"Reciter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... word of many meanings; here it would allure to the square crate-like seat of palm-fronds used by the Rawi or public reciter of tales when he is not pacing about ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... exclusively by members of the Sangha,[112] is a proof that it has not neglected literature. The chief public religious observances are preaching and reading the scriptures. This latter, known as Bana, is usually accompanied by a word for word translation made by the reciter or an assistant. Such recitations may form part of the ordinary ceremonial of Uposatha days and most religious establishments have a room where they can be held, but often monks are invited to reside in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... his family; nor did he know the anguish his supposed murder had cost them. In those times of civil contention the dearest relatives were often long ignorant of each other's fate. So numerous were the instances of cruelty, so multiplied the tales of wo, that they wearied and confused the reciter. Many parents believed their sons safe in a foreign country, who, at last they found, had long since perished in some obscure skirmish, where valour bled unshaded by its deserved laurels. Others, who had lamented the death of their dearest relations, received them back at the King's ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... discovery affected Damaris to a singular extent. She had small enough wish for Henrietta Frayling's society at this juncture; still less for that of her attendant singer-reciter-parson. Yet their names, and the train of recollections evoked by these, made for the normal, the average, and, in so far, had on her a wholesome effect. For Henrietta, of once adored and now somewhat tarnished memory—soulless, finished, and exquisitely artificial to her finger-tips, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... sentiments of their forefathers. Verse is naturally connected with music; and, among a rude people, the union is seldom broken. By this natural alliance, the lays, "steeped in the stream of harmony," are more easily retained by the reciter, and produce upon his audience a more impressive effect. Hence, there has hardly been found to exist a nation so brutishly rude, as not to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of their bards, recounting the exploits of their forefathers, recording ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... [65] [The reciter of the tale is a Turkish fisherman, who has been employed during the day in the gulf of AEgina, and in the evening, apprehensive of the Mainote pirates who infest the coast of Attica, lands with his boat ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... circles, the tale is distributed in countless forms over an unlimited area. The elements of the story remain, wholly or in part, while the literary clothing is altered according to the 'taste and fancy' of the reciter. The lore is now traditional, whether it be in prose, as Maerchen, or in verse, as ballad. And so it remains in oral circulation—and therefore still liable to variation—until it is written down or printed. It is left 'masterless,' unsigned; for of the original author's composition, may be, only ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... French epics, or chansons de geste, is the song of Roland, of which the oldest copy now extant is preserved in the Bodleian Library and dates back to the twelfth century. Whether the Turoldus (Theroulde) mentioned at the end of the poem is poet, copyist, or mere reciter remains ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of words, the teacher of rhetoric, the ...
— Sophist • Plato
... her his arm, and together they made their way out of the crowded room into a smaller apartment where an amateur reciter was ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... were maudlin, they were in the worst possible taste. So far as the reciter was concerned, they were absolutely insincere clap-trap. But the crowded audience received them with rapture; and the very fact that an astute caterer should serve up this particular form of clap-trap showed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... multiplying manuscripts of these poems would not be greatly felt. The reciter would be obliged to learn them off by heart; he need not, and often did not, possess written versions of the poems he recited. And even literate men, as Bishop Grosseteste, preferred to listen to these gestours, rather than to read the narrative themselves. Therefore, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... with his first great story Pickwick. Oliver Twist was his encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler. Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in Dickens ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Party; Miss FRESIA BLUDKINSON, a talented young Professional Reciter, has been engaged to entertain the company, and is about to deliver the favourite piece entitled, "The Lover of Lobelia Bangs, a Cowboy Idyl." There is the usual crush, and the guests outside the drawing-room, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... in voice training, the selections here given for the earliest exercises, are such as naturally call for some slight approach to the singing tone. Some are in the spirit and style of song or hymn; others are in the form of address to distant auditors, wherein the reciter would call to a distance, or "sing out," as we say. This kind of speaking is a way of quickly "bringing out" the voice. Young students especially are very apt in this, getting the idea at once, though needing, as a rule, special ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... shortening of syllables according to their position, as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow them, must always have corresponded with the stresses or absence of stress which would naturally be made apparent by the voice of an ideal reciter; and to me, as to some other people, the question has proved amusing of how far in English verse Latin prosody could be reproduced. Many attempts have been made at deciding this question by experiments. The most remarkable of these are two which were ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... undertake to teach her to play the instrument, but that a "professor" could be secured to go out from Detroit twice a week—if desired. We seemed to be in for it, so the lessons were desired, and we comforted ourselves with the assurance that if Mary did not turn out to be a tiptop reciter she would surely prove a tiptop cornet player. Her unusual talent would justify my wife in her unusual step, and the society of Lake City would forgive her for attempting to thrust the girl into its midst as an equal. Many of our acquaintances seemed to take mother's ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... Gothic, and probably he was right. In this town the talk was mostly about Art, and many fine things were said in regard to "sweetness and light." Everybody claimed to be an artist of some kind, whether painter, musician, novelist, dramatist, verse-maker, reciter, singer, or what not. But although they seemed so greatly devoted to the Graces and the Muses, it was but the images of the Parnassian Gods that they worshipped. For in the purlieus of this fine town, horrible cruelties and abuses were committed, yet none ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... writing, was accorded by him to the lesser but still eminently intellectual toil of preparing his Readings for representation. It was not by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had, in his new capacity as a reciter, merely to select two or three chapters from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the fragmentary portions thus taken from his larger works were re-written by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... perceive how it is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside. Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and creative minds is ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... Highlands similar charms are found, and are often handed down from male to female, and from female to male. They are also in common use in Ireland. Besides healing diseases, such charms are supposed to cause fertility or bring good luck, or even to transfer the property of others to the reciter, or, in the case of darker magic, to cause death or disease.[1127] In Ireland, sorcerers could "rime either a man or beast to death," and this recalls the power of satire in the mouth of File or Druid. It raised blotches on the face of the victim, or even ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... which she often went back—had been a scene, for our young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at large—in the name of these and other attractions the company in which, by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. She lived under ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Professor Franz Gotze, and—as one of the first singing mistresses of the present day—the inheritor of his school; she is also a talented singer, reciter, and dramatic poetess. She ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... charming letter in which Pliny (Bk. v. letter 17) tells Spurinna the pleasure he had just received from a recitation by a noble youth in the house of Calpurnius Piso, and how, when it was over, he gave the youth many kisses and praises, congratulated his mother and his brother, in whom, as the reciter tried his powers, first fear for him and then delight in him was manifest. To the sentences quoted above the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— 30 'I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;— Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.— You with the unpaid bill, Despair,— You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,— 35 I will pay you in the grave,— Death will listen to your stave. Expectation too, be off! To-day is for itself enough; 40 Hope, in pity mock not Woe With smiles, nor follow where I go; Long having lived on thy sweet food, At length I find one moment's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... patronage of the wealthy; but this will not appear necessary when it is considered that, in his time, journeys were usually performed on foot, and that he probably traveled, with a view to his support, as an itinerant musician or reciter. From most of the traditions respecting him, it appears that he was poor, and it is to be feared that necessity, rather than the mere desire of gratifying curiosity, prompted his wanderings. All that has been advanced respecting the occasion of his blindness ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... such open proofs of brains, even though audiences are found so slow in coming together. People as a rule lounge in the squares and waste the time in gossip when they should be listening to the recital. They get some one to come and tell them whether the reciter has entered the hall yet, whether he has got through his introduction, or whether he has nearly reached the end of his reading. Not until then do they enter the room, and even then they come in slowly and languidly. Nor do they sit it out; no, before ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... and sometimes for philosophers,' as Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but at the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this subject. No doubt his profession as a reciter and story-teller prevented him. We can see that Thucydides was sceptical; but can we fully see what his scepticism was directed against, or where, for instance, Nikias would have disagreed with him, and where he and Nikias both ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... young children are presented with a suitable story, they will usually have no difficulty in fitting ideas to words, and thus building up the story. It requires, in fact, the continuity found in the telling method to keep the children's attention on the story, the tone of voice and gesture of the reciter going a long way in helping the child to call up the ideas which enable him to construct the story plot. Moreover, some telling must be done by the teacher in every lesson. Everything cannot be ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... tell the truth, I don't get much time for reading, we're always so busy at the store and——But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the sword-swallower, the reciter of long poems, the clever manipulator who defies imitation—all possess prestige: but on the other hand, prestige surrounds demoniacal spells, wizardry, and all effectiveness ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... observations hold; save that they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the era producing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented as told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being sometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither they had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people, so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should have striven ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the reciter could get fairly under way the door mercifully opened, and Sir John entered. He advanced towards the Marchesa, and shook her warmly by the hand, but said nothing; his heart was evidently yet too full to allow him to testify his relief in words. He was followed closely by the Colonel, who, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... have been a curious study for such men as love to gaze upon the dark and wily features of human character, to have watched the contrast between the reciter and the listener, as Beaufort, with much circumlocution, much affected disdain and real anxiety, narrated the singular and ominous conversation ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... above the comprehension of the merest peasant, is apt to escape in frequent repetition; and the lacunae thus created are filled up either by lines from other ditties or from the mother wit of the reciter or singer. The injury, in either case, is obvious and irreparable."[45] From this point of view Scott considered that the ballads were only getting their rights when a skilful hand gave them such a retouching as should enable ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... curse Was sent on him, this love of making verse, By what offence heaven's anger he incurred, A grave denied, a sacred boundary stirred: So much is plain, he's mad: like bear that beats His prison down and ranges through the streets, This terrible reciter puts to flight The learned and unlearned left and right: Let him catch one, he keeps him till he kills, As leeches stick till they have ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... hill, on a little open space where a reciter is declaiming with vigorous gestures the verses of Saadi, the adorable Persian poet, I abandon myself to the contemplation of the Transcaucasian capital. What I am doing here, I propose to do again in a fortnight at Pekin. But the pagodas and yamens of the Celestial Empire can wait awhile, ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... with their villas, their favourites, their circle of dependants, men of culture, wit, and urbanity, through all which runs, strangely intermingled, a vein of extreme coarseness, vulgarity, and meanness; the lounger and the reciter, the diner-out and the legacy-hunter; the clients struggling to win their patrons' favour and to rise in the social scale, enduring the hardships and discomfort of a sordid life unillumined by lofty ideals or strength of will, a life that under cold northern skies would have been intolerable; ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... liked, and very much sung, in this neighbourhood. I can trace it back several generations, but cannot hear of its ever having been in print. I have never heard it with any considerable variation, save that one reciter called the dwelling of the feigned ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... reciter and retailer of the stories he had read and heard, and as the reciter of tales of his own invention, and he ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... occupied by these two ministers only; they had no competitors of equal rank. In 577, the King of Kudara made a second attempt to introduce Buddhism into Japan. He sent to the Yamato Court two hundred volumes of sacred books; an ascetic; a yogi (meditative monk); a nun; a reciter of mantras (magic spells); a maker of images, and a temple architect. If any excitement was caused by this event, the annals say nothing of the fact. It is briefly related that ultimately a temple was built for the new-comers ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Reciter is seldom happy in his delivery of blank verse. To which the unsympathetic may retort, that he does not deserve to be. Mr. Punch, however, recommends his pupils to treat such sneers with the contempt they merit, and to study the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... resist so facile and moderate a demand, so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half of the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn'd soliloquy about England getting drunk, which, like its reciter, stupidly stood alone, nothing prevenient or antevenient, and cleared away a good deal besides; and sent this copy, written all out (with alterations, &c., requiring judgment) in one day and a half! I sent it last night, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... re-appeared in Glasgow. He now became steady; and joining the Total Abstinence Society, advocated the cause of sobriety in a number of temperance songs. Renouncing his pledge, he soon returned to his former habits. He proceeded to Ireland, where he supported himself as a public reciter of popular Scottish ballads. He contributed to the Banner of Ulster a narrative of his experiences in America; and published at Belfast, in a separate volume, his "Lays of the Covenanters," two abridged editions of which were subsequently printed and circulated ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the fox, who regarded himself as the cleverest of all the beasts and who looked on his honest, dull-witted neighbour the armadillo as a born fool. Old gauchos used to tell me that twenty or more years ago one often met with a reciter of ballads who could relate the whole story of the Bien-te-veo. Good reciters were common enough in my time: at dances it was always possible to find one or two to amuse the company with long poems and ballads in the intervals of dancing, and first and last I questioned ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... but even the mecanique, the manner and the matter. Hence, however prosy and long drawn out be the formula, it retains the scheme of The Nights because they are a prime feature in the original. The Rawi or reciter, to whose wits the task of supplying details is left, well knows their value: the openings carefully repeat the names of the dramatic personae and thus fix them in the hearer's memory. Without the Nights no Arabian Nights! Moreover it is necessary to retain the whole apparatus: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Java, story and performance being of ancient origin and religious signification. The subjects of the topeng are derived from the Panji group of dramatic poems, the ancient costumes, the curious masks, and the office of the dalang or reciter, whose ventriloquial skill is required for the entire wording of the libretto, comprise a valuable memento of bygone days, otherwise entirely forgotten. The wayang-wayang or "shadow dance" of puppets, vies with the topeng in popularity, but the latter ranks as classic and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... conveyed also to the same scaffold the poet Roucher, his friend:—"Ils parlerent de la poesie a leurs derniers moments; pour eux, apres l'amitie, c'etait la plus belle chose de la terre. Racine fut l'objet de leur entretien et de leur derriere admiration. Ils voulurent reciter ses vers; ils choisirent la premiere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later. Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands incomplete to this day; but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell —as Joseph Addison would say. The church is always trying to get ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to my house years ago by a friend when he happened to be stationary for an hour, and he is certainly a unique and interesting character, a marvellous talker, reciter of Scotch ballads, a maker of epigrams, and a most unpractical, now-you-see-him and now-he's-a-far-away-fellow. I remember his remark, "Breakfast is a fatal habit." It was not the breakfast to which he referred but to the gathering round ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... appeared that concerts in which one took part were necessary to one's intellectual existence. Forest Glen at once decided it must have one, and Lottie Price, seeing a chance to distinguish herself as a reciter, once more took at the flood the tide that would sweep her on to glory, and boldly proffered a ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... a sooveneer best. To blazes wi' sooveneers! An' she dragged me awa' to a shop, an' I had to buy her a silly-like wee tie that cost me eichteen-pence-ha'penny; an' then she wanted a lang ride on the caur, an' that burst fivepence; an' she nabbed the remainin' bawbee for a keepsake.' The reciter ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... conundrum got its laugh, every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form—pierrots, niggers, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter: any or all of these will be ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... interesting tale. Living in the land of Ossian, it was natural to ask a stranger, "Can you speak of the days of Fingal?" If the answer was in the affirmative, then the neighbors were summoned, and poems and old tales would be the order until the hour of midnight. The reciter threw into the recitation all the powers of his soul and gave vent to the sentiment. Both sexes always ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... forward into the room, and flung his arms above his head. Then he dropped them to his side, and shrugged his shoulders, finishing in an attitude reminiscent of Plate 6 ("Despair") in "The Home Reciter." ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Rama and Sita, born after Rama had repudiated Sita, and brought up in the hermitage of Valmiki. As they were the first rhapsodists the combined name Kusilava signifies a reciter of poems, or an improvisatore, even to the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... me, anyhow!" she replied to him obstinately. How could they have got it fixed into their heads that she was a reciter? ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett |
