Staccato Quotes

Music is another language, one so close to actual thought, strung together, sometimes staccato, flowing, and sometimes even nonsensical or harsh to the ears. It's truth in an otherwise dishonest world. ~ Moryah DeMott

I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

Anyone can discern the evils of the factory system or the Terror.
But it takes considerable wisdom to discern the evils embedded in the staccato blather of a seventeen-year-old girl. ~ Peter J. Leithart

A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternate world. Then they ceased communicating altogether. and began to liase in dreams and nightmares. ~ Will Self

The harmony of the universe knows only one musical form - the legato; while the symphony of number knows only its opposite - the staccato. All attempts to reconcile this discrepancy are based on the hope that an accelerated staccato may appear to our senses as a legato. ~ Tobias Dantzig

Samson's grace and surefootedness at breakneck paces was the closest Roxleigh had ever come to some semblance of peace in his life. His head was never clearer, his nerves were never calmer, and his mind was never more unbound than when he rode Samson. He listened to the horse's steady breathing, the exertion of his exhalations, and the steady beat of his hooves, punctuated by the swift silence of the jumps and the exclamation of the landing, like a staccato symphony. His mind unfurled its stressed tethers with the smooth action of Samson at full speed. ~ Jenn LeBlanc

What - what - what are you doing?" he demanded.
"I am almost six hundred years old," Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. "It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument." He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to. "It's called a charango. I am planning to become a charanguista!"
"I wouldn't call that an instrument of music," Ragnor observed sourly. "An instrument of torture, perhaps."
Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby. "It's a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell."
"That explains the sound you're making," said Ragnor. "Like a lost, hungry armadillo."
"You are just jealous," Magnus remarked calmly. "Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself."
"Oh, I am positively green with envy," Ragnor snapped.
"Come now, Ragnor. That's not fair," said Magnus. "You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion."
Magnus refused to be affected by Ragnor's cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune.
They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts ~ Cassandra Clare

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. ~ Charles Baudelaire

It's hard to say where a story begins and ends. You have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Somewhere between perception and reality. Between what is spoken and what is heard. Between what is written and what is edited out. I know this, you can't have an ending without a beginning. Even if they are really just random pieces of the middle that tend to stand out. Staccato notes on the page. Points on a circle. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts - the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it's inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature's way of signaling that "it's a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don't waste your precious resources on this situation; it's a false alarm. Laughter is nature's OK signal. ~ V.S. Ramachandran

When you love someone, there's a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one. It's a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It's just the way you've learned to fit. ~ Jodi Picoult

I would never sleep. I knew that. Not with my blood ringing in my ears, and my heart beating an angry staccato rhythm in my chest. I would never relax. ~ Ruth Ware

The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many different colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is like a newsreel- grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large numbers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything elsewhere. ~ Margaret Atwood

What do you do when you find yourself out in a lie - even a white one? Well, one thing for sure, you don't put on black, you don't mourn and beat out a staccato mea culpa on your breast. You go! Get the hell out! Take a chance! Forget you're an American, living in the suburbs of success, hoping to move into the big city ... You go! ~ Vincent Price

If a man is only as good as his word,
then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours.
The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian
in the same sentence - that really turns me on.
The way you describe the oranges in your backyard
using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath.

I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue
wrapping around your diction
until listening become more like dreaming
and dreaming became more like kissing you.

I want to jump off the cliff of your voice
into the suicide of your stream of consciousness.
I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die.
I want to map it out with a dictionary and points
of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart
than a strategy for communication.
I want to see where your words are born.
I want to find a pattern in the astrology.

I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions.
I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments,
in the haiku of your epiphanies.
I want to know all the names you've given your desires.
I want to find my name among them,

'cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word.
I want to thank whoever told you
there was no such thing as a synonym.
I want to throw a party for the heartbreak
that turned you into a poet.

And if ~ Mindy Nettifee

Via Negativa

Sometimes it's too hard with words or dark or silence.
Tonight I want a prayer of high-rouged cheekbones
and light: a litany of back-lit figures,
lithe and slim, draped in fabrics soft and wrinkleless and pale
as onion slivers. Figures that won't stumble or cough:
sleek kid-gloved Astaires who'll lift
ladies with glamorous sweeps in their hair -
They'll bubble and glitter like champagne.
They'll whisper and lean and waltz and wink effortlessly
as figurines twirling in music boxes, as skaters in their dreams.

And the prayer will not be crowded.
You'll hear each click of staccato heel
echo through the glassy ballrooms - too few shimmering skirts;
the prayer will seem to ache
for more. But the prayer will not ache.
When we enter, its chandeliers and skies
will blush with pleasure. Inside
we will be weightless, and our goodness will not matter
in a prayer so light, so empty it will float. ~ Mary Szybist

Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fucking cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beginning to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett. ~ Thomas Pynchon

He clutched the harmonica to his chest and cried into his pillow. He could have sworn he heard music...the Brahms...first as a child's lullaby, then a mournful lament, and finally, a staccato march, accompanied by the ominous sound of jackboots. ~ Pam Munoz Ryan

razor-thin hips glide across the lobby with determined expressions on their faces. The tapping of their stilettos on the marble floor rings out a harsh staccato rhythm like a machine gun. I've been working here for three ~ Evelyn Glass

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It's always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there's too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I st ~ Aidan Chambers

I heard a rapid alternation of notes,
a vibrating staccato of an ancient instrument,
nearly as old as nature herself,
a cricket singing
in my garden last night,
the first time this year.
When turning my garden's soil,
I often uncover crickets,
curmudgeons that scramble to find solitude
and cover from the light,
but I rarely hear their
ancient song 'till near
summer's end.

Although the wind is now lofting the branches
and rustling the leaves,
the evening sun
still warms my face.
And my garden still blooms full
with pink-papered hollyhocks
and blue, green spikes of lavender,
and roses,
bright pinks and yellows,
all glowing from sunshine-swelled canes,
and zinnias,
rainbow-shingled orbs,
and more.

And yet, I am already dreading
the coming of fall,
all dressed in small rags
of red, yellow, and orange.
I know that my summer garden
is nearing its end,
as hailed by the cricket's song. ~ Jeffrey A. White

My mind didn't register the sounds at first. The woods echoed with the staccato bursts of automatic weapons and people screaming, but it wasn't computing, like Crisco's head snapping back and the way he flopped into the gray dust like every bone in his body had suddenly turned into Jell-O, the way his killer had swung around in a perfectly executed pirouette with the barrel of the gun flashing in the sunlight. ~ Rick Yancey

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts. Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils. More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She's a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face. Melanie! ~ M.R. Carey

His words clip out like bullets from a gun - sharp, staccato, shiver-inducing. ~ Julie Johnson

Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast. ~ Roger Steffens

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into infinite richness of human sense and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of programmed games. ~ Ralph Nader

In today's world of blogging and tweeting, conversation has become a bit more staccato. In many ways we're more efficient, but I think the amount of longer conversations that radiated more warmth may have gone down. ~ Indra Nooyi

A Lancashire Weaver

This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
The machines now stand idle
Looms clatter no more
There's a stack of old bobbins
piled up by the door.
I remember my Mam
she worked here, so she said
A Lancashire weaver
but now she is dead
Along with this mill
and along with the dreams
of working mill lasses
and their jobs, so it seems
We once wove the best
cotton cloth in the world
But now that's all gone
on the scrap heap been hurled
The clatter of clogs
on the old cobbled street
the humdrum staccato
from thousands of feet.
Tough work and much hardship
and many a care
Folks they got by
for brass, it was rare
but still we had pride
By Christ, did we ever!
Will it ever come back
The answer is NEVER
This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
I'm glad that my Mam
never saw it this way
Out in all weathers
came here every day
When this closed down
she had already died
Perhaps just as well
She'd have bloody well cried. ~ David Hayes

My heart jumps out of staccato rhythm in my chest and my stomach sloshes around like the great foaming tides of Orcus. ~ Francesca Zappia

The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of wagons, and the staccato of hoofs. ~ H.G.Wells

One of the functions of landscape it to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think, and I think that's one thing landscapes give us: places to think longer, more uninterrupted thoughts or thoughts to a rhythm other than the staccato of navigating the city. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The walls and windows popped in staccato percussion as they relinquished the heat of the day. The soft chimes of the mantle clock supplied a beckoning melody. ~ Laura Rudacille

But I would make it through "Death Valley." Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life. ~ Kim Gordon

There it was, the land under 80 degrees, a land of stern magnificence, where icebergs rear up almost to the very mountaintops, and mountain rises above mountain; there it was, inviolate, alive to the raucous voice of millions of birds, the continuous staccato bark of foxes, the castanet click as the hoofs of great herds of deer fell in a swinging trot; there it was, surrounded by waters whose surface was slashed and sprayed by schools of walrus and whales that had swum there before ever man was born. ~ Jeannette Mirsky

It's the same whether we eat margarine or don't. Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it's basically the same. Sure we're tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C'mon now, there's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing."
"You were more innocent in the old days."
"Maybe so," I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. "And no doubt there's an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want."
The room was treated to an extended pen-on-desktop staccato solo. ~ Haruki Murakami

Chief Moroka was not as great an orator as most of the Native chiefs but he excelled in philosophy. In that respect his witty expressions and dry humour were equal to those of Moshueshue, the Basuto King. He spoke in a staccato voice, with short sentences and a stop after each, as though composing the next sentence. His speeches abounded in allegories and proverbial sayings, some traditional and others spontaneous. His own maxims had about them the spice of originality which always provided his auditors with much food for thought. [104] ~ Sol T. Plaatje

I'm not quite sure. Probably because "Hanky Panky" and "I Think We're Alone Now" had more to do with it than anything else. For some reason, staccato eighth notes on a bass sounded like bubblegum. Basically, groups like the 1910 Fruitgum Co. took my early format and kind of perverted it, and made these mindless pre-fab hits over and over. In the 60s, anybody who was making commercial music, that is music that didn't have a political slant to it, or wasn't taking drugs, was bubblegum. And that term kind of hung on a lot of people back then, and it's unfortunate. ~ Tommy James

Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volkempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies.
Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God. ~ Anthony Doerr

He broke off and eyed with dignified surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replied with a series of frowns and staccato shakes of the head, which her husband found easily translatable. Under the austere stare of Mr. Bodfish their faces at once regained their wonted calm, and the ex-constable in a somewhat offended manner resumed his inquiries. ~ W.W. Jacobs

It is one of the many savage ironies in a life suffused with tragedy, that, when she was still married to Prince Charles, one of Diana's most cherished ambitions was to spend a weekend in Paris without bodyguards or photographers, losing herself in the crowd. Instead, as life slipped from her, with the Mercedes horn mournfully blaring into the night like a macabre 'Last Post', her adult life ended as it had begun, in the brazen, staccato embrace of the camera flash. Even in the city of dreams she could not escape her past. ~ Andrew Morton

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page. ~ Robert Cormier

He plunged into the foliage, and was swept into a humid, wet world of towering trees, animal chirps and thick ferns. After a few steps, he turned, and could barely make out the village. He walked a few more steps. He could see nothing now except for the thick trees and long ferns and grasses that surrounded him. He was enveloped into the confined space between trees, surrounded by the jungle heat and staccato chirps. He turned in the direction of the village, but could only see thick, dense trees. Hoping his sense of direction had not been muddled, he turned back around to the direction of the alleged ocean, and kept walking.

Now the calls he heard sounded more and more strange. How far had he walked by now? The jungle, or rain forest, whatever it was, did not relent, and he kept on weaving into narrow gaps between the sturdy ferns and towering trees, pressing onwards. This continued for a seemingly oppressive amount of time, and he began to doubt his decision. To come to this place. To take a chance with his life, which was going in the right direction. Why couldn't he be happy with the normal and mundane, he cursed, scolding his own stubbornness ~ T.P. Grish

The rhythm of my career has always been very static, staccato and then silent, and then a lot of work, and then none. ~ Holly Hunter

What are you doing here?" a deep voice demanded. My heart burst into a rapid staccato as I swung around, ready to defend myself. Only instead of a guard or employee, Giguhl sat a few feet away laughing at me.
"Dammit, you scared the crap out of me."
He laughed, a spooky noise coming from an even spookier-looking cat. "You should have seen your face. ~ Jaye Wells

Lettuce harvests in Salinas, melons in Brawley, grapes in Parlier, oranges in Ontario, cotton in Firebaugh -- and, finally, Santa Clara, the prune country. And because this place was pleasing to the eye, or because they were tired of their endless migration, Juan Rubio and his wife settled here to raise their children. And, remembering his country, Juan thought that his distant cousin, the great General Zapata, had been right when, in speaking of Juan, he once said to Villa, 'He will go far, that relative of mine.'

Now this man who had lived by the gun all his adult life would sit on his haunches under the prune trees, rubbing his sore knees, and think, Next year we will have enough money and we will return to our country. But deep within he knew he was one of the lost ones. And as the years passed him by and his children multiplied and grew, the chant increased in volume and rate until it became a staccato NEXT YEAR! NEXT YEAR!

And the chains were incrementally heavier on his heart. ~ José Antonio Villareal