"Brassy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the tumult of the voyage, our household monitor began audibly and regularly, we thought, to mark the seconds. Then it must have been only fancy. Now it is something more, and we know that our mahogany friend is really wagging his brassy beard just outside the door. We remember now, as we lay listening that rough night at sea, how Milton's magic sounding line came to us beating a sad melody with the old ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... and consider what tin foil was thirty years ago, we do not wonder that so many operators failed to make tight, good-wearing fillings. As it came from the manufacturer it looked fairly bright, but after being exposed to the air for a short time it assumed a light brassy color, and lost what small amount of integrity it originally possessed. This tin was not properly refined before beating, or something was put on the foil while beating, so that it did not have the clean, bright surface and cohesive quality which our best ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not overclean black frock coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... be less perky when we were all settled at a table in a perfectly charming restaurant, the most restful place to eat in that I ever saw. I can't imagine even a fiend being ill-tempered in it for long; and it was deliciously cool, as if we had come into a shadowy green wood after the blazing, brassy glare ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hot. There's a brassy sky without a cloud, and all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless as if they were cut out of metal. A little haze of dust hangs perpetually along the Lindens and the road ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... every word of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away "to take care of," and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... part been discussed. There is in some individuals a highly developed sentiment and reverence for tradition as such, and an aesthetic sensibility to the mellowness, ripeness, and charm that so often accompany old things.[1] The new seems, as it often is, loud, brassy, vulgar, and hard. But there are other and equally important causes. Men trust and cherish the familiar in ideas, customs, and social organization, just as they trust and cherish old friends. They know what to expect from them; they have their well-noted excellences, and, while they have ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... had in this case Pretensions rather brassy; For talents, to deserve a place, Are qualifications saucy. So their worships of the Faculty, Quite sick of merit's rudeness, Chose one who should owe it all, d'ye see, To their gratis grace ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... man—banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... clouds became lowery, and from them, black and ominous, as they soon appeared, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and a little rain fell. Toward nine o'clock, the clouds became thinner, and assumed a brassy or coppery appearance, and earth, rocks, trees, buildings, water, and persons were changed by this strange, unearthly light. A few minutes later, a heavy black cloud spread over the entire sky except a narrow rim at the horizon, and it was as dark ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... curving lines of yellow beach the drought-smitten plumes of the fast-withering coco-palms drooped straight, brown and motionless; and Wallis, the trader at Avamua village, as he paced to and fro upon the heated boards of his verandah, cursed the island and the people, and the deadly calm, and the brassy sky, and the firm of Tom de Wolf & Sons (whom he blamed for the weather), and the drought, and the sickness, and the overdue ship, and himself, and everything else; and he wished that Lita would go away for a month—her patience and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... gallant Twenty-ninth; but it often happens that a young man has an old head on his shoulders, and as one after the other of my superior officers—superior in rank—bit the dust—— That ball is badly cupped. You will hardly get it away with a brassy; if I were you I should play my niblick. Well out, sir! A fine recovery! On this very spot I saw a bomb burst. The air was filled with arms and legs. It seemed as if they would never come down. I shall play my brassy spoon, Purnell, the one with the yellow head. I see you don't carry ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... leave the room for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy vibration in the voice—a sign of nervous strain. With a smothered protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside the bed with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his knees and gathered the pale faces of the men together in one glance; and saw that intense expression of agony which physical pain can mold with men's features. And then he strained his eyes over the brassy horizon; but no cloud, no veil of vapor ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... ladling his soup, and who staggered and fell across chairs in illustration of highly emotional lines and, what was worse, he was of those who regard every unescorted woman as fair game. Bold of glance and brassy of smile, he began to make eyes at his ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... new and curious estate of nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its brightness some indication of its ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily seem bilious and brassy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... air-passage causes cyanosis and dyspnoea. When the oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... him for disdaining to shirk the difficulty by throwing the meanness of a cloak over it, and for recognizing the folly of masquerading our Yankee statesman in a Roman toga, and the indecorousness of presenting him as a brassy nudity. It would have been quite as unjustifiable to strip him to his skeleton as to his flesh. Webster is represented as holding in his right hand the written roll of the Constitution, with which he points to a bundle of fasces, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... often seen white of the purest sort in the untracked snows of northern forests, but never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate expression of the spirit of the scene. They flew with their delicate necks bent ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less satisfactory; it is the first impression ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... mere woman-mystery can give, The strange simplicity that will endure The pangs of death, most resolute to live. This God of riddles that shaped a thing so frail For his worst torment hid mysterious powers Within her breast who can like lilies prevail Through rains of doom that conquer brassy towers. Her heart lies broken; when some trivial chord Of sweetness chimes reveille through the sense,— A rose, a song, a smile, a courtly word. She wakes, and sighs, and softly passes thence Back to the masquers, though her soul's veiled Pyx Enclose the solemn ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... The sun's brassy edge glittered above the blue chain of hills as I walked across the pasture towards the path that led winding among the alders to the brook below. I followed it in the deepening evening light and sat down on a log, watching the water swirling through the ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... sun of Summer shines from out a brassy sky, And has parched and browned the meadows, and the creek's run dry, O sweet it is to wander there and hear the water sing It's rippling song of gladness from the ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... merchant's flesh), Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture, But, touch'd with human gentleness and love, Forgive a moiety of the principal; Glancing an eye of pity on his losses, That have of late so huddled on his back, Enow to press a royal merchant down And pluck commiseration of his state From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint, From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd To offices of tender courtesy. We all ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... with her hand, her chin, her brows, and her beautiful figure. And—as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a connoisseur—Natalie's pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice, that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the Casa-Reales were collaterally descended. These indications ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... old blower and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fierce and wrathful sunset had burned itself out on a brassy sky. The sun, a lurid ball of fire, had sunk in billows of blood-red cloud, and pitch blackness had fallen upon earth and sky and sea. Everything above and below breathed of speedy tempest, but the midnight was drawing near, and the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... of the absence of bird voices,—so silent the fields and groves and orchards were, compared with what she had been used to at home. The most noticeable midsummer sound everywhere was the shrill, brassy crescendo ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America. Whether it was that Archibald pressed too much or pressed too little, whether it was that his club deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the brassy shot in the Hints on Golf book, or whether it was that he was pursued by some malignant fate, I do not know. Archibald rather favoured ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... I feel a dire misgiving, Lest some false Laconians, meeting in the house of Cleisthenes, Have inspired these wretched women all our wealth and pay to seize. Pay from whence I get my living. Gods! to hear these shallow wenches taking citizens to task, Prattling of a brassy buckler, jabbering of a martial casque! Gods! to think that they have ventured with Laconian men to deal, Men of just the faith and honour that a ravening wolf might feel! Plots they're hatching, plots contriving, plots of rampant Tyranny; But o'er US they shan't ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... thumb, but the feature of the collection was one about the shape and size of a full-grown potato. This nugget was said to be worth $250. Those who have seen the Alaska gold say it is very bright, and brassy in color, but not as fine in quality as the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various |
