"Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated, and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence. He is now much recovered from his illness and is continually on the deck, apparently watching ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... heap on the sofa, with his head deep in the cushion as though he sought escape from the light. Again the feeling of harbouring some small animal in pain came to him, and he frowned. The mute misery of that huddled form held a more poignant appeal ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the right angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." The chief characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid, sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk's in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talleyrand's in our own, poignant without effort. His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee: terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... social sympathy could never melt: With stern command to Albert's charge he gave To waft Palemon o'er the distant wave. "The ship was laden and prepared to sail, And only waited now the leading gale: 480 'Twas ours, in that sad period, first to prove The poignant torments of despairing love, The impatient wish that never feels repose, Desire that with perpetual current flows, The fluctuating pangs of hope and fear, Joy distant still, and sorrow ever near. Thus, while the pangs of thought ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... those at home who had no doubt long mourned him as dead grew more poignant, and remembering his uncle's affection for his sister, he regretted not having confided in him and begged him to get a letter conveyed to some point sufficiently civilised to have a post. He tried to find out from Fatima how long he had been laid up at the fakir's residence, and at first she ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... his cousin must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence of nice arrangements ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... on all the peoples who were not anointed, and made war among themselves for fourteen hundred years, taking the names of Arians, Manicheans, Donatists, Hussites, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists. And lastly, the Jansenists and the Molinists have had no more poignant mortification than that of not having been able to slaughter each other in pitched battle. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, I ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... of his Special Patrol duties Commander John Hanson resolves the unique and poignant mystery of ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... to every bird, But just a crumb to me; I dare not eat it, though I starve, — My poignant luxury To own it, touch it, prove the feat That made the pellet mine, — Too happy in my sparrow chance For ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the art preservative—meaning by that the cold-storage ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... thousands. They saw men who had just taken off their uniforms guiding the ploughs in the furrows. Smoke rose once more from the chimneys of the abandoned homes, and the boys who had faced the cannon's mouth were rebuilding rail fences. The odor of grass and newly turned earth was poignant and pleasant. The ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the various works have been chosen with care. It was evidently by no means an easy task. The passage chosen to show Colonel Newcome in the 'Cave of Harmony' gives in one poignant incident his character; the selection from 'Pendennis' does much the same. In the passage from 'Esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated 'Essay on George IV' demonstrates Thackeray in a very different ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of a president of the republic, even as his mediaeval prototype bore a bishop's mitre or a cardinal's hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a Francois Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... mademoiselle, mademoiselle!" said Maxime de Cliche slowly, impressively, in a tone of the most respectful but most poignant reproach. ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was very beautiful—but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell her; and he dared ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... prepare them for the reception of our lost one, and tho' we had nothing but wretchedness now to impart, I was willing to procure her a welcome to what we had. This task would have been more difficult but for our recent calamity, which had humbled my wife's pride, and blunted it by more poignant afflictions. Being unable to go for my poor child myself, as my arm grew very painful, I sent my son and daughter, who soon returned, supporting the wretched delinquent, who had not the courage to look up at her mother, whom no instructions of mine could persuade to a perfect reconciliation; ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... poignant as a dart, Drave god-like men to wild despair, And lit the skies with lurid glare But oh, thy false and fickle heart, ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... distant part of the country, where his family could never see him again, and where they knew he must linger out a miserable existence, more intolerable than death, amid the horrors of slavery? I ask whether you could witness all this, without the most poignant grief? This is no picture of the fancy. It is a sober reality. The only difference is, the men thus treated are black. But in my view, this does not diminish the horrors of such cruel deeds. Can it be expected then, that the citizens of this state, or indeed of any other, would witness ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... expression has been that of delightful and orderly sympathetic vision. This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the work of art; the emotions that weighed are lifted out ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... no time and little inclination for sentiment. Now, it was almost certain that had a term been ahead of her, whose end could be felt nearing, there would have been good-byes, last interviews, and last interviews but one, which are apt to be more poignant than those of the last moment of all. Even as it was there were threatenings of emotion. Wanless was stirred deeply. Mr. Menzies brought in a nosegay, and grasped her hand. "You will be sorely missed ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... movement a steadily progressive triumph, which, at its climax, is utterly broken and shattered. In doing this he has tried to epitomize the whole work. While in the other movements he aimed at expressing tragic details, in the last he has tried to generalize; thinking that the most poignant tragedy is that of catastrophe in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... house. His door stood open for ventilation and it came floating up the old stairs. He was aware of a vague pleasure before he localised the sound. It was music; a piano—but not the usual rooming-house instrument; a piano in tune, softly played. It drew him to the door and to the banisters outside, a poignant, haunting melody rippling in a minor treble, a melody that queerly sharpened the knife that stabbed him, yet ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... clock chimes forth the hour—the hour of fluted peace, of dead desire and epic love. Oh not for aye, Endymion, mayst thou unfold the purple panoply of priceless years. She sleeps—PRISCILLA sleeps—and down the palimpsest of age-old passion the lyres of night breathe forth their poignant praise. She sleeps—eternal Helen—in the moonlight of a thousand years; immortal symbol of immortal aeons, flower of the gods transplanted on a foreign shore, infinitely ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... road caused him to knit his brows and look very serious indeed. As he gave the saddle an impatient kick, his eyes rested on the Bologna sausage, one end of which protruded from the holster; then there came over him a poignant recollection of his Lenten supper of the night before and his no breakfast at all of that morning. He seated himself on the saddle, unwrapped the sausage, and proceeded to cut from it two or ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... wonderful minor harmony, comes another chorus—from three miles down the river: the convicts singing hymns in their cells at midnight. And I ground gently and sit in the silvered shadows with little bewildered shrimps flicking against me, and unlanguaged thoughts come and go—impossible similes, too poignant phrases to be stopped and fettered with words, and I am neither scientist nor man nor naked organism, but just mind. With the coming of silence I look around and again consciously take in the scene. I am very glad to be alive, and to know that ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... would assail, that friendship would be broken, that envy and jealousy would ply their innuendoes, that the Copperhead elements of a fraternity, claiming one of the offenders in its ranks, would assail with bitterness and awaken poignant grief, but no regret, that we should have the hatred of Copperheads, as long as that genus (thank Heaven, short-lived), existed in our land, and be regarded with distrust by those negative persons, who would be for the Union, had they any independence ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... visiting Balliol once or twice every year; and, heaviest blow, of John Tyndall, the friend and comrade whose genial warmth of spirit made him almost claim a brother's place in early struggles and later success, and whose sudden death was all the more poignant for the cruel touch of tragedy in the manner ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the mountain with vague shadows. As he advanced at every turn of his way Demetrio could see the poignant, sharp silhouette of a woman pushing forward painfully, bearing a child in ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... "du"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... unpretentious donations are of no slight weight. But charity is a virtue that counts for nothing unless meekness, philanthropy, altruism, is each its acolyte. How can we expect that beings who busy themselves with affairs of such poignant importance as whether they shall give Jones a full nod or Brown a quarter of a nod when they next meet him; as whether the Moneypennys are really quite lances enough for them to encounter the great Gilt-edges or ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... heaven's choir. He sang Wagner, Gounod, Schubert with absolute impartiality, as well as numbers of melting German lieder and touching English ballads. He brought smarting tears to the eyes of comfortable matrons, and swept their thoughts back to poignant moments of long ago—to youth and first love, to moonlight nights, entrancing meetings and heart-rending farewells! As for the younger and less emotional generation, even they were moved out of their everyday composure and hung upon the singer's words ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Away to Jesus," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See," "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray," "Deep River," "O, Freedom Over Me," and many others of these songs possess a beauty that is—what shall I say? poignant. In the riotous rhythms of Ragtime the Negro expressed his irrepressible buoyancy, his keen response to the sheer joy of living; in the "spirituals" he voiced his sense of beauty and his deep ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... in a big grey car and was sitting on the doorstep when Aunt got up. He told her not to disturb you, but of course Aunt thought that you ought to know at once and when she found that you were gone"—a poignant pause! ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... case is materially different where parties are united by sentiments of love and esteem, or bound by promises or engagements; under such circumstances the introduction of a second wife, under the same roof, could not fail to disturb the harmony of the family, and occasion the most poignant feelings of distress to the first. But a Chinese wife has no such feelings, nor does the husband make ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... 'Lamentations,' or 'Wailings,' having for their exciting cause the disappearance of Tammuz from this upper earth, and the disastrous effects produced upon animal and vegetable life by his absence. The woes of the land and the folk are set forth in poignant detail, and Tammuz is passionately invoked to have pity upon his worshippers, and to end their sufferings by a speedy return. This return, we find from other texts, was effected by the action of a goddess, the mother, sister, or paramour, of Tammuz, who, descending into the nether world, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... possessed, as you know, of a very subtle flavour. The larger music, the more majestic lengths of verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... north-country lips known to use that term except under stress of the most poignant emotion. To be "darling" one was compelled to be very ill, very sad, angelically repentant, or in an extremity of fear, and Darsie, who this morning was not afflicted in any one of these three ways, realised in a flash the awful significance of the term. She sat white ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... One poignant impression left on my mind by Greece, as well as Rome, was its diminutive size. I almost resented the fact that a place civilized thousands of years ago, and which had loomed up on my imagination as the land of ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... it has all the sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more poignant mood, with fine subtlety. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... it was so long ago; he felt young still! Of all his thoughts, as he stood there counting his cigars, this was the most poignant, the most bitter. With his white head and his loneliness he had remained young and green at heart. And those Sunday afternoons on Hampstead Heath, when young Jolyon and he went for a stretch along the Spaniard's Road to Highgate, to Child's Hill, and back over the Heath again to dine at Jack Straw's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... drifting Who, then, makes war? The answer is to be found in the Chancelleries of Europe, among the men who have too long played with human lives as pawns in a game of chess, who have become so enmeshed in formulas and the jargon of diplomacy that they have ceased to be conscious of the poignant realities with which they trifle. And thus will war continue to be made, until the great masses who are the sport of professional schemers and dreamers say the word which, shall bring, not eternal peace, for that is impossible, but a determination that wars shall be fought ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... Dallington conceal his disapproval of foreign food. The sorrows of the beef-eating Englishman among the continentals were always poignant. Dallington is only one of the many travellers who, unable to grasp the fact that warmer climes called for light diet, reproached the Italians especially for their "parsimony and thin feeding." In Henry the Eighth's time there was already a saying among the Italians, "Give the Englishman ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was—a feast-hall of some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant sense of lack of the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... shoe factory established by an enterprising Yankee in that city. The work lasted but a few months, when the proprietor failed and the factory was closed. In a strange city mother and children were left without employment. In her anxiety and distress a new trouble, the greatest and most poignant since Abijah's desertion, wrung her with a supreme grief. James, the light and pride of her life, had run away from his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the only consolation left the broken heart. And he did not want to live in Baltimore, and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of her eyes. The half sulky contempt with which she had received his advances passed away. She became at that moment a human being, self-forgetting, the heritage of her charms—for she really had a curious but very poignant attractiveness—suddenly evident. It was only a momentary lapse and it was entirely wasted. Not even one of the waiters happened to be looking that way, and Tavernake was ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dreadful truth. He wore a ribbon on his breast and he leaned on a crutch. For the instant, as father and son faced each other, there was something in Blair's poise, his look of an eagle, that carried home a poignant sense of his greatness. Lane thrilled with it and a lump constricted his throat. Then with Blair's ringing "Dad!" and the father's deep and broken: "My son! ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the twilight shadows about them. Memories too poignant assailed them, and her hand trembled as it lay upon ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... down upon each wise or foolish head among all my forgotten ancestors, it is under your soft light that I now feel stir within me a certain poignant regret! I would that I could have a son who might be able to see you when I shall see you no more. How I should love him! Ah! such a son would—what am I saying?— why, he would be no just twenty years old if you had only been willing, Clementine—you whose cheeks used ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Divisions. But his reference was chiefly to those Nationalist Irish Brigades, who had remained true, he said, to the old motto of the Brigade of Fontenoy, Semper et ubique fidelis. These men had known in the midst of their privations and sufferings a new and poignant feeling of anguish: they had seen "a section at any rate of their countrymen" repudiate the view that in serving as they served they were fighting for Ireland, for her happiness, for ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... what I have quoted out of my diary here it is not inappropriate to add that I lost my babies in three out of my five confinements. These poignant and secret griefs have no place on the high-road of life; but, just as Henry and I will stand sometimes side by side near those little graves unseen by strangers, so he and I in unobserved moments will touch with one ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... fine as this sport would be, under the conditions of this bill; something to keep them in the open air, something to bring a little gaiety into their dull lives!" Her voice had grown louder and it shook a little, with a rising emotion, though its sweetness was only the more poignant. "Oh, my dear Senator," she cried, "don't you see how wrong you are? Don't you want to ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... still continued, "you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... none by his humming; but he stopped short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of the movement. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... her own; that the act was part of the conflict which Lucy guessed at, but must not comment on, by word or look. All the letters were the true expression of the man. The first, in which he described in words, few; but singularly poignant, the death of his wife, his recognition of his son, and the faint beginnings of hope for the boy's maimed life, had forced tears from Lucy. Helena had read it dry-eyed. But for several hours afterwards, on an evening of tempest, she ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from every external point of view, seemed amongst the chosen ones of the world. The contrast was in itself amazing. And then the woman! Francis looked at her but seldom, and when he did it was with a curious sense of mental disturbance; poignant but unanalysable. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... luxuries continues to increase in the same proportion as it has done for the last few years, it must soon obtain an enhanced price, and a more rapid sale. The evils consequent upon the unrestrained use of these articles, are such as to justify the most poignant regrets that they should be held in such estimation by all descriptions of persons, since they have proved from their first introduction into the colony, and still continue to be, the fertile sources of social disorder, of domestic misery, of disorders, and of death. It is to no purpose ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... recollection—terrible and ineffaceable—was of her father that day, catching her to him and sobbing with his face pressed against her baby shoulder. It seemed as if the impression made then had extended all through her life, turned her into a creature of poignant sympathies and an unassuagable longing to console and compensate. She had not been able to do that for him, but she had been able to love—break her box ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... day was one of resplendent loveliness. The lake sparkled in the sunshine, and as they shot past its tiny bays and woody headlands, new beauties were every moment revealed to them. But while the scene softened Wyat's feelings, it filled him with intolerable remorse, and so poignant did his emotions become, that he pressed his hands upon his eyes to shut out the lovely prospect. When he looked up again the scene was changed. The skiff had entered a narrow creek, arched over by huge trees, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... so painfully strange—it does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent—I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... all things earthly looming heavily upon his horizon. There was no cowardly shrinking, there was very little regret. What he must do he felt was being forced upon him by an invincible fate, but the sting of it was far less poignant than would have been the case a few months ago. In fact the sting was ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... its normal speed before he became reluctantly but vividly aware that he was not alone with the slumbering lady; he was not even alone in his own clothes. A warm, creeping movement over his flesh betrayed the unwelcome and highly resented presence, unseen but poignant, of a strayed mouse, that had evidently dashed into its present retreat during the episode of the pony harnessing. Furtive stamps and shakes and wildly directed pinches failed to dislodge the intruder, whose ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... she saw that the door opposite was slightly ajar; evidently the visitor had failed to close it. Celia waited, with the familiar horror, the tense expectation, for a repetition of the groan. It came. Obeying an impulse, a womanly impulse, to fly to the call of such poignant distress, Celia crossed the corridor softly ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... and I do not think it probable I shall ever make such another friend.' Done concluded with a fervent wish that he might see her soon. There was the melancholy and the weakness of an invalid in the letter, and it disturbed Lucy greatly. She recalled, with a poignant sense of remorse, how little he had been in her mind during the past two months while he lay struggling for life. She felt that she had done him a wrong, and, scarcely understanding herself, gave way to a flood of tears ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... of my window; I listened. The light in the room opposite was extinguished. In one of those moments of poignant anxiety, I cannot say if it was illusion or reality, I thought I saw the old wretch also ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... want no explanation to see and understand how M. Josselin has written most of his chefs-d'oeuvre from the depths of a happy consciousness habituated to all that is most graceful and charming and seductive in real life—and a deeply sympathetic, poignant, and compassionate sense of the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the darkness, demanding his name and trying to see his face. Finally he seemed to prevail, but the figure slipped from his grasp and left him there alone. He turned back then, seeking the fire and smitten with poignant anxiety for the woman he loved; but the light was quenched, and the place could not be found. After struggling for what seemed a lifetime through mazes of darkness and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... love and conversation will do your business: that is, sir, a most delicious courtezan,—I do not mean down-right punk,—but punk of more than ordinary sense in conversation; punk in ragou, punk, who plays on the lute, and sings; and, to sum up all, punk, who cooks and dresses up herself, with poignant sauce, to become a new dish every time she is served up ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... mother! in your poignant grief for the loss of your poor drowned boy, you were spared the agony of seeing him, even in imagination, struggling faintly before that tempest of fire and smoke, calling plaintively for her on whose tender bosom his head had rested, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... answered all their questions, and prattled to them about his home, about his twin sister, about nearly all his cherished secrets. In that short space of time he had afforded materials enough for the coarse jeers of the brutal, and the poignant ridicule of the cruel for many a long day. Something of this derision had begun already, and he had found no secret place to hide his tears. That they would call him a milksop, a molly-coddle, and all kinds of horrid names, he knew, and he had tried manfully to bear-up under persecution. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Burton's music—her husband, and Dick Allport, and I—with the throb of London beating under us like the surge of an ocean in anger, when there rose above the smooth harmonies of the piano and the pulsing roar of the night a sound more poignant than them both, the quavering melody of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have attended his Majesty's arms in this portion of his dominions; we should do injustice to the memory of our late truly illustrious president, Major-General Brock, under whose auspices the latter were during his lifetime principally achieved, did we omit to accompany them with feelings of the most poignant ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... heart. But there was still more: there were the skeletons found at every step in this voyage of discovery in the midst of the dead, betraying the anguish and the terror of that last dreadful hour. Six hundred,—perhaps more,—have already been found, each one illustrating some poignant episode of the immense catastrophe in which they were ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... for having given that sudden shock and poignant anguish to Her Highness, but I could not have supposed that one who came so barefacedly to impress me with the Cardinal's innocence, could have been less firm in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the last time before him one of those liturgical chants which long ago at Milan had touched him even to tears, and now, since the siege, in the panic caused by the Barbarians, they dared not sing any more. Augustin, guarding himself even now against the too poignant sweetness of the melody, attended only to the sense of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... was improper; yet Elmore sometimes found his fancy forgetfully at work as before. He could not at once realize that the tragedy of this romance, such as it was, remained to him alone, except perhaps as Ehrhardt shared it. With him, indeed, Elmore still sought to fret his remorse and keep it poignant, and his final failure to do so made him ashamed. But what lasting sorrow can one have from the disappointment of a man whom one has never seen? If Lily could console herself, it seemed probable that ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... odors of the forest, the breath of leaf and flower. They were keen and poignant to him, and then came another odor that did not belong there. It was brought on the edge of the gentle wind, and his nostrils expanded, as he noticed that it was growing stronger and stronger. He ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sentence; but the firm composure of innocence was mistaken for defiance; and the blood mounting to my forehead from a feeling of injustice—of injustice from those I loved and venerated— perhaps the most poignant feeling in existence to a sensitive and generous mind—was falsely estimated as proceeding from impetuous and disgraceful sources. Mrs Drummond looked upon me with a mournful face, sighed, and said nothing; little Sarah watching me with her large black eyes, as if ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... introduced by her cousin, H. White, at Lichfield. In a letter written in 1806, she said that “the animated attention with which he honoured me, the praise he lavished on my poems, and the passages he quoted from them, constituted one of the most poignant literary gratifications I ever received. The hope that they may live, is attached to the demonstrated impression they had made on a mind of such distinguished classical endowment.” Further on, she said that he often exclaimed, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... righteous-souled old king, blessed with prosperity, leaned on Gandhari and suddenly looked like one deprived of life. Beholding him thus seated like one deprived of consciousness, that slayer of hostile heroes, viz., the royal son of Kunti, became penetrated by a poignant grief. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... rose from her chair like a tragedienne. "It isn't my body, it's my mind!" she cried, with poignant inflection, clasping her head with both her hands; and her look transformed her in the eyes of the young scientist. It was the tragic gaze of one who confronts insanity and death at a time when life should be at its sweetest. For an instant she stood there absorbed in her terror, then dropped ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... existence, our John departed this life in the year of Christ 1361, on the 10th of July, or rather on the 9th, at the midhour between Friday and Saturday. Sent into the world to my mortification and suffering, he was to me in life the cause of deep and unceasing solicitude, and in death of poignant grief. The news reached me on the evening of the 13th of the same month that he had fallen at Milan, in the general mortality caused by that unwonted scourge which at last discovered and visited so fearfully this hitherto exempted city. On the 8th of August, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... retribution? Is it in this country, situated at sixteen thousand miles from the seat of his injustice and oppression? To tell a poor man that he may obtain redress in the court of King's Bench, what is it but a cruel mockery, calculated to render the pang more poignant, which it would pretend ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... her from dropping it all, and flying back to the peace and quiet of her old Edinburgh home. And yet she had struggled on under the burden for four years—four long years this spring; but even at this late day, she was overcome with a feeling of homesickness, as poignant as it had been in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... spirit, he was conscious of it. Now he was in a foreign country, and it was almost as though his own land had cast him out so that the sharp appealing farewell to the Grey Hill, Treliss, and the sea was even more poignant than his farewell to his friends had been. Once more, at the thought of all the ways that he loved Cornwall, the choking sob was in his throat and the hot tears were in his eyes, and his hands were clenched. And then he remembered that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise. Poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... is. Not the much and justly praised arrangement and poetical justice of the Oresteia or of the story of Oedipus excel the Arthuriad in what used to be called "propriety" (which has nothing to do with prudishness), while both are, as at least it seems to me, far inferior in varied and poignant interest. That the attainment of the Graal, the healing of the maimed king, and the fulfilling of the other "weirds" which have lain upon the race of Joseph, should practically coincide with the termination of that glorious reign, with which fate and metaphysical aid had connected them, is ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... responsibility and of struggle against great odds was not to close without a private grief which was the more poignant because the condition of the campaign forbade my leaving the post of duty. On the day I visited General Rosecrans at Carnifex Ferry I got news of the critical illness of my youngest child, a babe of eight months old, whom I had seen ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... basis of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme enigmas. Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt before ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Don't try not to grieve. Don't repress yourself. It is right that you should mourn over your lost ideals. Nothing on earth brings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do not expect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautiful and dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You will see this some time. You have begun to see it now. You realize that this man was in ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... he might deplore. None who, whene'er the gory flow Was rushing hot, might healing herbs bestow, Or cull from teeming Earth some genial plant To allay the anguish of malignant pain And soothe the sharpness of his poignant woe. Like infant whom the nurse lets go, With tottering movement here and there, He crawled for comfort, whensoe'er His soul-devouring ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... your sceptical maturity find beauty in this story, you will not "get under the skin" of it, as the saying is, unless you have stopped sometime in your busy going, to consider, aside and with understanding, the pathos of the old actor. It is a curiously poignant human thing, written about by a few, suffered by many, and ignored ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... "The Three Sisters," and the poignant truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... all rules for such cases laid down and provided, Cecil's life ought to have been spent in alternations between feverish excitement and poignant remorse. But the truth must be told—she was unaccountably happy. The simple fact was that she had no time to be otherwise. Even when entirely alone her conscience could find no opportunity of asserting itself. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... more poignant torture. Next day, while Rudolph Musgrave was making out the list of honorary pall-bearers, the postman brought a letter which had been forwarded from Chicago. It was from Agatha, written upon the morning of that day wherein later she had been, as Patricia phrased ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... draws him to dry land; And through the brain of Peter pass Some poignant twitches, fast and faster; "No doubt," quoth he, "he is the Master Of this poor ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... and address of the girl who had been so cruelly, so wantonly, bereft of her lover, and it seemed to him both fitting and charitable that someone other than a police sergeant or detective should interpose between the grim tragedy of 27th Street and the even more poignant horror which was fated to descend on some house in 59th Street. Apparently, fate had decreed that he should be the messenger charged with this sad errand, and, with a singular disregard of consequences, he ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... narrating chapters from the book of experience. How superficially, heretofore, had I known her! We had met chiefly as scholars. But now I saw before me one whose whole life had been a poem,—of boundless aspiration and hope almost wild in its daring,—of indomitable effort amidst poignant disappointment,—of widest range, yet persistent unity. Yes! here was a poet in deed, a true worshipper of Apollo, who had steadfastly striven to brighten and make glad existence, to harmonize all jarring and discordant ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The poignant irony of her answer had changed before the end into the most musical accents in which a woman could find utterance for ingenuous love. To listen to her words was to pass in a moment from martyrdom to heaven. Montriveau ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise; poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... heartbreaking night of sleepless watching and poignant feeling. Nancy was alone in her prison, a beautiful apartment, the best in the house. Bull Sternford had conducted her thither personally, and, in doing so, had told her the thing he was doing, and of his real desire to ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... no answer; and those subtle movements—shadows of movements I might almost call them—recommenced. Then there came a sudden cry, shrill and poignant—had Grandfather been in his room he would surely have heard it—and the flash coming almost simultaneously with its utterance, I saw what has haunted my sleep from that day to this, my father pinned against the wall, sword still in hand, and before him my mother, fiercely ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed, with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances, even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. At this time, too, he composed much in the open air. This he rarely, if ever, did in later life. Not only many portions ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... and the cold intellect of Strindberg had rejected the "symmetrical dialogue" of the French drama in order "to let the brains of men work unhindered." But Hauptmann carries the same methods extraordinarily far and achieves a poignant verisimilitude that rivals the pity and terror of the most ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... course of three hours, I shall know these people: I shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever." It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect one with acute anticipations of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... rivet the attention of his audience. As he proceeded, it became more and more animated, firmer, and fuller, exhibiting a wonderful combination of freshness, sweetness, and power; so exquisitely plaintive, so overflowing with poignant grief—for it was of a melancholy character—that tears, sobs, and groans broke from the breasts of most of his audience. It was truly the triumph of song over human feelings, and the palm of victory was unanimously awarded to the ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with Ekstrom dead? ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... felt that I could do none of these things, and in a dreary, slow, helpless way, I thrust the watch back in amongst the tow, rammed more in after it, and then stood, after laying the rabbit down, asking myself what I should do next, while a poignant sense of misery and wretchedness seemed to make ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... why do you torture so With such keen beauty till the day appears? Why touch to life things buried long ago, Whose aching cries trouble the heart to tears; Ghostly—like wind tossed sea gulls calling low Out of the poignant vistas ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... PCESZY TURGIDOFF (the brilliant young Slav whose canvas has recently been acquired by the Royal Geological Museum) all true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels. But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had trickled into a very delta of arid sentiment. The critic could walk all the galleries of Europe and find nothing to lighten ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... came up. Once more he looked like a horse. He had been brave to face destruction, but he found himself unable to face being tickled to death. If only they had chosen some other method for his execution he would have perished gamely, but this was exquisitely poignant—beyond endurance. He tossed his head and stepped into a trot toward ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... is not all of the fishing. Yet there are circumstances which make this philosophy hard to accept. I have in mind an incident of angling tribulation which rivals the most poignant instant of my boyhood, when a great trout flopped for one sharp moment on a mossy stone and then was gone like a golden flash into the depths of ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... idea of my poignant dismay and disappointment on finding that this dreary-looking place of swamps and marshes was quite deserted, although there were still a number of ruined brick houses, gardens, and orchards there. The blacks told me that at one time it had been one of the most important penal ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... superlative folly of duelling. Not long after his marriage, with all his indifference to his wife, he was persuaded into a fit of singular jealousy. He was intimate with an ex-captain of dragoons, by name Poignant, who had retired to Chateau-Thierry; a frank, open-hearted man, but of extremely little gallantry. Whenever Poignant was not at his inn, he was at La Fontaine's, and consequently with his wife, when he himself was not at home. Some person took it in his head to ask ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... of Sterling. Even without the mask she had once worn she would easily have been recognized as Oldring's Rider. No man who had ever seen her would forget her, regardless of his ignorance as to her sex. Then more poignant than all other argument was the fact that he did not want to take her away from Surprise Valley. He resisted all thought of that. He had brought her to the most beautiful and wildest place of the uplands; he had saved her, nursed her back to strength, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... complained of the motor, but I was wishing then that it would cease its poignant imitation of a little dead boy, a boy who would play no more. By the touch of Dorothy's sleeve against mine I knew that she could hear it too. And the miles flew by, green and brown and golden, while I wondered what use I might ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton |
