"Unmusical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glimpse of the man and his boat seen for a moment, and the water flashed in the rays of the stars as he turned; then his voice was heard muttering, and the splash of his pole came more faintly, while Dave secured and stepped out of the boat, to burst out suddenly in his grating unmusical laugh. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... They appear as free of care as the zingali themselves: they laugh, and chatter, and show their white teeth all day long, asking each new-comer to purchase their fruits and vegetables, their pinole, atole, and agua dulce. Their not unmusical voices ring pleasantly upon ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... May to November, for very little gain apparently. A shilling a day per man must be the utmost of their emolument. It is rather sad to see somewhat respectable old men engaged in this way, with two or three younger associates. Their instruments look much the worse for wear, and even my unmusical ear can distinguish more discord than harmony. They appear to be a very quiet and harmless people. Sometimes there is a woman playing on a fiddle, while her husband blows a wind instrument. In the streets it is not unusual to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Uncouth, Ungraceful, Unfashionable, Unladylike, Uninteresting, Unpresentable, and Ugly. She was Unpoetical, Unmusical, Unlearned, Uncultured, Unimproved, Uninformed, Unknowing, Unthinking, Unwitty and Unwise. She was Unlively, Undersized, Unwholesome and Unhealthy. She was Unlovely, Ungentle, Uncivil, Unsociable, Untameable, and altogether Unendurable. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... had rung in her ears for the last two years in all phases of intensity, passion, tenderness, and anger; a voice upon whose modulations, rude and unmusical though they were, her heart and soul had hung in transport or anguish. But it was a chime that had rung its last peal to her senses as she entered the Carquinez Woods, and for the last week had been as dead to her as a voice from the grave. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... Indeed, there was no dancing in the early part of the evening; it was rather a musical company, and Betty's favourite amusement was often interrupted; for the music was too good, and the people present too well-bred, to allow of that jumble of sounds musical and unmusical which is so distressing, and alas! not ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... have some clear unmusical meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one can easily pass through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, was Mozart's ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... there was a gentle declivity (up which I had clambered) terminating in the broad, level road leading to Worthing. Here, on this broad expanse of the Downs, was a fairyland of soft sea air, sunshine and rest—rest from mankind, from the shrill, unmusical voices of the crude and rude product of the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... argument bear no unmusical sound, Nor jars interpose, sacred friendship to grieve. For generous lovers let a corner be found, Where they in soft sighs may ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... is a piano in the country except at the girls' school at Cetinje. The Scotchman had suggested the gusla as a substitute, and had been met with derisive laughter, for he had made the suggestion in all good faith. He was one of the most unmusical men I have ever met. The professor had followed this up with a learned discourse on the gusla, and the lesson to be learnt from it in the origin and development of modern music, when suddenly the sounds of a violin, being tuned in the room behind us, arrested ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... well as a great variety of sun birds flitting from flower to flower like living gems. It is to be admitted that the cries of those birds were not always in accord with the splendour of their plumage, being for the most part distinctly harsh and unmusical; but there was one exception that startled us not a little when we first heard it. Its cry was an exact reproduction of the sound of a sweet-toned bell, so exact, indeed, that for the moment I felt fully persuaded ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... forward in and out of the gloom while their changing shadows danced fantastically over the prairie. Here the three riders paused again to listen. Closer by, the cow-boys' crooning would have sounded harsh and unmusical, but at this distance it shaped itself into a plaintive, minor melody that was very pleasing. For many moments they waited and enjoyed it in silence. Then suddenly a quick gust of wind and a low, muttering rumble of thunder made them turn quickly and ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... without weariness. What cause it is that exempts this pleasure from satiety he has long and diligently inquired, and believes it to consist in the perpetual variation of the numbers, by which the ear is gratified and the attention awakened. The lines that are commonly thought rugged and unmusical, he conceives to have been written to temper the melodious luxury of the rest, or to express things by a proper cadence: for he scarcely finds a verse that has not this favourite beauty; he declares that he could shiver in a hot-house when ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... three miles, leaving our men to follow with the luggage in a light cart. They passed us just short of the railway, and John was making the night hideous and terrifying the sleeping country, by playing the horn in prodigiously horrible and unmusical blasts. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Indians now returned to the fire and stood beside the chief. It was evident to them that his end was imminent. He sang in a low, not unmusical tone the death-chant of the Hurons. His companions silently bowed their heads. When he had finished singing he slowly rose to his great height, showing a commanding figure. Slowly his features lost their stern pride, his face softened, and his dark eyes, ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... composing in Wiesbaden. Four years later he came to Boston, writing, teaching, and giving occasional concerts. Thence he returned to New York, where he was called to the professorship of music at Columbia University. Princeton University has given him that unmusical degree, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... we know what you're saying, As your eye glances over these Notes: 'What asses are these that are braying With flat and unmusical throats? Who writes such unspeakable patter? Is it lunatics, idiots—or who?' And you think there is 'something the matter.' Well, we think ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... talk. Let me tell you about my seven select spirits. They are having nursery tea at the present moment with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of noise, so if you can bear a deafening babel of voices and an unmusical clitter-clatter of crockery I will take you inside the room ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... neighborhood assert the origin of the manor and its quaint, happy and not unmusical name to have ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... exercise. Mozart was so devoted and so enthusiastic in his fondness for his father and mother and his sister that his heart was graduated early for any demand. The most unmusical people know that Mozart stands unrivalled among infant prodigies, that he was a pocket-Paderewski, at a period when most children cannot even trundle a hoop, and that he was deep in composition before the usual child is out of kilts. Everybody ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... speak truly he must have closely resembled a starved sweep on a wet day, while Disraeli declares his voice was as unmusical as the sound of a broken tin whistle. Of him Lecky writes:—"Richard Lalor Shiel forms one of the many examples history presents of splendid oratorical powers clogged by insuperable natural defects. His person was diminutive and ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... a beauty in the grey twilight, Which minds unmusical can never know, A holy quietude, that yields to woe A pulseless pleasure, fraught with pure delight: The aspect of the mountains huge, that brave And bear upon their breasts the rolling storms; And the soft twinkling of the stars, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... changelessness of expression in the other dark faces as he had seen in Silvertip's. It struck him forcibly. When they spoke in their soft, guttural tones, or burst into a low, not unmusical laughter, or sat gazing stolidly into the fire, their faces seemed always the same, inscrutable, like the depths of the forest now hidden in night. One thing Joe felt rather than saw—these savages were fierce and untamable. He was sorry for Jim, because, as he believed, it would be as easy ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... had very little of his care; and, if what he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmusical only when they are ill read, the art of reading them is at present lost; for they are commonly harsh to modern ears. He has, indeed, many noble lines, such as the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... the body is the medium through which the soul, the real man, gives expression to thought and feeling; and yet voice that is simply mechanical or physical is always common and meaningless and as a rule unmusical. The normal condition of true artistic ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... wandered away the moment he had finished and rested searchingly on the other gentlemen. Evidently she missed a face she had expected to find there, for her colour changed and she drew back behind the other ladies with the light, unmusical laugh women sometimes use to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... a complete misunderstanding of the case. Because you neither play nor sing, it by no means follows that you are unmusical. If you love music and appreciate it, you may be more musical than many pianists and singers; or latent within you and only awaiting the touchstone of music there may be a deeper love and appreciation of the art than can be attributed ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... suppose that it was selected as the most poetical composition of all the scores that were submitted to the Committee. But, perhaps by its tenor, by its allusions to the fire, to Garrick, to Siddons, and to Sheridan, it was thought most applicable to the occasion, notwithstanding its being in parts unmusical, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the lilting of the music stirring her pulses and lifting her feet, despite the unmusical rage she was in, "and ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... work that reveals genuine poetic imagination. Silius is free from many of the faults of his contemporaries, the faults that spring from aspirations towards originality. He is content to be an imitator. In his style, as in his composition, Vergil is an obsession. But the echoes are muffled or unmusical. Gifted with ease and fluency and—for his age—comparative lucidity of diction, Silius has no true ear for music, nor true eye for beauty. His verse moves naturally but heavily. He is the most spondaic poet[621] of his age, and the spondaic rhythm is not alleviated ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... that there was not time to lengthen them; took my feet peevishly out of them altogether, and dashed down, that winding way between King's sheds and corrals while the Ragged H boys kept King's men at bay, and the unmusical medley of shots and yells followed us far in the darkness of the pass. At the last fence, where we perforce drew rein to make a free passage for our horses, I looked back, like one Mrs. Lot. A red glare lit the whole sky behind us with starry sparks, shooting up higher into the low-hanging crimson ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... from Mr. Edwardes I stood in the front quadrangle and whistled. My whistle is unmusical and penetrative, useful only when a dog has been lost, and some man, whom I did not know, put his head out of his window and said abruptly, "For heaven's sake shut up that vile noise;" another man chucked a penny into the quad and told me he should send something heavier if I did not stop. The ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... show us another and a better way across the mountain. He spoke in a very loud voice, and there was a singular repetition of phrases and arrangement of words, which rendered his speech striking and not unmusical. ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... on,—softly, steadily, from the half hour to the hour, and from the hour to the half. Out of doors there was nothing stirring, unless the owl stirred between his unmusical notes, or Mr. Skip's dog did something but howl. Hardly a wagon passed, hardly a breath moved the leaves. Cindy, on her part, was lost in the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... shrill but not unmusical voice from Wingate's side. "Introduce us, please, Mr. Kendrick. We have been making furtive conversation for ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you, continue to play; never awaken her," said Gerfaut; and, as if he were afraid his wish would not be granted, he began to pound in the bass without being disturbed by the unmusical sounds. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... doubled over, and would lean in unison first to the right and then to the left, striking first one end, then the other of their instruments, which they held in the middle by a bejuco string from a hole made for the purpose. The note was not unmusical. Many of the men had their head-baskets on their backs, and one or two of them the palm-leaf rain-coat. I had never imagined that it was possible for human beings to advance as slowly as did these warriors; in respect ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... French shrill. It may seem strange to think that I comment upon such a small matter as a locomotive whistle, but when one is in a foreign land, amid foreign scenes and sounds, a familiar sound is good to hear, even though it is as unmusical as a deep blast of an ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... kind than any other in society, arising, doubtless, from their isolated position. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that this change if occasionally adopted in our polished dialect would afford an agreeable variety by no means unmusical. In conversation with a very learned Grecian on this subject, he seemed to consider because the learned are constantly, and sometimes very capriciously, introducing new words into our language, ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings |
