portentousness

Surrounding the central love story is a miasma of portentousness.

They were remarkable only for their expressions of grim portentousness.

There's a portentousness in certain other playwrights that doesn't appeal to me.

Beginnings are always difficult: even the most tough-minded writer finds it hard to avoid portentousness.

Whether it was the sudden mention of her mother or the whole emotional portentousness with which he had charged the scene Maggie burst out sobbing.

It is a state of mind in which banal events take on the portentousness of symbol or prophetic sign.

Besides the millennial portentousness, there was the fact that "two thousand" has one fewer syllable than "twenty hundred."

"But it would be the first time," asserted Fafhrd, with an even greater portentousness, "that you had to fight me over a pig!"

With that, a certain portentousness hovers over an evening that could be lifted by levity and an air of spontaneity.

The portentousness was infectious.

'Oh, good,' I said, as ever at a loss to respond suitably to such portentousness. '

'Allow me to attenuate my portentousness for you.'

It doesn't help that she's chosen a male narrator; the gender switch ruins the pitch and compounds the book's costume-drama portentousness.

Sometimes the portentousness becomes mystifying: "You're too beautiful to run out of anything," the Senator tells Monroe, "except your life."

And "Open Season" works as a commentary on the numbing blend of portentousness and vacuity that is popular culture today.

"People are starting to get a sense of portentousness and pretentiousness coming out of the museum community, because that's what museums are good at," he said.

Much better than Anderson's sentimental all-human-life-is-here suffering alone but together daisy chain of inflated portentousness Magnolia.

But it is also a hugely celebratory collective insanity, a world away from the portentousness and individualism of much current hip-hop and rock.

He is comfortable with his musical habits, and his foibles - the rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the portentousness - haven't disappeared.

But he made his theatrical and thematic points and then continued to reiterate them in numbing repetition, with a portentousness that was alienating.

A revolution doesn't hurt either, but Mr. Haussmann for the most part resists the lure of portentousness.

With such a setup, Mr. Johnson's book just about transcends its faults, one of which is a frequent straining for meaning, an unnecessary portentousness.

Inherently bold strokes like the work's opening chords were played pointedly, but without lingering or the magnified portentousness that has become part of the standard reading.

"Not only that," Daniel continued in feigned portentousness, "but there's an Alliance naval base going up in the north bay of the island.

But you reach the end of these stories both having gotten the point of McCann's bone-dry portentousness, and surprised to find the result so meager.