All 10 Uses of

austere

in

Light in August

And they would be seen together down town on Saturday evening sometimes: Christmas in his neat, soberly austere sergeand-white and the straw hat, and Brown in his new suit (it was tan, with a red criss-cross, and he had a colored shirt and a hat like Christmas' but with a colored band) talking and laughing, his voice heard clear across the square and back again in echo, somewhat as a meaningless sound in a church seems to come from everywhere at once.†
Chpt 2

austere = a notable absence of luxury, comfort, or decoration; or stern in manner

He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability.†
Chpt 2 *

From a distance, quite faint though quite clear, he can hear the sonorous waves of massed voices from the church: a sound at once austere and rich, abject and proud, swelling and falling in the quiet summer darkness like a harmonic tide.†
Chpt 3

Meanwhile he would see her from a distance now and then in the daytime, about the rear premises, where moved articulate beneath the clean, austere garments which she wore that rotten richness ready to flow into putrefaction at a touch, like something growing in a swamp, not once looking toward the cabin or toward him.†
Chpt 12

It seems to him that the past week has rushed like a torrent and that the week to come, which will begin tomorrow, is the abyss, and that now on the brink of cataract the stream has raised a single blended and sonorous and austere cry, not for justification but as a dying salute before its own plunge, and not to any god but to the doomed man in the barred cell within hearing of them and of the two other churches, and in whose crucifixion they too will raise a cross.†
Chpt 16

With stern and austere astonishment he thought It was like it was not until Mrs. Hines called me and I heard her and saw her face and knew that Byron Bunch was nothing in this world to her right then, that I found out that she is not a virgin And he thought that that was terrible, but that was not all.†
Chpt 17

They now moved in a grave and slightly aweinspiring reflected light which was almost as palpable as the khaki would have been which Grimm wished them to wear, wished that they wore, as though each time they returned to the orderly room they dressed themselves anew in suave and austerely splendid scraps of his dream.†
Chpt 19

austerely = in a manner that lacks luxury, comfort, or anything beyond minimum requirements

They now had a profound and bleak gravity as they stood where crowds milled, grave, austere, detached, looking with.†
Chpt 19

austere = a notable absence of luxury, comfort, or decoration; or stern in manner

It was some throwback to the austere and not dim times not so long passed, when a man in that country had little of himself to waste and little time to do it in, and had to guard and protect that little not only from nature but from man too, by means of a sheer fortitude that did not offer, in his lifetime anyway, physical ease for reward.†
Chpt 20

Definition:

a notable absence of luxury, comfort, or decoration

or:

of a person: stern in manner; or practicing great self-denial