Cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom.
We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.
A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
I’m not a child. Don’t talk to me like I am. (Kiara) No, you’re worse. You’re an adult who still thinks the world is a beautiful place, filled with people who will help you just for the sake of being nice. Wake up and smell the bloodbath and humility the rest of us have to cope with. (Syn)
He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.