Citations:ennui

English citations of ennui

• 1783 - Mrs. Hester Thrale, letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson, June 15, 1873,

  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.

• 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 231–232:

  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."

• 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter 6, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:

  “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, … !”

• 1934 — Cole Porter, I Get a Kick out of You

  My story is much too sad to be told, / but practically everything / leaves me totally cold.

  The only exception I know is the case, / when I’m out on a quiet spree, / fighting vainly the old ennui,

  and I suddenly turn and see, / your fabulous face.

• 1934, Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Grove Press, published 1961:

  Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

• 1956 — Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars, p 44

  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.

• 1990 — Terry Pratchett, Eric, p 165

  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.

• 1997 — Terrance Dicks, The Eight Doctors, p 256

  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.

• 1999 — Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, p 139

  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.

• 2005 — Neil Strauss, The Game, p 59

  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.

• 2021, Yi-Ling Liu, Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan, Wired.com (9 March 2021);

  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.