The silence oppressed him, made him bend low over the horse's neck as if to hide from a wind that had begun to blow far away and was twisting slowly through the darkness in its slow search.

The street that is full now of traffic and parked cars then and for many years drowsed on an August afternoon in the shade of the curbside trees, and silence was a weight, almost palpable, in the air.

To Pike, silence was tantamount to an admission of guilt, and he determined to get Robinson onto the dueling ground at all costs.

There was a pretty thorough silence at that point.

But the price was the silence of the grave for all criticism or opposition.

She did this now, comfortably aware of the mist running down the windows, of the silence outside, of the dark afternoon it was getting to be.

The cake was received in a stunned silence that was evidence in itself of the dearth of taste thrills Mama had been providing.

There was a long silence.

If we thus spent our very first day in the midst of a large number of your people honoring a new hero and a great national achievement, our last day, to us at least, was equally impressive and very moving, even though the crowds were absent and there was almost complete silence.

sugar sprayed with a hiss that was loud in the silence.

Something else distracted him, yet there was no sound, only tomblike silence.

Otherwise, the silence was complete.

The sudden silence was too silent.

The silence was getting on Alec's nerves.

`` Well '' -- This time there was a long silence, while the telephone hummed faintly with a voiceless life.

They ate in silence, with hoods so drawn over their faces that they could see nothing but what was on the table before them.

This change was disparaged by critics as an end to the ' right to silence ', though in fact an accused still has the right to remain silent and cannot be compelled to take the stand.

Otherwise, for the benefit of the wicked, it was more proper to set a limit for their rage by my silence, rather than any new things written to provoke daily the insanity of the envious.

Job at last breaks his silence and " curses the day he was born.

It was said that when Attlee visited King George VI at Buckingham Palace to kiss hands, the notoriously laconic Attlee and the notoriously tongue-tied George VI stood for some minutes in silence before Attlee finally volunteered the remark " I've won the election.

A slightly earlier, surprisingly reliable version of the same concept was to bundle a sequence of audio digital " signal " and " no signal " information ( i. e. " sound " and " silence ") on magnetic cassette tape for use with early home computers.

The term euphemism itself was used as a euphemism by the ancient Greeks, meaning " to keep a holy silence " ( speaking well by not speaking at all ).

There was a sacred spring from which water had to be drawn in silence, it was so holy.

It was the only thing in his life for which he felt guilt.

The land over which he sped was the land he had created and lived in: his valley.

On a shelf in the office behind the counter was a small radio dialed permanently on a station which broadcast only vulgar commercials and cheap popular music.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

The only thing which would have attracted attention was that two wore the uniform of prison guards, three the striped suits of convicts.

For everyone involved knew that the whole valley was a powder keg, and Mitchell Barton the fuse which could send it into explosive violence.

There a dozen giant monitors played their seventy-five-foot jets of water against the huge seam of tertiary gravel which was the mountainside.

When they reached their neighbor's house, Pamela said a few polite words to Grace and kissed Melissa lightly on the forehead, the impulse prompted by a stray thought -- of the type to which she was frequently subject these days -- that they might never see one another again.

But she was caught in it, and she faced the terrible possibility that, if it were a dream, it was one from which she might never awaken.

The slight flutter that had disturbed the motion of her heart when she entered the forest was gone now, and even the dim groves of trees through which she occasionally passed did not reawaken her fear.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

There was no lock on the door, only an iron hook which he unfastened.

Jess's coarse features twisted in a surprised grin which was smashed out of shape by Curt's fist.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

He had no idea which was up and which was down.

I was again in motion and at a speed which belied the truck's similarity to Senor X's Ford turtle.

But it was only Johnson reaching around the wire chicken fencing, which half covered the truck cab's glassless rear window.

The car was just about to us, its driver's fat, solemn face intent on the road ahead, on business, on a family in Sante Fe -- on anything but an old pick-up truck in which two human beings desperately needed rescue.

There had been a good second or two during which my muffler had been blowing out, and now I was certain I'd seen her somewhere before.

There was something about the contour of her face, her smile that was like New Orleans sunshine, the way she held her head, the way she walked -- there was scarcely anything she did which did not fascinate me.