Sentence examples for asking in earnest from inspiring English sources

I wish Americans would start asking in earnest how people across the world could hate us enough to kill themselves for their cause.

But eventually every child wants to know if there is a Santa Claus, and it is the delicate task of a parent to discern when his child is asking in earnest.

"Do you mean me?" he asked in earnest.

An editor asks in earnest about shape, silhouette.

Many questions are only starting to be asked in earnest.

Four decades later, thanks to Sabbath and Stephen King and Charles Addams and Stephenie Meyer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freddy Kreuger and countless other pop-culture manifestations of the demonic, the question, originally asked in earnest, has become rhetorical — not to say redundant.

At the time, photographed defiantly on the City Hall steps with a giant prop key to lock traffic out of the park, a Tammany Hall leader framed a question that was only then starting to be asked in earnest.

As John Updike asks in earnest, heartbreaking surprise, having glimpsed himself looking remarkably old in a bathroom mirror, "Where was the freckled boy who used to peek / into the front-hall mirror, off to school?" Likewise, Hitchens writes: "I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste.

At one point during the prep session, Gerald F. Seib, the Washington bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, asked in earnest, "Does anyone have the feeling like we're ganging up on Romney?" Mr. Williams, a commentator for the network, did not miss a beat.

She fears him, compares him to a predator, and asks, in earnest many times over: "please don't hit me".

This great question and the fact that I was being asked in earnest by complete strangers put me in a complicated place.