All 50 Uses of

approach

in

Underworld, by DeLillo

And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability.

approach = get near

The planes come sparking out of the mountains to the south, glinting in the haze as they approach in a long line to make their landings, and I see the open-steel truss of the waste facility at the end of the road.
*

Men passing in and out of the toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark's reek and mold are consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through a life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men's room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing.†

He approaches second in a burst of coattails and limbs and untied shoelaces and swinging belt.†

And an approaching object that made me think of a hundred movies in which something comes across the wavy plain, a horseman with scabbarded rifle or a lone cameleer hunched in muslin on his dumb-headed beast, This thing was different, raising twin kicks of sand, coming at a nice clip.†

I stood and watched, trying to generate the will to make an approach.†

Can you approach her now?†

And that's what we did, approaching at an altitude of four hundred feet.†

The Rapture is approaching.†

The car approaches briefly, then falls back.†

Random energies that approach a common point.†

It approaches briefly, then falls back.†

Then he made a left turn out of the howl of highly motivated traffic and into residential streets, beginning to relax at last, approaching the circle on Kennedy Drive, another dead president.†

He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza—only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads.†

The car approaches briefly, then falls back.†

It approaches briefly, then falls back.†

He knocked on the metal sheath that covered the door and heard Mercedes approach in her slappy shoes.†

When the van approached the building Edgar felt along her mid-section for the latex gloves she kept tucked in her belt.†

The nuns got out of the van and approached the building.†

What's your approach to bomb waste?†

We approach God through his unmadeness.†

Then it passed, gone on the breeze, and he heard the watery shush of traffic on the bridge and saw his Eleanor approach, alight with her strawberry smile, under a sky blue umbrella.†

And there was Tommy in his high chair, the chair and cash register platformed, islanded higher than the surging mass of old paper that was going chemically brown, and it made Marvin think of all the game footage he'd seen during his search, fans in the Polo Grounds throwing scorecards and newspapers onto the field as the day waned and the Dodgers approached their doom.†

Was there a family waiting, was she a commuter of the future, did people live unknown to us in the crawlspaces of the what, the infrastructure, down the tunnels and under the bridge approaches?†

He stands near the bridge approach and listens.†

They laughed and crossed to the Brooklyn side, where Acey worked in an old warehouse not far from the bridge approach.†

Do you wish to hell you could see a tower shot with all the special effects, with the sun coming up ass-backwards and the trees casting shadows in the wrong direction, the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud arranged split-secondly on the shock disc, sort of primly place-centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn?†

She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.†

The scientist approaches and touches the man, tenderly, on the cheek.†

He approached and lowered himself and felt the sun on her body, the residue of deep heat transferred to his hands and mouth and the way their bodies exchanged a sense of the day and the land, all the heat and blowing dust heavy on their breath, tasted again, fingertipped and felt and smelled.†

Doing things with Jell-O was just about the best way to improve her mood, which was oddly gloomy today—she couldn't figure out why From the kitchen window she could see the lawn, neat and trimmed, low-hedged, open and approachable.†

An approach so suicidal Charlie found it somewhat lovable.†

She had a ritual thing she did, a reflex, not coy but wary and foxy, pulling away from me the more she showed a need, dancing away, eyes bright, her shoulder rounding against my approach.†

She felt the weight of the gaze and looked across at me on the empty road with a mountain of lavender tailings rising above the old sheds that marked a mineworks and it was a look so intimate and reaching, so deep in things we'd done that it became a crazy kind of dare, a form of drag-strip chicken—which one of us would break the lovers' gaze and look away first to see if the car had wandered into the eastbound lane, with a shiny-eye pickup approaching, half a second from dazzling death.†

He approached a woman not only masked but wholly medieval, it seemed, a cloth wound about the head and a long plain cloak sashed at the waist and a tight bodice girdled high under her breasts.†

Had he in fact approached her on the dance floor or had she subtly stepped into his path?†

Their ships are approaching our blockade.†

NOVEMBER 9, 1965 It was a place you might wander into if you didn't know the neighborhood, a graveyard bar under a bridge approach, and you might mistake the place at a glance for one of those Eighth Avenue bars that never seem to close, the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone, where the pipe fitters and garment workers go, or the railbirds back from the track, or the insomniacs back from nowhere, a sandwich and a beer, or a shot and a beer, but this was anothe†

He begins to prowl the lines, to scout the prospects standing on line along the high wall, he checks out faces and attitudes, he doesn't want to rush, he follows the wall in a westerly direction and sees what he thinks he might be looking for, finally, the kid's maybe eleven, the man's pulling a sandwich from a gym bag and they're standing there in total innocence of his approach.†

how it goes, and it's not going well, giving himself another five minutes by the clock on the wall at the southwest end, and then five more minutes, telling himself if he doesn't spot someone in five minutes, with a wholesome kid in tow, he will give up and go home, and then one more minute, and then one more, prowling the lines, making approaches that don't pan out, and about an hour later he is talking to a man and his son who are squatted down outside the bleacher section near the end of a very long line, camped out with a sleeping bag for the kid and a duffle coat for the man, and Manx is working his way into the names.†

It also occurs to him that he's approaching the corner where the street preacher spoke earlier in the evening, or last night, and then he realizes no, he's confused, he's still ten blocks north of there.†

And approaching now to see his mother in the first-floor window, cranked up in her special bed, white hair shining in the soft light.†

Nick approached and looked through the opening, hoping that Mike might see him and invite him in to watch the game a while.†

He gave most of what he earned to his mother but at least he had something in his pocket, approaching age seventeen, and he went to the show and sat in the balcony with Allie and Ray, two guys who talked back to the screen, but after a while what could you say to a movie that wasn't the sameshit thing you'd said a thousand times before?†

She had a gesture that seemed to mark a state of hopelessness too deep to be approached with words.†

At approach distance she smelled laundered and starched, steam-ironed, and her nails were buffed to a glassy lava finish, and the rosary beads that hung from her belt like a zoot-suiter's key chain were blinky bright, and when she rustled low and near she smelled more intimately of tooth powder and cleansing agents and the penance of scoured skin.†

Viktor lights a cigarette and approaches them.†

In Phoenix now, with the years blowing by, I take a drive sometimes out past the regimented typeface on the map and down through the streets named for Indian tribes and past the roofing supply and sandblasting and the condom outlet, painted now in ice-cream flavors, and finally I see the impressive open-steel truss of the waste facility down off Lower Buckeye Road, with grackles sparking across the landfill and the planes in a long line coming out of the hazy mountains to drop into approach patterns.†

Marian midfifties is lean and tanned and not so edgy now, it's clear, and a little more measured in her approach to the moment.†

The kids love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave.†

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Grouped by 3 Meanings

Definitions:

(1) (approach as in: approached the city)
to get closer to (near in space, time, quantity, or quality)
(2) (approach as in: use the best approach)
a way of doing something; or a route that leads to a particular place
(3) (approach as in: approached her with the proposal)
to begin communication with someone about something -- often a proposal or a delicate topic
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
More rarely (and typically only in classic literature), the phrase nearest approach to as used in "her nearest approach to an apology" or "her nearest approach to a smile" typically means that "something is as close to something else as it ever gets." "As near an approach to" can have a similar meaning.

Page Numbers by Book Edition

approach in Underworld, by DeLillo

approach

in

Underworld, by DeLillo