"Poignancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... goodness, would seem a mere superstition of originality. The interpretation offered, in what follows, of the existence of these experiences is sufficiently startling to require no assistance from novelty of phrasing to give it interest and poignancy. That our souls are actually able to touch, in the darkness which surrounds us, the souls of super-human beings, and that the vision of such super-human beings is the "eternal vision" wherein the mystery of love is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... looking eagerly from one to the other, conquered easily. I do not know if either of the other two were conscious of the new note of life which she seemed to bring with her into our shabby, smoke-smelling room, but to me it came home, even in those first few moments, with wonderful poignancy. An alien note it was, but a wonderfully sweet one. We three men had drifted away from the whole world of our womenkind. She seemed to bring us back instantly into touch with some of the few better ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy, his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... That signall'st punctual through the sleepy mould The Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's first cry; O, Baby Spring, That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth A month before the birth; Whence is the peaceful poignancy, The joy contrite, Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight, That burthens now the breath of everything, Though each one sighs as if to each alone The cherish'd pang were known? At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart, With it the Blackbird breaks the ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... that were an admirable achievement, or even of any particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which ever seemed to ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... and when she did it was usually connected with some phase of life over the mountains. I believe that she was so thankful to know he escaped the torture that his death lost much of poignancy. Only once did she revert to his taking off, and then ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... of feeling produced. But in another moment the quiet voice fell soothingly, expressing a strength of endurance which would fail in no crisis, nor fear to face any depths of pain; yet gathering to itself a poignancy of sweetness, rendered richer by the discipline ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... light appeared in the east, a faint rumble became perceptible and increased. The swaying shaft of light intensified and a moment later the long-drawn poignancy of a chime-whistle blowing for the river-road crossing, exquisitely softened by distance, echoingly penetrated the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... don't want to bother about age. Neither of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with poignancy: "I know if I were a man I ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time. Nature has beneficently provided, also, that many an object, which is capable of communicating no direct pleasure to our senses, shall affect us agreeably through the medium of sentiment. The image of the Owl is calculated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in her mind, incipient even before he had quite gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her discretion. She was ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... was strange that she so reluctantly admitted the idea of love; especially as, in the sculptor, she found both congeniality and variety of taste, and likenesses and differences of character; these being as essential as those to any poignancy of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... horrible. And perhaps, after all, he was mistaken; perhaps his dislike of the work had got upon his nerves, and showed him everything in the darkest colours. It could scarcely be as bad as he thought, or human society would be impossible. But argument could not blunt the poignancy of his feelings; he preferred, therefore, to leave them inarticulate, striving to forget. In any case, the ordeal would soon be over; it had to be endured for a few hours more, and then he would plunge into his books again, and enjoy good company, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... it was evident that he did not take my "one-horse" establishment seriously, and I left his store without an order. I was berating myself for having revealed the true size of my business. Somehow my failure in this instance galled me with special poignancy. I roamed around the streets, casting about for some scheme to make good ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Darsie had listened while a woman who had been near San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire endeavoured to describe what was in truth indescribable, how the very air itself was at that time charged with a poignancy of agony—an impalpable spiritual agony, apart from such physical cause as heat and fire, an agony which arose from the grief of thousands of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the Lost Chord. A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the Lost Chord the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away entirely, leaving him so far from prostrated that by one A.M. he was ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... making of patties, for stuffing of veal, game, and poultry. The ingredients should be so proportioned, that no one flavour predominates; and instead of using the same stuffing for veal, hare, and other things, it is easy to make a suitable variety. The poignancy of forcemeat should be regulated by the savouriness of the viands, to which it is intended to give an additional zest. Some dishes require a very delicately flavoured stuffing, while for others it should be full and high seasoned. The consistence of forcemeats is ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... cruelly, to be sure, and the arrow had gone home; but when she met the look that was fixed on her after her little shaft was fired, Lucy's resolution faltered. The tears came rushing to her eyes so hot and rapid that she could not restrain them. Some trouble of her own gave poignancy to that outbreak of filial grief. "Papa is so very ill!" she said, with a sob, as a scalding drop fell upon her hand; and then got up suddenly, afraid of the consequences. But the Curate, mortified, wounded, and disheartened as he was, had no comprehension either ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... quicker, but—for a minute, for two minutes—nothing decisive happened, nothing that they had hoped for; yet Coquenil felt, he knew that something was going to happen, he knew it by the agonized tension of the room, by the atmosphere of pain about them. If Groener had not spoken, he himself, in the poignancy of his own distress, must have cried out or stamped on the floor or broken something, just to ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... Rachel snatch from drawer or wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while the incidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who had possessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certain poignancy. