Word: joyless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...skepticism toward what was then the secular religion of wholesomeness and cheer, its resistance to charm, its out-of-focus foregrounds and deranged angles -- above all, its strange new mood of cool melancholy -- were met with shock at the time. The reception it got from critics -- "warped" and "joyless" were two of the milder descriptions -- is photography's own version of the opening- night riot that greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring...
...there too much sex on American TV? Not necessarily. Sex is a beautiful, even holy, part of human life, a unique way for husband and wife to express their love. No doubt there is too much dishonest sex on TV. How often do we see the aching emptiness, the joyless despair that so often follows sex without commitment? And certainly there is too much violence. It desensitizes its viewers to the horrors of actual violence and implies that it is an effective way to resolve conflict. I seldom see the dehumanization that violence produces, not only in its victims...
...days on the sailing circuit, Turner had struck some of those who know him as a joyless monomaniac who pursued achievement not out of passion for the undertaking but out of a tortured focus on the finish line. "He told me 20 times that he never liked sailing," says Wussler. "He said, 'You know, Bob, I got cold and I got wet.' He was more in love with just winning." These days Turner talks about the "Zen experience" of fly-fishing. He has stopped pacing around his home and office (Wussler once counted 74 consecutive circles). And when...
...boss to an impassioned if erratic reformer. Born in 1931 in Sverdlovsk province in the Ural Mountains, he grew up in a family so poor that all six members slept on the floor of a one-room apartment with a goat. His childhood was, he has written, "a fairly joyless time." He was always, he later recalled, "a little bit of a hooligan." When he was 11, he lost the thumb and forefinger of his left hand after he and a pair of chums stole two hand grenades from a warehouse; as they tinkered with the weapons, one exploded...
...could scarcely be more different in background and personality. Yeltsin's childhood was a grim struggle for survival in a one-room communal hut in the Ural industrial town of Sverdlovsk. At six, he was looking after his two siblings, boiling potatoes and washing dishes. "It was a fairly joyless time," he recalls, possibly also because his father frequently thrashed him with a leather belt...