Sentence examples for diffidence of from inspiring English sources

The sad songs make the laughter brighter by revealing how merriment can camouflage the diffidence of a wounded dreamer.

Now in the wake of Groh's defection to Virginia, along comes this outsider, who blows away the ingrained diffidence of Jetland.

He addresses the world through clear-framed spectacles and with the diffidence of a grad student; he carries his credit cards bundled together by a rubber band.

Girls are often socialized to be people-pleasers; perhaps it is the diffidence of the cat, its refusal to play nice, that strikes their fancy.

Herbert von Karajan, a mentor to him, was amazed by the public diffidence of so obviously talented a man, and, in fact, Kleiber turned down the directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic when von Karajan resigned, in 1989.

Even after her plays had been performed in Moscow and St .Petersburg, after she won an international residency in London, she had the diffidence of a neophyte, friends said.

There's a cocktail of swagger and reserve about Neilson, of diffidence and defiance, of the teenager and the wise old man.

It is also difficult to know whether that "contrary" denotes a character trait – unconventional, humorously rueful, outsiderish – or a more familiarly gendered diffidence born of a low expectation of recognition and reward.

But his diffidence was of a piece with his dry, trembling baritone.

A co-organiser of the famous 1936 Surrealism exhibition in London, self-educated Gascoyne moved in literary and artistic circles with a certain charming diffidence born of precarious sexuality and finances – and persistent recourse to off-the-shelf Benzedrine.

"I don't want to make this sound boastful, I hope you'll understand," he told me, with a diffidence characteristic of G.M. executives when they tall about themselves as distinct from their organization.