SIZE, POSITION, RELATION, AND PROPORTION
large, big
huge, vast, great, massive, extensive, bulky, sizable, considerable, ample, substantial, hefty, jumbo, bounteous, oversize, oversized
very large
giant, gigantic, mountainous, colossal, mammoth, behemoth, brobdingnagian, gargantuan, stupendous, amplitudinous, monstrous, gross, extensive, far-ranging, far-reaching, enormous, titanic, humongous, immense, megatherian, astronomical, Bunyonesque, elephantine, pachydermatous, pythonic, cyclopean, supersized, supersize, whopping
large in capacity
capacious, voluminous, roomy, spacious, comprehensive, commodious
whole
complete, entire, intact, sum, all, full
partial
incomplete, portion, percentage, fraction, slice
increased
raised, augmented, expanded, added to, supplemented, ratcheted up, ramped up, went up, appended, tacked on, heightened
decreased
lowered, lessened, fell, reduced, diminished, declined, went down, rolled back, phased down, curtailed, shortened, subtracted from
small, little, or short
inconsiderable, pint size, diminutive, puny, wee, petite, slight, undersize, squat, bantam, truncated
very small
tiny, teeny, teeny-weeny, minuscule, infinitesimal, minute, miniature, midget, microscopic, trace
wide
broad, thick, latitudinous, spread, outspread
very wide
expansive, panoramic, widespread
narrow
thin, slender, slim, constricted, spindly
sparse
scanty, meager, exiguous, slight
at rest
stationary, not moving, motionless, fixed, stopped, static, inert, at a standstill, still, stuck
in motion
moving, going, running, operating, in action, active, kinetic, advancing, progressing, proceeding, dynamic, locomoting, locomotive, in a state of unrest, motile
high, tall
elevated, lofty, altitudinous
very high
towering, soaring
long
lengthy, extensive, elongated
very long
far-reaching, endless
very deep
profound, abyssal, bottomless, depthless, unplumbed, yawning, cavernous
related
connected, interconnected, associated, affiliated, interrelated, correlated, correlative, correlational, interlinked
interconnected
intermingled, entwined, interlocking, entangled, intertwined, conjoined, bonded
placed or occurring at intervals within or among
interspersed, intermingled, interposed, interjacent, interlarded
in direct relation to
corresponding, correlative, mutual, reciprocal, vis-à-vis
in order
ordered, orderly, systematic, grouped, arranged, arrayed, aligned, organized, sequential, serial, alphabetical, numerical, hierarchic, hierarchical, regimented
not in order, out of order
disarranged, unordered, disarrayed, unaligned, jumbled, muddled, out of kilter
in a line or something like a line
lined up, aligned, ranged, arranged, arrayed, in a row
in proportion
proportionate, proportional, prorated
not in proportion
disproportionate, disproportional, ill-proportioned
in balance
balanced, equipoised, equiponderant, equiponderous, counterbalanced, counterweighted, counterpoised, even, evened out
not in balance
unbalanced, disequilibriate, off-balance, off-kilter
larger or heavier on or leaning to one side
lop-sided, tilted, one-sided
heavier or larger on top
top-heavy
having a perfectly divisible order left and right (bilaterally) or top and bottom
symmetrical
not symmetrical
asymmetrical
having radial symmetry
actinoid, actinomorphic, actinomorphous
north
northern, northerly, boreal, hyperborean
south
southern, southerly, austral, meridional
east
eastern, easterly, oriental
west
western, westerly, occidental
opposite
contraposed, antipodal, counterposed, contrary, opposing
pertaining to opposite sides
heterolateral
at the top
apical, topmost
at the bottom
basal, bottommost
on or to the right
dextral
on or to the left
sinistral
to or at the side
lateral, flanking
on the same side
ipsilateral, ipselateral, homolateral
on the opposite side
contralateral
upright or up-down in direction
vertical, standing, perpendicular, plumb, erect, true
at a 90° angle
right-angled, orthogonal
side to side in direction
horizontal, level, plane
extending across or at a right angle to linearly
