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esoteric
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  • There are only a few questions left, and they are the esoteric ones.†   (source)
  • The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were "esoteric," a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in "shameless auto-exculpation," the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a "cursory" journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the "hieroglyph" of his displeasure.†   (source)
  • On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20; 773.573.6521; JG—Kuffs?)†   (source)
  • She would chuckle, and Pari would humor her, but she sensed an edge to these jokes, an oblique sort of chiding, a suggestion that her knowledge had been judged esoteric and her pursuit of it frivolous.†   (source)
  • For his esoteric amusement he commanded the jolies filles (and we obliged) to line up in front of him in order of height.†   (source)
  • The books from Jaime's den were piled in the courtyard, doused with gasoline, and set on fire in an infamous pyre that was fed with the magic books from the enchanted trunks of GreatUncle Marcos, the remaining copies of Nicolas's esoteric treatise, the leather-bound set of the complete works of Marx, and even Trueba's opera scores, producing a scandalous bonfire that filled the neighborhood with smoke and that, in normal times, would have brought fire trucks from every direction.†   (source)
  • Pastor Falk was saying that this person was enthralled by esoteric sources, specifically the Apocrypha.†   (source)
  • When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.†   (source)
  • He was not interested in the parchments, which he thought of more as an esoteric pastime, but his attention was attracted by the rare wisdom and the inexplicable knowledge of the world that his desolate kinsman had.†   (source)
  • There were people perched all around her office, locked in a fierce and esoteric debate about which particular shade of pink would look best on an upcoming cover.†   (source)
  • Walking back to the dorm, flipping the pages, he feels himself shudder: it's filled with cryptology, systems of decoding numbers for use in a computer, and esoteric mathematical proofs that seem to have no connection with anything tangible.†   (source)
  • It is becoming very esoteric.†   (source)
  • The man and woman stepped into the room stify side by side as though right out of a familiar, though esoteric, anniversary daguerreotype on a wall.†   (source)
  • There's nothing mysterious or esoteric about it.†   (source)
  • I had long argued that Communist literature was, for the most part, dull, esoteric, and Western-centered, but ought to be simple, clear, and relevant to the African masses.†   (source)
  • The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce "their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality-is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.†   (source)
  • He brings me slides he thinks I would like to see and offers them to me shyly and eagerly, with a conspiratorial giggle, as if we are sharing a delicious, esoteric secret, or something religious.†   (source)
  • Other, older Eldunari joined in the conversation, but their explanations made even less sense, for they came mainly as a torrent of overlapping images, sensations, and strange, esoteric comparisons that left Eragon hopelessly bewildered.†   (source)
  • This power to astonish is true even of seemingly long or esoteric stories that no one is said to read: the way to Swann's house and the way to the Guermantes house turn out to have been the same way all along?†   (source)
  • National Focus: More Esoteric Issues†   (source)
  • While my fellow students were already establishing themselves in various esoteric specialties, most of which they invented for themselves on the theory that if you are the only specialist in a given field you need fear no competition, I was still unable to deflect my interests from the general to the particular.†   (source)
  • While I am probably not an expert in anything, except perhaps for my own peculiar mode of existence, I know a little bit about lots of esoteric things.†   (source)
  • Shura Shlesinger knew mathematics, esoteric Indian doctrine, the addresses of the best-known teachers at the Moscow Conservatory, who was living with whom, and God only knows what else.†   (source)
  • It was a very strange document filled with references to esoteric events that had occurred over the year.†   (source)
  • esoteric tax ramifications
  • esoteric regulatory structure
  • To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.   (source)
  • Obviously, the nomenclature is esoteric, but the physics is very advanced.†   (source)
  • Masons are a very obvious link between Peter Solomon and any number of esoteric topics.†   (source)
  • Um, what I meant is that Noetics is more ....esoteric.†   (source)
  • And if you don't believe Peter, read some of Newton's esoteric texts on the Bible.†   (source)
  • With this esoteric thought she closed her eyes and fell asleep again.†   (source)
  • The chaplain memorized the prophetic words solemnly, entranced further by their esoteric import.†   (source)
  • He raised his voice once or twice in manly sorrow and then sat down with the other men listening to the endless wailing of the women and the esoteric language of the ekwe.†   (source)
  • "The circumpunct," Langdon said, "we already know has many meanings—one of its most esoteric being the rose, the alchemical symbol for perfection.†   (source)
  • When he could no longer find what he wanted at the library, he paid rare-book dealers to purchase for him some of the most esoteric texts on earth.†   (source)
  • The only computer work Nola had done tonight was historical research for Sato on esoteric Masonic topics.†   (source)
  • It does ....and it also sounds very Rosicrucian, Kabbalistic, Alumbradian, and any number of other esoteric groups.†   (source)
  • Echoes of the ancient Art still resonated in every corner of the globe, from the mystical Kabbalists of Judaism to the esoteric Sufis of Islam.†   (source)
  • Every esoteric tradition interprets 'the stone' in its own way, but invariably the occultum lapidem is a source of power and enlightenment.†   (source)
  • The illuminated Adepts and their esoteric fraternities witnessed the rising evil and saw that man was not using his newfound knowledge for the good of his species.†   (source)
  • Her brother's bore older, more esoteric titles like the Kybalion, the Zohar, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and a translation of the Sumerian tablets from the British Museum.†   (source)
  • According to Rosicrucian doctrine, the order was "built on esoteric truths of the ancient past," truths which had to be "concealed from the average man" and which promised great insight into "the spiritual realm."†   (source)
  • He could not even tell whether they were real mathematical formulas and calculations, but since he knew Salander's peculiarities he assumed that the equations were genuine and no doubt had some esoteric meaning.†   (source)
  • I've read you, seen you, expounding on your esoteric interpretations of complex legal matters, assaulting every decent thing the courts of this country have decreed in the last thirty years, when you haven't the vaguest idea what it is to be poor, or hungry, or have an unwanted mass in your belly you neither anticipated nor can provide a life for.†   (source)
  • It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it's put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you can have.†   (source)
  • The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the land-scapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.†   (source)
  • Out of this somewhat esoteric bureaucratic debate, a need had arisen for the Section to assign a trusted colleague to the operation who could reinforce its control: espionage, in fact, against members of the immigration division.†   (source)
  • Yossarian was stunned at how waxen and ghastly Snowden's bare leg looked, how loathsome, how lifeless and esoteric the downy, fine, curled blond hairs on his odd white shin and calf.†   (source)
  • From his point of view this assumption provided an adequate explanation for most of my otherwise inexplicable activities, and it is just possible — though I hesitate to attribute any such selfish motives to Ootek — that by associating with me he hoped to enlarge his own knowledge of the esoteric practices of his vocation.†   (source)
  • She liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn't been overwhelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn't slimed up with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang.†   (source)
  • This is what is really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday.†   (source)
  • The whole air of the place was masculine, transient: a population even whose husbands were at home only at intervals and on holiday—a population of men who led esoteric lives whose actual scenes were removed and whose intermittent presence was pandered to like that of patrons in a theatre.†   (source)
  • The text in which we learn of the Makroprosopos and the Milooprosopos, the Zohar (zdhar, "light, splendor"), is a collection of esoteric Hebrew writing given to the world about 13os by a learned Spanish Jew, Moses de I eon.†   (source)
  • Simeon's teachings were supposed to have been drawn from the hnknzah nistarah or hidden wisdom of Moses, i. e., a body of esoteric lore first studied by Moses in Egypt, the land of his birth, then pondered by him during his forty years in the wilderness (where he received special instruction from an angel), and finally incorporated cryptically in the first four books of the Pentateuch, from which it can be extracted by a proper understanding and manipulation of the mystical number-values of the Hebrew alphabet.†   (source)
  • I do', looking straight at the other, the esoteric, the sybarite, standing (the youth) now, erect, thin (because he was young), his face scarlet but his head high and his eyes steady: 'Yes.†   (source)
  • So I can imagine him, the way he did it: the way in which he took the innocent and negative plate of Henry's provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept.†   (source)
  • And he spent ten days there, not only the esoteric, the sybarite, the steel blade in the silken tesselated sheath which Henry had begun to ape at the University, but the object of art, the mode and mirror of form and fashion which Mrs Sutpen (so your father said) accepted him as and insisted (didn't your father say?) that he be (and would have purchased him as and paid for him with Judith even, i†   (source)
  • to me than to any grief for being so less its partner—a woman saying 'Yes, Rosa?' calmly into the midstride of my running which (I know it now) had begun five years ago, since he had been in my house too and had left no more trace than he had left in Ellen's, where he had been but a shape, a shadow: not of a man, a being, but of some esoteric piece of furniture—vase or chair or desk—which Ellen wanted, as though his very impression (or lack of it) on Goldfield or Sutpen walls held portentous prophecy of what was to be; —Yes, running out of that first year (that year before the War) during which Ellen talked to me of trousseau (and it my trousseau), of all the dreamy panoply o†   (source)
  • Henry would not let him; it was the probation, you see) when she received a letter from him saying We have waited long enough, she and Clytie should begin at once to fashion a wedding dress and veil out of rags and scraps; Ellen, the esoteric, the almost baroque, the almost epicene objet d'art which with childlike voracity she essayed to include in the furnishing and decoration of her house; Sutpen, the man whom, after seeing once and before any engagement existed anywhere save in his wife's mind, he saw as a potential threat to the (now and at last) triumphant coronation of his ol†   (source)
  • The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends.†   (source)
  • After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face.†   (source)
  • Neither individually nor as a crowd could they be said to dominate the environment, as one comes to dominate a work of art he may possess, no matter how esoteric, no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into something else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist in it was as difficult as walking on a highly polished moving stairway, and no one could succeed at all save with the aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among broken glass—which qualities limited and defined the majority of those present.†   (source)
  • He had been "spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic women.†   (source)
  • These precautions thrilled him, and to the others at McGurk they had something of the esoteric magic of the alchemists.†   (source)
  • Yesterday an 'esoteric healer' came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake.†   (source)
  • His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language with mathematical formulae, that he was a liar and six kinds of a fool.†   (source)
  • It's just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they're getting strength to conquer life, when they're merely running away from it.†   (source)
  • To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.†   (source)
  • Madame de Bellegarde discoursed for some time longer in this sympathetic strain, with an eager abundance which seemed to indicate that her opportunities for revealing her esoteric philosophy were indeed rare.†   (source)
  • The life esoteric is not for ordinary person.†   (source)
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