Most Poignant Quotes & Sayings

In entertainment, I adore Ricky Gervais in 'Derek.' His performance is unbelievably charming, funny and poignant. In life, I adore my girlfriend. She is the most adorable person I have ever met - from her silly jokes to her cute teeth to her little drawings. — Josh Zuckerman

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory. — Paul Samuelson

At the Serima Mission, in Victoria Province, I am shown around by an enchantingly pretty African nun called Sister Balbina ... She cannot be more than 25, and has the most delightful figure. How poignant that she should have dedicated her life in this way.
When we come to the bell tower, I ask her to climb up the ladder in front of me.It was rather a caddish request, I suppose, but I had often wondered. Black petticoats and pink knickers. To think I had to come all this way to find out. — Auberon Waugh

Regrets are particularly poignant for the old, those of us who have used up most of the chances we'll ever get and are left to make peace with our failed choices. Most things distance themselves with space and time to eventually slide off the edge of our consciousness, but not regrets. You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return. And the longer you deny them, the more they punish you when they can no longer be held at bay. — Lionel Fisher

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been
Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she
had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances.
For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter
what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way.
And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself.
Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again.
And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right. — Cynthia Voigt

THE BILL FOR DARRELL BOB HOUSTON THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in. Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown. — Tom Robbins

That to me was the most poignant part of Diana's wedding; as she was walking up the aisle and her eyes were going left to right, looking at people and smiling in the way that Diana did - and that diamond tiara glittering like mad. It was great. — Bruce Oldfield

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

I've gotten literally thousands of contacts from people across the country - and the most poignant ones being elderly people - who said I had given up on America and I was just waiting to die. — Benjamin Carson

The most amazing thing about young men is how invisible they were to you when you were young. It is also the most poignant. — Perry Brass

One of the most poignant pieces of recent science fiction for me was the portrayal of the adults in the Pixar film WALL-E. I feel like we're on the cusp of becoming fat babies in floating chairs being fed everything in shake form, and I feel like I am as prone to laziness as anybody. — Nick Offerman

Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too - some sort of virtues - but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good. We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it. — Michael Cunningham

I want to be whole. More than half-healed. More than half-loved.

I was never given a lovely life. And I've had far too much taken from me, the most poignant being my innocence, my joy, and my trust... I want them all back. — Cheri Bauer

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag

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

Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn, and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the window-panes to prevent the implosion of shattered glass told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted across the sky. — Azar Nafisi

Alas! that was the greatest of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the final step to be taken, but he must do it. Mournful destiny! he could only enter into the sanctity in the eyes of God, by returning into infamy in the eyes of men! — Victor Hugo

I had to tell it because it was the only honorable way to fulfill the promise that I had made on the Red Lake Reservation almost twenty years earlier. This, then - The Wolf at Twilight - is the fruit of that promise. It is the part of Dan's life I had left untold. It takes us to places that for too long have been hidden in shadow and reveals truths about what has been taken from Native people and what the rest of us have lost in that taking. But it also reveals what we may all yet become if we heed Sitting Bull's poignant entreaty and put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for the children. I hope you find it worthy of your time. If it opens your eyes to another way of understanding, I am grateful. If it simply entertains you, I am pleased. But what matters most is that it touches you. For it is, above all, a story of Native America, and its goal is to lodge deep in your heart. — Kent Nerburn

Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. — Billy Graham

Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night. — Sybil Adelman

We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. — Bruce Lee

But if after I am free 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 come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. — Oscar Wilde

Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes. — Hugh Howey

And yet I feel that the most real home I'll ever have is the space where our roads merged and traveled along together ... for a time. — Craig Thompson

I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness. — Wilbur Smith

And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon's choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curse and blessing is a mind that perceives the world literally. — Mark Haddon

Names.
What's in a name, really? I mean, besides a bunch of
letters or sounds strung together to make a word. Does a
rose by any other name really smell as sweet? Would the
most famous love story in the world be as poignant if it was
called Romeo and Gertrude? Why is what we call
ourselves so important? — Julie Kagawa

Failure is life at it's most poignant and it's only there to push you in the right direction. — Oprah Winfrey

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

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people. — Rob Bell

There is something important you should know: the most significant examples of great work, the most poignant, the most inspiring, the ones we know would take your breath away, we can't tell you about. They haven't happened yet. They're yours. — David Sturt

May Sarton said, "the deeper you go, the more universal you become." It's a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don't need to admit are usually those things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real. — Sabrina Ward Harrison

Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine. — Abraham Verghese

Death was just an image, I told myself, a coming together of events in a single frame, and pain was just a part of the painting and haven't we learned our lesson? Meaning is most poignant when never fully accessed. — Alison Espach

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God." — Arnold Bennett

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life. — Sigmund Freud

You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it," she said.
"And it's the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death. — Frank Herbert

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. — Hugh Howey

We're the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn't with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us. — Philip Roth

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus. — Vladimir Nabokov

As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. 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.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard. — Edith Wharton

Christ walked the path every mortal is called to walk so that he would know how to succor and strengthen us in our most difficult times. He knows the deepest and most personal burdens we carry. He knows the most public and poignant pains we bear. He descended below al such grief in order that he might lift us above it. There is no anguish or sorrow or sadness in life that he has not suffered in our behalf and borne away upon his own valiant and compassionate shoulders. — Jeffrey R. Holland

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. — Karen Abbott

the details of anything you love are
always what is most thrilling, most poignant,
most important.
i loved her as she rose from bed and fell back
against it again, and all she did in-between.
when you love someone you accept them,
you become them in a way, and all they
do forms into you. their mannerisms turn
into truth- the way she holds her favorite coffee mug,
the way she laughs, the way she smells, the way her lips
curl after certain words. all of the simple things
suddenly become gigantic things and light up the world
before you like a flame thrown into the clouds.
what a breathtaking display. the way
the earth begins to dissolve in your periphery
and a human being replaces it.

no matter what they tell you-
a person is a universe when truly
loved and anything less is not
love at all. — Christopher Poindexter

...the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly, and hold nothing back from their true worshippers. We must go to them lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervales, lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them. Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship. — L.M. Montgomery

If you're not fascinated by Korea yet, you damn well should be. The most innovative country on earth deserves a hilarious and poignant account on the order of Euny Hong's The Birth of Korean Cool. Her phat beats got Gangnam Style and then some. — Gary Shteyngart

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written. — Raymond Queneau

credited with one of the most poignant summaries of commitment to Christ ever penned: "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep [this temporal life] to gain what he cannot lose [eternal life with Christ]. — Tim LaHaye

All forms of beauty are poignant, Japanese beauty particularly so. That lily-white complexion, those mellow eyes, the inimitable shape of the nose, the well-defined contours of the mouth, and the complicated sweetness of the features are enough, by themselves, to eclipse the most perfectly assembled faces. — Amelie Nothomb

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper's images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as "our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness" ...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. — Olivia Laing

Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing
that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart
is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love. — Bill Vaughan

It is when we are confronted with ... poignant reminders of mortality that we become most aware of the strangeness and wonder of our brief life on Earth. — Kathleen Basford

Among all the tragic consequences of depression and war, this suppression of personal self-expression through one's life work is among the most poignant. — Henry Wriston

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. — Eric Hoffer

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