Word: ennuie
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...fact that Hannah's characters and settings are chiefly Southern lends the book a flowery tang. "Beauty is fleeting," says a woman in one story. "What stays is your basic endurance of pettiness and ennui." Though Hannah readily exploits the southerner's license to orate, he is not especially interested in regional manners. His real concern is with the hollering, clawing passions that manners are supposed to civilize. Hannah likes to rend the social fabric and examine what's underneath. Two of his stories are apocalyptic, set during worldwide calamities that turn people savage. Three others take...
...same old place for vacation, you don't even have the comfort of the same old faces. With no change of scene and no old high school friends to catch up with, vacation survival means avoiding major confrontations with your nearest and dearest and a continuous battle with ennui. Now don't get me wrong, I love my family. But it is a strain to spend seven uninterrupted days in their loving and perhaps over-solicitous company...
Daniel Berrigan, radical Jesuit priest, on the declining state of civil disobedience: "When we get locked up now, there's a sigh of ennui...
...ennui was an ironic commentary on the confused French political scene, in which the center-right and the left-wing opposition were splintered into four competing groups, each trying to explain its quarrels to an increasingly indifferent electorate. As a result, the Frenchman's distrust of politicians deepened. "Left or right," shrugged the owner of a small porcelain shop in Paris' middle-class 18th arrondissement, "it's the same salad." Complained a nearby bistro owner: "The politicians always make a deal. Don't worry about that." In short, for many voters the campaign had become political Grand Guignol, masking power...
...Carter should not allow other elements simply to fall prey to fatigue and ennui. Since Congress apparently is unwilling to take steps that are commonly recognized as essential because of the political damage that might result from requiring the public to make sacrifices, the Carter administration must represent the interests of long-term rational planning over petty short-sightedness. The requirements of a sound national energy policy demand the quickest and most effective action possible...