Plaintive Quotes & Sayings

Light griefs are plaintive , but great ones are dumb — Seneca The Younger

The first thing we did was change all the clocks so that her siblings thought it was bedtime, then put them to bed ignoring their plaintive protests that they were not tired. They wept themselves to sleep soon enough. — Meg Cabot

The student skit at Christmas contained a plaintive line: "Give us Master's exams that our faculty can pass, or give us a faculty that can pass our Master's exams." — Paul Halmos

His body was as powerful as ever, looking as strong and exciting and cut as it did in my fantasies. He owned me in smooth, explicit strokes. But it was the noises he made that had me aching. The tight grunt each time his hips met mine. There was a helplessness in that plaintive sound. Something that said, Let me in, a plea trying to pass for an order. — Cara McKenna

I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian. — Walter Savage Landor

At this time of my parting, wish me good luck, my friends! The sky is flushed with the dawn and my path lies beautiful. Ask not what I have with me to take there. I start on my journey with empty hands and expectant heart. I shall put on my wedding garland. Mine is not the red-brown dress of the traveller, and though there are dangers on the way I have no fear in my mind. The evening star will come out when my voyage is done and the plaintive notes of the twilight melodies be struck up from the King's gateway. — Rabindranath Tagore

She didn't hear anything except a muted fuzzy silence. It was the first time in days and days she hadn't heard the ocean and the rain and the wind. She closed her eyes. Quiet. That would have been enough. For the scientist to have given her this minute of peace would have been enough. Then she heard a coo. Another longer coo, sliding from high to low. Oh, it was saying. Oh. Is it you? In answer came more ghostly, plaintive calls. The dolphins sang to each other. The songs pierced her chest like hot sticks, each call sharper than the last. She hoped Doug could hear them. She began to cry. — Diana Wagman

With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information. — Tina Brown

Ty swore. "Next time I'll be sucking you off instead of watching it hit your belly," he growled, earning a desperate, plaintive groan from his lover in response. Ty — Abigail Roux

April comes to us, with her showers sweet. I wake to the cries of little birds before the light comes across the heath. They wait all night with open eyes. Now, with the rain at dawn, their voices make melody.
I turn back the reveled cloth of gold on my bed and walk to gaze beyond my glazed casement window. In the plaintive voices of the wood fowl, I imagine my mother calling to me, her words echoing across the years. — Ned Hayes

Not a cute little whimper. Not a plaintive little wail. A full-throated, piercing "This Woman Has Kidnapped Me, Call the Cops" scream. — Sophie Kinsella

The proliferation of right-to-carry laws throughout the states has drawn plaintive complaints from the criminal element. They feel that it makes their profession too dangerous when the streets are full of "civilians" who may or may not be armed. Poor babies! — Jeff Cooper

Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air ... I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment. — Jane Johnson

The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire. — Jean Lorrain

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [ ... ] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. — Oliver Sacks

It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream. — Robert Schumann

The weary August days are long;
The locusts sing a plaintive song,
The cattle miss their master's call
When they see the sunset shadows fall. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep. — Pam Munoz Ryan

You came down from your throne and stood at my cottage door.
I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear. You came down and stood at my cottage door.
Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours. But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love. One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world, and with a flower for a prize you came down and stopped at my cottage door. — Rabindranath Tagore

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos. — Lydia M. Child

I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain. — Anne Michaels

I always dreamed 'bout ridin' the big wheel," Mick added, looking down at his shoes with a plaintive expression. "But me mom needs all the money I c'n make." He glanced around at the others and then back at me. Those big brown eyes - with long black lashes that were going to make him a real heartbreaker in a few years - were all the more effective because they were still brimming with tears from the ear twist. "But it's okay, Miss Kate. I don' wanna make no trouble for you. — Rysa Walker

And every day and every night they'd play upon my heart a song / So plaintive and so wild and strange that / all who heard it danced along / And sang and whirled and sank and trod and / skipped and slipped and reeled and rolled — Neil Gaiman

