"Reciter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... individual omissions, alterations, and additions. Thus, by ever-widening circles, the tale is distributed in countless forms over an unlimited area. The elements of the story remain, wholly or in part, while the literary clothing is altered according to the 'taste and fancy' of the reciter. The lore is now traditional, whether it be in prose, as Maerchen, or in verse, as ballad. And so it remains in oral circulation—and therefore still liable to variation—until it is written down or printed. It is left 'masterless,' ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... girl of eleven, told the story of Joan of Arc. Other girls followed her, each telling her own pet story. Their skill in this direction was a thing to marvel at. The audience was a joy, with half-raised heads, wide eyes, open mouths, every nerve of them hanging on the reciter's words. Indeed, I, too, found that one of the tale-tellers had "got" me with her story of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... they were maudlin, they were in the worst possible taste. So far as the reciter was concerned, they were absolutely insincere clap-trap. But the crowded audience received them with rapture; and the very fact that an astute caterer should serve up this particular form of clap-trap showed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... would be a select few; studious and curious men; a class of readers capable of analyzing the complicated emotions which they had experienced as hearers in the crowd, and who would, on perusing the written words, realize in their imaginations a sensible portion of the impression communicated by the reciter. Incredible as the statement may seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and there was in early Greece, a time when no such reading class existed. If we could discover at what time such a class first ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... the 'gentleman's hosiery' was a well-known reciter, and he was called upon loudly to perform by all the assistants in his department. Needing no pressing, he gave a long poem of tragic character, in which he rolled his eyes, put his hand on his chest, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... success, made a present of it to the sorrowing Draupadi. Thus the tenth Parva, called Sauptika, is recited. The great Vyasa hath composed this in eighteen sections. The number of slokas also composed (in this) by the great reciter of sacred truths is eight hundred and seventy. In this Parva has been put together by the great Rishi the two Parvas called Sauptika ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and retailer of the stories he had read and heard, and as the reciter of tales of his own invention, and he had ready and ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... contrast is even more rasping when we remember that the tale is not put into the mouth of a girl gazing dreamily into the glowing coals on the hearth, or of some elegant reciter amusing a social group in a Roman drawing-room or garden, but of a grizzled hag who is maid of all work in a robbers' cave. She tells it to divert the mind of a lovely young bride held for ransom. It begins like a modern fairy tale, with a great king and queen who had "three daughters ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Smith and Mason were in his hands. It is only just to say that Mr. Webster tells all this himself, and that he gives all credit to his colleagues, whose arguments he says "he clumsily put together," and of which he adds that he could only be the reciter. The faculty of obtaining and using the valuable work of other men, one of the characteristic qualities of a high and commanding order of mind, was even then strong in Mr. Webster. But in that bright period of early manhood it was accompanied by a frank and generous acknowledgment ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of these poems would not be greatly felt. The reciter would be obliged to learn them off by heart; he need not, and often did not, possess written versions of the poems he recited. And even literate men, as Bishop Grosseteste, preferred to listen to ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... not resist so facile and moderate demand: so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn'd soliloquy about England getting drunk, which like its reciter stupidly stood alone nothing prevenient, or antevenient, and cleared away a good deal besides ... I sent it last night, and am in weekly expectation of the Tolling ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... good plodder, and Mr. Thurston complimented her on the excellence of her Latin recitations, when he had his wits about him and could remember that she existed. He never had any difficulty in remembering Nancy. She was not, it must be confessed, especially admirable as a verbatim et literatim "reciter." Sometimes she forgot entirely what the book had said on a certain topic, but she usually had some original observation of her own to offer by way of compromise. At first Mr. Thurston thought that she was trying to conceal her lack ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... post while Twisty Barlow, upright and eager, said his say. A colorful tale it was in which the reciter was lavish with pearls and ancient gold. It appeared that one had but to sail down the coast of Lower California, up into the gulf and get ashore upon a certain strip of sandy beach in ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... on by his uncle to be the talker. His recitals were amusing in themselves to Sir Thomas, but the chief object in seeking them was to understand the reciter, to know the young man by his histories; and he listened to his clear, simple, spirited details with full satisfaction, seeing in them the proof of good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Hartleben, himself a poet and dramatist. I have not read the original French verse, but the idea seems to be faithfully represented in the German version. This moon-stricken Pierrot chants—rather declaims—his woes and occasional joys to the music of the Viennese composer, whose score requires a reciter (female), a piano, flute (also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola), and violoncello. The piece is described as a melodrama. I listened to it on a Sunday morning, and I confess that Sunday at noon is not a time propitious to the mood musical. It was also the first time ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... can only be and do something good when I concentrate all those faculties on one impulse and recklessly consume them and myself for its sake. Whatever part that impulse leads me to adopt, that I am as long as necessary, be it musician, poet, conductor, author, reciter, or what not. In that manner I at one time became a speculative art philosopher. But apart from this main current I can create and do nothing except under extreme compulsion, and in that case I should ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... speaker is radically different from that of the actor or reciter. You are not impersonating some one else, nor interpreting the thought of another. You must above all things be natural, real, sincere and earnest. Your work ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... words, as prevailing at the Ladrones!—Ils se divertissent a danser, courir, sautir, lutter, pour s'exercer, et eprouver leur forces. Ils prennent grand plaisir a raconter les avantures de leurs ancetres, et a reciter des vers de leurs poetes. 4. The principal share sustained by the women, in the entertainments at Captain Cook's islands, appears sufficiently from a variety of instances in this work; and we cannot read ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... amazed at the astonishing memory of this country lad: and the applause that greeted the reciter might well be calculated to awaken his latent vanity. It was like being called before the curtain after the first act by a young actor on his first appearance. And I believe every one understood the meaning of the verses, which seemed ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... have been a curious study for such men as love to gaze upon the dark and wily features of human character, to have watched the contrast between the reciter and the listener, as Beaufort, with much circumlocution, much affected disdain and real anxiety, narrated the singular and ominous conversation between ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is a lost art? Isn't that what you were going to say? But it's not, you know; we've refined it—that's all. Look at the Photographer, and the Interviewer, and the Pathetic Reciter, and the— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... those tight-laced, high- heeled tales of the 'teacup times' of Louis XIV and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the English reciter was hushed—and it was hushed in England more than a century ago—our great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, of Little Red Riding-hood and Blue Beard, mingled together in the Cabinet des Fees with Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin's wondrous lamp; ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... ANY part of it. There can hardly have been any standard text; at best there was a continuous tradition of those parts of the poems which were especially popular, and the knowledge of which was a valuable asset to the professional reciter." ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Al-Zaman heard her brother reciting, she called the Chief Eunuch and said to him, "Go, fetch me the man who is repeating this poetry!" Replied he, "Of a truth I heard him not and I wot him not and folks are all sleeping." But she said, "Whomsoever thou seest awake, he is the reciter." So he went, yet found none on wake save the Stoker; for Zau al-Makan was still insensible, and when his companion saw the Eunuch standing by his head he was afraid of him. Then said the Eunuch, "Art thou he who repeated poetry but ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... she dragged me awa' to a shop, an' I had to buy her a silly-like wee tie that cost me eichteen-pence-ha'penny; an' then she wanted a lang ride on the caur, an' that burst fivepence; an' she nabbed the remainin' bawbee for a keepsake.' The reciter paused as if ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... [65] [The reciter of the tale is a Turkish fisherman, who has been employed during the day in the gulf of AEgina, and in the evening, apprehensive of the Mainote pirates who infest the coast of Attica, lands with his boat on the harbour of Port Leone, the ancient Piraeus. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the originals, we have every reasonable reason for being pretty certain that they are not. In the case of ballads taken down from repetition, we know as a matter of certainty that, according to the ordinary laws of human nature, the reciter has altered the text which he or she heard, that that text was in its day and way altered by someone else, and so on almost ad infinitum. 'Mrs. Brown's version,' therefore, or Mr. Smith's, or Mr. Anybody's, has absolutely no claims to sacrosanctity. It is well, no doubt, that all such ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... from female to male. They are also in common use in Ireland. Besides healing diseases, such charms are supposed to cause fertility or bring good luck, or even to transfer the property of others to the reciter, or, in the case of darker magic, to cause death or disease.[1127] In Ireland, sorcerers could "rime either a man or beast to death," and this recalls the power of satire in the mouth of File or Druid. It raised blotches on the face of the victim, or even caused ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Beside, none knows the reason why this curse Was sent on him, this love of making verse, By what offence heaven's anger he incurred, A grave denied, a sacred boundary stirred: So much is plain, he's mad: like bear that beats His prison down and ranges through the streets, This terrible reciter puts to flight The learned and unlearned left and right: Let him catch one, he keeps him till he kills, As leeches stick till they have ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon. Ah! how fine! grand! He would rather hear that than any opera: it was diviner! 'Yes, the best poetry is,' she assented. 'On your lips,' he said. She laughed. 'I am not a particularly melodious reciter.' He vowed he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. Ah! she was going to leave. 'Yes, and you will find my return quite early enough,' said Diana, stepping a trifle more ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside. Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and creative minds is ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... C. T. U. gave a silver medal for the best reciter, and for three consecutive years Miss Morrison had trained the winner; so Mrs. Ducker was naturally anxious to have Maudie trained by so successful an instructor. Miss Morrison had studied elocution and "gesturing." It was in gesturing that Maudie was being instructed ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... of the Ion. Coming from Ephesus, Ion claimed to be the best professional reciter of Homer in all Greece. Acknowledging that Homer made him all fire, while other poets left him cold, he is made to admit that his knowledge of poetry is not scientific; otherwise he would have been able to discuss all poetry, for it is one. Socrates then makes the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... was a theatre with steps leading up to a glittering bow-front, and a dark wall spattered with the white squares of playbills, under which a queue of people watched with happy and indifferent faces a ragged reciter whose burlesque extravagance of gesture showed that one was now in a country more tolerant of nonsense ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... when he is the centre of some disturbance. He has always shown much delight in talking about war; and he would go without his meals to listen to a good story about fighting. He has the habit to, when the reciter of the story has finished, of trying to discount what he has heard, and to make his auditors believe that some exploits of his own have been far more thrilling. When everything is peaceable, even when there ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... was the latest school fashion; and about the beginning of winter it appeared that concerts in which one took part were necessary to one's intellectual existence. Forest Glen at once decided it must have one, and Lottie Price, seeing a chance to distinguish herself as a reciter, once more took at the flood the tide that would sweep her on to glory, and boldly proffered a request for ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... simultaneously. The ardour of the poet appeared to communicate itself to the audience. Their wild and sun-burnt countenances assumed a fiercer and more animated expression; all bent forward towards the reciter, many sprung up and waved their arms in ecstasy, and some laid their hands on their swords. When the song ceased, there was a deep pause, while the aroused feelings of the poet and of the hearers gradually subsided ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... but before the reciter could get fairly under way the door mercifully opened, and Sir John entered. He advanced towards the Marchesa, and shook her warmly by the hand, but said nothing; his heart was evidently yet too full to allow him to testify his relief in words. He ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... wedding journey he delighted to tease his young Julia by ordering at Delmonico's "boiled pig's feet a la St. Jo." A few years later a quartet was accustomed to meet at Eugene's home. Field did not sing with the quartet but as a fifth member acted as reader or reciter in their little entertainments. Eugene delighted to tease his wife by walking into the parlor when the quartet was practicing at his home and saying: "Well, boys, let us take off our coats and take it easy; it's too hot." When this was done, Eugene would blaze forth in the brilliancy ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Scholar at Westminster. One day he happened to take up from his mother's parlour window a copy of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene.' He eagerly perused the delightful volume, though he was then only twelve years old: and this impulse being given to his mind, became at fifteen a reciter of verses. His 'Poetical Blossoms,' published whilst he was still at school, gave, however, no foretaste of his future eminence. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his friendship with Villiers was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... having brought her into notice, the next step in Miss Johnson's career was her appearance on the public platform as a reciter of her own poems. For this she had natural talent, and in the exercise of it she soon developed a marked ability, joined with a personal magnetism, that was destined to make her a favorite with audiences ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... she often went back—had been a scene, for our young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at large—in the name of these and other attractions the company in which, by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... as might have been expected from his nationality, as a reader and reciter, and during the long evenings added much to the profit ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... scientifically accurate. The verses, as they passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, would be in a constant state of flux and change. When a man forgot a verse, he would make something to take its place. A more or less appropriate stanza from another ballad would slip in; or the reciter would tell in prose the matter of which he forgot the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... have thought anybody or anything could recite down here except the reciter we hear away ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Gotze, and—as one of the first singing mistresses of the present day—the inheritor of his school; she is also a talented singer, reciter, and dramatic ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... before he could distinguish any particular object in the soft gloom of the apartments. And then he saw that Mr. Heron was speaking to a lady in white, and he discovered at once, with a curious quickening of his pulses, that the reciter of the ballad stood before him with a ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... that songs of this sort were driven off the better-class music-hall stage about this time, and there is little doubt that Mr. Anstey, to whom Mr. Bernard Partridge afterwards rendered artistic help, took yeoman's share in the campaign. More certain it is that with "Mr. Punch's Young Reciter" he effectively suppressed the drawing-room spouter. No one with a sense of humour who has read that series can now stand up and recite a poem of a sentimental or an heroic nature from the pens of Mr. Clement Scott or Mr. G. R. Sims without ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... its want of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack of sting. The fabliau-writer or reciter was not required—one imagines that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it—to spin a long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... was walking unto the temple of Ptah, and went unto the house of the chief reciter Uba-aner, with his train. Now when the wife of Uba-aner saw a page, among those who stood behind the King, her heart longed after him; and she sent her servant unto him, with a present of a box full ...
— Egyptian Literature
... who had gone away for a moment with the opening of the poem, was back again, and had stepped within the door. He stood there now, resting his great frame against the wall and gazing toward the reciter like one entranced. When Noel got to the second part, and that heart-breaking refrain began to melt and move all listeners, the Paladin began to wipe away tears with the back of first one hand and then the other. The ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... transports us to the days of old-world Java, story and performance being of ancient origin and religious signification. The subjects of the topeng are derived from the Panji group of dramatic poems, the ancient costumes, the curious masks, and the office of the dalang or reciter, whose ventriloquial skill is required for the entire wording of the libretto, comprise a valuable memento of bygone days, otherwise entirely forgotten. The wayang-wayang or "shadow dance" of puppets, vies with the topeng in popularity, but the latter ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... 'Samuel Brandram' in the Dictionary of National Biography is a reciter who died in 1892; he certainly had less claim to the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— 30 'I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;— Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.— You with the unpaid bill, Despair,— You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,— 35 I will pay you in the grave,— Death will listen to your stave. Expectation too, be off! To-day is for itself enough; 40 Hope, in pity mock not Woe With smiles, nor follow where I go; Long having lived on thy sweet food, At length I find one moment's good After long ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... fellow-animals, especially the fox, who regarded himself as the cleverest of all the beasts and who looked on his honest, dull-witted neighbour the armadillo as a born fool. Old gauchos used to tell me that twenty or more years ago one often met with a reciter of ballads who could relate the whole story of the Bien-te-veo. Good reciters were common enough in my time: at dances it was always possible to find one or two to amuse the company with long poems and ballads in the intervals of ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... purpose among the orthodox Guslars of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[10] A description given by Sir Richard Burton of a story-teller at the bazaar at Tangier may stand, except as to the external details, for that of an Arab reciter throughout Northern Africa and the Moslem East. "The market people," he says, "form a ring about the reciter, a stalwart man, affecting little raiment besides a broad waist-belt into which his lower chiffons are ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... is the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later. Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands incomplete to this day; but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell —as Joseph Addison would say. The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... waiting for them outside on the step. Then he settled himself down again, for the engine was waiting to take water. He wrote a few words on a half-sheet and handed it to Donald. 'That's my address,' he said. 'Do write or look me up at my store, if I can be of any use at any time.' The reciter of 'Sir Galahad' shook his hand warmly, promising that he would do so. Then Home scrambled out into the noontide heat. Soon the slow train woke up again, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... knew it. And as he lay talking alone with the man whom they had summoned, two or three nights before the end, she, sitting in the next room, had been conscious of a deep and smarting jealousy. Had not the hard devotion of twenty years made him at least her own? And here was this black-coated reciter of incredible things stepping into her place. Only in death she recovered him wholly. No priest interfered while he drew his last breath ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... believed them, though incident or sequence underwent no change, they would become closer knit, more coherent, and each an organic whole. Gradually they would take a regular and accepted form, which would ease the strain upon the reciter's memory and leave his mind free to adorn the story with fair devices, that again gave help in the making it easier to remember, and thus aided in its preservation. After a couple of generations had rounded and polished the sagas by their telling ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... the room, and flung his arms above his head. Then he dropped them to his side, and shrugged his shoulders, finishing in an attitude reminiscent of Plate 6 ("Despair") in "The Home Reciter." ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... supposed murder had cost them. In those times of civil contention the dearest relatives were often long ignorant of each other's fate. So numerous were the instances of cruelty, so multiplied the tales of wo, that they wearied and confused the reciter. Many parents believed their sons safe in a foreign country, who, at last they found, had long since perished in some obscure skirmish, where valour bled unshaded by its deserved laurels. Others, who had lamented the death of their dearest relations, received them ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... a very skillful dancer, and an excellent reciter of the mele; so the fame of his skill was not slow in extending through all the valleys ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... surveying the contents of his pockets; or drawing down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look awful, and rolling his head to complete the effect; or alternately handling his own nose and Mordecai's as if to test the relation of their masses. Under all this the fervid reciter would not pause, satisfied if the young organs of speech would submit themselves. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some antic or active amusement, when, instead of following the recitation he would return ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot |
