Quotes about poignance

A collection of quotes on the topic of poignance, life, death, feeling.

Quotes about poignance

“It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Death, Universe

“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 book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

Life, Death, Reality, Sense

“The relational model provides different categories, different underlying structures into which experience can be organized. Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration, domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger, differentiation, and so on. The body is still centrally important. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number of combinations — the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities make this an enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships, different configurations of connections, between self and others.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 91

Life, Reality, Strong, Parting

“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 The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Men, Books, Beauty, Feeling

“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 (1942) American writer

Source: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual

Tattoo

“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 (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“Wodeyar's musical output numbers close to 100 kritis [Compositions]. The nature of this output, whether it is in the choice of ragas like Bhanu Chandrika, Hamsanatini and Bhoopala Panchama, or in the lyrics which carry deep meanings drawn form the Upanishads and Srividya worship, show a keen and intelligent mind at work. Fascinating as the life was of this multi-faceted personality, it also had a poignancy for the trials and tribulations he faced.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In Jayachamaraja Wodeyar http://www.radioweb.in/programs/jayachamaraja-wodeyar

Life, Music, Intelligence, Nature

“Justice Blackmun begins his statement [declaring Blackmun's opposition to capital punishment] by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us, the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern. The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. See McCollum v. North Carolina.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!
Callins v. Collins 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in denial of cert).
1990s

Death, Men, Justice, Penalty

“The poignancy of things
A purple flower
The blossoms of spring
And the light snow of winter
How they fall”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Spring, Flowers, Light, Winter

“The poignancy which all beauty has.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 23, p. 87

Beauty

“Poignance is all.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Wasteland! (Mr. Lionel Bart’s Notes in Exegesis of His Latest Musical Project)”, p. 206.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

“I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”

Flann O'Brien book The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman (1967)

Life, Pain, Health, Sadness

“If every earthly pleasure were melted An intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life into a single experience and bestowed upon one man,
it would be as nothing when measured by the joy of which I write for here it is God who passes into the depths of us in all His purity,
and the soul is not only filled but overflowing.
This experience is that light that makes manifest to the soul the terrible desolation of such as live divorced from love;
it melts the man utterly; he is no longer master of his joy.
Such possession produces intoxication, the state of the spirit in which its bliss transcends the uttermost bounds of anticipation or desire.
Sometimes the ecstasy pours forth in song, sometimes in tears:
at one moment it finds expression in movement, at others in the intense stillness of burning, voiceless feeling.
Some men knowing this bliss wonder if others feel God as they do; some are assured that no living creature has ever had such experiences as theirs;
there are those who wonder that the world is not set aflame by this joy; and there are others who marvel at its nature, asking whence it comes, and what it is.
The body itself can know no greater pleasure upon earth than to participate in it;
and there are moments when the soul feels that it must shiver to fragments in the poignancy of this experience.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

An Anthology of Mysticism and Philosophy

Love, Life, Men, God

“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 (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/metropolitan-1990 of Metropolitan (10 August 1990) <br class="br">Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

Life, School, Girl, Memory

“Those who are not in some sense of the younger generation will hardly realize what poignancy there is for us in the news of the death of Randolph Bourne. … Randolph Bourne belonged to us, and stood for us, in a way which he perhaps did not fully know, but which we now very keenly feel.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

Floyd Dell quotes

Way, Death, Feeling, Sense

“Brijmohan Maharaj’s Kamdeva matched grace with grace. To the loving he added fear, and a secret knowledge of his fate. Together they devised a poignancy that was memorable and must surely be rare in dance.”

Birju Maharaj (1938) Indian dancer

His dance in the ballet choreography Rati Kamdeva performed along with co-artiste Kumudini Lakhi reviewed in the Statesman in "Movement in Stills: The Dance and Life of Kumudini Lakhia}, page=115.

Fate, Knowledge, Secret, Dance