"Poignantly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of readers. But I doubt whether a book of similar merit could command such a following to-day; and I will even confess that I have myself never read the concluding parts, and do not know to this day who the woman was or what were the wrongs from which she so poignantly suffered. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... excited, and felt poignantly. For some time it tasked all the powers of Ralph's mind, and the seductive blandishments of the maiden herself, to allay the fever of his spirit; when, at length, he was something restored, the dialogue was renewed by an inquiry of the old lady ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... days in Washington, when the suspense was breathless and the heart of the nation responded in muffled beats to the dull booming of the cannon of Meade and Lee at Gettysburg, an episode occurred, with Lincoln as the central figure, which reveals perhaps more poignantly than any other in his whole career the depths of feeling in that tender and reverential soul. On Sunday evening, July 4,—the fourth day of that terrible battle, with nothing definite yet known of the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... seems as if he had in them written his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made lovely. Each one of these five sonnets ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Lucy never rode down so far as the stately monuments, though these held memories as hauntingly sweet as others were poignantly bitter. Lucy never rode the King again. But Slone rode him, learned to love him. And Lucy did not race any more. When Slone tried to stir in her the old spirit all the response he got was a wistful shake of head or a laugh that hid the truth or an excuse that the strain ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... woman's frenzy, she drew a knife upon him and stabbed him in the neck, with the intent to kill him. Being muscular, he quickly disarmed her, though he afterward suffered from the wound poignantly. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... was crowded out in the make-up. There was too much to write about, and I was always over-set! I saw and felt, with you, and regarded it as more poignantly pathetic, the tragedy of that little handful of San Luisanos, herded away in the heart of those barren hills to make way for the white man. And now the white man is almost gone and Father Dominic's ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... quick live eyes was not a reflection of the sun. She felt the color flood her cheeks in waves. She dared not look at him, but she was poignantly aware that his gaze was fixed on her, that it seemed to bore to the soul and read the hidden secret there. A queer lightheadedness affected her. It was as if her body might float away into space. She loved him. Whatever he was, the man held ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... fixed on him as if she were powerless to draw them away. It was sweet—it was poignantly sweet—to be cared for by him, to feel that Jim's warm heart and keen mind were at her service, that the swift smile was for her, the ardour in his eyes was all her own. For perhaps half an hour she rested, almost without speaking, and Jim talked to her ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... the final satisfaction, the justification of a man's life? Bob was still too young, too individualistic to consider the doctrine of the day's work well done as the explanation and justification of all. The coming years would pass as quickly, leaving as little behind. Never so poignantly had he felt the insistence of the carpe diem. It was necessary that he find a reality, something he could winnow from the years as fine gold from sand, so that he could lay his hand on the treasure and say to his soul: "This much have I ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much sinister emphasis as he ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... certain season, which the mind has associated with a special experience, will often arouse and poignantly concentrate an old emotion, which has been almost forgotten throughout the other months of the year. The arrival of Spurling, and the agony which he had suffered when he had begun to suspect that the woman whom he loved was dead, had happened when the snow was on the ground; ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... lawn; If I am there, it is simply as a piece of furniture, like the stove, or the clock, or the centre-table. I am simply tolerated, perhaps as an object of ornament, perhaps as an object of use. This is a humiliating confession; the thought that it is actually true pains me poignantly. ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... the season invited. I saw the long, velvety vista of the cypress avenue, the slender feathers of trees in young leaf, the pleasantness of the grass, heard the invitation of a calling thrush, thought poignantly of Virginia, and went out, hoping to see ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and improvements, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... to think poignantly of Isabel: he had seldom been able to "see" her more clearly than as he sat looking out of his compartment window, after reading the account of this accident. She might have been just on the other side of the glass, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... days immediately following George Eveleth's death the two women who loved him found themselves separated by the very quality of their grief. While Diane's heart was clamorous with remorse, the mother's was poignantly calm. It was generally remarked, in the Franco-American circles where the tragedy was talked of, that Mrs. Eveleth displayed unexpected strength of character. It was a matter of common knowledge that she shrank from none of the terrible details it was necessary ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... now sixty years old, or close upon it. He could not remember a year in which he had had a vacation of more than a fortnight's length; he was weary all through to the bones and the marrow, now, and was yearning for a holiday of a whole three months—yearning so longingly and so poignantly that he had at last made up his mind to make a desperate cast for it and stand the consequences, whatever they might be. It was against all rules to ask for a vacation—quite against all etiquette; the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... of a Jew, and still more every general reflection on Jewish usury, avarice, and cruelty, I felt poignantly. No power of imagination could make me pity Shylock, but I felt the force of some of his appeals to justice; and some passages struck me in quite a new light on the Jewish side of ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... her anxiety to shield the murderer; and she experienced a vague relief—felt but not considered—at being freed from the incubus of Gourlay's tyranny. It seemed, too, as if she was incapable of feeling anything poignantly, deadened now by these quick calamities. But that she, that Tenshillingland's daughter, should come to be an object of common charity, touched some hidden nerve of pride, and ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the emotion contained in this little drama, where the low mentality of the characters is rendered with the mastery which Gorky usually shows in creating his elemental heroes. Among other works that should be noted are "Cain and Arteme," so poignantly ironical in its simplicity, "To Drive Away Tedium," "The Silver Clasps," "The Prisoner," and that little masterpiece, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," in which we see twenty-six bakers pouring out an ideal and mystical ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... their garden and the milk of one cow, which gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it. They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially the two younger cottagers, for several times they placed food before the old man when ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... humble, ['A] Kempis speaks more poignantly than even David, in that great cry of the heart ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... brother," was the answer. "You will care for yourself most damnably and pity yourself most poignantly. I speak from experience. 'Tis odds you will not live, and that is my chief regret. I would you had my thews to keep you alive ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... alive to every sensation, responsive to every impression. The desire of creation, of composition, grew big within him. Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain. Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called this sensation, so poignantly. For an instant he told himself ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... joy in Harriet's heart was accompanied with the first agonies of renunciation, was perhaps all the more poignantly sweet because of them. She had not come to this hour without knowing what he meant to her, this quiet man with the splendid mouth and the keen gray eyes, and she trembled now with an exquisite emotion that seemed ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Jeff had been used to drinking chocolate with his little friend only a year before. It was the first time he had been here since that night when the danger signal had flashed so suddenly before his eyes. The whole thing came back to him poignantly. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... for though it be a grievous fault to omit nothing, and marks the writer to be deficient in the development of character, and that sympathy which throws inspiration over the vivifying page of biography, yet, to admit everything, has this merit—that we are sure to find what we want! Warburton poignantly describes our Des Maizeaux, in one of those letters to Dr. Birch which he wrote in the fervid age of study, and with the impatient vivacity of his genius, "Almost all the life-writers we have had before Toland ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... through the wedding-breakfast which her aunt gave to the bride, and to preside at the feast that welcomed the pair to Schloss Rittenheim. Though the old love could not enter him again, the old torture came back poignantly. ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... motherless lad—not yet grown wise, but old enough, indeed, to want a mother—in some dim way (which even yet is not clear to my heart's ignorance, nor ever will be, since I am born as I am) sensitive to feel the fathomless, boundless lack, poignantly conscious that my poor vision, at its clearest, was but a flash of insight. I used to try, I know, as a child, lying alone in the dark, when my uncle was gone to bed, to conjure from the shadows some yearning face, to feel a soft hand come gratefully from the ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... lover of Miss Milner—she, the happiest of human beings—Miss Woodley partaking in the joy—Mr. Sandford lamenting, with the deepest concern, that Miss Fenton had been supplanted; and what added poignantly to his concern was, that she had been supplanted by Miss Milner. Though a churchman, he bore his disappointment with the impatience of one of the laity: he could hardly speak to Lord Elmwood; he would not look at Miss Milner, and was displeased ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... a mournful head, sadly envisaging the loveliness of the world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... scattered, the principal churches are all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal— since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its sophistications—though for that matter isn't it all rich and precious sophistication?— better than other ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... heard Rose's news with no sense of surprise. She felt as if she were living in a dream—a dream which was at once poignantly sad and yet exquisitely, unbelievably happy. "I have been there several times lately," she said, in a low voice, "and I had grown quite fond of her. Of course I'll go. Will you telephone for a fly? I'd rather be alone ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... she appeared so poignantly desirable. He wanted to seize her in his arms, smother her with kisses, bury his face in her hair. And swiftly upon this desire came the thought that if she appealed to him so strongly, might she not appeal quite as strongly to the rogue? He laid the spoon ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... the measure of his unspoiled manhood. The girl he wished to make his wife had been taken from him. She had removed herself far from his kindness and care, but he could not cease to offer her the care she needed more poignantly than before. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... grows and it grows, as though leaping Up higher the more one is thinking; And ever its tunes go on sinking More poignantly into the ears: Yea, so blessed and good seems that fountain, Reach'd after dry desert and mountain, You shall fall down at length in your weeping And bathe your sad face ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... what your mood will be when you receive this letter; perhaps at that moment you will not be touched with the emotions I now feel so poignantly, and then you may not read it in the spirit in which it was written. But against that I cannot guard, and the act of writing relieves my feelings at the moment—that is at least what I ask of it. You would not believe the condition into which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... douce province of Anjou which inspires him; the song to Venus in its happiest stanzas is only less admirable than the Vanneur de Ble, with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is associated. The personal note, which is in general absent from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness the complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Instantly his brain cleared. A moment before he had been hopelessly drunk: now, he was sober. It was as though the delicate scent had entered his nostrils and cleansed his brain, clearing it of the befuddling fog, and leaving it, wholesome, alert, capable. Poignantly, with the scent of those flowers, the scene of a year ago leaped into memory, when he had stooped to restore them to her hands—there in the tiny glade ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse in her life—and was now perhaps too old to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... sensibility was due in part to the tacit influence of their presence, enforcing upon him habitually the fact that there are those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in a sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of all he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the stair, sounding bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his death in distant ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to the end with veiled eyes. He read Werner much more accurately than Werner read him. But most poignantly of all he realised the hopelessness of submission, at least for the leaders. There was nothing now but to carry the fight through—no other hope for himself. Also he discovered a fresh goad ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... hugging the side of the lake, advanced, obviously toward my humble abode. My heart seemed to turn a somersault. I should have known that car if I had met it in Bagdad. It was a long blue motor, polished to the last notch, deeply cushioned, luxurious, poignantly familiar, the car, in short, that I had pursued to Bleau, and that later, in flat defiance of President Poincare or the Generalissimo of France, or whoever makes army rules and regulations, I had guided through the war zone to the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... it was awkward—he did not know how he could enter that door and talk to Cherry. And yet he knew that that meeting of Cherry, that the common exchange of words and glances, that the daily trifling encounters with Cherry were all poignantly significant now. Or if he did not fully sense all this yet he felt thrilled to the soul with the knowledge that she was there, back in the shadowy house somewhere, with the pale striped gown and the disordered ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... improbability of his career speaks so closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, the smile which is not ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Austen Vane with his eye, and in spite of himself experienced the compelled admiration of one fighting man for another. A thought, which had made itself vaguely felt at intervals in the past half hour, shot suddenly and poignantly through Mr. Flint's mind what if this young man, who dared in spite of every interest to oppose him, should in the apparently inevitable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and trodden on their tails; but I have never killed one. When I grew up, my attitude towards them remained the same, and wherever I went I won the reputation for being the inveterate, the most poignantly inveterate, enemy ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... there was something poignantly familiar to Maryette, and she turned with a start and looked at him out of her dark blue, ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... touched his mind; restless, poignantly yearning. He swung to face the locked door, knowing there could be nothing behind it. The first real fear came to him as he did so. The thing was lonely—the thing that watched him was as ...
— Cry from a Far Planet • Tom Godwin
... making prints in the dust. Well, I could answer it; and again my hand closed on the knob, unhesitatingly this time, pulling further. That was my answer; and the rejoinder to it was more than I had thought to hear—a whole quick sequence of notes, faint but clear, playful, yet poignantly sad, like a trill of laughter echoing out of the past, or even merely out of this neighbouring darkness. It was so like something I had known, so recognisable and, oh, recognising, that I was lost ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... millionaire more poignantly was the thinly veiled hint that the Duke de Metuan had also sailed for America as one of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... feet a haunting and ghostly fragrance. Myriads of grasshoppers chanted in the warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint purple ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Feed my Lambs, I took them as words that might be applied, first to the Lord Bishop of this diocese, secondly to the priest who will take my place in this Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most poignantly of all to myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in this moment of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in compelling me to resign what has counted for all ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... romance. It belongs on the plane below, the plane of stories told to meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. On this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly, for it is poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from calling a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary error of calling a good and readable story bad because it is not a ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... "The Melody in F," and as the poignantly beautiful strains poured forth from that wonderful violin, she knew that she had her audience with her. Though so intellectual that they themselves were incapable of producing music of real depth of feeling, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... himself that he credited everyone else with purpose and prejudice. He did not realise the vast preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddled kindliness. The mistake of much of Carlyle's work is that it is too poignantly dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; and he did not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throng the background of the stage. Neither did he ever go about the world with his eyes open for general facts. Wherever he was, he was intensely observant, but he spent ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... find there she could not have told, but it was gone. The place was unknown to her. She saw an opening among gloomy pines, empty, silent, unreal. No haunted house, no barren moor, no neglected graveyard ever spoke more poignantly, more mournfully, with such utter hopelessness. There was no sign of his or of her former presence. Across the open space something had passed its hand, and it had changed. What had been a trysting-place, a bower, a nest, had become a tomb. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... follows him over the lawns of the White Lodge, cooing and laughing, blowing kisses and praising him. Yet do not imagine his life has been all gaiety! The afflictions that befall royal personages always touch very poignantly the heart of the people, and it is not too much to say that all England watched by the cradle-side of Prince Edward in that dolorous hour, when first the little battlements rose about the rose-red roof of his mouth. I am glad to think that not one querulous ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... not a passion for children? Were there not moonlight evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was fragrant with the pink and the lilac? Not melancholy this, nor poignantly sad, but having in it nevertheless something of the pathos of life unfulfilled. And was there not sometimes, not yet habitually, coming upon these faces, faces plain and faces ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... offered him, and things ran smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last fourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressive motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia's death. The finest of them is his setting of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... sudden sense of displeasure, a little chagrin, and some wonder, accompanied by the feeling that she wished he had not carried her. She did not quite know why, yet the dependence on him made her restless. Suddenly she wondered poignantly what he thought of her. The more she wondered, the more she wanted to know, and at last she ventured, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... and patches in the carpet, which now seemed to stare her out of countenance, the pink vases, and the candelabra, were a constant reproach for her disobedience. Larry, too, grew to hate the sight of them. He often realized poignantly also that it is not well to be too easily influenced by one's playmates; for if he happened to be late and ran into the room and popped down on his knees in a hurry, he was almost sure to start up again with an exclamation caused by the prick of one of the numerous tacks which ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... were instructed. Tuly said: "The great trouble is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know you have. You, this one. You, that one." Tuly probed mercilessly; so poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost unbearable pain. "With you, Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst. For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds, the conscious and the unconscious. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... Fund Bill Mr. FELL and other Members for East Anglia represented very poignantly the woes inflicted upon their constituencies by the air and sea raids. Fishermen and lodging-house keepers were alike deprived of their livelihood. Could not the Government do something for them, either by billeting soldiers or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... accost the hurrying girl, raise his cap, then pour into her outstretched hand the gold he had taken, would have known at once that here was an every-day exercise of natural politeness. Not so the cashier. The farther he got from the bank, the more poignantly did he realize that these two in front, both strangers to him, had, by their combined action, lured him, pistol and all, away from his post during the dullest hour of the day. It was not the decamping with those few pieces ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... sweetly ominous notes preliminary to booming out the hour. They always reminded him of the warning bell on a wild and rocky coast, with something of the Lorelei in its cadences: like a heartless woman's subtle allure, poignantly ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... draw away, but willingly yielded place to his hands at the fastenings; and what had proved impossible to her, to his strong fingers was a matter of comparative ease. Yet, not entirely consciously, he was not quick. As he tugged at the bolts he was poignantly sensitive to the subtle warmth of her at his side; he could hear her soft dry sobs of excitement and suspense, punctuating the quiet; and was frightened, absolutely, by an impulse, too strong for ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... frate crossed himself, opened his book, and wandered away, in relief against the western sky. Rowland passed back into the convent, and paused long enough in the chapel to look for the alms-box. He had had what is vulgarly termed a great scare; he believed, very poignantly for the time, in the Devil, and he felt an irresistible need to subscribe to any institution which engaged to keep him at ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... to leaving. How well he remembered that moment of restless turning of ledgers and the slight accession of eagerness in the younger clerks, as they followed the long columns of figures down with the forefinger of the left hand—the pen poised in the right. The whole scene smote him poignantly as he stood at the teller's window waiting. And he might have been doing that, he thought! A whole lifetime spent in doing just that and more like it, year ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... a vehement sweeping gesture with his arm which emphasized more poignantly than speech the contrast he felt here where we sat—tight, confining walls, small stifling windows, chairs to rest the body, smothering roof and curtains, doors of narrow entrance and exit, floors to lift above the sweet surface of the soil,—all of them artificial barriers to shut out ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the back-ground. Having been brought up genteelly, she declines the mode of conveyance provided for her journey to Tyburn with the utmost volubility. Being about to be hanged merely does not seem to affect her so poignantly as the disgraceful "drag" she is doomed to take her last journey in. She swoons at the idea; and the curtain falls to end her wicked career, and the sufferings ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... a large beer-sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of All the World—before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper Faxon remarked again the strange emaciation, the premature physical weariness, of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed his nephew's hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... them, with this skeleton behind the door of their hearts, fearful at every moment! Does it seem good in the scheme of existence, or a blot there, that those who are themselves innocent, but who are yet the real sufferers, whether punishment to the culprit fall or fail, should be made thus poignantly miserable? We ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... reason of certain peculiarities of dress, was suspected to be from the island. In due course, he was recognised as a native of Inishmaan, in exactly the manner described in the play, and perhaps one of the most poignantly vivid passages in Synge's book on "The Aran Islands" relates the ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... was tempered by a strong wind, which whistled through the trees. A host of fantastic clouds filled the sky. They looked like animals, and were always changing shape. The ground, as well as the leaves and branches of the forest trees, still held traces of heavy dew or rain during the night. A poignantly sweet smell of nature entered his nostrils. His pain was quiescent, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... recollection to the uttermost. He would fain have shut out both the past and the future, contenting himself as he might with the present, but the thing was impossible. The worm had eaten into his heart, and its gnawings were too painful, not poignantly to remind him of the manner in ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... same time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized poignantly was utterly independent and careless of me, as me; and that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I become ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... realised his own insignificance so poignantly as when he strolled through the City streets at their busiest hour, and was unrecognised even by the bareheaded clerks who dashed madly in all directions, carrying papers of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... have wept, it was because, forsaken, I felt perhaps more poignantly than some The blank eternity from which we waken And all the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women. One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound—how much less could I be when the hurt was healed? Before she might have been in ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... have him confess that she had had a great deal to do with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and contemplate his love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the happiness she had lost. But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all else was forgotten ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... remained quiet, aloof, secure from invasion. Handsome young men who fell in love with her—and there were several such—seemed unable to stir any emotion in her, except perhaps, an impatient resentment. Marcia, of course, knew nothing of Glenn Mitchell. But Anne Champneys remembered him poignantly. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her to go on living without him. