"Muted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cabin to his comrade, and she heard them shouting and laughing together, and then the muted scamper of their bare feet on the soft road toward ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... of the radio grew more distant. He slumped forward in the bucket seat, his head striking the controls in front of him—and, for him, the sounds of the muted radio ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... an extremely difficult task. The tone of the muted horn, for example, is perfectly familiar to the average musician. Yet who would undertake to describe in words the tone of the muted horn? A description of the sounds produced by a perfectly managed voice is almost as difficult to frame ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... head to the mandoline, and suddenly began to sing a Neapolitan song, in a faint, compressed head-voice, looking up at her again as his lips moved, looking straight into her face with a curious mocking caress as the muted voix blanche came through his lips at her, amid the louder quavering of the mandoline. The sound penetrated her like a thread of fire, hurting, but delicious, the high thread of his voice. She could see the Adam's apple move in his throat, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... ammunition to the muzzle. Had a stray sparrow been fluttering in the air, he would certainly have got a fright, and probably a fall—nor would there have been any hope for a tom-tit. But an eagle—an eagle ever so many thousand feet aloft—poo, poo!—he would merely have muted on the roaring multitude, and given Sardanapalus an additional epaulette. Why, had a string of wild-geese at the time been warping their way on the wind, they would merely have shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... windows; if it was cold, she opened them and leaned out. If it was quiet, she was filled with fear; if it was not quiet, she longed for peace. She could not say her prayers; she had none to say; her mind and soul were muted, muffled, dumb. She felt the hours following each other in regular order as something terrible; she wanted to skip over years, just as one might skip over pages of a tiresome book. And when the worst came to the worst, and she did not know ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... now in sheets and the steely light played on his dark face and sombre dress and the sharp white note of his collar. Through the constant rush and patter of the rain the girl's voice went on—a low voice with a note of pleasure and laughter in it which muted with the tragedy ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... the yellow lights leap one by one Along high walls; And along black streets that glisten as if with rain, The muted city seems Like one in a restless sleep, who lies and dreams Of vague desires, and memories, and half-forgotten pain . . . Along dark veins, like lights the quick dreams run, Flash, are extinguished, flash again, To mingle and glow at last in the enormous brain And die away . . . As evening falls, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... unanswerable objection is, so much the worse for the artist's art if he had such intentions. Chopin's description of the Adagio quoted above—remember the beloved landscape, the beautiful memories, the moonlit spring night, and the muted violins—hits off its character admirably. Although Chopin himself designates the first Allegro as "vigorous"—which in some passages, at least from the composer's standpoint, we may admit it to be—the fundamental mood of this movement ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... away while Quillan was speaking. Everybody at the table seemed fairly high, and two of the couples were embarrassingly amorous; but she couldn't quite picture any of them as somebody's spies or agents. She listened to the muted chatter. Some Hub dialect she ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... mark the clarion shout— "Go where the winds of victory whirl you!" His eagle organ, petering out, Whines like a sick and muted curlew; A plaintive dirge supplants the paean That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... been fitted later into the dialogue form. However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound," which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed under the fascination ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... true, for they all rest on Sundays, getting up late, sleeping after dinner, and not going out till they have had coffee about five. Today, when I hoped they had all gone out, I had such a longing to play a little that I muted my strings and played to myself in a whisper what I could remember of a very beautiful thing of Ravel's that Kloster showed me the other day,—the most haunting, exquisite thing; and I hummed the weird harmonies ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... Fiorsen beside her in the darkness, his dim, broad-cheekboned face moody in the corner or pressed close to hers. Once they had walked a long way homeward in the dawn, Rosek with them, Fiorsen playing on his muted violin, to the scandal of the policemen and the cats. Dim, unreal memories! Grasping Betty's arm more firmly, she rang the bell. When the man servant, whom she remembered well, opened the door, her lips were so dry that they could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... erect and cupped his palm round his ear. Far off; muted by distance, but still unmistakable; he heard the baying of bloodhounds. Then this was the end. A sob broke from his throat. What was he, an animal; to be hunted down as a sport? Tears of self-pity welled to his eyes as he thought ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... "harp"-stop, which muted one string of each note by a piece of leather, became, by the interposition of a piece of cloth between the hammer and the strings, the piano, harp, or celeste. The more complete sourdine, which muted all the strings by contact of a long strip of leather, acted as the staccato, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... And I knew not that there were sparrows in the wall, and mine eyes being open, the sparrows muted warm dung into mine eyes, and a whiteness came in mine eyes: and I went to the physicians, but they helped me not: moreover Achiacharus did nourish me, until I ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... heretic Christian parents of Russia, and had risen by degrees to the rank he now held. The origin of his advancement was owing to the following trivial incident. One day a kite flying over the king of Cambaya, muted on his head, on which the king was so enraged that he declared he would give all he was worth to have the kite killed. Malek Azz who heard this, was an excellent bowman, and immediately let fly an arrow which brought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... was voluntary there was almost invariably a good turn-out. None of us is likely ever to forget these little gatherings; the solemn quiet which the distant crackle of rifles seemed but to emphasise; the Psalms and Hymns, in which all joined devoutly but in tones muted and softened in harmony with the evening stillness; the short lesson, read by the light of a screened candle or electric torch; the simple prayers for our comrades facing death, for the sick, the wounded, and the dying, for the bereaved, and for the dear ones waiting for us at home; ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... of the suite is made up of themes actually learned from Chinese musicians. It represents the "Wedding of Aladdin and the Princess," a sort of sublimated "shivaree" in which oboes quawk, muted trumpets bray, pizzicato strings flutter, and mandolins (loved ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... impoverished bed had groaned with the restless weight of him all those many nights through which he had lain wakeful, in impotent mutiny against the outrageous circumstances that made him a prisoner there. Its walls had muted the sighs in which the desires of youth had been spent. Its floor matting was worn threadbare with the impatient pacings of his feet (four strides from door to window: swing and repeat ad libitum). Its solitary gas-jet had, with begrudged illumination, sicklied o'er the pages of those ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... presiding place of honour. It is a very great responsibility to sit in the presiding place of honour. From that conspicuous position one leads the whole table's activities: conversing to the right, laughing to the left, sharply on the lookout for any conversational gap, now and then drawing muted tete-a-tetes into a harmonic unison. She is, as it were, the leader of an orchestra of which the individual diners are the subsidiary instruments. Upon her watchful resourcefulness hangs the success of a dinner-party. But Missy, though a trifle fluttered, had felt no anxiety; she knew so well ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... with all the fragrance there; The lane in flower somehow With youth, and plighted hands, and star-strewn air, And muted 'Thee' and 'Thou':— All the wild bloom and reach of dreams that never were, —Never to ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... silence... faintly disturbed only by that softly sibilant, almost muted percussion which recalls inevitably the ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... said the old man, in a peculiar voice that was quite low and yet strangely vibrant, like the note of a muted violin. "I have come to ask you if you could oblige me with a couple of pieces of sugar. I have run out, and somehow—one has one's foolish weaknesses—I dislike ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... if we were progressing through the nave of a mighty church with a muted organ in the distance. There was animal life too, a strange lizard-like bird that rose up in flocks ahead of ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... ninth added. He thus achieves a chord which also contains the tonic triad of A minor. The same thing is now done with the dominant triads, and half the battle is won. Moreover, the instrumentation shows the same boldness, for the double theme is first given to three solo violins, and they are muted in a novel and effective manner by stopping their F holes. The directions in the score say mit Glaserkitt (that is, with glazier's putty), but the Konzertmeister at the Gewandhaus, Herr F. Dur, substituted ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... his own, the pilot's seat. Haney pushed a button. Through the fabric of the ship came the muted uproar of a pushpot engine starting. Haney pushed another button. Another. Another. More jet engines bellowed. The tumult in the Shed would ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... in such a rhythmical fashion as to impart to it exceeding vitality, and I announced it with the English horn, with a curious rhythmic background by the tympani; the strings in division played tremolando and the bass staccato and muted. This may not be clear to you; it is not very clear to me, but at the time it all seemed very wonderful. I finished the work after nine months of agony, of revision, of pruning, clipping, cutting, hawking it about for my ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... perverse words, Ye darken beauty with your plots of pain! What languors beat through me like muted chords? I know indeed that suffering shall profane These lovers, sweet as viols or violet-spices. Strangely must end their dreamy chess-playing, Strange wounds amaze their broidered Paradises, And stain the falconry and garlanding. Their bodies must be broken as on wheels, Their souls be carded ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... Dauphin, passing other white-gloved lackeys, each a separate perfection of punctiliousness; and passed through a marble hallway, muted with rugs of the Orient, and came into a vast high chamber, large as a theater—marble walls and ceiling, tapestries, moulded plaster and gilt in moderation, silken ropes instead of handrails on the stairways, electric lights so shaded that each ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray, a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... that, at least, I was honest with you." The bitter note of mockery that had rung through all his former speech was suddenly absent—muted, crushed out, and the quiet, steadfast utterance carried conviction even in Sara's reeling faith, shaking her to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... end of the procession was leaving the stage, and Elsa was sitting on the bed alone. Still no Lohengrin. The violins arrived at the muted chord of B flat, which is Lohengrin's cue. They hung on it for a second, and then the conductor dropped his baton. A bell rang. The curtain descended. The lights were turned up, and there was a swift loosing of tongues in the house. People were pointing to Sir Cyril in our box. As for him, ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of judgment Trilling had made with my still keen affection for the best of Anderson's writings. By then, I had read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light—a glow of darkness, you might say—that ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... on his shoulders and a muted growl coming from him. Then Humbolt heard the first whisper of sound; a faint, faraway roaring that was ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... cattle with his wild shouts and gestures! There was no danger of the musicians of Paris upsetting their neighbors with the noise of their inspiration, like the bear of Bonn. When they composed they muted the strings of their thought: and the heavy hangings of their rooms prevented any sound from outside ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... up. He was about to call out, when prudence muted his voice. For the moment he could not recollect just what had happened or where he was; but a vast impending consciousness of evil and of danger weighed upon him. It warned him to keep still, to make no outcry. A ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... The music had changed. Muted cornets, banjos and saxophones were wailing out a tom-tom adagio. People were rising from tables and moving toward a dancing space. Eddie stood beside her ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht |
