"Poignantly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... 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, if I may so express it, more natural than it is ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 were not what ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Melody in F," and as the poignantly beautiful strains poured forth from that wonderful violin, she knew that she had her audience with her. Though so intellectual that they themselves were incapable of producing music of real depth of feeling, they could understand and could enjoy ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women. One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... house at 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 been a hearty ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... and he could never know the effect produced on the hard-bitten captain by the soft warm contact of his velvet body. But it made the captain remember back across the years to his own girl babe asleep on his arm. And so poignantly did he remember, that he became wide awake, and many pictures, beginning, with the girl babe, burned their torment in his brain. No white man in the Solomons knew what he carried about with him, waking and often sleeping; and it was because of these pictures that he had come to the Solomons in ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... corner where, above a saloon with a large beer-sign, 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 a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... bear to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that he should wake up in the middle of the night dreaming of her, when he had gone to his bed with a mind filled to overflowing with the sweet presence of Marie-Anne Boulain. And now his mind reached out poignantly into mysterious darkness and doubt, even as the darkness of night spread itself in a thickening ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... frate crossed himself, opened his book, and 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 ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... he abruptly exclaimed, "that there are so few deep convictions to-day concerning the great essentials of Christianity! As I sit here and listen to you belittle God and rend the great truths of His Christ, as announced in His Word, the Bible, I am moved by feelings poignantly sorrowful! The Christ has once been crucified; and will you slay ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and misses', third floor, and she didn't care a thing about the big outdoors or the great open spaces. She didn't even pretend to—at first. A clear-eyed, white-throated, capable young woman, almost poignantly pretty. You sensed it was the kind of loveliness that fades a bit with marriage. In its place come two sturdy babies to carry on the torch of beauty. You sensed, too, that Myra would keep their noses wiped, their knees scrubbed, and their buttons buttoned and that, between a fresh blouse ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... She had suffered poignantly, as may be supposed, before she set the training of a lifetime aside, and consulted a professional expert. But the urbanity and patience of Merton, with the high and unblemished reputation of his Association, consoled ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... aside with the careless hand of a woman to whom the incense of men's devotion has been so freely offered as to have become commonplace. But now the new ring of determination, of something unexpectedly dogged in his voice, poignantly recalled the warning uttered by Lady ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... on the far away coast of Donegal, and who, by reason of certain peculiarities of dress, was suspected to be from the island. In due course, he was recognised as a native of Inishmaan, in exactly the manner described in the play, and perhaps one of the most poignantly vivid passages in Synge's book on "The Aran Islands" relates ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... the season invited. I saw the long, velvety vista of the cypress avenue, the slender feathers of trees in young leaf, the pleasantness of the grass, heard the invitation of a calling thrush, thought poignantly of Virginia, and went out, hoping to see her ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... other side? His honor would like to know. Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desires that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... old familiar road to Abersethin. The 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 ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... 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, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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
... you make melody like that, decent New Englander that you are! It's so poignantly searching-sweet, so sin verguenza (without shame!) El profesor had them play La Golondrina, their national anthem, really, which means merely The Swallow, to start with, but everything else a hungry heart can pack into it. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... If I am there, it is simply as a piece of furniture, like the stove, or the clock, or the centre-table. I am simply tolerated, perhaps as an object of ornament, perhaps as an object of use. This is a humiliating confession; the thought that it is actually true pains me poignantly. ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the Arab girl was of an entirely different world from hers, remote as a creature of another planet. The Agha's daughter was transformed in the eyes of her guest. From a mere picturesque figure in a vivid fairy tale, she became pathetically, poignantly human. Sanda began to hear the call of another soul yearning to have her soul as its friend, and all that was warm and impulsive in her responded. A thrill of expectation stirred in her veins when, on the evening of the third day, after the wind had ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 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 ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... have wept, it was because, forsaken, I felt perhaps more poignantly than some The blank eternity from which we waken And all the blank eternity ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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
... 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
... forbid that I should be severe, or presume to sit in judgment on any poor soul that sought my sympathy! I do not judge,— I simply feel. And my feelings have for a long time, I confess, been poignantly sorrowful." ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... displeasure, a little chagrin, and some wonder, accompanied by the feeling that she wished he had not carried her. She did not quite know why, yet the dependence on him made her restless. Suddenly she wondered poignantly what he thought of her. The more she wondered, the more she wanted to know, and at last she ventured, "Are ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... 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 sources whether ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... 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 errand-girl ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... 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
... beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal— since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its sophistications—though for that matter isn't it all rich ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... and without such turning she could not live. She still walked the streets falteringly, seeking some place; but her heart was gone from the quest. Now, she was sunken in an apathy that saved her from the worst pangs of misery. She had suffered so much, so poignantly, that at last her emotions had grown sluggish. She did not mind much even when her tiny hoard of money was quite gone, and she roamed the city, starving.... Came an hour when she thought of the river, and ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... 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 ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a fellow-sinner was both rash and presumptuous, for there is but one Judge before whose seat we all must give account. Yet, in condemning the authors of the horrible troubles that had befallen France, and which all God's children had felt scarcely less poignantly than Renee herself, sprung though she was from the royal stock, it was impossible not to condemn the duke "who had kindled the fire." Yea, for himself, although he had always prayed God to show Guise mercy, the reformer avowed, in almost the very ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... 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. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 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 number of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... there is more truth in poetry than in history. And this, at least to-day, is perhaps the real value and delight of our churches; I mean those great sanctuaries we call Cathedrals which stand about England like half-dismantled castles and remind us more poignantly than any other thing of all we are fain to forget. There are the indelible words of our history most clearly written. Consider the bricks of S. Martin's, the rude stones of the little church of Bradford, the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... mediocre imagination of its provincial designer. A fine rain had set in before we found the square, and here indeed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction; despite the wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was razed to the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied yet harmonious facades of Flemish houses made familiar by photographs. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hopeful prospects? Must it not even rise strongest upon a thoughtful mind, when her hopes are the fairest? Even her pleasures, were the man to prove better than she expects, coming to her with an abatement, like that which persons who are in possession of ill-gotten wealth must then most poignantly experience (if they have reflecting and unseared minds) when, all their wishes answered, (if answered,) they sit down in hopes to enjoy what they have unjustly obtained, and find their ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... 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 warning of the approaching catastrophe to Heriot, and received his reply after ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... out of the kingdom. There can be little doubt that continued misfortune and disappointment had begun very early to impair his noble mind. For long periods he was a wanderer, lost sight of by his friends and even by his father and brother. There are fragments of his writing extant which show how poignantly he felt the cruelty of his fortune. "De vivre et pas vivre est beaucoup plus que de mourir!" And again, writing to his father's secretary, eight years after Culloden, he says—"I am grieved that our master should think that my silence was either neglect or want of duty; but, ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... of Chilcote's return to his own, Loder tasted the lees of life poignantly for the first time. Before their curious compact had been entered upon he had been, if not content, at least apathetic; but with action the apathy had been dispersed, never again ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... 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 worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... half-called, this book tendencious; but in a certain larger view it is not so. It is the eternal interest of passion working upon passion, not the temporary interest of condition antagonizing condition, which renders "Dona Perfecta" so poignantly interesting, and which makes its tragedy immense. But there is hope as well as despair in such a tragedy. There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... 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
... recurred 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 ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... 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 and ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... of Karamaneh looked up into mine and her hands were clutching me, but the glamour of her personality had lost its hold, for I knew—heavens, how poignantly it struck home to me!—that Nayland Smith was gone to his death. What I hoped to achieve, I know not, but hurling the trembling girl aside, I snatched the Browning pistol from my coat pocket, and with the ray of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... light and shade a more penetrating feeling of mystery and awe than he in his "Virgin of the Rocks." Add to all this, a feeling for beauty and significance that have scarcely ever been approached. Where again youth so poignantly attractive, manhood so potently virile, old age so dignified and possessed of the world's secrets! Who like Leonardo has depicted the mother's happiness in her child and the child's joy in being alive; who like Leonardo has portrayed the timidity, the newness ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... found. As a matter of fact, having climbed the path that ran beneath oaks and through patches of brakes, spleenwort, and lady-ferns, she was astonished to hear a faint, plaintive singing, and stopped to listen. The voice was poignantly thin and sweet, with the frail, melancholy sound she had heard from distant shepherds' pipes in Switzerland. Had she not, after a few seconds, recognized the air, she would have been ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... celebrate men and moods and deeds. It has been found necessary to omit a few of the less important verses in the earlier edition to make room for the most significant of the lyric commemorations of events almost contemporary, and therefore appealing to us more immediately, and perhaps more poignantly. ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... those sad and sweetly ominous notes preliminary to booming out the hour. They always reminded him of the warning bell on a wild and rocky coast, with something of the Lorelei in its cadences: like a heartless woman's subtle allure, poignantly difficult ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... 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 ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... in all our literature more poignantly dramatic than this first part of "Pippa Passes." The strains which Pippa sings here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic. There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... 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
... closes with 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 ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 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 tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirty dollars ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the left sagged a tormented male victim of many ailments meticulously catalogued below, but in too fine print for offhand reading by one in a hurry. The frame of the sufferer was bent, upheld by a cane, one hand poignantly resting on his back. The face was drawn with pain and despair. "For twenty years I suffered untold agonies," this person was made to confess in large print. It was heartrending. But opposite the moribund wretch was a figure of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... 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 in dreams!" ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... circumstances, his object was to stupify recollection to the uttermost. He would fain have shut out both the past and the future, contenting himself as he might with the present, but the thing was impossible. The worm had eaten into his heart, and its gnawings were too painful, not poignantly to remind him of the manner in ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... seemed to him he should never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown race that never can tell its own story. This feeling always moved Siegmund's pity to its deepest, leaving him poignantly helpless. This same foreignness, revealed in other ways, sometimes made him hate her. It was as if she would sacrifice him rather than renounce her foreign birth. There was something in her he could never understand, so that never, never ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... cat-like fervor, "that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise—like two convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... with her hazily for over a week. On Ovid's birthday she had sent little presents to the grandchildren and written to her stepdaughter a letter which she hoped would make her feel that she was still the daughter of her father's house. In doing this she had been poignantly reminded of the birthday fete two years ago, of Perilla's sweetness to her, and of their conversation, so light-hearted at the time, about woman's place in the state. Since then she had been wondering whether she could still ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... 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
... his coming victory over her was poignantly unsatisfying. He tried to picture her—did picture her—receiving the news of Corrigan's defeat, and somehow it left him with a feeling of regret. The vengeful delight that he should have felt was absent—he felt sorry for her. He charged himself with being a fool for yielding to so ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... place, the houses, the fields, the 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 days of winter, when ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to mine only," sighed the minister, with, a retrospective suffering. "Well, what can be done for him now? I feel my complicity with Barker as poignantly as you could wish." ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... a more comprehensive weakness, the greatest in fact which besets his mind, viz. a general tendency to bend to the prevailing opinion of the world, and a constitutional predisposition, to sympathise with power and whatsoever is triumphant. Hence, I could not but regret most poignantly the capital opportunity I had forfeited of throwing in a deep and stinging sarcasm at his idol, just at the moment when we should have been waiting to be turned off. I know Professor Wilson well: though a brave man, at twenty-two ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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, and that she was capable ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... nor any hints of sensuous delights hereafter.* In all the great Buddhist poems, of which the Shu Hsing Tsan Ching is the best example, there is the same deep sadness, the haunting sorrow of doom. To look on beautiful things is only to feel more poignantly the passing of bright days, and the time when the petals must leave the rose. The form of desire hides within it the seeds of decay. In this epic of which I have spoken, Buddha sees the lovely and virtuous Lady Aruna coming to greet ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... walk; but being selected for the throne, it was imperative to make him Dunce all through. To us, there, he is merely a Type; and we judge the strokes of Dryden in their universality, not asking if they were truly applicable to his victim, but whether they express pointedly and poignantly the repulsion entertained by Wit for Dulness. In this enlarged sense and power we feel it as poetry. When the father, encouraging his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had been tossed during the last six months before it was written. He had by his own conduct wound round himself complications from which he could not extricate himself, yet which he could not but poignantly feel. One cannot read of the "wandering stabs of remorse" of which he speaks, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... in company of his secretary, Mr. Hudson, and his 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 ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... question 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 as this came home ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... 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 ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... he had so often played, the bower in which, on 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
... uprushing of joy in Harriet's heart was accompanied with the first agonies of renunciation, was perhaps all the more poignantly sweet because of them. She had not come to this hour without knowing what he meant to her, this quiet man with the splendid mouth and the keen gray eyes, and she trembled now with an exquisite emotion ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... 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 ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... most important assistant and the man upon whom the routine work of the Embassy largely fell, "he acted like a man who was carrying on his shoulders all the sins and burdens of the world. I know no man who seemed to realize so poignantly the misery and sorrow of it all. The sight of an England which he loved bleeding to death in defence of the things in which he most believed was a grief that seemed to be ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... 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
... darkening heavens. Shrilly the youthful voices 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
... was acutely conscious of the clearness of the frosty atmosphere, of the merciless glare of electricity beating upon him from every side from the numberless street lamps and cafe lights. And poignantly he regretted neglecting to mask himself with ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... casually, in the 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 Blogrim's chalk-pit. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... 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 ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 he was, he was intensely observant, but ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 hedge-rows, and make pony and donkey shoes ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... home across the mesa from Albuquerque, sniffed the soft breeze that came from opal-tinted distances and felt poignantly that spring was indeed here. The grass, thick and green in the sheltered places, was fast painting all the higher ridges and foot-hill slopes, and with the green grass came the lank-bodied, big-kneed calves; which ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... that the lady again conceived, and in due time was delivered of a son, whereat Gualtieri was overjoyed. But, not content with what he had done, he now even more poignantly afflicted the lady; and one day with a ruffled mien:—"Wife," quoth he, "since thou gavest birth to this boy, I may on no wise live in peace with my vassals, so bitterly do they reproach me that a grandson of Giannucolo is to succeed me as their lord; and therefore I fear that, so I be ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... 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 ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Bellmore was one of the younger matrons, whose beauty, descent, and wealth gave her a reserved seat in the holy of holies that required no strenuous bolstering. She was generous enough thus to give Mrs. Kinsolving the accolade that was so poignantly desired; and, at the same time, she thought how much it would please Terence. Perhaps it ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... pursuit 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
... to himself that it was awkward—he did not know how he could enter that door and talk to Cherry. And yet he knew that that meeting of Cherry, that the common exchange of words and glances, that the daily trifling encounters with Cherry were all poignantly significant now. Or if he did not fully sense all this yet he felt thrilled to the soul with the knowledge that she was there, back in the shadowy house somewhere, with the pale striped gown and the disordered corn-coloured hair, and that somehow they ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... 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 houseless in; and that must be, in truth, a sorry hostelry ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... 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
... would be a wonderful cosmography. But the novelist, even he who has the courage to write a dull book, can touch but here and there, on the little promontories of daily life, where it seems to him the spiritual lava boils up near the surface and betrays most poignantly the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the measure 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 than before. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... 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, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Pension Frensham struck her now as poignantly pathetic, in its quickness and its absence of ceremonial. Ten steps, and her career was finished, closed. Astonishing with what liquid tenderness she turned and looked back on that hard, fighting, exhausting life in Paris! For, even if she ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Metropolitan Tower began to play those sad and sweetly ominous notes preliminary to booming out the hour. They always reminded him of the warning bell on a wild and rocky coast, with something of the Lorelei in its cadences: like a heartless woman's subtle allure, poignantly difficult ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... more poignantly humiliating than being handled by a man who does not intend to strike. The head of the syndicate began to breathe heavily. Dick walked round him, pawing him, as a cat paws a soft hearth-rug. Then he traced with his forefinger the leaden pouches underneath the eyes, and shook ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky |
