All 14 Uses
sinister
in
Sophie's Choice
(Edited)
- Then at this moment Sophie, as if sensing the perhaps sinister shift in Nathan's mood, hurried to his side and touched his shoulder with a fluttery, nervously placating hand.
p. 74.4sinister = evil, harmful, or frightening
- It seemed to be a perfectly amiable smile, with not a trace of the sardonic about it, but for an instant I felt intensely about his presence what I had already felt and what I would feel again—a fleeting moment in which the attractive and compelling in him seemed in absolute equipoise with the subtly and indefinably sinister.
p. 125.9
- Nor was there any pathology here, anything to do with sinister psychic repression which might have driven me to seek medical care.
p. 131.9 *
- I sensed an immediate change of mood, as if her happy reminiscence of their first days together had (perhaps by my comment) become adumbrated by the consciousness of something else—something troubling, hurtful, sinister.
p. 171.9
- It was out of the glare of daylight and the bustle of business, when Jews disappeared into their domestic quarantine and the seclusion of their sinister and Asiatic worship—with its cloudy suspicion of incense and rams' horns and sacrificial offerings, tambourines and veiled women, lugubrious anthems and keening banshee wails in a dead language—that the trouble began for an eleven-year-old Presbyterian.
p. 176.5
- Then there was an even more sinister revelation.
p. 203.4
- I heard myself groan, clearly audible above the harangue, and it occurred to me that this dreadful assault on Sophie had weirdly identical resonances to those of the fracas in which I had first glimpsed him acting out his implacable enmity, the scenes distinguished one from the other mainly by the tone of voice—fortissimo that evening weeks ago, now singularly level and restrained but no less sinister.
p. 218.8
- And what, I have asked myself (pursuing George Steiner's speculation upon the existence of some sinister metaphysical time warp), were the activities of old Stingo, buck private in the United States Marine Corps, at the moment when the terrible last dustin a translucent curtain of powdery siftings so thick that, in Sophie's words, "you could taste it on the lips like sand"—of some 2,100 Jews from Athens and the Greek islands billowed across the vista upon which she had earlier fixed…
p. 238.9
- At any rate, although for several years she had labored on various weekends typing out much of his bilingual correspondence having to do with patents (sometimes using a British-made Dictaphone which she hated for the spookily faraway and tinnily sinister sound it gave to his voice), she had never, until the Christmas season of 1938, been called upon to deal with any of his many essays; these had been handled until then by his assistants at the university.
p. 262.9
- Finally there is a sinister zone of likeness between Poland and the American South which, although anything but superficial, causes the two cultures to blend so perfectly together as to seem almost one in their shared extravagance—and that has to do with the matter of race, which in both worlds has produced centuries-long, all-encompassing nightmare spells of schizophrenia.
p. 269.2
- One of the lesser-known but more sinister operations contained within the Nazi master plan was the program called Lebensborn.
p. 327.6
- , uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her come—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh.
p. 360.6
- The effect of silence was sinister, baffling—surely, I thought while we edged our way toward the rear, such a throng should give up a vagrant mumble, a sigh, some evidence of life—until the moment we found our tattered and rumpsprung seats.
p. 381.6
- He had no longer any doubt that Nathan was the most sinister form of golem.
p. 547.2
Definitions:
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(1)
(sinister) evil or harmful; or making an evil or frightening impression
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely and only in very old usage, sinister can refer to the left side of something.