Gleeful meaning

Adjective: Gleeful

Pronunciation: (glee-ful)

Gleeful meaning:

• full of high-spirited delight

Synonyms: exultant, exulting, jubilant, rejoicing, triumphal, triumphant

Quotations:

1. Chloe Neill – Can you at least pretend to be professional today? Lindsey stopped, glanced back at Luc. You show me professional, and I’ll show you professional. Luc snorted, but his expression was gleeful. Sweetheart, you wouldn’t know professional if it bit you on the ass. I prefer my bites in other places. Is that an invitation? If only you were so lucky, cowboy. Lucky? Hooking up with me would be the luckiest day of your life, Blondie.
2. Iain M. Banks – Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
3. Alexandra Ripley – But if you knew that, why on earth did you marry her? Rosemary asked. Why? Rhett’s mouth twisted in a smile. Because she was so full of fire and so recklessly, stubbornly brave. Because she was such a child beneath all her pretenses. Because she was unlike any woman I had ever known. She fascinated me, infuriated me, drove me mad. I loved her as consumingly as she loved him. From the day I first laid eyes on her. It was a kind of disease. There was a weight of sorrow in his voice. He bowed his head into his two hands and laughed shakily. His voice was muffled and blurred by his fingers. What a grotesque practical joke life is. Now Ashley Wilkes is a free man and would marry Scarlett on a moment’s notice, and I want to be rid of her. Naturally that makes her determined to have me. She wants only what she cannot have. Rhett raised his head. I’m afraid, he said quietly, afraid that it will all begin again. I know that she’s heartless and completely selfish, that she’s like a child who cries for a toy and then breaks it once she has it. But there are moments when she tilts her head at a certain angle, or she smiles that gleeful smile, or she suddenly looks lost-and I come close to forgetting what I know.
4. Karen Marie Moning – Drustan raked a hand through his hair and fumbled in the dark for the door. When it didn’t budge, a part of him was not surprised. Yet another part of him met the fact with a kind of glad resignation. She wanted battle? Battle she would get. It would be a pleasure to have it out with her finally. Once he’d ripped the door from the framing, he would exact vengeance upon her wee body with gleeful abandon. No more honorable I won’t touch you because I’m betrothed. Nay he’d touch her. Any damn place and any damn way he wanted to. As many times as he wanted to. Until she begged and whimpered beneath him. She’d been trying to drive him mad? Well, he was giving in to it. He would act like the animal she made him feel like being. The hell with Anya, the hell with duty and honor, the hell with discipline. He needed to top.
5. Kate Morton – It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it’s wondrous, don’t you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?
6. George Saunders – Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself. Well, the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing. The thing would be won.
7. Steven Erikson – An old man emerged from the ditch, a creature Of mud and wild autumn winds capering Like a hare across a boulderer field, across And through the stillness of time unhinged. That sprawls patient and unexpected in the place where battle lies spent, not moving and never again moving bodies strewn and death-twisted like lost languages tracking contorted glyph on a barrow door, and he read well the aftermath, the disarticulated script. Rent and dissolute the pillars of self toppled. Like termite towers all spilled out round his dancing feet, and he shouted in gleeful. Revelation the truth he’d found, in these Red-fleshed pronouncements . There is peace! He shrieked. There is peace! and it was no difficult thing, where I sat in the saddle above salt-rimed horseflesh to lift my cross bow Aim and loose the quarrel, skewering the mad man to his proclamation. Now, said I, in the silence that followed, Now, there is peace.
8. Ella Wheeler Wilcox – All Mad. He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains, you say, I haven’t a doubt of your statement, But who isn’t mad, I pray? Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane. Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain. The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith. The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death. The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon. The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon. The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud. The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God. All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny. The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh. Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay. Are only the dupes of delusions. We are all of us all of us mad.
9. Arundhati Roy – She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab an unshriveled and thickened with age. She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts, her earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry go not all the way round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together by Dr. Verghese Verghese. 
10. Gary L. Thomas – I’ve found that obedience to God creates quiet fulfillment in the present. There is a spiritual satisfaction that comes even in the midst of our trials. It is a demeanor that may not be as showy as gleeful happiness, but it is much less subject to moods and makes for much more permanent a disposition.

Sample sentences:

1. When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.
2. I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers, but gleeful rearrange of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there’s no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars. On and on it goes, all the way to the lightless borderlands of time and space, which we come to discover in some future age are but the beginnings or endings of a single word spoken from the mouth of God. Some nights, while I traipse down the hill, I imagine that word isn’t a word at all, but a burst of laughter.
3. I’ve hoped for this for so many years, waited for someone to come along whom you could finally love more than your family, someone who would turn you inside-out and toss you off your path, His mother looked positively gleeful in the face of his misery. Someone just like Nicola for you to blow it with.
4. You’re innocent until proven guilty,  Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphone  but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed. The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exits she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now. Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.
5. In the fantasy I spun for myself that night before falling asleep, those deep dark secrets were revealed. That simple touch became a violent embrace, worthy of any bodice-ripper. There were a certain number of gleeful perversions committed on Ivan’s battered leather sofa. And at some point in the fantasy, Ivan was a vampire, because I was sort of weird that way. He was a real, Gothic-style, Bram Stoker sort of vampire who bit people as a metaphor for having dubious-consent, alpha-male sex with them, I should point out. None of your modern, sensitive vampires for me. I appreciated the classics.
6. I am not like other people other people are like other people. they are all alike: joining group in huddling they are both gleeful and content and I am burning in hell.my heart is a thousand years old I am not like other people.
7. He lowered his head and beat, fists balled, teeth clenched, the roaring in his ears loud and total. He saw only Thomas’s bloody face, his brother’s mouth moving, saying something, perhaps pleading, and Griffin’s heart swelled with gleeful rage. He’d touched her. He’d hurt her. And for that he deserved to walk upon crippled legs.
8. I woke up dead. Not only dead but in hell. I had always been somewhat sketchy on what the afterlife  were there actually such a thing – would be like for a person such as I. From all accounts and all my imaginings, I figured it would be one of two things. Either I would be surrounded by great, burning masses that were endlessly immolating souls in torment or else I would find myself trapped within my own mind as a helpless bystander, condemned to watching me live out my life over and over again and powerless to do anything to change any of it. When idle speculation prompted me to dwell on these two options, I would find myself drawn invariably to the former, since the later was just too hideous to contemplate. I was almost afraid to open my eyes, because once I did, I would know one way or the other. Perhaps I could have just lain there forever. Perhaps I was supposed to. Perhaps that was my true condemnation: to simply reside in hell with my eyes closed afraid of opening them lest matters deteriorate even further than they already had. This, in turn, made me dwell on the fact that every time I had believed things couldn’t get worse, they promptly had done so with almost gleeful enthusiasm .
9. You went full-on bitchy and made a dramatic exit? He sounded way too gleeful over my histrionics. I have taught you well, my young apprentice.
10. It was the scale, the extremity of things here that made an impression on her: the two beds in their double room that could comfortably sleep three people each; the throaty clunking of the machine down the corridor that ejected fat glinting ice cubes, tumbling like coins from a jack potting fruit machine; the toothache temperature of the Cokes from the mini bar (she had never known drinks to be so cold); the improbable proportions of the cars on the freeway; the sleek gleefulness of the morning TV presenters with drawls so sassy they sounded put on; the enormity of the breakfasts and the people who ate them. 
11. Thunk. I jump back in alarm, my heart pounding against my ribs. And then I hear, “Jemma!” A loud whisper, coming from below. I open up the doors and step outside. Moving quickly to the railing, I lean against it and peer down to find Ryder standing there, staring up at me. He’s dressed in a suit and tie the same charcoal suit he wore to the gala, with a narrow silver-blue tie. What are you doing? I call down to him. He drops a handful of pebbles, scattering them into the grass by his feet. Shh! Can I come up? I lower my voice to match his. What’s wrong with the front door? He eyes me with raised brows. Really? I picture my parents downstairs. Imagine what questions they’d ask, what gleeful conclusions they’d leap to at the sight of him here, asking to see me. I shake my head and reach a hand down toward him. Here, can you climb? There’s a vine-covered trellis against the house beside my balcony. If he can just get a foothold, he’s tall enough to swing himself up and over the railing. Which he does in less than two minutes. Pretty impressive, actually. Once he’s got both feet on the balcony, he casually brushes himself off. Somehow, he manages to look like he just stepped off the cover of GQ. I tip my head toward the window. You wanna come in? You think it’s safe? Just let me go lock the door, I say before hurrying back inside. And don’t think I’m not amused by the irony. Because unlike normal people, we’re not sneaking around to avoid being caught and punished. Nope. On the contrary, our parents would celebrate if they caught us in my bedroom together. I’m talking music and streamers and champagne toasts. As quietly as possible, I turn the key in the lock, listening for the click. Sorry, folks. No party tonight.
12. I am begging you. Drop this bullshit with me. Because, God’s honest truth, I don’t know that I’m strong enough to do it for both of us. I blinked at him, hating that I was so transparent but downright gleeful because, You feel it too? He scoffed, those heavy, blue eyes coming back to mine. I’ve known you two days and I’m drowning in it, Cora. So, yeah. It’s safe to say I feel it.
13. As Kit reached the part about the schoolmaster and his cane, to her amazement a rusty chuckle interrupted her. Hannah’s face had crumpled into a thousand gleeful wrinkles.
14. George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living. They don’t know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his for a little while at least because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is to join. I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body even this beat-up carcass that still has warm blood and semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight Levi’s, shirt and cowboy boots and take a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout of his pleasure. But George doesn’t want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body the tough triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris.
15. Canned shtick Pete gleeful: The left one’s the hospital, the right one’s death. The right one steals your life while the left steals your breath. 
16. For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the labour Party being elected on a program me like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued namely that the labour party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins.
17. Never keep someone on a job who likes it too much. She knows when she sees the single flash of that gleeful and hungry face that they’re not here to raid for what they can find. They’re not here for anything that can be given.