She had lived what most girls of her age would have called a dull and pleasureless life.

He seems to me punitively stupid, pleasureless, a real crank.

World-weary and spent, Dawn appears to be headed for a pleasureless but safe life.

Just so cynical, unlearned, pleasureless and soul lacerating use of language.

That is why I remain in my cabin, and cultivate the rather pleasureless habit of smoking in the dark."

But it will also be one of the most colorless, pleasureless, tedious and miserable societies ever conceived by the mind of man.

The dark side of crack, however, is that the euphoria fades quickly as cocaine levels drop, leaving the users feeling depressed, anxious, pleasureless.

Its troubled characters may clamber into coffins, ogle chickens and play with leeches, but it's all pleasureless.

Some of the paintings have a pleasureless, disjointed, rush-job look; others really broadcast something, intellectual wit and a harsh sense of mystery.

In contrast, the scenes in the present, set on Western reservations and the wide, flat roads that connect them, show a good-looking but fairly pleasureless existence.

The reasons for this seem obvious: Decades of dictatorship, along with the prevailing public image of a drab, pleasureless society, were not good restaurant marketing tools.

The first thing to say about Shame, Steve McQueen's new film about pleasureless consumption, is that it's good.

I cooked for him carefully and quietly pitied his pleasureless life, until he started two-timing me and came to my house late one night looking for dinner.

The twisted, pleasureless man had tormented us all, and those he had succeeded in training, he had warped into a mindlessly loyal coterie for Prince Regal.

Some of the paintings, with their pleasureless surfaces and maladroit, rush-job look, aren't good; but others really broadcast something, a star-power spark of self-assurance and a chill, romantic mystery.

In another story, Peterson adopts a wry, resigned stance as he is done wrong by a wily farmer who lives near his country home, allowing himself only a small, pleasureless act of retribution.

More empty, pleasureless years, punctuated by a few hours of fame, which would only bring him to the attentions of people who were just like him, who had ambitions of their own, and hoped to maneuver him to get something.

Mr. Navarre's deployment of narrative devices reminiscent of Woolf and Faulkner is numbing in its cumulative impact, since he seeks to demonstrate that all the Prouillans, even the in-laws and faithful retainers, are crushed into the same pleasureless futility.

It opens in an 18th-century "molly house," meaning a place where men come to cross-dress and couple, and in the second half switches between there and modern London, where the same cast is holding what is clearly supposed to be a glum, pleasureless orgy, complete with cocaine, leather, chains, prying video cameras and desultory fellatio.