"Singsong" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried Dame Eliza, in a singsong heedless voice, which showed that such bickerings were nightly things among her guests. "No brawling or brabbling, gentles! Take heed to the good ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me first. Come, Daisy! I want to know why is it so much more wicked to sing a song than to make somebody else singsong?—for that's the way they all do the spelling book, I know. ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... presentation, in singsong verse, of his own undeserved indigence and the brutality of employers, and so ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... know, I will know," she said, her eyes filled with cunning, her voice a strange singsong oddly at variance with the coarse bigness of her body. "Oh, no, she will never ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... ZOE: (Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... taken to keep it clean. Often the rafters are festooned with cobwebs and dirt. Of furniture, save the teacher's low desk, there is none. The teacher uses a grass mat, while the boys sit cross-legged on the earthen floor. The teacher, in a singsong voice, reads a sentence which the boys shout after him. Then another sentence is read, which the pupils likewise shout in a singsong voice, while their bodies sway to and fro. This goes on until sentence after sentence is memorized. No one knows nor cares what he is saying. The teacher never ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the sleepy usher's nod, a sleepy boy would rise and recite the perfunctory evening prayer in a dull singsong voice—beginning, "Notre Pere, qui etes aux cieux, vous dont le regard scrutateur penetre jusque dans les replis les plus profonds de nos coeurs," etc., etc., and ending, "au nom du Pere, du Fils, et du St. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... was turned down the canyon. His sensitive, quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not pierce the green screen through which the stream rippled away, but to his ears came the voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong voice. Once the buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the sound he snorted with a sudden start that jerked him through the air from water to meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet, while ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... sight-seers, mainly of the West and South. Every hotel door was like the vent to a hive—black with comers and goers. The old man with the cough medicine met them again. They could repeat his singsong cry now, and with a little impulse of fun-making Ida joined in with him: "Doc-ter Fergusson's double-ex selly-brated, Philadelphia cough drops, for coughs or colds, sore throat or hoarseness; five ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... Warcraft, "you are looking at the representatives of mankind's only sibling. The noble Ankorbades." Then he recited in a singsong voice: ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco
... said; "they are too monotonous, too singsong, to dead-and-alive; they have no expression, no elocution. It isn't natural; it could never happen in real life. A person who had just acquired a dog is either blame' glad or blame' sorry. He is not on the fence. I never saw a case. What the nation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... 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; cacophonous; harsh ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rang gently, like melody heard through water and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... years since Alec learned it, but the words were as familiar still as the letters of the alphabet. As Macklin's high-pitched voice reached them, Philippa joined in in a singsong undertone, and even Alec found himself unconsciously following the well-remembered lines ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... would suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high- aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching—you could have said preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... was selected by his lordship, and is remarkably happy. It is from Homer's Odyssey. I will translate it, as well as I can extempore, into a measure which gives a better idea of Homer's manner than Pope's singsong couplet. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... himself for having brought them, and with Winny for having made him bring them; and he was angry with himself for being angry. But he couldn't help it. Their voices exasperated him. The children's voices, the high, reiterated singsong, "Where we goin'?" Winny's voice, poignantly soft, insufferably patient, answering them with all that tender silliness, that persistent, gentle, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... and soothed the bird gently as before. "Having slain, therefore, my predecessor in the high godship," she suggested, in the same singsong voice as the parrot's. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... there is no need of light above ground, yet I marveled that they had no means of lighting their way through these dark, subterranean passages. So we crept along at a snail's pace, with much stumbling and falling—the guards keeping up a singsong chant ahead of us, interspersed with certain high notes which I found always ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... miracle had saved him, but when he realized the ease with which the girl had, single-handed, beaten off twenty gorilla-like males, and an instant later, as he saw them again take up their dance about him while she addressed them in a singsong monotone, which bore every evidence of rote, he came to the conclusion that it was all but a part of the ceremony of which ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... singsong caused her almost physical pain. Hobbling to the window, she opened it so violently that it nearly fell from its warped frame, and cried out, "Get away from here, go along," and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Those whose unconquerable instinct impelled them to the more invigorating sam-shu had only to make known their natural desires. As the feast progressed, and the spirits of the company rose, the charms of music were added to the delights of appetite. A band of singsong girls gently beat their tom-toms, and carolled in soft and soothing strains. As they finished, a general desire to hear Mien-yaun was expressed. Willing, indeed, he was, and, after seven protestations that he could not think upon it, each fainter than the other, he suffered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... them. They rose at half-past five when the day dawned; after a bath in a pond in the grounds, they had a slice of rice-pudding with treacle on it, and then went to church for morning prayers. By seven o'clock they were all at lessons in the big room—such a buzzing and curious singsong of Chinese words—until nine, when the breakfast took place; rice, of course, and a sort of curry of vegetables, also a great dish of fish, either salt or fresh; a little tea for the elder children, no milk or sugar, and water for the rest. They soon learnt ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... came from the deck the singsong of men heaving up the anchor. When the serang stepped on board the greater part of the crew of the Good Intent were forward. Little time was spent in haggling. A melon was thrown up as a sample, and the price asked was so extraordinarily low that Captain Barker evidently thought ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... the little poem which later she was to recite; for this adorable little Lucy was, as a matter of course, to figure in the entertainment. It therefore happened that she heard not one note of Jim Patterson's painfully executed piece, for she was saying to herself in mental singsong a foolish little ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... around the ring of lodges announcing in singsong fashion the christening, and inviting everybody to a feast in honor of the event. A real American christening is always a gala occasion, when much savage wealth is distributed among the poor and old ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman |
