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crucial
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  • My grandparents knew that I was at a crucial juncture in my life. These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys; within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possible irrevocable turn.   (source)
  • This particular elimination was crucial for us to understand, because it was the first one that was isolated and not caused by rule breaking.   (source)
  • It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.   (source)
  • In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition.   (source)
  • What did my mother do at this crucial moment?†   (source)
  • MARGOT SAYS THAT JUNIOR YEAR IS THE most important year, the busiest year, a year so crucial that everything else in life hinges upon it.†   (source)
  • Were he to venture his own opinion now, he would almost certainly be revealed as a poseur, as one who was inadequately informed on the crucial issues of the day.†   (source)
  • There was a crucial difference: The subject of the monster's ire wasn't me but my dog, Casper, with whom I'd lost my temper earlier in the night.†   (source)
  • Sophie, this is crucial.†   (source)
  • 'I don't know where you learned about right and wrong, Mundungus, but you seem to have missed a few crucial lessons,' said Mrs Weasley coldly.†   (source)
  • For another, those who have passed have not done so at the same time, and this, you see, is crucial.†   (source)
  • A crucial test would be the presence, or absence, of gunshot powder on Hansford's hands.†   (source)
  • I asked him; he said he'd been helping his father, who had fallen behind on a few crucial orders.†   (source)
  • At other times, at a crucial moment, I make it easier for things to happen.†   (source)
  • I believe that economic incentive is crucial as a motivator, especially in a consumer-driven society.†   (source)
  • This is a crucial moment for you!†   (source)
  • The crucial lines now read: "You'd be forgiven for thinking me mad—wandering into your house barefoot, or snapping your antique vase.†   (source)
  • My hope is to provide counseling and housing for families and victims of abductions and exploitations during the crucial early days of reconnection.†   (source)
  • It was almost perfect, minus one crucial detail.†   (source)
  • These are the most crucial months.†   (source)
  • Of course she was going to take that into account when she made her decision, that crucial decision that would determine her whole future.†   (source)
  • It was a crucial misunderstanding, upon which the fate of the plane would ultimately rest.†   (source)
  • This was a crucial drive, for the team and for me.†   (source)
  • For Gey, the rotation was crucial: he believed that culture medium needed to be in constant motion, like blood and fluids in the body, which flow around cells, transporting waste and nutrients.†   (source)
  • It is of vital importance that conservators and curators be allowed into the crucial areas to assess the damage as soon as possible —†   (source)
  • "Johan muttered—but he begged his "valiant countrymen" to see that cooperation was the only way forward at this crucial period of their history.†   (source)
  • From here on timing was crucial if the illusion was to be effective.†   (source)
  • I found people who had helped Enrique and saw towns or crucial spots he had passed through or spent time in along the way.†   (source)
  • He had been roadblocked on the crucial scene between Denker, the sadistic headmaster, and Gary Benson, his young hero, during the last unhappy six months at Stovington, months when the craving for a drink had been so bad that he could barely concentrate on his in-class lectures, let alone his extracurricular literary ambitions.†   (source)
  • FAUBUS, U.S. GOVERNMENT HEAD INTO CRUCIAL COLLISION IN FEDERAL COURT TODAY —Arkansas Gazette, Friday, September 20, 1957†   (source)
  • She is the most dramatic member of the family, and the worst actress, which in our family is a crucial skill.†   (source)
  • Or had she given him any crucial information?†   (source)
  • He unleashed the full, devastating power of his eyes on me, as if trying to communicate something crucial.†   (source)
  • I'd forgotten my cheerleading sweater again, just as I was always forgetting something crucial-regulation socks, matching ponytail holders, pom-poms.†   (source)
  • But it was crucial to choose the right kind of boat.†   (source)
  • Early in the novel, Jim's courage has failed him at a crucial moment.†   (source)
  • Now she was part of the forty most crucial minds at the company—the Gang of 40—privy to its most secret plans and data.†   (source)
  • There were several steps involved, the most crucial being to heat the final compound to exactly the right temperature.†   (source)
  • McDonaldland — with its hamburger patch, apple pie trees, and Filet-O-Fish fountain — had one crucial thing in common with Disneyland.†   (source)
  • Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills?†   (source)
  • It was crucial for him to know whether the Paravan had any political support or whether he was operating alone.†   (source)
  • It was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has new standards by which to judge oneself.†   (source)
