Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alas, the plot committee takes over. An aunt and uncle reveal that Julia's long-gone mother is not dead but teaching school in Oregon. A reunion follows, not a word of which is believable, including the mother's rueful assertions that she deserted Julia's father for a lover, and later watched Julia's college graduation from a back row. This slack stuff is soap opera, and even a writer as gifted as Hegi can't dress it up as anything else...
...retired, says he was a conscientious teacher, imparting military instruction but simultaneously making sure that his students knew the difference between acts of war and acts of terrorism or human-rights violations. He expressly prohibited indiscriminate "wide area" attacks. "I said, 'Never, never, never do car bombs,'" he recalls. Rueful pause. "I never said, 'Don't do a camel bomb.'" That was a mistake. It was with horror that he later heard about the incendiary dromedary that, vaporized by remote control while tethered at a Soviet officers' canteen, killed or maimed more than a dozen people. There is an unpredictability...
...said, but our histories slammed down between us once again. The three of us who'd served couldn't help falling into a certain manner and language when recalling those days. "You're doing it again," one of the others said to us at such a moment, with rueful good nature. We understood him, but the old covenant was too strong to resist, and too dear...
...life "has been hopelessly wasted." He has sacrificed everything for his elderly brother-in-law, a pompous professor. Vanya's despair and resignation eventually give way to hysterical action: he picks up a pistol and goes after his brother-in-law. As usual, his aim is off, leaving him rueful: "To have made such a fool of myself: to have fired twice and missed...
Emma most frequently plays the deceased member of the trio. Although in life she was a trial (like her husband), in death she became a perfect angel. It seems inevitable that Hardy would work this transformation on her behalf, given his rueful temperament. His poems are brooding, self-chiding. His life seems a variation on the biblical injunction that a man must lose himself to find himself. In Hardy's case, anything and everything had to be lost before its value could be found. He was a man for whom happiness was always just around the corner -- the corner...