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detritus
in a sentence

show 34 more with this conextual meaning
  • I shielded my eyes from the shafts of sunlight and began picking my way over the detritus where the altar railing had once stood.†   (source)
  • His river carries the detritus of a dying civilization and features, among other things, a rat trailing along the bank; the river is slimy, dirty, its famous bridge falling down (in nursery rhyme form), abandoned by its nymphs.†   (source)
  • The water was filthy now, streaked with oil and spotted with detritus.†   (source)
  • Her last name is listed now as Kouris, but I recognize in the old woman's face a familiar bright-eyed grin, and more than detritus of her youthful beauty.†   (source)
  • He looked around the table at the detritus of Alex's awful dinner and started clearing the untouched plates.†   (source)
  • She couldn't figure out what to do, and in the end she'd simply gone back inside and gotten ready for work, sliding the letter into the top desk drawer with the detritus of rubber bands and paper clips, waiting for Al to get home and help her gain perspective.†   (source)
  • Flecks of moss, dirt, and other bits of detritus floated inside the orb.†   (source)
  • The hide, head, and other detritus were bagged and left for the trash man.†   (source)
  • He now wore a photographer's vest over his simple shalwar kamiz, with pockets enough to accommodate the detritus that swirled nowadays around the frenzied director of the Central Asia Institute.†   (source)
  • "It's more like good intentions buried in the detritus of daily life.†   (source)
  • Churchill, Truman, and their aides conferred discreetly on one further, just-emerging alternative: the one whose detritus still floated in the high winds above the testing ground at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico, where it had fissioned into human history only days earlier, at five-thirty A.M., on July 16.†   (source)
  • Jefferson was the type of school that had sprouted from the urban landscape in the past few decades like a flower, nourished by the rich decay and detritus all around.†   (source)
  • But there was no television, no stack of DVDs or CDs, the sort of detritus Simon associated with modern living rooms.†   (source)
  • He stood up to poke at the papers at the back of the desk, but the medical detritus took up too much space for there to be any room for sorting.†   (source)
  • If I see him at all it is the picture of him silently whittling down fruit-wood dowels into the most refined sets of chopsticks, the used-up squares of finishing sandpaper petaling about his desk amid the other detritus of peanut shells and wood shavings and peels of tangerine, the skins of everything he touches compulsively mined, stripsearched.†   (source)
  • The roads of central Virginia are now littered with the detritus of Lee's retreating army: guns, blankets, broken wagons, artillery limbers, dead horses, and dead men.†   (source)
  • getting rid of her life's detritus
  • The thing's jointless legs seemed to be swatting at the paper and other detritus whirling around it.†   (source)
  • There was detritus all over the floors—garbage, papers, bandages and other medical supplies.†   (source)
  • Would be nice to so easily get rid of all of life's varied detritus.†   (source)
  • Now the fire was mutating, forming a gigantic pack of fiery beasts: Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again, and the detritus of centuries on which they were feeding was thrown up into the air into their fanged mouths, tossed high on clawed feet, before being con-sumed by the inferno.†   (source)
  • After clearing the frozen detritus from Beck's face, Hutchison discovered that the Texan was still alive, too: "Beck was mumbling something, I think, but I couldn't tell what he was trying to say.†   (source)
  • On February 24, seven and a half months after he abandoned the Datsun, McCandless returned to Detrital Wash.†   (source)
  • Two days after McCandless set up camp beside Lake Mead, an unusually robust wall of thunderheads reared up in the afternoon sky, and it began to rain, very hard, over much of the Detrital Valley.†   (source)
  • Every chair was filled, every table occupied, mostly by men, and the floors were littered with packs, weapons, bedrolls, antiquated comm equipment, ration boxes, and all of the other detritus of an army of refugees… or perhaps a refugee army.†   (source)
  • They turned off Temple Bar Road, drove two roadless miles down the bed of Detrital Wash, parked their rigs near the lakeshore, and started scrambling up the steep east bank of the wash, a slope of crumbly white gypsum.†   (source)
  • DETRITAL WASH†   (source)
  • The cab of this truck was comparatively clean, the only detritus a stack of papers on the passenger seat.†   (source)
  • Evidence of the dragons' habitation was visible everywhere, from deep scratches in the basalt to puddles of melted rock to a number of dull, colorless scales caught in nooks, along with other detritus.†   (source)
  • It was a sound like the tide crashing up the shore, the breaking of an enormous wave, carrying massive detritus with it, the smashed bones of whole cities, the onrush of a great and evil power.†   (source)
  • For a bewildered moment she thought it had started to rain—then she realized it was rubble and dirt and broken glass: the detritus of the shattered manor being flung down around them like deadly hail.†   (source)
  • It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs.†   (source)
  • There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital.†   (source)
  • Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum.†   (source)
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