Example sentences of "all i could do " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | ‘ I was so tired by that time that all I could do was sit in a deck-chair on the sea-front and sleep all day , but it was enough . ’ |
| 2 | ‘ Lemurs are a delicacy in Madagascar and it was all I could do to stop my fellow passengers eating them , ’ he says . |
| 3 | He was a tall , heavy-built almost surly type who spoke no English ; all I could do was listen patiently , smile , and offer a small but polite salute on departure . |
| 4 | The idea of God pursuing a whole family like a demented genealogist seemed grossly unfair , but as it was a commandment all I could do was hope that neither my father nor any of my immediate ancestors had done anything really sinful , and that if they had , God did n't know of my relationship . |
| 5 | There were no books in the room so all I could do was look out of the window and wait for the quarterly chimes from the Cathedral Clock . |
| 6 | By next morning some stray cat had eaten much of his back , so all I could do was measure him . |
| 7 | So all I could do was to prance about waving flashcards and realia like a second-rate conjuror at a children 's party , and try not to glance at my watch more than once a minute . |
| 8 | ‘ I realised he was n't going to be able to stop and all I could do was watch him come closer and closer to me . |
| 9 | ‘ All I could do was scream down the phone — God knows what the listeners made of it . ’ |
| 10 | All I could do was dig it out . |
| 11 | I wanted to run out and scream , but Mum had the key and all I could do was stand stock still , listening to the thumping of my heart . |
| 12 | All I could do was pile up small bits of information hoping it would make an understandable structure one day . |
| 13 | ‘ That 's all I could do , without alerting everyone in the neighbourhood . |
| 14 | With my father I had more difficulty : all I could do with him was to argue about literature , citing my teachers ' opinions as being more up-to-date and therefore more valid than his own . |
| 15 | All I could do was to mumble that I regretted not taking my degree , and , though I could see it was irritating of me to whine , to feel stale and bored was not such a trivial thing ; that though we might have the vote now , meals still had to be prepared and children looked after and since this kind of drudgery was despised by society as not being ‘ real work ’ , we were in the hideous position of being both exhausted and imprisoned by it and also looked down on for doing it ; that I had honestly tried to be the sort of wife Richard wanted — and the sort of wife I felt I ought to be — but it was like being in a kind of airless cell and I could only see Richard as a jailer ; that I saw myself becoming progressively more and more incapable of doing anything , not just mentally , but from some kind of paralysis of will . |
| 16 | Is that what she was like ? ’ and all I could do was say well , no , not at all … but that was the licence you got at the NME , because the most important word in the paper is I . ’ |
| 17 | Over the first four days it was all I could do to get Dawn to step off the perch I 'd set up in the field , with my glove just a few inches away from her . |
| 18 | It was all I could do to keep my feet . ’ |
| 19 | Tonight all I could do was make sure of Crispin . |
| 20 | There was an immediate loss of power and all I could do was to crash-land the aircraft . |
| 21 | She was heavy and it was all I could do not to let her slide through my arms . |
| 22 | In fact , there was n't anything else at all I could do that night except go to bed . |
| 23 | All I could do was write a letter , and by the time I 'd written a letter and it got where it was going and a reply got back , a week or two weeks could have gone by . |
| 24 | But all I could do was remind people of John 's situation . |
| 25 | ‘ All I could do was lie on the bed ’ , she says , ‘ it made me feel very ill and because of that I felt slightly depressed . |
| 26 | All I could do was repeat the injections , but was it going to make the slightest difference ? |
| 27 | But all I could do was wrestle with the lunging hind foot , dressing the infected cleft with a crude mixture of copper sulphate and Stockholm tar and finishing with a pad of cotton wool held by a tight bandage . |
| 28 | I can still see him sitting there at his desk , me standing in front , yelling at me how lucky I was , how I 'd been given everything , was this all I could do with it . |
| 29 | All I could do was stay silent . |
| 30 | And all I could do at this terrible invasion was to rise and stand mutely , with my hands by my sides , staring up at this tremendous being — whom I now saw clearly for the first time . |