All 10 Uses of
futile
in
Black Boy
- But there was only endless talk that led nowhere and I began to keep away from home as much as possible, preferring the simplicity of the streets to the worried, futile talk at home.†
Chpt 1.1
- Rebelling against futile hope and embracing flight.†
Chpt 1.3 *
- My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering.†
Chpt 1.3
- My mind would drift into a fantasy and I would imagine myself a son in a family that had meat on the table at each meal; then I would become disgusted with my futile daydreams and would rise and shut the window to bar the torturing scent of meat.†
Chpt 1.5
- They did not seem to be individual men, but part of a huge, implacable, elemental design toward which hate was futile.†
Chpt 1.10
- I did not approve of it because I knew that, in the long run, it was futile, that it was not an effective way to alter one's relationship to one's environment.†
Chpt 1.10
- With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots: I Protest This Fraud I knew that my gesture was futile.†
Chpt 2.16
- Perhaps what I had already learned to feel in my childhood saved me from that futile path.†
Chpt 2.19
- "There're a lot of misunderstandings that I'd like to clear up," I said, forcing the words out of me, for I knew now that my errand was futile.†
Chpt 2.20
- They will have to grope about blindly in the sunshine, butting their heads against every mistake, bruising their bodies against every illusion, making a million futile errors and suffering for them, bleeding for them, until they learn how to live, I thought.†
Chpt 2.20
Definition:
effort that is pointless because it is unproductive or unsuccessful