"Dissonant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rhythm of arsenals burning... Clangor of iron smashing on iron, Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying Of ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... about this message, [Sidenote: Abr. Fl. out of Fabian, pag. 364.] and for answer, promised to send his commissioners vnto Calis, which should further commune and conclude with them. This semeth dissonant from the report of Fabian deriued out of Gagwine. For he saith that Charles hearing of the suppression of K. Richard, sent 2 of his houshold knights into England, requiring king Henrie the fourth, then newlie made king, to send ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed
... combat betweene Cnute and Edmund, Cnute is ouermatched, his woords to king Edmund, both kings are pacified and their armies accorded, the realme diuided betwixt Cnute and Edmund, king Edmund traitorouslie slaine, the dissonant report of writers touching the maners of his death, and both the kings dealing about the partition of the realme, Cnute causeth Edrike to be slaine for procuring king Edmunds death, wherein the reward of treason is noted; how long king Edmund reigned, ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (7 of 8) - The Seventh Boke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... suggested (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant,) that the word 'aches' was then 'ad libitum', a dissyllable—'aitches'. For read it, 'aches,' in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakspeare's writings with the same musical or, rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... chase away the thought, To lull the sound of dissonant despair, Appears to me with added terrors fraught, And my torn heart can find ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... from Bach's Fifth French Suite (see Supplement No. 32) is unsurpassed for rhythmic energy; the closing measures sound as if all the bells of heaven were ringing. The example of Mozart (see Supplement No. 33) is noteworthy for its daring use of the dissonant element and for its free modulations. Of the counterparts of the gigue the following are excellent examples: The Rigaudon—the Finale of Grieg's Holberg Suite, the vigorous one from Rameau's opera Dardanus, and MacDowell's independent piece in this form, op. 49, No. 2; the Furiant—the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... their tenants and servants, in such wise as some whole towns were fain to keep the churches both night and day, and durst not come at their own houses."—Whilst engaged in these ignoble practices, less dissonant, however, to the manners of his age than to those of our's, he wooed, and won, and married, a daughter of the Percy of Northumberland; and it is conjectured, upon very plausible grounds, that his courtship and marriage with a lady of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... her task. She and lively Miss Forrester had never discussed spiritual things together. They spoke freely of their choirs and of church, but that never seemed dissonant with the most frivolous social things. Now as Winifred thought of the real Holy Place and the worship there "in spirit and in truth," it seemed difficult to speak of it. She began bravely, and began at the beginning, with Mr. Bond's ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... harangue with alacrity, and testified their applause after the barbarian manner, with songs, and yells, and dissonant shouts. And now the several divisions were in motion, the glittering of arms was beheld, while the most daring and impetuous were hurrying to the front, and the line of battle was forming; when Agricola, although his soldiers were in high spirits, and ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... succeeding lessons, all notes in the measure not belonging to the harmony implied on the first beat, must be treated as dissonances, e.g., those belonging to the implied harmony may be left by a skip (a) or stepwise progression (b) unless dissonant with the cantus firmus; then avoid their use; if foreign to it, whether consonant (c) with the C.F. or not (d), they must be treated as embellishments ...
— A Treatise on Simple Counterpoint in Forty Lessons • Friedrich J. Lehmann
... Bharatas. And owing to the swiftness of those fleet coursers conducted by him, I could see nothing—and this was strange. Then the Danavas there began to sound thousands of musical instruments, dissonant and of odd shapes. And at those sounds, fishes by hundreds and by thousands, like unto hills, having their senses bewildered by that noise, fled suddenly. And mighty force flew at me, the demons discharging sharpened shafts by hundreds and by thousands. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... only sound they heard. A flock of white cockatoos were roosting on the tree, and favored the party with their dissonant cries. They are described as having "most sharp and ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... of our northern and southern colonies, before that time jarring and dissonant, were understood, compared, adjusted, and perfectly reconciled. The passions and animosities of the colonies, by judicious and lenient measures, were allayed and composed, and the foundation laid for ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stone door on hinges, and a little window high up, and two apertures, through one of which the people announced their gifts to the hermit, and put questions of all sorts to him; and when he chose to answer, his voice came dissonant and monstrous ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... naked music, pulsatile and drowsy, turned hysterical as Zarathustra-Strauss waved on his Uebermensch with an iron hammer and in frenzied, philosophic motions. Music was become vertiginous; a mad vortex, wherein whirled mad atoms, madly embracing. Dancing, the dissonant corybantes of the Dionysian evangel flitted by, scarce touching earth in their efforts to outvie the Bacchantes. With peals of thunderous and ironical laughter the Sphinx sank into the murmuring sand, yawning, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... crept slowly forward. The general and Totski had agreed to avoid any hasty and irrevocable step. Alexandra's parents had not even begun to talk to their daughters freely upon the subject, when suddenly, as it were, a dissonant chord was struck amid the harmony of the proceedings. Mrs. Epanchin began to show signs of discontent, and that was a serious matter. A certain circumstance had crept in, a disagreeable and troublesome factor, which threatened to overturn ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... steady bright June sunshine, in the sifting dust of a city corner, in the dissonant, confused noise of the traffic below, they stood ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... thing it is to be an ass!'[1] If one, that strutted up the brawling streets As foreman of the flock whose concourse greets Men's ears with bray more dissonant than brass, Would change from blame to praise as coarse and crass His natural note, and learn the fawning feats Of lapdogs, who but knows what luck he meets? But all in vain old ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... champions was armed with a lance about ten feet long, and a short stick, which he seemed to handle as if it was a machine to assist him in managing or throwing the lance: They called to us in a very loud tone, and in a harsh dissonant language, of which neither we nor Tupia understood a single word: They brandished their weapons, and seemed resolved to defend their coast to the uttermost, though they were but two, and we were forty. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... ritual and he approached the vibratory motor. Constans watched intently as he proceeded to manipulate a series of polished rods and levers. Suddenly the loud, humming note separated into two distinct tones, at first in musical accord and then becoming more and more dissonant. The revolving disk slowed down and stopped, and with it the dynamo came finally to rest. The hour of worship had come to an end; the Shining One ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... nothing, nothing care to know,— But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother—! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... of Brutus with Cicero is forcible, indeed, but harsh and abrupt. Latin, in short, is not a philosophical language, not a language in which a deep thinker is likely to express himself with purity or neatness. Cicero found it barren and dissonant, and as such he had to deal with it. His good sense enabled him to perceive what could be done, and what it was in vain to attempt; and happily his talents answered precisely to the purpose required. He may be compared to a clever landscape-gardener, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... esteem only that to be providently done which the happy success commends. By which means it cometh to pass that the first loss which miserable men have is their estimation and the good opinion which was had of them. What rumours go now among the people, what dissonant and diverse opinions! I cannot abide to think of them; only this will I say, the last burden of adversity is that when they which are in misery are accused of any crime, they are thought to deserve whatsoever they suffer. And I, spoiled of all my goods, bereaved of my dignities, ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... the hounds, unleashed, lifted frantic voices. The very sky seemed full of the discordant tumult; wood and shore reverberated with the volume of convulsive and dissonant baying. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... shape, the curious cannot show Any one part that's dissonant in you: And 'gainst your chaste behaviour there's no plea, Since you are known to be Penelope. Thus fair and clean you are, although there be A mighty strife ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... dividences, no occupations, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and passion, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would he find his ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... note, the tuneful chords among, May make mad discord of the sweetest song. E'en so with dissonant clamor through the breast Of Gawayne rang the Green Knight's merry jest; But what wild meaning must it not impart To the vague fears of gentle Elfinhart? For she had heard in the first trumpet-blast A signal ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... had drank tea, I strolled into the garden; they told me it was now called the pleasure-ground. What a dissonant idea of pleasure! those groves, those all'ees, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up or over-grown—many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clew in my memory: I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly, and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French reserve, mixing with the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... and flop like those of automata—these are his. He eats this way and he drinks that way, and he will continue to do so until he stiffens into the ultimate quietude. He snores on this note, he laughs on that, dissonant, unescapeable, unchanging. This is the way he walks, and he does not know how to run. A predictable beast indeed! He is known inside and out, catalogued, ticketed, and he ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... a dissonant tone in her voice and a slight flash in her eyes. "What are you thinking of? There never was a Mr. M'Corkle; it was one of my noms de plume. And where ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... in the very teeth of nature, did all this; and whose appalling sincerity must, in our eyes, cover a multitude of such sins as sentences wrenched about end for end, clauses heaved up and abandoned in chaos, words disemboweled or split quite in two in the middle, and dissonant combinations of sound that are the despair of such poor vocal organs as are granted to human beings. The verses seem to have been hammered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge. In all parts of the book is manifest the agony it ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... may strike the reader as strange and even dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a church or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free in thought and untrammelled ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... pinched his pointed chin, and casting up an angry look, replied in a dissonant voice,—"I ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... I stood, and seemed to regard my horse with curiosity. On my imitating their chirp one fluttered down, and attempted to alight on my horse's ears. On my whistling to them, one whistled some beautifully varied notes, as soft as those of an octave flute, although their common chirp was harsh and dissonant. The male and female seemed to have very different plumage, especially about the head; that on the one having the varying tint of the Rifle bird, the head of the other more resembling in colour, that of the DACELO GIGANTEUS. They were ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... — N. discord , discordance; dissonance, cacophony, want of harmony, caterwauling; harshness &c. 410. Babel[Confused sounds]; Dutch concert, cat's concert; marrowbones and cleavers. V. be discordant &c. adj. .; jar &c. (sound harshly) 410. Adj. discordant; dissonant, absonant[obs3]; out of tune, tuneless; unmusical, untunable[obs3]; unmelodious, immelodious[obs3]; unharmonious[obs3], inharmonious; singsong; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pudding into budding, because it is derived from the French word boudin; and in that case why not retain the original orthography and pronunciation of all the foreign words we have adopted, by which means our language would become a dissonant jargon without standard or propriety? The controversy was referred to us; and Banter, notwithstanding his real opinion to the contrary, decided it in favour of Wagtail; upon which the peevish annuitant arose, and uttering the monosyllable pish! with great emphasis, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... we yield to the caress of this mood than there enters the supernatural element which invests the tragical portion of the story. Ominous drum beats under a dissonant tremolo of the strings and deep tones of the clarinets, a plangent declamatory phrase of ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the system of laws which they had to administer stood in striking contrast with the habits of mind which they had cultivated. The France which had been in great part constituted by their efforts was smitten with the curse of an anomalous and dissonant jurisprudence beyond every other country in Europe. One great division ran through the country and separated it into Pays du Droit Ecrit and Pays du Droit Coutumier, the first acknowledging the written Roman law as the basis of their jurisprudence, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... tones giving rise to the feeling of incompleteness or unrest, and therefore requiring resolution to some other combination which has an agreeable or final feeling. (cf. consonance.) The diminished triad C—E[flat]—G[flat] is an example of a dissonant chord. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... which two aduantages of long, dayes and short nights, though we want the equalitie of Angle, it commeth to passe that in Sommer our heat here is as great as theirs is there, as hath bene proued by experience, and is nothing dissonant from good reason. Therefore whosoeuer will rightly way the force of colde and heat in any region, must not onely consider the Angle that the Sunne beames make, but also the continuance of the same aboue ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... comes back to her mind. Then they both astonish me, for on their well-tuned guitars they will pick out accompaniments in parts, and try again each time that the chords are not perfectly true to their ear, without ever losing themselves in the confusion of these dissonant harmonies, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... (of scandalizing me) was wholly deceived; for behold the catastrophe! Such of the readers as were learned in the laws, finding not only gross errors and absurdities on law, but palpable mistakings in the very words of art, and the whole context of that rude and ragged style wholly dissonant (the subject being legal) from a lawyer's dialect, concluded that inimicus et iniquus homo superseminavit zizania in medio tritici, the other discreet and indifferent readers, out of sense and reason, found out the same conclusion, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... particular. At last Antoinette, who had quite lost her place, and saw to her horror that, instead of going on, she had begun again at the beginning, and that there was no reason why she should ever stop, broke off suddenly, and ended with two inaccurate chords and a third which was absolutely dissonant. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... This morning, before leaving, Friedrich had to do an exceedingly strict thing: secure the Originals of those Menzel Documents. Originals indispensable to him, for justifying his new procedures upon Saxony. So that there has been, at the Palace, a Scene this morning of a very high and dissonant nature,—"Marshal Keith" in it, "Marshal Keith making a second visit" (say some loose and false Accounts);—the facts ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... was of bad augury at the commencement, owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder, intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful memories. Diana sat startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a revival of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her heart. She ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... consult some other interest than his own. Never may we become plus sages que les sages, as the French comedian has happily expressed it—wiser than all the wise and good men who have lived before us. It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... mine is a little dissonant from the ordinary forms; it would produce no great effects, nor be of any long duration; innocence itself could not, in this age of ours, either negotiate without dissimulation, or traffic without lying; and, indeed, public employments are by no means ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... still those dissonant thoughts!—List how the music Grows on the enchanted air! And see, the torches Restlessly flashing, and the crowd divided Like waves before an ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... those days could afford to ignore the decisions of the critical monthlies, but the brilliant criticism and incisive diction of the Edinburgh Review carried weight and exerted far-reaching influence. Jeffrey's article was practically the only dissonant note in the chorus of praise that greeted Marmion, and Scott probably resented the critic's attitude. Lockhart, in his admirable chapter on the publication of Marmion, admits that "Jeffrey acquitted himself on this occasion in ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... former memorable relation, and I heard thence an unusual clamor. There was in it something of laughter, and in the laughter something of indignation, and in the indignation something of sadness: still however the clamor was not thereby dissonant, but consonant: because one tone was not together with the other, but one was within another. In the spiritual world a variety and commixture of affections is distinctly perceived in sound. I inquired from afar what was the matter. They said, "A messenger is arrived from ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... life Consolatories writ With studied argument, and much perswasion sought Lenient of grief and anxious thought, But with th' afflicted in his pangs thir sound 680 Little prevails, or rather seems a tune, Harsh, and of dissonant mood from his complaint, Unless he feel within Some sourse of consolation from above; Secret refreshings, that repair his strength, And fainting spirits uphold. God of our Fathers, what is man! That thou towards him with hand so various, Or might I say contrarious, Temperst ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... pain Flooding the night—and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come— Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. And then a third voice, long unheeded—held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame—Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... his criticism in the words that "some of his [Lincoln's] assertions and admissions were both unsatisfactory and offensive to anti-slavery men; betrayed too much of the spirit of caste and prejudice against color, and sound harshly dissonant by the side of the Proclamation of Emancipation and the grand utterances of his later state papers." Rise and Fall of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... away into the back kitchen to wash himself. As he was bending his head over the sink before the little mirror, lathering to shave, there came from outside the dissonant voices of boys, pouring out the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... multiplicity of details; but this popular conception is a fallacy. "Atmosphere" is dependent rather upon a strict selection of details pervaded by a common quality, a rigorous rejection of all others that are dissonant in mood, and an arrangement of those selected with a view to exhibiting their common quality as the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... skill, But the ploughman's thoughtless cry, Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat, And the joiner's hammer-beat, Softened are above their will, Take tones from groves they wandered through Or flutes which passing angels blew. All grating discords melt, No dissonant note is dealt, And though thy voice be shrill Like rasping file on steel, Such is the temper of the air, Echo waits with art and care, And will the ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... their sentiments, and took the oaths, that they might be qualified to sit in parliament. They formed an accession to the strength of the anti-revolutioners and episcopalians, who now hoped to out-number the presbyterians, and outweigh their interest. But this confederacy was composed of dissonant parts, from which no harmony could be expected. The presbyterians and revolutioners were headed by the duke of Argyle. The country party of malcontents, which took its rise from the disappointments of the Darien settlement, acted under the auspices of the duke of Hamilton and marquis of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... country, as if he were conscious of his second mocking self, and afraid of his own satire. Mr. Hale was puzzled. His visitor was a different man to what he had seen him before at the wedding-breakfast, and at dinner to-day; a lighter, cleverer, more worldly man, and, as such, dissonant to Mr. Hale. It was a relief to all three when Mr. Lennox said that he must go directly if he meant to catch the five o'clock train. They proceeded to the house to find Mrs. Hale, and wish her good-bye. At the last moment, Henry Lennox's real ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... his countrymen took to flight, but presently returning in order to prevent his body from being carried off, and having roused with their dissonant clamours various tribes to their aid, a stern conflict arose, the arrows flying on ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus |
