Although it was dark as usual I could see that the hall had only recently contained a great many people.

Atonement, if atonement were possible, could only be made at that sacred, sacrificial basin.

Now, he could only play the last card in what was probably the world's coldest deck.

And he could no longer think of face-saving, of honor, but only of escape.

So far as he knew, only his father could be there.

With the rapid rate of closure, the approach from below, the side, and ahead, there would be only a moment when damage could be done.

The way his red rubber lips were stretched across his pearly little teeth I thought he was only having a little joke, but, no, he wanted me to bend down from the roar of wind so he could roar something into my ear.

Then he would realize they were really things that only he himself could think.

From above one could only occasionally catch a glimpse of life on the floor of this green sea: a neighbor's gingham skirt flashing into sight for an instant on the path beneath her grape-arbor, or the movement of hands above a clothesline and the flutter of garments hung there, half-way down the block.

The part of the mind that preserves dates and events may remonstrate, `` It could have been like that for only a little while '' ; ;

it was mud in wet weather and dust, ankle-deep, in dry, and could be crossed only at the corner where there were stepping stones.

During the next five years liberal leaders in the United States sank in the cumulative confusion attendant upon and manifested in a negative policy of Containment -- and the bitterest irony -- enforced and enforceable only by threat of a weapon that we felt the greatest distaste for but could not abandon: the atom bomb.

It was, of course, a little boy's fantasy of winning his mother to himself, and replacing the father who could not give her the things she wanted -- a classical oedipal fantasy if you like -- but if it were only this the story would be banal.

These could be met only by considering the dynamical elements of several planets at one time.

They explained that they desired only to stop in India until a ship traveling on to Burma could be found.

It purports to be a letter from Steele to a friend at court, who, in Miss Blanchard's opinion, could only be meant as Swift.

The countrywide success of `` Lazybones '' and `` And The Angels Sing '' could only lead to Hollywood, where, besides Harold Arlen, Mercer collaborated with Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Richard Whiting, Walter Donaldson, Jerome Kern, and Arthur Schwartz.

Sherman was responsible for the story when he said in his memoirs that this was the only time he could recall seeing Thomas ride so fast.

For them only a little more needed to be learned, and then all physical knowledge could be neatly sorted, packaged and put in the inventory to be drawn on for the solution of any human problem.

For by now the original cause of the quarrel, Philip's seizure of Gascony, was only one strand in the spider web of French interests that overlay all western Europe and that had been so well and closely spun that the lightest movement could set it trembling from one end to the other.

the pope was playing a dangerous game, with so many balls in the air at once that a misstep would bring them all about his ears, and his only hope was to temporize so that he could take advantage of every change in the delicate balance of European affairs.

When these chores were finished, only then, was she allowed whatever freedom she could find.

He spoke no German but he could sing it and the words of the song were the only ones he knew in a foreign language.

His mother Bess, who could not write herself, reminded her husband through Sturley to buy the apron he had promised her and `` a suite of hattes for 5 boies the yongst lined & trimmed with silke '' ( for John, only a year old ).

The fall of Rome, the discovery of precious metals, and the Protestant Reformation were all links and could only be explained and understood by comprehending the links that preceded and those that followed.

He stood looking down at her for a moment, wondering what could have reduced her to this condition.

) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.

I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.

As he lowered himself on the chair behind his desk I wondered what this dapper, slightly ridiculous man could possibly have to do with the workings of the hall.

No man could have reached his spot nor held it without being ruthless, and Hague had made a virtue of ruthlessness all of his life.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

with more time I could have loosened a small burr or cotter pin --

She realized I'd have to notify the police, but fervently hoped I could avoid mentioning her name.

They were married over the week-end, though he was easily sixty and she could not have been even thirty.

Her form was silhouetted and with the strong light I could see the outlines of her body, a body that an artist or anyone else would have admired.

If it were not that I knew who it was I could have mistaken it for my Aunt so well did her clothes fit him.

This was the worst thing I could have said.

and I have heard many say that they are content to earn a half or a third as much as they could up North because they so much prefer the quieter habits of their home town.

What steps have been taken to guard against the one sort of mishap that could trigger the destruction of continents??

This and other fears of the solar system have disappeared gradually, first, with the Ptolemaic system and its built-in concept of periodicity and then, more firmly, with the Newtonian innovation of an universal force that could account quantitatively for both terrestial and celestial motions.

The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.

I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole -- that I could not see -- but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory: wind-blown, frost-bitten, white chrysanthemums beneath a window, with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November ; ;

Such problems are of extreme interest as well as importance and are so much like fighting in a rain forest or guerrilla warfare at night in tall grass that we might have to re-examine primitive conflicts for what they could teach.

Any attempt to reconcile this statement of the central issue in the campaign of 1956 with the nature of the man who could not conceive it as the central issue will at least resolve our confusions about the chaotic and misleading results of the earnestness of both doctors and President in a situation which should never have arisen.

Actually, you could wish for some passion, now and then, but when you look around the world and see the little volcanos of current history which partisan social passions have wrought, you are glad that in these pamphlets there is at least some civilized calm.

Given the conceptual context within which ancient thought thrived, how could anyone have questioned this principle??

He might have been the man in the moon for all you could have understood him.

If you had screamed right there in the street where we stood, I could not have felt more fear.