"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disappointments returns humbled to his home. The later narrative Mara, in the collection entitled Hans and Grete (1909), is also the fruit of exotic experiences. This account of a love in imagination has the same motif as one of the most original narratives of the Swiss Spitteler, Imago, with the only difference that in Mara over-excitation of the brain is motivated by tropical heat. Strauss is in all of his narratives an extremely acute psychologist, who everywhere concentrates his attention upon the development ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... life—if in such a life one moment may without impertinence be 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 than to get himself ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... of the rug was reproduced in every detail of the room. The, window, draperies, of thin, Oriental fabric, had bands of Chinese embroidered silk cunningly sewed on them. These bands carried out in the azure groundwork and the golden threads the motif of the rug. The cushions, which were everywhere in evidence, were made of the same embroidered silk which banded the window draperies, while blue strips of the same material were thrown carelessly over a teakwood table and, a chest ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... in the first category, and the remaining figures in the second. Now if the ordinary order cells be represented by white, and the reverse ordinary by black, just such a pattern has been created as forms the decorative motif of the quilt. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... track, but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Shakespearean influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with talk of "new Inventions, Engines, and I know not what, which have ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... really good work here, Margot! I had an idea last night, after you had gone to bed, and I was watching the stars through the pines. I won't read it to you yet, for it wants working up, but it's good—I am sure it is good! And that little stream along from the house; I found a song motif in that,—'Clear babbling over amber bed!' How's that for a word- picture? Shows the whole thing, doesn't it? The crystal clearness of the water; the music of its flow, the curious golden colour of the rocks. I'm ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... process thus in the first instance is purely a matter of feeling—exactly what we speak of as "motif" in a ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... affairs with a realism that is convincing, but free of offence. The heroine allures and for a long time retains the devotion and affection of a typical solitary Londoner, who is not less devoted to the bon motif; but the inevitable break occurs. There is plenty of humour and of first-hand knowledge in this study of upper Bohemian life of to-day, and ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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 America flat ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... thirty major markets; and the cumulative finding put these three in a class by themselves, at the top. Furthermore, these random tests agreed 100% with Everett in the selection of 'SOWLES' CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS' as the ideal motif, out of those pre-eminent three.... So we are doubly, even triply checked out before take-off; since these findings confirm the humble ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... upon; and withal, a 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 blue ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... abhorred vain repetition. Since it takes two to keep an argument going, Thompson's beginning was but the beginning of a monologue which presently died weakly of inattention. When he gave over trying to inject a theological motif into the conversation, he found MacLeod responsive enough. The factor touched upon native customs, upon the fur trade, upon the vast and unexploited resources of the North, all of which was more or less ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 he tipped the cottage ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald |
