Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, Grenville Kleiser [learn to read books TXT] 📗

surprise

In a tumult of self-approval and towering exultation

In a vague and fragmentary way

In a wise, superior, slightly scornful manner

In accents of menace and wrath

In its whole unwieldy compass

In moments of swift and momentous decision

In quest of something to amuse

In requital for various acts of rudeness

In the air was the tang of spring

In the dusky path of a dream

In the face of smarting disillusions

In the flush and heyday of youth and gaiety and loveliness

In the heyday of friendship

In the mild and mellow maturity of age

In the perpetual presence of everlasting verities

In this breathless chase of pleasure

In this chastened mood I left him

Incapable of initiative or boldness

Inconceivable perversion of reasoning

Indolently handsome eyes

Indulge in pleasing discursiveness

Ineffable sensation of irritability

Infantile insensibility to the solemnity of his bereavement

Infantine simplicity and lavish waste

Innumerable starlings clove the air [clove = split]

Insensible to its subtle influence

Inspired by the immortal flame of youth

Intangible and indescribable essence

Intense love of excitement and adventure

Intimations of unpenetrated mysteries

Into her eyes had come a hostile challenge

Into the purple sea the orange hues of heaven sunk silently

Into the very vestibule of death

Involuntarily she sighed

Involuntary awkwardness and reserve

Involved in a labyrinth of perplexities

It came to him with a stab of enlightenment

It elicited a remarkably clear and coherent statement

It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity

It is a thing infinitely subtle

It is not every wind that can blow you from your anchorage

It lends no dazzling tints to fancy

It moved me to a strange exhilaration

It parted to a liquid horizon and showed the gray rim of the sea

It proved a bitter disillusion

It seemed intolerably tragic

It seemed to exhale a silent and calm authority

It was a breathless night of suspense

It was a desolating vision

It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind

It was a night of stupefying surprises

It was all infinitely soft and refreshing to the eye

It was an evening of great silences and spaces, wholly tranquil

It was sheer, exuberant, instinctive, unreasoning, careless joy

It was the ecstasy and festival of summer

It was torture of the most exquisite kind

J

Jealousies and animosities which pricked their sluggish blood to tingling

Joy rioted in his large dark eyes

Judging without waiting to ponder over bulky tomes

K

Kind of unscrupulous contempt for gravity

Kiss-provoking lips

L

Laden with the poignant scent of the garden honeysuckle

Language of excessive flattery and adulation

Lapped in soft music of adulation

Lapse into pathos and absurdity

Large, dark, luminous eyes that behold everything about them

Latent vein of whimsical humor

Lead to the strangest aberrations

Leaping from lambent flame into eager and passionate fire [lambent = effortlessly brilliant]

Leave to the imagination the endless vista of possibilities

Life flowed in its accustomed stream

Lights and shadows of reviving memory crossed her face

Lionized by fashionable society

Long intertangled lines of silver streamlets

Lost in a delirious wonder

Lost in irritable reflection

Love hovered in her gaze

Ludicrous attempts of clumsy playfulness and tawdry eloquence

Luke-warm assurance of continued love

Lulled by dreamy musings

Luminous with great thoughts

M

Magnanimous indifference to meticulous niceties

Making the ear greedy to remark offense

Marching down to posterity with divine honors

Marked out for some strange and preternatural doom

Mawkishly effeminate sentiment

Memories plucked from wood and field

Memory was busy at his heart

Merged in a sentiment of unutterable sadness and compassion

Microscopic minuteness of eye

Misgivings of grave kinds

Mockery crept into her tone

Molded by the austere hand of adversity

Moments of utter idleness and insipidity

Moods of malicious reaction and vindictive recoil

Morn, in yellow and white, came broadening out of the mountains

Mumble only jargon of dotage

My body is too frail for its moods

N

Nature seemed to revel in unwonted contrasts [unwonted = unusual]

New ambitions pressed upon his fancy

New dreams began to take wing in his imagination

Night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars

Night passes lightly in the open world, with its stars and dews and perfumes

Nights of fathomless blackness

No mark of trick or artifice

Noble and sublime patience

Nursed by brooding thought

O

Obsessed with the modishness of the hour

Occasional flashes of tenderness and love

Oddly disappointing and fickle

One gracious fact emerges here

One long torture of soul

One of the golden twilights which transfigure the world

Oppressed and disheartened by an all-pervading desolation

Oppressed with a confused sense of cumbrous material [cumbrous = cumbersome]

Outweighing years of sorrow and bitterness

Over and over the paroxysms of grief and longing submerged her

Overhung and overspread with ivy

Overshadowed by a vague depression

P

Pale and vague desolation

Pallor of reflected glories

Palpitating with rage and wounded sensibility

Panting after distinction

Peace brooded over all

Pelted with an interminable torrent of words

Penetrate beneath the surface to the core

Peopled the night with thoughts

Perpetual gloom and seclusion of life

Pertinent to the thread of the discussion

Pervasive silence which wraps us in a mantle of content

Piles of golden clouds just peering above the horizon

Platitudinous and pompously sentimental

Plaudits of the unlettered mob

Pleasant and flower-strewn vistas of airy fancy

Pledged with enthusiastic fervor

Plumbing the depth of my own fears

Poignant doubts and misgivings

Power of intellectual metamorphosis

Power to assuage the thirst of the soul

Precipitated into mysterious depths of nothingness

Preening its wings for a skyward flight

Pressing cares absorbed him

Pride working busily within her

Proclaimed with joyous defiance

Prodigal of discriminating epithets

Prodigious boldness and energy of intellect

Products of dreaming indolence

Profound and chilling solitude of the spot

Proof of his imperturbability and indifference

Provocative of bitter hostility

Pulling the strings of many enterprises

Purge the soul of nonsense

Q

Quickened and enriched by new contacts with life and truth

Quivering with restrained grief

R

Radiant with the beautiful glamor of youth

Ransack the vocabulary

Red tape of officialdom

Redolent of the night lamp

Reflecting the solemn and unfathomable stars

Regarded with an exulting pride

Rehabilitated and restored to dignity

Remorselessly swept into oblivion

Resounding generalities and conventional rhetoric

Respect forbade downright contradiction

Restless and sore and haughty feelings were busy within

Retort leaped to his lips

Rigid adherence to conventionalities

Rudely disconcerting in her behavior

Rudely reminded of life's serious issues

S

Sacrificed to a futile sort of treadmill

Sadness prevailed among her moods

Scorched with the lightning of momentary indignation

Scorning such paltry devices

Scotched but not slain

Scrupulous morality of conduct

Seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before the eyes

Seething with suppressed wrath

Seize on greedily

Sensuous enjoyment of the outward show of life

Serenity beamed from his look

Serenity of paralysis and death

Seriousness lurked in the depths of her eyes

Served to recruit his own jaded ideas

Set anew in some fresh and appealing form

Setting all the sane traditions at defiance

Shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty

She affected disdain

She assented in precisely the right terms

She bandies adjectives with the best

She challenged his dissent

She cherished no petty resentments

She curled her fastidious lip

She curled her lip with defiant scorn

She did her best to mask her agitation

She disarmed anger and softened asperity [asperity = harshness]

She disclaimed fatigue

She fell into a dreamy silence

She fell into abstracted reverie

She felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions

She flushed an agitated pink

She forced a faint quivering smile

She frowned incomprehension

She had an air of restrained fury

She had an undercurrent of acidity

She hugged the thought of her own unknown and unapplauded integrity

She lingered a few leisurely seconds

She nodded mutely

She nourished a dream of ambition

She permitted herself a delicate little smile

She poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition

She questioned inimically [inimically = unfriendly; hostile]

She recaptured herself with difficulty

She regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes

She sat eyeing him with frosty calm

She seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution

She seemed wrapped in a veil of lassitude

She shook hands grudgingly

She softened her frown to a quivering smile

She spoke with hurried eagerness

She spoke with sweet severity

She stilled and trampled on the inward protest

She stood her ground with the most perfect dignity

She strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her

She swept away all opposing opinion with the swift rush of her enthusiasm

She thrived on insincerity

She twitted him merrily

She was both weary and placated

She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations

She was demure and dimly appealing

She was exquisitely simple

She was gripped with a sense of suffocation and panic

She was in an anguish of sharp and penetrating remorse

She was oppressed by a dead melancholy

She was stricken to the soul

She wore an air of wistful questioning

Sheer superfluity of happiness

Sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life

Silence fell

Singing lustily as if to exorcise the demon of gloom

Skirmishes and retreats of conscience

Slender experience of the facts of life

Slope towards extinction

Slow the movement was and tortuous

Slowly disengaging its significance from the thicket of words

So innocent in her exuberant happiness

Soar into a rosy zone of contemplation

Softened by the solicitude of untiring and anxious love

Solitary and sorely smitten souls

Some dim-remembered and dream-like images

Some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain

Some flash of witty irrelevance

Something curiously suggestive and engaging

Something eminently human beaconed from his eyes

Something full of urgent haste

Something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture

Something that seizes tyrannously upon the soul

Sore beset by the pressure of temptation

Specious show of impeccability

Spectacular display of wrath

Spur and whip the tired mind into action

Stale and facile platitudes

Stamped with unutterable and solemn woe

Startled into perilous activity

Startling leaps over vast gulfs of time

Stem the tide of opinion

Stern emptying of the soul

Stimulated to an ever deepening subtlety

Stirred into a true access of enthusiasm

Stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life

Strange capacities and suggestions both of vehemence and pride

Strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets

Stripped to its bare skeleton

Strode forth imperiously [imperious = arrogantly overbearing]

Struck by a sudden curiosity

Struck dumb with strange surprise

Stung by his thoughts, and impatient of rest

Stung by the splendor of the prospect

Subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty

Sublime indifference to contemporary usage and taste

Submission to an implied rebuke

Subtle indications of great mental agitation

Subtle suggestions of remoteness

Such things as the eye of history sees

Such was the petty chronicle

Suddenly a thought shook him

Suddenly overawed by a strange, delicious shyness

Suddenly smitten with unreality

Suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes