"Strident" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and for the bell to be perfect, all these five tones must be in absolute tune with each other. Space prevents my giving details as to how this result can be attained. Under the Canon's tuition I learnt to distinguish the "third," which is at times quite strident, but the "fifth" nearly always eludes me. During Canon Simpson's lifetime he could only get one firm of bell-founders to take his "five-tone" principle seriously. I may add that English bell-founders tune their bells to the "nominal," whilst Belgian ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... jury in this case, and capable of human emotions upon which he might play. At times he became declamatory beyond the point of good taste. In voice and manner he betrayed the school in which he had been trained. "When I hear gentlemen," he cried in strident tones, "attempting to justify this unrighteous fine upon General Jackson upon the ground of non-compliance with rules of court and mere formalities, I must confess that I cannot appreciate the force of the argument. In cases of war and desolation, in times of peril and disaster, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... A somewhat strident-sounding bell announced it, and the three passed directly into the next room, furnished so conventionally there was absolutely nothing upon which to let the eyes rest in surprise, or pleasure. But it was painfully neat and regular, and both aunt and nephew were secretly satisfied ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Kid, with his usual strident tones. "Take it easy, Bud, We've got a long, hard trail ahead of us, and we ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... the captain's table, Mr Butler was expressing his opinion upon various subjects in loud, strident tones, and with a disputatiousness of manner that caused most of those about him mentally to dub him a blatant cad, and to resolve that they would have as little as possible to ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... to accept his concessions to Ulster feeling; but they did not like them. REDMOND'S declaration that the PREMIER "has gone to the very extremest limits of concession" drew from Ministerialists a more strident cheer than any accorded to their Leader as he expounded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... defence. The crashing of the trees as they fell, the blows of crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like the buzzing of ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... the Strand, and dingy blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... said. Then he laughed as only an Australian black can, with a glitter of seemingly endless white teeth, and a strident roar that might have been ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... exaggerate the horrors of the last day of the doomed city. The rumbling of the earth beneath; the dense obscurity and murky shadow of the heaven above; the long, heavy roll of the convulsed sea; the strident noise of the vapors and gases escaping from the mountain-crater; the shifting electric lights, crimson, emerald green, lurid yellow, azure, blood red, which at intervals relieved the blackness, only to make it ghastlier than before; the hot, hissing showers which ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... strident chorus in choice argot, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his cafe. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge Mirliton hanging ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... engines throbbed with a pulsation that set every bolt and joint creaking, the strident echoes of the firemen's shovels could he heard scraping against the iron floor, and little whistlings of steam came like higher notes in the general tune. Even the noises of the ship were ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... us not long after, and we ate it on deck, in a grim silence, each privately racking his brain for some solution of the mysteries. I was, indeed, so swallowed up in these considerations that the wreck, the lagoon, the islets, and the strident sea-fowl, the strong sun then beating on my head, and even the gloomy countenance of the captain at my elbow, all vanished from the field of consciousness. My mind was a blackboard on which I scrawled and blotted out hypotheses, comparing each with the pictorial records in my memory—ciphering with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a device for selling bread under a fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight—this was afterwards floated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company and bumped against the law—now it was a new scheme for still more strident advertisement, now it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now a cheap and nasty substitute for this or that common necessity, now the treachery of a too well-informed employee, anxious to become our partner. It was all put to ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the rear of the 'bus, assisted by two young men in brass buttons. Mr. Hooker made way for a corpulent, puffing old lady. She stopped in front of him and demanded in hot, strident tones: ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon
... His thin, strident voice echoed weirdly in the small, close boudoir. Chauvelin made no reply. There was nothing that he could say. All that Robespierre had put so emphatically before him, he had fully realised, even whilst he was ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... remained where he was, leaning against a wall in the shade, eating an onion and ready to give the signal with his whistle; he did not glance towards the two watching officers. To Lieutenant Jovannic, the falsity and unreality of it all were as strident as a brass band; yet in the long vista of the village street, brimful of sun and silence, the few people who moved upon their business went indifferently as shadows upon a wall. An old man trudged in the wake of a laden donkey; a girl bore water-buckets slung from a yoke; a child was sweeping ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... wilt not be able to bring them up, [5787]"and what greater misery can there be than to beget children, to whom thou canst leave no other inheritance but hunger and thirst?" [5788]cum fames dominatur, strident voces rogantium panem, penetrantes patris cor: what so grievous as to turn them up to the wide world, to shift for themselves? No plague like to want: and when thou hast good means, and art very careful of their ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... will offer Conscription; and, with no "perhaps" at all, some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon ever conferred upon the youth of a nation. Then, if there is any manliness or fibre left in the adherents of freedom, they will answer that we adopted Conscription for a definite object, and, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... way, flinging back a trail of chaff as long as his voice could carry to the room above, a room curiously dim and still, it seemed to him, as he came out into the strident sunshine of the July day. Once in the street, moreover, and safely out of range of Opdyke's windows, his fun dropped from him, and he shook his sturdy shoulders, as if he were trying to shake them free from ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... her a hymn-book of ivory and silver; and she dreamed they sang from it together until the church thrilled with their united voices. But the song they sang seemed to pain her, and her voice hurt her throat. His voice, too, grew harsh and piercing, and—she awoke with the sun in her eyes and the strident cries of ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the noisy city street, I listened to the newsboys' strident cries Of "Extra," as with flying feet, They strove to gain this man or that-their prize. But one there was with neither shout nor stride, And, having bought from him, I stood nearby, Pondering the cruel crutches at his side, Blaming ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... heard upon the borders of the great Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... private views, pushing themselves in front of everybody else, standing before the picture so that no one can get near it, and shouting out their silly opinions, which they evidently imagine to be brilliantly satirical remarks, in strident tones: the women who, in the stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all through the performance; and who, having arrived in the middle of the first act, and made as much disturbance as they know how, before settling down ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... hills where twilight stands, Above the shadowy pasture lands, With strained and strident cry, Beneath pale skies that ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of State. "After this, if we beat them now, a treaty surely.... Palmerston—The Emperour—The Queen of Spain—Mason says ... Inefficiency of the blockade—Cotton obligations—Arms and munitions...." Still talking, they moved away. A strident voice reached her from the end of the room—L. Q. C. Lamar, here to-night despite physicians. "The fight had to come. We are men, not women. The quarrel had lasted long enough. We hate each other, so the struggle had to come. Even Homer's heroes, after they had stormed and scolded long enough, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... with me, and three good horses, which were supposed to be salted—that is, proof against the sickness. Among the Kaffirs was an old fellow named Indaba-zimbi, which, being translated, means "tongue of iron." I suppose he got this name from his strident voice and exhaustless eloquence. This man was a great character in his way. He had been a noted witch-doctor among a neighbouring tribe, and came to the station under the following circumstances, which, as he plays a considerable part in this ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... straining their eyes into the dense smother, while whistles were blowing on all sides. The shrill shriek of the government tug, the hoarse bellow of the ocean liner, and the fog whistle on Yerba Buena Island, all joined in a strident warning, sending their intermittent ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... under unfavorable conditions to large numbers of people, that their voices have become too loud and too much strained to be pleasant to the ear. A soft, pleasing voice, loud enough to be distinctly audible, is always better than a strident, forcible utterance that compels attention ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however, strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that the compositions of Schumann and Schubert ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... extreme end of this gallery was a door, at which Trotto knocked softly. From within a strident voice said: "Come in!" Then followed an exclamation of ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... the volume of the receiver so that the clicks in the mike no longer were so strident. "Set on maximum and ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... the fugitives, and a roar of ironic mirth broke from his lips, resounding high above the strident rasping of the beetle-legs, and roaring ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... pepper-and-salt mixture soberly immaculate. He touched his hat when our young gentleman appeared and mounted beside him; the horse, meanwhile, shivering a little and showing the red of its nostrils as the train, with strident whistlings, drew out of the station bound ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a struggle, and, upon being told that he was Dick Whittington's cat, had proceeded to cut some feline capers that would have tickled the sensibilities of a totem-pole. Mr. Daney's honest cachinnations now were so infectious that Nan commenced to laugh with him—heartily, but no longer with that strident little note of resentment, and cumulatively, as Mr. Daney's mirth mounted until the honest fellow's tears cascaded across ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... will find the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... a loud high pitched, strident voice floated into the room through the open window. Gay, whose eyes had never shifted from the girl outside, saw her cheeks suddenly blanch. She looked round hurriedly like a frightened rabbit seeking a ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... "Maud" is a study in pessimism. The lover's blood is tainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with all things and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broad sympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, rasping and self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wings beneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up their young; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity, then despise him, then pity him once more, and in sheer ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... chap; is it so bad as all that?" Peter's somewhat strident voice had grown tender as a woman's. He laid his hand affectionately on Lancelot's tumbled hair. "You know I believe in you with all my soul. I never doubted your genius for a moment. Don't I know too well ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... a while that unknown noise increased A rattling, that with strident roars did blend, And whining moans; but suddenly it ceased, A fearful thing stood at the cloister's end, And eyed him for a while, then 'gan to wend Adown the cloisters, and began again That rattling, and the ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... in such a strident tone that the mountains echoed the sound. The visitors drinking in the kiosk smiled; they were well accustomed to the man. A neat red-cheeked girl appeared in the doorway. "Number 47," shouted the landlord, and went off to his ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet, growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... in a strident voice, "I'm going in and get supper, and when it's ready we'll set down and eat it. I ain't going to wait one minute. I'm just sick of this ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hear two of them chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery, tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and female, that you so often hear in New England,—the harsh, strident voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful. Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of the reproach ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with the patina of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of refinement driven too high had broken ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... squalid inn, Marguerite would have enjoyed the sweet scent of this autumnal night, and the distant melancholy rumble of the autumnal night, and the distant melancholy rumble of the waves; she would have revelled in the calm and stillness of this lonely spot, a calm, broken only at intervals by the strident and mournful cry of some distant gull, and by the creaking of the wheels, some way down the road: she would have loved the cool atmosphere, the peaceful immensity of Nature, in this lonely part of the coast: but her heart was too full of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... say that!" he cried, and his voice had a new and strident note. "I had nothing whatever to ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... sunlight, as they built their airy hammocks high among the swaying branches of the great willow, and one inquisitive robin swept boldly through the clustering vines which screened the front of the veranda and perched upon his shoulder. He heard the merry hum of the bees at work and the strident call of the locusts, mingled with the distant neighing of horses and the soft lowing of the cows, but all the sweetness of nature was powerless to lift the gloom which seemed to envelop him as in a shroud. His face was white and drawn ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... his low, strident voice, "what's that bay there? Too weak for the work—no good. You want better stuff than that. An axle yonder not packed properly! . . . And look at that black pony—came out of a governess-cart, I should think! ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... anger and fear; but the highest development of their vocal efforts seems to be devoted to charming the females. If birds have a love of music, then there must be a marvellous diversity of taste among them, ranging all the way from the shrieking, strident screams of the parrots and macaws to the tender pathos of the wood pewee and ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... no case of findin' now. The boy's dead." His strident voice quavered and broke, but rose again to a snarl. "And, by God, I'll spend a million to get ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... time more strident and commanding. M. Pougeot aroused himself with an effort. "We're acting like children," he muttered. "It's nothing. I told them at the office to ring me up about nine." And he put the receiver to his ear. "Yes, this is M. Pougeot.... What?... The Ansonia?... ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... wars colonial possessions "became pawns in the game."* (* The phrase is Professor Egerton's, Cambridge Modern History 9 735.) There was no Imperialism then, with its strident note, its ebullient fervour and flag waving. There was no national sense of pride in colonial Empire, or general appreciation of the great potentialities of oversea possessions. "The final outcome of the great war was the colonial ascendancy of Great Britain, but such was ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... company of all the rest, found itself alone, and set up a fretful, continuous scream, disagreeable even to me, and torturing to Martial ears, which, adapted to hear in that thin air, are painfully alive to strident, harsh, or even loud sounds. Instantly obeying a sign from her mother, Eveena rose in the middle of a conversation to which she had listened with evident interest, and devoted herself for half-an-hour to please and pacify ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Over the cannons' rattle, Over the strident voices of men and their dying groans, I hear ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... her pure girlish voice had just sung 'Full fathom five thy father lies,' when Lady Bracebridge, in her most strident voice, which went ringing through ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... belong to a gamin, she presented on the whole a graceful enough ensemble. But there were two drawbacks—her rather large mouth was wreathed in a stereotyped smile, and when she opened it it gave utterance to a voice of somewhat unpleasant, strident timbre. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Silvery-strident throat— so assiduously serenading my brain, flinching under the glittering hail of your notes— were you not safe behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall... I might fathom your golden delirium with throttle of finger and thumb shutting ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... of all were the evenings when the Marquis chose to improvise. Plaintive, tender melodies for the most part; prolonged trembling, faintly-expiring airs; and sometimes harsh, strident notes that evoked weird echoes from the bare wainscoted walls. Mrs. Frost would sit, tears of sadness and of pleasure in her eyes, the kindly homely features of her face moving with interest and delight. Nancy was usually ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... cried now. "I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands, prophetically conscious of victory and death. I see my own apotheosis, my public funeral, my nation's tears, my burial in the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my praise in immortal verse!" The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one—the new Centaur, half man, half chair—flew by me again in the dying light. "I am Shakespeare!" cried ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... that day, what might have happened if she had gone through with this truant indiscretion. But halfway on the journey her escort had deserted her momentarily to buy a cigar. Left alone upon the upper deck of a ferryboat, crowded with a strident and raucous company, she had felt herself suddenly grow cold, not with fear, but with a certain haughty and disdainful anger. These people were not her kind! She had risen swiftly from her seat and hidden discreetly in the ladies' washroom until after the boat had landed and ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... and hands found the way quietly, and she reached the front door without incident, but when she felt for the great bar whose strident clanging in its bracket had been a last signal of night within the house, her hand encountered nothing. Wonderingly she slid her fingers up and down the polished oak. At last she realized that the bar hung loose; the door was merely on the latch. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... argument," interrupted Mrs. De Peyster, dignified, not a strident note in her voice—for she never lost her self-possession or the true grand manner. "I believe you will remember, Miss Gardner, that when you applied for your present position two months ago, I told you that I made it a rule to have no servants or employees of any kind who ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... walking, worn-out by grief and fear, he fell into a doze in his chair, for he was afraid of his bed, as one is of a haunted spot. But suddenly the strident cry of the preceding evening pierced his ears, so shrill that Ulrich stretched out his arms to repulse the ghost, and he fell on to his back ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... fir-trees a blue lake as blue as an Indian moonstone, and then one by one, with the unexpectedness of a flight of glow-worms, sparkled the serried ranks of the hotels. Out they flashed, breaking up the mystery, defying the mountains, as insistent and strident ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... perverted instincts that made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound of their nasal strident voices brought him relief. He could not shake off their fascination for him. He was like a man hanging round the scene ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... marksmen. And now suppose that an infantry brigade receives orders to charge. "Charge!" The word carries magnificent poetic associations, but, alas, it is a very prosaic affair nowadays! The lines move onward in short rushes, and it seems as if a swarm of ants were migrating warily. The strident voices of the officers ring here and there: the men edge their way onward: it seems as if there were no method in the advance; but somehow the loose wavy ranks are kept well in hand, and the main movement proceeds like ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of vim. She usually talks at the top of a very high and strident voice (I don't know what they did with it at the convent), and I suddenly heard her screaming to the cabinet minister, 'Haven't you heard that? Oh, everybody's quoting it in Fleet Street, aren't they, Mr. Bryan? But I suppose you never go to Fleet ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... seemingly in all earnestness, Paul and Dora resumed their quarrel, and Dora's strident voice echoed through ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... coat trimmed with gilt braid, his hat cocked upon one side of his bony head, pleasing himself with the belief that he was the object of universal admiration, and swelling with a vast and consummate self-satisfaction as he boasted, with strident voice and extravagant enunciation, of the magnificence of the ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... called the strident voice of Blackrock, who, jerking himself back several years into youth again, was umpiring the game with great joy. Nonchalantly Sam snapped the ball back over-hand. Princeman smiled with calm superiority. He ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... that's an extra large floe," said Thirlwell as a detonating crash rang across the woods. Then there was a roar that was pierced by a high, strident note, and he knew the floe was tearing ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... sheriff, and himself were projected out upon the sidewalk by one of his quick maneuvers. A crowd of men came running to the place. Above the rising murmur of their voices, raised in excitement, came a shrill and strident cry. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... was one of those who hold themselves erect and firm, however much old age may try to bend them. She had a sweet face and soft white hair. She looked so mild and gentle that it was surprising to hear her speak with a voice that was as strident and solemn as that of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart, himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... blue-white radiance that beat upon his unseeing eyes with unrelenting ferocity. Stabbing pains bored into his very brain, pains that carried with them an unspoken and unintelligible command. Why couldn't they let him alone; leave him to die in peace? He knew he was on his feet, swaying. There were voices, strident and guttural, and then by some magic the veil was lifted. His brain cleared and he saw that he stood before a dais where a much bejeweled and resplendently clad woman sat curled in the luxurious cushions of a golden seat. Chalk-white was her face and her lips ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... coarse prettiness, laughed a mocking strident laugh that expressed the feelings of the crowd even more than the louder curses around her. The workers slowly dispersed, in little groups, talking in excited, angry tones. Dale Lynch detached himself from one of these groups and walked on alone, a frown darkening his face; nor did he shake off ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... banged. Before its strident vibrations had ceased troubling the thin morning air, the train began to move slowly out of Kerb. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... of the shrill, weird cry, the animal stood at bay. Again came the well-known strident halloo. A maelstrom of memories was awakened by the call. Instinctively obeying the old summons she started toward the train, when from over the hill behind her ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... Blackana thrust me forward, and I went straightway to the chairman who seized me by the back and held me aloft in his right hand, while a deafening roar of strident voices was measuring ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... of heaven were torn, A strident shout rang from some neighbour shrubs Three Nubian soldiers ran upon her with Delighted oily faces. Screaming first Commands to her small son to make for home, She laboured to recross the current as when In nightmares the scared ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... cried, addressing Silas in strident tones; this is no time for weeping. "What have you done? How came this body in your room? Speak freely to one who may be helpful. Do you imagine I would ruin you? Do you think this piece of dead flesh on your ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be thought that all the notes of these most engaging birds, symbolic of light in plumage and in flight, are shrill and strident. When they feed—and they seem always to be feeding or carrying food—their chatter is perpetual and varied in tone. Occasionally a male bird sets himself to beguile the time with song. Then his flame-red eyes flash with ardour, his head is thrown back, a sparkling ruffle appears on his otherwise ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total contrast to the first. The music of the first is throughout full of sunlight. At times it may be strident, violent, rather tumultuous; but sweetness is the prevailing note, and as soon as Elsa comes on we have the sheer loveliness of first her answers to the king, and then of her vision; then comes Lohengrin, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with one of his strident laughs, "what might be considered, by the thoughtless, as benefits, were resented, by the older and wiser of the crew, as innovations and intrusions of an impertinent and offensive nature. But the immediate result was that interest in the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... best bed-linen. And now when I want her to call the child Yosef, after my first husband, peace be on him, her own father, she would out of sheer vexatiousness, call it Yechezkel." Malka's voice became more strident than ever. She had been anxious to make a species of vicarious reparation to her first husband, and the failure of Milly to acquiesce in the arrangement was a source of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Woe to any who in his ignorance passed between the Chair and the member addressing it; who walked in from a division with his hat on; or who stood an inch or two within the Bar whilst debate was going forward. Mr. Biggar's strident cry of "Order! Order!" reverberated through the House. Others joined in the shout, and the abashed offender hastily ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... shots cutting through brushwood. They end their sharp, breathless rush in the water of the river pool with a loud "Splash! splash!" Before the songsters have time to resume their interrupted rivalry a missel thrush, the strident whistling butcher's boy of the wood, appears round the corner, and, just like that blue-aproned youth, he proceeds to cuff and abuse all the smaller fry, saying, "Yah! get along! Who's your hatter? Does your mother know you're out?" and other ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... "protest," although at that moment he had the written one in his pocket. After a moment's struggle to remember what he wished to say, he found himself hopelessly befogged, and abandoned the attempt. Then, to the amazement of all who heard him, he burst out into a loud, strident peal of unmeaning, maniacal laughter—laughter which had no spice of merriment in it, and which was a mere spontaneous effort of nature to relieve the strain upon the shattered nerves. Bench, bar, jury and spectators stared aghast. Such laughter ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... freedom. Let us think it out. Let the struggle go on, and let us not, with pallid faces and strident voices, cry out in fear; for the only tribunal that can righteously adjudicate the lightness of human thought is the tribunal, as Schiller has it, of history, which unquestionably is on earth the tribunal ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... refused to budge. He was waiting for the first cicada whose strident call was due, he declared, in a week's time. Till then he ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... under the great sycamore trees. Through open doorways she would catch glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a flickering candle. From the darkness there would steal the sound of flute or zither, of voices singing. Occasionally it would be some strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and plaintive. But early in October the rains commenced and the stream became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... exercises to the fullest extent the beneficial characteristics of the Tibia class of stop already detailed. If only by reason of the faculty so largely exercised, of thus mollifying and enriching the upper notes of other stops—which too often prove hard and strident in tone—the Tibia Minor deserves recognition as one of the most valuable of modern ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... to her she had been asleep five minutes, and there was only the faintest glimmer of light in her room, when she was awakened by something new. Just under her window there was a strident laugh. ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... the shrieking, strident cries produced by a pair of clarinets, and altogether there came from out of the knots of the serpents a hideous chaos of sound, drawn onward by a team of six horses, and received with wild cheers by the crowd, for it was really the new triumphal march freshly down from town, but in ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion. This is going on; this is being done. I think that "The Antichrist" has a useful place in that enterprise. It is strident, it is often extravagant, it is, to many sensitive men, in the worst of possible taste, but at bottom it is enormously apt and effective—and on the surface it is undoubtedly a good show. One somehow enjoys, with the malice that is native to man, the spectacle ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... March 16.—The WINSOME WINSTON, sauntering in from behind SPEAKER'S Chair when Questions had advanced some way, startled by strident cheer from Ministerialists and Irish Nationalists. Opposition angrily replied. FIRST LORD, faintly blushing, found anchorage on Treasury Bench. Unpremeditated outburst of enthusiasm meant as welcome back from Bradford, where he reviewed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... open-air salon of the people, was a feverish going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the Pere Duchesne, L'Ami du Peuple, the Jean Bart, the Vieux ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... as far as their appearance and breeding went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the souls of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea's heart, their music ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... is what you do propose to do, then, if you don't accept our offer and come to live with us? Were you expecting to keep on living in this great barn of a house?" Ellen Robinson's voice was loud and strident with a crude kind of pain. She could not understand her sister, in fact, never had. She had thought her proposition that Julia come to live in her home and earn her board by looking after the four children and being useful about the house ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill |
