All 7 Uses of
cease
in
A Separate Peace
- Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height until you looked above the familiar trunks and the lowest umbrellas of leaves and took in the lofty complex they held high above, branches and branches of branches, a world of branches with an infinity of leaves.†
p. 29.9ceased = stopped or discontinued
- In an apse of the church sat their wives and children, the objects during the tedious winter months of our ceaseless, ritual speculation (Why did he ever marry her?†
p. 73.2ceaseless = never-endingstandard suffix: The suffix "-less" in ceaseless means without and reverses the meaning of cease. This is the same pattern you see in words like harmless, fearless, and powerless.
- Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaseless plans, Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper's dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.†
p. 75.2
- So I ceased to have any real sense of it.†
p. 123.6ceased = stopped or discontinued
- If he could not enlist—and for all his self-sufficiency Brinker could not do much without company—he could at least cease to be so multifariously civilian.†
p. 130.2 *cease = stop or discontinue
- The headlights turned in an erratic arc away from me, and then I heard the engine laboriously recede into the distance, and I continued to listen until not only had it ceased but my memory of how it sounded had also ceased.†
p. 184.2ceased = stopped or discontinued
- The headlights turned in an erratic arc away from me, and then I heard the engine laboriously recede into the distance, and I continued to listen until not only had it ceased but my memory of how it sounded had also ceased.†
p. 184.2
Definitions:
-
(1)
(cease) to stop or discontinue
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Note that the expression, cease fire means to stop doing battle such as firing funs at each other. Similarly, the noun, cease-fire, is a state of having stopped doing battle.