"Fairy tale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... word came to Green Valley that this same man was a much loved pastor somewhere in the mountains. And Green Valley, perennially young, unthinking, joyous Green Valley, laughed incredulously as a sweet-hearted but wrongly educated child always laughs at a true fairy tale or a simple miracle. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... stand upright? But this is nothing to the phantasies of fluor, and quartz, and some other such companions, when they get leave to do anything they like. I could show you fifty specimens, about every one of which you might fancy a new fairy tale. Not that, in truth, any crystals get leave to do quite what they like; and many of them are sadly tried, and have little time ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... did not seem to comprehend the excitement around him; that is, he comprehended it and saw everything, but he stood aside, as it were, like someone invisible in a fairy tale, as though he had nothing to do with what was going on, though it pleased him to take ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James. In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, published at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it "a fairy tale," and insisted that a work "so fantastic and so burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Erasmus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters. The princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Archbishop ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in a fairy tale, you'd make all the knights that wanted to marry you go all over the world to find the other half; and then most likely the person that had it would turn out to be a king's son, and he would marry you, and you would be a queen, and ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... ascertained. It is probable that during some months, the little volume circulated only among poor and obscure sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified the imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within and from without, which every moment ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... which because it calls up scenes from the "Meistersinger" must also necessarily call up music from the same comedy. But there is little cause here for quarrel with Professor Humperdinck. He has applied the poetical principle of Wagner to the fairy tale which is so closely related to the myth, and he has with equal consistency applied Wagner's constructive methods musically and dramatically. It is to his great honor that, of all of Wagner's successors, he has been the only one to ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Brave and good—young and charming! above all, he has never worn the horrid European dress! And destitute of every resource! This is quite ravishing! It is too much happiness at once! Quick, quick let us improvise a pretty fairy tale, of which the handsome and beloved prince shall be the hero! The poor bird of the golden and azure plumage has wandered into our dismal climate; but he will find here, at least, something to remind him of his native region of sunshine and perfumes!" Then, addressing ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Baby Bunting. It's a rotten business, isn't it? No dragon in a fairy tale could have guarded the princess more closely. If I'd stayed any longer she'd have ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... thin lips, and her face tightened in an expression of settled grief. Kitty was sorry for Mrs Norton, but Kitty was too young to understand, and her sorrow evaporated in laughter. She listened to John's explanations of the future as to a fairy tale suddenly touched with the magic of realism. That the old could not exist in conjunction with the new order of things never grew into the painful precision of thought in her mind. She saw but the show side; she listened as to an account of private theatricals, and in spite ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... succeeded was not to be tried. The Deus ex Machina appeared with its flaming sword. The Doubting army was cut to pieces, and Mansoul was saved. Again, however, the work was imperfectly done. Diabolus, like the bad genius in the fairy tale, survived for fresh mischief. Diabolus flew off again to Hell Gate, and was soon at the head of a new host; part composed of fugitive Doubters whom he rallied, and part of a new set of enemies called Bloodmen, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... odd wink. 'You need never go in again, like the what's-his-name in the fairy tale, or you are a sillier child than I take you for. They'—nodding at the piano—'are getting a terrible pair of old cats, and we want ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rivers like seas; he told of immense buildings and temples, of trees a thousand years old, of birds and flowers of the colours of the rainbow: he named the cities and the peoples he had visited ... their very names seemed like a fairy tale. The whole East was familiar to Muzzio; he had traversed Persia, Arabia, where the horses are nobler and more beautiful than any other living creatures; he had penetrated into the very heart of India, where the race of men grow like stately trees; he had ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... rooms should always give out a gay and cheerful atmosphere. To obtain this wall papers with colorful friezes with characters from fairy tale, Mother Goose or Noah's Ark, may be used above a simple wainscot. Painted walls with stenciled designs are also attractive. Small chairs and tables with good lines, a bookcase, a toy cupboard, a sand table, and window boxes where the children may plant ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... of the missions seems like a fairy tale, wonderful and unreal. Into a wilderness inhabited only by savage men and wild animals, hundreds of miles from any civilized settlement, there came these men trained ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... miscreant seized Jack by the waist, and Thames by the nape of the neck, and marched off, like the ogre in the fairy tale, with a boy under each arm, while Charcam brought ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... eyes were as round as a child's awaiting a fairy tale. If Mr. Penrose had needed encouragement they would ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... me, and then just like magic from out our haunted chamber there appeared well, I can hardly call her a good fairy, she was too homely, but at least a girl who told me of something so delightful that it sounds almost like a fairy tale. I talked of it to father at dinner and then rushed over to tell you, as I thought you might be interested, but perhaps I had ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... within the enchanted precincts, equally gorgeous. It was the brightest and the last full display of magnificent pseudo chivalry, and to Stephen's dazzled eye, seeing it beneath the slant rays of the setting sun of June, it was a fairy tale come to life. Hal Randall, who was in attendance on the Cardinal, declared that it was a mere surfeit of jewels and gold and silver, and that a frieze jerkin or leathern coat was an absolute refreshment to the sight. He therefore ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... frequent allusions in poetry and prose and in the conversation of educated people. Care has been taken to exclude everything that is not strictly within the limits of probability; hence there is here no trespassing upon the domain of the fairy tale, the ...
— Fifty Famous Stories Retold • James Baldwin
... BEAST, the hero and heroine of a famous fairy tale. Beauty falls in love with a being like a monster, who has, however, the heart of a man, and she marries him, upon which he is instantly transformed into a prince of handsome presence ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... could ride," remarked the subaltern dubiously, fancying that Bela Moshi in his desire to accompany him was inventing a fairy tale ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... ain't takin' in that fairy tale of Crane's any more'n I am, Dick. Why can't we do a bit for ourselves over this; it won't hurt the boss none. Won't throw him down. This horse was a good youngster, an' Crane didn't get him without seein' him do somethin'. You jest keep me ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... father bought her a beautiful little white horse, like the milk-white palfrey of a princess in a fairy tale, and she rode every day over the county. Usually Squire Eben accompanied her on a tall sorrel which had been in his possession for years, but still retained much youthful fire. The sorrel advanced with long lopes and fretted at being ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is a short time for so much to have happened, it can only be said that Romance is a fairy tale where seven-leagued-boots and magic carpets are essential properties of the mind. In a fairy tale you are here and you are there by the simple turning of a ring. Matter—the body—is a thing of nought. It is the ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and against the grimy chimney-pots—that talk I shall never forget. Life became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale this world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I caught at least some touch of reality—of awful reality—in the idea that this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from tiny cells, might ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... sorts of parcels, big and little, began to arrive for their new protege. Myrtle was amazed and awed by the splendor of her new apparel, and could scarcely believe her good fortune. It seemed like a fairy tale to her, and she imagined herself a Cinderella with two fairy godmothers who were young and pretty girls possessing the purse of Fortunatus and the generosity of Glinda the Good. At night, when she was supposed to be asleep, Myrtle ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... else this would be an uncanny case of coincidence. And the two expressions, "Aus alten Zeiten," and "Mit ihrem Singen," the latter of which is so important, Heine could have derived only from Schreiber. Heine was not jesting when he said it was a fairy tale from the days of old; he was following, it seems, Schreiber's saga, the first sentence of which reads as follows: "In alten Zeiten liess sich manchmal auf dem Lureloy um die AbenddAemmerung und beym Mondschein eine Jungfrau sehen, die ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... is certainly pleasure in a wonderfully dainty meal, served in wonderful vessels of glass and china and silver, and marble and gold and flowers to help the effect. I could have dreamed myself into a fairy tale, often, if it had ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... changes a person! she thought. He looked at ease now in this gorgeous garment, and a very prince for a fairy tale. That accounted for the dreadful gray flannel—he was a soldier and unaccustomed to wearing ordinary clothes. She had heard that in foreign countries even the officers wore their uniforms habitually; not as the English do, merely as ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... Young Doctor. "Her of the plumage—her! Shure, she's not livin' in this wurruld. She's only visitin' it. She's got no responsibility. If iver there was a child of a fairy tale, that wumman's the child. I belave she'd think her son was doin' right if he tied the ould fella up to a tree an' stuck him as full of Ingin arrows as a pin-cushion, an' rode off with the lovely little lady in beyant there. That's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her wedding-dress. There were the gold-laced coat and the breeches with the sword-slash in them, the sash, the belt, the plumed hat, the high boots, the pistols, and glittering among them all, the sword. That chest of Father Anthony's and its contents were something of a fairy tale to the boys of the Island, and each of them dreamt of a day when he too might behold them. The chest, securely locked and clamped, stood in the sacristy; and Father Anthony would have seen nothing incongruous in its ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... dredgings. A whole literature has been written on it of late. Any reader who wishes to know it, need only ask the first geologist he meets; and if he has the wholesome instinct of wonder in him, fill his imagination with true wonders, more grand and strange than he is like to find in any fairy tale. All I have to do with the matter here is, to say that, arguing from the known to the unknown, from the Atlantic deep- sea ooze which we do know about, to the chalk which we do not know about, the whole of the chalk must have been laid down at the bottom of a deep and still ocean, far ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... the wretched, sordid homes, the insufficient meals, the quantities of children clamouring for food and warmth. Their parents and grandparents have lived the same lives, and anything else would seem as unattainable as the moon, or some fairy tale. There has been one enormous change in all the little cottages—the petroleum lamp. All have got one—petroleum is cheap and gives much more light and heat than the old-fashioned oil lamp. In the long winter afternoons, ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... tale," said Bielfeld dressing hastily; "a fairy tale, by which we have been too often deceived to ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... storm with roots overgrown by moss and dry yellow needles. Here there was a fragile wooden bridge over the stream, and just opposite on the other bank there was a little barn for drying maize, standing on four low piles, and looking like the hut on hen's legs in the fairy tale; a little ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Gods"). The killing of the sow to obtain a good harvest is homologous with the sacrifice of a maiden to obtain a good inundation of the river. The sow is the surrogate of the beautiful princess of the fairy tale. Instead of the maiden being slain, in one case, as Andromeda, she is rescued by the hero, in the other her place is taken by a sow. These late rationalizations are merely glosses of the deep motives which more than fifty centuries ago seem to ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... had made to the dig when they were room-mates. Jack, however, was describing to Hannah the recent rush and the glory of her class, and Lillian's glances were lost upon him. The lemonade finished, he took the Freshman over to Professor Craig's mother, and left her with a pleasant fairy tale about ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... was remembering an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid. Something about a fellow named Socrates who was given a cup of hemlock to drink. It was the finis for Socrates. But the old hero had been nonchalant and ...
