"Poignantly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Old! Ring in the New! Carley had poignantly felt the sadness of the one, the promise of the other. As one by one the siren factory whistles opened up with deep, hoarse bellow, the clamor of the street and the ringing of the bells were lost in a volume of continuous sound that swelled on high into ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country became one of the most poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... grow moist. She felt glad and poignantly sad at the same time. She would have liked to kiss and bless the other woman, for now it was clear that he had come to claim her ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... realized this more 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 ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Moses and Elias. Perhaps, too, the difference between the calm serenity of the mountain, and the hell-tortured misery of the plain—between the converse with the sainted perfected dead, and the converse with their unworthy successors—made Christ feel more sharply and poignantly than He ordinarily did His disciples' slowness of apprehension and want of faith. At any rate, it does strike one as remarkable that the only occasion on which there came from His lips anything that sounded like impatience and a momentary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the business world, 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 ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... 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
... to the woman he has chosen. Sad, with my heart brimming over with sweet memories and sweeter prophecies, and all its tiny crevices so filled with love that discontent can find no entrance there! Lonely, when the vision of the beloved is so poignantly real in absence that his bodily presence adds only a final touch to joy! Dull, or sad, when in these soft days of spring and early summer I have harboured a new feeling of companionship and oneness with Nature, a fresh joy in all her bounteous ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of contentment 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 ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... miraculously, 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 ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... distressing degree. Their nourishment consisted entirely of the vegetables of their garden and the milk of one cow, which gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it. They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially the two younger cottagers, for several times they placed food before the old man when they reserved none ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... left without his natural material for 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 or of his fellows along with ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... moment! Does it seem good in the scheme of existence, or a blot there, that those who are themselves innocent, but who are yet the real sufferers, whether punishment to the culprit fall or fail, should be made thus poignantly miserable? We know nothing. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... disheartened by ideals of perfection which can be achieved only by those who run away. Nature, that 'thrifty goddess,' never gave you 'the smallest scruple of her excellence' for that. Whatever bludgeonings may be gathering for you, I think one feels more poignantly at your age than ever again in life. You have not our December roses to help you; but you have June coming, whose roses do not wonder, as do ours even while they give us their fragrance—wondering most when they give us most—that we should linger on an empty scene. It may indeed be ...
— Courage • J. M. Barrie
... have 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 whom she ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 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
... then carve a statue. Some boy has revealed to him the beauty of his young strength, and the sculptor moves to immediate expression. He calls his statue David, but the white form radiates the rhythm and glory of all youth. And as we realize youth in ourselves, more poignantly, more abundantly, the mere name of the boy does not matter. The fact that the portrait shows us Carlyle is an incident. Carlyle is the "subject" of the picture, but its meaning is the twilight of a mighty, indomitable mind, made visible and communicable. His ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... obsequious retinue follows him over the lawns of the White Lodge, cooing and laughing, blowing kisses and praising him. Yet do not imagine his life has been all gaiety! The afflictions that befall royal personages always touch very poignantly the heart of the people, and it is not too much to say that all England watched by the cradle-side of Prince Edward in that dolorous hour, when first the little battlements rose about the rose-red roof of his mouth. I am glad to think that not one querulous ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... 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? ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... "The Group" was written, and, according to custom, submitted by Warren to John Adams for criticism and approval, we find him praising Mrs. Warren, and quoting from her play. So poignantly incisive was Mrs. Warren's satire that many people would not credit her with the pieces she actually wrote, and there were those who thought it incredible that a woman should use satire so openly and so flagrantly as she. The consequence is, many of her contemporaries attributed the ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... 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 ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... 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
... answer; but, in fact, Susie's frank analysis of the situation poignantly kindled an imagination which stood in no need of stimulus. Ah, if this were the Golden Age, when love never went astray, how happy we might be! But it is not the Golden Age—far from it! Meanwhile, I think I can assert, with a clear conscience, that no dishonorable ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 why I always ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... was heightened 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 have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... to 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Ballymartin was so lonely, now 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 ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... 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
... of his unspoiled manhood. The girl he wished to make his wife had been taken from him. She had removed herself far from his kindness and care, but he could not cease to offer her the care she needed more poignantly ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... which was high, to move 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 ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... quality to Larry in that second voice. But he did not try to place it then: he was too poignantly concerned in his own situation, and in the ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... with her admirable art some emotion secret from him. He knew this—felt it intuitively, though he did not understand; and the knowledge affected him poignantly. What place had dissimulation in their understanding? Why need she affect what ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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" has ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... wept, it was because, forsaken, I felt perhaps more poignantly than some The blank eternity from which we waken And all the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... to one of the candles flanking the inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper Faxon remarked again the strange emaciation, the premature physical weariness, of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed his nephew's hand, and if it were not poignantly visible ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... too, which was afterwards fatally realized, that many of us should never meet again, was calculated to embitter my leave-taking, even more poignantly. Of the friends who were then around me at Sierra Leone, the greater number are now no more; the principal persons amongst whom are the following: Colonels Lumley and Denham; Mr. K. Macauley (member of council); Mr. Barber, Mr. Leavers, Mr. Reffel (acting ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... doubt whether a book of similar merit could command such a following to-day; and I will even confess that I have myself never read the concluding parts, and do not know to this day who the woman was or what were the wrongs from which she so poignantly suffered. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... 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
... 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 that ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... parts, it is not difficult; it is entrancingly beautiful; 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 ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... 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
... voice seemed somehow to drive out the very thought of 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 to her like a man who had been smitten down in the pride ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... The 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. Never could ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... mind—intimately connected. The first was to carry on that general story of the British effort, which I began last year under your inspiration, down to the opening of this year's campaign. And the second was to try and make more people in this country, and more people in America, realise—as acutely and poignantly as I could—what it is we are really fighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; what are the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflicted on France, in particular, ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and improvements, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... rose and fell, until the amen came as a full stop. Then the little troop was marshalled two and two, made a collective obeisance to Mrs. Windsor and her guests, and wheeled out of the garden into the drive at a quick step, warbling poignantly, "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Gradually the sound decreased in volume, decreased in a long diminuendo, and at ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 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 ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... 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, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... though, to have him confess that she had had a great deal to do with it. She was taken with the self-cruel fancy to lay bare and contemplate his love for her, that she might feel more poignantly the happiness she had lost. But he abruptly turned again to leave, and all else was forgotten ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... world is gray— Grown prudent and, I guess, more witty. She's cut her wisdom teeth, they say, And doesn't now go in for Pity. Besides, the melancholy cry Was that of one, 'tis now conceded, Whose plight no one beneath the sky Felt half so poignantly as he did. ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much sinister emphasis as he was ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... 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
... methodical habits, ever have told how long their voyage lasted. It passed, unreal and timeless, in a glorious mist, a delighted fever: the background a blur of glossy white bulkheads and iron rails, awnings that fluttered in the warm, languorous winds, an infinite tropic ocean poignantly blue; the foreground, Miss Forrester. Her white figure, trim and dashing; her round blue eyes, filled with coy wonder, the arch innocence of a spoiled child; her pale, smooth cheeks, rather plump, but coming ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness only makes ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... of his last words had caused that uncontrollable 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Gratcher, and she became supremely lovely to the little boy when she permitted him to guard her from it, instead of running home across the lawn when it was surely coming;—a loveliness he felt more poignantly at certain reflective times when he was not also afraid. For, the Gratcher being his own invention, these moments of superiority to its terrors ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... to him as she never could have written to any man in 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 after to-morrow. Those verses she wrote ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... infinite in his 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 ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... nerves tingling, 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 actually ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in the dingy parlor of the place and listened to the jarring talk of the commercial travelers. Already Galavia and the months which had been, seemed receding into an improbable dream, but the misery of their bequeathing was poignantly real. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... 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, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... consciousness, and he could not consent to abase himself before the untoward and discordant facts. He did not disguise from himself, however, that, if he might have chosen earlier, he would have avoided the ordeal of the meeting, from which he shrank in anticipation. Already he was poignantly conscious of the heavy draughts it made on his composure, and he raged inwardly to note how his fingers trembled as he stood before the rack of guns, now and again a weapon in his hands, feigning an interest in examining the construction first of ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 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
... he was, the experience of these days was hardly happiness. It went too deep; it brought him too poignantly near to all that is most real and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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, ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... her a good deal of pain, and she relinquished all hope of sleep. Her thoughts began to circle about Burke Ranger in a worried, confused fashion. She felt she would know him better when she had seen Guy. At present the likeness between them alternately bewildered her or hurt her poignantly. She could not close her mind to the memory of having taken him for Guy. He was the sort of man—only less polished—that she had believed Guy would become. She tried to picture him as he must have been when younger, but she could ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... and white prairie flowers—her flowers. 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 beside ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... "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 ... ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a 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 ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... only those lovers were dominant in my imagination whom I had witnessed in the act that had so poignantly affected me. My delight now took the form of imagining myself strapped to the thighs of the person while ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... like these from pallid lips pierce a loving listener's heart more poignantly than steel. They sound romantic, perhaps, in books; in real life they ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... been tortured since his youth by inexplicable aversions, by shudderings which chilled his spine and made him grit his teeth, as, for example, when he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactions had long persisted. Even now he suffered poignantly when he heard the tearing of cloth, the rubbing of a finger against a piece of chalk, or a hand touching a bit ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... just far enough, at that hour, to put us in heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of times to arrive anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems homelike then. The dusk has snatched from you the silent companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone. It is the hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when most he shrinks from himself, though he want another near. It is then the rays of the house lights wander abroad and appear to beckon the ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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
... 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." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain,—dingy, uncontrovertible old recitation rooms where young ideas flashed bright and futile as parade swords,—elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms! Book-history, ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... handing him the book. "My heart is 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 than friends. They ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual; the ebb was occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment. Hannah had told me in the morning there was a letter for me, and when I went down to take it, almost certain that the long-looked for tidings were vouchsafed me at last, I found only an unimportant note from ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... marriage, "to a degree of 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 ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... with Sister 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 ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... wife. In more than one autumn, after his stay in the Forest of Dean was completed, he made a journey through Switzerland to the Italian lakes. He journeyed under a resolution not to visit any gallery of pictures, for these must recall too poignantly the companionship which had made the special joy of all his picture-seeing. But he sent his companions that they might compare their impressions with his memory, always astonishingly vivid and exact. The sights to which he gave himself were sun ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... 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
... humble, ['A] Kempis speaks more poignantly than even David, in that great cry of the heart and ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... pang, my dear Smiles, to reflect that the fame to be won here, the honour of having popularised HIM, here on the confines of his native Arden, will never be associated with the name of Mortimer. Sic vos non vobis, as the Mantuan has poignantly observed. But for the sake of the children— and, by the way, how do my bantlings find themselves this morning? Tol-lollish, I trust?—for the sake of the children it was necessary, as we used to say with the Pytchley, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 an easy peace ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of All the World—before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... materials. Had the plan been carried into execution, we have no doubt that Voltaire would have produced a book containing much lively and picturesque narrative, many just and humane sentiments poignantly expressed, many grotesque blunders, many sneers at the Mosaic chronology, much scandal about the Catholic missionaries, and much sublime theo- philanthropy, stolen from the New Testament, and put into the mouths of virtuous ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... very 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 emotion filled ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... lying with 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 loveliness ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... the special and singular duration of some such space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour—so poignantly that you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it to the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of the world in their hands—your seniors. You remembered the duration ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... The praise made Sally poignantly happy, but he was fair and just enough to say it was rightfully due to Aleck rather than to himself, since but for her he should never ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... convey the emotion contained in this little drama, where the low mentality of the characters is rendered with the mastery which Gorky usually shows in creating his elemental heroes. Among other works that should be noted are "Cain and Arteme," so poignantly ironical in its simplicity, "To Drive Away Tedium," "The Silver Clasps," "The Prisoner," and that little masterpiece, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," in which we see twenty-six bakers pouring out an ideal and mystical love on Tanya, the little embroiderer, who they believe, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... manner of a man preoccupied, a plump, pink left hand. With his right hand he held up and flaunted, for exhibition, a drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they beauties?" he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour, nothing less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... 