Word: livid
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Often enough, in his furious haste to get things down on paper and his weakness for pyrotechnics, Faulkner trips over his own inventiveness. His tales of violence then become preposterous and cheap; his livid rhetoric creates a verbal log jam, with prepositions flying wild, clauses drifting crazily and parentheses multiplying like rabbits. But when he is really in command of his story (about half the time), Faulkner makes his rhetoric work for him, even when it is full of echoes of Ciceronian oratory and of overripe Elizabethan poetry...
...across the paddies. Around 8 o'clock a detachment of South Korean policemen turns up, and an electric change comes over the people. Now, as the police approach and halt them and order them to stand, and then to move on, they leap at every command with a livid and unmistakable fear...
...Here," wrote Norcott, "huddled together at a counter under unearthly neon lights, livid-hued customers sip their grisly 'shakes' or study a menu card which offers a wide selection of chemical concoctions made from substances utterly foreign to the milk-giving cow. For as little (or as much) as one shilling ninepence, the determined pleasure seeker may numb his insides with a 'frosted chocolate snowball' (frozen soya bean flour with mock cocoa gravy), a 'Hollywood Delight' (cold soya stew with ice vegetable jam), a 'Moo-moo Special' (mixed leftovers studded with damaged...
...landscapes, the portrait had the hot, bright colors of the Riviera, where he lives much of the year. His landscapes, more than halfway abstract, showed things like grasshoppers hopping into scarlet immensities and bushes brandishing their thorns at green skies. The portrait was equally harsh. Posed against a livid yellow background, Maugham sat with folded arms beneath a fringe of tropical palms. His jut-jawed old face seemed to betray a struggle between pain and hauteur...
...door, his sea-chest following behind him in a handbarrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail jailing over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards...