"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been a man, Carrigan would have found an answer. For he was not robbed, and therefore robbery was not a motif. "A case of mistaken identity," he would have told himself. "An error in ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... accosted by a young millionaire—insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude, but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition. Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men, authors,—Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Monsieur Reeve,—Je suis revenu ici il y a deux jours apres avoir fait en Autriche un voyage imprevu dont vous avez connu le motif et le resultat. J'ai ete recu par l'auguste malade [Footnote: The Comte de Chambord, known among the Legitimists as Henri V.] avec une affectueuse cordialite qui m'a profondement touche, et j'ai quitte Vienne en conservant quelque espoir de le voir sortir de la crise cruelle ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... amongst the elements which moved President Wilson. That picketing had compelled Congress to see the question in terms of political capital is also true. From the first word uttered in the House debate, until the final roll-call, political expediency was the chief motif. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... time she had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... he could spread a New York Success on the marble-top Table and dissect it until nothing was left but the Motif, and then he would heave that into the Waste Basket, thereby leaving the Stage in ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... frequently married by their patrons, it is believed that not a few women from "special villages" are taken to wife without their origin being known. Unwitting marriage with an Eta woman has long been a common motif in fiction and folk story. Many members of the "special tribes" go to Hokkaido and there pass into the general body of the population. The folk of this class are "despised," I was told by a responsible Japanese, "not so much for themselves as for what their ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... from people whose faces we had stepped on, or who had been suddenly interrupted in a snore of powerful dimensions by the violent impact of a hard head against the diaphragm. By the time we had reached our own place the remarks had swelled to a chorus with a deplorable motif. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... B.C.$ Seems to have been derived largely from the Early Asian. It influenced Assyrian and Greek decorations, and was used as a motif in some French Empire decoration. Not used in its entirety except for ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... repetition of one or more verses, either exactly repeated or slightly modified, at the end of a stanza or less frequently at another fixed place (4, 10, 34). Aside from its rhythmic-melodic effect the refrain helps to center the attention on a certain idea or motif. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... thought more critical than another—must have come somewhere about 1870. M. Vollard once asked him what he did during the war. "Ecoutez un peu, monsieur Vollard! Pendant la guerre j'ai beaucoup travaille sur le motif a l'Estaque." M. Vollard is too good a patriot to add that during the war he also went into hiding, having been called up for military service. Cezanne, I am sorry to say, was an insoumis—a deserter. He seems to have supposed that he had something more important to do ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... were solid. Though she liked to dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif. It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a good taste in ties, and an income of ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... of their apparel, they have developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas. Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed. They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor. His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the Park on Sunday. She's Red Crossing. Had on the most elaborate costume you ever saw. Imagine a nurse's uniform brought up to the standard of the highest art, or perhaps I ought to say an artistic dress with the red cross for motif. She told me that she expects to go to the ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to beings whose ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... theatre was the prose farce of "Mr. H——," in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a nobleman travelling incognito. Hitherto ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... felt he was going to say something more—something still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. "What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... indeed, are those hangings which pertain to the earlier date, but a study of those few, taken in conjunction with the still fewer that remain of the 16th century, prove the gradual growth of the designs that have the tree motif ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... like wool and turned the men on the planks into colourless figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms, mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat, confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the shipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the barrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the swinging high planks, and then at last, the dollop, dollop, as the stuff shot into ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... instance, the case of the artist. He must start by having a definite objective, what in studio phrase is called a "motif"; something that has given him a certain impression which he wants to convey to others, but which cannot be stated as an isolated fact without any surroundings. Then the surroundings must be painted so as to have a natural ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... failure, he was struck by the similarity of one of his compositions to another. They all seemed to contain the same melody, in one form or another, and he saw plainly at last that he was subconsciously haunted by the leading motif of the first movement of his last symphony, the symphony that was played on that dreadful night for the first and last time. The inference was plain enough. This melody haunted him, he could not forget it; it showed itself in all his work and he ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... Mann! Mein Mann!" Presently she covered her face, and her voice died into a wail of despair: "O, mein Mann! O, mein Mann!" She turned away, staggering about like some creature that has received a death wound. Hal's eyes followed her; her cry, repeated over and over incessantly, became the leit-motif of this symphony ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... to attempt to describe a future composition of mobile light. Certainly there is an extensive variety of possibilities. A sunset may be compressed into minutes or an opalescent sky may be a motif. Varying intensities of a single hue or of allied hues may serve as a gentle melody. Realistic effects may be introduced. The expressiveness of individual colors may be taken as a basis for constructing the various motifs. ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... He was security for an annuity of Richard's, and so suffered this seizure on his account. It is a strange combination altogether, and is now more the subject of conversation than any other topic, and it serves me also as one to fill my letter. Si le recit vous ennuye, vous n'ignorez pas le motif que j'ai a vous le faire. I suppose that you are not always at audiences, and that you may like sometimes to know what passes in circles from whence everything of moment is excluded, and where you may be again, to ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... child, that her ears may be rejoiced with mine." And Mother Mayberry caught at the top of the gate as the girl slipped the nodding baby down into her arms and in her wonderful muted voice hummed the Grail motif while the Deacon raised his thin old hands ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the signal; some of them did not conceal their hilarity. The audience, certain then that the music was laughable, rocked with laughter. This merriment became general; it increased at the return of a very rhythmical motif which the double-basses accentuated in a burlesque fashion. Only the Kapellmeister went on through ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... regarded his wife with serious attention. Lighting his pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an air which had for its sole motif the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town's Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... generations,—and she has the Irish voice. It's delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That laugh, now, when she doubles over at the hips—who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves her hand, too. She's at her best in the second act. She's really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... kind of RTLD motif throughout the stanza. The assonance is even more striking. The stressed vowel sounds (which are of course the most important[79]) line by line ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... tout artifice, tels que Morvilliers, de Thou, Pibrac, Montluc et Bellievre, louer contre leurs sentimens, ou excuser par complaisance une action qu'ils detestoient dans le coeur, sans y etre engages par aucun motif de crainte ou d'esperance; mais dans la fausse persuasion ou ils etoient que les circonstances presentes et le bien de l'Etat demandoient qu'ils ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... alone. She wore a loose cream-coloured gown knotted about the waist; her arms were bare, and her hair unbound and flowing loose over her shoulders to her girdle. She was to die in this act; it promised to be harrowing; and the first few notes she uttered recurred again later on as the motif for the famous quartet in the ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... well played. It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last faced ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... he exclaimed, "wasn't that 'Marche Triomphante to-night great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it—my—" he cried, hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing—almost good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm getting to like music with go to it—with bang and brass. Wagner does it; honest, Jane, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... man could stand free and sway his body gracefully this way and that; yes, 'tis the thing to do; she may yet look at me as she now looks at St. Mar!" so thought Cedric. The piece was soft and gentle, with a pathetic motif running through it. Katherine became so rapt she drew closer and closer, until at last she stood beside St. Mar. He became confused and halted, and finally left off altogether and turned to read the admiration in the azure ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... did the future look in those years! In this period Erasmus repeatedly reverts to the glad motif of a golden age, which is on the point of dawning. Perennial peace is before the door. The highest princes of the world, Francis I of France, Charles, King of Spain, Henry VIII of England, and the emperor Maximilian ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga |
