All 11 Uses
cynical
in
The Sunlight Dialogues
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- No matter how cynical we try to be, the food is never what we secretly expected; the beds rob us of our sleep and health; the company lacks zest, not to mention how it smells; the toilets are a cruel, cold shock; and at the end of it all, instead of the justice we have a right to expect, as feeling creatures—fzzzt!†
Chpt 2
- Not knowing he was doing it, his mind on things more immediate—patching barn doors, calming Millie when her dander was up, milking, studying, shearing sheep, stewing over poor Tag's bad luck—he had gone down Luke's road fifteen years before Luke was born: cynical denial that the old man was what he seemed.†
Chpt 3
- Luke had never known the old man, knew only the sprawling farm he left, the barns, the big house, the stone fence now in disrepair, the iron gates, the dying tamaracks the old man's father had brought into Genesee from God knew where—all of them female, by some fluke, and now all withering away without issue—so for Luke the cynicism was easy.†
Chpt 3cynicism = believing that things usually go poorly and that selfish and insincere
- But Hodge too, or the part of his mind that wasn't busy, had managed cynicism.†
Chpt 3 *
- But for Will Hodge Sr, firmly grounded in reality, the cynicism had not worked for long.†
Chpt 3
- And so Hodge had toyed in the back of his mind with another kind of cynicism, and this, too, before Luke was born.†
Chpt 3
- And so, renouncing cynicism, in the back of his mind he had taken the road Will Jr would take: emulation.†
Chpt 3
- The policeman resists this inevitable tendency of his thought, if only because human beings are by nature social creatures, even policemen; nevertheless, the subtle pressure toward cynicism is everlastingly there.†
Chpt 5
- Right, be a cynic.†
Chpt 11cynic = someone who expects the worst -- especially of people (such as expecting them to be selfish and lie)
- It made him cynical and cross, and in a hundred ways it interfered with the resolve he'd made the night before last, the night of the thunderstorm.†
Chpt 17
- He smiled, gently cynical, cigarette poised in his lean hand, between his thumb and four fingers.†
Chpt 19
Definitions:
-
(1)
(cynical) someone who expects the worst -- especially of people (such as expecting them to be selfish and lie)
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)