All 17 Uses of
cynical
in
Main Street
- Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?†
Chpt 1
- Cynical.†
Chpt 5
- The universal sign of winter was the town handyman—Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus.†
Chpt 7
- He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls.†
Chpt 11
- "Don't be cynical.†
Chpt 13
- Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over.†
Chpt 17
- She did not, as the cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for."†
Chpt 20
- a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!†
Chpt 22
- Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!†
Chpt 22
- Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess.†
Chpt 22
- They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments.†
Chpt 24
- She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life.†
Chpt 24 *
- She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism.†
Chpt 26
- He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him.†
Chpt 33
- The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy.†
Chpt 37
- Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.†
Chpt 37
- If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow….†
Chpt 38
Definition:
-
(cynical) someone who expects the worst -- especially of people (such as expecting them to be selfish and lie)