Now, to stave off means to stop or to keep an unpleasant feeling away.
Build a wall to keep something unpleasant out, and you are also walling yourself in, possibly with something else unpleasant.
It would also have to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier, the system of defences deployed to keep unpleasant chemicals in the bloodstream from gumming up delicate neural tissue.
I kept my promise to them, but what I gather from this unpleasant experience is that there are students, and probably a large population, who think that they learn only when they get good grades.
Radiguet's narrator, unnamed, is a very self-aware little shit – the whole book, with its plain, almost affectless prose, reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, avant la lettre – yet his insights compel us to keep reading, in the unpleasant knowledge that we may learn something, possibly even about ourselves.
If you are not willing to change yourself in order to change the situations, then it will be hard to keep yourself out of unpleasant circumstances.
What did this unpleasant scene add?
Not long after this unpleasant incident, Connor kills himself.
"We initially recoiled at this unpleasant and surprising conclusion.
There is, however, an explanation for this unpleasant behaviour.
But spare us eulogies for this unpleasant character.
