All 5 Uses
sublime
in
Sophie's Choice
(Edited)
- Blackstock, a robust, handsome, gracefully balding man in his middle fifties, was one of God's blessed whose destiny had led him from the stony poverty of a shtetl in Russian Poland to the most sublime satisfactions that American materialistic success could offer.
p. 103.1sublime = complete
- It was a grand display of wizardry, Nathan's production-inspired mockery of such outrageous, runaway, sublime silliness that I found myself emulating my father, gasping, shorn of strength, collapsing sideways on the greasy banquette.
p. 199.8 *sublime = extreme
- Sophie eventually saw that only a few years before, during Poland's Fascist resurgence, her father might have gained some converts; now with the Wehrmacht edging ponderously eastward, these Teutonic screams for Gdansk, the Germans provoking incidents along all the borders, how could it be other than a sublime foolishness to ask whether National Socialism had the answer to anything except Polish destruction?
p. 270.7
- Lying there, I realized that as a boy my father had never punished me severely except once—and then only because of a crime for which I sublimely deserved reprisal.
p. 320.5sublimely = utterly or completely
- But his obsession must have blinded him to many things, and it is an irony that—even if the Poles and other Slavs were not next on the list of people to be annihilated—he should have failed to foresee how such sublime hatred could only gather into its destroying core, like metal splinters sucked toward some almighty magnet, countless thousands of victims who did not wear the yellow badge.
p. 411.9sublime = extreme
Definitions:
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(1)
(sublime as in: she is sublime) impressively wonderful -- often beautiful or morally admirable
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(2)
(sublime as in: sublime ignorance) pure or extreme
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(3)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) More rarely, in chemistry or physics, sublime is used to indicate that something changes from a solid into a vapor without first melting; or vaporizes and then condenses right back again. That sense of the word is also often seen in the form sublimate.