Poignancy Quotes

A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.

V. Vale

Tattoo, Eye, Unique

V. Vale, Andrea Juno (1989). “Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual”, V/Search

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It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.

Betty Smith

Grieving, Light, Rivers

BETTY SMITH (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

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Don't fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.

Paul Tsongas

Giving, Depth, Granted

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There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book, Men, Dust

F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.308, e-artnow

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It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.

Tracey Ullman

Sadness

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The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred

Allen Ginsberg

Floating, Fleeting, World

Aperture, Richard Avedon, Eric Fischl, Allen Ginsberg (1985). “The Human Street: Photographs”, Aperture

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Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Quiet, Dogma, Sometimes

Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). “Save Me the Waltz: A Novel”, p.129, Simon and Schuster

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There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Father, Anger, Giving

Elizabeth Gaskell (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Illustrated)”, p.1967, Delphi Classics

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But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

Anne Lamott

Wind, Grace, Want

Anne Lamott (2013). “Thanks: The Second Essential Prayer”, p.7, Hachette UK

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To all that he touched he gave a new meaning, a new color, a new outline, a new loveliness, and a new poignancy.

Frederick Delius

Music, Color, Touched

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There are many facts within fiction. This captivating story provides invaluable insights into the childhood of a girl who has Asperger’s syndrome. Fiction allows the author to explore different perspectives and add poignancy to the experiences of sensory sensitivity and being bullied and teased of someone who has Asperger’s syndrome. The title Delightfully Different describes Asperger’s syndrome but also the qualities of this novel.

Tony Attwood

Girl, Perspective, Childhood

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There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

Richard Wilbur

Morning, Honesty, Fall

Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.385, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It's as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives.

Michael Leunig

Lying, Heart, Media

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Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.

Ron Rash

Philosophical, Writing, Character

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I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

Martin Amis

Eye, Tears, Cinema

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The beauty in the story is at one with suffering. That is also part of our upbringing - we don't think there could be beauty
otherwise. Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end - therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is
singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further.

Joan Chen

Thinking, Suffering, Stories

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...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.

Martha Graham

Latin, Teaching, Drawing

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No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way.

Simon Roberts

Photography, Agonizing, Way

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There was nothing the matter with me that was not also the matter with everyone else. I was not as interesting as I thought I was. My major problem, inadequate or inappropriate love from my parents, was as common as dirt. And one rainy day, all the boring poignancy of these realizations detonated in me like an atom bomb, burning the dead shadow of each former torment or preoccupation onto solid rock. Those silhouettes, that record would remain: the museum where I used to be.

J. D. Daniels

Rainy Day, Rocks, Museums

J. D. Daniels (2017). “The Correspondence”, p.25, Random House

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I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.

Dana Spiotta

Mistake, Realization, Realizing

"Dana Spiotta’s Age of Innocence". Interview with Jeff Vasishta, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 11, 2016.

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Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now...that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.

Joseph Campbell

Unique, Giving, Facts

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I've always been obsessed with penetrating the female psyche. When I shoot, I'm like a tornado. I never sit down, never take a break, never eat. I'm focused on getting that moment of revelation, of insight, of poignancy, of meaning.

Joyce Tenneson

Photography, Female, Tornadoes

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The sages say that life is illusion, but does that change its poignancy?

Ming-Dao Deng

Life, Change, Doe

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It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time.

Roger Ebert

Crush, Girl, Teenage

Roger Ebert (1997). “Roger Ebert's Video Companion”, Andrews McMeel Pub

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As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.

Stefan Zweig

Fall, Reality, Drawing

Stefan Zweig (1955). “Stories and Legends”

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