"Singsong" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some strange freak of fate a miracle had saved him, but when he realized the ease with which the girl had, single-handed, beaten off twenty gorilla-like males, and an instant later, as he saw them again take up their dance about him while she addressed them in a singsong monotone, which bore every evidence of rote, he came to the conclusion that it was all but a part of the ceremony of which he was ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his day's work on his mind and he spoke rapidly, with a patent show of getting his exhortation done in time to fall into step with Jerry, appearing, at the moment, axe in hand. He picked up his dinner pail. "Do you reject Him?" he repeated, in his former singsong. "Do you reject ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a general laugh, in the midst of which Mr. Gresley, whose complexion had deepened, sprang to his feet and endeavored to attract Dick's attention, but Dick saw nothing but his audience. Mr. Gresley began to speak in his high, "singsong" voice. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... for this adorable little Lucy was, as a matter of course, to figure in the entertainment. It therefore happened that she heard not one note of Jim Patterson's painfully executed piece, for she was saying to herself in mental singsong a foolish little ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fire, lifting his knees high, stepping slowly, beating the rattling horn into the palm of his hand. Behind him in single file, imitating his step, marched the other Indians. The smiles faded out of their countenances; their jaws were set, and deep in their throats they growled a weird singsong. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... since Alec learned it, but the words were as familiar still as the letters of the alphabet. As Macklin's high-pitched voice reached them, Philippa joined in in a singsong undertone, and even Alec found himself unconsciously following the well-remembered lines ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... said Nicholas in his curious singsong tone, "does it not make your blood boil to see tyranny in ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... was a curly-headed lad of twenty, with a shrewd, good-humored face. He stood in a slouching attitude, one shoulder much higher than the other, and as he gave forth, in a singsong voice, his emphatic rhymed directions, his fingers played idly with the red-silk lacings of his brown flannel shirt. To an imaginative looker-on those idly toying fingers had an indefinable air of being very much at home with the trigger of the six-shooter ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... supply set before them. Those whose unconquerable instinct impelled them to the more invigorating sam-shu had only to make known their natural desires. As the feast progressed, and the spirits of the company rose, the charms of music were added to the delights of appetite. A band of singsong girls gently beat their tom-toms, and carolled in soft and soothing strains. As they finished, a general desire to hear Mien-yaun was expressed. Willing, indeed, he was, and, after seven protestations that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... look at lecturing simply as part of the routine tend to fall into either the singsong rhythm which one frequently hears in college professors and certain radio announcers, or go all out for the sonorous intonations which are beloved by many of the clergy. Many young officers get into these same cadences whenever they talk to men, and before they know ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... ranch gleamed on the dark prairie like a constellation. Lights burned at every window; a broad beam issued from the door and threw a welcoming beacon across the darkness and silence of the night. The scraping of fiddles mingled with the rhythmic scuffle of feet and the singsong of the words that the dancers sung as they whirled through the figures of the quadrille and lancers. About the walls of the room where the dancing was in progress stood a fringe of gallants, their heads newly oiled, and proclaiming the fact ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the older boys and girls sat on the stairs in groups of twos and threes, while from the upper hall the scurry of feet, and the singsong cry that London Bridge was falling down, showed what the little ones were playing. It was after eleven o'clock when the wagonettes came rumbling up to the door. The rain had stopped, and a few stars were beginning to ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... a moment, it seemed to me that I could hear some faint, monotonous singsong rising above all the rest. At first I thought it was the croaking of a monster frog, but as we plodded on and the sound grew more distinct, I knew it could not be that. At last, in sheer perplexity, I stopped ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... regular business of the meeting drew to a close one of the members rose, and on being recognized announced that she had a resolution to offer, and read in a high singsong voice: ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... threatening for the third time, three or four of the girls led by Bertha Martin, supplied it in a subdued singsong without waiting for Pastor Lahmann's slow voice. Miriam had scarcely attended to his discourse. He had begun in flat easy tones, describing his visit to Geneva, the snowclad mountains, the quiet lake, the spring flowers. His words brought her no vision and her mind wandered, half ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... for being there. He was angry with himself for having brought them, and with Winny for having made him bring them; and he was angry with himself for being angry. But he couldn't help it. Their voices exasperated him. The children's voices, the high, reiterated singsong, "Where we goin'?" Winny's voice, poignantly soft, insufferably patient, answering them with all that tender silliness, that persistent, gentle, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the same sights and sounds. There were moments when I thought to go mad, wrenching at my cords till my wrists bled, yet with no hope to escape. But in time, by good luck, my wits grew deaden'd to it all, and I march'd on with the rest to a kind of lugubrious singsong that my brain supplied. For hours I went thus, counting my steps, missing my reckoning, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... and, at the sleepy usher's nod, a sleepy boy would rise and recite the perfunctory evening prayer in a dull singsong voice—beginning, "Notre Pere, qui etes aux cieux, vous dont le regard scrutateur penetre jusque dans les replis les plus profonds de nos coeurs," etc., etc., and ending, "au nom du Pere, du Fils, et du ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... heard such reading in my life! I thought I could have gone on listening to him all night. The only clergymen that I ever heard read were Mr Bagnall and poor old Mr Digby, and the one always read in a high singsong tone, which gave me the idea that it was nothing I need listen to; and the other mumbled indistinctly, so that I never heard what he said. But Mr Keith read as if the converse were really going on, and you actually heard our Lord and the woman ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... marked accent upon the long syllable next preceding the caesura, and a slighter one upon that next before each of the demi-caesuras. When made too prominent, these pauses lead to a singsong style, which should ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... said; "they are too monotonous, too singsong, to dead-and-alive; they have no expression, no elocution. It isn't natural; it could never happen in real life. A person who had just acquired a dog is either blame' glad or blame' sorry. He is not on the fence. I never saw a case. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... he passed. At this stage he was of the jocular persuasion. "Still an unwelcome visitor, ma'am? No little tidbit of news for me to-day?" There he sat, twiddling his thumbs, reiterating his singsong: "Just so!" and looking wise as an owl. Mahony knew the air—had many a time seen it donned to cloak perplexity—and covert doubts of Rogers' ability began to assail him. But then he fell mentally foul of every one he came in touch with, at present: Ned, for the bare-faced fashion in which he left ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... said Peletiah, "it's only just happened." But Grandma didn't hear, so he picked up Polly's letter, which was open, and began in a singsong tone: ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... confidence about the up-and-down variety of the Saxon dialect, he did not venture this afternoon to find his way by tram to the house. The blind German script in which his hosts' solicitous and minute instructions were couched, and the funny singsong of the natives talking blatantly about him, made him feel still more helpless. He sought refuge in an open droschke. He could then, too, enjoy ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... very close to spelling heaven to her mind. Not that she would come to it vacant-minded, but rather as a trained woman, starved for companionship and wanting something of the beauty and ease of life. She sat dreaming of it here with rows of dark faces before her, and the singsong wail of a little black reader with his head ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... you," Gore growled at the prisoners in general. A shuffling sound followed the singsong call, and then a "galley boy" of forty years or so, badly crippled by club-feet, shuffled up to the hatch and laboriously let himself down to the platform. The huge bowl of stew he was carrying was far too heavy for him, and ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... continually shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high- aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching—you could have said preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... . . Blessed be the righteous Judge!" as though I had told him the news of his son's death. With that he took out a pocket knife, and wanted to make the "mourning cut." At that moment my ear caught the sound of the heartrending singsong of the Psalms. The voice was old and tremulous. It was an old man, evidently a lodger, who was reading his Psalter ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... her. It was a wedding chorus, which I was willing to wager was the Japanese "Miserere"; but this error may have its significance after all. To us, in short, the music was execrable. A falsetto, and a grinding, singsong falsetto at that—the most disagreeable sound I ever heard in music—is very common, and highly esteemed. The instruments resemble banjos, and there is a harsh kind of drum accompaniment; but there ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... prayer, and on being asked this evening he readily complied. His voice was deep and round and mellow, and the burden of his utterances was suitable to that or any other religious occasion, being a sort of singsong tribute to the eternal glory of humility and submission to the divine will. The prayer was followed by a rousing sermon from the preacher, and, in closing, he called attention, as Henley evidently had gathered from some source that he would do, to the future plans of the organization. The time ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... in singsong verse, of his own undeserved indigence and the brutality of employers, and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... ye kindly. Whin a man has a wife and sivin childer hangin' to um—" but here the singsong voice of the porter calling the Burlington westbound silenced all other sounds and the clerk ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... life. The hum and murmur of it was like the spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it—nay, the vision that was builded in it—was the vision of the age to be: the vision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of his sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his soul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and with the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with Creation morning, and into something (in our far-off, ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... impressionability, and to the straining after technical scenic effects. Thus, extreme vehemence in anger would excite me to the point of forgetting the fiction, and cause me to commit involuntarily lamentable outbursts. Hence I applied myself to overcome the tendency to singsong in my voice, the exuberance of my rendering of passion, the exclamatory quality of my phrasing, the precipitation of my pronunciation, and the swagger ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... gently, like melody heard through water and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the front of whizzing ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... of some prehistoric monster. There was an uncomfortable pressure in our ears, then the noise became more regular, followed by a buzzing and a shrill hum. All the high notes of the engines in the central station intermingled and made a bewildering noise. It was like a mad diabolical singsong. And yet it was almost like silence after the dull, heavy pounding of the oil-motors—only more insistent and irritating. The penetrating hum in the various vents announced the fact that the diving mechanism was in operation. It moaned ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot |
