Example sentences of "[vb past] [adv] [vb pp] to be [adj] " in BNC.

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1 I 'd only wanted to be alone !
2 ‘ I 'd kinda hoped to be alone here tonight .
3 I 'd always wanted to be famous .
4 I 'd always wanted to be famous .
5 At the same time she had fiercely wanted to be proud of Phoebe , to support Phoebe 's admirable fight on her behalf .
6 He had obviously decided to be pleasant to her .
7 The fact that the cold war lasted so much longer than the economic idyll meant that Americans never adjusted to the fact that , economically , their country had long ceased to be able to deliver the annual increase in prosperity they had come to consider a birthright .
8 ’ He was n't yet thirty when he wrote that ; he had already decided to be old before his time .
9 But suppose that nearly all the entries had just happened to be nasty .
10 Broaddus — owner of Prodesco , a textile company in Pennsylvania , and an American with extensive business interests outside catering — was a friend and former hotel client of Brown , and had always wanted to be involved in the hospitality industry .
11 She had always hankered to be tall and fair , like Riborg .
12 The Christian attitude towards pain had always tended to be stoical ; as Jeremy Taylor bluntly put it : ‘ He that is afraid of pain is afraid of his own nature . ’
13 Whether he would have been able to stick to it if he had ever risen to be national leader of the Liberal Party is not certain .
14 They were mixed because although all the vitality , the song , humour , and much of the idiom came from what E. P. Thompson has described as the traditionally ‘ rowdy ’ element in working-class culture these things had now ceased to be spontaneous and informal and had passed into other hands .
15 A report from the Lower Franconian town of Kitzingen in May 1943 , dealing particularly with opinion among academics , salespeople , and the bourgeoisie — groups which had earlier tended to be pro-Nazi in their sympathies — stated that ‘ a disgust about the Party was building up among the people , and a rage which would one day boil over ’ .
16 The representative insider now fears that his job , which he had previously assumed to be safe , might now be in jeopardy .
17 She had never expected to be beautiful , and she was startled to see how nearly she approached a kind of beauty .
18 She had never expected to be beautiful because nobody had ever suggested that she might be so .
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