toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

poignant
in a sentence

show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • ...they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.   (source)
    poignant = sharp or intense
  • And I know, sir, that next to scripts that are Tender and Poignant, you love scripts that have Courage and Integrity.   (source)
    poignant = arouse deep sadness
  • A little girl with gold hoops in her ears and ugly scabs on her brow—did she feel, as he did, goodness and warmth and poignancy when he helped Doc dab iodine on her sores?   (source)
    poignancy = deep emotion
  • He had seen the sadness, the richness, the tragic poignancy of a way of life that each year, bit by bit, slipped beyond memory and was gone.   (source)
    poignancy = intense sadness
  • She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.   (source)
    poignantly = sharply or with intense feeling
  • At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.   (source)
    poignant = sharpest (filled with feeling)
  • His earliest recollection was of great branches of lilac, standing in white jars, and they filled the house with a wistful, poignant smell.   (source)
    poignant = sharp or powerful
  • With poignancy, Sissy realized that he was growing up.   (source)
    poignancy = deeply felt emotion -- perhaps sadness
  • ...all those elements of poignant sorrow and abundant happiness that make for...   (source)
    poignant = intensely touching the emotions
  • we have here a very poignant human drama.   (source)
    poignant = deeply touching the emotions
  • He shook his head sadly, and with a look of poignant regret on his face.   (source)
    poignant = deeply felt
  • The music seemed to fill the whole room at Pete's with its poignant tilt,   (source)
    poignant = sharp or intense
  • This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.   (source)
  • ...with its soulful and poignant longing.   (source)
    poignant = intense
  • The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now.   (source)
    poignant = sharp or intense
  • ...and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic.   (source)
    poignant = intense
  • Besides, many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy;   (source)
    poignancy = intense emotional feeling
  • How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief?   (source)
    poignant = sharp or intense
  • Most poignant were his memories of his mother.†   (source)
  • Miss Homer sparkled with wit and vivacity as Nell Gywn; she was dramatic as Queen Isabella of Spain; her Josephine was a delightful vignette; and her Lady Emma Hamilton was a poignant bit of acting.†   (source)
  • As he had grown, he had found a further use for his father's poignant gift.†   (source)
  • The words Father, Mother, Ravi, India, Winnipeg struck me with searing poignancy.†   (source)
  • Was there some premonition, she would wonder, that made that moment so poignant, some foreknowledge that this was the last afternoon the three would ever spend together in the small cottage?†   (source)
  • Borgenicht, in fact, unwittingly captures this poignancy in his memoir, which was published in 1942.†   (source)
  • "Oh, so poignant," said Varys.†   (source)
  • It's poignant and it's truth.†   (source)
  • In the shadows the mummified bundle—what little was visible—had a ragged, poignant, oddly personal look, less like an inanimate object than some poor creature bound and helpless in the dark, unable to cry out and dreaming of rescue.†   (source)
  • The last note hovered poignantly in the silence.†   (source)
  • While listening to Ruben Ramirez's life story, I looked out the car window at one poignant scene after another, at abandoned warehouses and slaughterhouses, at junkyards, slums, and parking lots where Chicago's stockyards once stood.†   (source)
  • The cells babbled with the poignant tongues of despair licking the walls.†   (source)
  • I'd dressed for the meeting, a decent suit and tie, but I realized as I rang his doorbell that a four-hundred-dollar suit in this neighborhood was more poignant than if I'd shown up in jeans.†   (source)
  • In order to add even greater poignancy to their memories, she had brought her copy of the portrait of them dressed as old-fashioned ladies, taken by the Belgian photographer on the afternoon that a young Juvenal Urbino had delivered the coup de grace to a willful Fermina Daza.†   (source)
  • How poignant.†   (source)
  • The Teacherage, which stands opposite the up-to-date school, is an out-of-date edifice, drab and poignant.†   (source)
  • John's letter was particularly poignant.†   (source)
  • This lack of artifice owes as much to the rousing arrangement of songs, which blend seamlessly together, as it does to Echevarri's poignant narrative.†   (source)
  • The timing of the trip was particularly poignant: the Wednesday before the family's second Thanksgiving in America.†   (source)
  • Hunched over her small desk, the overhead light turned off, her desk lamp poignantly lighting only her paper, the rest of the room in warm, soft, uncreated darkness, she wrote her secret poems in her new language.†   (source)
  • People stood in line at the coffee wagons, holding their poignant mugs.†   (source)
  • The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of own boyhood, which usually seemed to have happened to another person-to a person who had jumped through some osmotic lens and be-come someone else-but which now seemed poignantly close.†   (source)
  • The threat of Bologna to others had instilled in Doc Daneeka an even more poignant solicitude for his own safety.†   (source)
  • I glance around the living room, trying to pick up poignant details to put into my article.†   (source)
  • I pressed my lips together hard, determined not to make poignant tear streaks down my no doubt filthy face.†   (source)
  • Choking back her emotions, she poignantly described what it was like being a ten-yearold girl and learning that her mother had been blown away by a sawed-off shotgun at her place of employment.†   (source)
  • The lonesome hole banked with poignant flowers.†   (source)
  • This most emotional passage of all was too much for many in Congress, and to it Jefferson had added a final poignant note: "We might have been a free and great people together."†   (source)
  • During the past year, any erotic image or thought had the power to stir him only for a moment, whereupon he was overcome by poignant memories of Michelle, her precious body and her wholesome enthusiasm for pleasure.†   (source)
  • It is a brave and poignant performance.†   (source)
  • She wanted the poignancy…that's what she'd seen.†   (source)
  • German was "suspect and taboo," a poignant judgment for a newspaper published by Adolph S. Ochs, who grew up in a German-speaking home.†   (source)
  • The note was incredibly poignant.†   (source)
  • As a father, I believe that the death of a child in Africa is no less poignant or tragic than the death of a child anywhere else.†   (source)
  • 1 just kept thinking of his wife, Martha, nearly-poignant-if-not-for-her-feeble-will Martha, forever pale and small-shouldered and smiling, pulling uncomfortably at the strap of her sequined body suit, her tightrope fifty feet up in the air; Hoagland was down on the ground, in a cage, wielding a chair in one hand, a bullwhip in the other.†   (source)
  • Young children see so clearly things of poignant detail, even if they soon learn to forget.†   (source)
  • All she knew was that, crossed with shadow, their family life took on a poignancy sharper than she could stand.†   (source)
  • It is too poignant, iike the little boy peering in the candy store window.†   (source)
  • "How poignant," Oedipa said.†   (source)
  • At once poignant and reminiscent of Southern Sundays, it also unnerved me a little, since I had the firm impression that synagogues did not come equipped with belfries.†   (source)
  • They hadn't mentioned the bush boy during the day; but now, with the flames a-flicker and the stars aglow, they missed him more; missed him with an added poignancy.†   (source)
  • It is said that each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of noontide, the slow, poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.†   (source)
  • My cooking days are over, I thought a little sadly, and suddenly what I had formerly performed without thought, or even with impatience-the gathering of fuel, and the blowing of the fire, and the waxing of the flames under the steaming pot, with all the business of smoke down the lungs and in the eyes-acquired a sweet and piercing poignancy.†   (source)
  • It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.   (source)
    poignance = deep emotional impact
  • Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs   (source)
    poignant = sharp or intense
  • I have a dim half remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing, darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress more poignant.   (source)
  • Nay, you may have met with another whom you may love; and considering yourself as bound in honour to Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which you appear to feel.   (source)
  • 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 for themselves.   (source)
    poignantly = sharply (with intense feeling)
  • That particular flag was poignant for two reasons.†   (source)
  • The flowers, so lovely, the scents, so poignant, helped her with her own balance.†   (source)
  • She'd French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick.†   (source)
  • It was something larger, an immediate awareness of another living spark, a sharp and poignant thing, a nerve-sympatico that made them emotionally one.†   (source)
  • It's her flashes of joy that are most poignant for me now And so in memory she rambles through her mundane activities, to the outward eye nothing very unusual — a bright-haired girl walking up a hill, intent on thoughts of her own.†   (source)
  • Sliding in and out of the groups of octogenarians are hustling, overdressed boys who've watched too many Vegas movies and don't know how poignant they are, trying to imitate Rat Pack cool in cheap suits in the Missouri woods.†   (source)
  • And the fact that the frail was his mother and the King of the Mountain his father made it more poignant, but did not change the essential facts.†   (source)
  • Perhaps the most poignant scene Klin studied comes at a point in the movie when Martha is sitting next to Nick, flirting outrageously, even putting a hand on his thigh.†   (source)
  • Then she came to the roan mare with the big, poignant eyes, the long white blaze down her nose, and knew without being told.†   (source)
  • To one who lived with violence and death, it was especially poignant to see them assailed, but I had the sense that the meaning of it did not stop there, that of this battle something would come other than suffering.†   (source)
  • Her movements were slow and languorous, without guile or stratagems, and as her large hands reached out to me I remembered how I had learned that there could be an immensely poignant beauty in the awkwardness of human beings from watching Abigail set a table or open a book or simply brush the hair from her eyes.†   (source)
  • I wanted to linger there, experiencing the sensation of something precious perilously attained too late and now to be lost forever-a poignancy.†   (source)