cross, crosswise, transverse, athwart, diagonal
at a slanted angle or in a sloping direction or position (from the perpendicular)
angled, aslant, slanting, slanted, oblique, raked, canted, inclined, tilted, leaning, bent, crooked, askew, on a bias, turned, deflected, veering, on a slope
diagonally positioned
catercornered, catercorner, catty-cornered, kitty-cornered
on the outside
external, exterior, without, outer, outermost, superficial
on the inside
internal, interior, within, inner, innermost
center
core, nucleus, middle, centrum, heart, nexus, nub, hub
edge
periphery, border, margin, marge, fringe, boundary, frontier, perimeter, circumference
extending out from a center
radial, radiating, spoked
middle (linearly)
central, midway, medium, mean, medial, mesial, midmost, middlemost
constituting a central line or axis
axial
coming together linearly
meeting, converging, convergent, intersecting
going in two different directions
forked, forking, separating, diverging, divergent, bifurcating, bifurcate, bifurcal, dichotomous, diffluent
running in directional alignment without touching
parallel, nonconvergent, nondivergent, paradromic, collateral, collimated, running side by side
not with or near or set aside
apart, separate, individual, discrete, disjunct, detached, independent, asunder, portioned off
apart
detached, disconnected, unfastened, sundered, disjoined, parted, independent
in pieces or parts
divided, partitioned, compartmentalized, segmented, sectored, fragmented
in two parts
bipartite, dual, double, twofold
in three parts
tripartite, triple, threefold, triform
in four parts
quadripartite, quadriform, fourfold
divided into two usually equal parts
bisected
divided into three usually equal parts
trisected
divided into four usually equal parts
quadrisected
scattered
dispersed, distributed, disseminated, strewn, diffused
continuous
continual, uninterrupted, serial, unbroken, steady, flowing, of a piece
not continuous
discontinuous, interrupted, broken, disjunct
at a point farther than
beyond, in excess of, over, over and above, above and beyond
having the same position or place
coinciding, coincident, coextensive
coinciding when superimposed
congruent
lying along the same straight line
collinear
even or continuous with a given surface
flush
having coinciding axes (or being concentric)
coaxial
of the same size
equal, equivalent, equisized
near
nearby, close, close by, proximal, proximate, nigh, immediate, in the area of, propinquous, propinquant, neighboring, vicinal
next to
adjacent, contiguous, apposite, paradromic (parallel), bordering, side by side, juxtaposed, cheek by jowl, conterminous, coterminous, abreast, beside, by, alongside, apposed
up against or connected to
abutting, adjoining, against
lying close against
adhering, clinging
distant
far, far away, far off, at a distance, long-range, a good way, remote
equally near to or far from
equidistant
at the edge
peripheral, border, marginal
at or near the beginning
initial
at or near the end
terminal, final
near the point of attachment
proximal
at the far end from the point of attachment
distal
over
above, atop, upward, higher, superior
lying above
superjacent, superincumbent, overlying
placed above
superposed
extending over and covering part of
overlapping
on the surface of
atop, superincumbent, superimposed
overhanging or sticking out
overhung, projecting, beetling, jutting, lowering, pensile, protruding, protrudent, outjutting, outstanding, extrusive, protrusive
under
below, beneath, downward from, lower, inferior
lying below
subjacent, underlying, surmounted
underhanging
underhung
hanging from
dependent, pendent, suspended, pendulant, dangling, suspensory, nutant
supporting
bracing, buttressing, underpinning, carrying, bearing, propping up, sustaining, bolstering, shoring up, girding, suspensory
ascending
rising, climbing, acclivous, acclivitous
descending
dipping, dropping, falling, declivous, declivitous
set back
recessed, in a cleft
surrounding
encompassing, enclosing, encircling, circumscribing, enveloping, enfolding, enwreathing, engirding, circumambient, circumjacent, circumferential
surrounded
encompassed, encircled, circumscribed, enveloped, enwreathed, enfolded, engirded
enclosing
containing, confining, closeting, cloistering, immuring, entombing, harboring
enclosed
contained, confined, closeted, cloistered, immured, entombed
between or in between
in the middle, betwixt, interjacent, intervenient
between two lines
interlinear, interlineal
among
amid, amidst, in the midst of, mid, midst
in the middle or center
central, middlemost, centralized
near the center
paracentral
placed in between or among
inserted, interposed, insinuated, interpolated, interjected, intercalated, sandwiched, spatchcocked
situated at intervals
spaced out, interspaced, interspersed, intermittent, intervaled, intervallic
in a space or opening
interstitial, interspatial
facing directly or frontally
head-on
with the side facing
broadside
regarded from the end or longest dimension or with the longitudinal end forward
lengthwise
regarded from one side or with one side forward
sideways, crosswise, widthwise
in front of
anterior, to the fore
at or to the front
frontal, anterior, ventral, obverse, in the foreground, fore, vanward
behind
posterior, to the rear, in the background, aft of
at or to the back
rear, posterior, reverse, dorsal
at or to the side
lateral, on the flank, sideward
facing
face-to-face, vis-à-vis, fronting
facing or moving ahead or to the front
forward
facing or moving back or to the rear
backward
upside down
topsy-turvy, bottom up, turned over, inverted, upturned
inside out
outside in, everted
backwards
reversed, inverted
back to front
reversed, retroverted
turned so as to show a different surface
obverted
in contact
touching, tangent, tangential, abutting, contactual
joined
affixed, in conjunction, conjoined, bound, tied, adjoined, adjoining, connected, combined, combinative, fastened, yoked, bridged, linked, united, interlocked, dovetailed, bonded
brought together
gathered, amassed, heaped, collected, accumulated, bunched, piled, stacked, conglomerate, agglomerate, glomerate, assembled, combined, cumulate, massed, conjoined, of a piece, clustered, grouped, united, conjunct, serried, integrated, melded, conflated, compacted
lying directly in the path of or in front of
athwart
crossing one another
intersecting, crisscross, decussate
second from the last
antepenultimate
next to last
penultimate
as seen from high above
bird’s-eye (view)
as seen (graphically) were the exterior or wall removed
cutaway
as seen (graphically) were the parts shown individuated or apart
exploded
Unspecific Quantities or Amounts
pile
gang
drop
sliver
soupçon
snatch
lump
passel
whit
shard
herd
bevy
tinge
cornucopia
welter
strip
potpourri
scintilla
wisp
bunch
quantity
chunk
tuft
snippet
profusion
hunk
body
clutch
squirt
particle
clump
multitude
droves
legion
bite
flood
team
glob
morsel
slice
wad
dab
group
mountain
stack
gazillion
deal
horde
modicum
crumb
trifle
quantum
slew
handful
pocketful
boxful
roomful
jarful
mob
shipload
covey
tad
raft
mishmash
conglomeration
spritz
heap
fraction
truckload
slab
zillion
fragment
bulk
pittance
smear
bit
pinch
scrap
mess
contingent
dash
spate
few
plague
crop
flock
number
galaxy
mass
dribs and drabs
growth
litter
bundle
smidgen
pack
sampling
dollop
symphony
infinity
agglomeration
hair
smattering
congeries
tribe
load
smithereens
gaggle
abundance
series
knot
collection
slip
trickle
piece
speck
myriad
file
crock
riot
troop
plenitude
host
nibble
snack
iota
spark
panoply
lot
gobs
shred
batch
boatload
touch
scads
hint
army
trace
swarm
mound
sheaf
amalgam
litany
sprinkling
tidbit
clot
ort
daub
assortment
parcel
complement
stash
oodles
splash
carload
segment
part
cluster
wealth
remainder
drizzle
spray
portion
serving
patch
fleet
plethora
At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should’ve known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside-out upside-down mirrors.
—CLAIRE MESSUD, The Woman Upstairs
(The Planck energy is a quadrillion times larger than the energy produced by our largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. It is the energy at which Einstein’s theory of gravity finally breaks down. At this energy, it is theorized that the fabric of space-time will finally tear, creating tiny portals that might lead to other universes, or other points in space-time.) Harnessing such vast energy would require colossal machines on an unimaginable scale, but if successful they might make possible shortcuts through the fabric of space and time, either by compressing space or by passing through wormholes.
—MICHIO KAKU, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
The portal, flanked on either side by shops, contained two seats outside for clients. The atrium, in process of being redecorated at the time of the eruption, contained a marble impluvium. Beyond, the peristyle and its adjacent chambers resembled a suburban villa, with the major difference that, being in the crowded city, it was self-contained and inward-looking. At the rear of the house, a spacious portico, with its sunken water channel, overlooked a spacious garden, containing pear, chestnut, pomegranate and fig trees. . . .
—G. B. TOBEY, A History of Landscape Architecture
Their dark branches grow to an extraordinary extent laterally; are endlessly angled, twisted, raked, interlocked, and reach quite as much downward as upwards.
—JOHN FOWLES, The Tree
Carolyn was blond and wore minks. She had gigantic jade and diamond rings on nearly every finger. And a gold charm bracelet that made a soft tinkle sound when she waved her hands in the air. At night, she slipped into a nightgown with fur trim along the neck and at the hem. And even her slippers had high heels. I thought she was beautiful, like a movie star.
—AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, Possible Side Effects
Beneath the strongest of the lantern beams they saw that the ladder or iron staircase Scott had found leading from the next to last platform to the plating of the double bottom of the vessel had been twisted around sideways offering a not too difficult climbing angle, except that the last five steps had been sheared off, leaving a gap about level with their heads. A man could take hold of the bottom and swing himself up. Above, at the top, the light showed the gleaming silver cylinder of the propeller shaft, the entrance to the tunnel and the reversed walkway of solid piping that followed it to the stern of the ship.
—PAUL GALLICO, The Poseidon Adventure
But the Flatlander could discover that he lived on the surface of a sphere, rather than on a flat plane, by noting that every time he went on a trip in what he thought was a straight line, he would return to where he started. If he brought out his surveying instruments, he would discover that the sum of angles in a triangle was greater than 180 degrees. In other words, his world did not obey the laws of Euclidean geometry. The Flatlander could even construct a triangle with three right angles by connecting the North Pole to a point on the equator with a north-south line, then going a quarter of the way around the equator, and finally turning north to return to the North Pole.
—J. RICHARD GOTT, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel through Time
These abandoned channels are best preserved on the slip-off side of a bend—usually as a nest of crescentic loops. Artificial levees form a regular pattern and roughly parallel the course of the river. Drainage or irrigation canals are generally at right angles to the river, although lateral canals may parallel it.
—WILLIAM C. PUTNAM, Map Interpretation with Military Applications
Having fastened on coincidence as crucial, Euclid may well have remembered that in his definitions, he affirms that a line, although it has length, has no width. What investigation might justify the conclusion that two lines without width coincide? If no investigation, how could we say that two lines coincide even in length if we cannot say whether they coincide at all?
—DAVID BERLINSKI, The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements
Keen to secure some photographs, I scaled the bank and climbed between the tensioned strands of the fence in sight on my right as I fought my way along the edge of the plantation for what I estimated to be about two hundred yards on a course roughly parallel to the road.
—JOHN LISTER-KAYE, The White Island
I feel like a female character in some kind of Pearl S. Buck novel . . . battling for a spot in the old master’s house. But I’m like Wife Number Two or Three or Ten. I come with lots of baggage, lots of demands, no skills . . . and a passel of blond children!
—SANDRA TSING LOH, Mother on Fire
In one case the entire residence unit consists of juxtaposed rectangular rooms enclosing a roughly trapezoid court.
—DAVID L. CLARKE, Spatial Archeology
On the opposite shore stood the recently completed concert-hall, with Laing’s medical school and the new television studios on either side. The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation.
—J. G. BALLARD, High-Rise
The act of pious charity performed, Cedric again motioned them to follow him, gliding over the stone floor with a noiseless tread; and, after ascending a few steps, opened with great caution the door of a small oratory, which adjoined to the chapel. It was about eight feet square, hollowed, like the chapel itself, out of the thickness of the wall; and the loophole which enlightened it being to the west, and widening considerably as it sloped inward, a beam of the setting sun found its way into its dark recess. . . .
—SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe
My way of excitedly repaying my dad for these weekday mornings that I would keep in my heart for the rest of my life was to wake the poor man with seizurelike drumming at around seven in the morning on weekends; one toy metal drum, just marching and pounding. First, the length of the hallway in front of my parents’ bedroom a couple of times, then the perimeter of the backyard; a pounding and marching that was at once obsessive-compulsive, extremely punctual, and eerily, calmly emphatic, like a new recruit to the Naval drum corps honoring the dead or a tiny drumming version of Christopher Walken.
—DAN KENNEDY, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad
Away to his right was a dark, formless blur lying on the water, a blur that might have been Cape Demirci: straight ahead, across the darkly velvet sheen of the Maidos Straits, he could see the twinkle of far-away lights—it was a measure of the enemy’s confidence that they permitted these lights at all, or, more likely, these fisher cottages were useful as a bearing marker for the guns at night: and to the left, surprisingly near, barely thirty feet away in a horizontal plane, but far below the level where he was standing, he could see the jutting end of the outside wall of the fortress where it abutted on the cliff, the roofs of the houses on the west side of the square beyond that, and, beyond that again, the town itself curving sharply downwards and outwards, to the south first, then to the west, close-girdling and matching the curve of the crescent harbour. Above—but there was nothing to be seen above, that fantastic overhang above blotted out more than half the sky; and below, the darkness was equally impenetrable, the surface of the harbour inky and black as night.
—ALISTAIR MACLEAN, The Guns of Navarone
Many people felt that if Broadway could not be crossed at street level it should be bridged, and there were many fantastic schemes for doing so. In 1848, John Randel published a proposal for six miles of elevated track, constructed in cast iron and glass, which would run for three miles over Broadway’s sidewalks. Passengers would be raised from the ground to an elevated train through elevators complete with sofas and then board a horse-drawn car making all stops. This tender car would gain the speed of a continuously moving horse-drawn car on a parallel track to which passengers would transfer while in motion. To exit, they would transfer back to the all-stops tender car.
—STACY KIRKPATRICK, Art and the Subway: New York Underground
An interesting point is that in this particular “ideal” theme, the fundamental diagram of the face is the same as the one of the whole body; the link between the two is that the height of the face is equal to the vertical distance between the middle of the body (intersection of the legs in “ideal” specimens) and the navel (the minor of the two segments in the Φ proportion determined by the navel) is equal to the distance between the tip of the medium finger (the arm hanging vertically) and the floor or horizontal level supporting the whole.
—MATILA GHYKA, The Geometry of Art and Life
The movement made to swing the left arm holding the muleta, which is crossed in front of the body, out and past the right side to get rid of the bull is called crossing. Any time the man does not make this cross he will have the bull under him. Unless he swings him far enough out the horn is certain to catch him.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Death in the Afternoon
Had Kennedy been flying during the day or with a clear moon, he would have been fine. If you are the pilot, looking straight ahead from the cockpit, the angle of your wings will be obvious from the straight line of the horizon in front of you. But when it’s dark outside, the horizon disappears. There is no external measure of the plane’s bank. On the ground, we know whether we are level even when it’s dark, because of the motion-sensing mechanisms in the inner ear. In a spiral dive, though, the effect of the plane’s G-force on the inner ear means that the pilot feels perfectly level even if his plane is not.
—MALCOLM GLADWELL, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
The process begins with a simple geometric form, a triangle, positioned in three dimensional space. The midpoint of each edge of the triangle has been connected to the other midpoints dividing the original triangle into four triangles. The midpoints are deflected randomly upward or downward to give volume to the form.
—RICHARD MARK FRIEDHOFF, Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution
The stakes are high. Peering into the unknown for the first time, anything could happen. There are scads of competing theoretical models hoping to anticipate what the LHC will find. You don’t know what you’re going to see until you look. At the center of the speculation lies the Higgs boson, an unassuming particle that represents both the last piece of the Standard Model, and the first glimpse into the world beyond.
—SEAN CARROLL, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Above him Escher’s head grew smaller and smaller against the bright circle of sky at the mouth of the Moulin. At this depth the shaft divided into two parts like the legs of a pair of trousers. Agassiz chose the wider of the two ways but soon found it repartitioned into a number of impassable holes. Upon signaling to Escher, he was hoisted back up to the bifurcation and then allowed to descend the other passage. He was now more than 100 feet below the surface of the glacier.
—RONALD H. BAILEY, Glacier
Away from people—they must get away from people, he said (jumping up), right away over there, where there were chairs beneath a tree and the long slope of the park dipped like a length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke high above, and there was a rampart of far irregular houses hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a circle and on the right, dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over the Zoo palings, barking, howling.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway
. . . detailed features are shown not by conventional signs nor by their outline ground-plans, but by pictures of their actual appearance as viewed from above at an oblique, near vertical, angle. At first sight this seems to be simply the technique of the bird’s-eye view, and we might say that Varle’s plan of Philadelphia is a mixture of bird’s-eye view and map.
—P. D. A. HARVEY, The History of Topographical Maps
The final element of the surround was a gate. A sturdy young tree, stripped of its branches, was positioned upright at one side of an opening in the fence. A hole was dug for the base, and a mound of stones was piled up around it for support. It was reinforced by tying it with thongs to the heavy mammoth tusks. The gate itself was constructed of leg bones, branches, and mammoth ribs lashed firmly to cross-pieces of saplings chopped to size.
—JEAN M. AUEL, The Mammoth Hunters
Jack looked at him sharply, then down at the chart and at Stephen’s drawing: it showed a little bay with a village and a square tower at the bottom of it: a low mole ran twenty or thirty yards out into the sea, turned left-handed for another fifty and ended in a rocky knob, thus enclosing a harbour sheltered from all but the south-west wind.
—PATRICK O’BRIAN, Master and Commander
A fleet of barges were coming lazily on, some sideways, some head first, some stern first; all in a wrong-headed, dogged, obstinate way, bumping up against the larger craft, running under the bows of steamboats, getting into every kind of nook and corner where they had no business, and being crunched on all sides like so many walnut shells. . . .
—CHARLES DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop
Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
She closed the magazine and set it on the grass beside her chair. The smell of roses was heavy, almost hypnotic. Claire heard bees. Across the Parkers’ yard next door, she could see a gaggle of boys walking down the street, the tops of their summer buzzed haircuts shining in the late afternoon sun.
—ANN HOOD, The Obituary Writer
On the other side, to their left, Geoffrey’s house came in sight, almost a bird’s-eye view, the bungalow crouching, very tiny, before the trees, the long garden below descending steeply, parallel with which on different levels obliquely climbing the hill, all the other gardens of the contiguous residences, each with its cobalt oblong of swimming pool, also descended steeply toward the barranca, the land sweeping away at the top of the Calle Nicaragua back up to the pre-eminence of Cortez Palace.
—MALCOLM LOWRY, Under the Volcano
I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock.
—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
The tower, described in the prospectus as “probably very old”, made of old stones culled from some ruin or ruins, was, as various architectural features suggested, no doubt set up in the late nineteenth century. It had been at some point, perhaps in its original construction, attached by a rough stone and brick arched passage to a closely adjacent, indefinitely ancient, stone-built cottage or cabin. The wooden floors and cast-iron spiral staircase in the tower were sound, and both buildings had been sufficiently “modernised”.
—IRIS MURDOCH, The Book and the Brotherhood
There are twenty-six tables in a railed off section to the right and rear of the room. Fourteen more tables are portioned off in the section to the left. Between these areas, with its own sense of importance, is the platform holding the final table. It’s circled with TV camera stations and a row of chairs reserved for family and close friends. Tall bleachers sit on adjacent sides.
—ANNIE DUKE, How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker
At these meals his wife, Asun, appeared from the kitchen with a cornucopia—salads drenched in olive oil, deviled eggs, tasty chorizo, a potato soup, a good piece of meat or fish, a bottle or two (or three) of homemade wine, brandy, some flan—while Ambrosio sat expectantly, rubbing his prodigious belly, joined by whichever of the now almost-adult Molinos children happened to rotate through that day.
—MICHAEL PATERNITI, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese
Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red earthen roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher-situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the top of the Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the Pantheon, looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Marble Faun
Just opposite him hung a “Last Judgment”: curly-headed cherubs with rotund behinds flying up into a thunderstorm, blowing trumpets. To Richard’s left hung a pen drawing by a German master; Rubashov could only see a part of it—the rest was hidden by the plush back of the sofa and by Richard’s head: the Madonna’s thin hands, curved upwards, hollowed to the shape of a bowl, and a bit of empty sky covered with horizontal pen-lines.
—ARTHUR KOESTLER, Darkness at Noon
The book was a standard-issue 1950s schoolbook—battered, unloved, grimly hefty—but near the front it had an illustration that just captivated me: a cutaway diagram showing the Earth’s interior as it would look if you cut into the planet with a large knife and carefully withdrew a wedge representing about a quarter of its bulk.
—BILL BRYSON, A Short History of Nearly Everything
The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long granite wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards at the end of it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy sea-wall runs along outside of it. On the near side, the sea-wall makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end too has a lighthouse. Between the two piers there is a narrow opening into the harbour, which then suddenly widens.
—BRAM STOKER, Dracula
The Mews was one of the most important parts of the castle, next to the stables and the kennels. It was opposite to the solar, and faced south. The outside windows had to be small, for reasons of fortification, but the windows which looked inward to the courtyard were big and sunny. The windows had close vertical slats nailed down them, but no horizontal ones.
—T. H. WHITE, The Once and Future King
There was a steep wall of sand, behind which the firing could be heard. They made the people form up into short lines and led them through the gap which had been hurriedly dug in the sandstone wall. The wall hid everything from view, but of course the people knew where they were. The right bank of the Dnieper is cut by deep ravines, and this particular ravine was enormous, majestic, deep and wide like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted you would scarcely be heard on the other. The sides were steep, even overhanging in places; at the bottom ran a little stream of clear water. Round about were cemeteries, woods and garden plots. The local people knew the ravine as Babi Yar.
—D. M. THOMAS, The White Hotel
The tip of the nose of the Stansbury Mountains had been sliced off by the interstate to reveal a sheer and massive section of handsome blue rock, thinly bedded, evenly bedded, forty metres high. Its parallel planes were tilting, dipping, gently to the east, with the exception of some confused and crumpled material that suggested a snowball splatted against glass, or a broken-down doorway in an otherwise undamaged wall.
—JOHN MCPHEE, Basin and Range
I moved quickly, sliding open the window, slithering on my stomach through the frame to the bathroom sink below, flipping myself over and landing on the bathroom floor. I replaced the screen, closed the window, and opened the cabinet above the sink. There was volumizing mousse, mousse with extra hold, mousse with extra body, and mousse with both extra body and extra hold. A “dollop”? How much was a dollop?
—SHALOM AUSLANDER, Foreskin’s Lament
After that they went on again; and now the road struck westwards and left the river, and the great shoulder of the south-pointing mountain-spur drew ever nearer. At length they reached the hill path. It scrambled steeply up, and they plodded slowly one behind the other, till at last in the late afternoon they came to the top of the ridge and saw the wintry sun going downwards to the west.
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit
A few hundred yards to my right was the lip of the gorge, obscured by a rise in the land, and rolling away to the left and ahead was the harsher landscape of the Causse, hard parched soil, sagebrush, telegraph poles. Just past the ruined farm, La Prunarède, I turned down a sandy track on the right, and five minutes later I was at the dolmen.
—IAN MCEWAN, Black Dogs