"Toneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as by a flash. Thoroughly to understand such a moment, and not to treat it wrongly, was the whole secret, and this I fully realised on that day from the absolute failure on the great singer's part to produce the right effect. The toneless, hoarse way in which she uttered the words was like throwing cold water over the audience and myself, and not one of those present could see any more in the incident than a botched theatrical effect. It is possible that the public had expected too much, for they were curious ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... one's sight, life ebbs visibly out of cheeks and eyes and lips; it is death as not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death. There are moments, at other times and with other performers, when it is difficult not to laugh at some cat-like or ape-like trick of these painted puppets who talk a toneless language, breathing through their words as they whisper or chant them. They are swathed like barbaric idols, in splendid robes without grace; they dance with fans, with fingers, running, hopping, lifting their feet, if they lift them, with the heavy delicacy of the elephant; they sing in discords, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... kept the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or florid to any but American ears. In spite of the invariable good taste with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his voice. Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... form and expression which threatens to affect opinion—as if one's standard was somehow wrong. (Who has not seen men with faces of this corrective power till they frustrated it by speech or action?) His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... answered in the affirmative. Then, to the injunction, "Tell me what you are to do to-morrow night?" she repeated in a toneless voice every item of the programme outlined for her, while Victor nodded in undisguised delight, and Shaik Tsin ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... finished," repeated McKay in his toneless, unaccented voice which carried such terrible conviction to the other man. "Forty-eight years ago the Hun planned a huge underground highway carrying four lines of railroad tracks. It was to begin east of the Rhine in the ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... started. "Yes, I hear you." Its toneless, mechanical voice droned the words. Then the tempo quickened; the grid of wires in the mouth aperture behind its parted lips vibrated with a faint jangle. "I hear you. I cannot answer that question. He controls me. There is chaos—here,"—one ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... them and said in a somewhat toneless voice: "I shall be delighted to see him again. Have ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... said in a toneless, miserable voice; "she was not so base as that. Tell me more of what ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the building answered a mournful clangor, a cracked and toneless jangle, which, seeming to echo through empty apartments, sought and found an exit apparently by way of one of the openings in the round tower; for it was from above our heads that the noise ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... room, as she hovered over the work spread out before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson's mumbling lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society to amuse itself. This lassitude is felt most by those who have shared least in the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... these fools go upstairs!" said Alfie's wife in a fierce whisper. She was carrying out plates and clearing a space about the couch. Virginia, kneeling by her mother, repeated over and over again, in an even and toneless voice, "Oh God, spare her—Oh ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... shut your eyes and see him over again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him, physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man, very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him, but his hair had not turned ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... at length in the same level, toneless voice. "I will take you to the first desert station outside of Oran, where you can join the train. For your own sake I must not be seen with you in Oran, as I am known there. If you should by any chance ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... was coarse and toneless, but he knew no other way of voicing it, and she noted nothing of ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan |
