Sentence examples for benumb from inspiring English sources
verb
To make numb, as by cold or anesthetic.
He feels "a clogging and a heat at my breast-bone as if my bowels would have burst out"; a preacher's call to abandon the sin of idle pastimes "did benumb the sinews of my best delights"; and he can say of one of the texts of scripture that seemed to him to spell his damnation that it "stood like a mill-post at my back".
Horses require care, attentiveness, patience and grace -- sudden movements or roughness scare them or benumb them; carelessness can be rewarded with an accident.
Though he was "never quite benumb'd by the world's sway," these hours of insight became more and more rare, and the stirrings of buried feeling were associated with moods of regret for lost youth, regret for the freshness of the early world, moods of self-pity, moods of longing for The hills where his life rose And the sea where it goes.
Listening to a Powell speech could be a fascinating, benumbing experience he would use headlines to dazzle, plain words to bemuse.
In Plato's "Meno", his interlocutor compares Socrates to "the flat torpedo sea-fish; for it benumbs anyone who approaches and touches it".
Even as the Islamist murderers struck in Paris, some media-studies maven in a liberal-arts college was doubtless explaining that the difference between our time and times past is that the ubiquity of images benumbs us and their proliferation makes us indifferent.
Let a fifty-eight-million-dollar stainless-steel balloon dog that astounds the eye while benumbing the mind stand for the values of the first constituency.
Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband had gained a mastery which she could no more resist than she could have resisted the benumbing effect from the touch of a torpedo").
As a latecomer to the benumbing, deathly silent horrors of the area's ruin, I liked the work.
Mr. Cohen segued into some benumbing mind-reading (your daughter's name is Sara, you met John Kennedy, your lucky number is 56).
Only by focusing on the smallest terms of individual experience might we begin, by implication, to get a sense of the benumbing scale of the destruction visited on a continent and a race.
