If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. It not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance.
I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. What is grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.
Mercedes nursed a special grievance - the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex pregorative, she made their lives unendurable.
I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
There are some people who do not want this thing to continue to work, and that's what they're doing is all about. They don't want to unify. They don't want this thing to work. That's the whole point of going forth with grievance after grievance after grievance and victim after victim after victim, because this inherent system... There is an all-out assault on the unity of this country. There are people whose express purpose is to rip it apart.
Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories.
I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.
Failure is life at it's most poignant and it's only there to push you in the right direction.
The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.
Beauty is at its most poignant when the cold hand of Death holds poised to wither it imminently.
A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."
Every want that stimulates the breast becomes a source of pleasure when redressed.