"Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they again entered the underground passage than they saw a soft couch, and a fatigue so poignant suddenly overcame them that they could ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—the long ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... ray from the glowing Grail held before his gaze by Amfortas: that the Saviour embodied in the Grail must be delivered from the sin-sullied hands now holding it. He has seemed to hear the appeal of the Saviour, poignant, to be so delivered. He is left, when the vision fades, with the sense of this necessity—involving for himself, though he knows not how, a duty and a quest: Amfortas must be healed, the Sacred Treasure must be taken ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... not less deep, was more calm than at first. Again and again she had returned to her young brother's coffin, with varying feelings; now overwhelmed by poignant grief, now partially soothed by the first balm of holy resignation; now alone, now accompanied by her friends. Once, early that morning, the infirm mother was brought into the room to look for the last time on the face of her son; she ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... 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 the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... was a most amiable woman both in mind and person: She had an elevated understanding, with all the delicacy, and softness of her own sex. Her voice, however sweet in itself, was still rendered more harmonious by what she said. Her wit was poignant without severity: Her manners were humane, polite, easy and unreserved.— Wherever she came, she attracted attention and esteem. As virtue was her guide in morality, sincerity was her guide in religion. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... better to have had a star and lost it, than never to have had a star at all. But I did not ask. The old lady's grief was too poignant, her mind too ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... prayers of Peggy were endless. Finding him not only to be what she knew, the man who relieved her from the most poignant distress, but likewise the vanquisher and the saviour of her brother, she said and protested she was sure there was not such another angel upon earth! She was sure there was not! Frank was ashamed of and almost offended at her incessant praise. It was so natural and so proper ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... know him—tis the mouldy lemon Which our court wits will wet their lips withal, When they would sauce their honied conversation With somewhat sharper flavour—Marry sir, That virtue's wellnigh left him—all the juice That was so sharp and poignant, is squeezed out, While the poor rind, although as sour as ever, Must season soon the draff we give our grunters, For two legg'd things are ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... beauty and tragedy may be a paradox, but no reader can miss its power. The mere story of Hector's death as told by Homer is poignant, even when read in an English translation: the magic of the original language and metre doubles the effect. The combination of these two apparently inconsistent things, which is one of the marks of Greek poetry, is, of course, found in other literatures; the description ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... on a woman's, which in my case had served as a deterrent. It wasn't however, I hasten to add, that my case, in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn't ambiguous enough. At the thought that Vereker was perhaps at that moment dying there rolled over me a wave of anguish—a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him. A delicacy that it was my one compensation to suffer to rule me had left the Alps and the Apennines between us, but the vision of the waning opportunity made me feel as ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... dear papa" were but alive, so that she might tell him, too, about the coming event. This was impossible though, as she added, with her customary melancholy shake of the head, and a return to her normal expression of poignant grief; for, as she said very truly, "one can never expect to be thoroughly happy in this ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be sure, reasons and to spare why the name should make her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman: dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively, furthermore, she would seek to extract from such a situation all the ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the plainness with which down there he could hear the gale raging. Its howls and shrieks seemed to take on, in the emptiness of the bunker, something of the human character, of human rage and pain—being not vast but infinitely poignant. And there were, with every roll, thumps, too—profound, ponderous thumps, as if a bulky object of five-ton weight or so had got play in the hold. But there was no such thing in the cargo. Something on deck? ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... fair words with virtue fraught The pious glorious saint besought. But the good speech with poignant sting Pierced ear and bosom of the king, Who, stabbed with pangs too sharp to bear, Fell prostrate and lay ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... sad music, in the strictest sense. But they were all intense, poignant and tremulous with the deepest longings ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... business. But Morange, as he confided to Mathieu, was distressed for other reasons. The scene in the workroom, the revelation of Norine's condition, the fate awaiting the girl driven away into the bleak, icy streets, had revived all his own poignant worries with respect to Valerie. Mathieu had already heard of the latter's trouble from his wife, and he speedily grasped the accountant's meaning. It vaguely seemed to him also that Morange was yielding to the same unreasoning despair as Valerie, and ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a setting of Robert Burns's lines, "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon." It is one of the most expressive of MacDowell's songs, being full of deep and very human pathos. The melody is one of the most poignant he set down, but it is subjected to repetition that becomes monotonous. The song is expressively indicated Slow: With pathos, ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... old things are all coming back," she says in a tone of poignant regret, whether at this fact or at the realization of the loss of them he is not ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... 