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... He did not look up when she returned presently with a cup of tea, but he felt her presence poignantly, as he had never before sensed the presence of a woman. When he was able to swallow his wrath and meet calmly the glances of these strangers he turned his head casually ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... no great elation at the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award of salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt a poignantly keen desire to ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... tramp!" rang your column's tread. "Tramp, tramp, tramp!" through the street. (Ah, dear, it was summer once, and there Were flower scents on the misty air— Honeysuckle and mignonette, poignantly, sadly sweet!) "Tramp, tramp, tramp!" rang your column's tread, And my eyes were dim as I bowed my head; And my heart seemed broken and old and dead, Under your ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... had risen an odor the like of which he had never encountered in his life. A combination, it was, of the unforgetable stench which hangs over a battlefield when the dead are long unburied, and of a fragrance more rare, more heady, more poignantly sweet than any essence ever concocted by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... bits of the backwoods, and the veldt; queer unexpected cynicisms, all sorts of side views on England had lodged in him, and he did not hide them. They came from him like bullets, in that frank voice, and drilled little holes in the listener. Those critical sayings flew so much more poignantly from one who had been through the same educational mill as himself, than if they had merely come from some rough diamond, some artist, some foreigner, even from a doctor like George. And they always made him uncomfortable, like the touch of a prickly leaf; they did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was afterwards fatally realized, that many of us should never meet again, was calculated to embitter my leave-taking, even more poignantly. Of the friends who were then around me at Sierra Leone, the greater number are now no more; the principal persons amongst whom are the following: Colonels Lumley and Denham; Mr. K. Macauley (member of council); Mr. Barber, Mr. Leavers, ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's The Azalea. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... a big descending phrase, articulate almost in its grim dogma, as it runs into the line of the first legend in full tumult of gloom. It is followed by the doom slowly proclaimed in thundering tones of the brass, in midst of a tempest of surging harmonies. Only it is all more fully and poignantly stressed than before, with long, resonant echoes of the stentorian tones ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... celebrate men and moods and deeds. It has been found necessary to omit a few of the less important verses in the earlier edition to make room for the most significant of the lyric commemorations of events almost contemporary, and therefore appealing to us more immediately, and perhaps more poignantly. ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... or half-called, this book tendencious; but in a certain larger view it is not so. It is the eternal interest of passion working upon passion, not the temporary interest of condition antagonizing condition, which renders "Dona Perfecta" so poignantly interesting, and which makes its tragedy immense. But there is hope as well as despair in such a tragedy. There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing can harm them more; that even for those who have ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the youthful voices rose and fell, until the amen came as a full stop. Then the little troop was marshalled two and two, made a collective obeisance to Mrs. Windsor and her guests, and wheeled out of the garden into the drive at a quick step, warbling poignantly, "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Gradually the sound decreased in volume, decreased in a long diminuendo, and at last ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the blackbird was singing deliciously, yet less poignantly sweet than he should sing at dusk. There was a mysterious stir and flutter of spring in all the coppices. A quiet south wind marshalled the pearly clouds before it as though it were a shepherd driving a flock to ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... a somewhat similar transference of skilled experience that the great writers of Spain, who in so many cases were first soldiers and men of the sword, when they took up the pen, wrote, carelessly it may seem, but so poignantly, so ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... it so interesting that thousands look forward to a new poem from him as readers look for a new story by a great novelist. He has helped to take away poetry from its conventional "elevation" and bring it everywhere poignantly in contact with throbbing life. Thus he is emphatically apart from so-called traditional poets who brilliantly follow the Tennysonian tradition, and give us another kind of enjoyment. But although Mr. Masefield is a twentieth century poet, it would ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... shattered Lovers' Bridge, Peter had carried her in his arms across the stream and kissed her hair. She had known then, known very surely, that love had come to her—Peter loved her, and his slightest touch meant happiness so poignantly sweet as to be almost unbearable. Only the knowledge ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds, or even ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... soldier. I read it, and dreamt of the time when I should walk the Champs Elysees again. It was growing dusk when I turned back to the noise of battle. There was a white moon in a milky sky. Motor-bikes fled by me, great lorries driven by Jehus from London buses, and automobiles which too poignantly had been Strand taxis and had taken lovers home from the Gaiety. I jogged along thinking very little, but supremely happy. Now I'm back at the wagon-line; to-morrow I go back to the guns. Meanwhile I write to ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson |
