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cadences QUOTES

cadences QUOTES

1 " The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. "

― Ian McEwan , Black Dogs

2 " Here sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation echoed throughout the starless air of Hell;at first these sounds resounding made me weep:tongues confused, a language strained in anguishwith cadences of anger, shrill outcriesand raucous groans that joined with sounds of hands,raising a whirling storm that turns itselfforever through that air of endless black,like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows.And I, in the midst of all this circling horror,began, " Teacher, what are these sounds I hear?What souls are these so overwhelmed by grief?" And he to me: " This wretched state of beingis the fate of those sad souls who lived a lifebut lived it with no blame and with no praise.They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angelsneither faithful nor unfaithful to their God,who undecided stood but for themselves.Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out,but even Hell itself would not receive them,for fear the damned might glory over them." And I. " Master, what torments do they sufferthat force them to lament so bitterly?" He answered: " I will tell you in few words:these wretches have no hope of truly dying,and this blind life they lead is so abjectit makes them envy every other fate.The world will not record their having been there;Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them.Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by... "

3 " In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for those wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President's speech. "

― Oliver Sacks , The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

4 " She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty. "

― Laura Kalpakian , Educating Waverley

5 " Amazing things would never seize to unfold if you think with faith and walk to the cadences of courage, confidence and enthusiasm. "

6 " (LBJ) had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate "

― Robert A. Caro , Master of the Senate

7 " I had heard my brothers and sisters use curse words but had never dared use one myself in front of anyone. But I had practiced alone in my room lots of times, trying out different cadences and into nations: 'Fuck, fuck, fuck you, fucknut. Shit, shitstain, fucker! Go fuck a duck, you asswipe!' My favorite was, 'What a fucking cocksucker.' The plan was to say this casually to one of my new friends while one of our teachers walked by. No one in kindergarten ever really got my sense of humor, so I was hell-bent on making my mark in the first grade. "

― Chelsea Handler , My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

8 " T.S. Eliot said to me 'There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it’s in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character. "

― Ted Hughes , Letters of Ted Hughes

9 " For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. "

― Ralph Waldo Emerson , The Poet

10 " What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures. "

― Sven Birkerts , The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

11 " The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. "

― Robert Charles Wilson , Spin (Spin, #1)