quicken

quicken vb 1 Quicken, animate, enliven, vivify can mean to make alive or lively, but the words diverge more or less widely in their implications.

Quicken stresses either the renewal of life, especially of suspended life or growth, or the rousing of what is inert into fullness of activity. Sometimes the rekindled life is physical but more often it is spiritual, intellectual, or imaginative

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it is the Spirit that quickeneth ... the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life— Jn 6:63

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its characters never quicken with the life one feels lurks somewhere within them— Jerome Stone

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Animate (compare animated under LIVING and LIVELY) emphasizes the imparting of vitality or of motion and activity or the giving of liveliness or of the appearance of life to something previously deficient in or lacking such a quality

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that which animates all great art—spiritual ferment— Clive Bell

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vendors and shoppers . . . animate its lanes— W. R. Moore

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Enliven suggests a stimulating influence that kindles, exalts, or brightens; it therefore presupposes dullness, depression, or torpidity, in the thing affected

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the sun . .. was wonderfully warm and enlivening—D. H. Lawrence

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but soon the feel of the paint on the canvas begins to enliven his mind; and the mind thus quickened conceives a livelier curiosity about the creature before him— Montague

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Vivify sometimes, like quicken, implies the renewal of life and at other times, like animate, implies the giving of the appearance of life. In each case it usually also suggests a freshening or energizing effect and implies vitality more often than activity or motion

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in . . . the Elizabethan age, English society at large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them— Arnold

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the room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone— O. Henry

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that Promethean fire, which animates the canvas and vivifies the marble— Reynolds

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Analogous words: activate, *vitalize, energize: rouse, arouse, *stir

Antonyms: deaden

2 excite, stimulate, *provoke, pique, galvanize

Analogous words: *activate, actuate, motivate: spur, goad, induce (see corresponding nouns at MOTIVE): *incite, foment

Antonyms: arrest

3 hasten, hurry, *speed, accelerate, precipitate

Antonyms: slacken