All 11 Uses of
conceive
in
The Scarlet Letter
- It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him.†
p. 132.8 *inconceivable = totally unlikely or impossible to understandstandard prefix: The prefix "in-" in inconceivable means not and reverses the meaning of conceivable. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
- Looking at him merely as an animal—and there was very little else to look at—he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at or conceived of.†
p. 18.2
- It might be difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of age.†
p. 19.1
- His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail.†
p. 21.8
- —I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter smile.†
p. 59.3
- And, I conceive moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of, will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.†
p. 121.9
- And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?†
p. 206.4
- Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph.†
p. 212.1
- "Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the old lady confidentially to Hester.†
p. 224.9
- A loud or low expression of anguish—the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom!†
p. 226.9 *
- Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people.†
p. 229.6
Definitions:
-
(1)
(conceive as in: conceive the idea) to originate, understand, or imagine
-
(2)
(conceive as in: conceived their first child) become pregnant or fertilize an egg