Tone Quotes

“When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.”
― Germany Kent

“When Jackson used that particular tone of voice, men died, pure and simple.”
― Christine Feehan, Safe Harbor

“Tone is the hardest part of saying no.”
― Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing

“emotionless tone hurting as much as the news”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.
To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased.”
― Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

“Before I start a film or a play, I try to build a world in my mind. An imaginative world which the character lives in; and I create that with novels, with painting, with music, with films. I try and understand tone. Tone is so important. Is this a thriller, is this a Gothic romance, is this an action film, is this a love story? Then, once I understand that, I just jump into it. This might be like an incomplete way of describing it, but it's like I build a swimming pool, then I just dive in. Do you know what I mean?”
― Tom Hiddleston

“Well, there would be no sound
if we shout on the background.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

“God created a woman to be the keeper of her home. She sets the tone, and where her mind and heart goes, her home and marriage tend to follow.”
― Ngina Otiende, The Wedding Night: Embracing Sexual Intimacy as New Bride

“People can be reassured by a tone of voice. By a touch. A gesture. Even if the voice and gestures are false, the innocent person meets the liar halfway to complete the lie. It's a partnership.”
― Jody Shields, The Winter Station

“There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when it's a weak ethic one is resonating with.”
― Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl

“Your volume speaks volumes. Be aware of your dynamics, your tones as well as the loudness and softness of your voice on the phone and in person.”
― Loren Weisman

“His voice was the sound of gravel crunching underfoot when you went in search of gravestones.”
― Sonali Dev, A Change of Heart

“The great law of art is uniformity of tone; since it cannot record all experience, its fidelity to its chosen fragment of experience implies its consciousness of all experience as a similar though more variegated uniformity of tone. (To intrude into a work an unrelated tone is to imply that one is incorporating the ‘all,’ a presumption that speaks volumes on the author’s inability to grasp experience’s multiplicity.) Here lies the greatness of Jane Austen: her perfection in the small implies her comprehension of the large.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961

“... for there was neither pride nor regret in his tone; indeed it kept its level note, as of one who tells a tale so well known that the words have been rubbed smooth of meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

“Mood isn't a particular thought or a particular part of the brain, nor in a particular part of the body, such as a foot or an ear, it is everywhere, but nothing in itself, more like a colour in which thoughts are thought, a colour through which the world is seen.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.”
― Paul Auster

“Daisy had this incredible voice. It was gritty but never scratchy. You’d have thought she had rocks in her throat that the sound had to travel over. It made everything she sang complex and interesting and kind of unpredictable.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Unapofikia hatua ya kuwa na kila kitu katika maisha, unapokuwa umefanya kila kitu ulichotamani kufanya katika maisha, unakuwa na bahari nzima ndani ya tone ambalo ni wewe. Unaridhika. Wewe si tone tena ndani ya bahari, wewe ni bahari ndani ya tone. Kinachobaki baada ya hapo ni kusaidia jamii iliyosaidia kukulea ulipokuwa mdogo, kuacha alama katika dunia kabla na baada ya wewe kuondoka, bila kujali watu watasema nini juu ya maisha yako.”
― Enock Maregesi

“We walked in silence towards Swinica, beyond which the road, worn by long-distance lorries, twisted and turned; we walked slowly, like one walks after midnight Mass, like my father coming home on Sunday from a fishing trip or from a little game of poker, like the curate after administering extreme unction, like my grandmother returning from the fields dragging a pram, in which instead of her first-born, prematurely dead daughter, there lay a bunch of ripe poppy heads covered with a kerchief.”
― Wioletta Greg, Swallowing Mercury

“She is at once warm and dismissive, a tone common among fools and mountebanks, rarely used by those who truly know.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Tone, attitude, and character prove the greatness, maturity, and insight, not the gray hair, age, or appearance.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Leadership isn't just legislation, that
it's a matter of persuading people
and giving them confidence, and
bringing them together and setting
a tone.”
― Barack Obama

“His tone had been regretfully similar to a man's he had never met, but who remained ingrained in him as an example of what to never become.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“The essence of our being, what we actually are as human beings, is sound. We are sound. We’re part of the uni-verse. The one great sound. Each of us individually are a tone. A tone that we give our body, to the tone that we give our voice. - Dr. Lee Brown, Co-author of “The Sacred Tree”
― Dr. Lee Brown

“Your tone sets the tone.”
― Sarah Urist Green

“Maybe it was over a dozen years of having to obey Petunia immediately or having Minerva McGonagall for his Head of House or being friends with Hermione Granger…sort of. But whatever caused it, Harry knew instinctively that when an individual of the female gender got that tone in her voice, he damn well better stop, shut up, and pay attention... Neville, growing up with his Gran, froze as well, being equally as well-trained as Harry regarding female tones.”
― sifshadowheart, On Whom the Pale Moon Gleams

“Your voice is your power, what you say matters, how you say it matters more.”
― Dr. Toni Sorenson

“A problem?” Dane asks in a hopeful voice. We all side-eye him. “What? Oh.” He clears his throat and lowers his voice to say in the gravest tone, “Oh no, a problem?”
― Rory Miles, Shadow Slayer