All 10 Uses
paradox
in
Light in August
(Auto-generated)
- Sometimes, with the old couple snoring in the room beneath, when he lifted out the silent rope he would think of the paradox.†
Chpt 8 *
- And as he sat in the shadows of the ruined garden on that August night three months later and heard the clock in the courthouse two miles away strike ten and then eleven, he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe.†
Chpt 12
- It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature.†
Chpt 13paradoxical = seeming impossible (at least on first impression) because things that seem true contradict each other
- That this white man who very nearly depended on the bounty and charity of negroes for sustenance was going singlehanded into remote negro churches and interrupting the service to enter the pulpit and in his harsh, dead voice and at times with violent obscenity, preach to them humility before all skins lighter than theirs, preaching the superiority of the white race, himself his own exhibit A, in fanatic and unconscious paradox.†
Chpt 15
- But he sees at once that the man is in something like coma, as though oblivious and utterly indifferent to his whereabouts, and yet withal a quality latent and explosive, paradoxically rapt and alert at the same time.†
Chpt 16paradoxically = in a manner that seems (at least at first impression) to be impossible because things that seem true contradict each other
- To him there was nothing either of paradox or of comedy about it.†
Chpt 17
- I didn't believe It was in his mind, galloping in yoked and headlong paradox with the need for haste while he helped the old doctor hunt for the key to the strongbox in order to get the switch key for the car.†
Chpt 17
- The very fact that he could and did see no paradox in the fact that he took an active part in a partisan war and on the very side whose principles opposed his own, was proof enough that he was two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist.†
Chpt 20
- That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself.†
Chpt 20paradoxical = seeming impossible (at least on first impression) because things that seem true contradict each other
- He sees himself a shadowy figure among shadows, paradoxical, with a kind of false optimism and egoism believing that he would find in that part of the Church which most blunders, dreamrecovering, among the blind passions and the lifted hands and voices of men, that which he had failed to find in the Church's cloistered apotheosis upon earth.†
Chpt 20
Definitions:
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(1)
(paradox) a situation or statement that seems to contradict itself but may still be true
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) More rarely, paradox may refer to a statement that contradicts itself -- such as "I always lie."