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Bells Quotes

Quotes tagged as "bells" Showing 1-28 of 28
Edgar Allan Poe
“I

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.


II

Hear the mellow wedding bells -
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight! -
From the molten - golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! - how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!


III

Hear the loud alarum bells -
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now - now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale - faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells -
Of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
In the clamor and the clanging of the bells!


IV

Hear the tolling of the bells -
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people - ah, the people -
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone -
They are neither man nor woman -
They are neither brute nor human -
They are Ghouls: -
And their king it is who tolls: -
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells: -
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells: -
To the sobbing of the bells: -
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells, -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. ”
Edgar Allan Poe

Dorothy L. Sayers
“The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo--tan tin din dan bam bim bo bom--tan dan tin bam din bo bim bom--every bell in her place striking tuneably, hunting up, hunting down, dodging, snapping, laying her blows behind, making her thirds and fourths, working down to lead the dance again. Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells--little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity and old Batty Thomas, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. Up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the scarlet sallies flickering roofwards and floorwards, and up and down, hunting in their courses, went the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors

Dejan Stojanovic
“From one bell all the bells toll.”
Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells,
and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Dorothy L. Sayers
“The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Mick Herron
“Noon comes with bells on, because this is London, and London is a city of bells. From its heart to its ragged edges, they bisect the day in a jangle of sound: peals and tinkles and deep bass knells. They ring from steeples and clocktowers, from churches and town halls, in an overlapping celebration of the everyday fact that time passes.”
Mick Herron, London Rules

Charles Dickens
“The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora's youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles do in water.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Victor Hugo
“Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest.”
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Georges Rodenbach
“Bruges had the air of a ghost town. The high towers, the trees along the canals withdrew, absorbed by the same muslin: impenetrable fog with not a single rift. Even the carillon seemed to have to escape, to force its way out of a prison yard filled with cotton wool to be free in the air, to reach the gables over which, every quarter of an hour, the bells poured, like falling leaves, a melancholy autumn of music.”
Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

George Orwell
“All the while they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.”
George Orwell, 1984

Leland Dirks
“Her laughter changed her voice from wind chimes to the jingling of sleigh bells.”
Leland Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven

Jesse Jackson
“If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.”
Jesse Jackson

Patrick Leigh Fermor
“Dropping toward the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water
tags: bells

Georges Rodenbach
“The carillon is, after all, the music of the people. Elsewhere, in the glittering capitals, public festivals are celebrated with fireworks, that magical offering that can thrill the very soul. Here, in the meditative land of Flanders, among the damp mists so antagonistic to the brilliance of fire, the carillon takes their place. It is a display of fireworks that one hears: flares, rockets, showers, a thousand sparks of sound which colour the air for visionary eyes alerted by hearing.”
Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

Edgar Allan Poe
“Of the bells, bells, bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells”
Edgar Allan Poe
tags: bells

“None of us came here for the bells and whistles. It's [for] the personnel. These meetings? Like the one where you got your ass kicked? That's what makes you a better doctor. That's all that matters.”
Dr. Gato Villanueva Monday Mornings

Felix Wantang
“The doorbells of Heaven were designed for the prayers of the poor.”
Felix Wantang, Face to Face Meetings with Jesus Christ 2: Preparing for God's Paradise

Georges Rodenbach
“He was still climbing. Here and there doors opened revealing vast rooms, dormitories with heavy joists where bells were sleeping. A vague feeling stirred within Borluut as he went over to them. They were not entirely at rest,just as virgins are never completely at rest. Their sleep was visited by dreams. He felt as if they were about to move, stretch, moan like sleepwalkers. The incessant murmuring among the bells! A noise that persists, like the sound of the sea in shells! They never empty themselves entirely. Sound forming like beads of sweat! A condensation of music on the bronze...”
Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

Betty MacDonald
“Far off down the road, through the lazily drifting snowflakes, they could hear the merry sound of sleigh bells. Their gay little tinkling flying ahead of the sleigh and lighting up the night with sparks.”
Betty MacDonald, Nancy and Plum

“Тем же, кто говорит, что я гений, возникший из ничего, и что талант мой расцвёл внезапно, - им скажу я: Упражняйтесь! Упражняйтесь! Ибо нет другого пути к величию.”
Richard Harwell

“Надежда, этот зверь с тысячью жизней, вновь зажглась в глазах Дуфта.”
Richard Harwell

Ruth Ann Oskolkoff
“The afternoon light glistened onto the green leaves. Tinkling bells that hung on a string moved slightly. A squirrel ran through the bushes, and a snail slowly made its way across a muddy corner, which was still damp from the morning.”
Ruth Ann Oskolkoff, Zin

Daphne du Maurier
“The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.”
Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel
tags: bells

Charles Dickens
“They were old Chimes, trust me. Centuries ago, these Bells had been baptized by bishops: so many centuries ago, that the register of their baptism was lost long, long before the memory of man, and no one knew their names. They had had their Godfathers and Godmothers, these Bells (for my own part, by the way, I would rather incur the responsibility of being Godfather to a Bell than a Boy), and had their silver mugs no doubt, besides. But Time had mowed down their sponsors, and Henry the Eighth had melted down their mugs; and they now hung, nameless and mugless, in the church-tower.”
Charles Dickens

Georges Rodenbach
“Even during the nights, their nights punctuated by unending kisses, they were sometimes irritated by the carillon, which sounded every quarter of an hour from the top of the belfry opposite. A slow, indistinct jingling which seemed to come from far, far away, from the depths of childhood, from the depths of the ages. It was like a dead bouquet falling, an autumn of sound shedding its leaves over the town. ("The Dead Town")”
Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

Sofka Zinovieff
“Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.

~Ralph”
Sofka Zinovieff, Putney

Sarah J. Maas
“Beyond us, all around us, the screams of the dying were like the never-ending pealing of the city's warning bells.”
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin

Laura Chouette
“Campus

Shirt sleeves half out of the jeans,
Eyes grounding the green while looking
All around for Christmas nights.

Blue sounds of church bells ringing
On morning streets and alleys
Are rewritten in archways beneath.

The campus is clear of recitation,
And the steps lead to none other than doors
That keep opening to New Year’s hope.”
Laura Chouette