Top 44 Poignancy Quotes & Sayings

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

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.

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.

I hope maybe 'The Returned,' in some small way, can contribute to the argument of the poignancy of human life and make people not take for granted things.

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.

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.

Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

The kind of industrial wasteland that you see in so much of Europe has a tremendous poignancy to me, especially when it's run down and you see the collapse and failure of this system. And also how nature reclaims it.

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.

There's a poignancy to being with someone older. I think there's a greater appreciation of time and what you have together and what's important, and it can make the little things seem very small. It puts a kind of sharp light mixed with a sort of diffused light on something.

...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.

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.

If you want to reach any kind of poignancy or meaning a lot of times, coming from comedy is the best way to get there.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

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.

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.

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.

Wit generally succeeds more from being happily addressed than from its native poignancy. A jest, calculated to spread at a gaming-table, may be received with, perfect indifference should it happen to drop in a mackerel-boat.

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.

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

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

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

sometimes in comedy you can make the audience feel poignancy stronger than you can with tears or anguish.

Full-color images lack the poignancy of monochrome... Black-and-white film inherently peels off interesting images from the world; it sees things we do not see, and thus insists on the existence of a phantom presence within reality, a world we cannot perceive.

The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist's portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.

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.

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.)

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.

I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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--

The message is one of the beautiful things about the film. And I think part of the appeal is simply that they are prehistoric creatures, they are no longer around and that makes them magical and makes us feel quite emotional, because we know that those creatures did not survive in the long run, so there's poignancy in their fight for survival.

Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.

The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.

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.