Word: shyness
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...about her as Lan P'ing, the actress, not long after she arrived. How could she tell? He sought her out personally and offered her a ticket to a lecture he was to give at the Marxist-Leninist Institute. Startled and awestruck, she declined, then swiftly conquered her shyness, accepted the ticket, and went to watch him perform...
...character who, from all initial appearances, will require several encounters with a hanky during the course of the film, were it not for a certain twist. "I want to be normal," Carrie cries out to an unfeeling Mrs. White, but it's just not in the cards. An acute shyness alone does not separate Carrie from her classmates; evoking the image of another teenage girl of recent vintage who is "somehow different," Carrie is endowed with a power not commonly found among us mortals--the power of telekinesis. Ashtrays somersault, mirrors vibrate and shatter--and the camera's close...
...pretty sure we set a few facts straight. First off, I was American, and I didn't think Kissinger was "beautiful." In token of the pleasure this information gave them, they lit me a cigarrette--one in an alarming flow, since they insisted on taking my nauseated refusal for shyness. When I used the Serbian version of thank you, they revised my meager vocabulary to fit their own dialect. Two of them were professors; the pudgy man who showed off a snapshot of his daughter in return for a look at my ID taught economics, and Janev's field...
...example, his celebrated fear of germs: a 1946 air crash injured his lungs, rendering him susceptible to bronchial infection. As for his shyness, he was embarrassed both by his increasing deafness and the injuries that had marred his looks. Three air crashes had mangled his nose and cheeks. While flying over Siberia on a globe-circling flight in 1938, Hughes had had to breathe oxygen for many hours through an aluminum tube; that froze his jaw, causing a bone disease that slowly eroded his profile. Still, he remained a reasonably handsome man, but unfortunately he failed to think...
Clearly these letters do convey a feeling of Virginia's personality, but it is conveyed only indirectly. In the early letter to Clive Bell, for instance, it appears that she has communicated more of herself--her shyness, her insecurity, her distrust of men--than, doubtless, she intends. To see the Virginia Woolf in them, these letters must be read between the lines. What she does not say is often more interesting than what she does...