Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Interpretation
Words can only convey their true impact when they reflect the harsh realities they describe.
Edgar Allan Poe's quote highlights the idea that language has a profound effect on our minds, but this effect is intensified by the stark and often unsettling truths that the words represent. In essence, while words alone can captivate, it is their connection to reality, especially when that reality is bleak or horrifying, that makes them powerful and memorable.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of literature, you could introduce Poe's quote to illustrate the power of words.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
If you correct your hidden deeds subsequently, Allaah will correct your outward deeds.
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.
The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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