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piquant
in a sentence

show 51 more with this conextual meaning
  • Besides, here is a piquant FRICANDEAU and a fillet of beef.†   (source)
  • Often a drop of irony into an indifferent situation renders the whole piquant.†   (source)
  • How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple piquancy.†   (source)
  • These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and piquant that they were soon taken.†   (source)
  • They may be piquant enough at times.†   (source)
  • On his way home from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the more piquant.†   (source)
  • Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the gossips away from this four-year-old drama.†   (source)
  • Schwartz's face with his Piccadilly whiskers, and his slim figure in evening dress, had as usual an air of elegant solemnity which contrasted with the playfulness of his character and had a special piquancy here, or so it seemed to Peter Ivanovich.†   (source)
  • Sir Andrew had been dreaming evidently, gazing into the fire, and seeing therein, no doubt, a pretty, piquant face, with large brown eyes and a wealth of dark curls round a childish forehead.†   (source)
  • The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo.†   (source)
  • Clyde noted that a small, dark girl dressed in pink with a pretty and yet saucy and piquant face, nodded to him.†   (source)
  • They were pretty in the main, some even handsome, with an air of independence and indifference which added, in the case of the more favored, a certain piquancy.†   (source)
  • The enmity of our parents gave a piquancy to you in my eyes that was intenser even than the novelty of ordinary new acquaintance.†   (source)
  • There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts, and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.†   (source)
  • Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would go on.†   (source)
  • He had quitted the party early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke, whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the piquancy of an unusual combination.†   (source)
  • Rebecca used to mimic her to her face with the most admirable gravity, thereby rendering the imitation doubly piquant to her worthy patroness.†   (source)
  • 'That's just what gives it piquancy.†   (source)
  • His well-known haughty indifference to the society of womankind, his silent avoidance of converse with the sex, contributed a piquancy to what would otherwise have been an unromantic matter enough.†   (source)
  • So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.†   (source)
  • What gave the marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement, and this greatly captivated Adelaida Ivanovna's fancy.†   (source)
  • But if Maggie had been the queen of coquettes she could hardly have invented a means of giving greater piquancy to her beauty in Stephen's eyes; I am not sure that the quiet admission of plain sewing and poverty would have done alone, but assisted by the beauty, they made Maggie more unlike other women even than she had seemed at first.†   (source)
  • This kind of unflinching frankness was the most piquant form of joke to the company at the Rainbow, and Ben Winthrop's insult was felt by everybody to have capped Mr. Macey's epigram.†   (source)
  • Although nothing had been consulted but strength and security, the rude, massive logs, covered with their rough bark, the projecting roof, and the form, would contribute to render the building picturesque in almost any situation, while its actual position added novelty and piquancy to its other points of interest.†   (source)
  • Then they began to pass around the dusky, piquant, Arlesian sausages, and lobsters in their dazzling red cuirasses, prawns of large size and brilliant color, the echinus with its prickly outside and dainty morsel within, the clovis, esteemed by the epicures of the South as more than rivalling the exquisite flavor of the oyster,—all the delicacies, in fact, that are cast up by the wash of waters on the sandy beach, and styled by the grateful fishermen "fruits of the sea."†   (source)
  • There was something so piquant and original in these elucidations of humanity, that Mr. Shelby could not help laughing in company.†   (source)
  • There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm--much of what has been since seen in "Hernani."†   (source)
  • The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner.†   (source)
  • The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the chemist went on— "It's like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one piquant detail, matters really libidinous!"†   (source)
  • Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers, so animating and piquant, as well as soft: it cheers my withered heart; it puts life into it.†   (source)
  • "What is it?" said Rosa, a bright, piquant little quadroon who came skipping down stairs at this moment.†   (source)
  • …been harder than mine, your temptation greater; let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling,"—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust; would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking, that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love…†   (source)
  • In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with…†   (source)
  • The sense that he was watched, that craft was employed to circumvent his errant tastes, added piquancy to a journey so entirely sentimental, so long as the danger was of no fearful sort.†   (source)
  • At first, she felt offended; then she saw the injustice of making the self-abasement and modesty of the hunter a charge against him, and this novel difficulty gave a piquancy to the state of affairs that rather increased her interest in the young man.†   (source)
  • The tempting prospect of putting to the blush people who stand at the head of affairs—that supreme and piquant enjoyment of those who writhe under the heel of the same—had alone animated them, so far as he could see; for he knew nothing of Jopp's incitements.†   (source)
  • Of her daughters, the eldest, Amy, was rather little: naive, and child-like in face and manner, and piquant in form; her white muslin dress and blue sash became her well.†   (source)
  • But Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was among them, sprang forward and declared that it was by no means impossible, and that, indeed, there was a certain piquancy about it, and so on….†   (source)
  • "You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.†   (source)
  • I made it up to add piquancy.†   (source)
  • The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have found in it.†   (source)
  • I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade — the sweet charm of freshness would leave it.†   (source)
  • Neither did her face—with the brown ringlets on either side, and the slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April sun and breeze—precisely give us a right to call her beautiful.†   (source)
  • Is she piquant?†   (source)
  • Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested.†   (source)
  • All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones.†   (source)
  • —Let him! she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of her nose.†   (source)
  • The young American, like the youngster of any other race, inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its high disdain of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the antithesis of the hard and stiff speech that is expounded out of books.†   (source)
  • Now and then, as in the case of /Purgatoire/, it has temporarily departed from this policy, but in the main its influence has been thrown against the fine old French and Spanish names, and against the [Pg296] more piquant native names no less.†   (source)
  • My dear Kitty told me today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy butterflies), dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in our hearts and it has become a household word that il y a deux choses for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a breach of the proprieties, is the…†   (source)
  • But when its inventions happen to strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are soon worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and, in Whitney's words, become "incapable of expressing anything that is real.†   (source)
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