The Sunlight Dialogues

4 uses

Very abstract, abstruse, or subtle: often used derogatorily of reasoning.†

3 uses

He had a mincing way of talking, a thin, reedy voice that sounded like an affectation.†

1 use

But when he spoke again his voice partly allayed her fears.†

7 uses

You cognizant of that?†

1 use

No light showed but the incorporeal glow of television sets.†

1 use

I tell you you're doomed, defunct, cold dead, and you go right on thinking what you'll do when you get out, wondering how you can get our friend here to let you in on his professional secrets.†

1 use

Very abstract, abstruse, or subtle: often used derogatorily of reasoning.†

1 use

Point is, my father's theory is not as comforting as it used to be, not that I disavow it.†

1 use

A place for doleful creatures, a dance of satyrs.†

1 use

A car horn has a nightmarish kind of effrontery, or a birdsong.†

1 use

He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge.†

1 use

All that had gone into fiber before had drawn inward, leaving flaccidity outside, solid granite at the core.†

1 use

1 use

A terrible thought, that after God's withdrawal into silence the ancient mechanisms which made prophets arise should continue working, like machines left on in an abandoned factory: so that bearded wild men strode forth as before, howling, to any who would hear, their inarticulate warning.†

1 use

? was a merely systematic evil in which the participating doctors had no part, I set down in cold print, with facts and figures, the inhuman collusion of doctors and hospital administrations—the kind of collusion which results in thousands of deaths per week throughout this country: Negroes left to die in hospital waitingrooms, indigents not admitted or inadequately treated, outpatient cases not followed up because of bills unpaid at discharge.†

2 uses

The sky god was misanthropic, his brother had said, and the underworld god was totally indifferent to man.†

2 uses

To think that a man's opinions were wrong was for him no more to think less of the man than to think that a tree planted in the wrong place was wicked and pernicious.†

2 uses

Painters and musicians have a marked aesthetic proclivity.†

1 use

At last they were all shouting, their eyes resonant in the wet, stonewalled room.†

2 uses

There stood the whole family—three, four generations—the living testimonial to the man's having been; all dressed in their finest and at peace with one another; and there stood his business acquaintances and his friends from the church, the schoolboard he'd once been a member of, all quarrels forgotten; and there stood his friends from the Dairyman's League or Kiwanis or the Owls or the Masons.†