— Acid Bath • Vaseleos Garson
... interchange of correspondence between author and artist, the pictures for the new fairy tale, "Sylvie and Bruno," were being gradually evolved. Each of them was subjected by Lewis Carroll to the most minute criticism—hyper-criticism, perhaps, occasionally. A few instances of the sort of criticisms he used to make upon Mr. Furniss's work may be interesting; I have extracted ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... night the whole town was illuminated. The next day was what was called "a jubilee-masquerade in the Venetian manner" at Ranelagh: it had nothing Venetian in it, but was by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw: nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it. One of the proprietors, who is a German, and belongs to Court, had got my Lady Yarmouth to persuade the King to order it. It began at three o'clock, and, about five, people of fashion began ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... barred the way, and had to be overcome before the palace could be reached; the Good Spirit intervened at the right moment to prevent calamity, the prince and princess stepped forward and made life beautiful; for life is the most wonderful fairy tale that was ever written, and full of magic to those who have ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... "Fancy, I suppose," he said, slowly. "I did have some idea of selling it, but I don't think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won't buy. They think it's a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... the two elders was, that their young ones should marry and be happy ever after, like the Prince and Princess of the Fairy Tale: and dear Mrs. Mackenzie (have I said that at the commencement of her visit to her brother she made almost open love to the Colonel?), dear Mrs. Mack was content to forgo her own chances so that her darling Rosey might be happy. We used to laugh and say, that as soon as Clive's father was gone, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a fairy tale to Keith—a wonderful tale like no one he had ever read. And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it. His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... still cloisters, and he told himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic! Curiously enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale. All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was Olivia. So he "drove the night ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... country is the yard. It is divided into three feet and each foot into twelve inches. The foot refers to the length of a man's foot. It is said that the length of the yard was based upon the length of the arm of an English king, but that sounds like a fairy tale. Many of our units of distance and weight have been borrowed from the English and are more complicated than those used by the French, whose unit of length is the meter. In 1799, or thereabouts, an international convention met at Paris to decide what the exact length of ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... his fellow-passenger, "that's pretty. That sort of thing doesn't often happen outside a fairy tale." ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... Walpole defined it in a letter to Sir Horace Mann: "It is a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you; you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale called 'The Three Princes of Serendip.' As their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.... Now do you understand Serendipity?" In case the reader does not understand, Walpole goes on ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... afraid to tell you how dearly I loved you all through'? Such a time would be well worth waiting for, ay, though it never came for seven years, and seven more to the back of that. Then I should feel her happiness depended on mine. Now I often think the prince in the fairy tale will ride past our Putney villa some summer's day, like Launcelot through the barley sheaves (I'll paint Launcelot when I've time, with the ripe ears reddened in the sun, and the light flashing off his harness), ride by ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... excited," she said coolly. "If you choose to look upon life as a fairy tale, it's not my business to wake you up. The Sleeping Beauty position is very soothing while it lasts. Don't say I didn't warn you, that's all! I don't call it exactly 'poisonous' to try to prevent another girl from suffering as badly as one has ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and cabbage-garden variety are to be altogether excluded. It would be as reasonable to prohibit all kinds of fairy tales. Some tell us that we should tell children fairy stories only so long as they regard the whole of life as a fairy tale. But in view of the vivid imagination of childhood, no such sharp distinction is practicable. Let the reader recall his own childhood. Does the child regard the fairy tale as a lie, even after ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... seen the shining cross. Idols were abolished and the trees, once sacred to the old gods, were cut down. Meadows, rich with cows, smiled where wolves had roamed. The changes, even in ten years, were like those in a fairy tale. Best of all, a Christian prince from the south, grandson of Charlemagne, fell in love with Fos-te-di-na, now queen of the country. He sought her hand, and won her heart, and the date for the marriage was fixed. It was a great day for Free Frisia. The wedding was to be in a new church, ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... Robert. "There are many wonderful stories in this beautiful world—stories more wonderful than any fairy tale. But we must go home now, children; ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... languid circles, dappling the blaze of morning with their black-tipped wings. Grotesque, ungainly, gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to the Orient, but rather to have drifted hither out of some quaint, familiar fairy tale of the North; and indeed they are only transient visitors here, and will soon be on their way to build their nests on the roofs of German villages and clapper their long, yellow bills over the joy of houses full ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... had filled with wonder; she cast them down, and a strange smile began to play about her sweet strong mouth. All at once she was in the middle of a fairy tale, and had not a notion what was coming next. Her dumb shepherd boy a baronet!—and, more wonderful still, a Galbraith! She must be dreaming in the wide street! The last she had seen of him was as he was driven ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... a very old Indian legend mingled with a European fairy tale drawn through a French-Canadian source. The incident of the Elf who eats the food of three men is to be found in another tale. In one version, the bride, finding that her husband, though utterly deprived by magic of his memory, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the Silver Fleece all her possibilities were beginning to find expression. These new-born green things hidden far down in the swamp, begotten in want and mystery, were to her a living wonderful fairy tale come true. All the latent mother in her brooded over them; all her brilliant fancy wove itself about them. They were her dream-children, and she tended them jealously; they were her Hope, and she worshipped them. When the rabbits tried the tender plants she watched hours to drive them off, and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... is a symbolic representation of her own resurrection. To the passionate discussions in Germany, England, and France, as to whether this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer with an emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color and in fairy tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled by fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in an ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... it will be brief," she said smilingly, and permitting both her hands to remain in mine. "Soon, very soon, we shall be again together, Euan, and this interrupted fairy tale, so prettily begun by you and me, shall be ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where men lived in sunlight seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour into her ears. Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... you did nothing but wander. Remember, however, that I shall have an object in view; but if you only went on and on, like some enchanted lady in a fairy tale, you might be happier than now. In a day's wandering you would pass many a hill, wood, and watercourse, each perpetually altering in aspect as the sun shone out or was overcast; as the weather was wet or fair, dark or bright. Nothing changes in Briarfield rectory. The plaster of the parlour ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... they gaze and gaze again in boundless admiration; for the tropical sun shone down on a scene of dazzling and luxuriant vegetation, so resplendent that it seemed to them the realization of a fairy tale. Plants and shrubs and flowers were there, of the most curious and brilliant description, and of which they neither knew the uses nor the names. Majestic trees were there, with foliage of every shape and size and hue; some with stems twenty feet in circumference; others more slender in form, straight ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... It has very nice pictures, and we particularly like "The Man in the Moon, and How He Came There;" but the story doesn't end well, for he came there by gathering sticks on Sunday, and then scoffing about it, and he has been there ever since. But Mother made us a new fairy tale about the nightingale in Mary's Meadow being the naughty woodcutter's only child, who was turned into a little brown bird that lives on in the woods, and sits on a tree on summer nights, and sings to its father up in ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fraudulent sales or conveyances of property without actual and visible change of possession. The notion of a symbol, a paper or writing, which should represent that property would probably have impressed them like a spell or charm in a child's fairy tale. Even theft with asportation could not alter property rights, even in favor of innocent purchasers, when the owner did not intend to part therewith. A moment's recollection of what is now perhaps the most familiar of Teutonic saga to the ordinary reader, the text of Wagner's "Ring ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... do believe that, just as in a fairy tale, when that clock strikes twelve, Lupin will enter and ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus's purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... is really no similarity between the Beowulf story and Saxo's account of Bjarki, in which the blood-drinking episode is the main point, and, on the other, between Saxo's account and that in the Hrlfssaga, which has too much the nature of a fairy tale to be ancient tradition. He agreed with Bugge, that Bjarik's combat with the winged monster shows contact with the story of Beowulf's ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... an allegory—to establish a creed in a romance. Thus the early mythology of Greece is to be properly considered in its simple and outward interpretations. The Greeks, as yet in their social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency—unconscious of all that may ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Carabas started in life as the cadet of a noble family. The earl, his father, like the woodman in the fairy tale, was blessed with three sons: the first was an idiot, and was destined for the Coronet; the second was a man of business, and was educated for the Commons; the third was a Roue, and was shipped ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... remember that philosophies are brought forward because it is believed or hoped that they are true. A fairy tale may be recited and may be approved, although no one dreams of attaching faith to the events narrated in it. But a philosophy attempts to give us some account of the nature of the world in which we live. If the philosopher frankly abandons the attempt ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... voices of the witnesses, the wind, the snow storm, the danger of being lost; and then all at once this splendid, brightly lighted room, the sounds of the piano, the lovely girls, the curly-headed children, the gay, happy laughter—such a transformation seemed to him like a fairy tale, and it seemed incredible that such transitions were possible at the distance of some two miles in the course of one hour. And dreary thoughts prevented him from enjoying himself, and he kept thinking this was not life here, but bits of life fragments, that everything here was accidental, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... fishes, and the multitude that were fed, and the twelve baskets of fragments that remained—story familiar in all its details to every Sabbath-school scholar in the land, but utterly new to Tode, falling on his ear for the first time, bearing all the charm of a fairy tale to him. There was just one thing that struck this ignorant boy as very strange, that a company of men and women, some of them gray-headed, should spend their time in coming together that stormy evening, and reading over and talking about so utterly improbable a tale. He listened ...
— Three People • Pansy
... that week in April was eating his bully and hardtack in the forest at Kurgomin or Khalmogora or Bolsheozerki or Chekuevo or Verst 448, this menu seems like a fairy tale, but he knows that the boys who had fought on the line and fallen before Bolo fire or fallen ill with the hardship strain, were entitled to every dainty and luxury that was afforded by ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... stand before the window of an antique shop, and study the brocaded objects, silver chains, rings with gaudy stones, engraved plates, and rare clocks. All manner of roguish ideas came to her mind, and around every wish she wove a fairy tale. The meagrest incident sufficed to send her imagination to the land of wonders, just as if the fables and legends that the people had been passing on from hearth to hearth for centuries were leading a ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... imagined, when the news of the Western Union agreement became known, the story of the telephone became a fairy tale of success. Theodore Vail was given a banquet by his old-time friends in the Washington postal service, and toasted as "the Monte Cristo of the Telephone." It was said that the actual cost of the Bell ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... breaks the crystal shallows of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love story written in America. How could there ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... many of the countries of Europe about California. I even tell Californians about California. I will say to the credit of Californians though that they listen. Listen! did I say listen? They drink it down like a child absorbing its first fairy tale. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the bias of his own right-handed body, so decided it between them that he came to shore upon the beach in front of Attwater's. There he sat down, and looked forth into a world without any of the lights of hope. The poor diving dress of self-conceit was sadly tattered! With the fairy tale of suicide, of a refuge always open to him, he had hitherto beguiled and supported himself in the trials of life; and behold! that also was only a fairy tale, that also was folk-lore. With the consequences of his acts he saw himself implacably confronted for the duration ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... tremble before. It meant nothing, of course, but, like many inscrutable and unfathomable things, it terrified by its sheer blank, chaotic madness. He hung it in the exhibition. And it was—yes, it was—the hit of the occasion. This is not a fairy tale—not even fiction. The story was told me by the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... thoughtful, and was not to be moved to tell the end of the fairy tale. Neither would she in later times, however urgently he ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... such as "The Vision of Sir Launfal" or "Enoch Arden." They express the pleasing imaginings and longings of the human spirit, its ideals of character and conduct, its sense of the wonder and mystery of the universe. The fairy tale, in general, is nearer the surface of life; the myth was concerned with the most fundamental problems of the whence and the why ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... think what a wonderful fairy tale you might write for yourself—and every word of it true—of the adventures of one atom of Potash or some other Salt, no bigger than a needle's point, in such a lava stream as I have been telling of. How it has run round and round, and will run round ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... big or little, should wonder whether there is a meaning in this story deeper than that of an ordinary fairy tale, I will own that there is. But I have hidden it so carefully that the smaller people, and many larger folk, will never find it out, and meantime the book may be read straight on, like "Cinderella," or "Blue-Beard," or "Hop-o'my-Thumb," ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... attempt was made to deter them from their purpose, and stories of pipes and tobacco and probable insults were told; but they had no terrors for women who knew better than to believe that their neighbors would be turned into beasts (like the man in the fairy tale) for this one ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... succeeded after a night's sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a fairy tale. Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Tree told the whole fairy tale, for he could remember every single word of it; and the little Mice jumped for joy up to the very top of the Tree. Next night two more Mice came, and on Sunday two Rats, even; but they said the stories were not amusing, which vexed the little Mice, because ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... there is any other place in Sicily so faultless as Sta. Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome of all that is beautiful in Italy,—Venice excepted. Girgenti is a solemn epic, with its golden temples between the sea and hills. Cefalu is wild and strange, and Monreale a vision out of a fairy tale; but Sta. Catarina!— ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... although for shore visits they "dolled up" remarkably. Those early morning baths were fine appetisers, as will be understood by the reader who has had experience of the water along the Maine coast, and the number of eggs and slices of crisp bacon that came off the alcohol stove would sound like a fairy tale if told. At Camden the two cruisers lay side by side, with just enough room between to allow them to swing, and by keeping the tenders alongside the gangways it was only a momentary task to ferry from one boat to the other. In consequence ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Harald the Stern, although, in spite of much church-building and a certain amount of Pagan-persecuting, his character did not in any way emulate that of his saintly brother. The early part of his history reads like a fairy tale, and is a favourite subject for Scald songs; more especially his romantic adventures in ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at home; then she recited a fairy poem called "The Forsaken Merman," which, of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human pathos that it was more real than if it had been really "real," ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Junkie. He meant you to understand the story of the tiger as he did the story of the walrus—as a sort of fairy tale, ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... slices of Shakespeare, Augustus Thomas, George Ade, and other great writers, so you see we were giving them bits of the best living and dead dramatists. Our native Shakespeares do the same thing nowadays in all of their original works, and that's no idle fairy tale. We sandwiched comedy, drama, tragedy, and farce, and interlarded the mixture with Victor Herbert and Oscar Hammerstein's opera comique and May Irwin coon songs. Such a presentation of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was never ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... to some inherent craving in child-nature. But here comes in the necessity of discrimination. The true meaning of the word "faerie" is spiritual, but many stories masquerade under that title which have no claim to it. Some universal spiritual truth underlies the really fine old fairy tale; but there can be no educative influence in the so-called fairy stories which are merely jumbles of impossible incidents, and which not unfrequently present dishonesty, deceit, and cruelty in ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... separated their two oddly diverse lives—the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him. He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... to converse seated before a marble table in a hall from which one could see the foliage and the flowers of the Luxembourg. Baudelaire also talked there, with his clear caressing voice dropping diamonds and precious stones, like the princess of the fairy tale, from beautiful red, somewhat ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... origin of his fairy tale of Acajou and Zirphile, and account of his satirical preface to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... point of view. I'm afraid that's out of my line. I have lost what little faith I had in these last few years. You believe in it all, of course—it's natural for a girl—but to me the idea of a personal God is as unreal as a fairy tale. It ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... centuries actual verification of the carefully transmitted tradition has at last been found."—Bath Herald, 1st September, 1883. If references to other examples were needed I should like to note Sir William Wilde's illustration as to "how far the legend, the fairy tale, the local tradition, or the popular superstition may have been derived from absolute historic ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... fatalism, which Dryfesdale also professes. It is not with him the philosophic doctrine of the concurring impulses of circumstance, or of natural laws, but rather the stupendously nonsensical notion of the Arabian kismet, that from the beginning of time every event was fore-arranged as in a fairy tale, and that all which is, is simply the acting out of a libretto written before the play began—a belief revived in the last century by readers of Leibnitz, who were truer than the great German himself to the consequences of his doctrine, which he simply evaded.[15] ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions of man's nature and the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that "Troilus and Cressida" which Shakespeare, in a spasm ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... too, and she fancied our Willie was like him. Nothing, therefore, pleased her better than to get him into her little room, and talk to him. She would take a little bit of sugar-candy or liquorice out of her cupboard for him, and tell him some strange old fairy tale or legend, while she sat spinning, until at last she had made him so fond of her that he would often go and stay for hours with her. Nor did it make much difference when his mother begged Mrs Wilson to give him something sweet only now and then, for she was afraid of his going to see the old woman ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... archaeology, and art. It is, moreover, far more interesting than any dictionary of the subject; for it follows the natural guidance of the Greek traveller, examining every town or village which he describes; analysing and comparing with foreign parallels every myth or fairy tale which he records; citing every information which can throw light on the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... pleasure of seeing it put into the quilting-frame by Maria, the seamstress of the household. And thus did our sweet little Jessie win her first really decisive victory over the little wizard which had hitherto been to her like the fisherman's wife, Alice, in the fairy tale—the plague ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... first few days after our arrival, my time was agreeably spent in receiving the visits of the nobility and gentry who came to pay their respects to the noble new-married couple, and, like Bluebeard's wife in the fairy tale, in inspecting the treasures, the furniture, and the numerous chambers of the castle. It is a huge old place, built as far back as Henry V.'s time, besieged and battered by the Cromwellians in the Revolution, and altered and patched ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to them the very incarnation of power on earth. She would have been thought rich in any country; to their utter wretchedness her wealth was fabulous beyond bounds of fairy tale. Most persons would have admitted that she was wonderfully practical and showed a great deal of common sense in what she did; to her own people she seemed preternaturally wise, only to be compared with Providence for her foresight, and much more ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a certain contempt for themselves that they had been beguiled. She was reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when once the child had called out that the king was in his night clothes. Surely these people knew no more about Flavia than they had known before, but the mere fact that the thing had been said altered the situation. Flavia, meanwhile, sat chattering amiably, pathetically ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... duel, to the swift challenging glance of a pair of blue eyes as a blood-red rose was pinned to my coat. But that was so long ago, years it seemed to me, away back in the past, a memory as it were of a fairy tale heard from the lips of a grandmother before the big open fire in the great hall on a winter night; a fairy tale, aye, and she the Princess, with her blue eyes and hair of waving brown, with her step as light as the dew-drop, and her voice as low and soft ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... Circe, as his carriage was the other day, by the unceremonious nabman. But that's nothing to what used to occur to the Marquis of W———. They say, that if he deposited a broach, a ring, or a watch upon his table, a hand and arm, like that of a genius in a fairy tale, was seen to introduce itself bon-gre, mal-gre, through the casement, and instantly they ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... at the joke, for they had just been reading the old French fairy tale of "Les deux Fees," and the application amused her; but she shook her head gravely at Aurora afterwards, and reminded her that no serious truth was well answered by a joke, ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... the ladies who moved about the castle, seeing themselves reflected from Marie's pages as in a polished mirror, I am not competent to speak. The type of beauty preferred by the old romancers was that of a child's princess of fairy tale—blue-eyed, golden-haired, and ruddy of cheek. The lady would wear a shift of linen, "white as meadow flower." Over this was worn a garment of fur or silk, according to the season; and, above all, a vividly coloured ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... a sound was heard, not a sight was seen, but I scent the Russian... how does it go on in the fairy tale... I've forgotten! 'At your service!'" a familiar voice ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "consists in two young men escaping from the city and relieving one tired school-teacher from her duty and permitting her to go and gather flowers if she will. But which was the girl you told the fairy tale to, Miss Page?" he added, as Alice began putting ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... wish now; for it may come to pass as the man's wish in the fairy tale did, and the black pudding flew up and stuck tight to his ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... few attractive women of late, the ladies of Baku being inclined to run to fat and diamonds, and he thought Lena Meredith the most lovely and the most wonderful creature that ever stepped out of a fairy tale. ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... like a fairy tale," said Mary when she was told about it, "and I don't know just what to say. I can just look up into the blue sky and say, 'Even so, Father; let me live and be worthy of it all.' It is a grand gift and I am so glad ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... that he dared yet to think of a love confessed and reciprocated. The prince in disguise is all very well in a fairy tale; in England of the twentieth century he is an anachronism; and Medenham would as soon think of shearing a limb as of profiting by the chance that threw Cynthia in his way. Of course, a less scrupulous wooer might have devised a hundred plausible ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... compiled a couple of centuries or more after the introduction of Christianity into Iceland, it is uncertain how much in them is literary explanation of tradition whose meaning was forgotten; some also, especially in Snorri, is probably pure invention, fairy tale rather ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... swung myself when a child. I said to Augustus Hare, who happened to be one of the party, "One would think that we all of us were going to Gretna Green." When we approached the castle, whose towers were blots in the November evening, I felt we were approaching a castle in a child's fairy tale. In point of magnitude, combined with ancient and absolutely continuous occupation, there is, so far as my own experience goes, no private dwelling in the kingdom which excels, or even equals, Raby. The ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Nan, and, dropping on his knee as reverently as the herald of the fairy tale, he asked, still smiling, but ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... it does claret; but unless I can divert you, I had rather wait till we can laugh together; the best employment for friends, who do not mean to pick one another's pockets, nor make a property of either's frankness. Instead of politics, therefore, I shall amuse you to-day with a fairy tale. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... clear, rather cold autumn day, with a frost in the morning, when the birch, all golden like some tree in a fairy tale, stands out picturesquely against the pale blue sky; when the sun, standing low in the sky, does not warm, but shines more brightly than in summer; the small aspen copse is all a-sparkle through and through, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... bed earlier than the others, and had wished her parents and the king and queen 'Good night,' she turned round once more at the half-closed door, and nodded to me in a friendly manner, and as though we were old acquaintance. I was her prince of the fairy tale." ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... Maria, who had listened only as to a fairy tale. 'Why, Phoebe, genies come out of bottles, and go away in smoke, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sinewy arms have long confinement and scanty fare, bowed down to this damp floor and withered. What a record of misery and wrong would not these walls give forth, were they for one little hour gifted with the power of speech, like the talking woods in the fairy tale. And yet, evil as the times were, when might, not right, was in the ascendant, they had their redeeming excellencies too. Knightly honour, chivalrous abhorrence of guile, the soul to endure, as well as the temper ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... dripped all over Marcella's apron. But Marcella was so glad to find Raggedy Ann again she didn't mind it a bit. She just hurried home and took off all of Raggedy Ann's wet clothes and placed her on a little red chair in front of the oven door, and then brought all of the other dolls in and read a fairy tale to them while Raggedy ...
— Raggedy Ann Stories • Johnny Gruelle
... Do you know, I sometimes think I have got into a fairy tale. Everything is so beautiful and so bewildering, and unlike what ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "he was severely punished while suffering from his disease. W.," she goes on, "died three days after a ten-days' punishment. He had to be lifted from the dark cell and carried to the hospital by attendants." Upon the whole, one has grounds for believing that the dark hole is not a fairy tale, and that it still exists and is at work in Atlanta Penitentiary, in spite of the impression to the contrary of the humane ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... they gaze and gaze again in boundless admiration; for the tropical sun shone down on a scene of dazzling and luxuriant vegetation, so resplendent that it seemed to them the realisation of a fairy tale. Plants and shrubs and flowers were there, of the most curious and brilliant description, and of which they neither knew the uses nor the names. Majestic trees were there, with foliage of every shape and size and hue; some with stems twenty feet in circumference; others more slender in form, ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... to Chaucer and the humblest ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the Provencal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke through the hedge of briers and ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the Eastern imagination, and the despotic character of Eastern rulers, it is easy to understand that such babads were more often than not reduced in point of veracity to the standard of an average fairy tale. M. Brumund, whose remarks on this subject are embodied in Leemans' work on the Boro-Boedoer temple, deals very severely with the babads. He cannot away with them, and goes near to denying their ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... bloom, an' flowery hawthorn-tree; Or sported 'mang the leafy woods, till nicht's lang shadows fell— Oh, we ne'er had thoughts o' partin' then, my ain dear Nell! And in winter, Nelly Brown, when the nichts were lang an' drear, We would creep down by the ingle side, some fairy tale to hear; We cared nae for the snawy drift, or nippin' frost sae snell, For we lived but for each other then, my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... covered with dust, which made it seem part of the woodwork it rested on, lay a little shabby book. How it caught my eye I hardly know, except that, believing in Providence as I do, I suppose it had lain there all those years, like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale, waiting for ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... "'Tis like a fairy tale," said he, and then told them several fairy tales he had heard when a boy. He was an uneducated man and his life was exceedingly simple, and the fairy tales were, ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... mountain form, and the other of cloud form and their visible causes, though separately published, are only reprints of the author's larger and nobler embodiment of his views on art, in "Modern Painters." "The King of the Golden River," of which we have previously spoken, is a fairy tale of much beauty, which he wrote for the "Fair Maid of Perth" whom he married, and who separated herself from him on the plea of "incompatibility." Playful as is the style of the story, it is not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... yarn about the memory, entitled "My M-made memory medley, mentioning memory's most marvelous manifestations." This took up as much as three or four pages of this book, every word beginning with m. It was a marvelous exercise for lingual development. He also had "The Far-Famed Fairy Tale of Fenella," and these were constantly and continuously recited, with scrupulous care as to enunciation. My father was an old-time conductor of choral and oratorio societies, and was the leader of a large choir. I had a good alto voice and under his wise dicipline it was cultivated, and I was ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... verse; and "May Maxwell," and "The Broken Pitcher," are pretty ballads, by the Howitts. We are not half through the book, and can only mention "the Young Governess," a school story—"the Birds and the Beggar of Bagdad," a fairy tale—"Lady Lucy's Petition," an historiette—"the Restless Boy," by Mrs. Opie, and the "Passionate Little Girl," by Mrs. Hofland—all sparkling trifles in prose. Among the poetry is "the African Mier-Vark," or Ant-eater, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... compare this incident with the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife and with the old Egyptian romance and fairy tale of the brothers Anapon and Saton dating from the fourteenth century, the days of Pharaoh Ramses Miamun (who built Pi-tum and Ramses) at whose court Moses or Osarsiph is supposed to have been reared (Cambridge Essays 1858). The ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... prudence and solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous elan, which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France—at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's fancy, more ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... of these machines all hard at work, and we feel we are in a fairy tale when we see the little round clean bits of gold drop, drop, drop without stopping on to the tiny round table with the collar; and the machine goes up and down, up and down, never stopping, and every time it does its work, and a new sovereign drops away into a box below. Drip, drip, drip, sovereigns ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... a symbolic tendency; it will have an aroma of the wisdom of the East, taught in forms of the parable, the apologue, with hints of allegory. The world, thrown outside of that transparent Greek life, becomes a Fairy Tale, which is here taken up and incorporated into a great poem. We shall be compelled to look thoroughly into these strange shapes of Egypt, and, if possible, reach down to their meaning, for meaning they must have, or be meaningless. We shall find that this Fourth Book stands in the front rank ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... words."—"What is the matter?"—"Nothing!"—They have scarce a meaning. But it was not always so. There was a time when to my thinking, every word was a flower or a pearl, like those which dropped from the mouth of the little peasant-girl in the Fairy tale, or like those that fall from the great preacher in the Caledonian Chapel! I drank of the stream of knowledge that tempted, but did not mock my lips, as of the river of life, freely. How eagerly I slaked my thirst of German sentiment, "as the hart that panteth for the water-springs;" ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... We are not characters in a fairy tale, but men of reason, inhabiting a world which reveals to us at every point of our investigation one certain and unalterable fact—an unbroken uniformity of natural law. We must not dream; we must act, and, before ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... subject I had preferred to his brilliant political poem, he made no effort to conceal his contempt for my choice. I had borrowed the plot from a dramatic fairy tale by Gozzi, La Donna Serpente, and called it Die Feen ('The Fairies'). The names of my heroes I chose from different Ossian and similar poems: my prince was called Arindal; he was loved by a fairy called Ada, who held him under her spell and kept him in fairyland, away from his ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... was as seductive as a kiss; and when she called me, her voice darted like a wine-ray right into my soul's phosphor. And why shouldn't she be so beautiful?" Did he imagine she was a messenger or something in the fire brigade? She was simply a Heaven's wonder, I could just inform him, a fairy tale. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... must aim at seeming, not being, natural. Obviously, one cannot deliver blank verse naturally; such, however, is the power of make-believe in the audience that if the dramatist and his company can engage the sympathy of the spectators, a fairy tale in rhymed lines, a tragedy in unrhymed verse, a melodrama with flatulent phrases, and a comedy seeking the most exact reproduction of modern life permissible may ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... literally been fulfilled and our people, free and independent, advances, respected and supported by universal sympathy, into the community of European nations. Are we living in a fairy tale? Politicians of all countries are asking this. I put the same question to myself and yet it is all an ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... idea, as she put her arms through the arm-holes, and said, "It is all so funny, mamma, that I can't straighten it out at all. It is like a fairy tale, and, O! mamma, I look like a fairy in this frock. Isn't it lovely? I wish I might go down and show it to ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... or fairy tale, Or minstrel's strain of music rare; But ever foremost in its train, Walk ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... The fairy tale is a poetic recording of the facts of life, an interpretation by the imagination of its hard conditions, an effort to reconcile the spirit which loves freedom and goodness and beauty with its harsh, bare and disappointing conditions. It is, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... Yet it all seems like a fairy tale to me, for I've never been in any other country than the United States since I made my first voyage here from Sangoa—the island where my eyes ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne |
