"Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated, and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence. He is now much recovered from his illness and is continually on the deck, apparently watching ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... heap on the sofa, with his head deep in the cushion as though he sought escape from the light. Again the feeling of harbouring some small animal in pain came to him, and he frowned. The mute misery of that huddled form held a more poignant appeal ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the right angle, and his life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." The chief characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid, sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk's in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talleyrand's in our own, poignant without effort. His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee: terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... social sympathy could never melt: With stern command to Albert's charge he gave To waft Palemon o'er the distant wave. "The ship was laden and prepared to sail, And only waited now the leading gale: 480 'Twas ours, in that sad period, first to prove The poignant torments of despairing love, The impatient wish that never feels repose, Desire that with perpetual current flows, The fluctuating pangs of hope and fear, Joy distant still, and sorrow ever near. Thus, while the pangs of thought ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
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