All 50 Uses of

approach

in

Light in August

…fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him by means of natural laws like gravity and ice, and by the very extraneous objects which he has himself invented, like motor cars and furniture in the dark, and the very refuse of his own eating left upon floor or pavement; and he thinks quietly how right the ancients were in making the horse an attribute and symbol of warriors and kings, when he sees the man in the street pass the low sign and turn into his gate and approach the house.
Chpt 3

approach = go toward

He heard Brown approach the door and then blunder into it, in silhouette propping himself erect in the door.
Chpt 5 *

approach = go to

He heard her approach across the floor.
Chpt 7

approach = getting near

When he entered the kitchen, he did not approach the door into the house proper, the door in which she had appeared with the candle on the night when he first saw her.
Chpt 11

approach = go to

He followed his daily routine, save that he did not approach the house at all now, taking his meals downtown again, as when he had first gone to work at the mill.
Chpt 12

approach = go toward

It has seemed to him always that at that hour man approaches nearest of all to God, nearer than at any other hour of all the seven days.
Chpt 16

approaches = comes

She climbs slowly and deliberately into the road, approaching the wagon.†
Chpt 1

So she seems to muse upon the mounting road while the slowspitting and squatting men watch her covertly, believing that she is thinking about the man and the approaching crisis, when in reality she is waging a mild battle with that providential caution of the old earth of and with and by which she lives.†
Chpt 1

But it was not alone backwatching, alarm; it seemed also to Byron to possess a quality of assurance, brass, as though the man were reiterating and insisting all the while that he was afraid of nothing that might or could approach him from behind.†
Chpt 2

Then he came down and approached and she stopped fighting then and he led her out, with the heads turning as they passed, until the superintendent told the organist to play.†
Chpt 3

Then he sees a man approaching along the street.†
Chpt 3

No light shown and no sound came from it when he approached and stood beneath the window of the room where she slept, thinking If she is asleep too.†
Chpt 5

He stood with his hands on his hips, naked, thighdeep in the dusty weeds, while the car came over the hill and approached, the lights full upon him.†
Chpt 5

Neither seemed to be moving, yet they approached, looming, like two shadows drifting up.†
Chpt 5

When she approached she saw that it was the Bible.†
Chpt 6

When McEachern approached he saw that the boy was not looking at the page at all, that his eyes were quite fixed and quite blank.†
Chpt 7

When he approached the fluting of young frogs ceased like so many strings cut with simultaneous scissors.†
Chpt 7

As they approached the kitchen they walked side by side.†
Chpt 7

It had taken her some time, because when she looked toward where the loose plank was, he was already approaching toward the bed, where the moonlight fell directly, and she watched him empty the tin can onto the bed and sweep the small mass of coins and bills into his hand and ram the hand into his pocket.†
Chpt 9

He knocked again, with scarce interval between; he was still knocking when the door (no shadow had fallen upon the curtain and no step had approached beyond it) fled suddenly and silently from under his rapping hand.†
Chpt 9

But he did not approach it at once, though the afternoon was drawing on.†
Chpt 10

There was nothing skulking nor even especially careful about his approach to the house.†
Chpt 10

But he did not move at all as the soft sound of slippered feet approached the kitchen from the house side of it, and when he did at last turn suddenly, his eyes glowing suddenly, he saw already beneath the door which entered the house itself, the faint approaching light.†
Chpt 10

But he did not move at all as the soft sound of slippered feet approached the kitchen from the house side of it, and when he did at last turn suddenly, his eyes glowing suddenly, he saw already beneath the door which entered the house itself, the faint approaching light.†
Chpt 10

A dual personality: the one the woman at first sight of whom in the lifted candle (or perhaps the very sound of the slippered approaching feet) there had opened before him, instantaneous as a landscape in a lightningflash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure; the other the mantrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking born of heritage and environment with which he had to fight up to the final instant.†
Chpt 11

Now he heard something else: feet within the house, approaching the door.†
Chpt 11

What they talked about to her he did not know, though he had watched them approaching the house in a manner not exactly secret, yet purposeful, entering usually singly though sometimes in twos and threes, in their aprons and headrags and now and then with a man's coat thrown about their shoulders, emerging again and returning down the radiating paths not fast and yet not loitering.†
Chpt 12

Standing in the middle of the road, with his right hand lifted full in the glare of the approaching car, he had not actually expected it to stop.†
Chpt 12

When he approached it, in the reflected glare of the headlights two young faces seemed to float like two softcolored and aghast balloons, the nearer one, the girl's, backshrunk in a soft, wide horror.†
Chpt 12

And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing—that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed—is well nigh overpowering.†
Chpt 13

It is not in him to support even the semblance of evil It was while he was thinking that that he started, sat forward: for an instant after recognizing the approaching figure in the full glare of the light he believed that he was mistaken, knowing all the while that he could not be, that it could be no one except Byron, since he was already turning into the gate.†
Chpt 13

Nevertheless the sheriff had the dogs—they had refused to approach the cotton house at all; they refused to leave the road, leaning and straining against the collars with simultaneous and reverted heads pointed back down the road toward the cabin from which they had been recently dragged away—brought up.†
Chpt 14

After a time two negro children appear around the curve, approaching.†
Chpt 14

She descended the steps and approached.†
Chpt 15

It is a canvas deck chair, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of Hightower's body that even when empty it seems to hold still in ghostly embrace the owner's obese shapelessness; approaching, Byron thinks how the mute chair evocative of disuse and supineness and shabby remoteness from the world, is somehow the symbol and the being too of the man himself.†
Chpt 16

So before twilight has completely faded he is saying to himself Now they are gathering, approaching along streets slowly and turning in, greeting one another: the groups, the couples, the single ones.†
Chpt 16

Then, leaning forward, he sees three people approach and turn into the gate, in silhouette now against the street lamp, among the shadows.†
Chpt 16

He approached the bed.†
Chpt 17

Anyway it got him back to the cabin, where the two of them left the car and approached the cabin door, beyond which the lamp still burned: for that interval he ran in the final hiatus of peace before the blow fell and the clawed thing overtook him from behind.†
Chpt 17

At four o'clock that afternoon, hidden, he sees the car come up and stop, and the deputy and the man whom he knew by the name of Brown get out and approach the cabin.†
Chpt 18

When he moved he approached on tiptoe.†
Chpt 18

He approaches the front, walking now.†
Chpt 18

Standing now in the fringe of bushes he watches the engine approach and pass him, laboring, crawling, with the rapt and boylike absorption (and perhaps yearning) of his country raising.†
Chpt 18

The train is beginning to increase its speed; he watches the approach of the car where Brown vanished.†
Chpt 18

He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town.†
Chpt 18

For an instant the professor paused in a sort of astonished interest, watching Stevens putting into the woman's hand, as into the hand of a child, two railroad tickets; moving again and approaching and still unseen by his friend, he overheard Stevens' final words as the flagman helped the old people into the vestibule: "Yes, yes," Stevens was saying, in a tone soothing and recapitulant; "he'll be on the train tomorrow morning.†
Chpt 19

He did not approach; the sheriff went to him.†
Chpt 19

blank, bleak eyes at the slow throngs who, feeling, sensing without knowing, drifted before them, slowing, staring, so that they would be ringed with faces rapt and empty and immobile as the faces of cows, approaching and drifting on, to be replaced.†
Chpt 19

When they approached to see what he was about, they saw that the man was not dead yet, and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit.†
Chpt 19

Woman (not the seminary, as he had once believed): the Passive and Anonymous whom God had created to be not alone the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach.†
Chpt 20

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Best Example Sentences
From Other Sources
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.

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approach in Light in August

approach

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Light in August