All 13 Uses
abstract
in
Sophie's Choice
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- But at my age, with a snootful of English Lit. that made me as savagely demanding as Matthew Arnold in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers' lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial, abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt.
p. 6.1abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
- She had not meant to, it was simple reflex; the reason she had shut music out during these days of malignant depression was that she had found she could not bear the contrast between the abstract yet immeasurable beauty of music and the almost touchable dimensions of her own aching despair.
p. 101.3
- It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit.
p. 205.9
- "It's curious," he said, the voice clinical, abstract, "these headaches."
p. 296.2
- This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Hoss might appreciate the venom of the Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind's more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama.
p. 301.1
- There are in the lives of all of us odd instances where one later crosses the path of someone associated with what one regarded as an abstract public event; that spring I had with a small shudder read the Daily Mirror headline RIVER SEARCH CONTINUES FOR WOMAN'S HEAD, scarcely realizing that I would soon have at least a distant connection with the victim's spouse.
p. 343.7
- Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind.
p. 350.6 *abstract = unfelt (not associated with any specific instance)
- Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears.
p. 394.1 *abstracted = distracted
- If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seem, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie and the others were helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war's end.
p. 411.3abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
- "So you believe in Christ the Redeemer?" the doctor said in a thick-tongued but oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer examining the delicately shaded facet of a proposition in logic.
p. 528.9
- Pushed remorselessly toward the end of the aisle in a crush of rubbery torsos and slick perspiring arms, she found herself tripping and side-stepping into the dank dim platform that connected cars, firmly sandwiched between two human shapes whose identity, in an abstracted way, she was trying to discern just as the train screeched to a slow and shuddering halt and the lights went out.†
p. 98.9
- It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan's mind.†
p. 123.6
- Sophie halted, gazing again for long moments into that past which seemed now so totally, so irresistibly to have captured her; she took several sips of whiskey and swallowed once or twice abstractedly in a daze of recollection.†
p. 310.9
Definitions:
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(1)
(abstract as in: abstract thought) of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
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(2)
(abstract as in: read the abstract) a summary; or to summarize -- especially academic writing
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(3)
(abstract as in: abstract art) not imitating external reality or the objects of nature
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(4)
(abstracted as in: abstracted, so didn't notice) lost in thought; or distracted by thoughts
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(5)
(abstracted as in: abstracted his wallet) removed
- (6) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)