Contort meaning

Verb: contort

Pronunciation: (kun’tort)

Contort meaning:

• Twist and press out of shape

Synonyms: deform, distort, wring

Derived forms: contorts, contorted, contorting

Quotations:

1. Jamie McGuire- You can’t tell me what to do anymore, Travis, I don’t belong to you! In the second it took him to turn and face me, his expression had contorted into anger. He stomped towards me, planting his hands on the bed and leaning into my face. The veins in his neck bulged as he shouted, and I met his glare, refusing to even flinch. He looked at my lips, panting. I belong to you.
2. Lisa Kleypas – He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. Aline, he whispered, Do you know what hell is?  Yes. Her eyes overflowed. Trying to exist with your heart living somewhere outside your body. No. It’s knowing that you have so little faith in my love, you would have condemned me to a lifetime of agony.” His face contorted suddenly. To something worse than death.
3. Tara Westover – I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: It is a subject on which nothing final can be known. The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.
4. Roberto Bolaño – What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
5. Veronica Roth – A sob racks my body again, and he wraps his arms around me so tightly I find it difficult to breathe, but it doesn’t matter. My dignified weeping gives way to full-on ugliness, my mouth open and my face contorted and sounds like a dying animal coming from my throat. If this continues I will break apart, and maybe that would be better, maybe it would be better to shatter and bear nothing.
6. Diana Gabaldon – There was another reason. The main one. Reason? I said stupidly. Why I married you. Which was. I don’t know what I expected him to say, perhaps some further revelation of his family’s contorted affairs. What he did say was more of a shock, in its way. Because I wanted you. He turned from the window to face me. More than I ever wanted anything in my life, he added softly.
7. Tara Westover – I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world. It is a subject on which nothing final can be known. The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. Blood rushed to my brain. I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say whatever you are, you are woman.
8. Franz Kafka – There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought
9. Molière – There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time and lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities.
10. Abbi Glines – I love you, I said, causing his face to contort in pain. I’m not a man so I do not have a heart that loves as a human does. I’m an immortal god that dwells with supreme power because I hold the keys to Death. But you are my existence. I am yours. Hot tears streamed down my face as I stared into the face of someone who comprehended an emotion much stronger than my weak, feeble words of love.

Sample sentences:

1. The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
2. In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they’re still beautiful.
3. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much. These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.
4. Izzy, said Jace, as they neared the pond, and she jumped up and spun around. Her smile was dazzling. Jace! She flew at him and hugged him. Now that was the way sisters were supposed to act, Clary thought. Not all stiff and weird and peculiar, but happy and loving. Watching Jace hug Isabelle, she tried to school her features into a happy and loving expression. Are you all right? Simon asked, with some concern. Your eyes are crossing.I’m fine. Clary abandoned the attempt. Are you sure? You looked sort of contorted.
5. When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, its sticking together that’s difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state that’s the unconscionable torture. Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but us, the jerks of infinity. We’d burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us by our pride.
6. All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.
7. Bethany. His quiet voice intruded.Her heart turned over heavily. This is real right? His face contorted as if he were in pain. Yes, it’s real. Crazy people probably did things like this all the time. Asked their imaginary alien friends if they were real, and of course, they’d say yes.
8. When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assault in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically normal. Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.
9. The very multiculturalism and multi ethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as white and oppressive, mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. 
10. In the strategy of my school, keep your body and mind straight and make your opponent go through contortions and twist about. The essence is to defeat him in the moment when, in his mind, he is pivoting and twisting. You should examine this well.
11. Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.
12. I see his longing and frustration. It hurts too much. His face contorts.Everything we won’t have.
13. Still, this moment belongs to the two of them, Mom and this handsome stranger. He reaches the passenger side door and stares down at her with steely violet eyes-down at my mother who never cries, down at my mother who’s now bawling like a spanked child-his face contorted in a rainbow of so many emotions, some that I can’t even name.Then Grom the Triton king sinks to his knees in front of her, and a single tear spills down his face. Nalia, he whispers.And then my mother slaps him. It’s not the kind of slap you get for talking back. It’s not the kind of punch she dealt Galen and Toraf in our kitchen. It’s the kind of slap a woman gives a man when he’s hurt her deeply. And Grom accepts it with grace. I looked for you, she shouts, even though he’s inches from her.Slowly, as if in a show of peace, he takes the hand that slapped him and sandwiches it between his own. He seems to revel in the feel of her touch. His face is pure tenderness, his voice like a massage to the nerves. And I looked for you. Your pulse was gone, she insists. By now she chokes back sobs between words. She’s fighting for control. I’ve never seen my mother fight for control. As was yours. I realize Grom knows what not to say, what not to do to provoke her. He is the complete opposite of her, or maybe just a completion of her.Her eyes focus on his wrist, and tears slip down her face, leaving faint trails of mascara on her cheeks. He smiles and slowly pulls his hand away. I think he’s going to show her the bracelet he’s wearing, but instead he rips it off his wrist and holds it out for her inspection. From where I’m standing it looks like a single black ball tied to some sort of string. By my mom’s expression, this black ball has meaning. So much meaning that I think she’s forgotten to breathe. My pearl, she whispers. I thought I’d lost it. He encloses it in her hand. This isn’t your pearl, love. That one was lost in the explosion with you. For almost an entire season, I scoured the oyster beds, looking for another one that would do. I don’t know why, but I thought maybe if I found another perfect pearl, I would somehow find you, too. When I found this though, it didn’t bring me the peace I’d hoped for. But I couldn’t bring myself to discard it. I’ve worn it on my wrist ever since. This is all it takes for my mom to throw herself into his arms, bringing Rachel partially with her. Even so, it’s probably the most moving moment I’ve ever encountered in my eighteen years. Or at least it would be, if my mom weren’t clinging to a man who is not my dad.
14. All the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.
15. Now I’ll never see him again, and maybe it’s a good thing. He walked out of my life last night for once and for all. I know with sickening certainty that it’s the end. There were just those two dates we had, and the time he came over with the boys, and tonight. Yet I liked him too much, way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did. Oh, he’s magnetic, he’s charming; you could fall into his eyes. Let’s face it: his sex appeal was unbearably strong. I wanted to know him the thoughts, the ideas behind the handsome, confident, wise-cracking mask. I’ve changed, he told me. You would have liked me three years ago. Now I’m a wiseguy. We sat together for a few hours on the porch, talking, and staring at nothing. Then the friction increased, centered. His nearness was electric in itself. Can’t you see, he said. I want to kiss you. So he kissed me, hungrily, his eyes shut, his hand warm, curved burning into my stomach. I wish I hated you, I said. Why did you come? Why? I wanted your company. Alby and Pete were going to the ball game, and I couldn’t see that. Warrie and Jerry were going drinking; couldn’t see that either. It was past eleven; I walked to the door with him and stepped outside into the cool August night. Come here, he said. I’ll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much. Then it hit me and I just blurted, I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them. He was definite, Nobody knows me. So that was it; the end. Goodbye for good, then, I said. He looked hard at me, a smile twisting his mouth, You lucky kid; you don’t know how lucky you are. I was crying quietly, my face contorted. Stop it! The words came like knife thrusts, and then gentleness, In case I don’t see you, have a nice time at Smith. Have a hell of a nice life, I said. And he walked off down the path with his jaunty, independent stride. And I stood there where he left me, tremulous with love and longing, weeping in the dark. That night it was hard to get to sleep.
16. A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of itself.
17.  It takes a great level of intelligence to maintain a thinking process as stupid as this. Because it is such a great undertaking, we take pride in it. It highlights our intellect. Too bad it also highlights our lack of wisdom. For all our twisting, wringing, stretching, and stuffing, we only contort ourselves.
18. Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we receive as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety. This is the inward reality of simplicity. However, if what we have we believe we have gotten, and if what we have we believe we must hold onto, and if what we have is not available to others, then we will live in anxiety. Such persons will never know simplicity regardless of the outward contortions they may put themselves through in order to live the simple life.
19. Without us, there is no her, after all. She is the city, not the tunnels, and so she does everything she can to keep us down here. Sometimes I even wonder whether it is only possible to create True Delicacies here because she gives them their power, as a bribe to stop us leaving. When the Grand Steward declared that nobody was allowed to enter or leave the city, I believe he became her chosen beloved. I will tell you something else, though I cannot prove it. The city grows, and not just through the effort of pick and shovel. She has been stretching, spreading and contorting to make room for us all, and I think that is why geography no longer makes sense.