piercingness

Their piercingness was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a physical one.

Fanny Herself Edna Ferber 1926

Their piercingness was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a physical one.

Fanny Herself 1917

Never was affliction so cutting as hers; she imputed the piercingness of it to what had happened that day, and believed that if the Duke de Nemours had not had ground to believe she loved him she should not have cared whether he loved another or not; but she deceived herself, and this evil which she found so insupportable was jealousy with all the horrors it can be accompanied with.

The Princess of Cleves La Fayette, Madame de 1951

He is a child in sensibility, while a youth in the vividness, and a man in the grasp, the piercingness and the copiousness of his thoughts.

The Opium Habit Horace B. Day

'Yelling and shrieking -- oh my gracious, it was enough to set your blood all curdled, -- for ear-piercingness I never did' ear nothing like it.

The Beetle Richard Marsh

His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's.

Musical Portraits Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers Paul Rosenfeld 1918

A song burst forth right over their heads with the peculiar piercingness of a boy’s voice when he sings with all his might.

Chapter XII 1917

Lucy's eyes, moreover, were riveted on her face, on its colour, its fineness of feature, its brilliance and piercingness of expression.

The History of David Grieve Humphry Ward 1885

According to Aubrey, he was tall, had long legs, and was "incurvelting at his shoulders; his hair was but thin and flaxen, with a moist curl; his gait slow and rather astalking; his eye was a kind of light goose-grey, not big, but it had a strange piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but when he conversed he looked into your very thoughts."

Royalty Restored 1883

I made my toilet by the mirror of a quiet pool; and as I was so doing, and smiling with some complacency to see myself restored to my own image, the mountains rang with a scream of far more than human piercingness; and while I still stood astonished, there sprang up and swiftly increased a storm of the most awful and earth-rending sounds.

The Dynamiter Robert Louis Stevenson 1872