Word: shyness
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Phoebe was starting on a similar course. To lose weight she took diet pills; to overcome shyness, she drank. But if pills, liquor and drugs vanquished inhibitions, they also led to paranoia. "If I smoked a joint and went into a restaurant where people were laughing," she explains, "you could not convince me that they were not laughing at me. The lady in the corner holding the compact was looking at me over her shoulder." A year ago, her throat raw from marijuana, she decided to stop using all drugs. Now she avoids even aspirin...
...county fair cattle shows throughout northern New York. As I followed Robin through his farm chores--gingerly side-stepping cow manure--I noticed that he got around surprisingly well on his mechanical limbs. I had unnecessarily steeled myself for his physical awkwardness. The awkwardness I found instead was the shyness typical of any boy going through puberty...
Paradoxical? "Misha" is more than that. He is an enigma compounded of moody shyness, bold theatricality, post-adolescent intellectual pretense and a sweetness that makes him melt at the sight of an appealing house pet. But that is how it should be for the newest, brightest star in an art that is itself a series of paradoxes. What other discipline demands of its practitioners that they train like athletes and sweat like stevedores in order to achieve romantic effects of the most ethereal nature? What other art places such emphasis on tradition, yet depends on such unreliable resources-the kinesthetic...
...whole attitude did not include me in the circle of her friends as she had included Nick. He was now deeply involved in a conversation with her younger companion, a pure country sapling of a girl who spoke in an uncut twang and who retreated into a scared doe shyness as she smiled at the music. The woman said she drove trucks every now and then, when she wasn't working at a local truck stop...
...those who want to disassemble Thurber as an eight-year-old would a broken alarm clock, the gears and springs are all here: the bow-and-arrow accident that cost him one eye at the age of six, the loopy Columbus boyhood, the insuperable Midwestern chauvinism, the sexual shyness, the days as a code clerk at the U.S. embassy in Paris, the two dozen straight rejections by The New Yorker, the friendships with Playwright-Actor Elliot Nugent and E.B. White, the odd adversary relationship with New Yorker Editor Harold Ross...