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Stop whining; you're eighteen years old and you keep acting like a puppy.
Throgh my complaint carried a teasing note, the irriated eddge behind it was real. The focus required by the hunt made me tense. It's not my fault. His plaintive reply came back. I've never had a tail before. I can't figure out what exactly it's supposed to do. It's so distracting. — Andrea Cremer

The pulse of India throbs in the music and the dance-drama. It is in the realm of living that India exposes herself, without consciousness. The poetry, the stoicism in the face of aching tragedy...the languishing air of over-rich beauty, the heaviness of joss-stick perfume...all these are India. The plaintive shepherd's flute surging across forbidding Himalayan valleys; a wandering Rajasthani minstrel intoning an hour-long ballad, carrying with him the breath of middle ages... — Peggy Holroyde

I didn't want to be in love with you. I didn't want to believe in love at all. It's never happened to me before. And to be perfectly frank, I'm still not entirely happy about the whole thing. I think - it's going to be exhausting. You're domineering and devious and I've noticed that whenever we're not kissing, I wish we were." Her voice had grown nearly plaintive; she stopped and cleared her throat. "It's a damnable situation. I don't know what to do about it."
He eyed her from the chair. "I'm pigheaded, too. Pray don't forget that."
"Certainly not. It was the next thing I was going to mention."
"My sweet, your notion of love is unique, to say the least. I wonder that you haven't written me sonnets already. Something like 'Ode to the Blackguard. — Shana Abe

And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath. — Thomas Hardy

You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. — Sylvia Plath

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!' — Linda Grant

I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?
Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.
Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.
Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes
The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon
That night when as summer waned I listened
To a languorous bird forever wroth
And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark
(The Voyager) — Pierre Albert-Birot

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil. — W.E.B. Du Bois

It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for. — Christopher Hitchens

Their howls rose to the sky and twisted together until they were on, and the other beasts joined in too, all of their voices creating a wild, plaintive song of sorry and abandon and anger and love. — Dave Eggers

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness. — John Steinbeck

She called me 'my lady,' " she told him in a plaintive voice. "I don't know who that is. I'm no lady." The last of his fury faded away to be replaced with a quick gleam. He peered under the sheet. "I can attest to that. — Thea Harrison

A familiar oak tree. A pine needle carpeted forest. She searches for secret messages from her dead father. The big house fills the background. Wind carries a sound of distant crying, and a plaintive voice sounding like her sister. — Michael Abramson

The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance. — Flora Rheta Schreiber

Always-
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions') — Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee. — Brandon Sanderson

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.
From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear- guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness. — Jerome K. Jerome

Don't be upset," he whispered.
"I couldn't stop it from happening," she said in a plaintive voice.
"You weren't supposed to," he said tenderly. "I was playing with you. Teasing you."
"But I wanted it to last longer. It's our wedding night, and it's already over." Pausing, Beatrix added glumly, "At least my part of it is."
Christopher averted his face, but she could see that he was struggling to contain a laugh. When he had mastered himself, he looked down at her with a slight smile and smoothed her hair back from her face. "I can make you ready again."
Beatrix was quiet for a moment as she evaluated her spent nerves and limp body. "I don't think so," she said. "I feel like a wrung-out kitchen mop."
"I promise to make you ready again," he said, his voice threaded with amusement.
"It will take a long time," Beatrix said, still frowning.
Gathering her into his arms, Christopher crushed his mouth over hers. "I can only hope so. — Lisa Kleypas

All things die not: while the soul lives, love lives: the song may be now gay, now plaintive, but it is deathless. — Mary Johnston

Yesterday's rain had left a bitter, springlike smell in the air; the vehemence that beat against her in the street and hummed above her had something a little wistful in it tonight, like a plaintive hand-organ tune. All the lovely things in the shop windows, the furs and jewels, roses and orchids, seemed to belong to her as she passed them. Not to have wrapped up and sent home, certainly; where would she put them? But they were hers to live among. — Willa Cather

The strident chimes of prayer bells from the distant temple resonated in the night air with ritual insistence, and nudged Kamala from her repose. What had once sounded to her like a sharp and persistent call to prayer now, with ceaseless repetition, mellowed to become plaintive and wistful, like one's favourite recording playing in the background to the syncopated percussion of lovemaking. (From the novel Blood & Nemesis by Ben Antao). — Ben Antao

Home"

It would take forever to get there
but I would know it anywhere:

My white horse grazing in my blossomy field.
Its soft nostrils. The petals
falling from the trees into the stream.

The festival would be about to begin
in the dusky village in the distance. The doe
frozen at the edge of the grove:

She leaps. She vanishes. My face -
She has taken it. And my name -

(Although the plaintive lark in the tall
grass continues to say and to say it.)

Yes. This is the place.
Where my shining treasure has been waiting.
Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain.

A few graves among the roses. Some moss
on those. An ancient

bell in a steeple down the road
making no sound at all
as the monk pulls and pulls on the rope. — Laura Kasischke

You can't come in."

Luna Morgan met her daughter's plaintive gaze with a blank one of her own. "What do you mean we can't come in?"

"I have a guest," Ivy said.

"Is he naked?" Max asked, wrinkling his nose.

"Who?"

"Your guest," Max said.

"It's not a man," Ivy said, rolling her eyes. "Get your mind out of the gutter. — Lily Harper Hart

As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard. — Edith Wharton

In these written tears alone have I expiated the hardness and ingratitude of my heart of eighteen years. I can never read over these verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will ever bring to me, - nor without hating myself. But souls above forgive. Hers has forgiven me. Forgive me, too, reader, for I have wept. — Alphonse De Lamartine

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?"
"If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress. — Anna Godbersen

If I sing "you broke my heart, you left me flat," everyone knows exactly what that means - they know the story. But if I sing a line that's plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It's open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that. — Bobby McFerrin

The day passed as it always did - in slow motion, with a thousand plaintive glances at the clock. But now it was even more unbearable, because every minute I wasted in school was another minute in which I failed to find her. — John Green

Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago. — William Wordsworth

O, brothers! let us leave the shame and sin Of taking vainly in a plaintive mood, The holy name of Grief
holy herein, That, by the grief of One, came all our good. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She hadn't been Rachel that night. She was evidence, a body of things to be picked and probed at, pictured and asked about, recorded and quoted. I want my life back. The voice was faint inside her own mind. She could hear the plaintive, almost despairing note to that voice. Like the wail of a scared child, this wasn't just about facing her fears. This was about everything. Her injuries, the loss of the life and world she'd once taken for granted, her long recovery. — Anais Torres

Don't ever leave me again," I said in a tiny voice.
I won't," he promised into my hair, sounding most un-Fang-like. "I won't. Not ever."
And just like that, a cold shard of ice that had been inside my chest ever since we'd split up-well, it just disappeared. I felt myself relax for the first time in I don't known how long. The wind was chilly, but the sun was bright, and my whole flock was together. Fang and I were together.
Excuse me? I'm alive too." Iggy's plaintive voice made me pull back. — James Patterson

A waltz begins, that floating, sweet rhythm. The fiddle is plaintive. A few minutes ago she was at least pleasantly contented. Now certain of the notes dip into her like ladles and come up full of loneliness. The people in the room recede. They are strangers, every one. — Anna Keesey

Sleep, elusive as a ghost, plaintive as a widow, and as easy to hold as the wind. — Jeff Salyards

If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow. — Boris Pasternak

All uncleanness seems washed clean in its lonely stretches ; the life-giving sun and ardent air must still bring singular joy, the eager morning breeze, the opalescent distance, the
plaintive evening sky all will continue to tell an exquisite if inarticulate story.
That Tripoli will remain, whatever the
Powers may decree. — Mabel Loomis Todd