Susurrus Quotes & Sayings

The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. — W.N.P. Barbellion

I took the conch shell and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for. — Ross Macdonald

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses
that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus. — China Mieville

Let go of it this instant, or I'll dump it's contents on your head and leave you to wallow in honeyed misery," he whispered in her ear, his amusement as plain as his threat.
Shahrzad froze, his breath tickling her skin.
"Do it and I'll bite your hand," she said. "Until you scream like a little boy."
He laughed--a rich susurrus of air and sound. "I thought you were tired of bloodshed. Perhaps I'll toss you over my shoulder. In front of everyone."
Refusing to comply with out a fight, she pinched his forearm until he grimaced. — Renee Ahdieh

Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them. — Milan Kundera

Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus. — Lev Grossman