Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

In this version, Leontes becomes, in effect, the director of his own self-tormenting fantasies, arranging the bodies of the other performers into postures that confirm his worst theories.

From New York Times • Dec. 7, 2016

Ms. Harris made herself known in 1950 as a 24-year-old playing a 12-year-old, the loquacious, motherless, fiercely self-tormenting Frankie Addams, in Carson McCullers’s adaptation of her own novel, “The Member of the Wedding.”

From New York Times • Aug. 25, 2013

We might say that as the music and the musician faded, there was no role left for him to play but that of his own sick and self-tormenting body.

From The Guardian • Apr. 23, 2010

On the troubled state of relations between the U.S. and its allies: We in the alliance have no reason to indulge in self-tormenting thoughts or in meekness.

From Time Magazine Archive

Bayle has himself described one of those self-tormenting and many-headed sceptics by a very noble figure, "He was a hydra who was perpetually tearing himself."

From Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 2 by Disraeli, Isaac