"Cicada" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yet, as has been said of Arab music, the persistent repetition of the same notes in the minor key is by no means monotonous and ends with haunting the ear, occupying the thought and touching the soul. Like the distant frog-concert and chirp of the cicada, the creak of the water- wheel and the stroke of hammers upon the anvil from afar, the murmur of the fountain, the sough of the wind and the plash of the wavelet, they occupy the sensorium with a soothing effect, forming a barbaric ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... certainly not harmonious, concert. Flocks of parrots and blue macaws flew overhead, the different kinds of cawing and screaming of the various species making a terrible discord. Then arose the strangely sounding call of the cicada, or cricket, one of the largest kind, perched high on the trees, setting up a most piercing chirp. It began with the usual harsh jarring tone of its tribe, rapidly becoming shriller, until it ended in a long and loud whistling note. Comparatively small as are these wonderful performers, their voices ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... his real self so well as Olive Keltridge. Aware of it, however, he was fully conscious that the fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... lost, then! No! a cricket (What "cicada"? Pooh!) —Some mad thing that left its thicket For mere love of music—flew 40 With its little heart on fire, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets did not entice us to ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... cicada's simmering cry, Survivor of the summer heat, Chimes faint; the robin, shrill and sweet, Pipes from green holly; whilst from far The rookery croaks reply, Hoarse, deep, as ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... truth. Despotism has its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour which precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler, stretched upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile's distance, the song of the cicada. Some fine morning an honest woman, who will be imitated by a great portion of our own women, discerns with an eagle eye the clever manoeuvres which have rendered her the victim of an infernal policy. She is at first quite furious at having for so long a time ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac |
