The professors of ennui are a very dangerous race of mortals; for, prefering any occupation to none, they are liable to make many people unhappy by their officious affiduites, while to themselves they stand perfectly exculpated by the remark that a man must do something--or be killed with ennui: how fortunate for society, when like Seward they seek only to give away their money all winter to persons who want it, and go to Flanders in summer to look at Claude Loraines.
Walter was glad of it; he could not have borne to have passed the night without explanation; and hearing that Kingston was in the library, he at once hurried there, and found him, seemingly, alone and unoccupied. "Maynard," exclaimed he, as his secretary entered, "do find something to say—I am dying of ennui."
“I don't mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera,[…]the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, … !”
Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
Sympathy, for one whose loneliness must be even greater than his own; an ennui produced by ages of repetition; and an impish sense of fun—these were the discordant factors that prompted Khedron to act.
Now and again screams of ennui rose from between the potted plants, but mainly there was the terrible numbing silence of the human brain being reduced to cream cheese from the inside out.
It was also known as ennui, the megrims, the blues, or the black dog. But whatever the name, the symptoms were always the same: listlessness, boredom, a sense that life was ultimately meaningless and futile, without point or purpose.
The success of Green and Schwarz finally trickled down even to first-year graduate students, and an electrifying sense of being on the inside of a profound moment in the history of physics displaced the previous ennui.
Women are sick of generic guys asking the same generic questions: "So where are you from?... What do you do for work?" With our patterns, gimmicks, and routines, we were barroom heroes, saving the female of the species from certain ennui.
Liu Cixin has compared present-day China to the US after World War II, “when science and technology filled the future with wonder.” It’s also a time when science and technology have filled the present with a sense of estrangement, ennui, and anxiety, and a writer like Chen is a natural chronicler of that tension.
