"Strident" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raised his voice suddenly to a strident shout, "hear me all you within the house. Give up the girl and the child to their legal protectors, and no harm shall befall either life or property. We shall be on shipboard in half-an-hour. I shall see to it that every man within the castle is rewarded from the Maitland money that ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... hidden in shrubbery, is of weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with the patina of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of refinement driven too high had broken and ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... colonial possessions "became pawns in the game."* (* The phrase is Professor Egerton's, Cambridge Modern History 9 735.) There was no Imperialism then, with its strident note, its ebullient fervour and flag waving. There was no national sense of pride in colonial Empire, or general appreciation of the great potentialities of oversea possessions. "The final outcome of the great war ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... Casiana the boarding-house keeper, idyllic silence had reigned for some time. Only through the balcony windows, which were wide open, came the distant rumbling of carriages and the song of a neighbouring cricket who scratched with disagreeable persistency upon the strident string of his instrument. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... charms on part of the women, and of her mental gifts on part of the men. Mr. Lambert had commended her to the care of Mrs. Burton. Her board was paid in advance and no questions asked. She went to church and sang softly, but in a voice so exquisitely sweet and penetrating that it tempered the strident melodies of the devout Omahannas, and caused many a head to turn. She spent the first few days at the rector's, or in her room. Then came a roomer with the rumor that she had a follower, and for two evenings ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... that wretched men must toil for bread; The tragedy of life he has not read, Or deems it but the comedy of fear: He never lifts his eyes above the ground To gaze upon the glittering world of stars; The poet's richest music only mars The rasping of the locust's strident sound. And yet I've never seen a wilder light Glow in the beauteous eyes of dawning love, Than flashes from this strange man's soul at sight Of some rare flower he finds in mountain cove: Mere fungus, or the poisonous, dank mushroom, Enchants him ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... interests, fascinates me. Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales...." An East of painted cardboard, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal.... The verse is grand, noble, tremendous; I liked it, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... these cries, accompanied by the strident clank of chains, produces upon me the effect of a galvanic battery, and I am obliged to put forth all that remains to me of moral strength to prevent myself from screaming and moaning like the others. With my feet in blood and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... breathless they could hear the rustle of the leaves in the almost motionless air, while the strains of gay music floating from the open windows sounded loud and strident. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... heartily tired were we of so continuously serpentine a track; we therefore kept pushing on. We saw several natives to-day, but they invariably fled to the fastnesses of their mountain homes, they raised great volumes of smoke, and their strident vociferations caused a dull and buzzing sound even when out of ear-shot. The pattering of the rain-drops became heavier, yet we kept on, hoping at every turn to see an opening which would free us from our prison-house; but night and heavier rain together came, and we were compelled to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... literature was acridly republican in tone and of a levelling tendency. Thus, for the first time since the brief attempt of the Cromwellian Levellers, the rich and the poor began to group themselves in hostile camps, at the strident tones of Paine's cry for a graduated Income Tax. Is it surprising that the sight of the free institutions of France and of the forced economy of the Court of the Tuileries should lead our workers to question the utility of the State-paid debaucheries ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... idle arms. They were clad in town clothes; jackets cut with clumsy smartness, hard black hats, immense boots, polished highly. Their women all in simple black, with white caps and shawls of faded tints folded triangularly on the back, strolled lightly by their side. In front the violin sang a strident tune, and the biniou snored and hummed, while the player capered solemnly, lifting high his heavy clogs. The sombre procession drifted in and out of the narrow lanes, through sunshine and through shade, between fields and hedgerows, scaring the little birds that darted away in troops right and ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... of the shrill, weird cry, the animal stood at bay. Again came the well-known strident halloo. A maelstrom of memories was awakened by the call. Instinctively obeying the old summons she started toward the train, when from over the hill behind ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... visibly, looked at him, and shrank two steps away; but she answered, in a voice which I could hardly recognise as hers, it was so high and strident; "I should call it a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of a loud high pitched, strident voice floated into the room through the open window. Gay, whose eyes had never shifted from the girl outside, saw her cheeks suddenly blanch. She looked round hurriedly like a frightened rabbit seeking a way ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... of here!" he said to me in a fierce undertone. "Wait outside and I will see you later!" Still, from the desk, resounded that harsh, strident voice, running on in an ascending scale, pouring forth a foaming ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... was strident, her hands clasped and unclasped. Then, as if a string had been loosened, she sank back in ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... you?" he exclaimed in a shrill and strident voice, for it acquires that quality when he is angry or alarmed, "and what are you ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Montgomery was a quiet, sleepy old town, and had expected to go immediately to bed on our arrival. What then was our amazement at hearing, echoing through the wide street in front of the hotel, the sound of strident ragtime. Investigation disclosed a gaudily striped tent of considerable size set up in the street and illuminated by those flaring naphtha lamps they use in circuses. Going over to the tent, we learned that there was dancing within, whereupon we paid our fifteen cents apiece ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... maples that stood guard along the north wall of the Puritan sanctuary. The windows were open. We could see the rhythmic motion of the fan-drill in the pews. The pulpit was not visible; but from that unseen eminence a strident, persistent voice flowed steadily, expounding the necessity and uses of "a baptism of fire," with a monotonous variety of application. Fire was needful for the young, for the middle-aged, for the old, and for those, if any, who occupied the intermediate positions. It was needful for the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... and tremble of the steamer's engines, above the surge and gurgle of the sea, a cry swept toward them from the shore. Long-drawn, sweetly-penetrating, yet with some strident accent of power and command, this voice of Earth rushed upon them over the quiet water—then died away again among the mountains and the night. Its passage through the sky was torrential. The whole pouring flood ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... God!"—and there was in his voice a note that was new to her. Sharp and strident with keenest anxiety, it set a sudden fire in her heart, for it ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country life—the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... as it went. The cocher, a torpid, purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pearlike, sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-colored coat wrong side before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large strange toy, and his strident voice said: ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... charmante!" cried the actress, with an inflection of irony in her strident voice. "Miladi, il faut absolument que nous nous connaissions. Je connais votre chere mere depuis si longtemps! A Paris, l'hiver passe c'etait une amitie ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her another disdainful glance and darted off into the thick of the crowd. A moment later Pollyanna heard his strident call of ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... the way quietly, and she reached the front door without incident, but when she felt for the great bar whose strident clanging in its bracket had been a last signal of night within the house, her hand encountered nothing. Wonderingly she slid her fingers up and down the polished oak. At last she realized that the bar hung loose; the door was ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... interested, and the energetic sense of loathing for the negro proved it. The music, loud and strident—an ordinary Italian piano-organ having been introduced amongst the Oriental instruments—banged on, and then abruptly came to a stop when the negro cracked his whip. The two African women resumed their chairs, there was some applause, and a good many small coins fell on the stage from the hands ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... Drowsiness stole upon his senses. He enjoyed it, but keeping a hold, so he thought at least, on his wits; but he must have been gone further than he thought because he was startled beyond measure by a fiendish uproar. He had never heard anything so pitilessly strident in his life. The witches had started a fierce quarrel about something or other. Whatever its origin they were now only abusing each other violently, without arguments; their senile screams expressed nothing but wicked anger and ferocious ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... this peroration, which had been delivered with an accompaniment of violent gesture and a wealth of obscene epithets, quite beyond the power of the mere chronicler to render. Lenoir had a harsh, strident voice, very high pitched, and he spoke with a broad, provincial accent, somewhat difficult to locate, but quite unlike the hoarse, guttural tones of the low-class Parisian. His enthusiasm made him seem impressive. He looked, in his ragged, dust-stained clothes, the very personification ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscular and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for nobility in whatever cause it was joined. He never disdained the actual world in any of its moods—bus-drivers, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... she was one of those who hold themselves erect and firm, however much old age may try to bend them. She had a sweet face and soft white hair. She looked so mild and gentle that it was surprising to hear her speak with a voice that was as strident and solemn as ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... off, the silence which came in their place was startling to the sense. The voices of the striking employees, who retained possession of the Union Passenger Depot, resounded strangely through the vast building, which was usually a babel of shrill and strident sounds. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the children were marched through the squalid streets, a strident band, to the dingy railway station, a grimy proletariat third-class railway station in which the sign "First Class Waiting Room" glared an outrage and a mockery, and were marshalled into the waiting train. The wonderful experience of which Paul had dreamed ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... seconds after that brief speech during which the room might have been empty, so profound was the silence. The hissing of a kettle upon the stove rose sharp and strident to the ear. Seven white faces, all turned upward to this man who dominated them, were set motionless with utter terror. Then, with a sudden shivering of glass, a bristle of glistening rifle barrels ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... everything, rises day and night from the whole country the song of the cicalas, ceaseless, strident, and insistent. It is everywhere, and never-ending, at no matter what hour of the burning day, or what hour of the refreshing night. From the harbor, as we approached our anchorage, we had heard it at the same time from both shores, from both walls of green ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... a sudden fresh shouting from the large crowd that still lingered outside the palace. I ran to the window, and saw a commotion in the midst of them. I flung the sash up. Then I heard a well-known, loud, strident voice: "Make way, ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... silent as the one in which we stood. This last fact struck us as the most incomprehensible of all. Mrs. Lansing was not the woman to sleep through a disturbance. Where was she, then? And why did we not hear her strident and aggressive tones rising in angry remonstrance at our intrusion? Had she followed her niece from the room? Should we in another minute encounter her ponderous figure in the group of people we could now hear ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... a strident voice shouting the evening papers in the street outside. Indeed, even while she spoke to Nelly, half her brain was listening in a strained way to that voice as it came nearer. What was it the creature was shouting? Before ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... is aware now of a shrill, insistent, strident sound. It drills into his soul; it will not be quiet; it will not let him be. Bing! His body, catching up from behind, drops about him again—and then he knows. It is Dolly; Dolly screaming, poor little ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... whips we started, and it was with satisfaction that I heard the trampling of hoofs bite into the sod and the bright steel edges rip through the matted roots. Soft earth and tangled grasses filled the iron scoop behind, the air vibrated with the strident clang of rails, and the locomotive engineer performed an inspiriting solo upon his whistle, while the rest of our party followed to finish the wake we left with their shovels. Somewhat improved appliances are ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the turmoil of waters and wind along {24} the wave-lashed rocks came the hoarse, shrill, strident cry of the sea-lion, the boom and snort of the great walrus, the roar of the seal rookeries, where millions of cubs wallowed, and where bulls lashed themselves in their rage and fought for mastery of the herd. By November, Waxel alone was holding the vessel ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... pointed head that swings and rolls its yoke of slender plumage! Ah! Eros, is it possible that you do not perceive that it is a symbol of my peacock, my bird translated into the language of this narrow and suppressed existence of ours? What a strange and exquisite messenger! My poor peacock, with a strident shriek of terror, fled from me on that awful morning, the flames singeing its dishevelled train, its wings helplessly flapping in the torrents of conflagration. It bade me no adieu, its clangour of despair rang forth, an additional note of discord, from the ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... to knock when the locomotive's whistle emits its strident crow, as we pass through a station. But the train is not going to stop, I know, and I wait ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... timidly in their turn at Maximilian, and each finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... miles. She had made good her course, she had run her distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by one, the points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . . and the cloud of birds hovered—the restless cloud emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath, of the outspread sea, and of the high ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... noiseless little noises of the earth Come with softest rustle; The shy, sweet feet of life; The silky mutter of moth-wings Against my restraining palm; The strident beat of insect-wings, The silvery trickle of water; Little breezes busy in the summer grass; The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying leaves, The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted leaves; The crystal splash of summer rain, Saturate with the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... a coarse prettiness, laughed a mocking strident laugh that expressed the feelings of the crowd even more than the louder curses around her. The workers slowly dispersed, in little groups, talking in excited, angry tones. Dale Lynch detached himself from one of these groups and walked on alone, a frown darkening his face; nor ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... where they could get a good view of the lugger swinging by a rope abreast of the starboard gangway, and as they passed along the quarter-deck, the shrill strident tones of the American's voice reached them through one of the open cabin skylights, while directly after, Murray, keen and observant of everything, noted that the two marines of whom his companion had spoken were standing apparently simply on duty, but thoroughly upon the alert and ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... scarlet card-case, and as slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its production, they fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen. But it was there only for an instant; for as it passed from his fingers to Arthur's, one or another slipped his hold. The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the universe; and that great western wind shook the whole house ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... play go on. There were some really clever stunts done that called for loud cheers on the part of the small crowd present. O. K. added his strident ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... Ethelwynn, and she entirely agreed with me. I had not the slightest desire to have a consulting-room of my own in Harley Street. All I longed for was a life in open air and rural tranquillity; a life far from the tinkle of the cab-bell and the milkman's strident cry; a life of ease and bliss, with my well-beloved ever at my side. The unfortunate man compelled to live in London is deprived of half of God's ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... But one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all. I seek her from afar, I come from temples where her altars are, From groves that bear her name, Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame, And cymbals struck on high and strident faces Obstreperous in her praise They neither love nor know, A goddess of gone days, Departed long ago, Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes Of her old sanctuary, A deity obscure and legendary, Of whom there now remains, For sages ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... from wall to wall across the end of the room where stood the seven seemed to be charged with red hot needles. Suddenly these ceased to leap and jump and burn; the old rug and the hidden wires under it were again quiescent. But the strident voices of the afflicted prisoners were not silenced, though the late lamentings were given over to a medley of condemnations, ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... to face, I think perhaps we would all be better off for no knowledge of that subjective war. Man has too much to do to lift himself out of the still clinging primordial slough to dally with subjectiveness. We should be acting, aggressive, strident in the strength of the ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... he was accustomed, and faute de mieux, Lord Alvanley invented a remedy. At his own expense, he engaged a hackney coachman who undertook to rattle his vehicle up and down past King Allen's lodgings till the early dawn, and another man who agreed to shout the hours throughout the night in the strident tones of a London watchman. The ruse was successful. Whether other persons living in the neighbourhood were equally pleased, history does not relate, but the melancholy dandy, deluded into a belief that he was back once more in his favourite haunts, slumbered peacefully, and was in ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great industrial centres, for instance,—young persons of the female sex, we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat apples and hand round daguerreotypes,—I say, I think the conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... they don't care whether it is true or not true. All they want is the privilege of howling out that their correspondent rescued you, and they would take that privilege without in any ways worrying if I refused my consent. You see, sir? I wouldn't like you to feel that I was such a strident idiot as I doubtless am appearing now ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... God from the souls of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea's heart, ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... awaiting her permission to enter. She gave it through Noie; and, the horn wand in her hand, seated herself upon a carved stool in front of the great hut. Presently an altercation arose upon the further side of the reed fence in which she recognised Ishmael's strident voice, mingled with the deeper tones of the Zulus, who seemed ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... voice hoarse and strident with emotion; but Mac, absorbed in his text, still read, flinging a fine and subtile emotion of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... could hardly, even by courtesy, be called musical; in fact, it was harsh and strident; but this evening the hills, and the trees, and the wide open spaces, Nature's mighty modulator, subdued the harshness, so that the voice rolled up to the people clear, full, and sonorous. Nor was the preacher possessed of great learning nor endued with the gift of eloquence. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... ever since. I can't make it out. Spring has come again and I'm nearly sixteen and go to the tracks mornings same as always, and I see Sunstreak and Middlestride and a new colt named Strident I'll bet will lay them all out, but no one thinks so but me and two ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... that all the notes of these most engaging birds, symbolic of light in plumage and in flight, are shrill and strident. When they feed—and they seem always to be feeding or carrying food—their chatter is perpetual and varied in tone. Occasionally a male bird sets himself to beguile the time with song. Then his flame-red eyes flash ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady overbore by sheer mass of tone production the strident soprano of Lew Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid disclosure of ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... avoid dawdling on the way. The multitudinous insect-life of the forest was already awake and stirring, the hum and chirp of the myriad winged things causing the air fairly to vibrate with softly strident sound, to which was added the rolling chorus of innumerable frogs inhabiting the marshy low-lying patches contiguous to the river margin. Great gorgeously winged dragon-flies swept hither and thither; ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... should say that Dicky is an oldish man, who drifted into this ugly quarter some time ago, and took his place in the parlour, which is a room that I now prefer to the bar. I was holding a friendly discussion with a butcher when a strident voice said, "You are absolutely and irredeemably ignorant of the rudiments of your subject." I started. Where had I heard that voice before? The man was clad in an old shooting-jacket; his trousers were out at the knee, and his linen was very dirty; yet there was a something about him—a ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say—one more word and out you go, whether you like it ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... banged. Before its strident vibrations had ceased troubling the thin morning air, the train began to move slowly out of Kerb. Pobloff ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... of darker blue; so bright were they that the colonel, looking around for the moon, was surprised to find that luminary invisible. On the green background of the foliage the fireflies glowed and flickered. There was no strident steam whistle from factory or train to assault the ear, no rumble of passing cabs or street cars. Far away, in some distant part of the straggling town, a sweet-toned bell sounded the hour of an evening ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and, with no "perhaps" at all, some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon ever conferred upon the youth of a nation. Then, if there is any manliness or fibre left in the adherents of freedom, they will answer that we adopted Conscription for a definite object, and, when once that object is attained, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... concerned in a social wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place. There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern manufacturer; there was the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Minkiewicz became strident as he repeated his old story. Some of the clients of The Fallen Angels stopped talking for a moment; it was only that crazy Pole again with ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... thus in the Song of Death all human life and its developments, recalling the sufferings of the cradle, swelling to the griefs of other ages in the stronger male voices and the quavering of the priests,—all this strident harmony, big with lightning and thunderbolts, does it not speak with equal force to the daring imagination, the coldest heart, nay, to philosophers themselves? As we hear it, we think God speaks; the vaulted arches of ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... rooms upon which the plate-glass windows looked, virtually no business, in the vulgar form of buying and selling, was carried on in the vestry, in the classroom or in the book-lined study. Many modern and entirely worthy businesses are conducted under the strident banner of "Cash Only." Fortune, East and Sabre's did not know the word cash. One would as soon look for or expect a till, to say nothing of one of those terrific machines known as cash registers, in the vestry, the classroom or the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... culture; every syllable, every lapse of his rude dialect, was as distinct as if he had been taught to speak in this way; his tones were low and even, and modulated to suave cadences; the ear experienced a sense of relief after the loud, strident voice of the miller, poignantly penetrating ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... express, looking out on the undulating, green acres of Leicestershire. And while his train was making a three minutes' stop at Leicester itself, the purpose of his journey was suddenly recalled to him by hearing the strident voices of the porters on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... puppet in his hands. As Richard III., we should look to find him most effective in schemeful soliloquy and the phases of assumed virtue and affection, while perhaps less eminent than his father or Edmund Kean in that headlong, strident unrest, which hurried on their representations to the fury or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... I am unkind" (As Colonel LOVELACE said) if I From festal scenes for you designed To solitude propose to fly; If, when the strident trumpets blare From Hampstead Heath to Clapham Junction, And bunting fills the ardent air, I don't assist at that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... giant, the other rolling in billows of fat—and his "nieces," the crowds thronging the landing-place and streets greeted the "menagerie" with jeers and shouts of laughter. They nicknamed Schulenburg the "Maypole," and Kielmansegg the "Elephant," and pursued the cavalcade with strident mockeries and insults. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... city street, I listened to the newsboys' strident cries Of "Extra," as with flying feet, They strove to gain this man or that-their prize. But one there was with neither shout nor stride, And, having bought from him, I stood nearby, Pondering the cruel crutches at his side, Blaming the ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... impossible to exaggerate the horrors of the last day of the doomed city. The rumbling of the earth beneath; the dense obscurity and murky shadow of the heaven above; the long, heavy roll of the convulsed sea; the strident noise of the vapors and gases escaping from the mountain-crater; the shifting electric lights, crimson, emerald green, lurid yellow, azure, blood red, which at intervals relieved the blackness, only to make it ghastlier than before; the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... fatigue of the old dealer seemed to have disappeared. He was sitting up straight, with tremulous lips, with flashing eyes, and continued in a strangely strident voice,— ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... few days Plooie reappeared and his strident falsetto appeal for trade rang shrill in the space of Our Square. Trouble developed at once. Small boys booed at him, called him "yellow," and advised him to go carefully, there was a German behind the next tree. Henri Dumain, our little old French David who fought the tragic duel ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... last sentence, I heard the strident rain drawing near across the forest, and by the time I was come to the word "cream" it burst upon my roof, and has since redoubled, and roared upon it. A very welcome change. All smells of the good wet earth, sweetly, with a kind of Highland touch; the crystal rods of the shower, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not forget that the House was the jury in this case, and capable of human emotions upon which he might play. At times he became declamatory beyond the point of good taste. In voice and manner he betrayed the school in which he had been trained. "When I hear gentlemen," he cried in strident tones, "attempting to justify this unrighteous fine upon General Jackson upon the ground of non-compliance with rules of court and mere formalities, I must confess that I cannot appreciate the force of the argument. In cases of war and desolation, in times of peril and disaster, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish, Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch, for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for a while that unknown noise increased A rattling, that with strident roars did blend, And whining moans; but suddenly it ceased, A fearful thing stood at the cloister's end, And eyed him for a while, then 'gan to wend Adown the cloisters, and began again That rattling, and the moan ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... for a moment or two; then the strident voice of the Mate rang out, "Boy! Boy! Where the hell have you got to now? Lay aft ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... travel, however, people are more interesting than land, and so it was at this time. As twilight shut down upon the valley of the Kennebeckasis, we heard the strident voice of pa going on with the Grecian catechism. Pa was unmoved by the beauties of Sussex or by the colors of the sunset, which for the moment made picturesque the scraggy evergreens on the horizon. His eyes were with his heart, and that was in Sparta. Above ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Yellin' Kid, with his usual strident tones. "Take it easy, Bud, We've got a long, hard trail ahead of us, and we ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-waggon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarcely a lull, and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said he, and strolled back to where the voices of the contending men of science rose in a prolonged duet, the high, strident note of Summerlee rising and falling to the sonorous bass of Challenger. I should have thought no more of Lord John's remark were it not that once again that night I heard him mutter to himself: "Blue clay—clay in a volcanic ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will find the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... cart drawn by two horses whose hempen harness told of the back country. Sometimes there sounded the slow and heavy tread of a pensive carabao, drawing a great tumbrel; its conductor, on his buffalo skin, accompanying, with a monotonous and melancholy chant, the strident creaking of the wheels. Sometimes there was the dull sound of a native sledge's worn runners. In the fields grazed the herds, and among them white herons gravely promenaded, or sat tranquil on the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... is the shorter?" asked the elder of the two travellers in a harsh, strident voice. Though visibly the elder, he was scarcely thirty years ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... she was full of vim. She usually talks at the top of a very high and strident voice (I don't know what they did with it at the convent), and I suddenly heard her screaming to the cabinet minister, 'Haven't you heard that? Oh, everybody's quoting it in Fleet Street, aren't they, Mr. Bryan? But I ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the volume of the receiver so that the clicks in the mike no longer were so strident. "Set on maximum and ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... weather. There had been every probability of a breeze springing up at sundown, but the great orange globe had slowly rolled down and disappeared in the golden west, amidst the loud barking of the hornbills and the strident shrieks of flocks of parrots, and not a breath of wind was astir. Then came down the night, a purply black darkness spangled with stars overhead and reflected in the water, and with that darkness ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... space where two or three sound posts were standing, she spoke to her sister. There was something strident in her voice, as if she pleaded for strength to ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... now grown to be a deluge; the gutters of the house roared; the air was filled with the continuous, strident crash. The stolidity of his face, on which the rain streamed, was far from reassuring me. On the contrary, I was aware of a distinct qualm of apprehension, which was not at all lessened by a view of the driver, craning from his perch to observe us with the expression of ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which were somewhat strident caused Madame Sagittarius to come away from her communion with the mighty dead with a loud ejaculation of the nature of a snort combined with a hissing whistle, to kick up her indoor kid boots into the air, turn upon her right elbow, and present ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... woman threw her shawl on the brown straw, and sat down quite near the road. She leaned her bare head against the trunk of a pine, listened to the katydids gossiping in a distant oak that shaded the "branch," to the quavering strident song of a locust; and she intended, after resting for a few moments, to return to the station-house; but unexpected drowsiness overpowered her. Suddenly aroused from a sound sleep, she heard the clatter of galloping hoofs, and as she sprang up, the horse, startled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... over in order to witness the removal of the ailing pilgrims. All that they could as yet see, far away in the depths of the black country, was the lantern in front of the engine, looking like a red star which grew larger and larger. Strident whistles pierced the night, then suddenly ceased, and you only heard the panting of the steam and the dull roar of the wheels gradually slackening their speed. Then the canticle became distinctly audible, the song of Bernadette ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... circumspect, thy charge will undo thee,—foecunda domum tibi prole gravabit, [5786]thou wilt not be able to bring them up, [5787]"and what greater misery can there be than to beget children, to whom thou canst leave no other inheritance but hunger and thirst?" [5788]cum fames dominatur, strident voces rogantium panem, penetrantes patris cor: what so grievous as to turn them up to the wide world, to shift for themselves? No plague like to want: and when thou hast good means, and art very careful of their education, they will ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... corrections will make the tone clearer will also make it more agreeable. The nasal pessimistic whine is not a pleasant recommendation of personality. High, forced, strident tones produce not only irritation in the listener but throat ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... "clumpety-clump! clumpety-clump!" of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman's strident voice wailing, "She may have seen better da-a-ys," with a mighty ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been alibis she had sought to establish ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun—it's a verb transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings—a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score; but London now is different. London at all hours speaks with a sustained, sullen, steady, grinding tone, never entirely sinking into quietude, never rising to ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... wondering why he doesn't come around is as though a coop full of turkeys went wondering why the poulterer didn't come around. No; I can't tell you why he—whoever he is—so leaves us in protracted peace. Perhaps he's fattening us," and the old gray buccaneer cheered the conversation with a laugh as strident as saw-filing. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... lighted and he stooped to pick it up. Where the other sticks were from grass trees this was something else. And among the bleached pile it had the vividness of flame. For it was a strident scarlet. Weeks turned it over in his hands, running his fingers lovingly across its perfect grain. Even in this crude state it had beauty. He stopped the Salarik who had just brought ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... deepening twilight we thoughtfully left the last resting-place of the mighty dead, a platoon of thirty Chinese soldiers approached, drew their swords, dropped upon one knee and shouted. The movement was so unexpected and the shout so startlingly strident that my horse shied in terror and I had visions of immediate massacre. But having learned that politeness is current coin the world over, as soon as I could control my prancing horse, I raised my hat and bowed. Whereupon the soldiers rose, wheeled into line and marched ahead of us to our ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... in strident tones; this is no time for weeping. "What have you done? How came this body in your room? Speak freely to one who may be helpful. Do you imagine I would ruin you? Do you think this piece of dead flesh on your pillow can ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were 'nice,' too, as far as their appearance and breeding went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully simple white lawn dresses, and their shining ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and her companion visibly slackened their pace—he must make his choice between joining them and passing obliviously by. He passed, hesitated, then slowed down. In a moment the pair were abreast of him again, dissolved in laughter now—not such strident mirth as he would have expected in the North from actresses in this familiar comedy, but a soft, low rippling, like the overflow from some subtle joke, into which ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... The crashing of the trees as they fell, the blows of crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... be distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the angelic school, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous sweetness, and a delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with his strident cry is an eagle, Canalis, rose and white, is a flamingo. In him women find the friend they seek, their interpreter, a being who understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe confidant. The wide margins given by Didot to the last edition were crowded with Modeste's pencilled ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... her in her garden where she sat beneath a tree. Around, the cicadas whirred in the speaking trees. Zig-zig-zig-zig. But they were no longer strident. They seemed but a vibration of the high ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... to examine him attentively in detail with the keenest curiosity, as though he hoped to obtain some revelation, to draw some secret from him. He could still hear the man's voice—a voice of very peculiar tone, somewhat harsh and strident, with an interrogative inflection at the end of each sentence. Again he saw those pale, pale eyes under the great prominent forehead, eyes that at times assumed a hideous, glassy, dead look, and at others lit up with an indefinable gleam that savoured of madness. Those hands too, he saw—white and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... searching the darkness with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light. They creep up under the bridge which spans the river with its watching eyes, and vanish, crying back a warning note as they make the upper reach, or strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms passes, ploughing ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... was now well up to the derelict, and pretty soon a prolonged and vibratory hissing noise, strident, insistent, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... for herself. She answered excitedly, and her neck craned forward as though to help her head to peer through the perpetual darkness which surrounded her. Her thin body, wrapped in an Indian shawl of many colours, the hissing of her strident words, which flowed freely, all contributed to make her resemble a serpent in some terrible nightmare. My mother did not like this woman, who had married my grandfather when he had six big children, the eldest of whom was sixteen and the youngest, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... close to the signal mast the strident howl of the fog-horn went off in his very face. He was so startled that he nearly fell, and shrank back as far as the granite parapet. The steamer which was the first to reply seemed to be quite near and was already at the entrance, the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... suddenly interrupted a strident voice speaking in Spanish and then some bad language in the same ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... doors is fresh and green, But no more green than we Who help to run the Grit machine, Or bow the Tory knee. We hear the strident party call In words no one believes; The Liberals are traitors all, The Tories ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... of findin' now. The boy's dead." His strident voice quavered and broke, but rose again to a snarl. "And, by God, I'll spend a million to get ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... said. Then he laughed as only an Australian black can, with a glitter of seemingly endless white teeth, and a strident roar that might have ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... struck ten. To where she stood came the strident sounds of the mechanical piano-player, for some of the gay party were waltzing in the hall. Their merry shouts and laughter were discordant to her ears. What cared any of those friends of her step-mother if she were in disgrace and ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... where twilight stands, Above the shadowy pasture lands, With strained and strident cry, Beneath pale skies that sunset bands, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... branches of the great willow, and one inquisitive robin swept boldly through the clustering vines which screened the front of the veranda and perched upon his shoulder. He heard the merry hum of the bees at work and the strident call of the locusts, mingled with the distant neighing of horses and the soft lowing of the cows, but all the sweetness of nature was powerless to lift the gloom which seemed to envelop him as in a shroud. His face ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... once, and if she had not been prepared for him she must have guessed him to be a man come on a message of importance. There was conscious emphasis in his voice, and there needed to be if it was to accomplish anything: a high voice, strident, and, like the rest of him, somehow suggesting insect life. He held out his hand and ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... his Sulla Physionomia, has given among the signs of libidinous impulse: knees turned inwards, abundance of hairs on the legs, squint, bright eyes, a high and strident voice, and in women length of leg below the knee. Aristotle had mentioned among the signs of wantonness: paleness, abundance of hair on the body, thick and black hair, hairs covering the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... her betimes. Morning and eve She in her wood-girt chapel sings her prayer, Which wins us kindlier harvest, and, some think, Success in war. She strives not with our Gods: Confusion never wrought she in my house, Nor minished Hengist's glory. Had her voice, Clangorous or strident, drawn upon my throne Deserved opprobrium'—here the monarch's brows Flushed at the thought, and fire was in his eyes— 'The hand that clasps this sceptre had not spared To hunt her forth, an outcast in the woods, Thenceforth with beasts to herd! ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... orders to charge. "Charge!" The word carries magnificent poetic associations, but, alas, it is a very prosaic affair nowadays! The lines move onward in short rushes, and it seems as if a swarm of ants were migrating warily. The strident voices of the officers ring here and there: the men edge their way onward: it seems as if there were no method in the advance; but somehow the loose wavy ranks are kept well in hand, and the main movement proceeds like ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman |
