"Nocturne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to her father than she had ever been, and testified the utmost gratitude, as if to thank him for the consent he seemed to have given by his silence. That evening she sang and played to him for a long time, exclaiming now and then: "We want a man's voice for this nocturne." Ginevra was an Italian, and that ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... feeling, as if her breath would not come properly, and her head was slightly spinning, and her hands dithering, Ingred began her "Nocturne," trying with a sort of "drowning" effort to keep her mind on the music in front of her, instead of on the music-master at the other end of the room. For sixteen bars she succeeded, then came the hitch. She had rejected the offered services of Doris Grainger, and had elected ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... It was a nocturne after the heart of Whistler, and Jones, as he gazed at it, felt for the first time the magic of this wonderful half revealed city with its million yellow eyes. He passed on, crossing to the right bank, and ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... mazurka, and nocturne, prelude and polonaise Clamour and wander and wail on the opiate air, Piercing our hearts with echo of passionate days, Peopling a top front lodging with shapes of care. And as our souls, uncovered, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... St. Leonard's is one of the most eccentric and original of Scott's characters, and the Whistler of St. Luke's, or the patron saint of painting, is in no respect deficient in these noble qualifications. The Seven Whistlers who fly unseen by night, ever piping a wild nocturne, are the most uncanny of birds, while there is, to my mind, something absolutely grotesquely awful (as in many of "Dreadful Jemmy's" pictures) in the narration that in ancient days the immense army of the Mexican Indians marched forth to battle all ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... pulled him towards the fence. Then, losing his breath, Derevenko said, "Leave the boy alone, you scoundrel! You,—you call yourself a Russian sailor? You? Have this...." and the slap on Pashinsky's face sounded to me like Chopin's First Nocturne. ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... had any key at all, was rather in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new day yet unborn—all of that on a ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... swiftly and with an effect of incoherence, much as a dream moves, during the few moments when I was getting ready for my bath. I laid out my shaving things, and put a record on the Victrola. I have never quite conquered my need for music while I bathe and dress. I think the record was a Grieg nocturne—something cool and quiet, with a touch of acutely sweet pain ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... The Thames nocturne of blue and gold Changed to a Harmony in grey: A barge with ochre-coloured hay Dropt from the wharf: and chill ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... call sport! To catch this nocturne in the train, the exact tint of the blue-black night, framed in the window of our lamp-lit carriage; or the soft night effect on field and cliff and sea as we pass. No academical pot shot this, for we are swinging south down the east coast past Cockburnspath ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... frequently played the flute or piano, while members of the family accompanied him. "Memory pictures," says one of his admirers, "that frail, slender figure at the piano, touching with white, shapely hands the chords of Chopin's 'Nocturne'." "He was a frequent visitor to our house," says another, "and would often play for us on his beautiful silver flute. The image of him standing in his rapt passion, while he poured forth the entrancing sound, I ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... a touch of something supernatural from the magic of moonlight and soft shadow and the man slipped his arm about her, while they looked off across the tempered nocturne of the hills and heard the lullaby of the night breeze in the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... cried excitedly. "It's something of Chopin's, a nocturne, I think. Girls, I know where I heard that selection played just ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... but Marilyn was already at the piano playing softly a bit from the Angel Chorus, a snatch of Handel's Largo, a Chopin Nocturne, one of Mendelssohn's songs without words. The two came in hilariously, the young man pretending to lean heavily on the girl, and finding much occasion to hold her hands, a performance to which she seemed to be not at all averse. They came ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... from the top of the Woolworth building; flecks of light indicated the noble curve of that great bridge which soars like a song in stone and steel above the shifting waters; the river itself was dotted here and there with moving lights; it was a nocturne waiting for its Whistler; here sea and city met in glamour ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... fashion. After a moment Liszt said: "No, no, it is not quite that." Hatzfeldt got up. Liszt seated himself at the piano, played two or three bits of songs, or waltzes, then, always talking to Hatzfeldt, let his fingers wander over the keys and by degrees broke into a nocturne and a wild Hungarian march. It was very curious; his fingers looked as if they were made of yellow ivory, so thin and long, and of course there wasn't any strength or execution in his playing—it was the touch of an old man, but a master—quite unlike anything I ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fashion how to dress itself? Old Paris! For young lovers at their windows; for every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!" We think we shall best do justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories (not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view to the more definite illustration of ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... control her mirth, hastily beat a retreat, followed more leisurely by Mr. Steell, and taking refuge at the far end of the room sat down at the piano, and began to play softly a Chopin nocturne. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... classed in the same category with certain drugs, as a therapeutic agent. And like drugs, each composition has its own special effect. Thus a brisk Strauss waltz might act as a stimulant, but it would not answer as a narcotic. A nocturne would be sure ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence |
