Looking for words and phrases to enrich poetry and creative writing? This classic collection from Grenville Kleiser provides plenty of expressive phrases.
You can review these lists when you seek extra power in written literary works. You can also use them to develop your vocabulary. First, see if you can determine meanings of each word you don't know by studying the context of the phrase that contains the unknown word. Then, confirm your impressions by looking up and learning each unfamiliar word.
R
Radiant with the beautiful glamor of youth
Ransack the vocabulary
Red tape of officialdom
Redolent of the night lamp
Reflecting the solemn and unfathomable stars
Regarded with an exulting pride
Rehabilitated and restored to dignity
Remorselessly swept into oblivion
Resounding generalities and conventional rhetoric
Respect forbade downright contradiction
Restless and sore and haughty feelings were busy within
Retort leaped to his lips
Rigid adherence to conventionalities
Rudely disconcerting in her behavior
Rudely reminded of life's serious issues
S
Sacrificed to a futile sort of treadmill
Sadness prevailed among her moods
Scorched with the lightning of momentary indignation
Scorning such paltry devices
Scotched but not slain
Scrupulous morality of conduct
Seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before the eyes
Seething with suppressed wrath
Seize on greedily
Sensuous enjoyment of the outward show of life
Serenity beamed from his look
Serenity of paralysis and death
Seriousness lurked in the depths of her eyes
Served to recruit his own jaded ideas
Set anew in some fresh and appealing form
Setting all the sane traditions at defiance
Shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty
She affected disdain
She assented in precisely the right terms
She bandies adjectives with the best
She challenged his dissent
She cherished no petty resentments
She curled her fastidious lip
She curled her lip with defiant scorn
She did her best to mask her agitation
She disarmed anger and softened asperity
She disclaimed fatigue
She fell into a dreamy silence
She fell into abstracted reverie
She felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions
She flushed an agitated pink
She forced a faint quivering smile
She frowned incomprehension
She had an air of restrained fury
She had an undercurrent of acidity
She hugged the thought of her own unknown and unapplauded integrity
She lingered a few leisurely seconds
She nodded mutely
She nourished a dream of ambition
She permitted herself a delicate little smile
She poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition
She questioned inimically
She recaptured herself with difficulty
She regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes
She sat eyeing him with frosty calm
She seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution
She seemed wrapped in a veil of lassitude
She shook hands grudgingly
She softened her frown to a quivering smile
She spoke with hurried eagerness
She spoke with sweet severity
She stilled and trampled on the inward protest
She stood her ground with the most perfect dignity
She strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her
She swept away all opposing opinion with the swift rush of her enthusiasm
She thrived on insincerity
She twitted him merrily
She was both weary and placated
She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations
She was demure and dimly appealing
She was exquisitely simple
She was gripped with a sense of suffocation and panic
She was in an anguish of sharp and penetrating remorse
She was oppressed by a dead melancholy
She was stricken to the soul
She wore an air of wistful questioning
Sheer superfluity of happiness
Sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life
Silence fell
Singing lustily as if to exorcise the demon of gloom
Skirmishes and retreats of conscience
Slender experience of the facts of life
Slope towards extinction
Slow the movement was and tortuous
Slowly disengaging its significance from the thicket of words
So innocent in her exuberant happiness
Soar into a rosy zone of contemplation
Softened by the solicitude of untiring and anxious love
Solitary and sorely smitten souls
Some dim-remembered and dream-like images
Some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain
Some flash of witty irrelevance
Something curiously suggestive and engaging
Something eminently human beaconed from his eyes
Something full of urgent haste
Something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture
Something that seizes tyrannously upon the soul
Sore beset by the pressure of temptation
Specious show of impeccability
Spectacular display of wrath
Spur and whip the tired mind into action
Stale and facile platitudes
Stamped with unutterable and solemn woe
Startled into perilous activity
Startling leaps over vast gulfs of time
Stem the tide of opinion
Stern emptying of the soul
Stimulated to an ever deepening subtlety
Stirred into a true access of enthusiasm
Stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life
Strange capacities and suggestions both of vehemence and pride
Strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets
Stripped to its bare skeleton
Strode forth imperiously
Struck by a sudden curiosity
Struck dumb with strange surprise
Stung by his thoughts, and impatient of rest
Stung by the splendor of the prospect
Subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty
Sublime indifference to contemporary usage and taste
Submission to an implied rebuke
Subtle indications of great mental agitation
Subtle suggestions of remoteness
Such things as the eye of history sees
Such was the petty chronicle
Suddenly a thought shook him
Suddenly overawed by a strange, delicious shyness
Suddenly smitten with unreality
Suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes
Suffered to languish in obscurity
Sugared remonstrances and cajoleries
Suggestions of veiled and vibrant feeling
Summer clouds floating feathery overhead
Sunk in a phraseological quagmire
Sunk into a gloomy reverie
Sunny silence broods over the realm of little cottages
Supreme arbiter of conduct
Susceptibility to fleeting impressions
Sweet smoke of burning twigs hovered in the autumn day
Swift summer into the autumn flowed
Go back to the Main Page of Expressive Phrases... or ... Go to the Next Page: Expressive Phrases, Page 7 (T).
Editor's note: This section of EnhanceMyVocabulary.com is excerpted and adapted from Project Gutenberg's Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, by Grenville Kleiser.
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