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Propinquity

noun
1.
The property of being close together.  Synonym: proximity.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Propinquity" Quotes from Famous Books



... however, some footsteps approached behind her, the footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was close at her heels and had said "Good morning" before she had been long aware of his propinquity. He appeared to be an artisan of some sort, and carried a tin pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a business-like manner if he should take her basket, which she permitted him ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... at the Falkland Islands, to recruit the ships' companies. Although there was no fresh beef, there was plenty of scurvy-grass and penguins. These birds were in myriads on some parts of the island, which, from the propinquity of their nests, built of mud, went by the name of towns. There they sat, close together (the whole area which they covered being bare of grass), hatching their eggs and rearing their young. The men had but to select as many eggs and birds as they pleased, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... subjective creation of his own enthusiasm. This hold Lady Nelson never gained; and the long absence from 1793 to 1797, during the opening period of the war of the French Revolution, probably did to death an affection which owed what languid life it retained chiefly to propinquity and custom. Both Saumarez and Codrington, who served under him, speak passingly of the lightness with which his family ties sat upon Nelson in the years following his short stay at home in 1797. The house was empty, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... cavalier in dresses for her hero. It may be a matter of affinity in later years, or, as the more prosaic Buckle suggests, dependent upon the price of corn, but at first it is certainly a question of propinquity. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... year and a half he had lived in the dingy house above the shop in Bridge Street. He had for eighteen months enjoyed that propinquity, that familiar intercourse, which is all that is necessary to make many an ugly woman beautiful in the eyes of the man in enjoyment of her society. It is small wonder then, if the poor Manchester man exaggerated in his own mind those unusual charms ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... and fro between Norminster and Abbotsmead as his business required, and if opportunity and propinquity could have advanced his suit, he had certainly no lack of either. But he felt that he was not prospering with Miss Fairfax: she was most animated, amiable and friendly, but she was not in a propitious mood to be courted. Bessie was to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... a certain fierce justice of heart. He has a mind, and when he opens it at all, he opens it freely to her. Jane becomes attached to her "master," as Pamela-like she calls him, and it is not difficult to see that solitude and propinquity are taking effect upon him also. An odd circumstance heightens the dawning romance. Jane is awoke one night by that strange discordant laugh close to her ear— then a noise as if hands feeling along the wall. She rises—opens her door, finds the passage full of smoke, is guided by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... observe a curious mark of propinquity which the poet notices, with respect to the hands of the father and daughter. Lord Byron, we suspect, is indebted for the first hint of this to Ali Pacha, who, by the bye, is the original of Lambro; for, when his lordship was introduced, with his friend Hobhouse, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... her. This was a matter which need not have troubled him, for Nature has a way of taking into her own keeping the bearing of young men toward young women when the two are thrown much into each other's company. Propinquity is a tremendous force in the life of humanity. It has caused as many love affairs as the kicking of other men's dogs has caused street fights—which numbers into infinity. Consequently, while Bob worried much and selected a number of widely differing attitudes—a thing ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... says Goethe, is the god of propinquity. On Dominique's part attachment seems to have come insensibly, as a matter of course and despite the precariousness of his position. M. Forestier encouraged the young man's advances. To Julie love for the brilliant ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... was love which gave her strength—love, not for him, but for that other man whose influence he was now convinced had always been paramount, and who with renewed propinquity had resumed his domination. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... voice,—she was sure that, though in speaking to her mother he was softly persuasive, he had used to herself a tone even more intimate and ingratiating. He and she had a secret; they were conspirators together: which fact was both disconcerting and delicious. She recalled their propinquity in the lobby; the remembered syllables which he had uttered mingled with the faint scent of his broadcloth, the whiteness of his wristbands, the gleam of his studs, the droop of his moustaches, the downward ray of his glance, and the proud, nimble carriage ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... not dream his feet were in them; ten years' probation seemed to vanish at the sight!—we wept! He spoke—could we believe our ears? "Marvel of marvels!" despite the propinquity of the Bluchers, despite their wide-spreading contamination, his voice was unaltered. We were puzzled! we were like the first farourite when "he has a leg," or, "a LEG ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various

... put up his monocle and duly answered: "I thought that you were still in Calcutta, Hawke." There was a faint noli me tangere air in the young staff officer's manner, and yet mere propinquity drew them together in a few minutes. With the insouciance of men bred in club and at mess, the two soldiers soon drifted into an easy chat, meeting on safe grounds. They calmly ignored the surrounding civilians, regardless of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... without her knowledge. No daughter of the house would ever have been put in such a position. So far as I can judge, Mary and Mr. Will Axworthy are quits. If he has had a good time in her society, she has had an equally good time in his, and he does not enjoy her letters so much as he did her propinquity." ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth

... indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... before he reaches the point of falling in love, the disposition and character of those to whom his fancy turns. When propinquity and mere physical attraction have aroused the emotions of a young couple, the ardor of their excitement so obscures observation and judgment that any careful analysis of each other's characteristics is impossible. Even if such an analysis were possible, one could not be intelligently made by ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... would show that mere friendly propinquity may constitute a danger. Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from a small lake town in northern Michigan was working in a Chicago cafe, sending every week more than half of her wages of seven dollars to her mother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis, at home. The mother ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... come Stephen La Mothe, and the very reaction from acute suspicion had drawn her towards him. Repentance for an unmerited blame is much nearer akin to love than any depths of pity. Then to repentance was added gratitude, to gratitude admiration, and to all three propinquity. Blessed be propinquity! If Hymen ever raises an altar to his most devoted hand-maid it will be to the dear goddess Propinquity! Yes! these days ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... the class of moral philosophy under Adam Smith at Glasgow. Perhaps his father had thought that in the more sedate capital of the West, and in close propinquity to Auchinleck, there would be less scope for the long career of eccentricities upon which he was now to enter. If such, however, had been the intention, it was destined to a rude awakening. All his life ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... which are found in the carboniferous formation, exhibit in a large degree these wedge-shaped strata, and we have therefore a clue at once, both as to their propinquity to sea and land, and also as to the manner in which they ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... gave him what might be called a stake in the affair. The brief and rare glimpses which he got of her nowadays made it absolutely impossible for him to conduct his wooing on a business-like basis. A diffident man cannot possibly achieve any success in odd moments. Constant propinquity is his ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... and undetermined values for which he had no precedents, and unlike every woman he had known—including his wife—she had an integrity of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere. In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... for the drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... serious matters of life so utterly set aside, and so much made of the things which many people take no sort of trouble about, as companionships and affections, which are so often turned into a matter of mere propinquity and circumstance. But of this I shall have to speak later in ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... along the track—the country was not wanting in them; or, more to be feared, there might be a panther lurking along some great overhanging forest bough. There was need to be vigilant. Either of these savages would make his propinquity known, at a short distance, to the senses of an animal so timid as the horse. Or, it might be, that a worse beast still—always worst of all when he emulates the nature of the beast—man!—might be lurking upon the track! If so, the nature of the peril was perhaps greater ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... Mexico continue to be most cordial, as befits those of neighbors between whom the strongest ties of friendship and commercial intimacy exist, as the natural and growing consequence of our similarity of institutions and geographical propinquity. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... Propinquity is the most frequent cause of love—for one who falls headlong into that passion fifty drift into it. In the isolation of that solitary spot on the face of the giant mountains, Kevin Dermot and Noreen Daleham drew nearer to each other in their few days together ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... founded by Mr. Pryer. Destroyed by fire. Formerly used as a blockade station by Germans trading with Sulu. Capture of the blockade runner Sultana by the Spaniards. Rich virgin soil and fever. Owing to propinquity of Hongkong and Singapore, North Borneo cannot become an emporium for eastern trade. Its mineralogical resources not yet ascertained. Gold, coal, and other minerals known to exist. Gold on the Segama river. Rich in timber. 'Billian' or iron-wood; ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher

... Propinquity is a great incentive to pleasant conversation, for there are few people that can talk the pretty nothings and sparkling witticisms, whereof parlor conversation properly consists, across space to people stranded ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... resumed its march, Dick rode by the side of Colonel Winchester. Time, propinquity, genuine esteem, and a fourth influence which Dick did not as yet suspect, were fast knitting these two, despite the difference in age, into a friendship which nothing could break. The meeting with Slade was forgotten ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler

... wilderness to me. I was too proud to sell them to my rich neighbour; I preferred to leave them before I saw them the prey of a tyrant, whose rank had triumphed over my industry, and who is now able to boast that he can travel over ten leagues of senatorial property untainted by the propinquity of a husbandman's farm. Houseless, homeless, friendless, I have come to Rome alone in my affliction, helpless in my degradation! Do you wonder now that I am careless about the honour of my country? I would have served her with my life and my possessions ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... his own people—its past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... (among other things) upon the idea that the principle source of error in all human investigations lay in the liability of the understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of an object, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity. "To estimate properly, for example," he said, "the influence to be exercised on mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distance of the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished should not fail to form an item in the estimate. Yet can you ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... favoring chances of solitude, propinquity, and daily opportunity. Seldom away from Clara for a day together, he was in condition to take advantage of any of those moods which lay woman open to courtship, such as gratitude for attentions, a disgust with loneliness, a desire for something to love. It was a great thing for ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... the world; So few great souls, love ordered, well begun, In answer to the fertile mother need! So few who seem The image of the Maker's mortal dream; So many born of mere propinquity - Of lustful habit, or of accident. Their mothers felt No mighty, all-compelling wish to see Their bosoms garden-places Abloom with flower faces; No tidal wave swept o'er them with its flood; No thrill of flesh or heart; no leap of blood; No glowing fire, flaming to white desire ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... intensity. 2. Its duration. 3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness. 5. Its fecundity. 6. Its purity. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... regent so much alarm as the town of Valenciennes, in Hainault. In no other was the party of the Calvinists so powerful, and the spirit of rebellion for which the province of Hainault had always made itself conspicuous, seemed to dwell here as in its native place. The propinquity of France, to which, as well by language as by manners, this town appeared to belong, rather than to the Netherlands, had from the first led to its being governed with great mildness and forbearance, which, however, only taught it to feel its own ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... lot in it, I'm sure," the man of the monocle was saying, bending toward Winifred with what Flint considered objectionable propinquity,—"telepathy, don't you know, and—and all that sort of thing. I had no idea I was to meet you to-night, but as I was standing on the doorstep I remembered how you looked at that dinner out in Cheyenne, and a remark you made to me—do ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... I haven't told a soul. When we get settled on the Y Bar I'm going to send for a friend of mine—she's a perfectly beautiful girl, and she's just as adorable as she is beautiful. And I'm going to make her come and pay us a long visit. I'm a great believer in propinquity, and especially out here——" ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... Fanny Brawne have not succeeded in representing her as beautiful: and at first sight Keats has complained, that, although she "manages to make her hair look well," she "wants sentiment in every feature." Propinquity, however, has achieved the usual result; and now the young poet believes his inamorata to be the very apotheosis of loveliness: he is never weary ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron

... and dipped my goose quill (anathema maranatha on steel pens, which I cannot help fancying, impart a portion of their own rigidity to style, for if the stylus be made of steel is it not natural that the style by derivation and propinquity should be hard?) into the ink-stand, after first casting my eyes on the busts of Shakespeare and Milton, which, cast in plaster, adorn my retirement, half imploring them to assist in so important an enterprise, when the door opened, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... strange old man who interested him despite himself. There was pity, but nothing filial in his feelings. For filial love only grows out of propinquity and a firm respect which must keep pace with the growing demands of a daily ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman

... herded together, for one day, perhaps two, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the petty annoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... says Mr. Ellins. "Undisturbed propinquity—a love charm that was old when the world was young. And if Marjorie is managing the campaign, it's ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... majority of the world's capitals, is never lost, and now it enabled Curtis to disregard the garish ugliness of the avenues and streets glimpsed during a quick run to the center of the town. For one thing, he realized how the mere propinquity of docks and wharves infects entire districts with the happy-go-lucky carelessness of Jack ashore; for another, he knew ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... note to better advantage than the one he had pushed into the heel of Tishy's fist. It had, as he thought it would, clinched the matter. He had never been unaware of the menace of Cloherty, R.A.M.C., but he was confident in the three forces that he had at his command—authority, bribery, and propinquity. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... then only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting up for years at the same hotel where his father had gone before him; faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, humorous vein of talk, and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which propinquity would seem to call to this international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur bottom, the Orca or Killer, the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... Let it be so.—Thy truth then be thy dower: For, by the sacred radiance of the sun; The mysteries of Hecate, and the night; By all the operations of the orbs, From whom we do exist, and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... Propinquity bred intimacy. Shortly afterwards Camillo's mother died, and in this catastrophe, for such it was, the other two showed themselves to be genuine friends of his. Villela took charge of the interment, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... not exist. I would I could hear again those long rubber-lipped snufflings of recognition underneath the door, with which each morning he would regale and reassure a spirit that grew with age more and more nervous and delicate about this matter of propinquity! For he was a dog of fixed ideas, things stamped on his mind were indelible; as, for example, his duty toward cats, for whom he had really a perverse affection, which had led to that first disastrous moment of his life, when he was brought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... does not speak with much confidence, as to the degree of propinquity which existed betwixt Mr. Matthew M'Kail minister of Bothwell and Mr. Hugh M'Kail, the young licentiate who was executed at Edinburgh, 22d Dec, 1666, for being concerned in the insurrection at Pentland. But Colonel Wallace, who commanded ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... I am highly satisfied by your lordship's obiter dictum. Not being in such a coign of vantage as your honour's excellency, I was misled by the propinquity of heads viewed from the rear. Now, before again becoming a sedentary, I am to propose a decisive test of plaintiff's bona fides in desiring my insignificant self as a spouse. Herewith I beg humbly to have the honour of renewing my formal ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... Nearness.— N. nearness &c. adj.; proximity, propinquity; vicinity, vicinage; neighborhood, adjacency; contiguity &c. 199. short distance, short step, short cut; earshot, close quarters, stone's throw; bow shot, gun shot, pistol shot; hair's breadth, span. purlieus, neighborhood, vicinage, environs, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... fringed the shore, lay a heavy English corvette in the deep shade of the land; but the arms of the sentry on her forecastle glinted in the moonbeams as he paced his lonely watch, and sung out, as the bell struck twice, his accustomed long-drawn cry of 'All's well!' Just beyond her, in saucy propinquity, lay a slaver, bound for the coast of Africa—a beautiful, graceful craft. Still farther out the crew of a clumsy French brig were chanting the evening hymn to the Virgin. Ships from every civilized country lay anchored, in picturesque groups, in all directions, and far down, her tall ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... are often made by propinquity, neighbourhood, adjacent homes, and constant meetings in the ordinary ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various

... backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... with Calvert Carter's strength of character to hold a beautiful girl in his arms it would be inevitable that a certain sense of ownership should subconsciously mingle with his thoughts of her. The germ of love may be discovered in propinquity. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... moment—and no wonder, considering the propinquity of the candle to his visual organs—Homer's infant likeness commenced the first untutored ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... flash of lightning, downward he darted and seized the snake by the back. The voracious crab held on, not liking to lose his prey, till he found himself borne upwards from the ground, and in unpleasant propinquity to the frigate bird's sharp beak. He must have felt that if he did not let go at once, he would be dashed to pieces; still, as a miser clutches his bags of gold, did Mr Crab the snake. Fortunately for him, the frigate bird had flown seaward, so that when he did let go, he ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... it so, he had never felt very enthusiastically concerning her. Truly, Priscilla Gower and enthusiasm were not in accordance with each other. Chance had thrown them together when both were very young, and propinquity did the rest. Propinquity is the strongest of agents in a love affair, and in Denis Oglethorpe's love affair, propinquity had accomplished what nothing else would have been likely to have done. The desperate ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett

... thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,—having, for example, noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank, diagonally opposite,—something almost invariably impelled his glance upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First National,—a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than the bank ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... skirts of two women bareback riders who stood not more than two yards away seemed tawdry and flimsy at close range; the pink fleshings of the world's greatest somersault artist looked rumpled and fuzzy; the zouave costume of the lady rope-walker lost its satiny sheen through propinquity; the clown was dusty and greasy and stuffy. An illusion was being shattered in the flash ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... was a perfectly bred gentleman, and it was the latter's business to agree with everybody. Doctor Tusher and the lady's maid, his spouse, had a boy who was about the age of little Esmond; and there was such a friendship between the lads, as propinquity and tolerable kindness and good humour on either side would be pretty sure to occasion. Tom Tusher was sent off early however to a school in London, whither his father took him and a volume of sermons ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... her blood. Her hands dropped to her sides, and her face, very rosy, became so wonderfully beautiful that Blizzard almost groaned aloud. Something told him that his morning was over, his morning filled with the happiness of propinquity and stolen looks, with the happiness that is half spiritual and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... the fact that she is technically an enemy. So I applied, stating the facts, to the Chief Constable, who, with a promptitude and a courtesy which I desire to acknowledge, sent a sergeant to interview me. Struggling against that sense of general and undefined guilt which the propinquity of a police officer always inspires and striving to assume an air of frank and confident honesty, I approached the sergeant and learnt from him that, this being a prohibited area, the Chief Constable could not give the required permission to travel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various

... fell in with signs that indicated the propinquity of the animals we were in search of. In several of the thickets, the maples were stripped of their twigs and bark, but this had been done previous to the falling of the snow. As yet, there were no tracks: we were not long, however, before this welcome ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... abesse, irreg., be away, be absent, be distant, with separative abl. /adpropinquo:, -a:re, draw near, approach (propinquity), with dative[A] /contineo:, -e:re, hold together, hem in, keep (contain) /disce:do:, -ere, depart, go away, leave, with separative abl. /egeo:, -e:re, lack, need, be without, with separative abl. /interficio:, -ere, kill /prohibeo:, -e:re, restrain, keep from (prohibit) /vulnero:, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge

... on the sofa near her, and that magnetic essence which is in propinquity appealed to her; ignorant of all such emotions as she was she only knew something had suddenly made her feel nervous, and that her heart ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn

... admirable, in a way. His hands and wrists were well-shaped, though scarred and roughened by the rasp of the hot straw. The warmth of the sun seemed to cling to his brown face; a joyous vitality emanated from him, and he had mental gifts. She felt lightly thrilled by his propinquity. ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... it neither murder, robbery, illness, accident, fire, or any other of the tragic and legitimate shakers of human nerves, two of the three who were gathered there sat through the meal without the least consciousness of what viands had composed it. Impressiveness depends as much upon propinquity as upon magnitude; and to have honoured unawares the daughter of the vilest Antipodean miscreant and murderer would have been less discomfiting to Mrs. Doncastle than it was to make the same blunder with the daughter of a respectable servant who happened to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... that a creature so leaping with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... Paul felt, there was a singular resemblance between the previous reproachful pose of George and this present attitude of his master, as if the mere propinquity of personal sacrifice had made them alike, that struck him with a mingled pathos and ludicrousness. But he said warmly, "It is I who must apologize, my dear colonel. I am not laughing at your conclusions, but at this singular coincidence with a discovery ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... happened in the pit. Then of course she and the Rector took command. Nobody who knew Catharine would have expected anything else. And now she and Mary and the Rector are busy looking after the poor survivors. 'It's propinquity does ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... long?" he asked, sipping his beer. He felt dimly that that imitation of love which must immediately take place demanded some sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate acquaintance, and on that account, despite his impatience, began the usual conversation, which is carried on by almost all men—when alone with prostitutes, and which compels the latter to ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... distinguish between meum and tuum? Prove that their values vary inversely as the propinquity ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... to be English, the sailor spoke in that language when presenting to them the two roses that he carried in his hand. They were merely flowers, like all others, grown in a land like other lands, but the frame of the thousand-year-old wall, the propinquity of the alcoves and drinking shops of a house built by Pansa in the time of the first Caesars, gave them the interest of roses two thousand years ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... ear, could send him to the Tower. So at the point of Sir Julian's sword—metaphorically—he was forced to go to the King and straighten matters as best he could. This the great Duke did, with the most exquisite urbanity. He knew well the King's humour, and the most propitious moment in it, and propinquity played him fair, and there vibrated in his Majesty's ear the dulcet tones of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... of the most scrubby and abject rogues which the slums of indigent Paris could yield, having apparently failed in some undertaking which had demanded for its fulfilment not only tattered clothes and grimy hands, but menial service with a beggarly and disease-ridden employer, whose very propinquity must have been positive torture to ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... than love for a steady diet. Suspicion, jealousy, prejudice and strife follow in the wake of love; and disgrace, murder and suicide lurk just around the corner from where love coos. Love is a matter of propinquity; it makes demands, asks for proofs, requires a token. But friendship seeks no ownership—it only hopes to serve, and it grows by giving. Do not say, please, that this applies also to love. Love bestows only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... was because the sex had attained wisdom with experience, had discovered that a brilliant mind on parade might be amusing, but that, like its duller fellows, it retired to barracks and found contentment in the same humdrum existence as they. The birth of eternal, enduring love was but a matter of propinquity. Sitting on the front doorstep of an afternoon talking and strolling down to the drugstore every evening for soda-water, Darby and Joan discovered that existence apart was worse than death. And so might Joan's richer sister in the old carved chair, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... post of Propinquity prone on my languorous knees My tears slither down like the Gum of ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman

... not linger, but climbed to the place assigned him, glad to escape the company of the woman who at that moment he almost hated. In his unreflecting passion for Cressy he had always evaded the thought of this relationship or propinquity; the mother had recalled it to him in a way that imperilled even his passion for the daughter; his mind was wholly preoccupied with the idiotic, exasperating, and utterly hopeless position that had been forced upon him. In the bitterness of his spirit his sense of personal danger ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... be removed easily—a gulf cannot. When paying his half-guinea the simple visitor imagines that the difference between the price of his seat and that of a place in the pit is to a great extent based upon an advantage of nearness—although it appears that some managers do not think that propinquity involves ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... of mere propinquity, he laid away sorrow against the returning time of her absence, as one lays away an ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... have added to the world's stock, by work in the gold-fields, have been in many cases labourers, directing their own efforts by their own intelligence. But some men have been exceptional in one or other of two ways—either in propinquity to the scene of action, or (and this is the more common case) in handihood, determination, and courage. It is not every one who has it in him to go in search ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... it. His love for her seemed changed to hate, and she tremblingly averted her gaze. At this juncture, the door opened, and the grocer and his wife entered the room. The former started, on seeing Amabel and the supposed preacher in such close propinquity, and a painful suspicion of the truth crossed his mind. He was not, however, kept long in suspense. Throwing off his wig, and letting his own fair ringlets fall over his shoulders, the earl tore open his cassock, and disclosed his ordinary rich attire. ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt, inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master. Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his corner across the room, because he glanced about with such ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... of personality adjustment that propinquity presents, there are such questions as these to look into: Is one standard of moral conduct after marriage to apply to both? How free is each partner to be? What opportunity is the girl to have to be herself, have her own interests and friends and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... that clumsy, stupid bull with the wooden legs, by no means Paul Potter's masterpiece, while the gem of The Hague gallery, the View of Delft, with its rich pate, its flowing rhythms, its clear daylight, seldom draws a large audience. And I do not doubt that only the propinquity of Rembrandt's Young Saskia to Vermeer's Merry Company (otherwise known as The Courtesan) in the Dresden gallery ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... a deprecatory apology from the proprietor, for one of those couples, a man and woman. The man was a well-known speculator,—cool, yet reckless and pleasure-loving; the woman, good-looking, picturesquely attractive, self-conscious, and self-possessed. Our propinquity was evidently neither novel nor discomposing. As she settled her skirts in her place, her bright, dark eyes swept our table with a frank, almost childish, familiarity. The younger members of the Club quite unconsciously ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... and see people, make yourself agreeable, and not sit in corners observing other people as if they were puppets dancing for your amusement. I heard Mrs. Van once say that propinquity works wonders, and she ought to know, having married off two daughters, and just engaged a third to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... sundry minor workshops in delicious propinquity and solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room and the girls' bedroom. In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... friendships on good comradeship, not on maudlin emotion, nor on propinquity. The right kind of girl and boy friendships may give joy for a lifetime; the wrong kind must ...
— Manners And Conduct In School And Out • Anonymous

... snowing when Johnny reached the capital. He had been parachuted into the enemy's motherland, naturally, because propinquity alone assured the success of ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase

... are no lions become unquiet and display alarm as soon as they are aware that a lion is approaching them in the night. Horses going along a bridle-path that used to leave the town at the back of the old dens of the carnivora in the Berlin Zoological Gardens were often terrified by the propinquity of enemies who were entirely unknown to them. Sticklebacks will swim composedly among a number of voracious pike, knowing, as they do, that the pike will not touch them. For if a pike once by mistake swallows a stickleback, the stickleback will stick in its throat by ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... than round by the Pentland Firth to the distant western island of Icolmkill. On the other hand, that St. Colme's Inch, in the Firth of Forth, is the island alluded to, is, as I have already said, perfectly certain, from its propinquity to the seat of war, and the point of landing of the new Scandinavian host, namely, Kinghorn; the old town of Wester Kinghorn lying only about three or four miles below Inchcolm, and the present town of the same name, or Eastern Kinghorn, being placed about a couple of miles further down ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... belong in contiguity," she said. "They are diametrically opposite in meaning. Please do not allow my ears to be offended by hearing you place them in propinquity again." ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter

... how different was this from the customs which prevailed under the sanction of the "holy bonds of matrimony"! When sexual intercourse became a self-indulgence, like the eating of candy, or the drinking of liquor; a thing of the body, and the body alone; a thing determined by physical propinquity, by the sight and contact of the flesh, the dressing and undressing in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... the secrets of its series, and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... rascals, and that they were beguiling the tedious moments of the sentry-go by pulling a chaplain's leg. They confessed it to me months afterwards in France. However, I was unsuspecting and had come submissive into the great war. I said that if they would remove their bayonets from propinquity to my person—because the sight of them was causing me a fresh attack of the pains that had racked me all day—I would go with them to the guardroom. At this they said, "Well, Sir, we'll let you pass. We'll take your ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... the car swung swiftly around a curve, she swayed against him softly, so that he began to look expectantly ahead for a change in the straight line of the track, laughing happily to himself at her involuntary apology. Their comradeship seemed to have entered upon a stage in which mere propinquity was sufficient to give content without the aid of conversation, and a deep serenity of mood had now replaced the wavering uncertainties of his earlier emotions. This atmosphere of harmony and understanding remained unbroken until they stood before her house; but now an inexplicable ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... my blood from warming at the sound of his voice through the door. Being still his wife, I shall have to sew and mend and cook for him. That is the penalty of prairie life; there is no escape from propinquity. ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... deliberate; where there was so much suffering that could not be escaped, they were scrupulous to inflict upon each other no unnecessary pain or embarrassment. Between a more common man and a less fastidious woman, placed in such propinquity, there would almost inevitably have been concessions and compromises but between these two there remained a barrier that might have been passed by Marion's unquestioning love, but never by Haig's inclinations, curbed as they had been through many years, and still reined ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... of whom were more to her than Imogen could be, but they lived at a distance and Imogen close at hand. Propinquity plays a large part in friendship as well as love. Imogen had no other intimate, but she knew too little of Isabel's other interests to be made uncomfortable about them, and was quite happy in her position ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge

... Morton's society. It has often been said that the English East-India ships are noted for quarrelling and making love. The quarrels may be accounted for on the same principle as the love-making, viz., propinquity; the same proximity producing hostility in whose sterner natures, that, in others of a gentler cast, produces its opposite feeling. We sailed, and it is scarcely necessary to tell the reader how much the tedium of so long a voyage, and the monotony of a sea-voyage, was relieved by ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... was so low that Drake felt he must stoop, and Nell's tall figure looked all the taller and slimmer for its propinquity to the timbered ceiling. The woman brought a couple of glasses of milk and some saffron cakes, and Nell drank and ate with a healthy, unashamed appetite, and apparently quite forgot Drake, who, seated ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France. He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Sally's tongue was not idle. Her talk was as fresh, as quaint, as original as herself, and yet so practical and to the purpose of Courtland's visit as to excuse his delight in it and her own fascinating propinquity. Whether she stopped to take a nail from between her pretty lips when she spoke to him, or whether holding on perilously with one hand to the trellis while she gesticulated with the hammer, pointing out the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... The approach of the torpedo-boats was almost noiseless, and the croaking of the frogs was said to have further favoured the Russians by drowning the sound of the engines, so that those on board the monitor were not aware of their enemy's propinquity until the launches were ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... pleasure from the contact. Afterward, though he never suspected it, desire for him became a consuming passion, and I remember on one occasion, when on a holiday, I occupied the same bed with him, the excitement of his propinquity brought on such a formidable attack of heart palpitation that my father called in the family physician on our return home. Needless to say my heart was found quite sound. The desire still remains after all these years, and nothing excites me more even ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... an attic window to put one in sympathetic relations with cathedral spires! At this height we and they, for a part of their flight upward, at least, were on a common level—and we all know what confidences come about from the accident of propinquity. They seemed to assure us as never before when sitting at their feet, the difficulties they had overcome in climbing heavenward. Every stone that looked down upon the city wore ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... THAT SOMETHING MORE IS INCLUDED, and that propinquity of descent—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings— is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... of that kind. The "raza Latina" of eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... he merely turned his eyes in the direction whence it came; one of his sergeants, looking a giant in stature in the false perspective of the fog, approached, and when clearly defined and reduced to his true dimensions by propinquity, saluted and stood ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... magician sat down by it. He placed the little boy before him, and poured ink into the hollow of the boy's hand, and bid him look into it steadily. I think the mother rather quailed, at seeing her child in such propinquity with "the Enemy;" but recovered herself on being exhorted to defy the devil and all his works. And the thing was not entirely without danger from another quarter; for it was understood the Pasha had directed a special edict against all dealing with familiar spirits; and the Pasha's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various

... such understanding and brightness, Philippa had never before known in one of her own sex, and she tried to think (whether she succeeded I do not know) that she did not mind the propinquity; since a woman so rich, so fair, and with such a command of suitors, could not desire to wreck the happiness of so inoffensive ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... of marriage. You know how men and women live long lives together though completely sundered in heart, and how others though separated in life walk side by side in the spirit. As this is so, why do you fear to see or know too much of me? Propinquity does not ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... was a gem incomparable in its beauty and its setting. It had been the place of revels of old kings and chiefs, and Pomare the Fourth had made it his residence. Cut off by half a mile of water from Papeete, it had an isolation, yet propinquity, which would have persuaded me to make it my home were I a governor; but it was given over to quarantine purposes, with an old caretaker who came and went in a ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... mass which was the trees surrounding the Abbey House, and between the trees there glimmered a faint light which might proceed from some rising star, or from Angela's window. He preferred to believe it was the latter. The propinquity made him very happy. What was she doing? he wondered— sitting by her window and thinking of him! He would ask her on the morrow. It was worth while going through that year of separation in order to taste the joy of meeting. It seemed ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... so,—thy truth then be thy dower: For, by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate, and the night; By all the operation of the orbs, From whom we do exist and cease to be; Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee, from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd, ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... disappointed. Laurence, if he referred to Lilith again, did so in the same casual, indifferent way as before, nor did he ever terminate any of his dreamy and seaward-gazing meditations in order to open converse with her, even with such inducement as solitary propinquity on more than ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... were necessarily brought to bear upon the same matters of public concern. Both, unfortunately, lived in Boston and were likely any day to come face to face round the corner of some or other narrow street of that small town. That reciprocal exasperation engendered by reasonable propinquity, so essential to the life of altercations, was therefore a perpetual stimulus to both men, confirming each in his obstinate opinion of the other as a malicious and dangerous enemy of all that men ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker

... been busy with the problem of housing her unwelcome guest. She had not been blind to the interested and welcoming look Jean had given the young man as she greeted him half an hour before. She was aware of the almost inevitable result of propinquity. She looked up now with relieved interest and despite herself, with faintly quickening approval. By living on the other side of the Island, Harlan would in part solve the problem. She could then see to it that he saw little of Jean. If it ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than their relatives,—they may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne



Words linked to "Propinquity" :   nearness, closeness



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