12 uses
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Definition
necessary or important or relating to the basic nature of something
- The law was unwritten and unpublicized and essential for survival in that militant, inflammatory zone entered through the Gates of Legrand.Chapter 1.3 (10% in)
- Two orderlies from the guardroom brought a stretcher and we strapped Poteete to it, kicking and screaming and delirious now In his screams, all the demons and the implacable cruelty of the Institute were contained in their purest, most essential form.Chapter 1.14 (94% in)
- My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.Chapter 2.16 (2% in)
- For in some far more essential way, I was abandoning my membership in that generation by the mere act of entering that room.Chapter 2.16 (43% in)
- We could do pushups all night long and there was a healthy, vigorous glow to our group, an essential vitality as we prepared ourselves for the fracas.Chapter 2.21 (53% in)
- Both of them found in my vulnerability an essential softness I lacked when my heels were clicking against the pavement just right and every word I uttered was a joke or the beginning of a joke.Chapter 3.22 (4% in)
- It was one of those times when I realized that Tradd was one of the most isolated people I had ever known, a boy of such deep essential silences and unvoiced questions I almost felt I had never met or touched him, but only observed him from a distance.Chapter 3.22 (27% in)
- Until this moment an essential part of me, some vital and unnamable center, had never felt that I was really part of the school.Chapter 3.26 (51% in)
- But I felt him recover, match me step for step, straining to retrieve the last essential angle, which I refused to surrender.Chapter 3.30 (58% in)
- Among the masts and with the hulls of boats reflecting in the waters of the incoming tide, we faced each other uncertainly, as allies, but most inimically and essentially, as white boy and nigger.Chapter 3.30 (83% in)
- What had been essential to my vanity in the barracks was not that I actually came to the aid of Pearce but that I demonstrated the sincere appearance of wanting to help him.Chapter 4.37 (93% in)
- The only essential quality of the woman it reflected was her awesome integrity, her unimpeachable correctness.Chapter 4.45 (20% in)
There are no more uses of "essential" in The Lords of Discipline.
Typical Usage
(best examples)