'sibylline' is a correct and usable word in written English
It can be used to describe something that is mysterious, cryptic, or difficult to interpret, often with a sense of wisdom or prophecy. Example: The old fortune teller spoke in a sibylline tone, leaving her customers baffled but intrigued by her predictions.
In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged 35 poems a year and conducted her social life mainly through her chiselled and often sibylline written messages.
He drew together a collection of his poems (published in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves) and wrote Biographia Literaria (1817), a rambling and discursive but highly stimulating and influential work in which he outlined the evolution of his thought and developed an extended critique of Wordsworth's poems.
line Oracles, collection of oracular prophecies in which Jewish or Christian doctrines were allegedly confirmed by a sibyl (legendary Greek prophetess); the prophecies were actually the work of certain Jewish and Christian writers from about 150 bc to about ad 180 and are not to be confused with the line Books, a much earlier collection of sibylline prophecies (see ).
Toddler Noah's cryptic construction out of household objects; Poppy's chorus of "Poo bum"; Rose's all-seeing antenna eyeballs, one in her sibylline mouth; Toby's "Fuck you", all voice the child's dire battle for survival.
They gave her a sibylline, vaguely Eastern air, and although they hid more of the body than a corseted gown with conventional crinolines, they were considered bohemian.
Sonnabend, who used to be married to Leo Castelli, and who still presides, in her nineties, over the New York gallery that bears her name, is characteristically sibylline about her plans for this work.
The new poems were more discursive and narrative, but retained their hard-to-parse, Blakean high-rhetorical style: "Let me proclaim it — human be my lot! — / How from my pit of green horse-bones / I turn, in a wilderness of sweat, / To the moon-breasted sibylline, / And lift this garland, Danger, from her throat / To blaze it in the foundries of the night".
Mr. Jeremiah also brought impressive power and intensity to Moto Osada's sibylline "Four Nights of Dream," the only opera with a male protagonist.
Donna Leon's new police procedural, BEASTLY THINGS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), finds her philosophical Venetian detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, in a "sibylline mode," anxiously consulting the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, his freethinkers' bible, for guidance on how to cope with the profound social evils afflicting his homeland.
On the advice of the Sibylline Books, a cult of Ceres, Liber, and Libera was introduced into Rome (according to tradition, in 496 bc) to check a famine.
Moving through the regular stages, he gained the quaestorship (often a responsible provincial post), probably in 81; then in 88 he attained a praetorship (a post with legal jurisdiction) and became a member of the priestly college that kept the Sibylline Books of prophecy and supervised foreign-cult practice.
