74 uses
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1 —2 uses as in:
Her manner was grave.
Definition
serious and/or solemn
The exact meaning of this sense of grave can depend upon its context. For example:
- "This is a grave problem," or "a situation of the utmost gravity." — important, dangerous, or causing worry
- "She was in a grave mood upon returning from the funeral." — sad or solemn
- "She looked me in the eye and gravely promised." — in a sincere and serious manner
- She was quite concerned at how many Canadian authors were on our reading lists; because she'd not read them, she suspected them of the gravest parochialism.p. 538.6
- Owen used to say, gravely, that his father would surely be damned for initiating the move, but that the Catholics had committed an UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE—that they had insulted his father and mother, irreparably.p. 24.2
There are no more uses of "grave" flagged with this meaning in A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Typical Usage
(best examples)
? —72 uses
exact meaning not specified
- " 'INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,' " he'd said over my mother's grave; and so I say that one for him—I know it was one of his favorites.p. 627.2
- The box, Owen explained, had been used to ship some granite-carving tools—some grave-marking equipment—so it was very sturdy.p. 66.2
- It had been made in a monument shop, with grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a miniature tombstone.p. 125.7
- CROWN HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O'ER THE GRAVE, AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE; HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND ROSE ON HIGH, WHO DIED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE.p. 136.2
- I think now that I must have wanted to see her grave at night, knowing how she hated the darkness; I believe I wanted to reassure myself that some light penetrated even the cemetery at night.p. 141.6
- He closed his prayer book and looked at how the light fell over my mother's grave; he seemed pleased.p. 144.3
- Mr. Fish gave no indication that he was even slightly troubled by his hypocrisy on this issue—for surely old Sagamore would roll over in his grave to hear his former master espousing canine restraints of any kind; Sagamore had run free, to the end.p. 180.3
- Owen was restrained from putting the football in the burlap sack, because Mr. Fish—while digging the grave—maintained that football was still a game that would give us some pleasure, when we were "a little older."p. 184.8
- The lights were turned on in some houses when Mr. Fish finished digging the grave, and Owen decided that the attendant mourners should hold candles, which Lydia was reluctant to provide; at my mother's urging, Lydia produced the candles, and my grandmother was summoned.p. 185.0
- He looked at my mother, and at me; he stared at the burlap sack; he gazed into the hole in the rose bed as if it were his own grave—and no coincidence that a short walk with his wife had ended here.p. 185.9
- Owen scooted under the bed; he lay on his back with his hands crossed upon his chest, like a soldier in a hasty grave.p. 196.7
- YOU SHOW A MAN HIS OWN GRAVE!p. 199.2
- At Scrooge's grave, Mr. Fish said: " 'Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question.p. 202.1
- So that Mr. Fish would stop stalling—and get to the part where he reads his own name on that grave—Owen stepped closer to the gravestone himself.p. 247.9
- Mr. Fish fell over what was meant to be his grave, and the sheer terror in Owen's cry was matched by a corresponding terror in the audience.p. 248.3
- "I SAW MY NAME—ON THE GRAVE," said Owen Meany.p. 249.3
- Seeing a name on that grave is just like the story—it's make-believe, Owen," Dan said.p. 249.4
- "Your own name on your own grave—it's a vision we all have.p. 249.5
- But Dan Needham regarded Mr. Merrill strangely, as if such a vision were quite foreign to Dan's experience; he was not at all sure that seeing one's own name on one's own grave was exactly "natural."p. 249.6
- He had "seen" his own name on his own grave; the world, not to mention Pastor Merrill, would have a hard time convincing him otherwise.p. 250.3
- I breathed in the still air of the old house; Lydia and Germaine must have been fast asleep, for even someone reading in bed makes a little noise—and 80 Front Street was as quiet as a grave.p. 250.9
- That was when I had the impression that it was a grave; the house itself frightened me.p. 250.9
- He saw immediately a crucial difference between Gravesend, the town, and Gravesend, the academy: the town paper, The Gravesend News-Letter, reported all the news that was decent and believed that all things decent were important; the school newspaper, which was called The Grave, reported every indecency that could escape the censorship of the paper's faculty adviser and believed that all things decent were boring.p. 292.9
- Among the editors of The Grave, in which Owen published the first essay he was assigned in English class, Owen was known as "The Voice."p. 293.6
- The editorial and the subsequent weekly essays that Owen published in The Grave were ascribed not to Owen Meany by name, but to "The Voice"; and the text was printed in uniform upper-case letters.p. 293.9
- Applicants for the position were given a subscription to The Grave; the snide, sneering precocity of the student body was well represented in its pages—and best represented by the capitals that commanded one's gaze to Owen Meany.p. 294.2
- Dan defended Owen; but The Voice was a proven irritant to many of the more insecure members of the Gravesend community—including those faraway but important subscribers to The Grave: "concerned" parents and alumni.p. 294.6
- After all, Owen had sent her every issue of The Grave; if she had once regarded Owen with distaste—she had called him queer and crazy, and a creep—Hester was no fool.p. 297.3
- The issue of Owen being granted this privilege was the subject of a special faculty meeting where tempers flared; Dan said there was a movement to replace the faculty adviser to The Grave—there were those who said that the "pregnancy humor" in Owen's column about the Senior Dance should not have escaped the adviser's censorship.p. 300.8
- But the faculty adviser to The Grave was an Owen Meany supporter; Mr. Early—that deeply flawed thespian who brought to every role he was given in The Gravesend Players an overblown and befuddled sense of Learlike doom—cried that he would defend the "unsullied genius" of The Voice, if necessary, "to the death."p. 300.9
- "NICE GUYS ARE THE TOUGHEST TO GET RID OF," Owen wrote for The Grave; but even Mr. Early was smart enough to censor that.p. 302.6
- When school began again—when we started the fall term of 1959—I realized that The Voice had not been idle for the summer; Owen came back to school with a stack of columns ready for The Grave.p. 305.6
- "WHY DOES THE SCHOOL WASTE ITS TIME WITH TWO SEARCH COMMITTEES?" asked The Voice in The Grave.p. 316.2
- "Well," old Thorny said, "Owen, you know, is The Voice—you know our school newspaper, The Grave?"p. 322.5
- For The Grave, The Voice titled his column "WHITEWASH."p. 323.9
- Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty adviser to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being "TYPICAL TEACHERS—INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY' .... that was what forced Mr. Early's hand.p. 324.4
- Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he took Dan's advice seriously.p. 324.6
- He was in the office of The Grave, experimenting with a brand-new photocopier; he found that he could copy his draft card—then he found a way to make a blank draft card, one without a name and without a date of birth.p. 331.8
- "I do not have the advantage of what amounts to a weekly editorial column in The Grave, but I should like to use my brief time—between hymns, and before our prayer—to enlighten you on the subject of our dear old school's charter, and its constitution.p. 336.3
- "So that you don't think that The Grave represents Republicans with even marginal objectivity, allow me to take a minute of your time—while, perhaps, the euphoria of John Kennedy's landslide election here is still high but (I hope) subsiding.p. 339.2
- He replaced Mr. Early as the faculty adviser to The Grave; Mr. White made himself the faculty adviser—and so The Voice was presented with a more adversarial censor than Owen had ever faced in Mr. Early.p. 339.7
- We were hanging around the editorial offices of The Grave—that year The Voice was also editor-in-chief—when a totally unlikable senior named Larry Lish told Owen and me that President Kennedy was "diddling" Marilyn Monroe.p. 372.9
- He was witty—even Owen was impressed by Lish's editorial cleverness for The Grave—and he was cordially loathed by students and faculty alike; I say "cordially," in the case of the students, because no one would have refused an invitation to one of his father's or his mother's parties.p. 373.4
- He avoided the editorial offices of The Grave, a hangout in which Owen was regularly king.p. 375.5
- We were standing in the dry, dusty stink of cigarettes that was the commonplace air in the editorial offices of The Grave, and Owen simply walked over to the coat tree and removed his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap and his jacket of the same well-worn material; then he walked out in the cold, which so ill-affected Mrs. Lish's troublesome complexion.p. 382.6
- Did you or did you not proposition Missus Lish in the editorial offices of The Grave?p. 383.1
- Did he think that the downfall of President Kennedy might come from an editorial in The Grave?p. 385.2
- The headmaster proposed—in addition to Owen's probation— that he be removed from his position as editor-in-chief of The Grave, or that The Voice should be silenced until the end of the winter term; or both.p. 386.7
- As for his duties as editor-in-chief of The Grave, he simply stopped contributing the column that had given The Voice his name and his fame.p. 387.4
- And would Owen have gone so far as to tell Dr. Dolder about Scrooge's grave?p. 390.3
- Lish admitted that the draft card had been created from a blank card in the editorial offices of The Grave—his illegal identification had been invented on the photocopier.p. 404.5
- The decision to throw Owen Meany out of school was so unpopular that the former headmaster, old Archibald Thorndike, emerged from his retirement to express his disapproval; old Archie told one of the students who wrote for The Grave—and a reporter from the town paper, The Gravesend News-Letter—that "Owen Meany is one of the best citizens the academy has ever produced; I expect great things from that little fella," the former headmaster said.p. 406.1
- So often in its pages he had written his name—his full name—in the big block letters he called MONUMENT STYLE or GRAVESEND LETTERING; so many times he had transcribed, in his diary, his name exactly the way he had seen it on Scrooge's grave.p. 422.4
- That's, how he wrote it; that was what the Ghost of the Future had seen on Scrooge's grave; that and the date—the date was written in the diary, too.p. 422.6
- Think of how much time he spent in that creepy monument shop on Water Street, the unfinished lettering of the names of the dead surrounding him—is it any wonder that he SAW his own name and the date of his death on Scrooge's grave?p. 445.2
- And the pedestal upon which Owen had stood her—in contrast to Mary's own rough finish (granite is never as smooth as marble)—was highly polished, exquisitely beveled; Owen had cut some very fine edges with the diamond wheel, creating the impression that Mary Magdalene either stood upon or was rising from her grave.p. 453.7
- "It's almost as if she's .... well, you know .... stepping out of her own grave."p. 453.9
- "And I don't want one of those things that look like a steppingstone—that's just like the military, to give you a grave that people can walk on!"p. 475.1
- As graves go, my mother's grave looked pretty nice.p. 489.9
- Grandmother had planted a border of crocuses and daffodils and tulips, so that even in the spring there was color; and Grandmother's touch with roses was evident by the well-pruned rosebush that took very firm grasp of the trellis that stood like a comfortable headboard directly behind my mother's grave.p. 490.1
- There was a major who'd taken a liking to him; Owen said that his writing and editorial work for The Grave had provided him with a better background for what the Army seemed to want of him than anything he'd learned in ROTC, or in Basic Training.p. 501.6
- "TEACH ME TO LIVE, THAT I MAY DREAD "THE GRAVE AS LITTLE AS MY BED.p. 529.2
- And you were there—when he saw his name, and the date of his death, on Scrooge's grave.p. 533.7
- The lettering was exactly as Owen preferred it—it was his favorite style—and the beveled edges along the sides and the top of the grave were exceedingly fine.p. 549.1
- In my sorry father's case, my disappointment with him was heightened by his refusal to admit that Owen Meany had managed—from beyond the grave—to reveal the Rev. Mr. Merrill's identity to me.p. 553.1
- CROWN HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O'ER THE GRAVE, AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE; HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND ROSE ON HIGH, WHO DIED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE.p. 577.9
- The weather was hot and sticky, and from the cemetery, at the end of Linden Street, we could once again hear the kids playing baseball on the high-school athletic fields—the sounds of their fun, and their arguing, and that good old American crack of the bat drifted to us while we stood at Owen Meany's grave and listened to the Rev. Lewis Merrill say the usual.p. 578.3
- I stood at Owen's grave, holding Dan Needham's hand, with my grandmother leaning against the two of us.p. 578.5
- I had fooled him with a dressmaker's dummy; Owen Meany had been the real miracle, but my father's faith was restored by an encounter with a dummy, which the poor fool had believed was my mother—reaching out to him from beyond her grave.p. 578.8
- Typically, the town newspaper, The Gravesend News-Letter, did not editorialize on the event, except to say that a march against mayhem on the nation's highways would be a more significant use of such civilian zeal; as for the academy newspaper, The Grave reported that it was "about time" the school and the town combined forces to demonstrate against the evil war.p. 582.4
- The Grave claimed that the crowd swelled to at least six hundred "well-behaved" people.p. 582.5
- It was Monday, July 8, 1968—the date he had seen on Scrooge's grave.p. 617.7
There are no more uses of "grave" in A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Typical Usage
(best examples)