Word: despairingly
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...stories contain little drama; the characters' search, and their eventual despair, is all quiet, internal. The Bishop of Ostergothenburg (Minnesota), who believes firmly in the hierarchy of authority but whose position is usurped by a cold, efficient assistant, doesn't go out in a blaze of glory. He is sideswiped by a truck and merely stays a while in the hospital, "doing fairly well for a man of his age, he understood, until he took a turn for the worse." And that's all. It is the understatement in these stories that make Powers such a master of his chosen...
Argentina is the saddest place on the continent: ravaged by years of misgovernment, terrorism from the left and right, inflation that runs at 20% to 30% a month, despair and cynicism among the large and seemingly helpless bourgeoisie. How this highly favored land, with its 10 ft. of topsoil and 25 million homogeneous people of European descent, achieved such a colossal mess defies understanding. For the past six weeks the word has been that a coup could come any day, with the army taking over from the pathetic Isabel Peron, but there is only modest hope that this would make...
...political stage, McMurphy may be acting out of idealism or he may have found a socially acceptable cover for profound psychopathy−or both. Kesey also understood that a belief in the possibility of rebellion is essential to modern man, a fallback position that can be taken up when despair threatens to turn into self-destruction. It is to restore that faint possibility for his fellow inmates that McMurphy ultimately acts without understanding what he is doing. The revolt he leads can only put him under the lobotomizer's knife. Instead, to keep hope alive, his friend, an Indian...
...never aspired to be a sex symbol, let alone Marilyn Monroe. In the end, trying to be a sex goddess can only bring pain and despair. If the career has not been based on a creative ideal, then where is that solid bit of your life?" −Shirley Knight
...doubt as to whether the "future holds anything worth striving for"--a condition which shows at least some parallel to that of Rome in decline. Many acute social critics--notably Lewis Mumford in America and F.R. Leavis in England--have been saying similar things, not out of despair but in the hope that if we face the situation we can make room for the shoots of new life trying to struggle through the concrete...