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 ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... his being able to take Azinte back to her old mistress, now that she had found her husband and child, even if it had been admissible for a lieutenant in the British navy to return freed negroes again into slavery, and wound up with bitter lamentations as to his unhappy fate, and expressions of poignant regret that fighting and other desperate means, congenial and easy to his disposition, were not available in the circumstances. After which explosion he subsided, felt ashamed of having thus committed himself, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... her affectionate heart—as she heard the particulars of her own history for the first time, and reflected upon that poor, heartbroken mother, who had gone to her rest long ago—she could not feel any poignant grief, for her memory of the lost one was too shadowy and faint. But she had found a home and ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... Mecklenburg silk, with silver buttons, I give to the friend who expresses in words the most poignant regret. I hold that tears are more genuine than words, for which reason the best weeper has been preferred, and so has received the velvet suit. Nevertheless, the loudest lamenter is not unworthy; and so I repeat that he shall have the silk suit. If there be ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... leaned to his. Slowly he picked his way ashore while she reclined in his embrace, her arms about his neck, her smooth cheek brushing his. A faint, intoxicating perfume she used affected him strangely, increasing the poignant sense of her nearness; a lock of her hair caressed him. When he deposited her gently upon her feet he saw her face had gone white and ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... began, and then stopped suddenly. He saw the expression of his companion's eyes, which were looking him through and through with the most poignant love and yearning mingled in their gaze, and something clutched at his heart that he ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... selected from 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... it went along the living wire; that ominous call which tells of broken life and the tragedy of war. Nothing is so poignant in the watches of the night as the call for stretcher-bearers; there is a thrill in the message swept from sentinel to sentinel along the line of sandbags, telling as it does, of some poor soul stricken down writhing in agony on the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... as it fell, and just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping shoulders. But the expression on the face was even stranger than the sudden apparition. It was an expression of keen and poignant disappointment—as of a man whom fate has baulked of some well-planned end, his due by right, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... with the great world had destroyed the temptation to puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober Town the fever of the heart by some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth, and which it best dedicates ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... again, he receives a point, and so on. The old-fashioned open-air sport was cruel enough, for it often happened that the hare ran for two or three miles with her ferocious pursuers hard on her track, and every muscle of her body was strained with poignant agony; but there is this to be said—the men had healthy, matchless exercise on breezy plains and joyous uplands, they tramped all day until their limbs were thoroughly exercised, and they earned sound repose by their wholesome exertions. Moreover, the element of fair-play ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... poignant moment.] "What have I done to deserve this?" [he exclaimed. The relief from anxiety, so generously proffered, entirely overcame him; and for the first time, he allowed himself to confess that in the long struggle against ill-health, he had been beaten; but, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... one of regret. He felt a poignant humiliation to think that this young girl, a stranger in the house, should be aware of a thing of that kind concerning his father's wife. Yet, oddly enough, a second later, he realised that he no longer regarded Esther as a stranger. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... evening, while Mendouca was reading in his cabin, my friend Pedro joined me on deck, and, with many expressions of poignant distress at his father's behaviour to me, endeavoured to excuse it upon the plea of irresponsibility already urged by Mendouca himself; the poor lad assuring me that even he was not always safe from the consequences of his father's violence. And during the half-hour's chat that ensued I learnt ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... was almost too fierce to be endured assailed him. His was a strong body, demanding much nourishment, and it cried out to him for relief. He tried to forget in sleep that he was famished, but he only dozed a while to awaken to a hunger more poignant ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... two or three little evidences of his kindness and charity that she liked to hear, and that it evidently was a relief to him to tell. She was just the kind of woman unconsciously to draw forth confidences, and to reward them. Something poignant in his feeling was rather set forth than concealed by his sober, self-restrained ways and quiet words; it suited Emily, and she allowed herself to speak with that tender reverence of the dead which came very well from her, since she had loved him living so well. She was rather eloquent ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... objection to the dinner in itself. On the contrary, she complimented me on what she was pleased to call my ready invention. But when we came next to the order in which the dishes were to be served—" Miss Notman paused in the middle of the sentence, and shuddered over the private and poignant recollections which the order of ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... look back now 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
... and red ribbon to a carefully prepared list of aunts and godmothers, or reckon up a little pile of bright quarters on the dining-room table in preparation for to-morrow's largesse—then it is that the brief, poignant and precious sweetness of the experience claims us at the full. Then we can see that all our careful wisdom and shrewdness were folly and stupidity; and we can understand the meaning of that Great Surprise—that where we planned wealth we found ourselves poor; that where we thought ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Pepe's love—and now all hope was dead, and she knew that her chance of having him for her very own was lost forever. Still worse was it that the love which she longed for so hungrily should go to another. This was more than she could bear. Pepe's death, she felt, would have caused her a pain far less poignant—for she herself easily could have died, too. But Pepe lost to her arms, and won to the arms of such a poor, spiritless creature as this Pancha, was an insult that made greater the injury done her a thousand-fold. Her fierce love was turned in a moment to fiercer hate; and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... upon a plank, and had fallen into the sea. But Porthos, the good harmless Porthos! To see Porthos hungry, to see Mousqueton without gold lace, imprisoned perhaps; to see Pierrefonds, Bracieux, razed to the very stones, dishonored even to the timber—these were so many poignant griefs for D'Artagnan, and every time that one of these griefs struck him, he bounded like a horse at the sting of the gadfly beneath the vaults of foliage where he has sought shade and shelter from ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... world might not absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe—to the poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably—was led to fancy a general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Espirito Santo, in a little chapel behind one of the transept altars, I saw, through a huge rococo frame of gilded wood, a Maria de los Dolores that was almost terrifying in poignant realism. She wore a robe of black damask, which stood as if it were cast of bronze in heavy, austere folds, a velvet cloak decorated with the old lace known as rose point d'Espagne; and on her head a massive imperial diadem, and ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... selfishness of the world. They virtually admit, though they often theoretically deny, the baseness of human nature; and, strangers to disinterestedness themselves, they do not expect to meet with it in others. They are content with a low degree of enjoyment, and are thus exempted from much poignant suffering; and it is only when the casualties of life interfere with their individual ease, that we can perceive that they are ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly, silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion—they were naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Other and more poignant memories had day after day obliterated the recollection of that experience. But it came back now as freshly as if it had all occurred yesterday. He was one of a gang of twenty who were traveling from Millbank to Dartmoor. The journey to Waterloo in the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the advocate himself, he afforded at least as much exercise to Sampson as he extracted amusement from him. When the man of law began to get into his altitudes, and his wit, naturally shrewd and dry, became more lively and poignant, the Dominie looked upon him with that sort of surprise with which we can conceive a tame bear might regard his future associate, the monkey, on their being first introduced to each other. It was Mr. Pleydell's delight to state in grave ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... summer perhaps, to restore her to what she had been before her terrible experience. And yet she seemed to him more beautiful than ever. Watching her furtively and anxiously, he endured a raging conflict of emotions, recalling with a poignant feeling of shame all that he had said to her in that room and elsewhere, in return for what she had done for him. An impulse seized him to rush to the door and lock it, to turn on her savagely, forbidding her to leave him as he had forbidden her to come to him. For ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... others on their guard against a too-ready acceptance of certain specious literature dealing with the fancied delights—I say fancied advisedly and for greater emphasis repeat the whole phrase—against the fancied delights of life in the greenwood, then in such case my own poignant pangs shall not have ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... arts of the sycophant: The pleasure of the guards was his delight, their displeasure, his poignant grief. He assumed the authority of his rank with us, he reported the slightest of misdemeanours amongst us to the guards and was instrumental in having many punished. These and other things gave him ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... mechanism is much better adapted to credulity than to questioning. All of us believe nearly all the time. Few doubt, and only now and then. The past exercises an almost irresistible fascination over us. As children we learn to look up to the old, and when we grow up we do not permit our poignant realization of elderly incapacity among our contemporaries to rouse suspicions of Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, or Aristotle. Their sayings come to us unquestioned; their remoteness makes inquiry into their competence impossible. We readily assume that they had sources ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... mutilated casket, which, with the jewel it contained, had suffered such irreparable injury, and restored it to its owner, great was the lamentation. Rachel weeping for her children could hardly have exhibited more poignant sorrow. ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... her bedroom. Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white. Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Almost is rapture poignant; somewhat ails The heart and mocks the morning; somewhat sighs, And those sweet foreigners, the nightingales, Made restless with their love, pay down its price, Even the pain; then all the story unfold Over and over ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... 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 sorrow for his fall. ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... vivid 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 of ointment at ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... 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 ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... perfect idea it 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... breathed and jammed one fist into the palm of his other hand. Yet, in a spirit of fun, she remained motionless, wondering how soon he would detect her. Then a deep groan burst from his lips. It was a sound of poignant suffering that went to the depths of her nature. Purposeless as seemed his life, she still felt that it could not be altogether bad. The very charm of his presence, which had a way of stamping him a gentleman born even when in his khaki working clothes, stood for some defense; and, ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... years what in reality she is, close on thirty-five. Her lips are pale and drooping, her cheeks colorless; her whole air is suggestive of deep depression, the result of sleepless nights and days filled with grief and suspense of the most poignant nature. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... in more vivid tints than those of Watteau, these splendid creatures in all the pride of their beauty and of their wardrobe, pluming themselves as if they never could grow old, and casting around them their piercing glances and no less poignant raillery. But Horace Walpole is not content with thus displaying his dazzling bevy of heroines; he reveals them in their less ostentatious moments, and makes us as familiar with their weaknesses as ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of her question was that of poignant interest. Her whole thought was centred on the life and well-being of this white man. For the moment the buckskin ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... mortified in proportion as she had before been elated. And though her sister's reflections were for the present suspended by the violence of pain, yet her vexation, when she was restored to the ability of contemplating the state of her clothes, would be equally poignant and without remedy. ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... talk. Now I sit by myself—necessarily I am silent. I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction. Perhaps all this will become less poignant in time. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that they are impersonal. We cannot identify ourselves with what moves us in painting or sculpture or architecture: on the contrary, it lifts us out of ourselves, away from our griefs and cares, instead of giving them a more intense and poignant expression, which at some moments is all the divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the Lady and the storm together were making easier for the slowly dying man his last trail across the desert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power, flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated every thought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture to his fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he could think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart. The bitter cold and the merciless wind were kinder as he called her image from out of the storm. She seemed ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... with a poignant sense of the breaking up of old social foundations in the agony and terror of the Great War. It is sent forth with a keen understanding of the spirit of youth that to-day challenges every inherited institution and ideal, even to the bone and marrow ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the Severn, and loll there in the shade, and make songs to his lute. He grew to love this leisured life of bright and open spaces; and its long solitudes, grateful with the warm odors of growing things and with poignant bird-noises; and the tranquillity of these meadows, that were always void of hurry, bedrugged the man through many ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... separate 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 ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the sounds of night began to rise in their poignant summoning of memory and hope. The past and the present seemed one to her in a beautiful dream; yet it was not so much a dream as life itself, a warm reality. Presently there came the slow thud of horse's feet, and the chaise turned ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings. When he wrote Chivalry, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardent eye of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... century has elapsed since that date, (June 1815,) and France is only now beginning to understand that the defeat of Waterloo was necessary for the liberty of Europe; but she not the less cherishes at the bottom of her heart a poignant grief and rage at having been marked out for a victim. On that plain where so many Spartan-like warriors fell for her sake—where the pyramid of the Prince of Orange, the tomb of Colonel Gordon, and the monument of the Hanoverians, serve as mementoes of the fight—no stone, or cross, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... crescendo which precedes the appearance of the Knight of the Swan, in Lohengrin, where the sonorities are augmented by gradual additions of voices and instruments until the culminating point is reached. An instance more poignant still is found in the great ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... and blankets in aid of his precepts, which has a wonderful effect in promoting their efficacy. Mansion and man are large alike, and alike overflowing with hospitality and kindliness. His original and poignant conversation is so joyous and good-humored, the making every body happy is so evidently his predominant taste, that the pungency only adds to the flavor of his talk, and never casts a moment's shade ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that unites us, that I fear, that virtue, that strong sense of honor and fame, so powerful in minds most turned to tenderness, would only have served to make more poignant the pangs ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... slowly. "But my heart is too full of poignant grief to think of them. To-night the secrets are mine alone; to-morrow you shall be in possession of at least one of them. I have, however, much yet to do, I see, before I rest," he added, glancing over his shoulder into the brilliant hall where ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... prevented from continuing their journey—he thought only of the horrible death of his poor old horse, the ancient companion of his fatigues and wars, the faithful animal, twice wounded like himself, and from whom for so many years he had never been separated. This poignant emotion was so cruelly, so affectingly visible in the soldier's countenance, that the landlord and his people felt themselves for a moment touched with pity, as they gazed on the tall veteran ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Softly, sadly, with poignant clearness, the music lifted into the night—low and pleadingly at first; then stronger and more vibrant with feeling, as though sweetly insistent in its call; swelling next in volume and passion, as though in warning of some threatening evil; ringing with ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... scene; and so, upon that day, I found within the little "city of the silent" the identical hill-side, but, with the most scrutinizing search, failed to find the sacred mound holding the most hallowed form of the home group, and over which were shed the bitter tears of childhood's grief, more poignant and more lasting than we usually attribute ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... hopes, and, after all, his regard for her was characterized more by boyish adoration than by the deep passion of manhood. To his sanguine spirit the excitement of camp and the responsibilities of his new position formed attractions which took all poignant regret from his leave-taking, and she was glad to recognize this truth. She had failed signally to carry out her self-sacrificing impulse, when he was so ill, to reward his heroism and supplement his life with her own; and she was much relieved to find that he appeared satisfied ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... unhappy, said the philosopher, till you see his end. With Sir Charles Dilke's life clear before us, if the question be put, "Was he happy?" only one answer can be given. He was happy. With a power of suffering which made bereavement poignant, with tragic experience of disappointment and distress, he never lost the faculty of enjoyment: he touched the world at many points, and his contact was complete ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... it like the message of Browning. What he does is to bring before us characters, situations, moods, images, that belong to the permanent and elemental in our nature. These are presented with a sympathy so living, a tenderness so poignant, a humor so arch and so sly, that they become a part of our experience in the most delightful and exhilarating fashion. Part of the function of poetry is to prevent us from becoming sluggish In our contemplation of life ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... be found. It is the pure essence of English conversational style. His works consist only of morceaux—of brilliant passages. I wonder that Goldsmith, who ought to have known better, should call him "a dull fellow." His wit is poignant, though artificial; and his characters (though the groundwork of some of them had been laid before) have yet invaluable original differences; and the spirit of the execution, the master-strokes constantly thrown into them, are not to be surpassed. It is sufficient ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Well, we shall miss you, surely," says Annie. And I am not mistaken; there is a wistfulness in her blue eyes, a poignant regret in her voice that ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... dear Tresham, does the sense of being pleased and amused blunt our faculties of perception and discrimination of character, that I can only compare it to the taste of certain fruits, at once luscious and poignant, which renders our palate totally unfit for relishing or distinguishing the viands which are subsequently ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of their tenderness! To live with Sidwell—to breathe the fragrance of that flower of womanhood in wedded intimacy—to prove the devotion of a nature so profoundly chaste! The visionary transport was too poignant; in the end it drove him to a fierce outbreak of despairing wrath. How could he dream that such bliss would be the reward of despicable artifice, of calculated dishonour? Born a rebel, how could his be the fate of those happy men who are at ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... seems both literally and figuratively, a golden land golden and gay. It is a land full of contradictions however. For those amazing memorials from a prehistoric past give it in places a strange air of tragedy. I challenge this grey old earth to produce a strip of country more beautiful, also more poignant and catastrophic in natural connotation, than the one which includes these cypresses of Monterey. Yet this same mordant area holds Point Lobos, a headland which displays in moss and lichens all the minute delicacy ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!'" Safety still; the voice came not. But the sound of his own repetition of the words brought him an eerie tremor; for the mist of a memory came with it; nothing tangible, nothing definite, but something very far away and shadowy, yet just poignant enough to give him a queer feeling that he was really keeping an appointment here. Was it with some water-sprite that would rise from the river? Was it with a dryad of the sycamores? He knew too well that he might ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... I marked the poignant sorrow in each high tree tongue, Conferring there above me where the blue moss hung; Till anguish grew from far away and broke in sullen roar, As when a smoking surf meets a ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... however, when day dawned it was found she was able to come into Boulogne under her own steam. After driving some cases over there, I went to see the remains in dry dock. It was a ghastly sight, made all the more poignant as one could see trunks and clothes lying about in many of the cabins, which were open to the day as if a transverse section had been made. The only humorous incident that occurred was that King Albert was arrested while taking a photo of it! I don't think for a moment they recognized ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... face. It was quite vacant, but the body expressed that she was waiting, waiting. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sped across the room like a swallow. I never forgot it. She was very thin, very pathetic, very young, and the movement was as poignant ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... was Shakspere. Laberius played in his own dramas. Shakspere did the same. Laberius' name corresponds etymologically, as regards meaning, to the root-syllable in Shakspere's name. Could Jonson, who was so well versed in classics, have made his satirical allusion plainer or more poignant? In Crispinus, both Shakspere's curly hair and the offence of application, plagiarism, or literary theft, with which he is charged by his antagonist, are manifestly marked; St. Crispin being noted among the saints for his filching habits. He made shoes for the poor from materials stolen ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... throw Upon the smouldering braziers, love and hate: And chaunt the grieved verses of a dirge For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms: With perverse moods I trouble you, and urge The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms, Some reverie, some pang of a damasked sword, Some poignant moment yet unparalleled In my dream-broidered chronicles, some chord Of mystery Love's music never knelled Before;—but nought of the rough alchemy That ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... he did not publish himself. It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them, all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to the battle in which he seemed to himself ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... of poignant despair, an unformed, inarticulate sense of calamity, seemed to run from end to end of the line. What had happened? Those in the rear, unable to read the placard, surged forward, a sense of bitter ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... had hitherto preserved with the utmost solicitude. She had scarcely left the room when the bride entered it accompanied by her mother, who casting her eyes on this splendid mantle, surveyed it with feelings of the most poignant remorse, and immediately recognized the testimony of her crime. She questioned the chamberlains, who were unable to explain the appearance of an ornament they had never before beheld; she then interrogated Le Frain, and, at the end of a short examination, fell into a swoon, exclaiming, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... unproductive branches. And so with Evie, as she stood talking to the cook. Though she could take up her mother's work inside the house, just as the man could take it up without, she felt that something unique had fallen out of her life. Their grief, though less poignant than their father's, grew from deeper roots, for a wife may be ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... hands lay peacefully on the little shabby bag. Her little feet in the ill-fitting shoes just reached the ground. In a way it was all so familiar. And yet he felt that if he touched her he would find out that this was not Christine at all. This was something that had belonged to her—as poignant, as heart-rending as a dress that she ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... not be imagined that to all men-of-war's-men this summons conveys such poignant emotions; but it is hard to decide whether one should be glad or sad that this is not the case; whether it is grateful to know that so much pain is avoided, or whether it is far sadder to think that, either from constitutional hard-heartedness ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... ... we take to be a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt. Peer's return to Solveig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem. It would be impossible to the Ibsen of to-day, who knows (none better) that No man can save his brother's soul, or pay ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her mind to ask her father to allow her, knowing well that he would consent to that or to any other wholesome wish of hers. But then came the thought that he would be all alone at home; and following that came another thought, and one of more poignant feeling. He was alone now! Already, for many days, she had left him, for the first time in her life! Stephen was quick to act; well she knew that at home there would be no fault found with her for a speedy return. Within a few hours she had brought her visit ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... As a child his lot was to do various chores on his father's farm. In driving the cows he had to go barefoot, perforce, by reason of poverty, and often thistles bruised his feet—a trial which seems to have left such a poignant and indelible impression upon his mind that when testifying before a United States Senate investigating committee forty years later he pathetically spoke of it with a reminiscent quivering. His father was, indeed, so poor that he could not afford to let him go ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... reverie of anything else between it and "Almayer's Folly." The only doubt I suffered from, after the publication of "Almayer's Folly," was whether I should write another line for print. Those days, now grown so dim, had their poignant moments. Neither in my mind nor in my heart had I then given up the sea. In truth I was clinging to it desperately, all the more desperately because, against my will, I could not help feeling that there was something changed in my relation to it. "Almayer's Folly" had been finished and done ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... blemish of even an impure thought, had gone to make up the sum of her existence. As a reward for all these virtues she was now called upon to bear the burden of an unspeakable anguish. What keener joy could she know than that which had come to her through her love for Dic? What agony more poignant could she suffer than the loss of him? But, putting Dic aside, what calamity could so blacken the future for her, or for any pure girl, as marriage with a man she loathed? We often speak of these tragedies regretfully and carelessly; but imagine yourself ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... phantasms of the living which coincide with a crisis in the experience of the person seen, and those which do not, it is obviously necessary to reject all evidence of people who were ill, or anxious, or overworked, or in poignant grief at the time of the hallucination. It will be seen later that neither grief nor amatory passion (dominating the association of our ideas as they do) beget many phantasms. Our business, however, is with the false perceptions of persons trustworthy, as far as we know, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... slowly through the park to the chalet. The moon was shining with all its brilliancy, the air was soft, and the two women, visibly affected, found encouragement, of a sort, in the things of nature. The mother stopped now and then, to rest her daughter, whose sufferings were poignant, so that it was well-nigh midnight before they reached the path that goes down from the woods to the sloping meadow where the silvery roof of the chalet shone. The moonlight gave to the surface of the quiet water, the tint of pearls. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... he had embezzled a small amount of the funds of a corporation in Newville, of which he was paymaster, for the purpose of raising money for a pressing emergency. Various circumstances showed that his repentance had been poignant, even before his theft was discovered. He had reimbursed the corporation, and there was no prosecution, because his dishonest act had been no part of generally vicious habits, but a single unaccountable deflection from rectitude. The evident intensity of his remorse had excited ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... black hair loose about her, her white arms outstretched to the moonlight, her face—exquisite as a flower—upturned to meet the glory. She was like a dream too wonderful to be true, save for the passion that lived in her eyes. That was vivid, that was poignant—the fire ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... the cry of that profound satisfaction which is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so poignant from those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that she asked leave to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw her were filled with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible outburst of a heart too full; and though ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... all the poignant relish of these vivacious natives, to whom such a stinging incident was an important event, also shows the personal freedoms taken on these occasions by a man of genius, entirely in the spirit of the ancient Roman ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the soul extends about men." It is a subtle and characteristic saying, and it might have been used by the dramatist as a motto for his Pelleas et Melisande; for not only does it embody the central thought of this poignant masque of passion and destiny, but it summarizes Maeterlinck's attitude as a writer of drama. "In the theatre," he says in the introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's l'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, "I wish to study ... man, not relatively ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... 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 ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away, Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each change of scene some unseen hand is ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... least poignant regrets in her mind was that she could tell no one of her good fortune. Not that Mlle. Fouchette was bavarde, but happiness unshared is ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of Light. Nature accommodates itself to every man's necessity. If the eye is maimed, so that it does not see the beauteous face of day, the touch becomes more poignant and discriminating. Nature proceeds through practice to strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... farm kitchen Railton was sitting moodily by the fire and his wife's face was sternly set. They are not an emotional people in the dales, and her trouble was too deep for useless tears, but as she glanced about the room all she saw wakened poignant memories. The old china in the rack had been her mother's; she had brought it and the black oak meal-chest to Mireside thirty years since. The copper kettles and jelly-pan were wedding presents, and Tom, her son, who died in Australia, had sent the money to buy the sewing machine. Now ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... be, superfluous to say that Miss Frederica Coppinger viewed with disfavour, that was the more poignant for its helplessness, Larry's adoption and ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... most poignant of these experiences, which occurred during the first few months after our landing upon the other side of the Atlantic, was on a Saturday night, when I received an ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London, and also saw for the first time the overcrowded quarters ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... such terms, and such words have been applied to his labours in that cause, and to the administration generally of his own diocese, by one of the very high English Church papers, as have been to me a cause of deep sorrow and poignant regret. ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... affection for his family was three-fourths sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwell was mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story more grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would go to his ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... iv. 29). But in another sense, too, there was judgment at death. The sorrow of the survivors, like the decease of the departed, was to be considered as God's doing, and therefore right. Hence in the very moment of the death of a loved one, when grief was most poignant, the survivor stood forth before the congregation and praised God. And so the Burial Service is named in Hebrew 'Zidduk Ha-din,' i.e. 'The Justification of the Judgment.' A few sentences in it ran thus ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... now had a vague sense that weapons of wood were unworthy to the point of being contemptible and ridiculous, and he employed them only when he was alone and unseen. For months a yearning had grown more and more poignant in his vitals, and this yearning was symbolized by one of his most profound secrets. In the inner pocket of his jacket, he carried a bit of wood whittled into the distant likeness of a pistol, but not even Sam Williams had ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... rack thy head, no urging would'st thou need To make thee lap Narcissus' mirror up." I was all fix'd to listen, when my guide Admonish'd: "Now beware: a little more. And I do quarrel with thee." I perceiv'd How angrily he spake, and towards him turn'd With shame so poignant, as remember'd yet Confounds me. As a man that dreams of harm Befall'n him, dreaming wishes it a dream, And that which is, desires as if it were not, Such then was I, who wanting power to speak Wish'd to excuse myself, and all the while Excus'd me, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... reproach to the novice as he sat by candle-light at his table giving shape and utterance to dreams which did not foretell penalties, nor allow any intimation to reach him of the disillusionings sure to come, sharp-edged and poignant, with the awakening day. The rocky coast of realities, with its shoals and whirlpools, which encircles the sphere of dreams, is never visible till the sun is high. You are not ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... about 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 ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end. He feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death. For it seemed to him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless pit. But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy: the cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes—and when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... vanity, un-reined imaginations, and no judgments at all, we next commence half-wits, and then think we have the whole field of knowledge in possession, and despise every one who takes more pains, and is more serious, than ourselves, as phlegmatic, stupid fellows, who have no taste for the most poignant pleasures of life. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... dismissed an old admirer until she had secured several new ones, and generally consoled those who had served her by a present of twenty or thirty thousand serfs. On the death of Lanskoi, it is recorded of her that "she gave herself up to the most poignant grief, and remained three months without going out of her palace of Czarsko Selo," thus perpetrating a very curious practical satire upon the holiest of human affections. Her grenadier lover Potemkin, according to the character given of him by the Count Segur, was little better than a gigantic and ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... surprise my father, he must have felt a poignant disappointment; but perhaps he knew that surprise was a ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... square face came a puzzled defiance. If he had not been early taught his station he would evidently have found some poignant retort. An intoxicated humblebee broke the silence by buzzing into Biddy's fluffed-out, corn-gold hair. Tod took it off with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... net Ulysses $1.25 net The Sin of David $1.25 net Poignant dramas which, according to the best critics, mark their author as the greatest writer of dramatic verse in England ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... very innermost recesses of his mind. Crane and Dunark scarcely breathed as the three-dimensional picture in the visualizer varied from a blank to the hazy outlines of a giant space-cruiser. It faded out as the unknown exerted himself to withstand that poignant inquisition, only to come back in, clearer than before, as Seaton advanced the potentiometer still farther. Finally, flesh and blood could no longer resist that lethal probe and the picture became sharp and clear. It showed the captain—for he was no less an ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... himself, for he knows himself to be inspired by the same great Spirit which animates the whole world of which he is himself a part. And having in this faith made his decision, he girds himself for the poignant battle of love. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of its own accord. She looked at the last words she had written and shut the book. Yes, she was near to all humanity; but nearer than any to one who was all the world to her. Suddenly she felt, with poignant intensity, the nearness not only of his body to hers, but the nearness of their souls. Her spirit and his touched in the silence of the forest. She did not look at him yet, but she knew that he was looking at her, and that his heart was in the look, calling to hers. And she could ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... towards me. Let me know what they are willing to think and ready to do under such unparalleled circumstances as have now occurred. I will wait your time, and their time; I will abide by your decision and their decision, pronounced after the first poignant distress and irritation of this day's events ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... and scarcely a day, passes, but contributions are solicited from the poorer traders of the Jews, to which the most indigent add their pence, with the true feelings of Jewish benevolence, in the hope of mitigating the poignant sufferings of the applicants. "The charity which plenty gives to poverty is human and earthly, but it becomes divine and heavenly ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... 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 ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... within him, a fierce feeling, a poignant and violent sensation of cold in his whole body, in all his limbs, as if his bones had suddenly been turned to ice. Oh! if he were to resemble Limousin and he continued to look at George, who was laughing now. He looked at him with haggard, troubled eyes, and he tried to discover ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant |