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... inherited the handicraft as well as the name; but his position at Court released him from the drudgery of manual labor. He was thus also brought in contact with the luxurious side of life, and became acquainted with those scenes of pleasure which he recalls only to add poignancy to the sorrow with which he contemplates the yesterday of life. Omar's astronomical researches were continued for many years, and his algebra has been translated into French: but his greatest claim to renown is based upon his immortal Quatrains, which ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Portland, and at the Ocean House on Cape Elizabeth. She returned much refreshed, and gave herself up cheerfully to her accustomed duties. But a cloud rested still upon her home, and at times the old grief came back again with renewed poignancy. Here are a few lines expressive of her feelings. They were written in pencil on a little ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... was unalterable, and that, as we all felt the poignancy of the parting, it would be better to take leave of each other now, rather than in public when they boarded ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Justin as of something noble and firm seemed to emanate from the room where he lay and fill the house; in his complete abdication, he dominated as never before. More than that, there seemed to be a peculiar poignancy, a peculiar sweetness, in every little thing done for him; it made one honorable ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... The absurdity that clung to everything connected with Dirk Stroeve gave it a curious note, like an unresolved discord, but made it somehow more modern, more human; like a rough joke thrown into a serious scene, it heightened the poignancy which all ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... reactions of the wider functioning of brain and muscle which struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy that the poignancy of individual loss ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of whom we were thinking. We had been, until then, her allies; we were ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... man who had come and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of those present had themselves succumbed—the brooding sense of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... poems are several passages in which the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem which begins "'Tis said that some have died for love" depicts the enduring poignancy of bereavement with an "iron pathos" that is almost too strong for art. And something of the same power of clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung with the thought that "even for the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... it, but the first attempt at walking, to which the poor fellow had looked forward as to a festival, proved in reality a painful and depressing experience. Back in his bed, limp with pain and exhaustion, poor Pat realised his own weakness with a poignancy of disappointment. He had expected to be able to walk at once, though not perhaps for any length of time, and these few stumbling steps had been a bitter revelation. All these weeks of confinement and suffering, and now a long and dragging convalescence! Pat's ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... their "little Mother" as they call their country. The vision of the High Adventure is not often vouchsafed to one, but it is a good thing to have had it—it carries one through many a night at the shambles. Radzivilow is the only place it came to me. In Belgium one's heart was wrung by the poignancy of it all, its littleness and defencelessness; in Lodz one could see nothing for the squalor and "frightfulness"; in other places the ruined villages, the flight of the dazed, terrified peasants show one of the darkest ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser. It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one's blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge. This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important element ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... social obligation which it implies, should be given a social right to become mothers whether or not the fitting permanent mate be found for a life-union under the law. This demand is reaching a critical poignancy in those countries in which the Great War has added to a long-increasing "surplus of women" an astounding total of millions of women fit to marry whose rightful mates are buried on the fields of conflict. Shall these women, it is asked, be denied motherhood as well as wifehood? Shall ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... take Dugald over his mathematics, I fear, before he goes up to the entrance." At which remark the painful feeling which the reciting and singing had caused Barney to forget for the time, returned with even greater poignancy. ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects: and that her range of literature should be, not more, but less frivolous; calculated to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any question of choice of books; only let us be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package of the circulating library, wet ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... for an appointment to some difficult mission in a wild and savage country. The Rev. Mr. Calthrop intimated that if he chose to accept rehabilitation on less arduous terms, he might obtain it; but the poignancy of his own sense of failure ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... conversation; she would not mortify him, but she could neither listen nor understand. He, who was so full of stalwart force, a doomed man, yet calm and happy under his sentence; he, only discovered to be so fondly loved in time to give poignancy to the parting, and yet rejoicing himself in the poor, tardy affection that had answered his manly constancy too late! His very calmness and stillness cut her to the heart, and after some ineffectual attempts to recover herself, she was forced to take ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that we may be idle and showy means a thought, a vision, an emotion which do not get on in our mind in company with the sight of sunset and sea, the taste of mountain air and woodland freshness, the faces and forms of Florentine saints and Antique gods, the serene poignancy of great phrases of music. This is by no means all. Developing in aesthetic sensitiveness we grow to think of ourselves also, our own preferences, moods and attitudes, as more or less beautiful ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... opinion of the harshness of his general demeanour. His occasional reproofs of folly, impudence, or impiety, and even the sudden sallies of his constitutional irritability of temper, which have been preserved for the poignancy of their wit, have produced that opinion among those who have not considered that such instances, though collected by Mrs. Piozzi into a small volume, and read over in a few hours, were, in fact, scattered through ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... flash the man leaped to his feet and turned his face westward towards the sea with outstretched arms, and a look and gesture of utter yearning gave poignancy and spirit to the careless, sleepy grace of his face and figure. He seized the boy's arm. "See now," he cried, his voice trembling upon the verge of music, "it is nearly twelve years that I have been a wanderer, shorn of my strength ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... by evidencing his entire freedom from the suspicion of anything behind the scenes, showed how incapable Knight was of deception himself, rather than any inherent dulness in him regarding human nature. This, clearly perceived by Elfride, added poignancy to her self-reproach, and she idolized him the more because of their difference. Even the recent sight of Stephen's face and the sound of his voice, which for a moment had stirred a chord or two of ancient kindness, were unable to keep ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Reverend Cecil could not deem it womanly to explore, unchaperoned, the less well-known quarters of four continents, to penetrate even to regions where skirts were considered improper and side-saddles were unknown. Even the nearness of Miss Desmond's fiftieth birthday hardly lessened at all the poignancy of his disapproval. Besides, she had not always been fifty, and she had always, in his recollection of her, smoked cigarettes, and travelled alone. Yet he had a certain well-founded respect for her judgment, and for that fine luminous common-sense of hers which had more than once shewn him his ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an added poignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the parent for a child which has just breathed and died. Why had it happened thus, when the least shifting of influences might have made it all so different? If she had been given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and light in ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... her to condemn the only instances of wit that remain to this generation; that dear polite double entendre, which keeps alive the attention, and quickens the apprehension, of the best companies in the world, and is the salt, the sauce, which gives a poignancy to ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... who hushes voices and footsteps and sudden noises; who stands between well-meaning and importunate outsiders and the retirement of the bereaved; who decrees that the last rites shall be performed smoothly and with beauty and gravity, so that the poignancy of grief may in so far as possible ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... which it was founded were reasonable, and the prejudices against it on all sides were unreasonable. I do not regret the opposition which I have experienced—the reproaches which I have incurred—the labours I have endured; but I do regret—and every day's reflection adds fresh poignancy to my regrets—that in carrying out a measure which I had hoped would prove an unspeakable blessing to my native country, I have lost so many friends of my youth. No young man in Canada had more friends amongst all Christian denominations than I had when the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... named after him. In this tribe the taboo is not much observed at any time except by the relations of the dead. Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the name of the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so to say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief being abated, it pleased the relations "to lift up the tree and raise the dead." By raising the dead they meant bestowing the name of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all intents and purposes a reincarnation of the deceased, since on the principles of savage philosophy ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... their passion. Without that warning fear they were exposed at every turn. It might be there, waiting for them in the background, but, with Maisie going about as if nothing had happened, even remorse had lost its protective poignancy. They suffered the strain of perpetual frustration. They were never alone together now. They had passed from each other, beyond all contact of spirit with spirit and flesh with flesh, beyond all words and looks of longing; they had nothing of each other but sight, ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... is the very point about which we are so solicitous. Sorrow shared with affectionate friends is relieved of half its poignancy. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... disregarding for the moment the suggestion of facts and ideas, is an emotion. Thus Mr. Mason: "In music we are capable of learning, and knowledge of the principles of musical effect can help us to learn, that the balance and proportion and symmetry of the whole is far more essential than any poignancy, however great, in the parts. He best appreciates music...who understands it intellectually as well as feels it emotionally;" and again, "We feel in the music of Haydn its lack of emotional depth, and its lack ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... grief was overwhelming in its poignancy. His sense of solitude was awful. Gone was the only living man who had stood to him for kith and kin. He was left alone in the world; utterly alone. That was the selfishness of his sorrow—the consideration of Sir Richard's ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... these are ordinary effects of such a scene as Ellangowan now presented; but the moral feeling, that in this case they indicated the total ruin of an ancient and honourable family, gave them treble weight and poignancy. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... supposition is but too just," replied the weeping girl; "and it is that circumstance which adds to the poignancy of my grief: were he a less estimable character, were he divested of those amiable qualities that render man dear to the eyes of woman, my reasons for refusing his addresses would be unanswerable. In that case, if I were made a victim to parental authority, some consolation might be ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... by the nearest of his kin." For this he had allowed the murder of young Mar and driven Alexander of Albany into exile; but who can wonder if in his stricken soul he now perceived or imagined that no man can cheat the Fates? His own son, his boy! Some nobler poignancy of anguish than the mere sick despair and panic of the coward must surely have been in his mind as he realised this last and crowning horror. The profound moral discouragement of a man caught in the toils, and for whom no escape was possible; the sickening sense of ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... minister in an ecstasy of petition set forth the needs of the church, the state and the individual. Esther did not hear a word until a sudden dropping of his voice forced a certain phrase upon her attention. He was praying, with an especial poignancy for "that blessing which maketh rich and ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... situation to gratify it. But now, since I have been talking of myself, I think I can go on with my story with a very decent composure. In complying with your request, I cannot say that my own experience warrants, in any degree, the old and commonly received idea that sorrow loses half its poignancy by its revelation to others. It was a humorous opinion of Sterne, that a blessing which ties up the tongue, and a mishap which unlooses it, are to be considered equal; and, indeed, I have known some people happy under all the changes of fortune, when they could find patient auditors. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... structure about the size and shape of a small canal-boat, with the most beautiful patriotic pictures all over it, of which I only remember Lord Cornwallis surrendering his sword in the politest and most theatrical manner imaginable, although the poignancy of his feelings had apparently turned his scarlet uniform to a pale orange. This magnificent equipage was a trifle rheumaticky about its underpinning, but, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, it still ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... flesh. He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him, in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers. The conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous revulsion of feeling. The poignancy of remorse was followed by an exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on his whole after-life. In him we first see the power of the personality of Jesus to touch those who ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... against the victim, scouted him, apologised for the—what should they be called?—who were not only admitted into the most respectable society, but courted to come, the spots not merely of wine on their military clothes giving them a kind of poignancy. But there is a God in heaven; the British glories are tarnished—Providence has never smiled on British arms since that case—oh! Balaklava! thy name interpreted is net of fishes, and well dost ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... interpret the whole lovely symbolism. It is all a time of glad, grateful remembrance of the wilderness march. It is all a time in which festal joys shall be theirs, and the memory of the trials and the weariness and the sorrow and the solitude that are past shall deepen to a more exquisite poignancy of delight, the rest and the fellowship and the felicity of that calm Presence, and God Himself shall spread His tent above them, lodge with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... as if her heart would break, catching her indrawn breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never now—it is too late," which seemed to ring in ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Then in tearful appeal, seeing his displeasure, "Oh, Felix, I love you!" The poignancy of her cry made him relent suddenly, and turn. He put an arm about her, and she clung to him wildly. "Oh, Felix, trust me! Oh, you're all ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... with me console you nothing? in pressing the hoped-for fruit of that union to your breast, in that tenderness which you will hourly receive from me, will there be nothing to compensate you for sorrows in which there is no remorse, and which, indeed, will owe their poignancy to the generosity of ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... London. "She seems entirely crushed," he continued, when they were driving toward the farmhouse. "For a few hours I trembled for her reason, while the fear that you might reproach her added much to the poignancy of her grief." ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... twice narrowly escaped hanging, and composed many of his poems in prison. He was a poet of great originality, for he broke away from the conventional subjects and the allegorizing habit of the Middle Ages and gave to the lyric a personal note and a depth and poignancy of feeling that made it almost a new creation, though he still adhered mainly to the traditional forms and showed a special preference for the ballade. Most of his ballades are introduced into his main works, the Petit ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct, a success of uncanny poignancy, an unearthly ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... it lasted until dinner, then began to die away. Her home and the familiar surroundings pressed upon her attention like live things insisting on recognition. The trivial talk round the table took on the poignancy of matters already in the past. The night before Fong, on his way back from Chinatown, had found a deserted kitten and brought it home announcing his intention to adopt it and call it George Washington. Lorry and Aunt Ellen made merry over it, but Chrystie couldn't. The kitten would ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of a country shopkeeper trying to operate an urban emporium. He was averse to deputizing his official labors. He was ignorant of system and science. He took on the pathos of a man who is out of his time, touched with the added poignancy of a passionate incredulity as to his predicament. He felt, at times, that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did not look on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression or variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyrics that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his "Epistle to Curio," he transformed it afterwards into an ode ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... for some time that his back and shoulders were paining with peculiar poignancy, in spite of the fact that he tried to traverse the distance with all possible speed. He began finally to wonder whether the fault did not lie in his cloak. He examined it thoroughly at home, and discovered that in two places, namely, on the back and shoulders, it had become ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... his hold on the bags." I turned aside, for fear that any one should see how white I was. Much too white to be accounted for even by this grisly story. To the rest, these poor bones might indeed bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy. To me, they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... a certain degree, that we felt so. It softened the poignancy of our reflections over the difference in the condition of ourselves and our happier ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of the robbery, which added so much poignancy to the sorrow at Garthowen. Ebben Owens seemed to take his son's disappearance much to heart, and to feel his absence more ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... Shakspeare or Milton; but he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr. Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope's wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought his whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... himself, until his allies were nearly suffocated. At another time he would blow out the candles in the cabin, and blaze away with his loaded pistols at random, right and left, whereby he severely wounded the feelings of some of his intimates by the poignancy of his wit, all of which he considered a most excellent joke. But he was kind to his fourteen wives so long as he was sober, as it is known that he never murdered above three of them. His borrowing, however, gave offence to our government, no one can tell how; and at length two ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a silence which in this corner of the great room seemed marked with a certain poignancy. It was the Prime Minister who ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... suffered at "V" Beach of whatever credit could be given to them. Yet in such times as we were living in, the unbelievable is readily believed, and men saw malice in the suppression of what could not long be secret: Ireland had too many dead that day. What made the suggestion more incredible only gave a poignancy to resentment, for Admiral de Robeck was an Irishman, with his home some few miles from the regimental ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... forms, yet the very splendour of the spiritual verity redeems and glorifies the material agency, while on the other hand the homeliness, and even animal quality, of the material thing, brings to man, with a poignancy and an appeal that are incalculable, the spiritual thing that, in its absolute essence, would be so far beyond his ken and his experience and his powers of assimilation ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... to is the celebrated epigram made by Rochester on Charles II. It was composed at the King's request, who nevertheless resented its poignancy. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... for this preluding or interjected note, has utterly 'sunk dumb.' But more noticeable are those haunting burdens which, in certain moods, seem somehow to have absorbed more of the story than the ballad lines they accompany—that appeal to an inner sense with a directness and poignancy beyond the power of words to which we attach a coherent meaning. How deeply the sense of dread, of approaching tragedy, as well as that of colour and locality, is stimulated by the iteration of the drear ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... is unnecessary to describe the sorrow with which I was afflicted at the news of his death, although it was an event I had expected many weeks before it happened. To express this sorrow with the force I feel it, would answer no other purpose than to revive in your breast that poignancy of anguish, which by this time I hope is abated. The object of this letter is to convey to your mind the warmest assurance of my love, friendship, and disposition to serve you. These I also profess to bear in an ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... came to the Marsh for a week, he went with her for once to church. In the tiny place, with its mere dozen pews, he sat not far from the stranger. There was a fineness about her, a poignancy about the way she sat and held her head lifted. She was strange, from far off, yet so intimate. She was from far away, a presence, so close to his soul. She was not really there, sitting in Cossethay church beside her little girl. She was not living ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning after, and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the ballroom where Van Lennop claimed his dance. She grew white even to her lips, and her knees shook unaccountably beneath her as she watched Dr. Harpe glide the length of the room in Van Lennop's arms. The momentary pain she felt in her heart had the poignancy of an actual stab. It was so—so unexpected; he had so unequivocally ranged himself upon her side, he had seen so plainly Dr. Harpe's illy-concealed venom and resented it in his quiet way, as she had thought, that this seemed ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... alternatives, we should enjoy the fruits of the earth indeed, but enjoy them only in common with the animals that feed upon it, or perhaps with less relish than they do, as it is agreed their organs of sensation have a greater share of poignancy than ours.—What is it but curiosity which renders study either pleasing or profitable to us?—The facts we read of would soon slip through the memory, or if they retained any place in it, could be of little advantage, ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... touched it with his forehead. The memory flashed back upon her oddly. She heard again Ralph Dacre's voice speaking in her ear. "You, Stella,—you are as ageless as the stars!" The pride and the passion of his tones stabbed through her with a curious poignancy. Strange that the thought of him should come to her with such vividness to-night! She passed on to her room, as one ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... and quite too deliciously torturing to the reviewer, whose only garden is in Spain.... The delightful humor which pervaded the earlier books, and without which Barbara would not be Barbara, has lost nothing of its poignancy."—Congregationalist. ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... fathom five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... little more than a youth, indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted with such an effort ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Decorations to such a Scene.' In the following February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals of an ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... with a strange pleasure I always get out of the poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn't all. Suppose that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and whom she will have to tell of this stain upon ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... case of mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is illustrated in the case of John Stuart Mill, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... leads to two different Places. Transitions, thus made from the right Course, have indeed the Pretence of being natural; but they ought always to lead us to something brilliant or poignant, in order to justify their Deviation; and not to end only at a ridiculous PUN, void of all Spirit and Poignancy. ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... mother, to whom she was devotedly attached, lay deeper than this hollow tinsel show; and yet the painful thought that she was too poor to pay this mark of respect to the memory of her beloved parent, in a manner suited to her birth and station, added greatly to the poignancy of her sorrow. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... celebration was a bit disappointing to Blue Bonnet. The old ladies—and the men, who were permitted to attend also—seemed awed into silence. Perhaps the sparkling tree, bright with candles and tarlatan bags of sweets, brought memories cruel in their poignancy; and the old-fashioned songs had rather a depressing effect ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... enjoying ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... to be supposed that Andrew Melville could retain the least personal resentment against Mr. Herbert; whose verses have in them so little of the poignancy of satire, that it is scarce possible to consider them as capable of exciting the anger of him to whom they ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... co-operated, in some Measure, with Utility and Reason. I will go a Step further. I thought those Laws not severe enough to suppress them as Enemies, nor yet sufficiently favourable to attach them to us as Friends. They were not so cruel as, wholly, to serve for quelling; and yet they had a Poignancy that might tend to provoke. And all this I imputed to the Resentment that was blended with the Humanity of our Ancestors. Their Humanity left to Papists a Power of hurting, while their Resentment abridged the Inducements that might engage ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... grow tighter and more cruelly tight, until—the end. During the years since her marriage Madame Gregoriev had, more than once, wished—nay, prayed for death. But a hopeless desire and the inevitable reality are generally two widely different things. And the clearest possible proof of the poignancy of the mental suffering of her past life lay in the fact that, fully understanding her position, it was a matter of only a few hours before she could accept, with some show of tranquillity, this last incident of, this fitting climax ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... had hanged himself. In place of that sympathy the oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own personal dread of this night's ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was almost like that of a physical pain. Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. The desire possessed him ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... with which I was overwhelmed from the cruel disappointment of my first love, filled up in some degree the vacuum left by his loss, who was so prematurely ravished from me in the flower of youth, leaving me a widow at eighteen; and though that loss is one I never can replace or forget, the poignancy of its effect has been in a great degree softened by the kindnesses of my excellent father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, and the relations resulting from my situation with, and the never-ceasing attachment ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... our sorrow in the presence of such a loss, let us resign ourselves to these catastrophes. Let us accept them in their poignancy and severity. It is good perhaps, and necessary, in an epoch like ours, that from time to time a great death should communicate a religious book to minds devoured by doubt and skepticism. Providence knows what it does when it thus puts a whole ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light. "Even then—to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't want me to—to take anything that I felt I ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... the moment his bitter query, the essential attitude of spirit which lay behind it, struck into me with a poignancy that stopped me where I stood. Was I, then, all wrong about the world? I actually had a kind of fear lest when I should look up again I should find the earth grown wan and bleak and unfriendly, so that I ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... France, or Italy, the case is quite otherwise. No human being can be more delicate than a Chinese woman in her dress, in her behavior, and in her conversation; and should she ever happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible, covers her face, that ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... I am spelled down at the Shehan school—and through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a peculiar poignancy of appeal. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was mentioned, there was a pang; every time she thought of him in solitude, the fear and anxiety gained strength. Consciousness of ignorance added to its poignancy; and young as she was, it would be hard to describe how much suffering she underwent in secret, night after night, as she lay awake, in her perplexed musings on that one absorbing thought. Yet they were like those vague nightly terrors of wolves, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... from a belief that such was inherent in the male sex, or from a fear that the effort would be misplaced, it is difficult to say). Christian was ever quick to respond to the call for martyrdom, but that the Twins should both maltreat and despise the venerable Harry, added a poignancy to renunciation that placed it almost beyond attainment. On this day of festival, happily, renunciation was not exacted; other attractions had absorbed the Twins, and Christian's rights ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... enumerated, and only felt in their full poignancy since the establishment of a branch of the Land League at Cahirciveen, the Valentians now complain that their land is ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... end, however, Mr. Moncrieff beat his opponent by sixty-seven votes, a majority so small in proportion to the constituency that the bitterness and humiliation of defeat must have been felt with more than ordinary poignancy. It seemed at that time as if the Conservatives would never have another chance of lifting their heads above water. There were few constituencies in Scotland on which they could place perfect reliance, and the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen they regarded ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... increasing within me. And then the possibility of losing my limb altogether was a thought which now and again forced itself upon me and made the warm blood curdle in my veins. All this time I knew, and the knowledge gave additional poignancy to my sufferings, that with care and proper surgical treatment I could easily have been cured; but I dared not open my mouth in the way of suggestion or complaint, I had already been taught, by bitter experience, the folly of that. Through all the hours of my ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... With the poignancy of a poisoned arrow reality came to me. Because Dick had loved Leila Burton he had laid his bond with me on the altar of his chivalry. For her sake he had sacrificed me to the hurt to which Standish would not sacrifice her. And the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... house on Thursday evenings only, and to show her no attention in public; if she could not have the old hours again, she wanted nothing less. And she wanted them passionately; those hours came back to her with a poignancy of happiness in memory that the present had not revealed, and the thought that they had gone for ever filled her with a suffocating anguish that was as complete as it was sudden. She implored him under her breath to come to her, then ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... more elegant works of polite literature. For these—and I could add to them dozens of later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain—for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... sorrow never enter, to join in an everlasting chorus of praise and glory to our Lord and Saviour! I grieve for our lost darling as a father only can grieve for a daughter, and my sorrow is heightened by the thought of the anguish her death will cause our dear son and the poignancy it will give to the bars of his prison. May God in His mercy enable him to bear the blow He has so suddenly dealt, and sanctify it to ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... alone in her strange surroundings, that desire was losing its poignancy. It didn't seem quite to fill her ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... grief in thus losing the best & most valued friend I ever had on earth, receives additional poignancy from the fact that, although duly impressed with an abiding sense of the imperishable obligation, conferred upon me by my lamented friend, I have been debarred, by my own physical infirmities, from proffering those services which it would have afforded me so much ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... chair, head averted. A tragedy had befallen me which completely overshadowed all other affairs, great and small. Indeed, its poignancy was not yet come to its most acute stage; the news was too recent for that. It had numbed my mind; dulled ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... finales. Haydn's adagios, at his best, speak with the deepest yet the simplest feeling. A fairly close analogy is that of Burns, who, with little natural inspiration, found inspiration in his native ballads, and often worked up the merest doggerel into artistic shapes of wondrous poignancy. Haydn's habitual temper was cheerful, and his music rattles along with a certain gaiety of gallop very far away from the mechanical grinding or pounding accents of the contrapuntalists. (I don't mean the great men; I mean the Wagenseils, ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... Most Holy Inquisition there was an old phrase whose poignancy has always seemed to me to be but half appreciated. One did not say: He was racked. She was burned. They were flayed alive, or pulled apart with little pincers, or clasped in the arms of the red-hot Virgin. One was too well-bred for so bald a use of language. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was there no ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... A deep poignancy in his voice made the expression childishly inadequate. "Why couldn't it have been the prints!" Suddenly he began to sob. "That's the finish. Not one of our subjects can ever be worked again. It's a loss of ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... we were both young, in sore straits, and hard pressed for money, he parted with this talisman to me, on condition that after his death I should return it to his eldest surviving son. You may guess the poignancy of the grief with which I tell you then that this heirloom is no longer mine. Many years ago I gave it into the hands of Runjeet Singh for a time, in the belief that its potency would aid our national fortunes" (what equivalent Lehna received, he doubtless deemed ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... there?" The husband in such a partnership gains less attention; at the most, he is allowed a subordinate share of the common stock of woe. The clean case for observation—he miserable, she miles away from any such poignancy of emotion—was presented by Coralie's consistency. It was not in her to make a bargain and pull grimaces when she was asked to fulfil it. True, she interpreted it in her own way. "I promised to marry you. Well, I have. How are you wronged, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... my fancy, and in process of time had acquired that subtilest, indefinable fascination which belongs only to imaginative reminiscence. In the future, I suppose, all this existence will have become such a childhood, its earth changed to sky, its dulness sharpened to a tender, delicious poignancy of allurement and suggestion. And were it not bliss enough for an immortality, this boundless deepening and refining of experience through memory and imagination? Only to feel thrilling in one's being chords of connection with times immeasurably bygone! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... multitude in prayer. The Israelites, oppressed by their conquerors and sore stricken at the reflection that their God has deserted them, lament, accuse, protest, and pray. Before they have been heard, the poignancy of their woe has been published by the orchestra, which at once takes its place beside the chorus as a peculiarly eloquent expositor of the emotions and passions which propel the actors in the drama. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at all; because it is so much on ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... base of a mountain, they now came within view of the castle, which was shewn in the perspective of the valley by a gleam of moon-shine, and then vanished in shade; while even a transient view of it had awakened the poignancy of Emily's feelings. Its massy and gloomy walls gave her terrible ideas of imprisonment and suffering: yet, as she advanced, some degree of hope mingled with her terror; for, though this was certainly the residence of Montoni, it was possibly, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... that had passed had seemed a very long one to John, but as the months came and went he had in a measure adjusted himself to the change in his fortunes and environment; and so as time went on the poignancy of his sorrow and regret diminished, as it does with all of us. Yet the sight of a gray-haired man still brought a pang to his heart, and there were times of yearning longing to recall every line of the face, every detail of the dress, the voice, the words, of the girl ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... ask good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless succession of such hours in ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience with ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... plumage of an eagle. Then he turned to another card. "Let us think of milder matters," he said. "Lavender Hill! Could any of your glebes and combes and all the rest of it produce so fragrant an idea? Think of a mountain of lavender lifting itself in purple poignancy into the silver skies and filling men's nostrils with a new breath of life—a purple hill of incense. It is true that upon my few excursions of discovery on a halfpenny tram I have failed to hit the precise ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... his wife, "...as a father only can grieve for a daughter, and my sorrow is heightened by the thought of the anguish her death will cause our dear son, and the poignancy it will give to the bars of his prison. May God in His mercy enable him ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... inhabitants. He had seen but never felt starvation. He had never sold his soul for bread. But he had witnessed such a sale, not once or twice but many times. In his carelessness he had accepted it as inevitable. But the recollection stabbed him now with sudden poignancy. Merciful God, toward what were his thoughts tending! He brushed his hand across his eyes as though to clear away some hideous vision and rose slowly to his feet. The expiring fire fell together with a little crash, flared for an instant and then died down in a smouldering red mass ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... not an atom of it, or rather it is wit, which is better, but that is not his talent neither, and they are indeed but despicable ones in my mind, et de tous les dons de la nature celui qui est le plus dangereux et le mains utile; but Charles's poignancy and misapplication of truth, making the most known falsehoods serve his person (purpose?) better, in all that he is admirable. His quotations are natural and pleasing and a propos, and if he had any judgment or conduct, or character, (he) would, and ought to be, the first man of this country. ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Baring has been universally successful, where the success of the great masters is only relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an incident the poignancy of which could scarcely be exaggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting that "A.H." is one of the few durable contributions to the literature ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... this is how the dear Lord looked, or acted—see, the words in the Bible are so or so forth. Therefore, there enters into these designs, which contain after all only the same sort of skill which was rife in Italy, so much homeliness at once, and poignancy and sublimity of imagination. The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, whom Van Eyck and Memling and Meister Stephan ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... CLARK). You were not let down at the supreme moment by a hurried shuffle of dimly seen forms or the click of an electrician's gear suggesting too solid flesh. The house was in a queer way stunned by the poignancy of the last scene between the young ghost-mother and the long-sought unrecognised son, and had to shake itself before it could reward with due applause the fine playing of as perfect a cast as I have seen for a long time. There's no manner of doubt that Sir JAMES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... The suddenness and secrecy of these goings add to the poignancy of them. I saw him but he did not see me. I found out the hour and made an effort. He is not my boy, but I wanted to look at him. It was perhaps for the last time. Good God! ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with a fine poignancy, bold and new in the very delicacy of texture, in the sharp impinging of these gentlest sounds. In the depths of the dirge suddenly, though quietly, sounds the herald melody high in the wood, with ever firmer cheer, soon in golden horns, at last in impassioned strings, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... indescribable longing of the convalescent for the food of recovery. So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required. One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me—the high airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... The condemnation of the poignancy of Aristophanes, as having too much acrimony, is better founded. Such was the turn of a species of comedy, in which all licentiousness was allowed; in a nation which made every thing a subject of laughter, in its jealousy of immoderate liberty, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... from any new situation; the appendages of the study in which I had engaged were too cumbrous for this state of dependence and uncertainty; they only served to give new sharpness to the enmity of my foe, and new poignancy to ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... leave for ever. Being on my frivolous errand, I was pulled up very short by the spectacle of five such stallholders as these whom the bigger revue which we call life had left so cold; and not only cold, but so tired and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them, that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... by his side, now with Shirley, and again with Louis Moore. And Louis met him in congenial spirit. He did not laugh much, but he uttered in the quietest tone the wittiest things. Gravely spoken sentences, marked by unexpected turns and a quite fresh flavour and poignancy, fell easily from his lips. He proved himself to be—what Mr. Hall had said he was—excellent company. Caroline marvelled at his humour, but still more at his entire self-possession. Nobody there present seemed ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... The poignancy of expression in her voice and words made the man tremble. And yet she did not speak bitterly nor angrily. Her feeling was beyond all passion. It was the expression of a soul that had suffered everything ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... can, to its lair, to see what it is, where its awful power lies, and what, if anything, one can do to resist it. It seems the most unreal thing in the world, when one is on the other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it has a strength, a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem like a personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand. Yet, strange to say, it has not ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... if she had not been a young woman with steady nerves and a level head, and an abundant confidence in both. Because that dingy little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy. It was not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the first time, and it couldn't be considered strange that her heart quickened a little as ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... presence brought them comfort. They knew that he loved them. Many times before when he had entered their home he had brought a benediction. They had a feeling of security and peace in his presence. Even their inconsolable grief lost something of its poignancy when the light of his face fell upon them. Every strong, tender, and true human love has a wondrous comforting power. We can pass through a sore trial if a trusted friend is beside us. The believer can endure any sorrow if ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... of condition value themselves so much. Not but that Mr. Pickle pretended to distinguish a certain vulgar audacity in her countenance, which in a lady of birth and fortune would have passed for an agreeable vivacity that enlivens the aspect, and gives poignancy to every feature; but as she possessed a pair of fine eyes, and a clear complexion overspread with a glow of health, which never fails of recommending the owner, he could not help gazing at her with desire, and forming the design of making a conquest ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... indefensible. "The Teton Sisters! What do you mean?" For was the shame of losing his wealth to be coupled with the shameful admission that he had taken a hand in gouging her former suitor? It was singular she hadn't thought of it before; now it struck home with redoubled poignancy. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the Russian language, would probably have prevented her organising anything like comforts for the soldiers there as she had done in Belgium. To those of us who loved her the very uselessness of her efforts in Russia adds to the poignancy of the tragedy of the death ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... not, in short, expect that our roses will grow without thorns: but then they are useful and instructive thorns: which, by pricking the fingers of the too-hasty plucker, teach future caution. And who knows not that difficulty gives poignancy to our enjoyments; which are apt to lose their relish with us when they are over ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time's ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... not only Frenchmen, but Americans, Argentinians, Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children, without their parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell him their love: most of them called him Our Father. And there was poignancy about their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of deliverance that escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of barbarism. To all these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George crushing the dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... old lady herself, attacked ruthlessly by Celia as wolf. Crawling on all fours he played elephant, or with the handle of a basket between his teeth, he submitted to be patted on the head and addressed as Towser. Persis looked on with a wonder that never lost its poignancy. That the self-centered Joel should succumb to the innocent spell of childhood had never entered her calculations, and she reproached herself that she ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Amalia enraged her and inspired her with horror and exasperation. But that of the count, it must be confessed, added poignancy to her grief and ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... admiral died, greatly softened the poignancy of the grief felt by his wife and son. The funeral procession set forth towards Bristol, where the admiral had desired to be buried, in Redcliffe Church, where a monument, still to be seen, was raised to his memory. William Penn was ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... youth; or if he hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression of the bitter melancholy that oppresses him, in the fixedness of misery with which he looks upon the faded dreams of former years, or the fierce ebullitions and dreary pauses of resolution, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... diminish the poignancy of every sorrow save those of remorse. Maria was now again in a regal palace, surrounded with every luxury which earth could confer. She was young and beautiful. She was beloved, and almost adored. Every monarch, every prince, every embassador from a foreign court, delighted to pay her ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... endearing familiarity has indeed been ours, melancholy and unsating; and it has given rise to a host of trying associations, conjured up by each new visit after a brief absence from Rome, and now adds poignancy of regret to what we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various |
