Sentence examples for except the ability from inspiring English sources

Bay has all the attributes of a great action director except the ability to instill fear in an audience.

Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.

Ms. McLellan's officials were unable to point to many benefits reserved to marriage under federal law, except the ability to get divorced and change family names.

That is, I suppose, a reflection of my general distaste for the whole cult of celebrity - not just the adoration of people with no merits except the ability to be photographed for newspapers but, equally, the assumption that a person of distinction is in every particular worth both admiration and imitation.

Characteristically, he turns his academic triumph into an indictment of the system — that success in examinations proves nothing except the ability to pass examinations, and that other, much worthier, et cetera — but he glides over the sheer extraordinariness of his facility.

The hostess, wan but triumphant at having finally collected twelve people with almost nothing in common except the ability to keep a contract score more or less correctly... View Article By Jelani Cobb By Seth Lind By David Remnick By Jia Tolentino.

Mr. Zayan, who has a charming accent and a neat salt-and-pepper beard and who favors spotless Adidas and pristine white shirts, says that — except for the ability to smoke indoors — he does not miss Paris.

For example, the majority opinion that only marriage, and not civil unions, would be permissible under the state Constitution was brusquely dismissive of Justice Martha B. Sosman's dissenting argument that civil unions would give gays exactly what marriage would, except for the ability to name it marriage.

The snag was that, apart from being able to pass an intelligence test, we had very little in common, except perhaps the ability to laugh at ourselves for being unintelligent enough to think we might meet another member with similar ideas.It was good to see credit given to Victor Serebriakoff for providing the building bricks that have made Mensa a society that is recognised worldwide.

Except, perhaps, the ability to invite each other out for lunch.

This gives rise to two possible configurations of chiral molecules, thus providing for a distinction between distinct substances whose physical and chemical properties are the same except for the ability to rotate plane polarized light in different directions.