Word: soberest
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This moral lunacy is dramatized with the piercing common sense that characterizes both Roth's funniest and soberest works. "The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any," says Merry through a veil, a safety net for microbes. Swede's reply cries out to distraught parents everywhere: "You are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me...your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn...
...woman out among her generation of U.S. poets, and not only because of her gender. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) suffered none of the public breakdowns, burnouts and crack-ups that afflicted such talented contemporaries as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Theodore Roethke. "You are the soberest poet we've had here yet," a secretary at the University of Washington once told her; she cherished the comment and repeated it to others. Bishop's public image seemed serene -- photographs taken well into her middle years invariably show small features arranged impassively within a round face...
...Oval Office debut, Eduard Shevardnadze demonstrated that he had already mastered the institution of the White House "photo op" that precedes even the soberest diplomatic sessions. "The reporters are on the offensive," the genial Soviet Foreign Minister told Ronald Reagan. When asked by reporters what message he would convey to his host, Shevardnadze quipped, "If I tell everything to you, what am I going to say to the President next...
...novel's implications reach far beyond the topical or the social. Erofeev's alcoholic innocence is ultimately a spurious from of escape: "I have seen the world close to and from a distance, from within and from without, I understand it but I cannot accept it...I am the soberest man on earth...
...LOTTERIES. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery . . . because the undertaker could make nothing by it. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price, [yet] the soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds . . . In a lottery in which no prize exceeded twenty pounds . . . there would not be the same demand for tickets...