half-belief

Grief turned back on him in the half-belief still that he was joking.

THE FEATHERS OF THE SUN 2010

I figured the talk was just that, talk, Media types expressing their half-wish, half-belief that politics is a 1980s style night time soap opera like Dynasty or Dallas with no more real world consequences than JR's scheming or Alexis 'latest plot against Krystle.

Lance Mannion: 2008

I figured the talk was just that, talk, Media types expressing their half-wish, half-belief that politics is a 1980s style night time soap opera like Dynasty or Dallas with no more real world consequences than JR's scheming or Alexis 'latest plot against Krystle.

Part of the way with CBK! 2008

Perhaps it's simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what they're doing and it will all turn out for the best.

Spreading Cancer 2006

Perhaps it\'s simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what they\'re doing and it will all turn out for the best.

Spreading Cancer 2006

Up the hill from the denser thickets of Orthodoxy in the Manchester/Salford lowlands to the more feathery coppices of half-belief in Heaton Park, then up the hill again to where the Gentiles breathed the clean air of the foothills of the Pennines and not a Jew of any sort had been seen since Leo the Peddler passed by selling pins and ribbons in the 1780s.

Kalooki Nights Howard Jacobson 2006

On Stalnaker's view, the child's half-belief is handled by attributing her the capacity to rule out some but not all of the possibilities incompatible with Daddy's being a doctor: As her knowledge grows, so does her sense of the excluded possibilities.

Belief Schwitzgebel, Eric 2006

He does so by a carefully self-cancelling syntax: the phrase "Nor is it unbelieved" establishes a disturbingly unattributed half-belief in ghosts which taints the beautifulas is indicated by the lines "lamenting deeds of which/The flowery ground is conscious."

Wordsworth's 'The Haunted Tree' and the Sexual Politics of Landscape 2001

Simon stood for a long moment, inwardly sneering at his half-belief of a few moments earlier.

Witch World Norton, Andre 1963

On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and slept in a stolidity which surprised him later.

Despair's Last Journey David Christie Murray