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 me, and that I had always depreciated ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... a home for her father and cousin at 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 ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 it seemed to make the aged ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... millionaire more poignantly was the thinly veiled hint that the Duke de Metuan had also sailed for America as ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... full in compassion for her. She would court again his light and soothing caresses, his gentle ministrations, so different from the brutal pawing of the male animals of her own race, the moiety with souls. Ah, how poignantly sweet, how amazing, that which to her American sisters was the usual, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... upon having a home, a real home—But he could not trust himself to think much along that 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
... 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 possible mischief occurring to John ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... to admit that Mr. Woods did not toss feverishly about his bed all through the silent watches of the night. He was very miserable, but he was also twenty-six. That is an age when the blind bow-god deals no fatal wounds. It is an age to suffer poignantly, if you will; an age wherein to aspire to the dearest woman on earth, to write her halting verses, to lose her, to affect the cliches of cynicism, to hear the chimes at midnight—and after it all, ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... at his wife with reverence. In such moments he realized, almost too poignantly, her ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... which whistled through the trees. A host of fantastic clouds filled the sky. They looked like animals, and were always changing shape. The ground, as well as the leaves and branches of the forest trees, still held traces of heavy dew or rain during the night. A poignantly sweet smell of nature entered his nostrils. His pain was quiescent, and ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... way 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, under the branches of that oak where I had first ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dog of a Jew, and still more every general reflection on Jewish usury, avarice, and cruelty, I felt poignantly. No power of imagination could make me pity Shylock, but I felt the force of some of his appeals to justice; and some passages struck me in quite a new light on the Jewish ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... 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
... feels a bit squeamish about applying these phrases even to 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 (the only two parts, by the way, which he has made me thirst to visit), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... become poignantly distasteful to him. He wished to get away; to be alone. He was conscious that a possibility had passed out of his life, the thought of which had been very dear to him. He wanted to think, to plan against this new condition. In discussing Inez with this man, in this way, he felt he was degrading ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... 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
... wandered away, in relief against the western sky. Rowland passed back into the convent, and paused long enough in the chapel to look for the alms-box. He had had what is vulgarly termed a great scare; he believed, very poignantly for the time, in the Devil, and he felt an irresistible need to subscribe to any institution which engaged to keep him at ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... Consolidated Fund Bill Mr. FELL and other Members for East Anglia represented very poignantly the woes inflicted upon their constituencies by the air and sea raids. Fishermen and lodging-house keepers were alike deprived of their livelihood. Could not the Government do something for them, either by billeting soldiers or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... second time that I neglected a favourable opportunity of making that confession, and as I had regretted having allowed the first occasion to pass unprofited, so was I, and still more poignantly, to regret ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... own insignificance so poignantly as when he strolled through the City streets at their busiest hour, and was unrecognised even by the bareheaded clerks who dashed madly in all directions, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... light and find it. But where could he discover a safe spot; his problem was a dual one; primarily, he must consider himself; he must not forget his own desperate situation and danger. The train, beginning to slacken, brought the sense of it once more poignantly to mind. His companion hadn't reached the station yet but he suddenly rose. The car stopped with a jerk; Mr. Heatherbloom murmured something hurriedly and dived ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... handicap in life was her immense capacity for suffering—suffering poignantly, unbearably, not only for her own sorrows but for the sorrows of others. Only those who appealed to her in trouble knew the depth of her sympathy, and how absolutely she shared the burden of the grief. But perhaps they did ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... simply "to stand by" and wait where this woman was concerned. After all, it was but the reapplication of a lesson learned long ago for the support and solace of another woman, by him supremely loved. To act thus was, therefore, not only natural but poignantly sweet to him, as a new and gentle offering laid upon the dear altar of his dead. It rejoiced him to find that now, as of old, the demand created a supply of silent but sustaining moral force, ready to pass into the sphere of active help ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the question, she laid one gloved hand upon the table; and though the Prophet's eyes were fixed upon the Scitsym, he was conscious in every fibre of the appeal the unstudied gesture made—as he was poignantly conscious of the clear eyes, the soft dark ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... under the maternal wing, amid her Royalist relatives and acquaintances, close to the King's head-quarters. Crippled already, like other Royalist families, by necessary contributions to the King's cause, the Powells had begun to be aware, and more poignantly than others because of their more straitened means, that their sacrifices were likely to be all in vain— that Parliament was to be master, and to have the power of pains and penalties over those whom it called Delinquents. Especially after the shattering ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... 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 ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... dazed resignation. For her natural horror at the 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 made her writhe ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown |
