Sentence examples for painfully modest from inspiring English sources

Their wish for their daughter is painfully modest.

Musicians in underground rock and the Antifolk world are often painfully modest, but Ms. Spektor is unapologetic about her ambitions.

Not that they will admit it, of course, because they would be evicted from the Midwest if they were anything but painfully modest.

This may sound like painfully modest progress after two decades, but it has been steady enough in the past few years to shift the underlying question from if to when.

He has kept his players on a tight leash in their media dealings and fielded as many questions as possible himself, never boring in his responses but unfailingly, painfully respectful and modest.

Lyndon Johnson was painfully sensitive about his modest education at Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Mr. Shapiro said he expected only modest increases in wages with a "painfully slow" recovery in the job market.

Suddenly the action shifts from Lady Hunstanton's elegant estate to Mrs. Arbuthnot's modest middle-class household, with picture arrangements on painfully busy wallpaper.

(Those of modest means come in for it, too, as in a painfully cloddish exchange between Saffy and her boyfriend, Nick, a police detective).

His last major work is a full-scale replica of his childhood home, a modest bungalow that resides as a public sculpture in his painfully beloved Detroit.

He was a painfully shy young man, he told interviewers, and felt obligated by his family's modest means to seek an education that would provide a good job.