half-wistful

I just prefer Gaiman when he's writing outside of his comfort zone, actually working to elicit genuine emotion from his audience rather than trying to strike that half-wistful, half-knowing tone that permeates so much of his fiction and usually puts me in mind of a clever teenager whose writing isn't nearly as profound as he thinks it is.

The 2007 Hugo Award: The Short Story Shortlist Abigail Nussbaum 2007

I have to admit that "half-wistful, half-knowing" is quite apt.

The 2007 Hugo Award: The Short Story Shortlist Abigail Nussbaum 2007

Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the sharpness of their opposition at this particular hour; he was to remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether to the street and stood there with a face half-wistful and half-rueful.

The Ambassadors 2003

What transpired behind that clear pale brow; what prompted the half-wistful half-mocking twist of the lips?

Marune: Alastor 933 Vance, Jack 1975

Wearing her best straw hat and carrying a rope-tied box, seventeen and shapely, half-wistful, half-excited, she set out alone for that world of great houses which in those days absorbed most other kind.

Cider With Rosie Lee, Laurie 1959

"Why don't he show it then?" muttered Tom, with a half-wistful, half-defiant glance toward the library door, which stood ajar.

An Old-Fashioned Girl 1950

"No," she answered with a little smile, half-whimsical, half-wistful.

The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House Or, doing their best for the soldiers Laura Lee Hope

She gazed at Bea with such an adorable half-wistful, half-joyful smile on her delicate face that Bea never quite forgot the sensation of realizing that it was meant wholly for her.

Beatrice Leigh at College A Story for Girls Julia Augusta Schwartz

She was looking straight out from the photograph and in her face was that look of half-laughing, half-wistful tenderness which Anstice knew so well.

Afterwards Kathlyn Rhodes

In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_.

Recent Developments in European Thought Various