"Poignantly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... susceptible persons, indeed, who had had their sorrows, lived about him; and this sensibility was due in part to the tacit influence of their presence, enforcing upon him habitually the fact that there are those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in a sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of all he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the stair, sounding bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his death in distant India; how ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... dazing and crushing import of his own unwilling instrumentality. At last he inquired slowly, "You mean that my sermon—that the things I said—" There he broke off and the distress in his eyes was so poignantly genuine that Conscience replied softly, "No, it wasn't you. It was Fate, I guess. Even I can't blame you. It only proves that the thing I warped my own life to ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... my last visit. It is now called Jackson Square. The St. Louis Cathedral has been largely rebuilt. I wander through the Cabildo again, visit the old cemeteries, read the names of the dead. The scent of strange blossoms affects me poignantly. I stroll through the parks, and I visit the ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Furrman, jogging home across the mesa from Albuquerque, sniffed the soft breeze that came from opal-tinted distances and felt poignantly that spring was indeed here. The grass, thick and green in the sheltered places, was fast painting all the higher ridges and foot-hill slopes, and with the green grass came the lank-bodied, big-kneed calves; which meant that roundup time was ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... at once answer. The girl in white was indeed strangely, at this moment poignantly, lovely. Some intensity of repressed feeling made her cheek of a white-rose pallor, and her dark eyes, those spots of velvet shadow, mysteriously deep. She had gone where the piano stood in a bower of palm and bamboo, with Signor Ceccherelli seated ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... of what he had done, the one which had come to afflict him the most poignantly was that his enjoyment of life was spoiled. At first he had thought that he never could take pleasure in anything again so long as he should live, that his good times were gone. But as his pliable character rearranged itself to suit the new environment, he began to see that there would come ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... of the Night Who comes with Silence up the coloured vale, Treading low gently, clad in greyish white, Poignantly piping, sound your reedy wail! For Day departed moves in funeral train Tended by Twilight and, in deepest rose, The splendid Sunset melts beneath the main While sweet the Sea-wind with cool softness blows. As when a mother gathers to her breast The child who ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... to him in restless slumber. It was disturbing to him that he should wake up in the middle of the night dreaming of her, when he had gone to his bed with a mind filled to overflowing with the sweet presence of Marie-Anne Boulain. And now his mind reached out poignantly into mysterious darkness and doubt, even as the darkness of night spread itself in a thickening ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... so fascinated, watching that transformation, even mere wonderful than any butterfly's, going on before my eyes; I was so enmeshed in the web of endless duties spun for me by my big poor parish that I did not have time to miss Mary Virginia as poignantly as I must otherwise have done, although my heart longed ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... and"—here he cast a furtive look at the shadow—"I have pinched and trodden on their tails; but I have never killed one. When I grew up, my attitude towards them remained the same, and wherever I went I won the reputation for being the inveterate, the most poignantly inveterate, enemy of cats. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... not receive money from Francis Ardry, and go to Brighton with the sister of Annette Le Noir, though there is nothing ungenteel in borrowing money from a friend, even when you never intend to repay him, and something poignantly genteel in going to a watering-place with a gay young Frenchwoman; but he has no objection, after raising twenty pounds by the sale of that extraordinary work 'Joseph Sell,' to set off into the country, mend kettles under hedgerows, and make pony and donkey shoes in a dingle. Here, perhaps, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... for which should be due sorrow." The girl smiled sadly. She felt poignantly how little ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... death. She had never in her life seen any one so supremely happy. But yet—though she was reassured—there was something else in the atmosphere that disturbed her. She could not have said wherefore, but she was sorry for Monck—deeply, poignantly sorry. She was certain, with that inner conviction that needs no outer evidence, that it was more than weariness and the strain of anxiety that had drawn those deep lines about his eyes and mouth. He looked ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... English soldier. I read it, and dreamt of the time when I should walk the Champs Elysees again. It was growing dusk when I turned back to the noise of battle. There was a white moon in a milky sky. Motor-bikes fled by me, great lorries driven by Jehus from London buses, and automobiles which too poignantly had been Strand taxis and had taken lovers home from the Gaiety. I jogged along thinking very little, but supremely happy. Now I'm back at the wagon-line; to-morrow I go back to the guns. Meanwhile I write to ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... and in that stage set to lowered lights her pallor was accented. From the colorless face shadowy, troubled eyes spoke the misery through which she was passing. The man divined that her pain was more than physical, and the knowledge went to him poignantly by the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... Queenie. Her eyes were red from weeping. A smile that someway affected Van most poignantly, he knew not why, came for ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... this skeleton behind the door of their hearts, fearful at every moment! Does it seem good in the scheme of existence, or a blot there, that those who are themselves innocent, but who are yet the real sufferers, whether punishment to the culprit fall or fail, should be made thus poignantly miserable? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... sudden he was acutely conscious of the clearness of the frosty atmosphere, of the merciless glare of electricity beating upon him from every side from the numberless street lamps and cafe lights. And poignantly he regretted neglecting to mask himself with ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... revel in sleep had passed she did a great deal of languid, undisturbed thinking. She seemed detached from her life, and it passed before her, not poignantly, but merely as something to look upon, quietly muse about. Soon she would step back into it, but now she was resting from it, simply viewing it as an interesting thing ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... Before the turbulence therein involved I stand affrighted as I do before London or the deep sea. I once read an epitaph in a German churchyard: "I will awake, O Christ, when thou callest me; but let me sleep awhile, for I am very weary." Has the human soul ever so poignantly expressed its craving for quietude? I fancy I should have been a heart's friend of that dead man, who, like myself, loved the cool and quiet shadow, and was not allowed to enjoy it in this world. I may not get the calm I desire, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... rate convinced the residents that no one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most. I recall the shrewd comments of a certain sailor who had known the disinherited in every country; of a Russian who had ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... characteristic of the Reverend Orme Leighton that the rancor which came with defeat was not visited upon those members of his clan who had fought against him. But for that very reason it was all the more poignantly directed against that vague entity, the North. Never, while life lasted, would he bow to the dominion of a tyranny, much more, of a tyranny which, by dividing the Leightons, had in a measure ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... little drama, where the low mentality of the characters is rendered with the mastery which Gorky usually shows in creating his elemental heroes. Among other works that should be noted are "Cain and Arteme," so poignantly ironical in its simplicity, "To Drive Away Tedium," "The Silver Clasps," "The Prisoner," and that little masterpiece, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," in which we see twenty-six bakers pouring out an ideal and mystical love on Tanya, the little embroiderer, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... shock of being taken by surprise in a matter so deeply vital to all the nations of the world has made poignantly clear is, that the peace of the world must henceforth depend upon a new and more wholesome diplomacy. Only when the great nations of the world have reached some sort of agreement as to what they hold to be fundamental to their common interest, and as to some feasible method of ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... recollections of Naples, eleven of which you may read in your red-covered Baedeker, or Recollections of Italy, or Leaves from my Note-Book, or Memories of Blissful Hours, and similar productions, I have most poignantly to remember our shopping experiences in Naples. But before launching my battleship I owe an apology to the worshippers of Italy. I can appreciate their rapturous memories. I share in a measure their enthusiasm. To a certain temper Italy would be adorable for a honeymoon ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... some five or six yards away, where she stood with her back to them. It was a darling back—with just enough gold braid to relieve the simplicity, and the tiniest revelation of sage-green. Letty admired it the more poignantly for its cold contempt ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the end with veiled eyes. He read Werner much more accurately than Werner read him. But most poignantly of all he realised the hopelessness of submission, at least for the leaders. There was nothing now but to carry the fight through—no other hope for himself. Also he discovered a fresh goad in his ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... magic moments out of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied with some fair face, or perhaps—being men—with several fair faces, once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably real memory can make them—all but bring them back—how vividly reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure knowledge ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... How well he remembered that moment of restless turning of ledgers and the slight accession of eagerness in the younger clerks, as they followed the long columns of figures down with the forefinger of the left hand—the pen poised in the right. The whole scene smote him poignantly as he stood at the teller's window waiting. And he might have been doing that, he thought! A whole lifetime spent in doing just that and more like it, year in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. "If you should send for me I'd come," she ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... for getting near a stag? this, too, when ten to one some cormorant on the tree of knowledge, some staid-looking publisher in decent mourning, is complacently pocketing the profits, and modestly charging you with loss? and this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibility on some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, even if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I must not say like swine,) would ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... deeply excited, and felt poignantly. For some time it tasked all the powers of Ralph's mind, and the seductive blandishments of the maiden herself, to allay the fever of his spirit; when, at length, he was something restored, the dialogue was renewed by an inquiry of the old lady as to the future destination ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... meaning of Raoul's carelessly uttered words and they had hurt her poignantly, but it was no new sorrow. He had told her himself months ago, callously, brutally, sparing her nothing, extenuating nothing. She pressed her cheek against the hand she was holding. She did not blame him, she could only love him, no matter what his life had been. It was Ahmed as he was she ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... an individualist himself that he credited everyone else with purpose and prejudice. He did not realise the vast preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddled kindliness. The mistake of much of Carlyle's work is that it is too poignantly dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; and he did not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throng the background of the stage. Neither did he ever go about the world with ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... outcry is explained by his own statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed as largely the expression, monotonous but often poignantly beautiful, of a temporary mood of questioning protest. But if his conclusion is not positive, it is at least not weakly despairing. Each man, he insists, should diligently preserve and guard in intellectual and moral ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... would have believed impossible. The sounds of his bodily anguish reached her from the room above. They stirred her emotion to a passion of helpless, agonizing pity. If she could only go up to him and put her hand on his forehead, and do things for him! But she couldn't; and she felt poignantly that if she did Ranny somehow wouldn't like it. So, as there was nothing she could do for him, she laid her head down ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... sight of her. It was only the reflex of something past. It could be explained psychologically. It was the sort of evanescent sentiment inspired by old songs, or by the scent of faded flowers, reviving old joys tenderly, perhaps poignantly, but fleetingly, insubstantially, and only as the wraiths of what they were. Yes, that was it, he repeated to himself as he lunched. It was nothing to be afraid of, nothing incongruous with the fact that he had left a wife and child in New York. It was not an emotion; it was only the echo, ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... on him as if she were powerless to draw them away. It was sweet—it was poignantly sweet—to be cared for by him, to feel that Jim's warm heart and keen mind were at her service, that the swift smile was for her, the ardour in his eyes was all her own. For perhaps half an hour she rested, almost without speaking, and Jim talked to her with studied ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... imagination when he hunts—whether with his toys or with real weapons. If he flings a stone and kills a toad he is instinctively killing meat for his home in the cave. How little difference between the lad and the man! For a man the most poignantly exciting, the most thrillingly wild is the chase when he is weaponless, when he runs and kills his quarry with a club. Here we have the essence of the matter. The hunter is proudest of his achievement in which he has not had the help of deadly weapons. Unconsciously ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who thinks the majesty ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... sickening suspicion rushed upon him that the doctor was right. She was in the grip of some dreadful delusion. At the same moment he was poignantly aware of her slenderness and fragility, the trembling of her hands. He reached her side, put out his hand to her to find her still staring at ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... children? Were there not moonlight evenings when they sat silent and musing on the stone steps, watching the shadows and the dancing gleams on the swift river, when the air was fragrant with the pink and the lilac? Not melancholy this, nor poignantly sad, but having in it nevertheless something of the pathos of life unfulfilled. And was there not sometimes, not yet habitually, coming upon these faces, faces plain and faces ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cat-like fervor, "that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise—like two convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity for ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... even rise strongest upon a thoughtful mind, when her hopes are the fairest? Even her pleasures, were the man to prove better than she expects, coming to her with an abatement, like that which persons who are in possession of ill-gotten wealth must then most poignantly experience (if they have reflecting and unseared minds) when, all their wishes answered, (if answered,) they sit down in hopes to enjoy what they have unjustly obtained, and find their own reflections ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... celebrate men and moods and deeds. It has been found necessary to omit a few of the less important verses in the earlier edition to make room for the most significant of the lyric commemorations of events almost contemporary, and therefore appealing to us more immediately, and perhaps more poignantly. ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... and experiences with the people who lived in America through the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there would be good ground for despairing ululations. And if our men could not bear it, if it would try their souls too poignantly, let us imagine the effect upon our women. No, let us not imagine it; but rather let us give full credit to the heroic souls of the mothers and the maidens who did actually bear up in the center of that terrible struggle ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... sure whether it was a handkerchief or the end of a wind-waved curtain. He faced about resolutely and did not look behind again. Shame, misery, hopelessness—he did not know which emotion was stinging him most poignantly. The oarsmen in the tender were gazing upward innocently while they rowed, but he perceived that they were hiding grins. His humiliation in that amazing fashion would be the forecastle jest. Through him these new friends of his had been subjected to insult. He felt that he understood ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... my efforts truly and faithfully to interpret the principles and purposes of the country we love, I may have the encouragement and the added strength of your united support? I realize the magnitude and difficulty of the duty I am undertaking; I am poignantly aware of its grave responsibilities. I am the servant of the nation. I can have no private thought or purpose of my own in performing such an errand. I go to give the best that is in me to the common settlements which I must now assist in arriving at in conference with the other ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... remained quiet, aloof, secure from invasion. Handsome young men who fell in love with her—and there were several such—seemed unable to stir any emotion in her, except perhaps, an impatient resentment. Marcia, of course, knew nothing of Glenn Mitchell. But Anne Champneys remembered him poignantly. She had ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Dresden,—what a piece of news! thinks Daun: "You, Zweibruck, Haddick, Maguire and Company, you are 36,000 in Saxony; Finck has not 12,000 in the field: How is this?"—and indignantly dismisses Haddick altogether: "Go, Sir, and attend to your health!" [Tempelhof, iii. 276, 258-261.] News poignantly astonishing to Daun, as would seem;—like an ox-goad in the lazy rear of Daun. Certain it is, Daun had marched out to Gorlitz in collected form; and, on Saturday afternoon, SEPTEMBER 22d is personally on the Heights (not Moys Hill, I should judge, but other points of vision), ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... unspoiled manhood. The girl he wished to make his wife had been taken from him. She had removed herself far from his kindness and care, but he could not cease to offer her the care she needed more poignantly ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... the other day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal— since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its sophistications—though for that matter isn't it all rich and precious sophistication?— ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... and you may drive for an hour without meeting more than a stray peasant cutting scrub or quarrying gravel on the hill-side, a train of mules carrying charcoal or faggots; the towns are far between, bleak, black, filthy, and such as only to make you feel all the more poignantly the utter desolateness of these mountains. No sadder way of entering Italy can well be imagined than landing at Ancona and crossing through the Apennines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... acquired." How heartless was the polished cynicism which could dare to hazard this false criticism! Nothing can be more imposing than his volatile and caustic criticisms on the works of James I., yet he had probably never opened that folio he so poignantly ridicules. He doubts whether two pieces, "The Prince's Cabala," and "The Duty of a King in his Royal Office," were genuine productions of James I. The truth is that both these works are nothing more than extracts printed with those separate ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... expository,—entirely objective and concrete. Surely this is the most artistic means of portraying those elements of character which contribute to external, or objective, events: and even what happens inside the mind of a character may often be more poignantly suggested by a concrete account of how he looks and what he does than by an abstract analytic statement of the movements of his mind. When Hepzibah Pyncheon opens her shop in the House of the Seven Gables, her state of feeling is indicated indirectly, by what she does ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women. One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound—how much less could ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... stupify recollection to the uttermost. He would fain have shut out both the past and the future, contenting himself as he might with the present, but the thing was impossible. The worm had eaten into his heart, and its gnawings were too painful, not poignantly to remind him of the manner in which it had ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Rose's news with no sense of surprise. She felt as if she were living in a dream—a dream which was at once poignantly sad and yet exquisitely, unbelievably happy. "I have been there several times lately," she said, in a low voice, "and I had grown quite fond of her. Of course I'll go. Will you telephone for a fly? I'd rather be alone there, ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... romanticism.... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent. There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty. Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardy in 1896, three years before "Sister ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... a will as resolute, and with a woman's queenly dignity she resolved to keep that soul-realm free. In her outward conduct she was more dutiful and attentive to her father's comfort than ever; but she felt poignantly that for the first time in her life an injunction was laid upon her by one who she so passionately loved which she could not obey. She found much comfort in softly singing to herself in that inviolate ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the new-made mother—never more exquisitely shown, and here the more poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was that he had been taken from her before that ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in The Buried Life, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. Sordello is a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... pictures of the girl, one following another inconsequently. They stabbed him poignantly. He had a white dream of her moving down the street at Tascosa with step elastic, the sun sparkling in her soft, wavy hair. Another memory jumped to the fore of her on the stage, avoiding with shy distress the advances of the salesman he ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... offered him, and things ran smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last fourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressive motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia's death. The finest of them is his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... mind; restless, poignantly yearning. He swung to face the locked door, knowing there could be nothing behind it. The first real fear came to him as he did so. The thing was lonely—the thing that watched him was as lonely ...
— Cry from a Far Planet • Tom Godwin
... the Circle C. The place radiated love, domesticity, kindly good fellowship. The casual give and take of the friendly talk went straight to the heart of the sheepman. This was living. It came to him poignantly that in his scramble for wealth he had missed that which was of far ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not only what ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... plane below, the plane of stories told to meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. On this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly, for it is poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from calling a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary error of calling a good and readable story bad because it is not a ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... incense of praise to the flower lover? Not less individual than the voice of friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to those who live with them, and among roses none impress this characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the silver-pink La France, equally delicious ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... gloried; that he should care to devise no measures for generating a sense of the evil he had done, and aiding repentance as makes forgiveness a necessary consequence; that he should, instead, ruminate how to make him feel most poignantly his absolute scorn of him, his loathing of his all but convict son—this made the man a kind of paternal Satan who sat watching by the repose of the most Christian, because most loving, most forgiving, most self-forgetting mother, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... answer it; and again my hand closed on the knob, unhesitatingly this time, pulling further. That was my answer; and the rejoinder to it was more than I had thought to hear—a whole quick sequence of notes, faint but clear, playful, yet poignantly sad, like a trill of laughter echoing out of the past, or even merely out of this neighbouring darkness. It was so like something I had known, so recognisable and, oh, recognising, that I was lost in wonder. And long must I have remained standing at that door, for I heard the sound often, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... deprived of the power to use them as guides through life. She felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old. And she contemplated the Honora of other days—of the flesh, as though she were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it had been animated and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... what toward the final satisfaction, the justification of a man's life? Bob was still too young, too individualistic to consider the doctrine of the day's work well done as the explanation and justification of all. The coming years would pass as quickly, leaving as little behind. Never so poignantly had he felt the insistence of the carpe diem. It was necessary that he find a reality, something he could winnow from the years as fine gold from sand, so that he could lay his hand on the treasure and say to his soul: "This much have I accomplished." Bob ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... reply. From her concealment Flora, sinking noiselessly again to the carpet, harkened without avail. The soldier—so newly and poignantly hurt that twice when he took breath he failed to speak—gazed on the disclaiming girl until for; very distress she broke the silence: "I—you—every flag of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... protest did not lead to any amelioration of the harsh conditions, a month later the same brave jurist, M. Leon Theodor, appeared in Brussels before the so-called "German Court of Justice" and, in behalf of the entire Magistracy of Belgium, addressed to the Prussian Military Judges the following poignantly pathetic and nobly dignified address, which met with the same reception ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... alive to every sensation, responsive to every impression. The desire of creation, of composition, grew big within him. Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain. Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called this sensation, so poignantly. For an instant he told himself that he ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... round and faced him. The observation had struck home. He realized how poignantly Dick must have endured the loss of Echo and thought of his betrayal by Jack. As he had suffered mentally so Dick must be suffering in the desert. In self-justification he returned to ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... his shoulder, that suddenly and poignantly reminded him of when Sylvia's hand was there, ceased for a moment, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... articulate almost in its grim dogma, as it runs into the line of the first legend in full tumult of gloom. It is followed by the doom slowly proclaimed in thundering tones of the brass, in midst of a tempest of surging harmonies. Only it is all more fully and poignantly stressed than before, with long, resonant echoes of the stentorian tones of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... "madness." It was a higher love, she felt, so much higher, indeed, that it had been too spiritual, too ethereal, to take root in the earthly soil from which her passion for George had sprung. But, if it were not love, why was it that every faint stirring of her emotions revived the memory so poignantly? Why was it that Miss Polly's sentimental interpretation of the doctor's interest evoked the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... through the golden green light under the trees, Antoinette leading, and the sight of the garden brought back to me poignantly the scene in the moonlight with Mrs. Temple. There was no sound save the languid morning notes of the birds and the humming of the bees among the flowers as Antoinette went tremblingly down the path and paused, listening, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... death is more poignantly mental than physical, since the mind, reviewing the acts of the past, anticipates with anxiety and with picturesque vividness the wrongs, scandals, terrors, fears and ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... Captain Bulsted was, an agreeable distraction. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she went to the altar poignantly pale. My aunt Dorothy settled the match. She had schemed it, her silence and half-downcast look seemed to confess, for the sake of her own repose, but neither to her nor to others did that come of it. I wrote a plain warning of the approaching ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your column's tread. "Tramp, tramp, tramp!" through the street. (Ah, dear, it was summer once, and there Were flower scents on the misty air— Honeysuckle and mignonette, poignantly, sadly sweet!) "Tramp, tramp, tramp!" rang your column's tread, And my eyes were dim as I bowed my head; And my heart seemed broken and old and dead, Under your ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... moment the boy gazed away to where the silver of the Southern Pacific rails glinted in the valley. Overland Red's presence brought back poignantly the long, lazy days of loafing and the wide, starry nights of wayside fire, tobacco, and talk. There was a charm in the free life of the road—that long gray road that never ended—never ended in the quiet shade of a mountain ranch or in ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... flash. Let him beware! With a word she could shatter his dream; ay, and so she would. What! sit there and let him turn the knife in her heart and receive the pain meekly? No! It was the thoughtless brutality with which he went about this new affair that bit so poignantly. To show her, so indurately, that she was nothing, that, despite her magnificent sacrifice, she had never been more than a convenience, was maddening. There was no spontaneity in his heart; his life was a calculation to which various sums were added or ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's The Azalea. Here ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hundred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case of the story of Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality. The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as Frederick Walker's Lost Path, or Langhorne's "Child of misery, baptized in tears." That it will ever again be ranked with such may be doubtful, for technique is the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and Crabbe's ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... the tumult of soul in which he had been tossed during the last six months before it was written. He had by his own conduct wound round himself complications from which he could not extricate himself, yet which he could not but poignantly feel. One cannot read of the "wandering stabs of remorse" of which he speaks, without thinking of ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the head of the family. His duty was to sit through the wedding-breakfast which her aunt gave to the bride, and to preside at the feast that welcomed the pair to Schloss Rittenheim. Though the old love could not enter him again, the old torture came back poignantly. ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... in Washington, when the suspense was breathless and the heart of the nation responded in muffled beats to the dull booming of the cannon of Meade and Lee at Gettysburg, an episode occurred, with Lincoln as the central figure, which reveals perhaps more poignantly than any other in his whole career the depths of feeling in that tender and reverential soul. On Sunday evening, July 4,—the fourth day of that terrible battle, with nothing definite yet known of the result,—the President drove out in a carriage, in company with two daughters of Secretary Stanton, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... God forbid that I should be severe, or presume to sit in judgment on any poor soul that sought my sympathy! I do not judge,— I simply feel. And my feelings have for a long time, I confess, been poignantly sorrowful." ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Browning declared once that the news of this unknown singer's death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or less earlier, the tidings of Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... younger matrons, whose beauty, descent, and wealth gave her a reserved seat in the holy of holies that required no strenuous bolstering. She was generous enough thus to give Mrs. Kinsolving the accolade that was so poignantly desired; and, at the same time, she thought how much it would please Terence. Perhaps it would end ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... called, or half-called, this book tendencious; but in a certain larger view it is not so. It is the eternal interest of passion working upon passion, not the temporary interest of condition antagonizing condition, which renders "Dona Perfecta" so poignantly interesting, and which makes its tragedy immense. But there is hope as well as despair in such a tragedy. There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing can harm them more; that ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... desolate in that atmosphere of dimmed sight and muted sound. It was barely sunset, but the chill of the dying year was in the air. The thought came to her, suddenly and very poignantly, of that wonderful night of spring, when she had first wandered along the cliff with the scent of the gorse-bushes rising like incense all around her, when she had first heard that magic, flute-like call of youth and love. A deep and passionate ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... As the wax descended on the paper Faxon remarked again the strange emaciation, the premature physical weariness, of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed his nephew's hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... experimentation for he cannot yet experiment easily in the world of the intangible. Moreover to the child the familiar is the interesting. And it remains so I believe through that transition period,—somewhere about seven years,—when the child becomes poignantly aware of the world outside his own immediate experience,—of an order, physical or social, which he does not determine, and so gradually develops a sense of standards of what is to be expected in the world of nature ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... George Eveleth's death the two women who loved him found themselves separated by the very quality of their grief. While Diane's heart was clamorous with remorse, the mother's was poignantly calm. It was generally remarked, in the Franco-American circles where the tragedy was talked of, that Mrs. Eveleth displayed unexpected strength of character. It was a matter of common knowledge that she shrank from none of the terrible details ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... frenzy, she drew a knife upon him and stabbed him in the neck, with the intent to kill him. Being muscular, he quickly disarmed her, though he afterward suffered from the wound poignantly. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... console those who suffer too poignantly from book-tragedies and "pictures of life." The artist selects, he studies tone and composition, whereas in real life tragedies are often accompanied by "extenuating circumstances." The unloved girl temporarily forgets her sorrow in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the deep sadness of beauty had entered my heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized poignantly was utterly independent and careless of me, as me; and that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto unknown to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... into the loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, how feeble ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... by Marilla Cuthbert, and felt that she could gad shoreward with a clear conscience. Many and delightful had been her shore rambles, sometimes with Gilbert, sometimes with Captain Jim, sometimes alone with her own thoughts and new, poignantly-sweet dreams that were beginning to span life with their rainbows. She loved the gentle, misty harbor shore and the silvery, wind-haunted sand shore, but best of all she loved the rock shore, with its ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... your mood will be when you receive this letter; perhaps at that moment you will not be touched with the emotions I now feel so poignantly, and then you may not read it in the spirit in which it was written. But against that I cannot guard, and the act of writing relieves my feelings at the moment—that is at least what I ask of it. You would not believe ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... smooth, jet-black hair, done close to her pretty head, a clear white-and-vermilion complexion, and a good figure, not too tall. She said little, but everything she did say, she most poignantly meant. If, while you were talking to her, she suddenly cried out: "Ah, that's really good!" there was no doubt you had had the good fortune to amuse her; while if she yawned and left you in the midst of a sentence there was no ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... offered me counsel. In the midst of the assembly, Krishna told me what was for my good, saying, "A truce (tense) to hostilities, O king! Let thy son take the whole kingdom! Give but five villages to the Pandavas!" Fool that I was, for not following that advice, I am now obliged to repent so poignantly! I did not listen to the righteous counsels of Bhishma. Alas, having heard of the slaughter of Duryodhana whose roars were as deep as those of a bull, having heard also of the death of Duhshasana and the extinction of Karna and the setting of the Drona-sun, my heart does not break into pieces. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... she appeared so poignantly desirable. He wanted to seize her in his arms, smother her with kisses, bury his face in her hair. And swiftly upon this desire came the thought that if she appealed to him so strongly, might she not appeal quite as strongly to the rogue? He laid the spoon on the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... changed to something she could not bear to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly invented misrepresentations ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wrath and a sound boxing of ears had quite sobered her enthusiasm. She had fared forth finally upon the adventure with tearful eyes and drooping heart, her mother's frigid kiss of farewell hurting her more poignantly than her drastic punishment of an hour before. For Dinah was intensely sensitive, keenly susceptible to rebuke and coldness, and her warm heart shrank from unkindness with a ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... lips. It was the first time she and Sarah had ever kissed. The contact with that desiccated skin intensified to an extraordinary degree Hilda's emotional sympathy for the ageing woman. She thought, poignantly: "Poor ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... dread as the quiet, solemn tones fell upon my ear, poignantly, as if they must penetrate to my heart. I could not keep myself from sobbing. His face was turned toward me in the dusk, and I covered mine ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... expected to find there she could not have told, but it was gone. The place was unknown to her. She saw an opening among gloomy pines, empty, silent, unreal. No haunted house, no barren moor, no neglected graveyard ever spoke more poignantly, more mournfully, with such utter hopelessness. There was no sign of his or of her former presence. Across the open space something had passed its hand, and it had changed. What had been a trysting-place, a bower, a nest, had become a tomb. A tomb, she felt, for something that once had ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... waited the half-frenzied man noted the absence of certain family portraits and cried aloud, poignantly: "She is packing! She is going away!" And when Mrs. Lambert returned he seized her by the arm, his eyes wild and menacing. "Tell me the truth! ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... if he were her own father, an impulse carried her straight across the hall with noiseless feet to the study door. Without knocking, she opened it softly and crept in. Henry Pym was seated at his writing-table, with his face hidden in his hand; and she saw, perhaps more poignantly than ever before, how the last few ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... tale of La Valliere acquired almost the quality of a legend?—grew in persuasiveness and in magnificence. It was the hour of La Valliere's unwilling ascendancy, and it foreboded also her fall. The situations seemed to me to be poignantly beautiful, especially that in which La Valliere and Montespan and the Queen found themselves together. And Morenita had perceived my meaning with such a sure intuition. I might say that she showed ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... have wept, it was because, forsaken, I felt perhaps more poignantly than some The blank eternity from which we waken And all ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... house of Lord Elmwood, every thing, and every person, wore a new face. He, was the professed lover of Miss Milner—she, the happiest of human beings—Miss Woodley partaking in the joy—Mr. Sandford lamenting, with the deepest concern, that Miss Fenton had been supplanted; and what added poignantly to his concern was, that she had been supplanted by Miss Milner. Though a churchman, he bore his disappointment with the impatience of one of the laity: he could hardly speak to Lord Elmwood; he would not ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Dick's temperament was poignantly romantic, and the natural tendency had been fed and nourished by indiscriminate reading. The Waddy Public Library, in point of fact, was largely responsible for many of the minor worries and big troubles ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... him even more poignantly in the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she forgotten—had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... recalled the empty flapping of the eviscerated cushion, the feeling of impotence as the flames rose again. From among the confused memories of that tragic flare one little figure emerged very bright and poignantly sweet, Edna, crying back reluctantly from the departing ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... him confess that she had had a great deal to do with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and contemplate his love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the happiness she had lost. But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all else was ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... if he had in them written his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... him a vehement sweeping gesture with his arm which emphasized more poignantly than speech the contrast he felt here where we sat—tight, confining walls, small stifling windows, chairs to rest the body, smothering roof and curtains, doors of narrow entrance and exit, floors to lift above the sweet surface of the ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... inside... for "Poor Butterfly" had been the song of that last year. The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly that this was the last spring under ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... library and sat down with him. The colonel, from his chair by the window, regarded his son in a fond approval. Even to his eyes where Jeff was always a grateful visitant, the more so now after he had been so poignantly desired, he was this morning the more manly and altogether fit. But Jeff was not going to ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... of their common and ever-increasing terror of the future. Each left unuttered the actual emptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting of it. Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long since learned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her. And, above all things, he ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... that his father's heavy footsteps no longer sounded through the hall. Sometimes, forgetting that he was dead, Henry would stop suddenly and listen as if he were listening for his father's voice. Since his return from Dublin, he had felt his loss more poignantly than he had before he went away. In the old days, his father would have been at the station to meet him. There would have been a ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... "a barren rascal," and had lashed him into fury; when, white with realisation that the secret was about to escape from his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had gone blindly into the street. Now facing each other for the first time after many months, they remembered all too poignantly that parting. The barren rascal who stood before her was the man who had written every word of Adrian's triumphant second novel, and had given it to her out of the largesse of his love. And he had borne with patience all her imperious strictures and had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... whether a book of similar merit could command such a following to-day; and I will even confess that I have myself never read the concluding parts, and do not know to this day who the woman was or what were the wrongs from which she so poignantly suffered. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs. Linforth wondered whether Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly home as he had stood upon these steps. Or were all these memories ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... whether John Franklin will confirm it, although there is more truth in the charge than I wish there were. In this land, those malignant qualities are ostentatiously displayed. I am made to feel their sting most poignantly. My mind has been taught a lesson in philosophy, and my judgment has gained an accession of experience that ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... line; it induced an absurd desire to weep at his plight. It made him feel like a child lost in a wood. That was silly, just an emotional reaction; nevertheless, the impulse was real and caused him to yearn poignantly for human comfort. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach |
