The Lovely Bones

1 use

What I finally realized were affectations—the smoking jacket that he sometimes wore to school and his foreign cigarettes, which were actually his mother's—I thought were evidence of his higher breeding.

2 uses

Occasionally one of the tour guides or teachers would notice him standing there, unfamiliar even if amiable, and he would be met with a questioning stare.

1 use

My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot not far from where I'd been killed. My father, sister, and brother heard the singing again once they were outside.

1 use

"... I'm sorry for your loss."
  I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together, and couldn't believe his audacity.

2 uses

They don't know whether his weirdness is benign or not.

2 uses

To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd.

1 use

Many of the women in the neighborhood commented on how well she kept herself and some had asked her if she would mind showing them how, though she had always taken these entreaties merely as their way of making conversation with their lone foreign-born neighbor.

2 meanings, 27 uses

2 uses

... the bright lights made her think only of all the futile efforts that hospitals contained to keep people awake for more bad news—the weak coffee, the hard chairs, the elevators that stopped on every floor...

1 use

1 use

If you saw it from a distance, the sinkhole seemed innocuous—like an overgrown mud puddle just starting to dry out.

1 use

The place radiated something malevolent.

1 use

She made a meticulous list of what I'd carried and worn.

1 use

2 uses

... the story of my death began to travel through the halls of the school, receiving add-on nuances as all good horror stories do.

2 uses

She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.

1 use

They searched the house perfunctorily and found nothing except both the evidence of what they took to be extreme loneliness and a room full of beautiful dollhouses on the second floor, where they switched topics and asked him how long he had been building them.

1 use

An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.

2 uses

He sat in his car and prepared the last vestiges of the face he had been giving authorities for decades—the face of a bland man they might pity or despise but never blame.