How to Use gnomic in a Sentence

gnomic

adjective

• He made gnomic utterances concerning death.
• Stuart Hameroff is an impish figure — short, round, with gray hair and a broad, gnomic face.
  — Steve Volk, Discover Magazine, 1 Mar. 2018
• Field adds gnomic nightmares of eerie neighbors and visions of a bed on fire in a jungle lake, all ripped off from Polanski and Weerasethakul.
  — Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9 Nov. 2022
• Like a somewhat mystical priest, the response came back in a gnomic but optimistic piece of evasion.
  — Jemma Green, Forbes, 4 Aug. 2022
• In images, the work appears as an eerie, gnomic scattering of 24 tall, white boxes, isolated on a hill.
  — Nikil Saval, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2020
• Yet her single-mindedness is offset by the lure of her fractured forms, her gnomic sentences, and her fairy-tale settings.
  — Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 4 July 2022
• Like Fitzgerald, Levy has a gift for the pithy, annihilating moment of gnomic insight.
  — Kirsten Denker, The New Republic, 31 Aug. 2021
• Mark Frost, who tethered the art-house director’s gnomic vision to the narrative imperatives of network television in the 1990s, has a much lighter touch on the reins this time around.
  — Laura Miller, Slate Magazine, 22 May 2017
• Hammons, whose eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch drawing could be said to have precipitated both projects, has played a quiet and somewhat gnomic role in the first one’s realization.
  — Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2019
• Some of the passages closely echo Oyler’s riffs on contemporary foibles, except written in gnomic fragments.
  — Kate Knibbs, Wired, 1 Feb. 2021
• Stein’s gnomic text, full of repetitions and oddities, and Thomson’s jaunty marches, waltzes and folk-like tunes create a stew of noise and conflict, with Susan B.,...
  — Heidi Waleson, WSJ, 12 Feb. 2020
• The process is painful, but its results are unique—the Frank stories are both utterly foreign and purely lucid, a set of gnomic parables that always end in a puff of irony or ambiguity.
  — Sam Thielman, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2022
• That is Thomson’s signature note: a mixture of excitement and rue wrapped up in a sweeping paradox that leapfrogs into the gnomic-philosophical realm.
  — Tom Shone, New York Times, 31 Aug. 2017
• This was classic Shorter—gnomic, gnostic, mischievous, wise.
  — David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 3 Mar. 2023
• The Return by quoting one of its more gnomic and portentous lines of dialogue, but in the works of David Lynch, words—and numbers, so many numbers!—are a halting, imperfect medium of communication.
  — Laura Miller, Slate Magazine, 5 Sep. 2017
• His own gnomic utterances, his constant wordplay, both onscreen and in interviews, helped maintain the illusion.
  — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 14 Sep. 2022
• Pop Smoke was a gnomic figure with a rich, booming voice; Fivio is less enigmatic but more entertaining, a charismatic and sometimes witty host who wants to keep everyone happy.
  — Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 18 Apr. 2022
• The idea of an archaic architecture appealed to architect Louis I. Kahn, a mystic with a penchant for gnomic aphorism and musing on phenomenology.
  — Dallas News, 5 Oct. 2022
• The effect is at once childlike and gnomic, persuasive in Margaret Mitsutani’s crisp, consistent translation from the Japanese.
  — Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2023
• Ibrahimovic’s carefully crafted public image could be read as a homage to Cantona, with his upturned collar and gnomic statements, packaged for the Instagram generation.
  — Rory Smith, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2017
• Mozart probably would not have devised the spare, gnomic opening utterances of the Fantasia on the harpsichord, where sound dies quickly and continuous activity is paramount.
  — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2022
• His gnomic statement reflects that period when Public Enemy waned.
  — Armond White, National Review, 8 Apr. 2020
• Both Hurt and Webb beautifully navigate the challenging rhythms of Stoppardian dialogue, which is an intricate blend of seeming non sequiturs, lightning-fast aperçus, throwaway jokes, and gnomic insights that threaten to make your head explode.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 27 Sep. 2019
• There’s Duncan’s assistant, Jimmy Jellico, who is mentally challenged but who comes out with astonishing gnomic splinters of wisdom.
  — Joanne Kaufman, WSJ, 23 Apr. 2021
• It is bookended by two mammoth works featuring a camouflage pattern—an apt motif for an artist who cultivated a facade of blank neutrality, parrying probing questions about his art and inspiration with gnomic sound bites.
  — Brenda Cronin, WSJ, 26 Oct. 2018
• Behind Cunningham’s pioneering compositional methods and gnomic pronouncements lies a craftsman whose precision, rigor, and imagination could take your breath away.
  — Marina Harss, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2019
• The style is Delphic: cautious; obfuscatory; verbose (or the opposite, gnomic); vague; artfully ambiguous; subtle; fascinating.
  — George Calhoun, Forbes, 10 May 2021

Last Updated: 5 Dec 2024