"Poignantly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tragedy, it is a romance. It belongs on the plane below, the plane of stories told to meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. On this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly, for it is poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from calling a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary error of calling a good and readable story bad because it is not a ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the hand with which he was signalling to the sommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more poignantly than a more heroic figure. "No more champagne, please, Nelson. Besides," she suddenly added, "it's ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... She was a little narrow in her complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too—too worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was, at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name. Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had been caught in an ugly net of circumstance. A great deal had been upset since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently separated; old boundaries no longer defined, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... gardens, even the very people that Hugh met in the streets, seemed to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds, or even on raw ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 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 question ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... the sacred circle. And then she stood quite still. What she had 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 ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... be more imposing than his volatile and caustic criticisms on the works of James I.; yet it appears to me that he had never opened that folio volume he so poignantly ridicules. For he doubts whether these 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, they are both nothing more than extracts printed with those separate titles, drawn from the King's "Basilicon Doron." He had probably ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... had been entertaining a vision of himself escorting this battered and bloody young person to a home of shrieking feminine relations, and poignantly surmising the sort of welcome apt to be accorded the good Samaritan ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... drawing him toward some hole in the cave, probably under water, and he realized most poignantly that something must be done shortly or he would be sacrificed to the pitiless ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... wind blue keenly over the brown, bare hills, the grey clouds hurried from the north over the pale evening sky, one brilliant star shone out like a golden gem before him. Once he would have admired its beauty, now the sight of it only awoke more poignantly the memory of his meeting with Valmai in the "Velvet Walk," and with a frown he withdrew his gaze from it. Here was the spot where he had first seen her! here was the bridge upon which they had shared their ginger-bread! and oh! cruellest of all sounds, there was the Berwen ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... and he could not bear to return to Woodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he had had such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the only place he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantly to live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was the only home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at their next meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the library tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... 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)
... daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead, whom he could find only in ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly meeting Sonny in all friendliness, suffered poignantly in secret. Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry, careless, laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle perplexed at her husband's increase in ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... a jealous woman's frenzy, she drew a knife upon him and stabbed him in the neck, with the intent to kill him. Being muscular, he quickly disarmed her, though he afterward suffered from the wound poignantly. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... think poignantly of Isabel: he had seldom been able to "see" her more clearly than as he sat looking out of his compartment window, after reading the account of this accident. She might have been just on the other side of the glass, looking in at him—and then he ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... impassive as a thing of marble, what time Fra Gervasio—who was my father's foster-brother, as you shall presently learn more fully—sank his head upon his arm and wept like a child to hear the piteous tale of it. And whether from force of example, whether from the memories that came to me so poignantly in that moment of a fine strong man with a brown, shaven face and a jovial, mighty voice, who had promised me that one day we should ride together, I ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... the brush into the bargain. He had once saved a man from drowning on the coast of Cornwall. He had come into his title unexpectedly, and made his new tenantry adore him. To crown all, he had, at a still poignantly recent date, practically refused the hand of an English heiress. But he had never before shot a bear, nor indeed had he ever seen one outside the Zoo. As he steadfastly regarded the heap of brown fur, a sinister doubt invaded ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... 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 ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... felt quite affectionately towards it, as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange lands. The immutability of things, as compared with the constant fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly. Here was this rock—cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago and washed by the waves of a million tides—still unchanged and changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in little more ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... of the Progress Literary Club party. And the tale tells how, after a paper by Donna Violet Balboa on "Spanish Architecture—Then and Now", Colombo sang to them the song of the land of Colombo's imagining. And poignantly beautiful was the song, for in it was the beauty of a poet's dream, and the eternal loveliness of that vision which men have glimpsed in all ages if ever so faintly. And when he had finished, the eyes of Colombo were wet with tears, for into this poem had he woven the dreams of his disillusionment. ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... that's all over, now. You must try to make your life what they think it is—those good people that love you! And I'll try, too!—I do try. And you mustn't cry, my little sweetheart," Chris added, with a tenderness so new, and so poignantly sweet, that Norma was almost faint with the sheer joy of it, "you mustn't blame me for just saying this, this once, because it's for the last time! We mustn't meet——" His voice dropped. "I think we mustn't meet," he repeated, painfully ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... 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 ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's The Azalea. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... properly staged, the dances of witches, etc., are fantastic and full of interest. For two hundred years every musician has admired Dido's lament, "When I am laid in Earth"; and indeed it is one of the most poignantly sorrowful and exquisitely beautiful songs ever composed. There are plenty of rollicking tunes, too, and the dance-pieces—with the dancers—are exhilarating and admirable for their purpose. The musicianship is as masterly ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... there anything more like the 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
... all good!" urged the man at a moment when it was too poignantly, too openly certain that Bean could hold ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... constraints, he followed the colonel into the 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 ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... wheat was burning. He was ruined. His wheatland must go to Anderson. Kurt thought first and most poignantly of the noble farmers who had sacrificed the little in their wheat-fields to save the much in his. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Instantly his brain cleared. A moment before he had been hopelessly drunk: now, he was sober. It was as though the delicate scent had entered his nostrils and cleansed his brain, clearing it of the befuddling fog, and leaving it, wholesome, alert, capable. Poignantly, with the scent of those flowers, the scene of a year ago leaped into memory, when he had stooped to restore them to her hands—there in the tiny glade ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... 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
... prevailing 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 Carrie" ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... voice stirred Rhoda as had his eyes. For the first time in months Rhoda felt poignantly that it would be hard to be cut down with all her life unlived. The mellow voice ceased and Cartwell, rising, ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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 served ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... 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 on her arms ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... to 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 daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising problems ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... heavens. Villages there seem none; 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 accustomed to the fat flatness of Flanders, to the market-bustle of a Flemish ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... wife and I—became suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse in her life—and was now perhaps too old to make a ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... a despised stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon, provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is by cozening ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... with this skeleton behind the door of their hearts, fearful at every moment! Does it seem good in the scheme of existence, or a blot there, that those who are themselves innocent, but who are yet the real sufferers, whether punishment to the culprit fall or fail, should be made thus poignantly miserable? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... young man seen before anybody whose charm went so poignantly to the root of his emotions. Every turn of the head, the set of the chin, the droop of the long, thick lashes on the soft cheek, the fling of a gesture, the cadence of her voice; they all delighted and fascinated him. She was a living embodiment of ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... he was 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
... was full of 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 had jolted into his place. He ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... Bill Mr. FELL and other Members for East Anglia represented very poignantly the woes inflicted upon their constituencies by the air and sea raids. Fishermen and lodging-house keepers were alike deprived of their livelihood. Could not the Government do something for them, either by billeting soldiers or by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... Mary Gabriel, to embroider the new altar-cloth for the Chapel. She talked more eagerly about a stitch she is learning from Mary Gabriel, than about any of those by-gone memories, which certainly had seemed most poignantly revived in her; and I had no small difficulty in turning her mind from the all-absorbing question as to how to obtain the right tint for the pomegranates. My lord, to a mind thus intent upon needle-work for the Altar of God, I could scarce have brought ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... the door, trying to smile, but making, I fancy, rather sorry work of it, for the sight of her loveliness brought home to me the more poignantly the cause ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... side, and the fatal cart in the back-ground. Having been brought up genteelly, she declines the mode of conveyance provided for her journey to Tyburn with the utmost volubility. Being about to be hanged merely does not seem to affect her so poignantly as the disgraceful "drag" she is doomed to take her last journey in. She swoons at the idea; and the curtain falls to end her wicked career, and the sufferings ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... 