"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and are 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
... noticed it in designs. On the Mahakam few are the Oma-Suling and Long-Glat houses which are not decorated with an artistic representation of this antoh. Among the Penihings in Long Tjehan I never saw a sword hilt carved with any other motif. On the knife-handle it is ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... 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 ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... at Salonika may well have a heartening influence upon all men in uniforms who waver in the path of duty—especially in these days of vast military operations when a whole world is in arms. It belongs in patriotic literature by the side of Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country." The motif is the same—that of obligation and service ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... was tried (the Valhalla motif). At first it seemed to produce the opposite effect, for the pulse was lowered. Later it rose to a rate double the normal, and the tension was diminished. The impression described by the subject afterward was a feeling of "lofty grandeur and calmness." A mountain climbing experience of ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... affluence. The outside public engaged in speculation to a degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... Shakespearean influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... inevitable earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went home. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... furnished the basis for the beautiful mansion I put up. Moved by nostalgic memories of my lost Southland I built a great and ample bungalow of some sixty rooms—stucco, topped with asbestos tile. Since the Spanish motif natural to this form would have been out of place in England and therefore in bad taste, I had timbers set in the stucco, although of course they performed no function but that of decoration, the supports being framework ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... 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 ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... d'un de mes concitoyens les plus distingues, avec une correspondance touchant une matiere a laquelle il me semble que le Danemark ne soit guere moins interesse que ne le sont les Etats Unis; le premier y ayant contribue le digne motif, l'autre en ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... world, a fact to which Epicurus gave expression by placing them in the 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 ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... The Ballad of the White Horse had come to Gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." But it is hard to say when the motif of the White Horse, the verses ringing in his head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many think the greatest ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... elsewhere, there have been legends similar to the story of Audunn, where a man, after having been to the Norwegian king with a tame bear, decides to present it to the king of Denmark. However, we know of no earlier source for this motif than the story of Audunn. Whatever its value as historical fact, it could well be the model to which the other versions might be traced. This story is preserved in the Morkinskinna, an Icelandic manuscript written in the second half of the thirteenth century, as well as in several ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... repetition. Since it takes two to keep an argument going, Thompson's beginning was but the beginning of a monologue which presently died weakly of inattention. When he gave over trying to inject a theological motif into the conversation, he found MacLeod responsive enough. The factor touched upon native customs, upon the fur trade, upon the vast and unexploited resources of the North, all of which was more or less ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 so-called Bohemian restaurants; and ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... should be of white and blue beads—large beads that will catch glitter from the sun. About her head a band of tan, and a white quill. The embroidery about the neck of her Indian robe is of pearls. The basket which she carries should be white, with a motif of rich blue and scarlet. She wears a tan (dressed deerskin) girdle, heavily embroidered in red beads. Her stockings and moccasins are tan-colored also, the moccasins embroidered in scarlet. The ends of her braids ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... Man" is Mr. Duncan's first full-sized novel having a distinct motif and purpose since "Doctor Luke of The Labrador." The tale of the big woods has for its hero, John Fairmeadow—every inch a man whom the Lumber Jacks of his parish in the pines looked up to as their Sky Pilot. Human nature in the rough ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker |
