There was the firmness of his lips, his heady taste, the startling intimacy of his tongue stroking hers as if enticing it to play.

He knew this person, with startling intimacy in some ways: a long life of sorrow and joy, richly lived; scholarship, loving, delight in a wide circle of friends.

This lends a startling intimacy to the production because no one is farther away than the second row.

Erdal earnestly prepared all the questions; he asked them, eliciting startling intimacies with his "lethal combination of charm and chutzpah," as Erdal writes.

The best of Joe Brainard's small-scale collages and works on paper - some of which are sexually explicit - combine a startling intimacy with a postmodern predilection for appropriation.

The dozens of letters that Justice Blackmun saved document a relationship of sometimes startling intimacy.

The startling intimacy of the link meshed with the physical intimacy of their passionate embrace.

The gallery setting eliminates the usual distance; the startling intimacy allows you to experience afresh the momentum and innovations of Monet's astounding trajectory in the span of three small galleries.

Tizzy Asher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote "there was a startling unspoken intimacy between them.

There was a certain airy lift to the message, a Heileresque health in that "nasty," and a startling new intimacy in that "Cher."