Rattling Sound Quotes & Sayings

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! — Milan Kundera

Standing at my door, I heard the discharge of a gun, and in four or five seconds of time, after the discharge, the small shot came rattling about me, one or two of which struck the house; which plainly demonstrates that the velocity of sound is greater than that of a cannon bullet. — Benjamin Banneker

Wagons rattling and banging,
horses neighing and snorting,
conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip,
fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off
so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!
And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger,
blocking the way and weeping
ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.
And a passerby asks, "What's going on?"
The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time.
From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north,
and even at forty some work the army farms in the west.
When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them;
when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier.
The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,
and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended. — Du Fu

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there. — Vine Deloria Jr.

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back. — Bram Stoker

She moved suddenly, planting her hands against the kitchen floor. Throwing back her head, she screamed, and that sound was full of sorrow and heartbreak. It started as a low tremble under my feet and then increased, shaking the kitchen table and rattling the plates and cups in the cabinets. Then it was a rumble, causing the house to groan and small clouds of dust to drop from the ceiling. The table scuttled over the floor. A chair toppled over and then another. Somewhere in the living room, a window shattered. Kat was going to bring the house down. Shit. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The lesson for this Round, as we shall hear time and again, is that each generation inhabits a different acoustic universe, constituted by different musics and memories of sound, by different thicknesses of walls and densities of traffic, by different means of manufacture and broadcast, by different diets and ear-damaging diseases, by different proportions and preponderances of metal rattling in kitchens, clanging on the streets, or ringing in the ( differently polluted) air above. — Hillel Schwartz

[F]reedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable. — Bill Maher

Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. — Gillian Flynn

...Roland de Chumsfanleigh (it wasn't his fault). — Terry Pratchett

Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I've been of some help. It's coming upon closing time, and I don't stay around here one minute more than I need to. We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good — John D. MacDonald

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil. — Desmond Tutu

The teams who play against us don't give us any gifts, but we were too kind. — Robert Laurent

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. — Steven Millhauser

It's just a stupid sword, she said, aloud this time ...
... but it wasn't.
Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell's grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan's stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow's smile. — George R R Martin

Frank, hunched against a bastard wind knifing in off the Irish Sea, isn't sure at first where the sound is coming from. It's barely light and a soft insistent hiss sits below the whining gale, like white-noise feedback at song's end. He leans a little closer and realises the source is sand rattling against the charred skin stretched tom-tom tight across the dead man's face. — Ed Chatterton

There is a mirror across from me, and I check my reflection in it before heading home. Despite the bone-deep fatigue and the growing fear and frustration, I look ... fine. Da always said he'd teach me to play cards. Said I'd take the bank, the way things never reach my eyes. There should be something - a tell, a crease between my eyes, or a tightness in my jaw.
I'm too good at this.
Behind my reflection I see the painting of the sea, slanting as if the waves crashing on the rocks have hit with enough force to tip the picture. I turn and straighten it. The frame makes a faint rattling sound when I do. Everything in this place seems to be falling apart. — Victoria Schwab

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

There the black horse stood - his feet planted firm on the ground, afraid to move. His coat was covered in sweat and a stark white rim lined his eyes. All three of us gawked at his sudden silence. The rattling metal gate was now the only sound. — Brittney Joy

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite. — Paul Theroux

Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell's grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan's stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow's smile. He used to mess my hair and call me "little sister," she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. — George R R Martin

I'm close to my mother's heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband's voice, and there's an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I'd say it's a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth. — Ian McEwan

I never hear the rattling of dice that it does not sound to me like the funeral bell of the whole family. — Douglas William Jerrold

Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and howling through the forest - moaning with a hungry sound as it strips the leaves from the bare boughs, and whirls them into the air. High over the tree-tops, in a widespread, trailing, noisy crew, there fly, with resounding cries, flocks of birds which seem to darken and overlay the very heavens. Then a strange feeling comes over one, until one seems to hear the voice of some one whispering: "Run, run, little child! Do not be out late, for this place will soon have become dreadful! Run, little child! Run!" And at the words terror will possess one's soul, and one will rush and rush until one's breath is spent - until, panting, one has reached home. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door
Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there. — Weldon Kees

He looked around when he heard a window-rattling roar. "Earthquake? Volcano? Nuclear war?" "Beaver," Peter told him. "I don't care if it is Alaska, you don't have beavers big enough to sound like that. — Nora Roberts

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. — Chuck Palahniuk