"Brassy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... simplicity that will endure The pangs of death, most resolute to live. This God of riddles that shaped a thing so frail For his worst torment hid mysterious powers Within her breast who can like lilies prevail Through rains of doom that conquer brassy towers. Her heart lies broken; when some trivial chord Of sweetness chimes reveille through the sense,— A rose, a song, a smile, a courtly word. She wakes, and sighs, and softly passes thence Back to the masquers, though ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily seem bilious and brassy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hand, her chin, her brows, and her beautiful figure. And—as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a connoisseur—Natalie's pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice, that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the Casa-Reales were collaterally ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... but never a white so pure, so soft, so warm as this. And then he saw by the undulations of the streak that it was a flock of long, graceful birds moving in single file from west to east. Shimmering in the brassy dawn sun, they rode like dream birds upon a vermilion sea, their slow movements so graceful, so rhythmic as seemingly to represent no effort, as if the birds merely floated along, their beauty and grace the ultimate expression of the spirit of the scene. They flew ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... a scarlet sun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. The Fuzzies, who were in to wake Pappy Jack with their whistles, didn't like it; they were edgy and restless. Maybe it would rain today after all. They had breakfast outside on the picnic table, and then Ben decided he'd go back to his camp and pick up ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... flies are numerous and busy—the horses can barely stand still, and nod their heads to shake them off. The hills seem near, and the trees on the summit are distinctly visible. Such noises as are heard seem exaggerated and hollow. There is but little cloud, mere thin flecks; but the horizon has a brassy look, and the blue of the sky is hard and opaque. Farmer George recollects that the barometer he tapped before coming out showed a falling mercury; he does not like these appearances, more especially the heated breeze. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... good terms. Nothing more. She always sliced with her brassy. So did I. It formed a ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... desk very soon after supper-time the Doctor had joined him, and with an unusual expression of leisure and friendliness had settled down lollingly on the other side of the fireplace with his great square-toed shoes nudging the bright, brassy edge of the fender, and his big meerschaum pipe puffing the whole bleak room most deliciously, tantalizingly full of forbidden tobacco smoke. It was a comfortable, warm place to chat. The talk had begun with politics, drifted a little way toward the architecture of several new city buildings, hovered ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... to the eye, and the chapman, kneeling on the floor close by Issa's stool, kept handing up one article after another for closer examination. The stuff seemed worthless enough to Constans—trumpery pieces of quartz crystal set in copper and debased silver, rings and bangles of a hue unmistakably brassy, hair ribbons, parti-colored dress goods, pins, needles, and a miscellaneous assortment of useless trinkets. Constans was genuinely astonished that Issa, who had been hitherto something of a good-fellow, should seem interested in ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow, every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs seemed a mouth breathing heat. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... over Batouch's opulent descriptions of the marvels of Ain-Amara, which they suspected to be very far away from the reality, and yet, nevertheless, when they saw the minarets soaring above the sands to the brassy heaven, it seemed to them both as if, perhaps, they might be true. The place looked intensely barbaric. The ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... minstrelsy, and then again Backward it swept like a great tidal wave Of anguish, all Hell's anarchy of grief Set to a sounding fugue. Grim-throated rose The awful hymn, and mingling with the wail Of voices, pealed the cymbals' brassy clang; The thunderous organs bellowed through the gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... the room for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy vibration in the voice—a sign of nervous strain. With a smothered protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... days, His face is not a face o'er brassy; Her mither sits to praise the claes; Holds him her box; to win the lassie He taks a pinch, and greets wi' granny, And helps his chair up nearer Jenny, And vows he loves her muir than any. She thinks her mither ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... out a bunch of keys, "if I ever see you again, I shan't speak to you. I don't own you any more than if I saw a crow; and if you want to own me you'll get nothing by it but a character for being what you are—a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... at once detect any variation from this character. Further, he knows how the tones of a badly-played instrument would sound if the instrument were correctly handled. An unskilled trumpeter in an orchestra, for example, may draw from his instrument tones that are too brassy, blatant, or harsh. An observant hearer knows exactly what these tones would be if ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... contracted, until they came together in the centre, and a row of pools of quicksilver had taken the place of the solid metal. Two smaller electrodes were plunged into the mercury, which gradually curdled and solidified, until it had resumed the solid form, with a yellowish brassy shimmer. ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has been remarked and described by every traveller with displeasure, by all with truth. The ill look of the very few and very unhealthy inhabitants confirms their descriptions; and beside the pale and swelled faces which shock one's sight, here is a brassy scent in the air as of verdigris, which offends one's smell; the running water is of an odd colour too, like that in which copper has been steeped. These are sad desolated scenes indeed, though this is not the season for mal' aria neither, which, it is said, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... like so many before it; the sun was low on the horizon, and its yellow beams were throwing a brassy tint over the sea and sky; the sailors were engaged, some fishing with patient assiduity, others, grouped into small knots, listening to prosy yarns; while a few were prostrated round the decks in attitudes of perfect abandonment or sleep. The officers were leaning over the taffrail, trying, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... a threatening murmur became audible. It was an unholy blend of rasping shouts and shriller chanting, punctuated by notes of a brassy gong. As Charlie ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the February wind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... which sometimes comes on the brass parts of lamp burners, moisten the cloth with common household ammonia, rub it on sapolio, and apply it to the coated surface with the aid of a little elbow grease. A bright brassy surface ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... oesophagus is pressed upon, the patient may have difficulty in swallowing. The left recurrent nerve may be stretched or pressed upon as it hooks round the arch of the aorta, and hoarseness of the voice and a characteristic "brassy" cough may result from paralysis of the muscles of the larynx which it supplies. The vagus, the phrenic, and the spinal nerves may also be pressed upon. When the aneurysm is on the transverse part of the arch, the trachea is pulled down with each beat of the heart—a ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... it be written in the terms of peace, And evermore on brassy tablets graven, That England shall demand no right nor lease Of frontier nor of town, nor armoured haven, But cede with unreluctant paw To Germans and to German law The whole of this egregious SHAW, And only re-annex the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... not enjoy a symphony without precise knowledge of the instrument that gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its function in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I bestow loosely a general approbation; yet ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... brassy edge glittered above the blue chain of hills as I walked across the pasture towards the path that led winding among the alders to the brook below. I followed it in the deepening evening light and ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... road-gang drew near to Murray. From the hills above their camp Denver could see the dumps and hoists, and the mill that was going up below, and as the ore-trains glided by on the newly finished narrow-gauge he picked up samples of the copper. It was the same as his vein, a brassy yellow chalcopyrites with chunks of red native copper, and he forgot the daily heart-ache and the ignominy of his task as he contemplated the wealth that awaited him. Yes, the mine was still his, though he was herded with common felons and compelled to build a road for Murray; it was his and the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... slowly upon him with the blackness of his look lightening into a smile as different from mirth as the brassy gleam behind a thundercloud is from sunshine. "What concerns your lordship?" he asked contemptuously. "Do you imagine that ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... continually. And the empty other half of the sky Seemed in its silence as if it knew What, any moment, might look through A chance gap in that fortress massy:— Through its fissures you got hints Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints, Now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow, Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow, All a-simmer with intense strain To let her through,—then blank again, At the hope of her appearance failing. Just by the chapel, a break in the railing Shows a narrow path directly across; ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... exclaimed Captain Shad. "Did you ever hear such brassy talk in your life! I wish to thunder I'd been here. There'd have been one mighty sick patient ready for the doctor and he wouldn't have been a South Harniss native either. But Mary-'Gusta didn't take none of his sauce, I tell you; that girl ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... silver given it by its maker. After the introduction of nickel from the mines in Saxony, the words "German silver" became truthfully appropriate as applied to that metal, but so habituated have the trade and the public become to brassy mixtures that German silver must always be understood as of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the form of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... set any better after old Brindle fills up on this dust," observed Martin, belligerency in his brassy voice. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the one Benny had built for me to wear at his weddin', that I gets sore. Course, she'd only borrowed it for Pa Sykes to wear on a Sunday afternoon call, him bein' a little runt of a gent, with watery eyes and a red nose, that never does anything on his own hook. And if he hadn't denied it so brassy I shouldn't have called him down so hard, right in the front hall ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... wearing robes of dark brilliant hues. On the shore, under the palms, wandered a crowd of white-robed Arabs, with red or blue turbans. Occasionally one saw a khaki uniform. It was intensely hot and damp. A haze lay over the further reaches of the river, and the sky had a brassy look unlike the intense turquoise clarity of the Egyptian sky. The palm fronds seemed metallic. As far as the eye could see along the right bank lay a confused mass of low white buildings, tents, huts of yellow matting and piles of stores. ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... of the Villa, as if the air had glowed there with its own cold, bluish, and dazzling light. This magic spot, behind the black trunks of trees and masses of inky foliage, breathed out sweet sounds mingled with bursts of brassy roar, sudden clashes of metal, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... is blowing dull and hollow from south-west; the clouds are rolling faster and faster up from the Atlantic; the sky to westward is brassy green; the glass is falling fast; and there will be wind and rain enough to-night to sweep even Aberalva clean for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Prairie—and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sitting in the old black panther's cage with the brute's head in his lap, stroking and twisting its ears as if it were a kitten. The cage door was wide open, and the day was already growing hot and brassy in the east. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy |
