Modulated Quotes & Sayings

Vere spoke again, "You want us to hide this six-foot-three, positively gorgeous, famous rock star - one who has sports-drink blue eyes BY THE WAY - and who is absolutely PERFECT looking, at Palmer Divide High? In this town? In my junior class?"
"Yes," Mrs. Roth answered. "Why is it such a difficult concept for you to grasp?"
"Because guys who look like that." She pointed a finger at him. "Do not come from this town. In addition to the face, he's too tall, and he's got the posture of some Russian - ballerina! And did you not notice his voice?"
"What's wrong with my voice?" Hunter frowned.
"It's all LOW and, SUPER-MANLY-AMAZING," she modulated her voice down, trying to sound like him.
Charlie cracked up, and Hunter had to bury his own laugh. — Anne Eliot

Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. — J.G. Ballard

The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call "cads versus dads."103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the "cad" end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women. — Steven Pinker

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development. — Torsten Wiesel

If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for depriving you of it. Realizing its advantages, I have deliberately mixed a little bitterness into it to prevent you from embracing it too greedily and imprudently. To place you in the state of moderation I ask of you, of neither running from life nor fleeing from death, I have modulated them both between sweet and bitter. — Michel De Montaigne

I have a baby that is 21 months old, and I watch Disney Junior with him. A lot of those shows are about pirates. Even the T-shirts and pajamas I buy for him have pirate themes like, 'Aye-aye, argh and mate.' But, I definitely grew up watching pirates. — Yasmine Al Masri

The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or "master" interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman's picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music. — Oliver Sacks

As Augustine says, God is at once both nearer than what is inmost to me and beyond what is highest in me. We can say all of this with some confidence merely because we can observe the divine simplicity's plural expressions and effects in contingent things, and from those abstract toward the reality of their unconditioned source. But, in the end, how that simplicity might be "modulated" within itself is strictly unimaginable for us. At that uncrossable intellectual threshold, religions fall back upon inscrutable doctrines, philosophers upon inadequate concepts, and mystics upon silence. "Si comprehendis, non est deus," as Augustine says: If you comprehend it, it is not God. — David Bentley Hart

Sol, listen," came the Voice, modulated now so it did not boom from far above but almost whispered in his ear, "the future of humankind depends upon your choice. Can you offer Rachel out of love, if not obedience?" Sol heard the answer in his mind even as he groped for the words. There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. Not this time. Not ever again. — Dan Simmons

I was examining the perfumed, coloured candles guaranteed to bring good fortune with continued use when a lovely mocha-skinned girl came in from the back room and stood behind the counter. She wore a white smock over her dress and looked about nineteen or twenty. Her wavy, shoulder-length hair was the colour of polished mahogany. A number of thin, silver hoops jingled on her fine-boned wrist. "May I help you?" she asked. Just beneath her carefully modulated diction lingered the melodic calypso lilt of the Caribbean. — William Hjortsberg

If you will, then you will, for nothing can withstand your will. As your faith is, so you are, where your mind is there you are. — Todd Rundgren

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation. — Kathy Acker

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books. — Vladimir Nabokov

Your minds PERCEPTION of the past will change your future vision, and either prevent or propel forward progress in life. — Joe Goodrich

A fine image is geometry, modulated by the heart — Willy Ronis

Channel the power of anger into the admirable qualities of passion, strength, and conviction or courage. Use quiet, carefully modulated words surrounding an edge of steel. — Gerald J. Lieberman

Every set up that you do, everything is precisely modulated and raised and lowered." — Robert De Niro

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!'
And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good. — Christopher Isherwood

First and foremost, the monk should own nothing in this world, but he should have as his possessions solitude of the body, modesty of bearing, a modulated tone of voice, and a well-ordered manner of speech. He should be without anxiety as to his food and drink, and should eat in silence. — Saint Basil

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable. — Lynne Truss

Every modulated sound is not a song, and every voice that executes a beautiful air does not sing. Singing should enchant. But to produce this effect there must be a quality of soul and voice which is by no means common even with great singers. — Joseph Joubert

I cook a mean Sunday lunch. My idea of Heaven is a lunch outside on a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon. It's the time to gather everyone together. — Cate Blanchett

The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life. — Joseph Joubert

As I was fixing in the bathroom, I thought about how I used to tell my ex Anne that there was "no reality." Light merely entered the eye and was translated into electrical signals which were translated into chemical signals translated into gestalts and translated into electrical signals again and so on. It was all a dream of a dream of a dream signifying a source which could be reality of which we experienced only distant modulated echoes of ripples.This used to really annoy her because she suspected it had something to do with my failure to get a job. — Carl-John X. Veraja

Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable. — Sally Mann

The clearest short-term yardstick may be the PSA nadir (discussed above). One study of 743 patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York confirmed that higher-intensity radiation does a better job of achieving a rock-bottom PSA level. Of the men who received higher doses - 76 to 81 Gy - 90 percent achieved a PSA nadir of 1.0 ng/ml or less; 76 percent of men who received 70 Gy and 56 percent of men who received 64.8 Gy achieved those low PSA levels. But there was a trade-off - the men who received higher doses of radiation also had a significantly higher rate of gastrointestinal side effects, urinary tract complications, and impotence. To overcome these side effects at high doses, intensity-modulated radiation therapy — Patrick C. Walsh

The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends. — Geoffrey Dutton

No seriously ... when there's families, you tend to go back to your room after the gig rather than go for a drink with the other guys. But there's always someone who's got something going, like the tour manager. — Phil Collins

I have never told a lie or modulated my natural voice ... I can't help what people think sounds male or female. — Alice Hastings Bradley

What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times. — Henry David Thoreau

The American dream is a crock. Stop wanting everything. Everyone should wear jeans and have three T-shirts, eat rice and beans. — Bill Hicks

Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion. — Robert Charles Wilson

Knowledge is potential power, but wisdom is the readily available power of the mind. — Debasish Mridha

Basically, I started on stage yelling and I kept yelling, and then I yelled some more, and then I yelled even louder. I'm modulated now. — Lewis Black