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 Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... deed was swallowed by her anxiety to shield the murderer; and she experienced a vague relief—felt but not considered—at being freed from the incubus of Gourlay's tyranny. It seemed, too, as if she was incapable of feeling anything poignantly, deadened now by these quick calamities. But that she, that Tenshillingland's daughter, should come to be an object of common charity, touched some hidden nerve of pride, and ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... heart-breaking tragedy to its close, suffering poignantly the grief of each lover, suffering death for each, and feeling her life desolated when the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... committee, had taken the other side. They had both been country boys—one from Ogle County, the other from the ague belt of Indiana—and their hearts warmed to Jared's display over on Broad Street. Their eyes filled, their breasts heaved, their gullets gulped, their rustic boyhood was with them poignantly once more. They murmured that English was a hidebound New-Englander who was incapable of appreciating the expansive ideals of Western life, and that Gowdy, city-born and city-bred, was wholly out of sympathy with the sturdy aims ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... had 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
... 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
... is broken. Committing her soul to the Virgin, she takes her way slowly back to the castle, the hand of death already heavy upon her, after bidding farewell to Wolfram in a passage which, though not a word is spoken, is perhaps more poignantly pathetic than anything Wagner ever wrote. Alone amid the gathering shades of evening, Wolfram sings the exquisite song to the evening star which is the most famous passage in the opera. The last strains have ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... consequences 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 ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... in rapt motionlessness, I fall to wondering—If ever this silence should fail to contain itself, if the expression for which this hour has been seeking from the beginning of time should break forth, would a profoundly solemn, poignantly moving music ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... finds: The hunter's horn and hounds the forests wake, The shipwrecked sailor from his hulk is swept. Or, washed aboard, just misses perishing. Adultresses will bribe, and harlots write To lovers: dogs, in dreams their hare still course; And old wounds ache most poignantly ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... rest. A pale moon suffused the country, 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 heart route. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the end with veiled eyes. He read Werner much more accurately than Werner read him. But most poignantly of all he realised the hopelessness of submission, at least for the leaders. There was nothing now but to carry the fight through—no other hope for himself. Also he discovered a fresh goad ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... which, without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description fabulous." The "Autobiography" and "Thraliana" tell a widely different tale. The mortification of not finding herself appreciated by her husband was poignantly increased, during the last years of his life, by finding another offensively preferred to her. He was so fascinated by one of her fair friends, as to lose sight altogether of what was due to appearances or to the feelings of ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... inditing of a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made unto the king." . . . She recited the opening lines very quietly, but her voice lifted at the third verse. Beautiful words always affected her poignantly, but the language of the Bible more poignantly than any other, because her own unforgettable injury had been derived from it and sanctioned by it, and because at the base of things our enemies in this world are dearer to us ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Motyer, held the incident a joke; one only possessed imagination sufficient to guess what these public events must mean to the father of Abel. Indeed, Estelle certainly suffered more for Raymond than he suffered for himself. She pictured poignantly his secret thoughts and sorrows at this challenge, and she could guess what it must be to have a child who hated you. In her maiden mind, however, the man's emotions were exaggerated, and she made the mistake of supposing that this grievous ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... 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 ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is writ to 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 the last new novel, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the scathing intention lurking in these soft low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much sinister emphasis as he ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... de Police on night-duty, and ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind; because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most undesirable publicity. He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly mocking air and not even looking at me. One can't hit like that a man who isn't even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of Sunday-supplement stories. Who will picture Lower Fifth Avenue between five and six, when New York's unsung beauties pour into the streets from a thousand loft-buildings? Theirs is no mere empty pink-and-white prettiness. Poverty can make prettiness almost poignantly lovely, for it works with a scalpel. Your Twenty-sixth Street beauty has a certain wistful appeal that your Forty-sixth Street beauty lacks; her very bravado, too, which falls just short of boldness, adds a final piquant touch. In the face of the girl who works, whether she be a spindle-legged ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the young millionaire more poignantly was the thinly veiled hint that the Duke de Metuan had also sailed for America as one of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... lodgings, which he might do without any scandal to gentility; he will 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 ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Archer Converse looked forth over those bowed and bared heads. The most of them were gray heads, and toil-worn hands were clasped in front of those men. And when at last the faces were raised to his there was an appealing earnestness in their gaze which touched him poignantly. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... among his own kind. Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... overcome by bodily pains that I could not say within myself, while I lifted my thoughts to heaven, 'Come what may of this ray.' And great as these gains have been, I could not dream of comparing them with those sufferings of the soul that we feel so profoundly and poignantly in the recognition ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... almost poignantly when a young lady in a Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. She really looked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... burst of sincerity. It completed his bewilderment, but he was not at all angry now. He was as if benumbed by the fascination of the incomprehensible. She stood before him, tall and indistinct, like a black phantom in the red twilight. At last poignantly uncertain as to what would happen if he opened ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... with Louis came like a summer cloud over the ineffable brightness of her sky, and she felt a sharp pang at her heart; still, she thought, it was different with Louis. His feeling for her could not be so strong as to make him suffer poignantly over her refusal. She was almost convinced that he had asked her more from a whim of good-fellowship, a sudden desire, perhaps a preference for her close companionship when he did marry, than from any deeper emotion. In consequence of these reflections her musings ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... She wrote her letter in a little glow of rescue, and was proud of the tact of that reference to his "fall down the steps"—for she reasoned that the self-esteem of any boy of nineteen must suffer poignantly over the memory of being knocked down by his father before the eyes of a strange girl. She wrote her note and ran down the stairs, then stopped to wonder how she could get it promptly to Dickie. It was intended as a poultice to be applied after the "bawling-out," and she could ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... with the chalk showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky 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 quite dead ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... has artistry, but it is its sincerity which gives it its value. Here are the little sharp experiences of life mirrored poignantly, sometimes feverishly, always truly. Each lyric is an instantaneous photograph of one of the many moments in existence which affect one briefly perhaps, but indelibly. Mr. Braithwaite says in his introduction that this author engages "life at its most reserved ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... and anon, in the mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack-the-whip with the necks and heels of their adoring lady friends; but such was not found to be the case. In all these essential and traditional regards the assembled Innocents were as poignantly disappointing as the costers of London had ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... accident had provoked her mother's untempered 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 shrinking that ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... accidental death; (4) he may hear noises as of a coffin being hammered; (5) he may see a living person dwindle to the size of a child, and anon expand to normal bulk. As Johnson remarks, many of the seers declared themselves poignantly afflicted by what they saw. Aubrey tells of a clairvoyant who asked the presbytery to pray that the gift (or curse) might be taken away. Instant ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... don't interest him. Eleanor! if you want to keep that boy, urge him to go out and have a good time, without you!" Then she added some poignantly true remarks: "My dear father used to say, 'Just as many men are faithless to their wives because their wives have plain minds, as because other women have pretty faces.' Well, I'm afraid poor dear mother's mind was plain; that's ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized poignantly was utterly independent and careless of me, as me; and that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... 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
... fine weather, Aunt Dorothy used to sit, and the door-step on which the white kitten used to gambol. But the shutters were closed, and the door was locked, and there was an air of desolation and a deep silence brooding over the place, that sank more poignantly into Martin's heart than if he had come and found every vestige of the home of his childhood swept away. It was like the body without the soul. The flowers, and stones, and well-known forms were there; but she who had given animation to the whole ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... of coldness;—and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her own utter loneliness in the world; and she was just now strung up to such a nervous tension, that she would almost have consented to wed Lord Roxmouth if by so doing she could have saved any ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... complexity of civilisation. He was so fierce 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 his eyes open for general facts. Wherever ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy of it was that he loved his wife—the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what she must put away from herself ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... loggia of Peter's house I'm bathed in a soft breeze that is heavy with a fragrance of flowers, the air is the air of our balmiest midsummer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a mocking-bird is singing for all it's worth. It seems a poignantly beautiful world. And everything suggests peace. But it was not ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... 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 ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... desire was the most devilish of man's enemies and the chief sign of his degradation. He could imagine no such unruly urgence in man's perfect estate, when Adam and Eve still dwelt in Paradise. But with man's fall sexual desire appeared as the sign and seal of human debasement. This theory is poignantly set forth in Augustine's City of God. He furnished therein a philosophy for the monks, and doubtless his fourteenth book was well thumbed by those who were wont to ponder somewhat wistfully on one of the sins they had fled the world ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... marriage with 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... her to him and half lifting her from her feet had begun with gentle force to bear her away. She made no violent resistance which indeed would have been quite vain in his powerful clasp, but burst into tears, crying poignantly: ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... she could not tell him, how poignantly she had sensed the menace of the cold and darkness during his illness. For the first time in her life she had realized to the full the unrelenting enmity of the clouds, the wind, the night; and during ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... was born 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 hated to ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... fascinating face. He interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had never sat beside such an irrepressible vitality. Like a bird to a succession of swinging boughs, he hung upon the golden utterances of his old chieftain and political mentor concerning a subject so poignantly dear to the experiences of one and the imagination ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... quickly could be done a second time. If only he had not struck the lad! If only he had commanded himself, and spoken him fairly and sent him back! Almost by this time the remedium might be here. Ay, here, in the palm of his hand! The reflection stabbed Blondel so poignantly, the sense of his folly went ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... been most poignantly mortifying to the fallen favourite was, that, in the course of her journey, she met with her greatest enemy, (Necker) who was returning, triumphant, to Paris, called by the voice of that very nation by ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... stalking-horse 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
... 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 ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... 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 integrity the fortress of his own soul, into which, when necessary, he ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... roomy house in Hyde Park Gardens, and the war was over. And she adored him and he was passionately fond of her. And she was always having children; she enjoyed having children; she demanded children; she had a child every year and there was never any trouble. And he never admired her more poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born, when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the French Renaissance Virgin in marble that stood on a console in his drawing-room at the Albany.... Such was G.J.'s ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... "modern," as if there is any particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience! But before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so freely, so profoundly, so poignantly. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... 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 Dick had been instrumental in visiting ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... blackbird was singing deliciously, yet less poignantly sweet than he should sing at dusk. There was a mysterious stir and flutter of spring in all the coppices. A quiet south wind marshalled the pearly clouds before it as though it were a shepherd driving a flock to ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... English, tapestry may mean almost any decorative stuff, and so comes it that we speak of the wonderful hanging which gives name to this chapter as the tapestry of Bayeux (plates facing pages 242, 243 and 244), when it is in reality an embroidery. But so much is it confused with true tapestry, and so poignantly does it interest the Anglo-Saxon that we will introduce it here, even while acknowledging ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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 ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... whatever was thought to be lost. So it has been with our music, so with the splendour of our armies, so with the fabric of our temples, so with our deathless rhymes. The old, when they are wise, can do for men younger than they what history does for the reader; but they can do it far more poignantly, having expression in their eyes and the living tones of a voice. It is their business to console ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... There was an instant's flutter of white from a stateroom port, but he was not 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 ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... 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 look ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... obviously toward my humble abode. My heart seemed to turn a somersault. I should have known that car if I had met it in Bagdad. It was a long blue motor, polished to the last notch, deeply cushioned, luxurious, poignantly familiar, the car, in short, that I had pursued to Bleau, and that later, in flat defiance of President Poincare or the Generalissimo of France, or whoever makes army rules and regulations, I had guided through the war zone to ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 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
... such a book as Mr. HARRY DE WINDT'S Russia as I Know It (CHAPMAN AND HALL); but honestly their appropriateness cannot be denied in view of the author's peculiar knowledge of the too mysterious country on which interest just now is so poignantly concentrated. He has not only traversed Siberia as few, even Russians, have done—that is an old though still thrilling story—but he has ranged at large over the whole country from Finland to the Crimea ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... to find some bud of comfort on which to fix her longing eye; she beheld, in the total loss of William, nothing but a wide waste, an extensive plain of anguish. "How am I to be sustained through this dreary journey of life?" she exclaimed. Upon this question she felt, more poignantly than ever, her loss of innocence: innocence would have been her support, but, in place of this best prop to the afflicted, guilt flashed on her memory every time she flew for aid ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... her feet to the fire, snugly rolled in his saddle blankets. But though her eyes were heavy, her brain was still too active to permit her to sleep immediately. The excitement of her adventure was too near, the emotions of the day too poignantly vivid, to lose their hold on her at once. For the first time in her life she lay lapped in the illimitable velvet night, countless unwinking stars lighting the blue-black dream in which she floated. The enchantment of the night's ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... unreality produced in the mind of the mature and experienced by a girl creature, can only be equaled by the intensity of the sense of realness in the girl herself. That centre of the world in which each human being exists is in her case more poignantly a centre than any other. She passes smiling or serious, a thing of untried eyes and fair unmarked smoothness of texture, and onlookers who have lived longer than she know that the unmarked untriedness is a sign that so far "nothing" ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that afternoon I could not help laughing at my absurd antipathy against Bourgonef. All his remarks had disclosed a generous, ardent, and refined nature. While my antipathy had specially fastened upon a certain falseness in his smile—a falseness the more poignantly hideous if it were falseness, because hidden amidst the wreaths of amiability—my delight in his conversation had specially justified itself by the truthfulness of his mode of looking at things. He seemed to be sincerity itself. There was, indeed, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... which all of our statesmen, from Washington down, have been exposed. Its final refutation comes from examining the entire public career and the character of the person accused. To any one who knew what Roosevelt's life had been, and who knew how poignantly he felt the national dangers and humiliation of the past three years, the idea that he was playing politics, and merely pretending to be terribly in earnest as a patriot, is grotesque. And I believe that no greater disappointment ever came to him than when he was prohibited from going ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... immediately following George Eveleth's death the two women who loved him found themselves separated by the very quality of their grief. While Diane's heart was clamorous with remorse, the mother's was poignantly calm. It was generally remarked, in the Franco-American circles where the tragedy was talked of, that Mrs. Eveleth displayed unexpected strength of character. It was a matter of common knowledge that she shrank from none of the terrible details it was necessary to supervise, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... stamped there again—indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. There is a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, though, as they do in a play. He ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... on his shoulder, that suddenly and poignantly reminded him of when Sylvia's hand was there, ceased for a moment, and ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... culture; every syllable, every lapse of his rude dialect, was as distinct as if he had been taught to speak in this way; his tones were low and even, and modulated to suave cadences; the ear experienced a sense of relief after the loud, strident voice of the miller, poignantly penetrating and pitched high. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... been 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 ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... emotion contained in this little drama, where the low mentality of the characters is rendered with the mastery which Gorky usually shows in creating his elemental heroes. Among other works that should be noted are "Cain and Arteme," so poignantly ironical in its simplicity, "To Drive Away Tedium," "The Silver Clasps," "The Prisoner," and that little masterpiece, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," in which we see twenty-six bakers pouring out an ideal and mystical love on Tanya, the little embroiderer, who they believe, is as pure ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... night, for now the general distress was brought home to them more poignantly than ever. At dawn they learned that these people were actually dying of neglect. The faint light betrayed the presence of new corpses lying upon the station flagstones. From those still living, groans, sighs, sick mutterings rose until O'Reilly finally dragged his youthful companion ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... 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 his ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... and accost the hurrying girl, raise his cap, then pour into her outstretched hand the gold he had taken, would have known at once that here was an every-day exercise of natural politeness. Not so the cashier. The farther he got from the bank, the more poignantly did he realize that these two in front, both strangers to him, had, by their combined action, lured him, pistol and all, away from his post during the dullest hour of the day. It was not the decamping with those few pieces of gold which ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... (There was nothing to laugh about; there never is. The writer puts it in from habit—automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable laughter." This makes the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... England—most characteristic of the war poems of Nizamat Jung—we see traces of the influence of more than one of the English poets he has read so lovingly. But the poem is none the less poignantly personal. The same may be said of the Sonnets here prefaced; for although they are related to the sonnets of earlier poets whose work must be familiar to the writer, yet they are in no sense imitations, nor ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... happiest stanzas is only less admirable than the Vanneur de Ble, with which more than any other single poem the memory of Du Bellay is associated. The personal note, which is in general absent from the poetry of Ronsard, is poignantly and exquisitely audible in the best pieces of Du Bellay. He did not live long enough to witness the complete triumph of the master; in 1560 he died exhausted, at ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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, ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... danger for you, and for the youths you are to educate, so poignantly that I venture to write with ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... poignantly than Mr. Fisbee, but no one was less capable of doing something of his own initiation. And although the Tuesday issue was forthcoming, embarrassingly pale in spots—most spots—Mr. Martin remarked rather publicly that the items ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... equestrian statue of Jackson which has been erected here since 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 life in the ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... even though she regretted having asked it. How would he bear his solitude, she wondered with an aching heart; and a sudden great longing arose within her to go and comfort him, as she alone possessed the power to comfort. All selfish considerations departed with the thought. She realized poignantly all that Sir Beverley had visualized when he had told her that very soon his boy would be all alone. She knew fully why he had pressed upon her the task of helping Piers through his dark hour. He had known—as she also knew—how sore would be his need of help. And ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell |
