Word: avidity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...friend, "and . . . you may understand that the intense pursuit of any idea that takes possession of me is one of the qualities that makes me different, sometimes for good, sometimes, I dare say, for evil, from other men." But Mrs. Dickens was bewildered by her passionate husband's avid pursuit of the moment. She found it hard to understand how he could give away to uncontrollable grief on hearing that a friend had died, and a few hours later enter into amateur theatricals with uncontrollable guffaws...
Sebastian's older brother, Lord Brideshead, was an avid collector of matchboxes. Sebastian's sister, Julia, was like a "Renaissance tragedy. . . . Dogs and children love her . . . my dear, she's a fiend. . . . There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to burn...
...guano birds. They "leave a ... magic nitrogen fluid ... a concentrated essence of a longing for the sky, which . . . liberates the roots from the prison of the furrow, animates the stem, lifts the branches and raises flowers into the air-and makes the petal wings tremble like a little bird avid for space and freedom...
...good Prince had possessed the keen scent of an avid slot-machine addict he would have been disturbed way back in 1933 - for I still recall as my most embarrassing moment standing at the cashier's window requesting change of a 10-franc note for my father who, though not the least interested in gambling, had discovered a dusty old slot machine in a forsaken corner of the famous Casino. I changed the lowly 10-franc note and Father broke the slot machine. Really...
...Sydney Greenstreet, S. Z. Sakall and a couple of babies who, though too young to know any better, are going to have quite a time living it down. The predicament: Miss Stanwyck, a highly publicized writer of recipes for a woman's magazine, has been pretending to her avid public (and to her honest publisher, Mr. Greenstreet) that she is a Connecticut country housewife, mother and cook. When the publisher insists that she entertain him and War Hero Morgan over Christmas, she is forced to make a hasty collection of the source of her recipes (Restaurateur Sakall), a phony...