All 8 Uses
yield
in
Sophie's Choice
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- In no particular order of significance, these were: (I) sudden illumination about my novel, its prognosis heretofore opaque and unyielding; (2) my discovery of Sophie and Nathan; and (3) anticipation of guaranteed sexual fulfillment, for the first time in my unfulfilled life.†
p. 118.8unyielding = strict, firm, or hard (not giving in, not giving way, or not giving up)standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unyielding means not and reverses the meaning of yielding. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- I have never written fast or easily and this was no exception, for even then I was compelled to search, however inadequately, for the right word and suffered over the rhythms and subtleties of our gorgeous but unbenevolent, unyielding tongue; nonetheless, I was seized by a strange, dauntless self-confidence and I scribbled away joyously while the characters I had begun to create seemed to acquire a life of their own and the muggy atmosphere of the Tidewater summer took on both an eye-dazzling and almost tactile reality, as if unspooling before my eyes on film, in uncanny three-dimensional color.†
p. 120.5
- I have spoken several times about Sophie's reticence concerning Auschwitz, her firm and generally unyielding silence about that fetid sinkhole of her past.†
p. 236.4 *
- The fury and commotion would yield nothing.†
p. 431.2 *yield = give
- When in turn she died forty years later, she did refer to the gold in her will, specifying that it should be divided among her many grandchildren; but in the fuzzy-mindedness of great age she had forgotten to state where the treasure was hidden, somehow confusing the cellar compartment with her safe-deposit box in the local bank, which of course yielded up nothing in the way of this peculiar legacy.†
p. 30.6
- Now Wanda had to go, and after a long and tearful embrace she was gone—leaving Sophie weak and hopeless, with a sense of inadequacy ... Thus Sophie came to spend her ten days under the Commandant's roof—a period culminating in that hectic, anxiety-drenched day which she remembered in such detail and which I have already described: a day when her feckless and flat-footed attempt at seducing Floss yielded not the possibility of freedom for Jan but only the bitterly wounding yet sweetly desirable promise of seeing her child in the flesh.†
p. 427.8
- I refused to let Sophie obsess me as a love object, yielding her up willingly again to the older man to whom she so naturally and rightfully belonged, and acquiescing once more in the realization that my claims to her heart had all along been modest and amateurish at best.†
p. 455.6
- Only when the wretched flyboy formally declared his intentions to marry and then produced the ring (Mary Alice continues to tell me in vapid innocence) did she yield up her darling honey pot, for in the Baptist faith of her upbringing, woe as certain as death would alight upon those who would engage in carnal congress without at least the prospect of matrimony.†
p. 475.8
Definitions:
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(1)
(yield as in: will yield valuable data) to produce (usually something wanted); or the thing or amount produced
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(2)
(yield as in: yield to pressure) to give in, give way, or give up
- (3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)