"Overtone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way to talk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teeth of a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone—it is an overtone of conversation, one might say—and it is distinctly nasal. The brakie could talk above the racket, and so, of course, could Lefty Joe. They sat about in the center of the train, on the forward end of one of the cars. No matter how the ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... gazed she repeated his name, leisurely, quietly, and even more softly than before: "Mr. Spinrobin." But this time, as their eyes met and the syllables issued from her lips, he noticed that a singular after-sound—an exceedingly soft yet vibrant overtone—accompanied it. The syllables set something quivering within him, something that sang, running of its own accord into a melody to which his rising pulses beat ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... automatic, so that the resonance-cavities shape themselves instantly to the note that is being produced within the larynx and, vibrating in sympathy with it, sound the overtones. The reciprocal principle of elective affinity between fundamental and overtone, between the shape assumed by the larynx for pitch and the shape assumed by the resonance-cavities for quality, is illustrated by the exciting influence of a sounding instrument upon a silent one tuned to the same pitch which, although not touched ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... upon it now. His voice roared again as it had done so many times before through the Tonah Basin camp. It reached to every listening ear where crowding men stood hushed and motionless; and the overtone of terror that altered its customary timber ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... impossible; but its somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance, that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe of meaning attaching to the concepts that ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life's journey they seemed weary ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... now that of a gigantic orchestra, now that of a full brass band, now that of a single unknown instrument—as though the composer had had at his command every overtone capable of being produced by any possible instrument, and with them had woven a veritable tapestry of melody upon an incredibly complex loom of sound. As went the harmony, so the play of light accompanied it. Neither music nor illumination came from ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... nuclear-battery motor didn't conk; the vehicle could almost fly without guidance. It was good to look down at the blue-green shagginess, below... Familiarity bred, not contempt, but a decline of dread to the point where it became a pleasant thrill—an overtone to the process of falling in love. Otherwise, perhaps they led each other on, into incaution. Out in the lonely fastnesses of Mars they seemed to find the sort of peace and separation from danger on the hectic Earth that the settlers had ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed England's declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own doctrine of 1812, to ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... emphatically, in truth, that it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... optical image of that carving knife cutting into the skin of the wrist, only with the difference that it seldom was found in both arms, usually in the one or the other. The sensation became a strictly tactual one with optical overtone, but there was no emotion in it. The pain element had disappeared. Also the shock, which still recurred in the first days slowly disappeared. The longer the symptom lasted, the more the optical factor faded away, and the tactual factor came into the foreground after three or four weeks. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... defect and the moral infirmity? It is difficult to say; yet we feel that the relationship is there, though we cannot express it in words. Perhaps the situation required that this judging machine should also appear before us as a talking machine. However it may be, no other overtone could more perfectly have completed the ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... aghast for a moment when that crash of noise broke around them; but they came from a life where there was nothing of beauty except the lonely strength of the mountains and the appalling silences of the stars that roll above the desert. Almost at once they caught the overtone of human joyousness, and they turned with smiles to each other, and it was "Pierre?" "Jack?" Then a nod, and she was in his arms, and they ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand |
