The images in "Elephant" are so plangently real that they become almost surreal, abstract.

Even with their epic stirrings her characters are wryly, plangently particular.

They have ranged in tone, I'd say, only from harrowing to plangently wistful.

He blew his nose plangently, held the handkerchief over his face for a moment, and composed himself.

The last sentence, however, was plangently clear.

Everything, everything in the first-class compartment was suddenly clear and plangently real, overpowering, awful.

Her films are sophisticated and plangently romantic, and the emotions she stirs up linger.

Dim lights glowed through its cloth sides and the strains of music wafted plangently over the water to Blade.

And in Canto 76, altogether more plangently:

Jawdropper stunning, yet plangently meaningful.

This smell was plangently like that - sickish sweet and decayed sour, mixed together and fermenting wildly.

This is music of patience, and its underlying combination of Buddhist and Christian mysticism, given voice in plangently harmonized ruminations, was often strongly appealing.

What Michael Redhill's entrancing novel depicts is itself a kind of Cornell box: a plangently charged little world out of which his narrator painfully finds her way.

No critic celebrates more inspirationally the revelations classic literary texts hold in trust for us; no critic laments more plangently our self-interested apostasy from our rich inheritance.

In the middle of her life, as a famous woman, she lamented plangently the deaths of the men who carried out her orders and whom she is said to have worn out with her incessant demands.

Mr. Harrell was at his best: His tone was both rich and varied enough to make the work's lugubrious passages sing plangently, and his fast passage work was agile and fully in tune.

Ms. Dukach, Mr. Vania and Mr. Corvino made themselves heard more fleetingly but sang pleasantly - and sometimes plangently - enough to suggest that at the New York State Theater their contributions might be more substantial.

Quintana died soon after the book was published, and in Blue Nights (Fourth Estate, £14.99) Didion writes plangently about motherhood, loss and memory, taking the twilight to which her title refers as a metaphor for "the end of promise, the dying of the brightness".

The Hemingway-Fitzgerald generation and its literary successors have tended to treat the world, when they did treat it, as a stage upon which Americans could be more heroically or plangently themselves, or (following the generations down to our day) introspectively, narcotically or psychotically themselves.

Although Olivia's father has died within the last year, it is possible that Feste approaches or has reached middle age, though he still has the wit to carry off good 'fooling' when he needs to, and the voice to sing lustily or plangently as the occasion demands.

The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments-near-wind and super-string-that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn.

Sara Wolf: (LA Weekly, June 14, 2002) "Marks says her trio isn't so much about September 11 as it is about impotence in the face of the inevitable, but the unforgettable events of that day plangently ring through the appropriately named "Against Ending's" driven at full tilt movement.