"Ventriloquism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called, specially marks Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, imparting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over some wild physical sensation, glutting his appetite of savagery, the meaning of which is almost as foreign to us and as primitive as are the mewing of a cat, the gurgling of an infant, and the snarl of a mother-tiger. At the very opposite pole of development ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... first novel, Wieland (whose father anticipates "Old Krook," in Dickens's Bleak House, by dying of spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story. Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his romances in his own country, and the only passages in them which have now a living interest ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... middle of the first portion of the sternum. Examination of many of these cases proves that the vibration is greatest here. It is certain that ventriloquists have existed for many centuries. It is quite possible that some of the old Pagan oracles were simply the deceptions of priests by means of ventriloquism. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... were? No; because Coleridge had blown upon these withered anatomies, through the blowpipe of his own creative genius, a stream of gas that swelled the tissue of their antediluvian wrinkles, forced colour upon their cheeks, and splendour upon their sodden eyes. Such a process of ventriloquism never has existed. He spoke by their organs. They were the tubes; and he forced through their wooden ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... when her own mouth is covered. I have myself investigated the direct voice in the case of four different mediums, two of them amateurs, and can have no doubt of the reality of the voices, and that they are not the effect of ventriloquism. I was more struck by the failures than by the successes, and cannot easily forget the passionate pantings with which some entity strove hard to reveal his identity to me, but without success. One of these mediums was tested afterwards by having the mouth filled with coloured water, but the ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it better to obey Gunson in every way while he was with us; and as I lay there, I saw him rise and stand thoughtfully before the fire, while almost directly a sound arose from close by me as if Esau was practising ventriloquism, and wanted to give a good imitation ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... the silversmith derisively, 'you can't throw the voice any such distance nor make it sound clear and sweet like that. I've made a study of ventriloquism.' ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was "lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... here placed, but each at least four times, and always by a peculiar modulation of the voice, speaking them in pairs, as they are coupled above. The sound is made to proceed from the throat in a way much resembling ventriloquism, to which art it is indeed an approach. After the last amatama Iligliuk always pointed with her finger towards her body, and pronounced the word angetkook, steadily retaining her gravity for five or six ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry |
