Brassy Quotes & Sayings

Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children - not to mention our president - cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his "Laments for a dying language":

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. — Charles Yang

Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp. — Anne Sexton

Because your heart accelerates with the thrumming of the tympani and the brassy blast of the horn section; it keeps tempo, marks time, this junior-sized metronome in your chest, and your entire body pulsates with the rhythm of the music; you can't help but be carried away by it as you listen and take it all in. You are mesmerized, you are utterly fascinated. — John Rowell

It would be good now, I thought, to be in Paris. The afternoon city heat would have gone. It would be good to sit under the trees near the marionette theatre. It would be quiet there now. There would be no one there but a student or two reading. There you could listen to the rustle of leaves unconscious of the pains of humanity in labour, of a civilisation hastening to its own destruction. There, away from this brassy sea and blood-red earth, you could contemplate the twentieth-century tragedy unmoved; unmoved except by pity for mankind fighting to save itself from the primeval ooze that welled from its own subconscious being. — Eric Ambler

10 faint heart -fearing: 3 God fearing combining form: 6 -phobic Fear Inside, The (1992 film) cast: Christine Lahti, Dylan McDermott, Jennifer Rubin Fear in the Night director: 5 Shane fearless: 4 bold, game 5 brave, cocky, gutsy, nervy, stout 6 awless, brassy, daring, gritty, heroic, plucky, spunky 7 assured, aweless, dashing, defiant, doughty, gallant, impavid, leonine, staunch, valiant 8 heroical, intrepid, resolute, spirited, stalwart, unafraid, valorous 9 audacious, confident, dauntless, dreadless, unabashed, undaunted 10 courageous, mettlesome, — Stanley Newman

Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There's a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There's heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse. And there is coppery fear, drawn tight as the strings of a violin, quavering on one single note that cannot possibly be sustained for a single second longer - but goes on and on and on, the tension before the crash of cymbals, the brassy challenge of the horns, the threatening rumble of the kettle drums. That's the kind of fear I felt. Horrible, clutching tension that left the coppery flavor of blood on my tongue. Fear of the creatures in the darkness around me, of my own weakness, the stolen power the Nightmare had torn from me. And fear for those around me, for the folk who didn't have the power I had. — Jim Butcher

The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old. — Ted Hughes

And look, I was a big, brassy guy who won and won big. I did what I wanted. — Brian Mulroney

She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy. — Alice Pung

I'm usually cast as the sassy, brassy best friend. — Annie Parisse

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth. — Steve Almond

The Gong lived in the Pit. It made a loud, brassy "nnnnnnngggggggggg" that set everyone's teeth on edge. Any deal over 50K per annum, the salesman got to take a whack at it, so that the whole company would know he'd landed a big fish. — Lori Berhon

It had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress . — Pat Conroy

July is hollyhocks and hammocks, fireworks and vacations, hot and steamy weather, cool and refreshing swims, beach picnics, and vegetables all out of the garden - first sweet corn on the cob dripping with butter, first tomatoes dead ripe and sunwarm, string beans, squash, crisp cucumbers. July can also be hard and shiny, brassy and sharp. Some days are like copper pennies in the sunlight. — Jean Hersey

Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter, since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the same ponderance and brassy assurance. If it was not Babbitt who was delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor who did deliver it. (p. 116) — Sinclair Lewis

As hard as it is to date someone with nineteenth-century manners-seriously, it's getting to a point where I spend so much time swimming laps in the campus pool to work off my sexual frustration, my highlights are becoming brassy-I still feel a thrill every time Jesse calls me Susannah. He thinks the name everyone else calls me-Suze-is too short and ugly for someone of my strength and beauty. — Meg Cabot

With young people, it's how brassy and flashy can you be. But you get a bit older, it's about how restrained can you be. You have to feel it all, think it all, but you don't have to play it - it's just gotta be there, and if the story's good and the script's good, people will see it. — Robert Taylor

The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed. — Rose Wilder Lane

A thousand feet above the crash site the flock of crows re-formed, drew into a tight cloud that took on the shape of a scythe as it flew low across the town, wheeling and soaring, filling the cool clear air with their brassy cries, and then it rose up in one coherent mass and disappeared into the east in the direction of Tallulah's Wall. — Carsten Stroud

Deliverance is to the Bible what jazz music is to Mardi Gras: bold, brassy, and everywhere. — Max Lucado

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way. — Peter York

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven't got mob psychology anymore. You can't have mob psychology when people don't give a damn what happens to a thing that's dead already - a political system that broke down under its own weight. — Clifford D. Simak

I've made a wonderful living playing that theatrical character - the professional brassy dame. — Ethel Merman