Intonations Quotes & Sayings

French, spoken by a number of people at a distance, strongly resembles the quacking conversation of ducks and geese, with its nasal elements. English, on the other hand, has a slower pace, and much less rise and fall in its intonations. Spoken at a distance where individual voices are impossible to distinguish, it has the gruff, friendly monotony of a sheepdog's barking. — Diana Gabaldon

She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt
without answering it. — Sinclair Lewis

***A SMALL THEORY***
People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and its ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. — Markus Zusak

You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life. — Richard Blanco

People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. — Markus Zusak

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. — Marcel Proust

Well, I really don't know what the secret of success is but I can tell you that the secret of failure is to try to please everyone. — Bill Cosby

It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change. — Martin McDonagh

I never set out to be a photographer. — David Bailey

I had a really fantastic dialect coach that I worked very well with, and I was constantly surprised by the different intonations that the Russian dialect has. — Andrew Scott

change was coming — Amy Lichtenhan

I am convinced there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds. — Carl Sagan

And it's a preference, a long-held preference, what you might call a 'habit of mind' - putting words into other people's mouths. And those people are played by people whose profession is to pretend to be other people. For which purpose, they adopt gestures, voices, intonations, even sexual attitudes not their own. On stage, they affect to be ravished and amused by someone whom they will, afterwards, run a mile to avoid having dinner with. Likewise, they spit torrents of abuse against an actor who later, later, in the softness of the night, they will share their bed with. — David Hare

I am used to wearing corsets. Even when I was first starting out it was either Shakespeare or Chekov. Everything that I was doing involved corsets. I guess I am just not destined to breathe that deeply. — Kate Beckinsale

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. — Jorge Luis Borges

If you're cast right you can actually just let yourself go because all your gestures will be right, all your intonations will be right because you just somewhere understand who this person is. — Susan Sullivan

I love accents; I would love to find more characters with a variety of vocal intonations. It creates a character. It's like you're singing a song. Some people find their character through walking or movement - for me, voice is one of the ways I find parts of the character. — Stana Katic

"I've learned what's funny verbally ain't so funny on e-mail: They don't hear your intonations. Melissa broke up with somebody over that. She tried to tell him: "That was a joke!" But he just didn't get it. Mick Jagger said, "F- 'em if they don't get the joke." And I love him. That comes with age: Knowing it's their problem, not mine." — Joan Rivers

My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked. — Cheryl Strayed

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body. — Stanislav Grof

[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [ ... ] that everyone did it. — Vladimir Nabokov

I was thinking about the cow thing. About how hanging on to an ex-boyfriend is like chewing your cud until somebody drops a fresh bale of hay in front of you. Or something like that. — Dandi Daley Mackall

There's a great freedom of forms and intonations in Luigi Fontanella's poetry. He doesn't take a strong formal stand; his poetry entertains moments of nearly proselike colloquial narrative along with moments of powerful lyrical tension. There is a movement of extremes, from powerful tonality to near atonality, and I like this a great deal; it's a stance that very effectively catches the spirit that makes work in poetry possible nowadays. — Giovanni Raboni

What if more women, mothers, gave birth as an ecstatic celebration of female sexuality? Mothers who do will often declare, "Now I can do anything!" What would the world look like if half of our population felt empowered to make a difference with their lives? — Jeannine Parvati Baker

The script is like music to me. I approach it like it's a musical piece and I hear how it's supposed to sound when people say the words. There's rhythms and there's intonations and things, and so, when somebody comes in and hits the notes that I hear, I go okay. Or, they come close enough, and then I'll say "Well how about you try it like this?" and if they have a good ear and they can pick it up, then I think okay, they've got it. — Rob Reiner

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God. — Karen Armstrong

A day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. — Markus Zusak

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author. — Sarah Zettel

The people talking on their cell phone and following GPS instructions to where grandma's house is saying I don't need space - excuse me, that's how you know where grandma lives, and when to make the left turn. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Live each day with ecstatic serenity — Lailah Gifty Akita

...the intranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions. — Arthur Phillips

FIREFLAKES: The stars; as transitory as snowflakes only their transitoriness is protracted. — Amy Leach

Lungs but could, conceivably, struggle along indefinitely — John Green

One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space - not just space but a necessity - for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to reach and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. There was where Austen's danger lay. — Azar Nafisi

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today. — Paul Weller

With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. — Bob Shacochis

People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. — Markus Zusak