"Jazz" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see I was about as convincin' as a jazz band tryin' to imitate the Metropolitan orchestra doin' the overture to "Lucia." If I hadn't finally had sense enough to switch the subject a little, there might have been a poutin' scene and maybe a double case of sulks. But when I got to askin' where she'd collected ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... his audience, he were forced to express himself in a humble and subdued manner, but express himself he must. The tunes that he chose were The Rosary, The Miserere, Tosti's Good-bye, Gounod's Ave Maria. There would be an occasional lapse into the jazz song of the moment, and quite frequently a sacred number. The songs themselves exasperated her, but what was unbearable were the trills and improvised fireworks. She would leave the room thoroughly angry, and would fancy that as she ascended the stairs ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... pounded her way through a noisy bit of "jazz," Caleb Patten, with one of his host's cigars lighted, was leaning a little forward in his chair, alert to seize the first opportunity of ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... home. Not only in the ward-room that did a jazz with a disturbing spiral movement when we speeded up from our casual 18 knots to something like 28 in a rough sea, but from the bridge down to the boiler room, where we watched the flames of oil fuel making steam in the modern manner, we were drawn into the charmed circle of comradeship ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... Kendrick. Nick's hobby was music, and he treasured his second-hand stereophonic unit and collection of tapes. He too was a classicist in his way, and there was many a long winter night when Harry sat there listening to ancient folk songs. The quaint atonalities of progressive jazz and the childishly frantic rhythms of "cool sounds" were somehow soothing and reassuring in their reminder of a simple heritage ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... hast thou learnt at last to jazz? Come take my arm, my clomplish boy;" O hectic day! Cheero! Cheeray! He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... every step, from beginning to end, is right before your eyes in print and picture. First you are told how to do a thing, then a picture shows you how, then you do it yourself and hear it. And almost before you know it, you are playing your favorite pieces—jazz, ballads, classics. No private teacher could make it clearer. Little theory—plenty of accomplishment. That's why students of the U.S. School of Music get ahead twice as fast—three times as fast as those who ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... and all that sort of latter-day tendency. Damn it, he can get all that outside the churches and get it better. Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and drink beer with him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing music-hall songs with him, and dance Jazz with him, and call it making religion a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of the people to God, they say, by showing them that religion is not incompatible with having a jolly fine time. And there's no God there that a man can understand for him to be lifted ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... brought in and passed around was something to be remembered. Jimmy in particular ate until his eyes bulged and fully sustained his previous reputation. And while they ate, the doctor turned on one lively selection after another, finishing with a selection from a jazz band that sent them into a ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... an' piccalo, Bofe warblin' sof an' lo' Slide ho'n an' saxophones, Jazz syncopated tones, Snare drum an' lead cornet, Alto an' clarinet, Las', but not least, dar cum Cymbals an' big bass ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... All we need is a plot. Come, come now—a plot alive with villains and weeping maidens. Halto! The window of the 5—and 10-cent store! a tumble of gewgaws and candies and kitchen utensils. Christmas tree tinsel and salted peanuts, jazz music and mittens. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... marked. To me the sweetest music in the world is the roar of a fifteen-inch gun on a day when the visibility is good and plentiful. But I do know enough to be able to say that the wild asses who with their jazz-bands "stamp o'er our heads and will not let us sleep" (slightly to amend my old friend FitzGerald) are nothing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... to leave town and live in the suburbs where the Bolsheviki wouldn't bother him), and don't leave any forwarding address with the postoffice. But if, as I fear from an examination of your pink-scalloped notepaper with its exhalation of lilac essence, the vortex of modern jazz life has swept you in, the crisis is ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... quite and he says "That's all bunk because I been out here before and talked my head off and nothing happened." So I says well if you have got to talk you don't half to yell it. So then he tried to whisper Al but his whisper sounded like a jazz record with a crack in it so he says I'm not yelling I am whispering so I said yes I have heard Hughey Jennings whisper like that out on ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... to drink deep of it, and drink again and again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music of humanity";—that is, taking our theory at its best, and before you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime. But what interested Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said: 'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the week; when you come to the theater you shall ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... had ever told me of it so frankly before. Children are so honest until we teach them to say that they're sorry when they're not, and to listen to stories that bore them and to pretend not to like Jazz when all ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... through a haze of tobacco smoke and over the noise of a jazz orchestra and the chatter of a dozen similar conversations. Hugh was excited but not really interested. The Nu Deltas invited him to their house every evening, but they were not making a great fuss over him. Perhaps they weren't going to give him a bid.... Well, he'd go some other ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... Bands (CONSTABLE) is not, as you might excusably suppose, a treatise on syncopation or the decline of Jazz, but takes its title from a verse in the Book of Proverbs. Really what the story most illustrates is the extent to which a clever and experienced writer can clothe a wildly impossible plot with some aspect of reality. Miss ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER assuredly does not lack courage; having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... music, perhaps, that changes the dancing. Jazz is becoming popular. And about all the crowd dances now is an infinite ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... dancer. Well, this finishes it. We're out here till breakfast-time. If those blasted servants come back before eight o'clock, I shall be vastly surprised. You won't get Seppings away from a dance till you throw him out. I know him. The jazz'll go to his head, and he'll stand clapping and demanding encores till his hands blister. Damn all dancing butlers! What is Brinkley Court? A respectable English country house or a crimson dancing school? One might ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... we're tied up till Larry comes." Barney turned back to Maggie. "I say, sister, how about robing yourself in your raiment of joy and coming with yours truly to a palace of jazz, there to dine and show the populace what real ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... beauty," drawled Simonoff. "This is the dance of Greek maidens at the sacrificial rites to Demeter. The Grand street thing is a contortion before the obese complacency of the great god Jazz. And Jazz has ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... end of the round; but he would not have experienced this feeling of helpless horror—the sort of horror an elder of the church might feel if he saw his favourite bishop yielding in public to the fascination of jazz. It was the fact that Bugs Butler was lowering himself to extend his powers against a sparring-partner that shocked Mr. Burrowes. There is an etiquette in these things. A champion may batter his sparring-partners into insensibility if he pleases, but he must ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... mentally to find signs of an alarm here—to encounter persons hurrying toward the Thirty-ninth Street side of the building. But nothing of the sort was afoot. A darky orchestra was playing a jazz tune very loudly in the cafe at the left of the Broadway entrance, so it was not only possible but very likely that the sounds of the shots had not been heard inside the hotel at all. Certainly his eye, sweeping the place, discovered no evidences of any unusual stir. Perhaps ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... did not profess to teach juniors; it was only after celebrating her fifteenth birthday that Ingred had been eligible as one of his pupils. He had the reputation of being peppery tempered, therefore she walked into the room to take her first lesson with her heart performing a sort of jazz dance under her jersey. Dr. Linton, like many musicians, was of an artistic and excitable temperament, and highly eccentric. Instead of sitting by the side of his new pupil, he paced the room, pursing his lips in and out, and drawing ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... astride a noted outlaw known as Jazz. The horse was a sorrel, and it knew all the tricks of its kind. It went sunfishing, tried weaving and fence-rowing, at last toppled over backward after a frantic leap upward. The rider, long-bodied and lithe, rode like a centaur. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... such pleasures as The shimmy and "the Bacchus Jazz"; Your presence with the maidens jars— You are the cloud ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... old gentleman in the crowded restaurant was compelled to sit, much against his will, next to the orchestra. His stare at the leader as the jazz selection came to an end. The annoyed ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... an hour that seems to vary according to one's proximity to the sea. The gilded palaces along the front keep deplorable hours, polluting the night air till dawn with indefatigable jazz: but at the pensions of the economical like the Normandie, early to bed is the rule. True, Jules, the stout young native who combined the offices of night-clerk and lift attendant at that establishment, was on duty in the ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse |
