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monotone
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  • The reporter appeared again on the grainy screen, his hair blowing upward like a boat's sail in the light wind, the monotone brick of the school a wall behind him.†   (source)
  • The unseen child — it sounded like a girl about Kate's age — spoke in a plodding, whispery monotone, her voice half-drowned in static.†   (source)
  • They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll.†   (source)
  • Now came a roll call on the old monotone, with a break of register, a yodel, on the final syllable.†   (source)
  • "Ray Singh is nice," my sister said in a monotone at dinner that night.†   (source)
  • The hum of ID scanners and monotone voice receipts as money changed accounts.†   (source)
  • One word, spoken in a raspy monotone: "No."†   (source)
  • Hi, I'm Alan," he said in a surprisingly deep monotone.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Barbour was from a society family with an old Dutch name, so cool and blonde and monotone that sometimes she seemed partially drained of blood.†   (source)
  • Gilpin read aloud Clue 2 in a deliberate monotone.†   (source)
  • Desjardins spoke in a monotone, like a surgery patient counting backward waiting for anesthesia to kick in.†   (source)
  • Just think how The Great Sadness reduced the range of color in your life down to monotones and flat grays and blacks.†   (source)
  • Where the clock's dull monotone Telleth of the day that's done, Where the moonbeams hover o'er Playthings sleeping on the floor, Where my weary wee one lies Cometh Lady Button Eyes.†   (source)
  • The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said something in a soft monotone.†   (source)
  • "Get him out of here and keep him out of here," she said in an unsettling monotone.†   (source)
  • Dee's voice was silky smooth, a gentle monotone exactly in sync with the rippling water.†   (source)
  • Her voice was monotone, depressed, and slurred, like she was heavily sedated.†   (source)
  • 'No, slave,' she persisted in her grave monotone, as though thinking aloud, the words revelations, pieces of a puzzle.†   (source)
  • The Council greets you, Clarissa Fray, she heard, and it was not just one silent voice inside her head but a dozen, some low and rough, some smooth and monotone, but all were demanding, insistent, pushing at the fragile barriers around her mind.†   (source)
  • "Weeks," Jacob said in a flat monotone.†   (source)
  • Luma parried the challenges and maintained a supplicant monotone that would've amused the boys on the Fugees, who knew what she sounded like when she wanted to make a point.†   (source)
  • Arya began to speak in a slow monotone, first of her capture and then of her long imprisonment and torture in Gil'ead.†   (source)
  • After examining my mother, the doctor spoke in a slow monotone.†   (source)
  • Your voice will remain in a monotone.†   (source)
  • I finished my bagel to the sounds of Dorothea's monotone chatter, interjecting a few nods or "uh-huh's" whenever she stopped talking long enough to wait for my response.†   (source)
  • The man in front, his body hidden under layers of fabric and body armor, held a gloved hand against the device in his ear and said, in a monotone voice, "Building clear."†   (source)
  • She stopped speaking in the monotone and started to talk like Mia again, at least when she was talking about music.†   (source)
  • They kept talking to each other in a rumbling, humorous monotone—a smile kept playing on both their faces—and every once in a while they ordered a new round of drinks, or exploded with laughter, or turned their attention again to the screen.†   (source)
  • Sure enough, momentarily the monotone, garbled voice of the American consul nears the living room.†   (source)
  • But when it became clear that this wasn't some sort of test by her pimp, and that she wouldn't be beaten for telling the truth, she recounted her story in a dull monotone.†   (source)
  • 'But then, a couple of weeks ago,' Gervais continued in the same flat monotone, turning a page, 'she dumped Nate.†   (source)
  • "Do not, I repeat, do not move again," his captor said, once more using that flat monotone.†   (source)
  • I could hear her voice distanced behind a monotone translation.†   (source)
  • The chaplain's voice floated up to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible monotone, like a gaseous murmur.†   (source)
  • It required more than a monotone sendoff, spiked with static.†   (source)
  • Moon Orchid still described aloud her nieces' and nephews' doings, but now in a monotone, and she no longer interrupted herself to ask questions.†   (source)
  • Holding the recorder toward Max, Nigel continued to speak in a clipped monotone.†   (source)
  • He spoke in a dull monotone and sounded like the radio reporter when he described how he had found Svensson and Johansson.†   (source)
  • Gone is the monotone.†   (source)
  • In a careful monotone, he relates the problem he has now, of female bodies; the fact that the world has suddenly become overpopulated with them and with their individual parts—breasts and legs and round-apple asses that he would like to fit his hands around.†   (source)
  • "Is here, miss," she whispered, in a nerve-grinding monotone she elects for only the most dire of discussions.†   (source)
  • Easy—I'd be at home, medicating myself into a monotone.†   (source)
  • "Nothing funny at all has happened to me during the past fifteen minutes," she answered in a barely audible monotone.†   (source)
  • He stood alongside the screen and faced his audience, beginning in a flat monotone: "Sir, my flybys were made between 11:08 and 11:13 p.m. this evening.†   (source)
  • He looked up, and then he began to speak gravely, almost in a monotone.†   (source)
  • Dagny turned to her, answering in the formal, inflectionless monotone of a business executive, "There have been no cases of raider gang attacks upon frozen trains-unfortunately."†   (source)
  • He began cussing out Zim in a low, almost expressionless monotone.†   (source)
  • The words were flat, monotone, and the expression on her face went completely blank.†   (source)
  • " Her whisper was a monotone like you might use to tell a ghost story or a joke, leading up to a "boo" or a punchline, but instead her words just stopped and lingered there.†   (source)
  • "And I'm awake," the AI said in a monotone.†   (source)
  • "Man," Rodrigo said in a monotone from the stage.†   (source)
  • Also, I had always known church was a dead place where you were expected to sit still through a thirty— or forty-minute monotone sermon about social ethics.†   (source)
  • And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.†   (source)
  • His voice became a monotone.†   (source)
  • Something quickened in the monotone of her voice.†   (source)
  • Very faint and distant, as though through a seashell, immersed in its monotone humming.†   (source)
  • When he spoke it was in a monotone.†   (source)
  • Mother's monotone voice became vicious.   (source)
    monotone = unvarying in pitch
  • The quiet, dreary monotone in which he habitually spoke quickened a little under his present excitement.   (source)
  • He spoke in a monotone, as if he'd done it a thousand times before.†   (source)
  • "Soft drinks aren't covered by the coupon," Holly explained, monotone.†   (source)
  • "Now," she said in a flat monotone, and George Harvey reached forward and turned the keys.†   (source)
  • He was mumbling a monotone stream of nonsense, the words an endless, senseless flow of noise.†   (source)
  • You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37.†   (source)
  • It was morning, and the overcast skies outside filled the room with a flat, monotone light.†   (source)
  • I was babbling, my voice a blank monotone.†   (source)
  • "I was passing on my way to the upper deck," said Father Hoyt, his voice a strange monotone.†   (source)
  • "Welcome to the Plug," he said in a flat monotone.†   (source)
  • Even lazy Monotone got to last week, but never me.†   (source)
  • He spoke in a monotone; the reality of the message had not seeped in.†   (source)
  • Conklin looked at the analyst and answered in a monotone.†   (source)
  • Even he could hear the monotone in his voice.†   (source)
  • "Follow me," Jane spoke again, her childish voice a monotone.†   (source)
  • Just cold, hard facts, delivered in a somber and even depressing monotone.†   (source)
  • Her voice jumped a couple of octaves, a marked contrast to Whitney's flat monotone.†   (source)
  • As he spoke in a monotone, Sophia felt a chill spread through her body at his words.†   (source)
  • 'And let me guess,' said Webb in a monotone.†   (source)
  • I don't expect anything," I said in a low monotone.†   (source)
  • In a monotone voice, Colin would say, "I AM A ROBOT.†   (source)
  • "I know," she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.†   (source)
  • I didn't know who had christened her Monotone, but they were right on the money.†   (source)
  • She spoke again, the whisper replaced by a monotone.†   (source)
  • "Come down and stay cold," said Conklin in a low monotone.†   (source)
  • 'He spoke to his wife,' said Conklin in a sudden monotone.†   (source)
  • "What happened outside?" he asked in a monotone.†   (source)
  • "Okay," she said, "you're almost set, so let's see...Monotone."†   (source)
  • May we get to what we're here for," said Jason Bourne, his voice a monotone.†   (source)
  • "What is it?" asked Jason, in a distant monotone.†   (source)
  • "That man up there is a decoy," replied Jason, his soft voice suspended in a cold monotone.†   (source)
  • "Please be clearer," said Ogilvie in a flat monotone.†   (source)
  • When he spoke it was in a monotone, the voice of someone else.†   (source)
  • Too ....monotone.†   (source)
  • Unlike stone-faced Mr. Pavlikovsky he was quite talkative, full of jokes or anekdoty as he called them, which he told in a droll, rapid-fire monotone.†   (source)
  • "Be quiet," Paul said, and the monotone stillness of his words carried more command than Jessica had ever heard in another voice.†   (source)
  • He began to speak in a low monotone, and Eragon listened with growing amazement as he wove an epic of attacks, sieges, and betrayal, of leaving Carvahall, crossing the Spine, and razing the docks of Teirm, of sailing through a monstrous whirlpool.†   (source)
  • There had been trouble enough already, but Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution only when Jackson began to read from his sheet in a stricken monotone, as though each word was a name on a list of dead people, and was unable to pronounce "inexperienced" even though it was said for him many times, and left out the last two words of his lines—"It can rise up and tread."†   (source)
  • The clerk at the window —a wan Chicana with scraped-back hair —began in a monotone to go down the long baleful list of them.†   (source)
  • Kassad's monotone was barely audible.†   (source)
  • Ellarose quieted down as Chuck rocked with her, humming a lullaby, with a radio announcer speaking in a steady monotone in the background: If you are going out for emergency relief today in the Midtown area, the Red Cross is advising to avoid Penn and Madison and head for some of the smaller relief stations.†   (source)
  • My voice was monotone, dead.†   (source)
  • As far as I could tell, Wilson recited all of this without taking a single breath, speaking in the flat monotone of someone who repeats the same sentences all day long.†   (source)
  • You acted relaxed and disengaged, didn't talk unless you had to and spoke in a monotone when you did, and—as soon as you got what you came for —left.†   (source)
  • Her name was Nancy, and in a hypnotic monotone, she informed me that, due to my exemplary test scores and impressive employment record, I had been "awarded" the position of OASIS Technical Support Representative II.†   (source)
  • WE SAT IN THE nearly empty bar —a once-famous oak-panelled joint smelling of hamburger grease, Ivy League pennants on the walls, while Platt talked in a rambling, uneasy monotone so quietly I had to strain to follow.†   (source)
  • After coming in on one of Enrique's many tireless interrogations about my father's whereabouts —interrogations that often brought me close to tears; he might as well have been grilling me about the location of missile sites in Pakistan—she sent me out of the room and then in a controlled monotone put a stop to it ("Well I mean, obviously the boy doesn't know where he is, the mother didn't know either ...yes, I know you'd like to find him but clearly the man doesn't want to be found, he's taken measures not to be found ...he wasn't paying child support, he left a lot of debts, he more or less flew town without a word so frankly I'm no†   (source)
  • In a low, slow monotone, he began to swear, cursing the three captives for not having fled with their neighbors, cursing the soldiers for what they had done and might yet do, cursing Galbatorix, and cursing whatever whim of fate had resulted in the situation as it was.†   (source)
  • This is the sort of architecture you used to see only in science fiction comic books, and seeing it pasted flat against the monotone lake-sky I feel I've stepped not forward in time but sideways, into a universe of two dimensions.†   (source)
  • "Tours start every hour on the hour, cost eleven dollars, and frankly aren't worth it," she answered in a monotone.†   (source)
  • My voice was a monotone.†   (source)
  • "They started sexually violating both of us," Claudine explained in a shy, pained monotone when we talked with her, "and then they started beating us.†   (source)
  • Colonel Korn chucked Havermeyer under the chin jovially, ignoring him, and then addressed himself to Dunbar and Yossarian in a dry monotone.†   (source)
  • His name just kept coming up, in event after event listed in the flat monotone of the guy who delivered the announcements each morning over the intercom.†   (source)
  • I stopped, he left, and, as he was gliding over the threshold I struck again, tapping out a monotone tattoo.†   (source)
  • But there were parish priests everywhere about, leaky-eyed and halting, their old monotones falling whispery from the pulpit.†   (source)
  • You've got to get there, Kip," said the man ominously, in that stubborn monotone of the unthinking which asserts an end without concern for the means.†   (source)
  • Colin could hear the annoyance in Hassan's voice as he asked, in the monotone of the aggressively bored, what life had been like in Gutshot when the oldster was a kid.†   (source)
  • The order of firing proceeded steadily down the long row almost like the ticking of a clock-except that clocks alternate, first ticking, then tocking, and this great machine expressed itself in a monotone.†   (source)
  • asked David in a monotone.†   (source)
  • Her voice had the even, dripping monotone of rain: "I can't answer the kind of questions you're asking, my girl.†   (source)
  • After a summer of monotone, one-word answers or no answers at all, here, from Monica, was a complete sentence.†   (source)
  • Serving forks, too, Monotone, okay?†   (source)
  • She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.†   (source)
  • She showed no emotion, but her voice had the intense monotone of a prayer: "Francisco ....if he could live through that night, what right have I to complain?†   (source)
  • He had added, in the monotone of reciting some impersonal, statistical report, "The newspapers are yelling that coal is now the most crucial commodity in the country.†   (source)
  • "You'll tell us everything we want to know voluntarily or we'll send you up into a chemical orbit your hacks never dreamed of with Dr. Panov," said Peter Holland, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his quiet monotone as hard and as smooth as polished granite.†   (source)
  • "My astute uncle," continued the clerk, overriding and not hearing Prefontaine's soft monotone, "made it completely clear that we were privileged to be dealing with illustrious men who required total confidentiality.†   (source)
  • She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"†   (source)
  • He could not distinguish the words; only the ceaseless monotone.†   (source)
  • She asked, in the same level monotone: "Whose opinion, Peter?†   (source)
  • She was listening to the third woman, a stout, pleasant-faced, elderly person who was talking in a slow clear monotone which showed no signs of pausing for breath or coming to a stop.†   (source)
  • Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written.†   (source)
  • Thought lapsed into monotone.†   (source)
  • The roar of the air screws momentarily drowned the shouting; then, as the machine touched the ground and the engines were turned off: "We-want-the whip; we-want-the whip," broke out again in the same loud, insistent monotone.†   (source)
  • He spoke in a monotone.†   (source)
  • We would take a batch of mail in our fingers and, while talking in low monotones out of the sides of our mouths, toss them correctly into their designated holes and suddenly our hands would be empty and we would have no memory of having worked.†   (source)
  • "Swing to the right an' a swing to lef'; break, now—break—back to—back," the caller sang the high vibrant monotone.†   (source)
  • In the shelter of a doorway, across the gutter, a cluster of children shouted in monotone up at the sky: "Rain, rain, go away, come again some oddeh day.†   (source)
  • The boy spoke in a croaking monotone.†   (source)
  • For almost an hour, in a savage monotone, Ben had tried deliberately, it seemed, to goad him to an attack.†   (source)
  • Ben prowled along, greeting the merchants with a grave scowl, leaning his skull against their round skulls of practicality, across their counters—a phantom soliciting advertisement in a quiet monotone.†   (source)
  • "I can't understand it," he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, "I can't understand how Ellsworth got so much power.... And Ellsworth's a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he's so friendly and witty, and what an erudition!†   (source)
  • Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others—his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, he blurted out a monotone cry of furious amazement at what he now heard.†   (source)
  • "No; he never got there," she replied, in a monotone.†   (source)
  • At sight of this danger the men suddenly ceased their cursing monotone.†   (source)
  • She thanked them, chatting in a rather monotone but pleasant voice.†   (source)
  • "The tears fell from her eyes—and then she died," concluded the girl in an imperturbable monotone, which more than anything else, more than the white statuesque immobility of her person, more than mere words could do, troubled my mind profoundly with the passive, irremediable horror of the scene.†   (source)
  • At the piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum "The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro") had begun singing in a Danny Deever monotone, accompanying himself with low chords on the piano.†   (source)
  • Within his cramped little mind dwelt something that was greater than Jefferies' books—the spirit that led Jefferies to write them; and his dawn, though revealing nothing but monotones, was part of the eternal sunrise that shows George Borrow Stonehenge.†   (source)
  • Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can't call you just Isabelle, and I'm afraid I'll come out with the "dearest" before your family this June), you've got to come to the prom, and then I'll come up to your house for a day and everything'll be perfect.... And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.†   (source)
  • Their notes were new, but their song was the old delicious monotone—the joy of living and love of spring.†   (source)
  • She was twanging a Swedish patois—not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: "Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor.†   (source)
  • This roar of turbulent waters was the sinister monotone of the mighty desert symphony of great depths, great heights, great reaches.†   (source)
  • She was holding a dammar torch at arm's-length aloft, and in a persistent, urgent monotone she was repeating, "Get up!†   (source)
  • The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.†   (source)
  • A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness: "Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone."†   (source)
  • It is sacred Latin, the dialect of monks, a chant from the Middle Ages, so to speak, a kind of muted, subterranean monotone.†   (source)
  • He crossed the wooden bridge and sat down to enjoy the sight of the falling water and rushing foam, to listen to its idyllic chatter, a monotone filled with interior variety.†   (source)
  • "But of course, to be sure," James Tienappel concurred, somewhat intimidated by his foster brother, who spoke so calmly and in a monotone; the crisp autumn evening was close to freezing, yet there beside him sat Hans Castorp without hat or overcoat.†   (source)
  • The waves of the ocean of time, in their eternal monotone rhythm, washed Easter ashore, and the Berghof celebrated it, just as it took note of all time's Stages and turning points in order to avoid undifferentiated tedium.†   (source)
  • And after his demise—well, even after that, Hans Castorp's relationship to the local landscape, if one ignores his ski outings, had maintained its conservative, monotone character, a trait that had held a certain special charm for the young man when he contrasted it with the range of his inner experiences and the duties involved in "playing king.†   (source)
  • And if you were to hear him talking—in his nonchalant, reasonable way, his voice a little hollow and monotone, with just a hint of Plan—or even if you just saw him there, so blondly correct, his hair nicely trimmed, his head with the stamp of something classic about it, his air cool and languid, suggesting an inherited, unconscious arrogance, then you could not doubt that this Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it—even he himself, had he ever actually considered the matter, would not have doubted it for a moment.†   (source)
  • But Emma's face always rose before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his ears, "If you should marry after all!†   (source)
  • She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in her usual muffled monotone, "Brother, I hope the new doctor will be able to do something for you.†   (source)
  • We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy.†   (source)
  • When my cousin Catherine's hand touched a red-hot wood stove, my grandmother seized her arm and with fingertips light as feathers stroked the blistering skin while murmuring an incoherent incantation in a trancelike monotone.†   (source)
  • VIRAG: (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone) That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the the known... BLOOM: I am going to scream.†   (source)
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