  • At times he half floated over the mountains, summoning the memory of almost every woman he had ever known, of all the nudes in paintings subject to his precise and vexing recollection, of the poignant and charged encounters on the streets and in parks, theaters, and lecture halls, where one sees the woman for whom one has to have been born, and then feels the deft and overpowering pain of circumstance as it draws her away, because the train must be caught, dinner is at a certain time,…†   (source)
  • He was entranced by the casual angle at which she had left them, the way the straps fell, and the way they looked in the white light that machine-gunned across them through rapidly driven clouds, and he wondered if he would be able to love Patrizia herself as much as he could love the poignant and accidental traces of her.†   (source)
  • The week was a poignant ceremony of opposing forces trying to find common ground for the good of the community's youth.†   (source)
  • Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years ahead of them.†   (source)
  • One of the most poignant aspects of the account was that her body had for complicated and obscure reasons gone unidentified, had been buried in a pauper's grave, and only after a matter of weeks had been disinterred and sent back for final burial in Virginia.†   (source)
  • The sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions, and though he dieted he could still not as Oedipa did use honey to sweeten his coffee for like all things viscous it distressed him, recalling too poignantly what is often mixed with motor oil to ooze dishonest into gaps between piston and cylinder wall.†   (source)
  • The temptation was both poignant and powerful, and it lasted for as long as it took me to read the letter twice more and to brood over the house and its homely lawn again, all of it seemingly suspended in a milky idyllic mist, which may, however, have been the result of the film's overexposure.†   (source)
  • I had, of course, experienced this surge of bittersweet time-sorrow often before—most recently when in a seizure considerably less sincere my cornpone blandishments had so notably failed to work their sorcery on Leslie Lapidus—but today the mood seemed especially fragile, quivering, poignant, translucent; I felt that at any moment I might dissolve into unseemly albeit magnificently genuine tears.†   (source)
  • Even the "I love you all, everything!" is realization and discovery as much as it is poignancy.†   (source)
  • Her face was charming, though marred with tears, and haunted as though with some poignant anxiety.†   (source)
  • They added their thin poignant voices to Johnny's.†   (source)
  • The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself.†   (source)
  • " "What's gotten into my children who used to be so good?" asked Katie poignantly.†   (source)
  • At night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights.†   (source)
  • Some days he regarded his bulk ruefully; but the distress of remorse was less poignant than the distress of fasting and he was presently found deliberating over the secret messages that a certain roast sends to the certain salad that will follow it.†   (source)
  • Sons who had lived beside their mothers hardly giving them a glance fell to picturing with poignant regret each wrinkle in the absent face that memory cast upon the screen.†   (source)
  • Keenly aware of his role as the exemplar of the self-made man, he played the part with an intense and poignant consistency that give his performance the quality of a high art.†   (source)
  • Therefore a poignant shadow, a keen accent, falls on these golden bristles, on these poppy-red fields, this flowing corn that never overflows its boundaries; but runs rippling to the edge.†   (source)
  • In the look of farewell on his face there was no sorrow, no pain, only a speculative wonder at himself, only a poignant stirring of emotions dead since boyhood, as he said again: "A very great lady."†   (source)
  • Yet there was a quiet lonesomeness about that night, a poignant stillness that made my voice sound small and hushed, hardly like my own.†   (source)
  • The evocations which at that time he found most poignant were-anyhow according to what he told Rieux-those of Paris.†   (source)
  • The grass was thick with dandelions: their poignant and wordless odor studded the earth with yellow magic.†   (source)
  • For the sensation, confused perhaps, but none the less poignant for that, of all those days and weeks and months of life lost to their love made them vaguely feel they were entitled to some compensation; this present hour of joy should run at half the speed of those long hours of waiting.†   (source)
  • Eugene thought of Spring, and the poignant and wordless odor of the elvish dandelions that would be there.†   (source)
  • For Gant and his wife, the year 1900, in which one day they found themselves, after growing to maturity in another century—a transition which must have given, wherever it has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to thousands of imaginative people—had coincidences, too striking to be unnoticed, with other boundaries in their lives.†   (source)
  • And in deference to this scruple he is constrained to admit that, though the chief source of distress, the deepest as well as the most widespread, was separation-and it is his duty to say more about it as it existed in the later stages of the plague-it cannot be denied that even this distress was coming to lose something of its poignancy.†   (source)
  • But all the while her heart beat in rhythm to the poignant sadness of the song the children sang while walking around in a ring with hands joined.†   (source)
  • Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the lunchroom, he learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.†   (source)
  • And when the picture was finished, you didn't see the dirt or the meanness; you saw the glory of innocence and the poignancy of a baby growing up too soon.†   (source)
  • …eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver—eating strange fabulous foods— swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues, dormice and camels' heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and rubies— everything, in fact, for which Epicure Mammon wished.†   (source)
  • Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that other boys of his age were not only self-supporting, but had for years kept their decrepit parents in luxury by their earnings as electrical engineers, presidents of banks, or members of Congress.†   (source)
  • Gant had grown very quiet: he sat in the darkness at the foot of the bed, leaning forward upon his cane, escaped from the revery of his own approaching death, into the waste land of the past, blazing back sadly and poignantly the trail across the lost years that led to the birth of his strange son.†   (source)
  • As he faltered along, with scowling intensity, through a success-sermon, there was something poignantly moving in his effort: it was the effort of his strange and lonely spirit to find some entrance into life—to find success, position, companionship.†   (source)
  • To Rosemary it seemed very poignant to drive away and leave them in their house.†   (source)
  • A poignant, agonizing memory swept over the prince's heart.†   (source)
  • Carley had poignantly felt the sadness of the one, the promise of the other.†   (source)
  • Then Tom found voice poignantly to beg Pilchuck to tell him everything.†   (source)
  • It interrupted less here than in Europe, its pathos was less poignant, its irony less cruel.†   (source)
  • He had fallen upon his old strange, futile dreams, now rendered poignant by reason of love.†   (source)
  • The hours dragged for both, and with as much poignance for Clyde as for Roberta.†   (source)
  • What a strange sound, vastly different from anything human, yet somehow poignant, tragic, terrible!†   (source)
  • The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant.†   (source)
  • What poignant pain, regret, love made his utterance fail!†   (source)
  • Let me go!" cried Stewart; and the poignancy of that cry pierced Madeline's heart.†   (source)
  • Just then home was vivid and poignant in her thoughts.†   (source)
  • Poignant regret seemed added to the anguish she was suffering.†   (source)
  • For here was true and poignant love, and in youth true and poignant love is difficult to withstand.†   (source)
  • Carley spent a poignant and depth-stirring hour at the bedside of Glenn's comrade.†   (source)
  • A poignant why was wrenched from Shefford.†   (source)
  • That struck him as far from a hopeless task, yet his longing and dread were poignant.†   (source)
  • A silence ensued after Milly's long poignant speech.†   (source)
  • That poignant word quivered in Shefford's heart.†   (source)
  • What glorious and bitter memories were expressed in her strange, poignant call!†   (source)
  • That would only torture me," replied Tom, poignantly.†   (source)
  • "Oh--oh--Catlee!" cried Milly, poignantly.†   (source)
  • Ah, dear friend, you are happy not to know these poignant joys and sorrows.†   (source)
  • Today this thought gained special poignancy from certain other considerations.†   (source)
  • Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again.†   (source)
  • There was a poignant ache in his torn heart.†   (source)
  • Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused.†   (source)
  • A poignant and rebellious doubt surged in his heart.†   (source)
  • Her suffering was the more poignant that she had to bear it in solitude.†   (source)
  • Now and then, as if to show the thoughts which were most poignant, he muttered, "Lepers, lepers!†   (source)
  • Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber.†   (source)
  • There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face.†   (source)
  • This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for Jean Valjean.†   (source)
  • A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.†   (source)
  • And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that the two paths were contrary to each other.†   (source)
  • At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant.†   (source)
  • There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish.†   (source)
  • They responded to his greetings with poignant courtesy and warmth, addressing him as "Herr Lieutenant."†   (source)
  • This was to be a poignant retaliation upon the officer who had said "mule drivers," and later "mud diggers," for in all the wild graspings of his mind for a unit responsible for his sufferings and commotions he always seized upon the man who had dubbed him wrongly.†   (source)
  • May one year back had been marked by Judy's poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence--it had been one of those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him.†   (source)
  • He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm.†   (source)
  • Then at a soft footfall, a rustle, and a moving shadow Joan's mingled emotions merged into a poignant sense of the pain and suspense and tenderness of the actual moment.†   (source)
  • The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly that this was the last spring under the old regime.†   (source)
  • Then more poignant than all other argument was the fact that he did not want to take her away from Surprise Valley.†   (source)
  • Child as she was, she felt the poignancy of her friend's grief, and with the infinite tact of her girlish tenderness, she did not try to pry into it, but was ready to efface herself.†   (source)
  • Syllables so unanticipated coming from one with the ignominious hemp about his neck—a conventional felon's benediction directed aft towards the quarters of honor; syllables too delivered in the clear melody of a singing-bird on the point of launching from the twig, had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty of the young sailor spiritualized now thro' late experiences so poignantly profound.†   (source)
  • He had that poignant carelessness about himself, his own suffering, his own life, which is a form of slow suicide.†   (source)
  • This, though never stated, was implied with an anxiety that there should be no mistake about it, which was really very true and charming, but added a poignant sense of lives far off to the other elements of the story.†   (source)
  • Memory was too poignant; the past was too close; he wanted to forget until he had toiled into the heart of this forbidding wilderness—until time had gone by and he dared to face his unquiet soul.†   (source)
  • Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach.†   (source)
  • Their grief, though less poignant than their father's, grew from deeper roots, for a wife may be replaced; a mother never.†   (source)
  • He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor.†   (source)
  • It was there; the open, the wild, the beautiful, the lonely land; and she felt the poignant call of blood in her—to seek, to strive, to find, to live.†   (source)
  • Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and self-embittered.†   (source)
  • Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs.†   (source)
  • Friend parted from friend, the son from his mother, and the restraint made the survivor's grief more poignant.†   (source)
  • That passed, and then clear and vivid rose memories of the rest that had happened—strange voices betraying fury of men, a deadened report, a moan of mortal pain, a woman's poignant cry.†   (source)
  • On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him—he could not have said why—of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.†   (source)
  • One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time.†   (source)
  • As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter lassitude, though the first warm draught already tinged her face with returning life, Rosedale was seized afresh by the poignant surprise of her beauty.†   (source)
  • And to express this one, if we must, the only thing to say, as bluntly as possible, is that Pieter Peeperkorn—with his regal mask, his high, creased brow, his poignantly ragged lips—was both at the same time.†   (source)
  • Then in the inevitable reaction, in the reflux of bitter reality, he would send out a voiceless cry no less poignant because it was silent: "Poor fool!†   (source)
  • The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability.†   (source)
  • It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain within his breast,—came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one's conscience.†   (source)
  • For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.†   (source)
  • The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.†   (source)
  • As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things.†   (source)
  • The huge car with a roar and a jerk seemed to answer Madeline's call, a cry no less poignant because it was silent.†   (source)
  • The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray strewn with tortoise-shell hair-pins—he shrank from the poignant intimacy of these trifles, and from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror above them.†   (source)
  • And these seized upon him at times as definitely and poignantly as though they were voices of accusation or complaint—so much so that he could not help but suggest by way of amelioration that he would like to see her and that he was coming around that night if she were going to be home.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER IX
    A silence ensued, fraught with poignant fear for Helen, as she gazed into Bo's whitening face.†   (source)
  • And then Helen drank thirstily, with closed eyes, while a memory of home stirred from Bo's gift of poignant speech.†   (source)
  • It was in just such company, the fine flower and complete expression of the state she aspired to, that the differences came out with special poignancy, her grace cheapening the other women's smartness as her finely-discriminated silences made their chatter dull.†   (source)
  • This information as to the suffering of American soldiers had augmented during the last few months, and seemed to possess strange, poignant power to depress Carley.†   (source)
  • Again the feeling of excitement, the poignancy of emotional heights, the ever-present impending sense of catastrophe became held in abeyance to the sheer intensity of physical sensations.†   (source)
  • The morning came at last, piercingly keen and bright, when Dale saw that the heights were impassable; the realization brought him a poignant regret.†   (source)
  • Somehow, in that poignant moment, when her flying feet kept pace with her heart, Helen felt in herself a force opposing itself against this raw, primitive justice of the West.†   (source)
  • But he had remembered only at poignant intervals, and the lapse of time had made thought of her a dream like that sad dream which had lured him into the desert.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)