"Tuneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may be devastated by the awful curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced Sheridan, the English orator, and shattered the golden scepter with which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless babble? What was it that swamped the noble spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, until, in a drunken fit, he reeled from the deck of a Western steamer, and was drowned. There was one whose voice we all loved to hear. He was one of the most classic orators of the century. People wondered ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference what the words might be or the theme—he sang every song and all songs to a fine, high, tuneless little tune of his own. At this moment Judge Priest, as Jeff gathered, was showing a wide range of selection. One second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all the way from Pike, and the next he was stating, for the benefit of all who might care ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... lark, when they welcome the dawn, Make a chorus of joy to resound through the lawn: But the mavis is tuneless, the lark strives in vain, When my beautiful charmer renews her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... safe, the child that cries, The kittens on the coat, The good-wife with her patient eyes, The milkmaid's tuneless throat; ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... fiddle—they umpah ump along. Underneath the quaver and whine of the jazz they beat the time, they make the tuneless rhythm. The feet dancing on the crowded cabaret floor listen cautiously for the trombone, the bassoon and the bull fiddle. They have a liaison with the umpah umps—the feet. Long ago they danced only to the umpah umps. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... at Aunt Anne and saw her in an ecstasy, singing in her cracked tuneless voice, a smile about her lips and in her eyes, that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel. Maggie felt the approach of tears; she stopped singing—softly the refrain of the last ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... twenty volumes of verse, the best of which he collected in five volumes (1907) and later in one volume (1911). The appreciative English critic, Edmund Gosse, in his Introduction to the 1907 collection, calls Cawein "the only hermit thrush" singing "through an interval comparatively tuneless." W. D. Howells's (p. 373) Foreword in the 1911 volume emphasizes Cawein's unusual power of making common things 'live and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... down, and heard him speaking once or twice, but he "had the Gaelic," and the sing-song voice and mysterious words sounded weirdly in her ears. Sometimes, as he put the final polish on the boots, he would break into song,—a strange, tuneless song which quavered up and down, and ended on long-sustained notes. Once even she saw the slippered feet move in jaunty dance-step to and fro, but at the sound of a clatter of saucepans from the kitchen close at hand he retired into his corner, and polished with redoubled energy. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold; even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... and Sunday. They have all been to church. They have struggled manfully through their prayers. They have chanted a depressing psalm or two to the most tuneless of ancient ditties. They have even sat out an incomprehensible sermon with polite gravity ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... inland. They stopped and strove to remember the location of the boat, and then followed the lane. The fog was amber-hued now and the morning was fast losing its chill. Perry broke into song and Han into a tuneless whistle that seemed to give him a deal of satisfaction. They soon found a main-travelled road and, after fixing the turn-off in their minds, wheeled to ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... he lay there sighing and groaning, prayerless, tuneless, hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the poor and the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den of despair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and the pious, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... found no rock. A rough line of piled stones severed it from surrounding lands, and a few trees stood there, promising summer shade, though, darkly moist along every budded twig, they now swayed in tuneless nakedness. Here the dead of Fort St. John were buried; and those approaching figures entered a gap of the inclosure instead of going on to the camp. Three of La Tour's soldiers, with Father Jogues and his donne, had come to bury the outcast baby. ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Wayne was ensconced comfortably in his little rock niche, hidden from the men in the valley below, but with a perfect view of everything that went on. The wind whistled around the cliffs, ceaselessly moaning a tuneless song. He felt like standing up and shouting wildly, "Here I am! Here I am!" but ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... never happened to enter before—a dingy door with the glass frosted. Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen. She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was the piano, battered, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... thought of that. The professionals will be stuck on the line, perhaps, and we shall have a songless, tuneless 'musical,' with only locals to eat ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... of that beloved voice seemed to have still its ancient influence, whilst that of Aramis, which had become harsh and tuneless in his moments of ill-humor, irritated him. He ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... away. She recked naught of the Alaculof challenge. Though the raucous notes of the tuneless lay could be heard plainly enough, they did not reach her ears. When she raced down the saloon companion she found Christobal bending over the small case of instruments he always carried. He straightened himself in his ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... no light came from any of the stores or houses along the street, but from behind the closed door of the cafe came the sound of voices and laughter mixed with the metallic banging of a very old piano beating out tuneless accompaniment to a bull-voiced singer roaring through the many verses of "Hinkey Dinkey ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... languid eye Life's autumn scenes grow dim; When evening's shadows veil the sky; And pleasure's siren hymn Grows fainter on the tuneless ear, Like echoes from another sphere, Or dreams of seraphim— It were not sad to cast away This dull and cumbrous ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... famous tune to walk to, And I wonder where they're off to. Step-step-stepping to the beating of the drums. But the rhythm changes as though a mist Were curling and twisting Over the landscape. For a moment a rhythmless, tuneless fog Encompasses her. Then her senses jog To the breath of a stately minuet. Herr Altgelt's violin is set In tune to the slow, sweeping bows, and retreats and advances, To curtsies brushing the waxen floor as the ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... nothing of Warren the next day, but on the day following he strode into the room, whistling in tuneless good humor. ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... the hastily converted hospitals and into dim prison cells came almost daily a little woman with a big smile, always with her hands full of flowers or delicacies, a basket swinging from her arm. As she walked she hummed tuneless airs, and her expression was such a dazed and meaningless one that the prison guards and other soldiers paid little heed to the coming and going of "Crazy Bet," as she was called. "Mis' Van Lew—poor creature, she's lost her balance since the ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... primitively. Beds were of bearskins and blankets, and the floor was the only bedstead. There were rustic tables of hewn boards, and benches without backs. In a storehouse there was a Fairbanks' scale, somewhat worn and rusty, and I found a tuneless melodeon from Boston and a coffee ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... true that Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase was associated still, in Swann's mind, with his love for Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... been driven out of the gates by the sword and had scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or cherishing the glow-worm tip ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... usual to have a festival. The young men wrestled and showed their prowess at trials of strength; the rest looked on and applauded. In the evening there was a dance, at which the local musician scraped out tuneless tunes on an ancient fiddle; and there was of course hearty eating and, it is to be feared, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace |
