Quotes About Intonation

What a woman says doesn't amount to shucks. It's the way she says it—that's what counts.

he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him.

Tone can be as important as text.

Sometimes my tone stinks.

The obvious priority is to get your intonation together. Your sound and your pitch should be inspiring to people, not a distraction.

Saying you love something out loud with the wrong intonation in your face can damn you and destroy what you're working on.

I'm sorry . . . what?" "For they are the Crows," he intoned solemnly, "and they are the harbingers of death.

vocal exercises, or vocalastics, as she called it, which involved singing the words Me, May, Ma, Mo, Moooo-oooo-oooo-ooo over and over again in ever-ascending pitches

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

How nice the human voice is when it isn't singing.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

I like a New York accent.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

There is no earthly reason why a solo string instrument or voice, having the possibility to play or sing pure intonation, should want, or try, to be tempered.

Only when you know the nuances of a language can you sing a song well.

A lot of cats in New Orleans, very soulful, very soulful musicians and they assume that they're singers. And they just make that assumption. And so when there's a little intonation problem, people are very forgiving of them because they heard how soulful they play.

I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.

the same voice and intonation each time you give a verbal cue and enunciate

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski's style.

Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning.

Mountains suggest pine-trees, the aboriginal, and let us hope, the never-to-be-exterminated dwellers upon their slopes... if ever our pine-forests are destroyed, the North will have lost the deepest intonation of its outdoor poetry. For the leaves of the pine are harp-strings played upon by the viewless presences of the air...

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.