All 50 Uses of
minute
in
The Sunlight Dialogues
- He saw himself walking along a beach where the sand was tiny grits of color, blue and green and deep red and yellow, like minute pieces from a stained-glass window.
Chpt 1 (definition 1)minute = very small
- A minute crack.
Chpt 8 (definition 1) *minute = small
- But afterward Clive Paxton walked in his garden, scrutinizing his lilacs and althea for minute flaws, giving orders, critically turning loose earth with his foot.
Chpt 11 (definition 1)
- He shall attend all meetings of stock-holders and of the Board of Directors and keep the minutes thereof.
Chpt 14 (definition 2) *minutes = formal notes (of a meeting)
Uses with a very common or rare meaning:
- Minutes passed.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3) *
- Then nothing, not a sound for fifteen minutes.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- He shifted in the seat, trying to get more comfortable, then closed his eyes a minute.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- After a minute he said, "You gonna raid her right now?†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- "Wait a minute," Clumly said.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- Miller talked, always, a mile a minute.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- At the Woodworth house no one had answered his knock, though he waited for perhaps five minutes.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- They waited on the porch for a full twenty minutes, Clumly fanning himself with his hat, Boyle standing meekly with his shackled hands folded.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- Octave Woodworth might appear at the door any minute now, and if she found only Boyle there, standing alone, in handcuffs, who knew?†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- She'd be worried by now, though of course she understood a policeman couldn't be expected home the same exact minute every night, like some grocery man.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- You'll put it off till the last minute and then you'll fall on your ass.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- He found her, three minutes later, asleep in the bed; or possibly, he thought for some reason, she was only pretending to be asleep.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know.†
Chpt 1 (definition 3)
- He did exercises every morning, slowly and methodically, combed his few wisps of graying hair with his short, square fingers, polished his thick glasses, revealing naked, for a minute or two, his protrusive, heavy-lidded eyes, then sat waiting like a hopeless and indifferent barber in a run-down shop, reading the day-old paper he'd gotten from the guard the night before.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- At night before he went to sleep he would kneel beside his pallet for a minute, cross himself, and mumble something.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- In five or ten minutes he was back again with a Lois Lane comic for the Indians.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- Miller went out and came back a minute later with old cups and a percolator with the cord dangling.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- Miller sipped his coffee, scowling more darkly by the minute, eyebrows lifting up and out like wings, and now Boyle was sweating all over, burning up.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- " After a minute the Chief shifted the food into his cheek and said, "You think our Sunlight Man is a little piece of nothing?"†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- He took several minutes to get back.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- Clumly, I'm asking you take a few minutes and write a few words about why a cop needs some motorcycle made off in Germany that's got no distributor here in Batavia.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- Miller said, "Got a minute?"†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- " "Now wait a minute.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- When they were first married, she would kneel beside the bed for fifteen minutes every night to pray, moving her lips, and when she found it bothered him she had taken to praying in the bathroom before she came in.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- It was a full five minutes before it was really clear in Nick's mind that it had all been a trick, some kind of illusion.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- To his surprise, the bearded man said nothing more, and as the minute of silence stretched on into two and then three he felt what he mistook at first for relief.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- " No one answered, and after a minute Verne shook his head and said, "He's a cool one," and patted his stomach.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- " After a minute the bearded man's laughter changed to whimpering.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- He thought a minute.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- In a matter of minutes there were five more cars at the hospital, Kozlowski waiting at the front door, Clumly and Figlow around in back.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- After a minute he turned it around, looking at it, breathing hard, and held it by the barrel.†
Chpt 2 (definition 3)
- He sighed, thinking once more of Luke the irascible, then returned to his desk and sat down to rest a minute.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- Will had just stood for a minute, watching unobserved.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- "We won't be a minute," he said.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- "A man never knows from one minute to the next," Hodge said.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- Wait a minute!†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- One night around the middle of February, it was so cold you had to fold your blankets with a hammer, that poor girl went out to that brick johnny they had behind the house, and that Indian boy snuck out behind her, and the minute she'd just got comfortable he hauled off and threw a pail of water at the door.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- He entered the front door muttering crossly, annoyed that he'd gotten himself upset, and he went up the front stairs slowly this time and paused at the top for a full minute to catch his breath and quiet his jangling nerves.†
Chpt 3 (definition 3)
- …novel that had come from an old friend, male, that afternoon, knowing Luke would be purposely late and carefully not worrying when the time they had agreed on came, but worrying in spite of that, growing angrier with the passing of each of the minutes she had known would pass, because Luke was childish--she could never be sure how childish--and because she, Millie Hodge, self-regarding bitch, as she described herself, invincible to all reasonable and honest attacks, had been forced…†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- The minute she'd heard it--Ben Hodge had told her, stopping by with some of that honey from his bedroom wall (inedible, as always, yellow-gray and specked with unidentifiable pieces, wings maybe)--she had known she was in for trouble.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- She knew the lights of the Hodge Pierce Arrow the minute they appeared at the top of the hill, and she put her hand out awkwardly, as though she did not know how to hitchhike.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- After a minute he said, "Why French, though?"†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- Ben talked as if softly, though it filled all the room, and thoughtfully, as if he were letting you hear him think it out for the first time, speeches filled with fine images and pleasant ways of saying things and sudden connections that made your heart beat faster for a minute, so that people leaned forward, here and there in the audience, exactly the way they might lean forward when the pole-vault bar was at eleven feet, higher than any Batavian had in those days ever gone.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- I think of a few minutes with you, not a whole lifetime.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- I think of a few minutes with you.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
- She had lolled through daydreams of living as his wife at Stony Hill (it never entered her mind that they might live anywhere else), but she too had thought chiefly of minutes--the few minutes when she saw him next, the few minutes when finally he would make love to her.†
Chpt 4 (definition 3)
Definitions:
-
(1) (minute as in: minute size) small, exceptionally small, or insignificant
-
(2) (minutes as in: keep the minutes) a written record of what happened at a meeting
-
(3) (meaning too common or rare to warrant focus) Much more commonly, minute and minutes refer to a period of time lasting 60 seconds.
Less commonly, they refer to a measurement of angle where 60 minutes make up a single degree, and where a right angle has 90 degrees and a circle has 360 degrees.