"Shrillness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a feeble little voice. "Father!" There was no shrillness in the tone now, nor malice, nor any mischievous thing,—just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. "Father!" the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... desolated future. Did I hear anything meantime in the halls below? No. Did I even listen for the sound of her return? No. I was callous to everything, dead to everything but my own misery. I did not even heed the approach of morning, till suddenly, with a shrillness no ear could ignore, there rose, tearing through the silence of the house, that great scream from my wife's room which announced the discovery of her body lying stark ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... was right. After listening for a few moments, they could clearly hear, above the roar and tumult out of doors, this shout repeated; and that with a shrillness and energy, which denoted that it came from some person in great distress or terror. They looked at each other, turned pale, and held their ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... the tones—there's a shrillness in them not to be mistaken. Farewell! I must depart; you have heard the proverb, 'those who are bound must obey.' Young Jack, I presume, is squalling, and I must either nurse him, rock the cradle, or sing comic tunes for him, though heaven knows with what a disastrous heart I often ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... these words, when the sharp crack of the remaining Indian's rifle, who had recovered from the blow given him by Hamilton, and was glad of the opportunity of so speedily avenging it, rung in his ear with piercing shrillness, and looking in the direction of the flying couple, Durant saw Hamilton stagger with his burden, and then both fell to the earth. Instantly the demon was roused within him; every emotion of fear was swallowed up in his usually cowardly heart by the burning thirst ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... The reserves, the hospital-corps men and the engineers hugged the breastwork for cover. The leaves clipped from the trees by bullets were blown aside with the hurricane breaths of shrapnel bursts; bullets whistled so near Marta that she heard their shrillness above every other sound. She was amazed that the house still remained standing—that any one was alive. But she had a glimpse of Dellarme maintaining his set smile and another of Feller, who had crept up behind the automatic, making impatient "come-on! come-on! what-is-the-matter-with-you?" ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... drones,—drowned indeed in tenor, and even in treble, from time to time; the whole Hall shrilling up round it into pretty frequent wrath and provocation. It has droned and shrilled wellnigh a fortnight, before we can decide, this shrillness getting ever shriller, That on Wednesday 26th of December, Louis shall appear, and plead. His Advocates complain that it is fatally soon; which they well might as Advocates: but without remedy; to Patriotism ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... 't was but this instant That I entered here, alarmed By the strange and sudden shrillness Of thy voice; and though I had On my hands important business, Grave and weighty, since to me Hath the Emperor transmitted This decree, which bids me search Through the mountains for the Christians Hidden there, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... and there, as if some work had been left unfinished. I looked all around, but saw no Zeenab. I coughed once or twice; no answer. The only sound which reached my ears was the voice of the doctor's wife, exerting itself upon some one within the house; although its shrillness pierced even the walls, yet I could not make out what was the cause of its being so excited, until of a sudden it burst into the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... you knew," said the girl as the din of shrillness subsided. There seemed to Chet a note of hurt in her voice. "I thought you knew, that you had come here knowing. I am Anita, and Frithjof is my brother—Frithjof Haldgren! I stowed away on his ship; he did not know. I was only thirteen then.... ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... midst of this activity, we heard the voices of men, walking round the building. They again whistled, with a piercing shrillness; and, though we heard nothing distinctly, yet we caught tones that were coarse, rude, and savage; and words, that denoted anger and anxiety, for the perpetration of some dark purpose no doubt corresponding to the fierce and threatening sounds ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... theatre I wandered to the pavilion of Zingalee gipsies, where a band of these wild sons of Hagar were creating a perfect furor by the shrillness and discord of their voices. Never was such terrific music inflicted upon mortal ears. It went through and through you, quivering and vibrating like a rapier; but the common classes of Russians delight in it above all earthly sounds. They deem it the very finest kind of music. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... carriage we got; in came Madame's box and my bag; Madame stood at the door, and, I think, frightened away intending passengers, by her size and shrillness. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... senses of both were paralysed. It is not easy for most of us, who have not been through the cruel suffocation of a dynamite explosion, to realise completely how the crushed collapse of the nervous system leaves mind, thought, and feeling absolutely prostrate before the mere shrillness of sound. We are not speaking now of the cases in which serious harm is done—of course anyone can understand that—but only of the cases, after all, and in even the best carried out and most brutally contrived dynamite attempt—the vast majority of cases in which the intended, or at least ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... would under the circumstances have preserved a depressed and solemn silence, but these good ladies chattered like magpies, with such shruggings of shoulders, such waving of hands, such shrillness of emphasis, that Pixie felt as if she were once more domiciled in the ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... complaint that the world had changed of late years. But now she felt grievously that the world was different—that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell of the shrillness and the naivete of a family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when, with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely leaving ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... looking up, and speaking in a hoarse voice, which told of the inward pain, "tell me, nurse! Is he DEAD, did you say? Have you sent for a doctor? Oh! send for one, send for one," continued she, her voice rising to shrillness, and starting to her feet. Helen lifted herself up, and looked, with breathless waiting, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... deep and strong, and victory seemed to incline toward him; but Mrs. Melmoth now made use of a tone whose peculiar shrillness, as long experience had taught her husband, augured a mood of mind not ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stars themselves sprang this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence, to its long voyage to ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... what I say." Her voice took on an added shrillness. "Your infatuation for my nephew has been patent for a year now—and it's time you should be brought to your senses; I can't suppose you're fool enough ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... been extinguished when three closely fired shots cracked the vast stillness of the night. Ensued vocal explosions of a curdling shrillness from the back of the house. One instantly knew them to be indignant and Chinese. Caucasian ears gathered this much. I looked from an open window as the impassioned cries came nearer. The lucent moon of the mountains flooded that side of the house, and starkly into its light ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... they were tingling still with the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life—the young men who had clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all their locked-up tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas! how many generations of the young have handled them; and they are still there, frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged, and old, and die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lust of manhood toll ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the Cigale of the flowering ash, far more alert and far more suspicious than the common species. Its harsh, loud song consists of a series of cries—can! can! can! can!—with no intervals of silence subdividing the poem into stanzas. Thanks to its monotony and its harsh shrillness, it is a most odious sound, especially when the orchestra consists of hundreds of performers, as is often the case in my two plane-trees during the dog-days. It is as though a heap of dry walnuts were being shaken up in a bag until the shells broke. This painful ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... was first broken by the sound of the boatswain's whistle, followed by the hoarse cry of "All hands, up anchor, ahoy!"—the former rising on the night air, from its first low mellow notes to a piercing shrillness that gradually died away on the waters; and the latter bellowing through every cranny of the ship, like the hollow murmurs of ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... quite overpowering. Corrie gasped in his effort not to break down; Alice wept with silent joy as she continued to chafe the man's limbs; and Poopy went off into a violent fit of hysterical laughter, in which her "hee, hees!" resounded with terrible shrillness ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... that he had slipped away in order to take part in a race, and I found him "squaring off" at a bigger boy who had tripped him up. Without a word I carried him home, followed by the jeers and laughter of the racers, the girls making their presence known in the early December twilight by the shrillness of their voices and by manners no gentler than ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... impassioned inquisitionists. On every side one is confronted by waving beards, condemning eyes, denouncing faces, clenched hands and pointing fingers. From full twenty throats at once one is beset by shrill interrogations; but, owing to the universal rapidity of utterance and the shrillness of enunciation, one is quite unable, in the present state of one's mind, to ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... above the wind and the steady roar of the furiously driven sand and alkali, Peggy thought she heard a wild screech or cry. It sounded like nothing human in its uncanny shrillness. Brave girl as she was, Peggy shuddered hysterically. Could she be losing her mind in the whirling confusion and elemental fury that waged all ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up, to be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sure," she said slowly, "though you told the boy." Her eyes, velvet-black in the shadow upcast by the lamp, opened slowly. "There has been much trouble with Father Antoine, and now small numbers go to mass or confession." Her voice had the effect of shrillness though it remained low; her hands flew out, grasping the table-edge at arms' length with an oddly masculine gesture. "He deserved that! To tell his canaille that I—that we——He dared! But now—now—we ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... startled to hear him speak in quite a new voice, with a Yankee shrillness in it; all his grandeur and good English had fallen from ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... God! that it should come to this! Ah! the cruelty! But still I will fight to the last—I will never go.' Her voice had risen to shrillness, her face was contorted by anger; she looked incarnate rage, a Megaera. Suddenly her features resumed their usual expression—nay, more, it was the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... awake, in consequence of some slight indisposition, and lay, according to his custom, musing on some favorite topic. Suddenly the silence, which was remarkably profound, was broken by a voice of most piercing shrillness, that seemed to be uttered by one in the hall below his chamber. "Awake! arise!" it exclaimed: "hasten to succour one that is ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... been said of Maria Jane in her earlier years that she had sung "Bonnie Doon" so pathetically she had moved the roomful to tears. Her voice was rather thin now, with a touch of shrillness on the high notes, but the little girl listened entranced. Then she sang "Scots wha' hae" and "Roy's wife of Aldivaloch." Margaret had come home, the supper-table was spread, the men came in, and they sat ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the attorney, with sudden shrillness. "Have a care what you're about. You are here to sell for the underwriters, let me tell you—not to act for Mr. Douglas Longhurst. This sale has been already disgracefully interrupted to allow that person to hold a consultation ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... into sitting upright in bed. Their shrillness tearing through the utter soundlessness of the empty house brought back all her terrors and set her heart beating ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... needle point met its flashing target. Again the horrid cry of the stricken beast reverberated through the rocky tunnel, shocking in its torture-laden shrillness, deafening in its ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would merge into discordant blendings of half-tones ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... Still screaming, she bounded—it was almost that she bounced—straight up. The others streamed to the zenith in the wake of her panic, caught up, closed about her. There floated down the shrillness of agitated question ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Sophia arrived at the conclusion of her story, there arrived in the room where the two ladies were sitting a noise, not unlike, in loudness, to that of a pack of hounds just let out from their kennel; nor, in shrillness, to cats, when caterwauling; or to screech owls; or, indeed, more like (for what animal can resemble a human voice?) to those sounds which, in the pleasant mansions of that gate which seems to derive its name from a duplicity of tongues, issue from the mouths, and sometimes ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding |
