invocation

in a sentence

When I chuckled at the older woman's invocation of the parable, she laughed, too.  (source) Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, 2014

They must perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly believe that Oryx appears to them in person.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

KHALA: traditional invocation to still the angry spirits of a place whose name you mention.  (source) Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

It amused him that he had to come to Ethiopia to learn exactly what it was: an invocation and a wake-up call for Lord Venkateswara.  (source) Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone, 2009

Immediately after collection, Maycomb Methodists sang what they called the Doxology in lieu of the minister praying over the collection plate to spare him the rigors involved in inventing yet another prayer, since by that time he had uttered three healthy invocations.  (source) Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, 2015

The affiance of the Soul-Sword is seraphic—like those angel knives you Shadowhunters use, but a thousand times more so, because its power was drawn from the Angel himself, not simply from the invocation of an angelic name.  (source) Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes, 2008

Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws-riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public-knock-kneed, droopstockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.†  (source) Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966

On one occasion, blue smoke poured from the lectern during the invocation, and there was fear that it was a bomb.  (source) Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Kennedy, 2012

The DRUMMER intones under the PRAISE-SINGER'S invocations.†  (source) Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman, 1975

But to think that the invocation of empirical studies on a subject frees one from the job of finding out what the great instinctive psychologists have said about that subject before you got to it is just misguided.  (source) Adam Gopnik, Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories?, 2012

She had grown tired of the strict religious routine of Granny's home; of the half dozen or more daily family prayers that Granny insisted upon; her fiat that the day began at sunrise and that night commenced at sundown; the long, rambling Bible readings; the individual invocations muttered at each meal; and her declaration that Saturday was the Lord's Sabbath and that no one who lived in her house could work upon that day.†  (source) Richard Wright, Black Boy, 1945

The only response the other two magicians evinced at the death of their companion was to increase the speed of their invocation.  (source) Christopher Paolini, Brisingr, 2008

For the first two or three days many stayed outside, under the palms and pomegranate trees in the garden in front of the porch, and listened from a distance to the swelling tide of prayers and invocations whose backwash filled the neighboring streets.†  (source) Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947