Example sentences of "as if they [vb past] be " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | They felt as if they 'd been scoured out with a Brillo pad . |
| 2 | They were soon strolling with me round the house as if they 'd been expecting me for weeks . |
| 3 | Down at the far end of the valley , there was still snow on the upper slopes of the mountains ; they looked as if they 'd been sugar-dusted , with stone walls showing like fine , black veins above the treeline . |
| 4 | Isobel was ambitious , and had her sights set on the national news media ; unfortunately , so did every other young news-hustler in every backwater station in the country , and few of them were having to contend with sinuses that felt as if they 'd been stuffed with pillows . |
| 5 | It was as if they 'd been ordered not to be taken alive . ’ |
| 6 | The crushing weariness was a formidable enemy , though , and she felt her eyelids drooping as if they 'd been weighted . |
| 7 | It looked as if they 'd been having a party and had just taken off in the middle of it . |
| 8 | His jeans looked as if they 'd been slashed with a knife . |
| 9 | Davide threw himself on it to stop her pulling it off altogether with the bowl of fruit and the jug of water and glasses with it ; so they grappled , and in the contact something gave way , melted within them both and they clung together , aching in their heads and their bones as if they 'd been caught out on the mountains in the winter and been chilled to the marrow . |
| 10 | He 'd lost weight , his eyes were staring and red as if they 'd been rolled in grit , and his clothes hung on him like a scarecrow 's ; it was almost as if , in the course of the past few weeks , he 'd been drained of the zest and the energy and the sense of confidence that she 'd steadily been picking up . |
| 11 | Well when I was down at the er council that May , I told them there and then that er I 'm prepared to er let one of the council men come to our house , about eight o'clock in the morning , and then stop till ten and then come back again about two and wait till they come home from school which they would n't have come home from school , but they go across the road and come back again , double back as if they 'd been to school |
| 12 | Though his features looked as if they 'd been carved from stone , in the depths of his gaze something stirred . |
| 13 | The third she found broken , knocked over on to its side , the water dripping from a puddle on the windowsill on to a seat below and through that on to the floor , and the flowers scattered and brown-edged , as if they 'd been picked for their beauty and freshness by a little girl and then loosed regardlessly on the path from her sticky hands as she ran off to do something else . |
| 14 | Only two or three of the terminals were occupied , by guys who looked as if they 'd been up all night and who were already on to their second pack of cigarettes . |
| 15 | She was wearing biker leathers and cowboy boots which all looked as if they 'd been applied with the aid of a shoehorn . |
| 16 | It seemed as if they 'd been wrong about one thing and only too right about the other . |
| 17 | THE VERY first line of Edward Albee 's Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? - ‘ What a dump ! ’ — is spoken by the play 's feminine protagonist in a parody of the classic Bette Davis manner : an ( imaginary ) cigarette held imperiously at eye-level , eyes blazing like the headlamps of an automobile , bee-sting lips enunciating each word ( including the ‘ a ’ ) for absolutely maximum effect , almost as if they had been snipped out of a newspaper headline by a writer of anonymous letters . |
| 18 | Yet when I emerged from that heaven-haven of sexual absolution , I would feel guilty , frightened , torn between happiness at being liberated from overwhelming sexual tension and the scared wonder of the events , as if they had been rituals in a half-remembered primitive religion . |
| 19 | The pressures of wedded bliss excluded Sadie as effectively from the life of her former friend as if they had been on different continents . |
| 20 | One , seldom more than three feet high and called by Ray the Dwarf Red Rose , had small flowers and rounded buds which before opening appeared ‘ as if they had been clipp 'd with Scissars ’ . |
| 21 | In Arequipa I had watched women in the church of Santo Domingo giggle happily as they dressed the Virgin for a procession ; , behaving much as if they had been preparing a girl for a wedding , not a poor girl though , rather one Velasquez might be called upon to paint . |
| 22 | There was a filthy taste in his mouth and his lips felt as if they had been stung . |
| 23 | The walkers who had wangled the lift with him looked as if they had been told they had a week to live , suggesting the car conversation must have fulfilled my expectations . |
| 24 | Angelo Heilprin , an American geologist who visited the scene a few weeks later and wrote a book about the tragedy , described ‘ twisted bars of iron , great masses of roof sheeting wrapped like cloth about posts upon which they had been flung , and iron girders looped and festooned as if they had been made of rope ’ . |
| 25 | Not many yards away , dunes and hillocks looked as if they had been dumped at random , each one rising about sixty feet above the plain . |
| 26 | These smaller dunes were distinct from the level ground on which they stood , as if they had been tipped in discrete heaps by the workmen 's lorry . |
| 27 | The prehistoric trees looked as if they had been felled the day before , but they were as sterile as hot bricks from a kiln and probably one hundred and thirty million years old . |
| 28 | At the base of these cliffs , almost as if they had been hewn in the rock by men , were three , four or five cave-mouths , chamber-like , as if they were a row of monastic cells in some monastery . |
| 29 | Many had great dents in them , as if they had been drawn through fences and over walls , and had taken the rough side of the hill . |
| 30 | I looked more closely at his cheeks , and saw that they looked as if they had been rubbed to get them red . |