  • Each day, I ride my bike around my neighborhood, getting exercise crucial for my health.†   (source)
  • Their execution of the first hundred innocent citizens of Warsaw in December 1939 was a crucial turning point.†   (source)
  • If I were Johanna, I would snap at him for a comment like that, but she says kindly, "My faction depends on me to advise them, and if you know information this crucial, it is important that I know it also so that I can share it with them.†   (source)
  • The first forty-eight hours were crucial.†   (source)
  • When he began, he was prepared to subject his patience to a crucial test, at least until he had proof that he was wasting his time with the only new approach he could think of.†   (source)
  • Luke's unit was responsible for crucial repairs, but he'd only been a junior member of the team when they were dating last year.†   (source)
  • Now came the crucial test: date palms, cotton, melons, coffee, medicinals — more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt.†   (source)
  • He hoped that the elements would not divert the jurors from the crucial and difficult matters at hand.†   (source)
  • Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy seemed crucial to me.†   (source)
  • I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations.†   (source)
  • I never was good at understanding that difference so crucial to my sister.†   (source)
  • It's where all the information about health and a lot of the complaints go, and it performs some crucial functions well, such as the collection and dissemination of worldwide epidemiological data.†   (source)
  • But it was significant in a crucial way.†   (source)
  • I have another fight in mind for you—one last, crucial fight.†   (source)
  • At one of the most crucial points in her life, she didn't have a chance to establish a firm self.†   (source)
  • Because when she died of murder on their wedding night, it was crucial that all Florin realize the depth of his love, the epochal size of his loss, since then no one would dare hesitate to follow him in the revenge war he was to launch against Guilder.†   (source)
  • It's crucial, then, that you master this skill as soon as we return.†   (source)
  • For Dewey and Duntz, patient professionals, had gradually narrowed the prisoner's life story to the events of the last seven weeks, then reduced those to a concentrated recapitulation of the crucial week-end-Saturday noon to Sunday noon, November 14 to 15.†   (source)
  • Disasters in my house are about as pretty as a car wreck, so avoiding them is crucial.†   (source)
  • This was a crucial occasion, more important than any of our previous visitors.†   (source)
  • That was a crucial question.†   (source)
  • He knew he had made a crucial error, the kind that could put the very existence of his team in jeopardy.†   (source)
  • The snow had fallen and he'd stood in that silence, all alone, and in one crucial moment he'd altered everything.†   (source)
  • That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer.†   (source)
  • Or was he seeing me as the kid who used to strike out in the Little League games, although I did hit a triple once in a crucial game and scored two runs and heard for the first (and only) time the cheers of a crowd?†   (source)
  • The really crucial thing, of course, is the recall of their other missile boats.†   (source)
  • He was grateful to Deets for having fixed a little rawhide string onto his so that he had been spared the embarrassment of losing it at crucial times.†   (source)
  • In 2001 the World Bank produced an influential study, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, arguing that promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty.†   (source)
  • Leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.†   (source)
  • Speed sometimes is crucial.†   (source)
  • Body position upon exit is crucial.†   (source)
  • Chairman Mao's communist theory about the so-called "three classes of people" was crucial when selecting us.†   (source)
  • Uttering "Nash," "Plymouth," "Chevrolet," or "Dodge" at a crucial moment could make the difference between life and death.†   (source)
  • In the days since the conflict, dragons soaring high in the skies above were not an uncommon sight—but neither were they seen in the numbers that had appeared at that crucial moment during the battle.†   (source)
  • Woman to woman now, I said, "I need to ask you a crucial question, Ms.†   (source)
  • Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners.†   (source)
  • No one understands that this is the crucial moment for a show of academic force, a display of pure will.†   (source)
  • Glyphs are crucial to vampire society, to our way of life.†   (source)
  • Could she be coming down with something on this most crucial day of her life?†   (source)
  • I mean, some of us have got crucial things we need to be doing.†   (source)
  • Such a crucial gap in the history, especially that of a short life, calls attention to itself.†   (source)
  • Pain jarred up his spine, and he realized with surprise that somehow, without any volition of his own, his legs had moved him forward that last crucial step.†   (source)
  • But were they the crucial ones?†   (source)
  • Speed would be crucial.†   (source)
  • Any information might prove crucial when the moment arrived.†   (source)
  • The Vector Three was a report that considered a crucial question: If a bacterium invaded the earth, causing a new disease, where would that bacterium come from?†   (source)
  • On the third and crucial night of Monday, March 4, the roar of the guns from both sides became more furious by far.†   (source)
  • There were circumstances under which kills had to be made quietly-utter silence was the unreachable goal, but at least minimal noise was crucial.†   (source)
  • Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter's decline, Annie had no idea.†   (source)
  • With a realm to rule, a war to fight, and a father to mourn, somehow I overlooked the crucial matter of naming a new master-at-arms.†   (source)
  • I seemed to arrive at a crucial time.†   (source)
  • I do not believe we should have to leave out the crucial elements of our language and culture to contribute to American literature, but, unfortunately, this is a conclusion I am forced to reach.†   (source)
  • That experience was amazing, a crucial step helping prepare me for the difficult task of talking about God with people I meet—something I would do later in life.†   (source)
  • And here at home, the power of the Mafia crime syndicates and the divisiveness of the civil rights movement are two crucial situations requiring immediate attention.†   (source)
  • It looks like a dashed line across the water with a few crucial chunks missing from the middle.†   (source)
  • He did not think of what it was that must not stop him, or why this sentence was such a crucial absolute.†   (source)
  • It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity.†   (source)
  • On the contrary, keeping these targets alive was crucial.†   (source)
  • To turn in a friend, a classmate, a roommate, or an upperclassman for an honor violation is the most demanding and crucial part of the code.†   (source)
  • If we got split up, these would be crucial.†   (source)
  • Gambling was so crucial to the economy of certain households that semi-respectable women slept with jockeys to get closer to "the horse's mouth."†   (source)
  • Baldwin had scored a crucial point.†   (source)
  • Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work.†   (source)
  • Inconsistencies began to arise in crucial details, all of which I inexplicably confused and alternated.†   (source)
  • And he said, once again, how much he regretted that whole thing with Belinda, but did I know that I played a crucial part in keeping him from proceeding any further in his relationship with her?†   (source)
  • The mid 1850s saw the invention of something much more crucial and useful to humankind: the crinoline, or hooped petticoat.†   (source)
  • This would cause a bottleneck as organization grew and Adam Selene was phoned oftener, and could be crucial if we lasted long enough to go into action.†   (source)
  • That was the crucial thing: Means could always be found.†   (source)
  • The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.†   (source)
  • Finally, the Admiral asked the crucial question—would Rita cooperate?†   (source)
  • But it contained one or two significant falsehoods, along with some crucial lacunae, as will eventually be made clear.†   (source)
  • Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.†   (source)
  • But we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.†   (source)
  • I didn't want to sound like a dunce or a withholder of crucial information, but I had to tell him, for my sake as well as his own, when I realized what her statements implied.†   (source)
  • Before taking a crucial step, he said, he wanted to advise me that working for the Curtis Publishing Company placed enormous responsibility on a young man.†   (source)
  • Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this Nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.†   (source)
  • That's the crucial point, and you haven't told us.†   (source)
  • The Republicans insisted that Ross's crucial vote was rightfully theirs, and they were determined to get it by whatever means available.†   (source)
  • All this Powell had planned in preparation for one crucial moment that was to come later.†   (source)
  • It was noticed that they were especially liable to break into 'Four legs good, two legs bad' at crucial moments in Snowball's speeches.   (source)
    crucial = important
  • We were on time, as was crucial to the culture, and the girls were already a mess.†   (source)
  • But deciding not to run away is a crucial first step.†   (source)
  • The canoe was good, the silence was crucial.†   (source)
  • "It is an act that is crucial to success, Draco!" said Snape.†   (source)
  • Despite the unexpected way in which it had happened, the crucial pieces were falling into place.†   (source)
  • Good God, man, something very crucial is going on in this house.†   (source)
  • It was crucial that Dell look professional, which was one of the hardest things for him to do.†   (source)
  • I can be whatever I want, and that's crucial to me now.†   (source)
  • Again I felt as if I had forgotten something crucial.†   (source)
  • That's when those who can help you recalibrate yourself become absolutely crucial.†   (source)
  • I didn't because I'm no artist and it's so crucial that the pictures are drawn in exact detail.†   (source)
  • I prayed that none of the fasteners we'd shaken loose had secured anything crucial.†   (source)
  • The missing memory, of course: those few crucial hours.†   (source)
  • Not unimportant, but not the most crucial of targets, and yet look.†   (source)
  • 'No!' said Harry furiously; it was crucial that Ron understand.†   (source)
  • All his speeches were crucial, now; he was approaching the brass ring.†   (source)
  • I like the magazine and I think we can make it stronger together, but you're crucial to that task.†   (source)
  • Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?†   (source)
  • You've been chosen because your opinions are crucial to us, and to our clients.†   (source)
  • "What we do isn't easy," he'd told his son, "but it's crucial.†   (source)
  • The crucial part of Greenberg's reform, however, is what he didn't do.†   (source)
  • Linda came to accept my climbing: she saw that it was a crucial (if perplexing) part of who I was.†   (source)
  • They left, satisfied that they had gotten the most crucial thing, the driver's license.†   (source)
  • In one crucial respect meatpacking work has changed little in the past hundred years.†   (source)
  • He felt he'd disappointed her, he'd failed her in some crucial way.†   (source)
  • Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith.†   (source)
  • 5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the crucial gas available without hesitation.†   (source)
  • Leveraging your credibility to spur action—this is crucial, okay?†   (source)
  • They knew they couldn't be the only crucial influences in my life.†   (source)
  • We must be moving closer to crucial targets, because the number of pods has noticeably increased.†   (source)
  • Working in groups was crucial in my classes, and friction between students was unavoidable.†   (source)
  • "Oh, and it's crucial that all company devices are password protected, so I gave you one.†   (source)
  • For years, I've told my students about this experience because it's a crucial lesson.†   (source)
  • Erika had always been a crucial part of Millennium.†   (source)
  • He held up the small backpack that we'd filled with a few crucial supplies from Anne's house.†   (source)
  • The crucial conversation with Ian might never have taken place if not for Jamie.†   (source)
  • Your chain was a clever stroke, and crucial to our victory.†   (source)
  • "It's crucial we stay together," she said.†   (source)
  • "That doesn't answer the crucial question!†   (source)
  • He had a feeling that he had missed a beat somewhere, had missed a crucial moment.†   (source)
  • Wherever they met, secrecy was their most crucial weapon.†   (source)
  • "Now this is crucial, Bella," Jacob stressed.†   (source)
  • Marian believed this is the crucial thing you have to consider when making a person feel at home.†   (source)
  • During that first crucial moment, Bannerman didn't even hear Cujo's low, rising growl.†   (source)
  • Sports are crucial to student development,' Mr. Thackray said.†   (source)
  • Composure and propriety are crucial for any effective fighting force.†   (source)
  • I think the most crucial thing she did—admittedly without meaning to—was confess.†   (source)
  • But the crucial factor for Zainab's family was that both parents were close to Saddam Hussein.†   (source)
  • No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart.†   (source)
  • Do you think I'll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues?†   (source)
  • It's crucial that you do well on your SATs and are focused on your classes.†   (source)
  • And yet, I was surprised, even disappointed, that at that crucial moment'You understand, right?†   (source)
  • "You have touched the crucial spot," Artkin said.†   (source)
  • Then why would they be entrusted with such a crucial mission?†   (source)
  • Glover's men proved as crucial as the change in the wind.†   (source)
  • But our room had to be different because of the simple yet crucial fact that Pig was poor.†   (source)
  • However, the gases in which the plates were incubated were crucial, as was the light.†   (source)
  • The first issue to arise was in many ways the most crucial, and that was the armed struggle.†   (source)
  • I also think I know why, but I'm missing some crucial pieces of information.†   (source)
  • Despite the crucial absence of armor to cover the charging boys, he could afford to wait no longer.†   (source)
  • At a time when it is crucial to be on the move, Lee chooses to remain in place.†   (source)
  • So they could get the chain reaction that's crucial to the whole operation.†   (source)
  • At 12:29 the motorcade makes the crucial sharp right-hand turn onto Houston Street.†   (source)
  • One of the most crucial functions in a democratic state.†   (source)
  • This was crucial because the next game was at South Carolina, and it was tough, as always.†   (source)
  • It was crucial that she stay calm for our sakes, she told herself.†   (source)
  • On the crucial day, Adam came in at under seventy-five minutes.†   (source)
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