Askew meaning

Adjective: askew

Pronunciation:(u’skyoo)

Askew meaning:

• Turned or twisted toward one side

Synonyms: awry, cockeyed, lopsided, wonky

Adverb: askew

Pronunciation:(u’skyoo)

Askew meaning:

• Turned or twisted to one side

Synonyms: awry
Quotations:

1. Leo Tolstoy – In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth – he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.
2. Nathan Reese Maher – Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?
3. Veronica Roth – She tries to turn too soon, and the ladder smacks into Fernando’s shoulder. The jolt knocks his glasses askew. He smiles at Christina and takes the glasses off, shoving them into his pocket. I thought the Erudite didn’t like nicknames? When a pretty girl calls you by a nickname, he says, it is only logical to respond to it.
4. Cassandra Clare – Before Tessa could answer, there was a knock at the door, and a familiar voice. It’s Jem. Tessa, are you there? Charlotte sat bolt upright. Oh! He mustn’t see you in your dress! Tessa stood dumbfounded. Why ever not? It’s a Shadow hunter custom bad luck! Charlotte rose to her feet. Quickly! Hide behind the wardrobe! The wardrobe? But Tessa broke off with a yelp as Charlotte seized her about the waist and frog-marched her behind the wardrobe like a policeman with a particularly resistant criminal. Released, Tessa dusted off her dress and made a face at Charlotte, and they both peeked around the side of the furniture as the seamstress, after a bewildered look, opened the door. Jem’s silvery head appeared in the gap. He looked a bit disheveled, his jacket askew. He glanced around in puzzlement before his gaze lighted on Charlotte and Tessa, half-concealed behind the wardrobe.
5. Megan Whalen Turner – In the silent aftermath, I said, “We’ll give them a second chance.”With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom in the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia’s ruthless advice and I had failed. Gen’s gift told me that I had not failed for lack of trying. I’d lifted out the matching gun and read its archaic inscription. Not the queen made me, but I can make the king. Looking at Akretenesh’s startled face down the long barrel of the handgun, I smiled, until I felt the scar tissue tighten. That one expression, I’d never showed him. My face gave away my humiliation, my rage, my surprise, and my embarrassment, but I had never let him see what I looked like when I smiled: my uncle. His diplomatic mask dissolved, and he backed away. In Attolia, I had been in front of a mirror at last, and I had understood what made Oerus back in Hanaktos ask me if my expression was a happy one or not. The smile rumpled the scar tissue under my skin, and it dragged my face askew, giving me the leer of a man who’d never had a moment of self-doubt, who’d never regretted a life lost. I’d worried that I wouldn’t have the nerve to carry this off, but in the moment, it was easy.
6. William Least Heat-Moon – Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.
7. Patrick Rothfuss – Well, after that she would do her best. That was the only way. You did not want things for yourself. That made you small. That kept you safe. That meant you could move smoothly through the world without upsetting every apple cart you came across. And if you were careful, if you were a proper part of things, then you could help. You mended what was cracked. You tended to the things you found askew. And you trusted that the world in turn would brush you up against the chance to eat. It was the only graceful way to move. All else was vanity and pride.
8. Robert Burns – But little Mouse, you are not alone,In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew,And leave us nothing but grief and pain.
9. Sarah Rees Brennan – Do you get the feeling that they’re talking about someone else other than an article? Kami stared at her fork, lying forlornly askew on her plate. I don’t know what you could mean. You are talking crazy. They are talking about boys.
10. Sylvia Plath – But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

Sample sentences:

1. You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.
2. There are nights when the world is completely askew because he’s gone.
3. Deceit for personal gain is one of history’s most recurring crimes. Man’s first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.
4. I don’t just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.
5. There was something unbearably sexy about cars at night, Ronan thought. The way the fenders twisted the light and reflected the road, the way every driver became anonymous. The sight of them knocked his heartbeat askew.
6. A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.
7. Cruel Prince James strode into the chamber, his cape flashing behind him and his terrible, terrible mustache askew with rage.
8. There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct.
9. You did not want things for yourself. That made you small. That kept you safe. That meant you could move smoothly through the world without upsetting every apple cart you came across. And if you were careful, if you were a proper part of things, then you could help. You mended what was cracked. You tended to the things you found askew. And you trusted that the world in turn would brush you up against the chance to eat. It was the only graceful way to move. All else was vanity and pride.
10. It’s been like absorbing a whole other person. So when that eerie crushed the air from your lungs, it felt like my heart stopped. Like it would stop the second yours did. The world tilted, went askew.
11. That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers.
12. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
13. This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved. At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.
14. Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by them- selves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
15. It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he’d lost. Though perhaps that’s not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars. He’s shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor’s idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn’t erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art. On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman’s axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.
16. At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is a tangle of wires.