Word: pitilessness
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...love affair--he pushed the idea of commitment, and the idea of possession, and the idea of affection to such an extreme that you can touch on other areas that love stories don't often touch on. [Greene is] a great novelist of character, and he's kind of pitiless-he observes them at their worst and their best...
...burned-out houses. Corpses, left where they fell, putrefy in fields and farmyards amid the buzzing of flies and the howling of stray dogs. As the first of Kosovo's Albanian refugees stream back across the borders or down from hiding in the hills, they are discovering just how pitiless a charnel house Serbian forces made of Kosovo...
...Nuremberg trials, where "war crimes" were supposed to find a fitting punishment. There are no moral equivalents. One might have hanged Himmler, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler himself--hanged them in a row and left their corpses to rot in public view, and still all one would have felt was a pitiless vacancy...
...Simon Wiesenthal asked whether it would be proper for a Jew in a slave-labor camp to grant forgiveness to a dying SS man begging absolution for earlier murders. As part of a symposium that is incorporated into the book, the writer Cynthia Ozick said absolutely not: "Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. The face of forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered...Let the SS man...go to hell." How-to books, therapy and interventions may be useful in dealing with an unfaithful spouse, gossiping colleague...
...freed from her parents' over-whelming influence) plays with the primitive imagery of the island. This section of the book almost resembles Apocalypse Now--it depicts a slow, insane voyage punctuated by the methodical expulsion of students around her, picked off one by one by the sniping, brutal and pitiless teachers. These teachers are every premed's nightmare--a series of Nurse Ratcheds bent on tormenting the weakest and the strongest alike. However, Jane slips through this carnage and, supposedly, beings to grow...