Top 30 Plaintive Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
Lydia M. Child
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Sleep, elusive as a ghost, plaintive as a widow, and as easy to hold as the wind.
Jeff Salyards
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Always-
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. All things die not: while the soul lives, love lives: the song may be now gay, now plaintive, but it is deathless.
Mary Johnston
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
