"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... annuity of Richard's, and so suffered this seizure on his account. It is a strange combination altogether, and is now more the subject of conversation than any other topic, and it serves me also as one to fill my letter. Si le recit vous ennuye, vous n'ignorez pas le motif que j'ai a vous le faire. I suppose that you are not always at audiences, and that you may like sometimes to know what passes in circles from whence everything of moment is excluded, and where you may be again, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the clearing we were treated to a most graceful spectacle, a performance of the Ataboi, a dance descriptive of the growth and blossoming of the alova flower. This was performed by seven beautiful girls to an accompaniment of song and clapping. The plaintive love-motif was unmistakably introduced by a deep-chested dame who played on the bazoola, a primitive instrument fashioned from the stalk of the figwort (Scrophulariaceae). It may interest music lovers to know that the Filbertines employ the diatetic ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... found it hard entirely to expunge. They always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and gains. Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on man's inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection that his friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high seas if the art of navigation had never been discovered—if man had submissively respected the limits imposed ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... sujets Bulgares, quelle que soit leur religion, jouiront d'une complete egalite de droits. Ils pourront concourir a tous les emplois publics, fonctions et honneurs, et la difference de croyance ne pourra leur etre opposee comme un motif d'exclusion. ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... the girl sang a song of sunshine dancing on grass, of meadowlarks flinging out their carefree notes of joy. Through it like a golden thread ran for a motif little melodies that had to do with a man who had staggered into Fort Desolation out of the frozen North, sick and starved and perhaps wounded, but still ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Less theatrical than his gifted namesake, not so fluid nor so picturesque, his thought reduced to black and white reads better. What Theodore Parker said can be analyzed, parsed, taken apart. He always had a motif and his verb ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... only the silvery notes of a violin, which comes stealing through the steady throb and swing of the heavier stringed instruments? Ah! why does the rhythm stop? A few chords breaking up the dream, the sound of a bugle calling you away, and the valse goes into the farewell motif with its tender longing and passionate anguish. Good-bye! you will be true? Your heart is mine, good-bye, sweetheart! Stop! that discord of angry notes—she is false to her soldier lover! The stars are pale, the nightingale is silent, the rose leaves fall, and ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... therefore more acceptable to customers." As prostitutes are frequently married by their patrons, it is believed that not a few women from "special villages" are taken to wife without their origin being known. Unwitting marriage with an Eta woman has long been a common motif in fiction and folk story. Many members of the "special tribes" go to Hokkaido and there pass into the general body of the population. The folk of this class are "despised," I was told by a responsible Japanese, "not so much for themselves as for what their fathers and grandfathers ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... choose the name, and what was the scheme or motif of his poem? Something is to be gathered from his own remarks and reflections; but it must be borne in mind that he is on the defensive, and that his half-humorous paradoxes were provoked by advice and opposition. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register—it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at sad little tables in their ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... that these give him he chooses the ones that chance to be beautiful. And in time these new beauties have become worn away like the trite metaphors that are now no longer metaphors, but part of the "funded capital." That was a ridiculous device of Schumann's, who found a motif for one of his loveliest things by using the letters of his temporary fair one's name—A B E G G; but it may not be so utterly unlike the procedure by which ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... which pertain to the earlier date, but a study of those few, taken in conjunction with the still fewer that remain of the 16th century, prove the gradual growth of the designs that have the tree motif ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... covered her face, and her voice died into a wail of despair: "O, mein Mann! O, mein Mann!" She turned away, staggering about like some creature that has received a death wound. Hal's eyes followed her; her cry, repeated over and over incessantly, became the leit-motif ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... les fouilles ne devront etre accordees qu'aux personnes qui offrent des garanties suffisantes d'experience archeologique. Aucune des Puissances mandataires ne devra, en accordant ces autorisations, agir de facon a ecarter, sans motif valable, les savants des ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... occurred to M. Zola in 1872, when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ramble through the Halles. I have in my possession, however, an article written by M. Zola some five or six years before that time, and in this one can already detect the germ of the present work; just as the motif of another of M. Zola's novels, "La Joie de Vivre," can be traced to a short story ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... - Edith Woodman Burroughs Snugly placed inside the abutting walls, east of the Tower of Jewels. Naive in character and simple in treatment, without any further symbolical meaning than that suggested by the name. Motif in side panels, "Ship ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... miles, yet we can fairly hear the drip of cool drops falling from thick moss to pools below. First an octave of two notes of purest silver, then a varying strain of eight or ten notes, so sweet and powerful, so individual and meaningful that it might stand for some wonderful motif in a great opera. I shut my eyes, and I was deaf to all other sounds while the wren sang. And as it dwelt on the last note of its phrase, a cicada took it up on the exact tone, and blended the two final notes into a slow ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... finish with the Second International and join the Third. It was clear that this gathering in the Kremlin was meant as the nucleus of a new International opposed to that which had split into national groups, each supporting its own government in the prosecution of the war. That was the leit motif of the whole affair. ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... fine Point d'Angleterre is simply Brussels of the best period when the glorious Renaissance was at its height. It is absolutely indistinguishable from Brussels of the same period. The specimen lappet, illustrated, shows the "figure" motif which appears in "Point de France" and the old "Venetian Point," and which at ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... paper and what was my surprise to see a big spread picture of myself, lined up against that row of Melle cottages and being shot for the delectation of the British public. There is the same long raincoat that runs as a motif through all the other pictures. Underneath it ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... and the story is a story of low life. Women play an important role in the narrative, more important perhaps than they do in any other kind of ancient literature—at least their individuality is more marked. The efficient motif is erotic. I say the efficient, because the conventional motif which seems to account for all the misadventures of the anti-hero Encolpius is the wrath of an offended deity. A great part of the book has an atmosphere of satire about it which piques our curiosity and baffles us at ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... first category, and the remaining figures in the second. Now if the ordinary order cells be represented by white, and the reverse ordinary by black, just such a pattern has been created as forms the decorative motif of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... dinner, beginning with onion soup which was strange; and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blast of trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner that night ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboard the boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the value of food as a two-way commodity—going down and coming up—but later in the dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one-way luxury, with ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... them again to Sister Mayberry, child, that her ears may be rejoiced with mine." And Mother Mayberry caught at the top of the gate as the girl slipped the nodding baby down into her arms and in her wonderful muted voice hummed the Grail motif while the Deacon raised his thin old ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... her in the Park on Sunday. She's Red Crossing. Had on the most elaborate costume you ever saw. Imagine a nurse's uniform brought up to the standard of the highest art, or perhaps I ought to say an artistic dress with the red cross for motif. She told me that she expects to go ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Below this was a little table that behaved with a mulish vindictiveness to any knee that was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parload's versatile ink bottle, and on it, leit motif of the whole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... languages than any modern performances I ever heard of." A French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared three years after the publication of the novel and a little later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons; and as one result, the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... veritable anguish.... These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of 'Phedre'—'Venus toute entiere,' and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde's motif continually." ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Baireuth, too; perhaps it will strike you as a dull and stinking little town, and so I dare say it is. But after lunch we shall go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of the theatre. Aren't you thrilled, Comber? Doesn't a holy awe pervade you! Are you ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to beings whose existence ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... she had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lettre du pere. Hum!... Je ne sais, au reste, ce que vous penserez d'une imagination[44] qui est venue a mon fils: elle est bizarre, il en convient lui-meme; mais le motif est pardonnable et meme delicat: c'est qu'il m'a prie de lui permettre de n'arriver d'abord chez vous que sous la figure[45] de son valet, qui, de son cote, fera le personnage ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... sixty-five years. He'd have impressed nobody—of importance. The super-motif, or dominant, of his era, was Exclusionism, and the notion of seeds in the air ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... B.C. to 500 B.C.$ Seems to have been derived largely from the Early Asian. It influenced Assyrian and Greek decorations, and was used as a motif in some French Empire decoration. Not used in its entirety except for lodge ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found—it had been put there for him by Amanda—among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... excursion three or four times a week. So that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... of their "masks." The surface of things is the heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People think with their bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are words, tones, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys |
