Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...displays greater vitality than most of his Kremlin colleagues. His hair is slate gray but abundant. His shoulders are only slightly stooped, and he walks without a shuffle. His dour, dark-eyed face has been etched over the decades with downturning lines, but it is still capable of all the familiar flashes of emotion: the rare, stray wisp of a smile, the characteristic sag of one side of his thin mouth to denote disapproval, the sudden contortions of carefully thoughtout anger. However he has changed over the years, Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko has also remained the same: the enduring personification...
Along the way, the man who once declared that "my personality does not interest me" has picked up a host of nicknames appropriate to his many roles. For his dour countenance he came to be known as Grim Grom; for his ability to conceal his mood, Washington diplomats began in the 1940s to call him Old Stone Face. The sobriquet, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in his memoirs, "accurately described an impenetrable mask which may well have contributed to his amazing and unique record of survival...
...remember that it was Poland which attacked us first"). By autumn of 1940, he was giving his best material to his diary-his sighting, for instance, of Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov on his way to meet a German delegation headed by Goring and Ribbentrop. Molotov looked "expressionless" and "dour . .. like a provincial schoolmaster." But the diary, quoted extensively in this journal, also records Shirer's edginess and fatigue...
...first floor, Jeff, who grew up on a farm in rural Vermont, could not comprehend his roommate Manny's relationship with Suzy, the girl next door. Suzy, who had led a tough life growing up in a troubled family situation in the South Bronx, and Manny, a cynical, often dour Mexican-American from California, were unlike anyone Jeff had ever seen before. Manny and Suzy's loud and often violent fights worried many people in the dorm, but it was Jeff who seemed scarred by it all. "I had never seen anyone deal with each other like that," Jeff recalls...
Detroit Policeman Raymond Cruz of City Primeval (1980), for instance, is mistaken for a high school shop teacher by a girl he tries to pick up in a bar. Ernest Stickley Jr. is a dour Oklahoma hick who, in Swag (1976), conducts a doomed 100-day armed-robbery career. Resurfacing in Stick, seven years and a prison stretch later, he has scarcely improved; he worships Actor Warren Oates and thinks disco is dynamite. But, like all of Leonard's main men, deep down he is as incorrodable as a zinc bar and as heady as the stuff...