"Shrillness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the conclusion of her story, there arrived in the room where the two ladies were sitting a noise, not unlike, in loudness, to that of a pack of hounds just let out from their kennel; nor, in shrillness, to cats, when caterwauling; or to screech owls; or, indeed, more like (for what animal can resemble a human voice?) to those sounds which, in the pleasant mansions of that gate which seems to derive its name from a duplicity of tongues, issue from the mouths, and sometimes from ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... future. Did I hear anything meantime in the halls below? No. Did I even listen for the sound of her return? No. I was callous to everything, dead to everything but my own misery. I did not even heed the approach of morning, till suddenly, with a shrillness no ear could ignore, there rose, tearing through the silence of the house, that great scream from my wife's room which announced the discovery of her body lying stark and cold ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... shrillness, the electric shudders deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note of time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic influence, how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with each other complainingly, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... form and desk And sudden floods of noise When fifteen minutes' fun and frisk Make happy girls and boys. As shrill as swifts in upper air Was our young shrillness: 'Twas joy of life, 'twas strength to fare ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... work had been left unfinished. I looked all around, but saw no Zeenab. I coughed once or twice; no answer. The only sound which reached my ears was the voice of the doctor's wife, exerting itself upon some one within the house; although its shrillness pierced even the walls, yet I could not make out what was the cause of its being so excited, until of a sudden it burst into the open ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... The antlers were driving sharp bargains with those who had escaped from or those who were not amenable to military discipline. The strolling players were moving crowds to noisy laughter in their canvas booths, through which the lights gleamed and the music sounded with startling shrillness. I thought as I turned towards my camp, how unaware are all of the drama Jackson is preparing for us, and what ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in order to take part in a race, and I found him "squaring off" at a bigger boy who had tripped him up. Without a word I carried him home, followed by the jeers and laughter of the racers, the girls making their presence known in the early December twilight by the shrillness of their voices and by manners no gentler than those of ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... harmony. The noises of the street, with all the whistles of the factories and the horns of the motor cars, are bad enough, and the antinoise crusade is quite in order. Yet the destructive influence of those chaotic sounds is far weaker than the shrillness and restlessness of these modern specimens of so-called literature. The mind is tossed up and down and is torn hither and thither, following now a column of text while the advertisements are pushing in from both sides, and then reading the latest advertisement while the serious text ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... with the shrillness and mechanical violence of occasional housewives. The girl swished her skirts defiantly and returned ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... of resoluteness, strength, and intellectual power, and yet withal a winning sweetness, unconquerable radiance, and hopeful joyousness. His voice is highly pitched and musical, with a timbre which is astonishing in an old man. There is none of the tremor, quaver, or shrillness usually observed in them, but his utterance is clear, ringing, and most sweetly musical. But it was not in any one of these features that his charm lay so much as in his tout ensemble, and the irresistible magnetism ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... a large drab body struck him. He was knocked flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down he heard smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time came from Hill. Then he found himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill's voice. Someone jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water poured over him, and passed. He scrambled to his feet dripping, and without looking seaward, ran as fast as his terror would let him shoreward. Before him, over the flat space of scattered ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of her own which she has begun to build up. It will all be to the glory, therefore, of their common infatuation with "art": she will doubtless be no less willing to serve his than she was eager to serve her own, purged now of the too great shrillness. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... insect. This is the Cigale of the flowering ash, far more alert and far more suspicious than the common species. Its harsh, loud song consists of a series of cries—can! can! can! can!—with no intervals of silence subdividing the poem into stanzas. Thanks to its monotony and its harsh shrillness, it is a most odious sound, especially when the orchestra consists of hundreds of performers, as is often the case in my two plane-trees during the dog-days. It is as though a heap of dry walnuts were being shaken up in a bag until the shells broke. This painful concert, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... steam issued with such resounding shrillness that the woman awoke with a jerk of her head; and as she put up her left hand to feel her armpit, her crumpled features gathered themselves into wrinkles. Then she glanced at the lamp, raised herself to a sitting position, and, fingering the place where the hair had ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... these words, when the sharp crack of the remaining Indian's rifle, who had recovered from the blow given him by Hamilton, and was glad of the opportunity of so speedily avenging it, rung in his ear with piercing shrillness, and looking in the direction of the flying couple, Durant saw Hamilton stagger with his burden, and then both fell to the earth. Instantly the demon was roused within him; every emotion of fear was ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... more at the sound of her voice, to which the nature of things affords no simile; for, as far as the voice of woman, when attuned by gentleness and love, transcends all other sounds in harmony, so far does it surpass all others in discord, when stretched into unnatural shrillness by anger ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... distance away, which, being low and without an upper story like the rest of the houses, attracted attention on account of this attic window in the gabled roof. I stood still. A soft distinct note increased to loudness, diminished, died out, only to rise again immediately to penetrating shrillness. It was always the same tone repeated as if the player dwelt upon it with pleasure. At last an interval followed; it was the chord of the fourth. While the player had before reveled in the sound of the single note, now his voluptuous enjoyment ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... womanish shrillness in the scream, a kind of hysteria on the stretch, that (contrasted with his big threat) might have provoked them at other times to a roar of laughter. But there was a sincerity in his rage to-day that rose above its faults of manner; and an immediate silence took the room—the more impressive ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... enharmonic scale[obs3]; key, clef, chords. modulation, temperament, syncope, syncopation, preparation, suspension, resolution. staff, stave, line, space, brace; bar, rest; appoggiato[obs3], appoggiatura[obs3]; acciaccatura[obs3]. note, musical note, notes of a scale; sharp, flat, natural; high note &c.(shrillness) 410; low note &c. 408; interval; semitone; second, third, fourth &c.; diatessaron[obs3]. breve, semibreve[Mus], minim, crotchet, quaver; semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver; sustained note, drone, burden. tonic; key note, leading note, fundamental note; supertonic[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the branches of a lofty tree, crowed aloud, so that the shrillness of his voice echoed through the wood and invited a Fox to the place, who was prowling in that neighbourhood in quest of his prey. But Reynard, finding the Cock was inaccessible by reason of the height of his situation, had recourse to stratagem in order to decoy him down. So, approaching ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... bird," he said, "and you do as much with your little voice as can possibly be done with it. But one requires a little more shrillness, that every hearer may hear that one ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... be on the right side—the blessed side and to prenounce the Pope of Babylon, and all her inward and her outward workings, which is Pagin. My sentiments is of little consequences, I know,' cried Miggs, with additional shrillness, 'for my positions is but a servant, and as sich, of humilities, still I gives expressions to my feelings, and places my reliances on them which ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... a cry, coming from no one knew where, which, unearthly in its shrillness and the power it had on the imagination, reverberated through the house and died away in a wail so weird, so thrilling and so prolonged that it gripped not only my own nerveless and weakened heart, but those of the ten strong men congregated below me. The diamond dropped from Mr. Grey's hand, and ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... wandered to the pavilion of Zingalee gipsies, where a band of these wild sons of Hagar were creating a perfect furor by the shrillness and discord of their voices. Never was such terrific music inflicted upon mortal ears. It went through and through you, quivering and vibrating like a rapier; but the common classes of Russians delight in it above all earthly sounds. They deem it the very finest kind of music. It ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... him she cried with sudden shrillness, "My lord, my great lord, give me back my child—my little Pierre. He is my heart's heart. My lord, he never did you any harm ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... lingered. No one was in sight. Then the metallic shrillness of a bicycle bell broke the silence. He wheeled about. Noiselessly threading his way down the village highway came a thick-set, rosy-faced boy of sixteen or ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... were tingling still with the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life—the young men who had clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all their locked-up tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas! how many generations of the young have handled them; and they are still there, frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged, and old, and die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lust of manhood toll them ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... we got; in came Madame's box and my bag; Madame stood at the door, and, I think, frightened away intending passengers, by her size and shrillness. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... colors. The choir was composed of a large number, mostly colored, of all ages. The front seats were filled by children of various ages—the rear, of adults, rising above these tiny choristers, and softening the shrillness of their notes by the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate. "The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy, in spite of his beard, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... patiently as if understanding why Mel had not followed, but determined to wait until he did. The reporter stirred and rose from the chair, his legs withering beneath him. The figure of Dr. Winters grew larger as he approached. The morning clatter of the hospital seemed an ear-torturing shrillness. The door of the office closed ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... this activity, we heard the voices of men, walking round the building. They again whistled, with a piercing shrillness; and, though we heard nothing distinctly, yet we caught tones that were coarse, rude, and savage; and words, that denoted anger and anxiety, for the perpetration of some dark purpose no doubt corresponding to the fierce and threatening sounds ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... him speak in quite a new voice, with a Yankee shrillness in it; all his grandeur and good English had fallen from ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... so scared," laughed the girl, "I haven't come down to that." Her voice had changed. It had a note of shrillness. In some indescribable way she had grown coarse. "I'm a kept woman," she explained. "What ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... was clearer than his; and Angela heard her repeating with a piteous shrillness, "No, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... carrying along with him his scholars, and the scholars with their books and slates—they had taken ship some two days previous to our arrival, and were all now engaged disputing boundaries. Fancy overhears the shrillness of their disputation mingle with the surf and scatter sea-fowl. It was admirable to observe the completeness of their flight, like that of hibernating birds; nothing left but empty houses, like old nests to be reoccupied in spring; and even the harmless necessary ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were the next thing in his range of vision—one face in particular, sallow and still with eyes glancing sideways, seeing all things;—divining much! soft steps, and bandages, and out of silence the excited shrillness of Don Diego Maria Francisco Brancadori the tutor:—the shepherd who had lost track of his one rather ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and the barking of numerous half-starved dogs, they were still more seriously annoyed by the incessant clatter of women's tongues, which pursued them every where, and which it was believed nothing less than sickness or death on their part could eventually silence. The shrillness of their voices drowns the bleating of the sheep, and the yellings of the canine race; and notwithstanding all the exertions of Richard Lander, seconded by those of their attendants, their noise in this town considerably retarded the recovery of his brother. A person in England ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... speech which has perhaps a Hibernian flavour. As my study is built out to the back of this house, it is parallel with your property at 15, Poynings Road. I am within fifty yards of the offending cowl. The noise it makes rises and falls in shrillness according to the speed at which the cowl revolves under the pressure of the wind. We are not disturbed at all by any cowl on Hathaway Mansions, but by this one of yours, about which I wrote you first so long ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... attorney, with sudden shrillness. "Have a care what you're about. You are here to sell for the underwriters, let me tell you—not to act for Mr. Douglas Longhurst. This sale has been already disgracefully interrupted to allow that ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of a—of a practical joker, Miss Edgarton?" he demanded with the slightest possible tinge of shrillness. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... voice. "Father!" There was no shrillness in the tone now, nor malice, nor any mischievous thing,—just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. "Father!" the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... scale^, enharmonic scale^; key, clef, chords. modulation, temperament, syncope, syncopation, preparation, suspension, resolution. staff, stave, line, space, brace; bar, rest; appoggiato^, appoggiatura^; acciaccatura^. note, musical note, notes of a scale; sharp, flat, natural; high note &c (shrillness) 410; low note &c 408; interval; semitone; second, third, fourth &c; diatessaron^. breve, semibreve [Mus.], minim, crotchet, quaver; semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver; sustained note, drone, burden. tonic; key ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shriek which was womanish in its shrillness, Smith sprang to his feet, all but upsetting the lamp in his violence. Unmixed horror was written ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... facility and perfection. Her lowest notes come out as clear and ringing as the highest, and her highest are as soft and sweet as the lowest. Her tones are never muffled or indistinct, nor do they ever offend the ear by the slightest tinge of shrillness; mellow roundness distinguishes every sound she utters. As she never strains her voice, it never seems to be loud; and hence some one who busied himself in anticipatory depreciation said that it would be found to fail in power, a mistake of which everybody was convinced who observed how it filled ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... till his body quakes and his chant runs into a shriek, ringing in my ears with a peculiar sharpness. This lay may be represented thus: "Teacher teacher, teacher, teacher teacher!"—the accent on the first syllable and each word uttered with increased force and shrillness. No writer with whom I am acquainted gives him credit for more musical ability than is displayed in this strain. Yet in this the half is not told. He has a far rarer song, which he reserves for some nymph whom he meets in the air. Mounting by easy flights to the top of the tallest tree, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... tide. Anyone who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it. All at once we heard the crow of the cock coming up with preternatural shrillness through the ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... was but this instant That I entered here, alarmed By the strange and sudden shrillness Of thy voice; and though I had On my hands important business, Grave and weighty, since to me Hath the Emperor transmitted This decree, which bids me search Through the mountains for the Christians Hidden there, and specially For Carpophorus, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... whose shrillness rose above the roar of the waves and the groaning of the ship's timbers, "Maurice, come here at ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the doorway, and Warwick, turning, faced the old judge. Time had left greater marks upon the lawyer than upon his office. His hair was whiter, his stoop more pronounced; when he spoke to Warwick, his voice had some of the shrillness of old age; and in his hand, upon which the veins stood out prominently, a ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... children took no notice of it. Up, and on, through the elastic carpet of heather and bilberry, and across bogs which showed like veins of vivid green on the dark surface of the moor; under circling peewits, who fled before them, crying with plaintive shrillness to each other, as though in protest; and past grouse-nests, whence the startled mothers soared precipitately with angry duckings, each leaving behind her a loose gathering of eggs lying wide and open on the heather, those newly laid gleaming a brighter red beside their fellows. The tin box and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... demanded Aimee, with increasing shrillness, "that you have told the child Marie about ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... him strangely and edged cautiously away. His eyes, like those of the others, had a dazed, stricken look. A woman was sobbing softly as she clung to her husband. From the streets far below came a quavering shrillness ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... said to himself. He went back to his study, and this time attacked his work resolutely. In a little while he was hard at work again, and the only sounds in the room were the ticking of the clock and the subdued shrillness of his quill, hurrying in the very centre of the circle of light his lampshade ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... composed of his uncle's friends; soldiers and statesmen who had no sympathy with mobs, but detested the selfish and dangerous system on which the Senate had carried on the government, and dreaded its consequences. Above the tumults of the factions in the Capitol a cry rising into shrillness began to be heard from Italy. Caius Gracchus had wished to extend the Roman franchise to the Italian States, and the suggestion had cost him his popularity and his life. The Italian provinces had furnished their ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... most of us, who have not been through the cruel suffocation of a dynamite explosion, to realise completely how the crushed collapse of the nervous system leaves mind, thought, and feeling absolutely prostrate before the mere shrillness of sound. We are not speaking now of the cases in which serious harm is done—of course anyone can understand that—but only of the cases, after all, and in even the best carried out and most brutally contrived dynamite attempt—the vast ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... But now she felt grievously that the world was different—that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell of the shrillness and the naivete of a family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when, with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... not see the forecastle boatswain's mate of the watch, who stood close by my elbow, ready pipe in hand. The rain came down in buckets, and in the midst of all the wind suddenly shifted, taking the sails flat aback. The shrillness of the boatswain's pipes is then their great merit. They pierce through the roar of the tempest, by sheer difference of pitch, an effect one sometimes hears in an opera; and the officer of the deck, our second lieutenant, who bore the name of Andrew Jackson, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan |
