"Strident" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up to the derelict, and pretty soon a prolonged and vibratory hissing noise, strident, insistent, ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... suddenly heard shouts from the direction of the fort. Immediately afterwards the deep notes of the huge gong kept in Angria's courtyard boomed and reverberated across the harbor, echoed at brief intervals by the strident clanging of several ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... man, who drifted into this ugly quarter some time ago, and took his place in the parlour, which is a room that I now prefer to the bar. I was holding a friendly discussion with a butcher when a strident voice said, "You are absolutely and irredeemably ignorant of the rudiments of your subject." I started. Where had I heard that voice before? The man was clad in an old shooting-jacket; his trousers were out at the knee, and his linen ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... two or three sound posts were standing, she spoke to her sister. There was something strident in her voice, as if she pleaded for strength to ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... herald filled his vast lungs with a mighty volume of New England air, set the long brazen trumpet to his lips, and blew such a blast that the led horses of the commissioners started and threw up their heads, and the windows of the court house shook with the strident vibration. Then, taking the paper on which the proclamation was written, and holding it up before him, he proceeded to bellow forth its contents in such stentorian wise that the commissioners might have heard it, had they been on Boston ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say—one more word and out you go, whether you like it ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... ten while the picture held with no other sound than the breathing of two men and the strident clamour of a blue-jay in ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... invited him over to paint your Matabel; and here he has been, admiring her, saying soft things to her, and turnin' her head. Sometimes you've been present. Most times you've been away. And now you've sent her to the Ship, and you are off stag huntin'." Then with strident voice, the woman sang, and looked maliciously at ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... hands of our marksmen. And now suppose that an infantry brigade receives orders to charge. "Charge!" The word carries magnificent poetic associations, but, alas, it is a very prosaic affair nowadays! The lines move onward in short rushes, and it seems as if a swarm of ants were migrating warily. The strident voices of the officers ring here and there: the men edge their way onward: it seems as if there were no method in the advance; but somehow the loose wavy ranks are kept well in hand, and the main movement proceeds like machinery. "I ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... "But I'm not quite ready to cash in my checks yet. The game isn't over!" He was pacing around the room, knocking on the metal walls with something that gave back a strident ring. "Have you any idea ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... while he stopped in the angle of a wall, and listened to the sounds of the city below him, the rush of the river below the Bastion, the motor and bell of the electric tram-car, the whistle of a freight locomotive at the further end of the town—strident noises brought from the West to break the drowsy murmur of the Orient, but not a sight nor a sound which could give him a clew as to the whereabouts of Linke or Countess Marishka. The inaction was maddening. In his belt the American ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... before the darkness, we would encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country life—the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour with ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-wagon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and startling thud resounded through the room; their eyes blinked against the coming horror; and still clinging together like drowning people, they fell to the floor. Then followed a prolonged and strident hissing as from the indignant pit; an offensive stench seized them by the throat; the room was filled with dense ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... keynote to the man's disposition. Gold! It was the gold he coveted. At all costs that gold was to be his. His eyes shone with greed. He moved towards the boxes as though he were about to handle them; but he paused abruptly before he reached them. The barking of the dogs and the strident tones of the Indian's voice outside arrested him. He suddenly remembered that he had not yet completed ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... hat with its waving plumes was overpowering enough, but her voice, strident and angry, seemed to ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... searching for the knob of the door. The smoke proceeded from the open cabinot in great ponderous murdering clouds. In one of these clouds, erect and tense and beautiful as an angel—her wildly shouting face framed in its huge night of dishevelled hair, her deep sexual voice, hoarsely strident above the din and smoke, shouting fiercely through the darkness—stood, triumphantly and colossally young, Celina. Facing her, its clenched, pinkish fists raised high above its savagely bristling head in a big, brutal gesture of impotence and rage and anguish—the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to emerge fully capable of governing the world by word or by deed? Louis must, assuredly, have found much bitterness in his intercourse with men, or have striven hard with Society in terrible irony, without extracting anything from it, before uttering so strident a cry, and expressing, poor fellow, the desire which satiety of power and of all earthly things has led even ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... in all earnestness, Paul and Dora resumed their quarrel, and Dora's strident voice echoed ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... boy only threw her another disdainful glance and darted off into the thick of the crowd. A moment later Pollyanna heard his strident call of "paper, ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... this period betray much more clearly the real temper of the man. They are filled full and brimming over with longing and impatience, with painful passion and with hope deferred. It is in the strident lyrics Ibsen wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can best read the record of his mind, and share its exasperations, and wonder at its elasticity. The series of sonnets In a Picture Gallery is a strangely violent ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the great open-air salon of the people, was a feverish going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the Pere Duchesne, L'Ami du Peuple, the Jean Bart, the Vieux Cordelier. Crowds gathered round Bassett's famous shop for caricature ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... in seemingly hopeless confusion. The shouting of orders, the rattling of cab wheels, the shrieking of whistles was deafening. From out in the river came the deep toned blasts of the steamer's siren, in grotesque contrast with the strident tooting of a dozen diminutive tugs which, puffing and snorting, were slowly but surely coaxing the leviathan into her berth alongside the dock. The great vessel, spick and span after a coat of fresh paint hurriedly put on during ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... knew that he was detested, and feared to be accused to Rome. The other side knew what they wanted, and were resolute. Encouraged by the hesitation of Pilate, they 'cried out all together.' One hears the strident yells from a thousand throats shrieking out the self-revealing and self-destroying choice of Barabbas. He was a popular hero for the very reason that he was a rebel. He had done what his admirers had accused Jesus of doing, and for which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... monks, and Robber Mother saw that now it meant business! With feet firmly planted she stood in the path and began shrieking in strident tones all the awful vengeance she would wreak on the cloister if she couldn't remain in the herb garden as long as she wished. But the monks did not see why they need fear her and thought only of driving her out. Then Robber Mother let out a perfect volley of shrieks, and, ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... earth; it seemed to be pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a clearing full of sunshine; presently, as if it were retracing its road, it rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding ribbon of road cut ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... had been darkness and dim shadow. Now, suddenly, there was a huge whistling, tossing circle of light and flame, and from the centre of this a banging, brazen, cymbal-clashing scream issued-a scream that, through its strident shrillness, he recognised as a tune that he knew—a tune often whistled by Jim at Cow Farm. "And her golden hair was hanging down her back." Whence the tune came he could not tell; from the very belly of the flaming monster, it seemed; but, as he watched, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... strident pitch now by the new resolution, Blount hurriedly set his desk in order, slammed it shut, and followed the stenographer to the street level. In the avenue he hesitated for a moment, the thoughts shuttling swiftly. In a flash the inferences fell into ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Magagnati, so delicate and intricate was the work that had been ordered from him; and the gondoliers, meanwhile, in their splendid liveries, held converse with other gondoliers in lazily drifting barks, with hatchments of other noble houses embroidered on their sleeves; and their tones were strident and quarrelsome, or self-complacent and patronizing, as the quality of the silken sashes which displayed the color of their house was heavier ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... looked at him, and shrank two steps away; but she answered, in a voice which I could hardly recognise as hers, it was so high and strident; "I should call it a chilly ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... planted on one stirrup, from the top of which drooped in the dull air the once gay guidon, battle-rent and sodden with rain, and as he went he shouted at intervals, "Dovinger's Bangers! Rally on the guidon!" Now and again his strident boyish voice varied the appeal, "Hyar's yer Dov-inger's Rangers! Bally, boys! Rally ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... gestured the command, whereupon the Atlantean nodded eagerly and, filling his chest, set horn to lips to blow a long, strident note that rang harshly, boldly ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... violently, went and sat in her high chair. The blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice of Mr. Brunt, the roar of Mr. Harby, came muffled through the glass partition. And now and then a pair of eyes rose from the reading-book, rested on her a moment, watchful, as if calculating impersonally, then ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... gentlemen, and the officer of dragoons in their turn crossed over in order to witness the removal of the ailing pilgrims. All that they could as yet see, far away in the depths of the black country, was the lantern in front of the engine, looking like a red star which grew larger and larger. Strident whistles pierced the night, then suddenly ceased, and you only heard the panting of the steam and the dull roar of the wheels gradually slackening their speed. Then the canticle became distinctly audible, the song of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a strident voice, "I'm going in and get supper, and when it's ready we'll set down and eat it. I ain't going to wait one minute. I'm just sick of ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-colored coat wrong side before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large strange toy, and his strident voice said: ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... with Forrest's famous escort. We had no idea of the result of the collision, or that there had been a collision. We had paused to make sure of our position and whereabouts. Meanwhile, the little six-pounder was barking away furiously, and presently we heard a strident voice cut the morning air: "Go and tell Freeman to put his battery right in on that gun. I ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... lyres, and shaking crotala, while the rays of the sun, setting behind them in the mountains of Numidia, shot between the strings of their lyres over which their naked arms were stretched. At intervals their instruments would become suddenly still, and a cry would break forth strident, precipitate, frenzied, continuous, a sort of barking which they made by striking both corners of the mouth with the tongue. Others, more motionless than the Sphynx, rested on their elbows with their chins on their ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... gathered up a handful of gravel, while he, perfectly satisfied, and opening his mouth wide from ear to ear in a burst of silent laughter, renewed his raking with all the strength of his arms. As the rake travelled over the gravel a regular, strident sound arose. When a few minutes had elapsed Rosalie, seeing her little charge absorbed in her amusement, seemingly happy and at ease, drew gradually farther away from her, as though lured by the grating of this rake. Zephyrin was now working ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... feet, O thin Terpsichore, I seek in this great hall, But one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all. I seek her from afar, I come from temples where her altars are, From groves that bear her name, Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame, And cymbals struck on high and strident faces Obstreperous in her praise They neither love nor know, A goddess of gone days, Departed long ago, Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes Of her old sanctuary, A deity obscure and legendary, Of whom there now remains, For sages ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... strident note. Gwendolyn's mother was circling into sight once more. Fortunately, she was keeping close to the outer edge of the road. The Piper faced in the direction she was speeding, and prepared to ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... half song, half odor, forth did float— As if God turned a rose into a throat— "When Nature from her far-off glen Flutes her soft messages to men, The flute can say them o'er again; Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone, Breathes through life's strident polyphone The flute-voice in the world of tone. Sweet friends, Man's love ascends To finer and diviner ends Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends. For I, e'en I, As here I lie, A petal on a harmony, Demand of Science whence and why Man's tender ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... triumphant originality. His figures of speech, drawn from all realms, are penetrating in quality, of startling aptness. Equally characteristic is his versification, varying as it does from passages of melodic smoothness and grace to lines as strident, broken, and harsh as the thought they dramatically reflect. In narration, whether in the brilliant rapidity and ease of a short poem like "Herve Riel" or in the sustained flow of a long story like that of Pompilia, we find unusual skill. In disquisition, in ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... to leaves and branches, only now and then displaying their full glory in a sleepy protest. There were scores, hundreds of them, and the diners passed in review of the spectacle like country visitors before the glass tanks of the Aquarium. A strident shriek sounded as a gorgeously caparisoned peacock preened himself; others were discovered here and there, brilliant- hued specimens, ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... 'nice,' too, as far as their appearance and breeding went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... pure tone. Many singers do not understand these two vital principles. They either sing with too much relaxation of the diaphragm and respiratory muscles, or too much rigidity. Consequently the effort becomes local instead of constitutional, which renders the tone hard and strident and variable to pitch. Again the vocal chords are either forced apart or pinched together, with ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... steam-spitting, fire-spouting locomotive with its deafening exhaust and strident whistle, clanging bell and glowing fire-box actually frightened him. As he stood close by the track and it came on threateningly, he backed away, his rifle held in his crooked arm, ready for some great emergency, he knew not what. A laborer laughed at him, and his hands instinctively ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Mrs Widger continued in a strident voice, buttering two hunks of bread with astonishing rapidity. "Take off thic hat, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... prove it otherwise? How could he hope to clear himself from the foul charge? Even as he yet swayed unsteadily upon his feet, a hand pressed across his eyes as if shielding them from that horrible vision, a voice, deep and strident, rang out: ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... swiftly returned to their allotted task, and his reeking pipe did its duty with hearty goodwill. There was the sound of strident voices in the outer room, and the rattle of the door handle turning ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... her side. In reaction from the excitements and fatigues of the day, they all early sought the rest which is never found in such perfection as in a mountain camp. Hemlock boughs formed the mattresses on which their blankets were spread, and soon there were no sounds except the strident chirpings of insects ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... were scarcely more than subconscious in him. He stood now a few inches behind Hilda, and, above these thoughts, and beneath the stir and strident glitter and noise of the crawling ant-heap, his mind was intensely occupied with Hilda's ear and her nostril. He could watch her now at leisure, for the changeful interest of the scene made conversation unnecessary and even ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of speech in mingled Spanish, Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch, for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice gained any heed in that contest. Even after the bells paused, the habit of effort kept the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... still immovable inner ice-fields; swam placidly among the narrow leads, or in huge bodies blackened the open pools or the projecting points of ice. Among them, too, wheeled many flocks of clamorous brent, while, from time to time, the desolate cry of the Moniac duck, or the shrill, monotonous, strident flight of the "Whistler" warned the sportsmen that new visitants were about to greet ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... fellows, sonorously garbed, were leaning over the counters, wrestling with the mediatorial hand-coverings, while giggling girls played vivacious seconds to their lead upon the strident string of coquetry. Carter would have retreated, but he had gone too far. Masie confronted him behind her counter with a questioning look in eyes as coldly, beautifully, warmly blue as the glint of summer sunshine on an iceberg ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... at an oasis in the day. Since morning he had been toiling through the Sahara of the city's noise: arid, senseless, inhospitable noise: roaring of wheels, clanging of bells, shrieking of whistles, clatter of machinery, squawking of horns, raucous and strident voices: confused, bewildering, exhausting noise, a desolate and unfriendly desert of ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... his way, flinging back a trail of chaff as long as his voice could carry to the room above, a room curiously dim and still, it seemed to him, as he came out into the strident sunshine of the July day. Once in the street, moreover, and safely out of range of Opdyke's windows, his fun dropped from him, and he shook his sturdy shoulders, as if he were trying to shake them free from an ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and presence in this later middle age of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time must ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... lashed himself to the wheel; but he piped all hands and delivered a short address to them; said he hoped they would do their duty like gallant hearties, but that he knew they were the scum of Rio and the Gold Coast, and if they snapped at him he would tear them. His bluff strident words struck the note sailors understand, and they cheered him lustily. Then a few sharp orders were given, and they turned the ship round, and nosed her for ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... its strident tones were to her ear! She dropped her eyes and caught sight of a dark stain on the snow-white plumage of the doves in the mosaic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Men." For the most part, however, their literature was acridly republican in tone and of a levelling tendency. Thus, for the first time since the brief attempt of the Cromwellian Levellers, the rich and the poor began to group themselves in hostile camps, at the strident tones of Paine's cry for a graduated Income Tax. Is it surprising that the sight of the free institutions of France and of the forced economy of the Court of the Tuileries should lead our workers to question the utility of the State-paid debaucheries of Carlton ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... far from her now, that old breeding ground of great, incisive sons, that nest of passions so strong that only a grip of granite—like her sea line—could master them (do you fancy, O languorous, faded South, do you bellow, O strident, bustling West, that because she neither sighed them nor trumpeted them, she had no passions? Allez, allez!) but I can close my eyes at any moment and smell the challenge of her Atlantic winds here on the Mediterranean or feel the heady languor of her miraculous "Indian Summer" ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... life seemed to have gone out, never speaking, when he was tired giving a little plaintive cry towards the servant, who was always near, who helped him to sit down, to crouch upon some step, where he would stay for hours, motionless, mute, his mouth hanging, his eyes blinking, hushed by the strident monotony of the grasshopper's cry—a blotch of humanity in ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... was wracked by strident cries from "de gang," engaged in a game of one-eyed cat. Finally the good lady of the house ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... cried out in a strident voice, raising his arm aloft, "I may say, with one foot on sea and one on land, for I hold the elemental secret of them both. And I swear by the living god—Science incarnate—that the suffering of the centuries is over, that for this earth and all ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... more than apprehended; he had actually foreseen that the Abbot ought to manage his own monastery. It was as if centuries ago, in the cave at Subiaco, he had heard that strident voice of Brother Athanasius in this matchboarded Chapter-room, as if he had beheld Brother Dominic, while apparently he was striving to persuade his brethren to accept the Father Superior's advice, nevertheless taking sides, and thereby ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... uttered an exclamation, so unexpected and strident, that the words were not articulate. But the Bishop understood them, for, as all turned to him, "Nay," he said, "it shall be for the Colonel to say. But it's ill arguing with a fasting man," he continued genially, "and by ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... the shrieking, strident cries produced by a pair of clarinets, and altogether there came from out of the knots of the serpents a hideous chaos of sound, drawn onward by a team of six horses, and received with wild cheers by the ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... is aware now of a shrill, insistent, strident sound. It drills into his soul; it will not be quiet; it will not let him be. Bing! His body, catching up from behind, drops about him again—and then he knows. It is Dolly; Dolly screaming, poor ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the Strand, and dingy blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there are ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... on the sweet green grass. The mellow ploughed earth on the right hand stretched down to the shore-line, and a plough-boy walked up and down the long, straight furrows whistling "My Nannie's awa'." Pettybaw is so far removed from the music-halls that their cheap songs and strident echoes never reach its Sylvan shades, and the herd-laddies and plough-boys still sweeten their labors with the old ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... because they don't care whether it is true or not true. All they want is the privilege of howling out that their correspondent rescued you, and they would take that privilege without in any ways worrying if I refused my consent. You see, sir? I wouldn't like you to feel that I was such a strident idiot as I doubtless am appearing ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... now; for most of our company were old men, bent and worn and twisted with years, and women aged to all appearance as the Fates themselves. They sat together in knots and talked—God only knows what they found to discuss—in low equable tones, curiously in contrast to the strident babble with which natives are accustomed to make day hideous. Now and then an access of that sudden fury which had possessed me in the morning would lay hold on a man or woman; and with yells and imprecations the sufferer would attack the steep slope until, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... it so bad as all that?" Peter's somewhat strident voice had grown tender as a woman's. He laid his hand affectionately on Lancelot's tumbled hair. "You know I believe in you with all my soul. I never doubted your genius for a moment. Don't I know too well ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... colonial possessions "became pawns in the game."* (* The phrase is Professor Egerton's, Cambridge Modern History 9 735.) There was no Imperialism then, with its strident note, its ebullient fervour and flag waving. There was no national sense of pride in colonial Empire, or general appreciation of the great potentialities of oversea possessions. "The final outcome of the great war was the colonial ascendancy of Great Britain, but such was not ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... which the words were chanted is described by Clavigero, Muehlenpfordt and other comparatively recent travelers as harsh, strident and disagreeable to the European ear. Mendieta calls it a "contra-bass," and states that persons gifted with such a voice cultivated it assiduously and were in great demand. The Nahuas call it tozquitl, the singing voice, and likened it to the ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... them chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery, tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and female, that you so often hear in New England,—the harsh, strident voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful. Indeed, I do not see ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... forth on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... upkeep of Navy, been to the fore, benches would have been half empty. As it was, they were thronged. Over the crowded assembly hurtled that indescribable buzz of excitement that presages eventful action. The PREMIER and LEADER OF OPPOSITION appearing on the scene were severally greeted with strident cheers from their followers. PRINCE ARTHUR, the Dropped Pilot, at urgent entreaty returning to the old ship in time of emergency, enjoyed unique distinction of being cheered by both sides. Demonstration ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... The rough, strident notes of Adhemar Meydieux's voice suddenly broke upon this atmosphere of gentle melancholy—"Well! what is this I hear? Esperance has gone; it is madness! I read in my paper this morning that she is going to play 'Dona Sol' at Brussels! So I have ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... of Minkiewicz became strident as he repeated his old story. Some of the clients of The Fallen Angels stopped talking for a moment; it was only that crazy Pole again with his ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent, oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his report to the Privy Council ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... their parti-colored pajamas over the foot of the bedstead, left the chintz chamber at seven and walked out into the new day. The air was cold and tingling; the ground was white as a sheet; the sky was a strident, implacable blue. The glitter and the glare assaulted their sleepy eyes. They turned up their collars, thrust their hands deep into their pockets, and took briskly the half mile which led to their own ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... bewildering and very, very ominous. There was strident argument. Presently Calhoun stood before ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... help overhearing a conversation between the two. He was in the stable, and the kitchen windows were open. He heard only a few words. "You don't mean to say you are goin' to hev him?" said Emma in her strident voice. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... of a strident voice shouting the evening papers in the street outside. Indeed, even while she spoke to Nelly, half her brain was listening in a strained way to that voice as it came nearer. What was it the creature was shouting? ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... I can judge,—after a month's experience,—the one thing no inhabitant of Amboise ever does is to go to bed. At midnight the river front is alive with cheerful and strident voices. The French countryman habitually speaks to his neighbour as if he were half a mile away; and when a score of countrymen are conversing in this key, the air rings with their clamour. They sing in the same lusty fashion; not through closed lips, as is the custom of English ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... there have been intangible hints of change in earth and air; the birds are silent, and the universal strident note of insect life makes more musical to memory the melodies of the earlier season. The sense of overflowing vitality which pervaded all things a few days ago, when the tide was at the flood, has gone; the tide has turned, and already one sees the receding movement of the ebb. Through ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... transformed as by the touch of magic. A sudden and baleful light flamed into his eyes, his face grew as red as blood, and he clapped his hand to his pocket with a sudden and violent motion. "Ze ball!" he cried, in a hoarse and strident voice. "Ze ball! Give me ze ball!" And upon the next instant our hero beheld the round and shining nozzle of a pistol pointed ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... the dust of travel, and freshened themselves, before the mellow notes of a gong sounded through the air, and at the same time a strident voice cried; ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... his fork into another settled heap, lifted it clear of the ground with one heave of his muscular shoulders, and heard within a strident buzzing. He held the hay poised until a mottled gray snake writhed into view, its ugly jaws open and its ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... is the shorter?" asked the elder of the two travellers in a harsh, strident voice. Though visibly the elder, he was scarcely thirty years ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... swings and rolls its yoke of slender plumage! Ah! Eros, is it possible that you do not perceive that it is a symbol of my peacock, my bird translated into the language of this narrow and suppressed existence of ours? What a strange and exquisite messenger! My poor peacock, with a strident shriek of terror, fled from me on that awful morning, the flames singeing its dishevelled train, its wings helplessly flapping in the torrents of conflagration. It bade me no adieu, its clangour of despair rang forth, an additional note of discord, from the inner courts of my palace. And ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... praise the hotel was known as 'The Sink of Iniquity,' and the chapel as 'This Little Corner of the Vineyard,' and through the front windows of the latter, one sabbath morn after another for many years, lusty Cornishmen, moved by the spirit, had hurled down upon McMahon and his house strident and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... not suppress a shudder; but, as he saw the peculiar way in which the old man's eyes were fixed upon his, a feeling of resentment arose within him, and his voice sounded strident and ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however, strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that the compositions of Schumann and Schubert ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... of Kingsland," he said to himself; "but for all that it is a fatal day to him. 'The sins of the father shall be visited on the children even to the third and fourth generation,' saith the Book Christians believe in. Christians!" he laughed a harsh, strident laugh. "Sir Jasper Kingsland is a Christian! The religion that produces such men must be a glorious one. He was a Christian when he perjured himself and broke her heart. 'Tis well. As a Christian he can not object to ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... sounding under missiles; in the morning the verandahs were half full of branches torn from the forest. There was a last very wild squall about six; the rain, like a thick white smoke, flying past the house in volleys, and as swift, it seemed, as rifle balls; all with a strange, strident hiss, such as I have only heard before at sea, and, indeed, thought to be a marine phenomenon. Since then the wind has been falling with a few squalls, mostly rain. But our road is impassable for horses; we hear a schooner has been wrecked and some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they fell, the blows of crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like the buzzing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the Hutchinsons' was almost like a life on another planet. Margaret was the younger, somewhat delicate daughter of a family of rather strident academics. Professor Hutchinson was not dependent on his salary to defray the expenses of his elegant establishment, but on his father, who had inherited from his father in turn the substantial fortune on which ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... He was a good-sized, powerful man, and as he stood poising himself with legs astride I could see that from the thigh downwards there was but a wooden stump upon the right side. At the sound of his strident, angry cries there was movement in the huddled bundle upon the deck. It straightened itself into a little black man—the smallest I have ever seen—with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Harper Freeman's voice could hardly, even by courtesy, be called musical; in fact, it was harsh and strident; but this evening the hills, and the trees, and the wide open spaces, Nature's mighty modulator, subdued the harshness, so that the voice rolled up to the people clear, full, and sonorous. Nor was the preacher possessed of great learning nor endued with the gift of eloquence. He had, however, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... borders of the great Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... wild as they were melodious; here a rippling torrent of ra, ra, ra-ra-ra, and la, la, la-la-la breaking in on the sustained verses of the leaders; falsetto notes, high and strident, savage and shrilling, piercing the thrumming diapason of the men; long, droning tones like bagpipes, bubbling sounds like water flowing; and all in perfect time. The clear, fascinating false soprano of the woman leader had a cadence of ecstasy, and I marked her under ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... sound of the shrill, weird cry, the animal stood at bay. Again came the well-known strident halloo. A maelstrom of memories was awakened by the call. Instinctively obeying the old summons she started toward the train, when from over the hill behind her she heard ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... go (a move that evoked strident protests from Billie, who was enjoying himself hugely with Humpy) they were all ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... prepared to accept his concessions to Ulster feeling; but they did not like them. REDMOND'S declaration that the PREMIER "has gone to the very extremest limits of concession" drew from Ministerialists a more strident cheer than any accorded to their Leader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various |
