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arid
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  • He could taste the familiar tang of museum air—an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon—the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.†   (source)
  • Thomas immediately saw that the object that held everyone's attention was a simple stick poking out of the arid ground.†   (source)
  • Arid almost as soon as I realized what I had said, I wished I hadn't.†   (source)
  • Yet, within its limited space, Costa Rica had a remarkable diversity of biological habitats: seacoasts on both the Atlantic and the Pacific; four separate mountain ranges, including twelve-thousand-foot peaks and active volcanoes; rain forests, cloud forests, temperate zones, swampy marshes, and arid deserts.†   (source)
  • I laughed arid got into my car.†   (source)
  • With an additional hundred pounds, he would have been huge and frightening; in some way, I thought, he looked like a man who had recently lost a hundred pounds—arid, at the same time, he appeared to have within him the capacity to gain it all back overnight.†   (source)
  • Arid each night, creeping a little closer to the tent, inching his way over the woodland blanket of decaying leaves and moist loamy soil until his shadow rose in the narrow opening of the tent and fell over her, and the tent was filled with her smell, and there would be the sleeping girl clutching the teddy bear and the hunter holding his gun, one dreaming of the life that was taken from her, the other thinking of the life he'd take.†   (source)
  • She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it.†   (source)
  • For the most part they were unspeakably boring, all about life in a traditional fishing village arid the enduring mysteries of animal husbandry, but one exhibit stood out from the rest.†   (source)
  • In the arid room —all sheetrock and whiteness — the muted colors bloomed with life; and even though the surface of the painting was ghosted ever so slightly with dust, the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window.†   (source)
  • However, to the south the plains are less arid and more heavily populated.†   (source)
  • Sol spent three days and nights in the arid mountains, eating only the thick-crusted bread he had brought and drinking from his condenser therm.†   (source)
  • You don't need to be a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Institute to know this is arid country above the tree line, not much growing.†   (source)
  • Slather every protuberance with arid zeal!†   (source)
  • They were sailing very slowly up a river without banks that meandered between arid sandbars stretching to the horizon.†   (source)
  • …arrived for work, and they would talk and smile sidelong, and she might touch his elbow, and they would sit together at the communal lunch, and in the evenings when their work was done for the day they would walk through Marin, hike up and down the paths and the streets that were forming, and once they walked past Saeed's shanty, and he told her it was his, and the next time they walked by she asked to see the inside of it, and they went in, arid they shut the plastic flap behind them.†   (source)
  • It wound through arid mountains and villages of wooden huts.†   (source)
  • Despite the pumpkin-season temperature, the day's arid glitter, both boys were sweating as they approached a barricade that state troopers had erected at the entrance to River Valley Farm.†   (source)
  • With other orphans, he had made it to Kakuma, a sprawling, water-starved refugee camp of more than seventy thousand in an arid corner of northwestern Kenya, where he lived for ten years before he was accepted for resettlement, along with thousands of other Lost Boys, in the United States.†   (source)
  • Some two hundred north-south ranges dissect this arid land, making Nevada the most mountainous state in the Union.†   (source)
  • By then, the sun had begun to crest the horizon, spreading gold across the arid landscape.†   (source)
  • He paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking cornpatch, drew a drink from one of his skins to start the saliva, and spatinto the arid soil.†   (source)
  • There is a jump from the bed and the round bulge disappears instantly as the smooth metal slats lie straight arid flat again.†   (source)
  • People there use this aridness as a blanket excuse for all of the hot, smoggy city's excesses.†   (source)
  • From the surrounding arid lands to the dust that swept the city to the settling of factory soot on sweat-coated bodies, one just accepted that cleanliness was a relative concept.†   (source)
  • On Christmas night, in driving sleet and snow, he arid his ragged army recrossed the Delaware and struck at Trenton the next morning, taking a drowsy Hessian guardpost completely by surprise.†   (source)
  • Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous.†   (source)
  • A lot of them aren't ashamed of Mutants; it doesn't seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they're right enough to live arid to learn to look after themselves.†   (source)
  • I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race arid transform the history of man.†   (source)
  • Arid, don't forget, you're the only one he asked for.†   (source)
  • Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes.†   (source)
  • Arid saw the blood.†   (source)
  • The writer Natalia Ginzburg remembered him after his death: "It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams."†   (source)
  • One year it had been an arid river plain, the next a rapidly developing metropolis of paved roads and factories, shopping districts, and spreading apartment buildings, all beckoning those from the south with the promise of housing and jobs in the thousands, and those who heeded the call brought with them the unmistakable hysteria of Hong Kong's commerce.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was only that notion, its arid hope, she sensed as this forenoon they made their seaward thrust, which would stop short of any sea.†   (source)
  • The aridity of that life, which had also been mine!†   (source)
  • Our district is known as 'little Castille' because the land is so arid.†   (source)
  • As a result, Sam's desert house in the brilliant arid Mesa outside Venusburg was overrun by charity cases.†   (source)
  • A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburned limbs and toughened bodies.†   (source)
  • His voice had lost its aridity, its detachment, and he was talking to the jury as if they were folks on the post office corner.   (source)
    aridity = lack of vitality
  • We see nearly the whole of Australia covered by lofty trees, yet that country possesses a far more arid climate.   (source)
    arid = dry
  • The scene looked beautiful, blue waters set among steep, arid mountainsides.†   (source)
  • He turned to see a man arid woman tearing away at the remaining glass in the broken window.†   (source)
  • I'll cry a few tears, but only a few, because the eyes of the elderly are arid.†   (source)
  • This arid plain isn't claimed by anyone, he continues.†   (source)
  • Mark sat down on the floor again arid closed his eyes.†   (source)
  • To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness.†   (source)
  • It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb.†   (source)
  • It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility.†   (source)
  • Spring was at hand, and even the arid sage flats soon came to life.†   (source)
  • Arid we need to move.†   (source)
  • Shots of a boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away; a row of heads on poles that was in the ex-Argentine, said the CorpSeCorps, though they didn't say whose heads they were or how they'd got onto the poles.†   (source)
  • The huge sleeping room Helenda and I share rocks gently in the boughs of a three-hundred-meter Worldtree on the Templar world of God's Grove and connects to a solarium which sits alone on the arid saltflats of Hebron.†   (source)
  • Cange, the squatter settlement, lay in the midst of this arid desolation, half a mile up the road from the huge freshwater reservoir.†   (source)
  • "You started that letter on a hike in rural Haiti," I mused aloud, thinking now of those arid highlands, of medieval peasant huts, donkey ambulances.†   (source)
  • I have avoided the temptation to simplify both the issues and the answers, and if the reader must occasionally struggle through an arid passage of technical detail, I apologize.†   (source)
  • August and September were arid months, when hardly anything grew and one ate mostly beans or peas that had been dried and stored.†   (source)
  • Not only did she refuse to open doors when the arid wind passed through, but she had the windows nailed shut with boards in the shape of a cross, obeying the paternal order of being buried alive.†   (source)
  • In the small isolated room where the arid air never penetrated, nor the dust, nor the heat, both had the atavistic vision of an old man, his back to the window, wearing a hat with a brim like the wings of a crow who spoke about the world many years before they had been born.†   (source)
  • The bullets have torn into Baxter's chest, spraying red mist everywhere arid knocking him onto his back with a hard thud.†   (source)
  • Arriving in the arid and dusty land of McAllen, Texas, this past July, nobody there or back in Monterrey considered the little team as anything more than a speck in the canyon.†   (source)
  • The pioneers who founded Garden City were necessarily a Spartan people, but when the time came to establish a formal cemetery, they were determined, despite arid soil and the troubles of transporting water, to create a rich contrast to the dusty streets, the austere plains.†   (source)
  • Arid when I became really famous, it was for being with Bryn, so it had less to do with the music I was making than the girl I was with.†   (source)
  • Aureliano Triste stood on the threshold waiting for the dust to clear and then he saw in the center of the room the squalid woman, still dressed in clothing of the past century, with a few yellow threads on her bald head, and with two large eyes, still beautiful, in which the last stars of hope had gone out, and the skin of her face was wrinkled by the aridity of solitude.†   (source)
  • Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.†   (source)
  • …stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too,…†   (source)
  • She had inherited from her mother an arid feminism, which had no meaning in her own life at all, for she was leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa, and she did not know how fortunate she was.†   (source)
  • Chuckled aridly.†   (source)
  • Arid in due time Uncle Pio brought with him that courser of the seas, the Captain Alvarado.†   (source)
  • …burst, as if that entire accumulation of seven months were erupting spontaneously from every pore in one incredible evacuation (she not moving, not moving a muscle) and then vanishing, disappearing as instantaneously as if the very fierce and arid aura which he had enclosed her in were drying the tears faster than they emerged: and still standing with his hands on her shoulders and looked at Clytie and said, 'Ah, Clytie' and then at me—the same face which I had last seen, only a little…†   (source)
  • Out of their caves the horrible dwarf-creatures of the arid, bitter earth will venture; and very very gradually there will be perceptible a slight improvement in their morals, health, beauty, and stature; until presently they will be living in a world such as the one we know today.†   (source)
  • " But he took this very aridly, which wasn't to be wondered at, considering the tramp appearance I made, in the wrack of my good clothes, inflamed at the eyes, and looking garbage-nourished.†   (source)
  • THE CRUCIFORM TREE One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico.†   (source)
  • We shared a cab along the arid miles between the Lutyens still life and the warm, palpitating motion picture of Old Delhi.†   (source)
  • Partly because of the dominance of the letter 'I' and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade.†   (source)
  • To the ear of that sick and hateful man who knew nothing of Runeberg and me save that we were in Staffordshire and who was waiting in vain for our report in his arid office in Berlin, endlessly examining newspapers ….†   (source)
  • It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or it fell upon the arid waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into furrows, here swept into desolate cairns, here sprinkled with stunted dark-green jungle trees.†   (source)
  • The arid cobbles, distinct close at hand and hemmed in by peeling bill boards, blackened hovels, vacant storage houses, contracted to scales in middle distance, slurred further on and slid up a narrow groove of houses into dusty blue sky.†   (source)
  • From Leonard he got little—a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built.†   (source)
  • Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy.†   (source)
  • Something, he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air, something arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it shrivel and fall.†   (source)
  • So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.†   (source)
  • The place smelled stale; the slate roofs glistered in the arid heat.†   (source)
  • His soul was filled on a sudden with a singular aridity.†   (source)
  • Aridly it drew down the thin corners of his shapely mouth.†   (source)
  • As he entered their arid tidiness, depression suddenly seized him.†   (source)
  • Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer.†   (source)
  • "Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to see you to-day!†   (source)
  • The night promised to be as arid as the day had been.†   (source)
  • The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the want of animal spirits.†   (source)
  • Straggling bits of forest—yellow pines, the driver called the trees—began to encroach upon the burned-over and arid barren land.†   (source)
  • Not at all; Fortune, who lets whole populations die of hunger, showered all her gifts at once upon the little aristocrat, like Kryloff's Cloud which passes over an arid plain and empties itself into the sea.†   (source)
  • It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation.†   (source)
  • Angus's aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig.†   (source)
  • The paleface, who was to drive him and his people into the fastnesses of the arid hills, was unknown and undreamed of.†   (source)
  • No vulgar profusion of vegetation: even a touch of aridity in the frequent patches of stones: Spanish magnificence and Spanish economy everywhere.†   (source)
  • I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw-mill and the arid acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his household through the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's words implied, and I expressed my wonder.†   (source)
  • It was a southerly slope, and therefore semi-arid, covered with cercocarpus and yucca and some shrub that Madeline believed was manzanita.†   (source)
  • On the blue background of the high coast they seem to float on silvery patches of calm water, arid and gray, or dark green and rounded like clumps of evergreen bushes, with the larger ones, a mile or two long, showing the outlines of ridges, ribs of gray rock under the dark mantle of matted leafage.†   (source)
  • Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing bluenosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter.†   (source)
  • The ghost of a world-famous violinist played as if behind veils, accompanied by a piano with the arid sound of a spinet—a romance by Rubinstein.†   (source)
  • I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to.†   (source)
  • Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there.†   (source)
  • …in the door once and turn once only 411 We think of the key, each in his prison thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DA Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me 424 Shall I at least set my lands in order?†   (source)
  • And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that afternoon, merely by the words: "By the way, guess whom I saw at the Trois Quartiers—at the umbrella counter—Swann!" caused to burst open in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom.†   (source)
  • He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality.†   (source)
  • This eastern view was one of the mountains and valleys, where, to be sure, there were arid patches; but the restful green of pine and fir was there, and the cool gray of crags.†   (source)
  • From his fund of memories came the dreadful, last visions of Wiedemann arid Sonnenschein helplessly rolling in bestial struggle; and he shuddered as he realized that in the end it is only the physical that remains—the nails, the teeth.†   (source)
  • His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity, whensoever possible, with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.†   (source)
  • Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness.†   (source)
  • The solitary and arid blades of grass arose from the passing gusts fearfully perceptible; the bold and rocky mountains were too distinct in their barrenness, and the eye even sought relief, in vain, by attempting to pierce the illimitable void of heaven, which was shut to its gaze by the dusky sheet of ragged and driving vapor.†   (source)
  • The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy bench with legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople.†   (source)
  • But he was shy of giving her an opportunity, because, if her communication bore upon the aridity of her matrimonial lot, he was at a loss to see how he could help her.†   (source)
  • He knew that it was barren and without shelter; but when the sea became more calm, he resolved to plunge into its waves again, and swim to Lemaire, equally arid, but larger, and consequently better adapted for concealment.†   (source)
  • When the wind lulled, a deeper silence than that of the deserts fell upon the arid, naked rocks, and weighed upon the surface of the ocean.†   (source)
  • …a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden—allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood.†   (source)
  • Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.†   (source)
  • Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.†   (source)
  • He drew back his chair, clasped his hands over his head, and gave himself up to dull and arid musings.†   (source)
  • To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a New-ton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity.†   (source)
  • These stones and this sand discover, on examination, a perfect analogy with those which compose the arid and broken summits of the Rocky Mountains.†   (source)
  • We crossed the stream, which we named East River, filling our flasks with water, and it was well we did so, for in continuing our journey, we found the soil become more arid and parched than we had expected; in fact we soon appeared surrounded by a desert.†   (source)
  • In all directions the grade sloped gently from the centre, where there was a reservoir, or deep marble basin, broken at intervals by little gates which, when raised, emptied the water into sluices bordering the walks—a cunning device for the rescue of the place from the aridity too prevalent elsewhere in the region.†   (source)
  • I hold that the more arid and unreclaimed the soil where the Christian labourer's task of tillage is appointed him — the scantier the meed his toil brings — the higher the honour.†   (source)
  • I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious.†   (source)
  • Contrary to the usual practice of the men of their caste, this party had left the fertile bottoms of the low country, and had found its way, by means only known to such adventurers, across glen and torrent, over deep morasses and arid wastes, to a point far beyond the usual limits of civilised habitations.†   (source)
  • The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr. Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully sensible of that gentleman's merits under arid conditions, as when something moist was going.†   (source)
  • The open–sea plants had already left behind the increasingly arid seafloor, where a prodigious number of animals were still swarming: zoophytes, articulates, mollusks, and fish.†   (source)
  • The tongue of arid land was the cradle of those English colonies which were destined one day to become the United States of America.†   (source)
  • Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou…†   (source)
  • Their object was to plant a colony on the shores of the Hudson; but after having been driven about for some time in the Atlantic Ocean, they were forced to land on that arid coast of New England which is now the site of the town of Plymouth.†   (source)
  • "The tariff," said the inhabitants of Carolina in 1832, "enriches the North, and ruins the South; for if this were not the case, to what can we attribute the continually increasing power and wealth of the North, with its inclement skies and arid soil; whilst the South, which may be styled the garden of America, is rapidly declining?"†   (source)
  • But I am at a loss to explain the political action of the American tribunals without entering into some technical details of their constitution and their forms of proceeding; and I know not how to descend to these minutiae without wearying the curiosity of the reader by the natural aridity of the subject, or without risking to fall into obscurity through a desire to be succinct.†   (source)
  • …her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.†   (source)
  • And this same arid soil hath ever been A haunt of countless mournful memories, As well in our day as in days of yore.†   (source)
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