DISSONANCE in sample sentences

One advantage of being thoughtless, is you don’t suffer as much from dissonance when you act in contradiction to your stated beliefs.

A felt a certain dissonance after arguments with his girlfriend, but he was still convinced he was a loving and supportive man.

At Magee, they did a wonderful job of simultaneously communicating two dissonant things. In so many words, they told parents that 1) Your child is special and we understand that his medical needs are unique, and 2) Don’t worry, we’ve had a million babies like yours come through here.

Randy Pausch -- The Last Lecture

They spoke of dissonance, of the demonic realms and dark, fell powers.

Cassandra Clare -- City of Heavenly Fire

Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent.

Bryan Stevenson -- Just Mercy

It bounced off the ant’s forehead with a dissonant twang.

Rick Riordan -- The Trials of Apollo

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On its side in enormous white letters bordered in black was the inscription KAKOFONOUS A. DISCHORD, and below in slightly smaller black letters bordered in white was DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE.

Norton Juster -- The Phantom Tollbooth

And suddenly she knew why this was so, why this sonorous and noble statement so filled with peculiar, chilling dissonances should flood her spirit with relief and recognition and joy.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

Grover Underwood and a team of satyrs danced around with their panpipes, playing harmonies so dissonant that the earthen-shelled ghosts cracked apart.

Rick Riordan -- The Blood of Olympus

They met the Dissonant Toad, which could imitate human speech in a gravelly voice.

Lemony Snicket -- The Reptile Room

The place doesn’t even look open, but Cressida pushes through the front door, setting off a dissonant chiming.

Suzanne Collins -- Mockingjay

His head was bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to drop.

Joseph Heller -- Catch-22

He was startled by the loud and dissonant voice of a man who was apparently dismounting at the door.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

There already existed between them all the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Perhaps Brandt’s as well, though he did what he could to ignore Walter, plugging his ears and humming a dissonant tune.

Stephenie Meyer -- The Host

The rumble and roar of the city smite the nerves of my face, and I feel the ceaseless tramp of an unseen multitude, and the dissonant tumult frets my spirit.

Helen Keller -- Story of My Life

There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear.

Malcolm Gladwell -- Blink

There was a dissonance, faint, every two minutes across the water, and finally even that disappeared.

David Guterson -- Snow Falling on Cedars

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,—who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,—that it faltered here and failed him.

Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.

Ralph Ellison -- Invisible Man

A baker’s cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the latest vestige of night’s sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son.

John Milton -- Paradise Lost

There was the awful dissonance of a lone horse galloping riderless.

Laura Hillenbrand -- Seabiscuit

And in due time, he found Glumra and informed her of Kvistor’s demise, and now he sat listening as she grieved for her slain child, alternating between wordless howls and scraps of Dwarvish sung in a haunting, dissonant key.

Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr

As the music, enlivened by unscored dissonances, swelled to a raucous climax, she gripped the wooden sides of her chair, closed her eyes.

Ian McEwan -- Atonement

The rock group gyrated to its outer limits, frantic dissonance worthy of the scene.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy

She had been awakened from her siesta by the thundering artillery that made the earth tremble, by the dissonances of the marching bands, the confusion of funeral hymns over the clamoring bells in all the churches, which had been ringing without pause since the previous day.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera

The dissonance woke him.

Dave Eggers -- Zeitoun

Nothing had alarmed me quite so much since I had come to the Institute as the volatile dissonance of that exquisite soundlessness.

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

The alarm had been tripped, the sound deafening, riding over the dissonance in the street; the gunshot seemed muted by comparison, the eruption of asphalt below not heard.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Identity

Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were upon him, and the morning’s dissonances all unheard.

Sinclair Lewis -- Babbitt

The Citroën navigated the chaos with authority, its dissonant two-tone siren parting the traffic like a knife.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

He could hear dissonant music from inside and the sound of an occasional yell.

John Ringo -- Live Free or Die

From another came a dissonant piping that made the dragon lash his tail wildly from side to side.

George R.R. Martin -- A Clash of Kings

Voices call to her in ragged words stitched together from many languages, like dissonant scraps of quilt.

Christina Garcia -- Dreaming in Cuban

What dissonance can quench it?

Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel

We walk down a flight of narrow stairs where the echo of our footsteps layers over itself, dissonant and hollow.

Veronica Roth -- Allegiant

The piece was intensely moving, a rapid patter of notes interrupted by brusque chords and a simmering dissonance.

Henry H. Neff -- The Fiend And The Forge

Strong dissonance.

Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road

It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.

James Baldwin -- Notes of a Native Son

Since turning fifty, Matron had noticed such dissonances and disconnections between her thought and action; they were becoming common.

Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone

Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.

Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit

Would it not be, like living one’s life over again, infinitely painful and dissonant?

Mark Helprin -- A Soldier of the Great War

By the end of the 1930s, Bonfiglio says, "New York speech had become dissonant with the notions of heartland American linguistic and ethnic purity."

Robert MacNeil and William Crane -- Do You Speak American?

To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance.

Don DeLillo -- Underworld

"Send the boys off to the right," exclaimed the resolute wife and mother, in a sharp, dissonant voice; "I warrant me, Asa, or Abner will give some account of the creature!"

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Prairie