Poignant Quotes - Page 3

• Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

  Elie Wiesel

  Littles, Violin, Next

  Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel (2012). “Night”, p.134, Penguin UK

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• Beauty is at its most poignant when the cold hand of Death holds poised to wither it imminently.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Hands, Cold, Kushiel's Dart

  Jacqueline Carey (2011). “Kushiel's Dart”, p.14, Pan Macmillan

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• I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Men, Agony, Gold

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.145, Penguin

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• There’s something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. You’re free to float to the moon and evaporate or sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean. But you’re free to explore. Some people confuse that with drifting, I suppose. I like to think of it as growing.

  Deborah Smith

  Inspirational, Ocean, Insperational

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• More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, Hands, Years

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• Men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

  Emma Goldman

  Religious, Men, Silence

  Emma Goldman (1983). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”, Schocken

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• I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Loneliness, Night, Feeling Lonely

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby'”, p.48, Cambridge University Press

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• With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

  Angela Carter

  Girl, Wall, Flower

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• It's fun singing with other people who are really good singers. There's something kind of poignant about braiding a couple vocals.

  Eddie Vedder

  Couple, Fun, People

  "Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam" by Josh Modell, www.avclub.com. November 06, 2002.

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• What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant.

  Patti Smith

  Intelligent, People, Being Positive

  "Patti Smith: 'I love Portland ... it's a real book town'". Interview with Jeff Baker, www.oregonlive.com. January 31, 2010.

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• She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.

  Jane Austen

  Regret, Stronger, Appearance

  Jane Austen (1833). “Sense and Sensibility: A Novel”, p.119

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• If I am content to heal a hurt slightly, saying "Peace, peace," where is no peace; if I forget the poignant word "Let love be without dissimulation" and blunt the edge of truth, speaking not right things but smooth things, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

  Amy Carmichael

  Forgiveness, Peace, Hurt

  Amy Carmichael (2003). “If: What do I Know of Calvary Love?”, p.27, CLC Publications

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• If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Friendship, Moving, Doors

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• At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Grief, Past, Profound

  Joris-Karl Huysmans (2015). “Against the Grain: (À rebours)”, p.111, BoD – Books on Demand

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• Pete Rose is too rich a character to fit on a bronze plaque. He requires a good, trenchant, poignant (ah, Petey) book, and this is it.

  Roy Blount, Jr.

  Book, Character, Rose

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• So in the end, was it worth it? Jesus Christ. How irreparably changed my life has become. It's always the last day of summer and I've been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. I'll grant you I've had more than my share of poignant moments. Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door.

  George Jung

  Summer, Jesus, Horse

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• Humans and other animals experience love and fear, and form deep emotional bonds with cherished companions. We mourn when a close friend dies, and so do other animals, as Barbara King's poignant book illustrates in compelling detail. How Animals Grieve helps us to connect and to better understand the complex social lives of other animals and of ourselves.

  Gene Baur

  Kings, Book, Animal

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• My fellow Americans: Last night when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that the troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join me in prayer:
  Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization. . .

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Prayer, Fall, Struggle

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Wall, Grief, Giving

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• Jerusalem Maiden is a page-turning and thought-provoking novel. Extraordinary sensory detail vividly conjures another time and place; heroine Esther Kaminsky’s poignant struggle transcends time and place. The ultimate revelation here: for many women, if not most, 2011 is no different than 1911, but triumph is nonetheless possible.

  Binnie Kirshenbaum

  Struggle, Pages Turning, Thought Provoking

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• A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.

  T.C. Boyle

  Mind, Culture, Looks

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• Success is transient, evanescent. The real passion lies in the poignant acquisition of knowledge about all the shading and subtleties of the creative secrets.

  Constantin Stanislavski

  Success, Real, Lying

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• Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Stars, Book, Writing

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• Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

  Diane Ackerman

  Love, Summer, Beach

  "A Natural History of the Senses". Book by Diane Ackerman, 1990.

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• I bow in reverence before the emotions of every melted heart....The more intense the delight in their presence, the more poignant the impression of their absence....When the tears of bereavement have had their natural flow, they lead us again to life and love's generous joy.

  James Martineau

  Life And Love, Heart, Grieving

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