembled in ecstasy.†   (source)
  • HOPE—(looks around him in an ecstasy of bleery sentimental content) Bejees, I'm cockeyed!†   (source)
  • "Gold, my lad," he answered with a certain ecstasy.†   (source)
  • Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings.†   (source)
  • This little Dorabella Feingold would smell up until her pants showed and turn her eyes with ecstasy.†   (source)
  • It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind.†   (source)
  • For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air.†   (source)
  • I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy.†   (source)
  • I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture.†   (source)
  • And he felt somehow that it gave a reason, a goal of profit, to his wild ecstasy.†   (source)
  • (He leaned against the bannister in an ecstasy of hope) Nobody knows†   (source)
  • But, stronger than shame, was the memory of rapture, of the ecstasy of surrender.†   (source)
  • He was wild with ecstasy because the Spring had beaten death.†   (source)
  • The big assembly room had about it the odor of completion, of sharp nervous ecstasy.†   (source)
  • He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known.†   (source)
  • Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy.†   (source)
  • He heard the wild tongueless cries of desire, the inchoate ecstasy that knows no gateway of release.†   (source)
  • —Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and passion.†   (source)
  • The boy's body might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion.†   (source)
  • In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement.†   (source)
  • "Music!" concluded the necromancer in ecstasy, unable to make the smallest beginnings of an imitation.†   (source)
  • And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: "There must be more money!†   (source)
  • (Has turned excitedly on hearing her mother's voice, and now hurries behind her to up R. of her) (In ecstasy) Mama, I'm here†   (source)
  • The screaming of her name was itself sheer, stark ecstasy, but all bliss was outplumbed in the clasping of her neck.†   (source)
  • It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.†   (source)
  • There would be times when he would almost moan when he talked to them, a kind of hymnal chant, a religious ecstasy, that came from some deep intoxication of the spirit, and that transported him.†   (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus:

show 3 examples with meaning too rare to warrant focus
  • And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.   (source)
    ecstasy = a state of intense absorption that transcends normal consciousness
  • There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.   (source)
  • This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.   (source)
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