When the checker at the grocery store asks me idly how I am doing, how can I refrain from grabbing the neck of his too-cheerful smock and hissing that I've had better days, thank you very much?
Yet, how could I refrain from doing so?
He was heartbroken to find out I could not help with his cause, so I refrained from pointing out how painfully common his fetish is among white men.
This is the one that bemoans how, in spite of how good you looked, how little you talked and how carefully you refrained from texting him afterward, your date still (unaccountably) didn't ask you out a second time: It's not painful; it's just really weird.
I use the word "reckoning" carefully; I admired how Coates refrains from outright condemnations of the American experiment, wanting to wrestle with it rather than destroy it.
During "A King at Night," he smiled at band members who flubbed the occasional note, and some of the people on blankets joined him in the refrain: "This is how I start another day in my kingdom".
In what's left of the night, we imagine the men's last moments – the knocking into each other and into the hot metal walls, the blistering skins and the bursting lungs, the incredulous refrain: this is how I'm dying.
The two try to earn money to buy the milk, but their voices are drowned out by the noise of the "bellowing Brundibar"; Brundibar's refrain ("Little children, how I hate 'em / How I wish the bedbugs ate 'em") exemplifies Kushner's skill at tempering the potentially frightening with the comic.
Time, similarly, had a story called "In Shutdown Washington, Women are the Only Adults Left," which referred approvingly to how Collins "refrained from partisan blame" while other women seemed to fall over themselves to offer compromises and, in the words of Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, be "reasonable".
Yes, you know how many people rated him or her, but you don't know how many people refrained from providing any feedback at all.
