"Toneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a toneless voice, hardly above a whisper, and like one whose throat is dry and mouth parched. But the brandy had revived him somewhat, and his eyes lost ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... carotid does not show the palpitation may be based on the fact that the right stands in much more direct connection with the aorta. All this, taken together, causes that so significant, lightly vibrating, cold and toneless voice, which is so often to be perceived in criminals who deny their guilt. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Bernhardt has shown us death. There are moments, at other times and with other performers, when it is difficult not to laugh at some cat-like or ape-like trick of these painted puppets who talk a toneless language, breathing through their words as they whisper or chant them. They are swathed like barbaric idols, in splendid robes without grace; they dance with fans, with fingers, running, hopping, lifting their feet, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... with feline softness, performed her duties with the precision of a mechanism. Her stillness had a curious quality of detachment; she seemed held in a spell, her eye, suddenly encountered, blank and vacant; even her voice was toneless. She reacted to nothing ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... advantage of which was not obvious to him, and the final aim of which he did not perceive. Until a correct touch has been acquired, it is of no use to talk about a fine singing tone. How can we expect to arouse an interest by mere toneless tinkling, while stiff, inflexible fingers are struggling with the notes; while the pupil sees only his inability to do any thing right, and receives nothing but blame from the teacher; while, at the same time, so much is to be kept in mind, ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... repeated McKay in his toneless, unaccented voice which carried such terrible conviction to the other man. "Forty-eight years ago the Hun planned a huge underground highway carrying four lines of railroad tracks. It was to begin east of the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Zell, slant into the bowels ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... opinion—as if one's standard was somehow wrong. (Who has not seen men with faces of this corrective power till they frustrated it by speech or action?) His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... scathing remark, when both were startled by a voice in front of them, issuing from "the chair." Silently the Senior Warden had entered, and had proceeded to open the meeting. His face was set and stern, and his voice hard and toneless. No help from that ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... answer was toneless. "Drought killed the crops, prairie fires burned the hay, of course the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... train stopped a long, endless time. And at every station I could make out that there were two railway men walking up and down the platform—one with a lantern in his hand—and they said things to each other in the night, low, and toneless, and meaningless. ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... men around him stared. His face was inscrutable as ever, his eyes fathomless, his voice flat and toneless. But slowly he raised his hands as if holding a bow; twitched his right thumb and forefinger in the motion of loosing a shaft; let the hands sink. His gaze calmly lifted from theirs and dwelt on the farthest wall. Not another ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... consented readily on condition that Snandulia accompanied them on the harpsichord. In a corner of the room there stood a little spinet, which not one of them had noticed before. Snandulia sat down to it and struck several chords. Nejdanov had never heard such sour, toneless, tingling, jangling notes, but the old people promptly struck up the ballad, "Was ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... desired information in a tired, toneless voice, and we departed. Little did Gatton realize that his words were barbed, when, as we descended to the street, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... a servant in the hall. "Tell the others," he said in a cold, toneless voice, "that Mr. Ninian ... has been killed ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... I suddenly stopped twenty yards away, for at the end of the silvery cadence of a woodhewer, I heard the low, measured, toneless rhythm which instantly revived to mind every detail of the clearing. I was headed toward a distant palm frond beneath whose tip was a nest of Rufous Hermits, for I wished to see the two atoms of hummingbirds at the moment when they rolled from ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... acknowledgment, even when she was out of temper; but now, finding that he was waiting for an answer, she just looked up at him once, then fixed her eyes on the ground again, and spoke at last in a voice so hopeless and toneless that he ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... on his way. Nature, inartistic, monotonous Nature, will renew the sap of her youth, and the dewy freshness of her first pale springtime, but the sap of your youth will have run dry for ever, and the voice of your springtime will be mute and toneless. Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy! ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... silence in the tiny cottage parlor as the young girl made this extraordinary announcement in a firm if toneless voice, without flinching and meeting with a sort of stubborn pride the five pairs of eyes which were now riveted ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... His voice, now, was toneless, emotionless, as though his part in the critical operation about to be performed were that of a spectator. No trace of nervousness, of fear, could I discern; his pulse ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... front room, as she hovered over the work spread out before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson's mumbling lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged with ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... and Edgecumbe still spoke in the same toneless voice. 'I knew him well. He was—where did I see ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking |
