"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pupil. No mother's mark is more permanent than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and mutilations, that students carry with them out of the lecture-room, if once the teeming intellect which nourishes theirs has been scared from its propriety by any misshapen fantasy. Even an impatient or petulant expression, which to a philosopher would be a mere index of the low state of amiability of the speaker at the moment of its utterance, may pass into the young mind as an element ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Pythagoras was afterwards developed into the solar system by Copernicus, and is now received as the Copernican system. But, turning from grave to gay, we find that five wits have been described, viz., common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Of these, common sense passes judgment on all things; imagination brings the mind to realise what comes before it; fantasy stimulates the mind to act; estimation has to do with all that pertains to time, space, locality, etc.; and memory ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... extraordinary, seen as it was under the influence of the old tragedies with which my mind was necessarily full, that I paused, balked in my advance, and well-nigh uncertain whether I looked upon a real thing or on some strange and terrible fantasy ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... to propose any kind of a plan for the future, her answer would have been, when denuded of side issues and fantasy, simply that she could see nothing better than simple drifting. As yet she could not anticipate, and it roused in her a kind of jealousy that Joyselle had so soon begun to think of Theo. His love for her ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... herself she had but one ambition—to hear men say, "This woman is the wife of the great Quintus Drusus." That would have been Elysium indeed. Cornelia, in fact, was building around her a world of sweet fantasy, that grew so real, so tangible, that the stern realities of life, realities that had hitherto worn out her very soul, became less galling. The reaction following the collapse of the plot against Drusus had thrown ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... a couple of voyages to the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De Clairville atoned for much ere he died. Francois, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as love at the first meeting,—a secret, an unaccountable affinity between persons (strangers before) which draws them irresistibly together,—as if there were truth in Plato's beautiful fantasy, that our souls were a portion of the stars, and that spirits, thus attracted to each other, have drawn their original light from the same orb, and yearn for a renewal of their former union. Yet without recurring to ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... servant of Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here—a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness—refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain—which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... at her window, gazing forth and numbly marvelling at the splendour. As of old, it struck her like a weird fantasy—this Indian enchantment—poignant, passionate, holding more of anguish than of ecstasy, yet deeply magnetic, deeply alluring, as a magic potion which, once tasted, must enchain the ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... that it is all a fantasy of the imagination, Frank. You had better take a composing draught, and to-morrow will find you more cheerful," said ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... poet leaves the realms of poetic fantasy to record a simple fact of everyday life—one which is appreciated by every man and woman irrespective of nationality or temperament. As in all other matters pertaining to the comfort of the European in the tropics, the Dutch, in the matter ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... don't mind telling you that I enjoyed very much writing my Tambourin Chinois.[A] The idea for it came to me after a visit to the Chinese theater in San Francisco—not that the music there suggested any theme, but it gave me the impulse to write a free fantasy ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of all fantasy. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... than possible that just three-score years ago, on a May day (see Who's Who), some Maestro of Fantasy slipped into a little house in Kirriemuir, N.B., with a black bag? Wouldn't that explain the otherwise inexplicable, the unwearying resourcefulness, the unabashed ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... past; something that buzzed like a thousand hornets and slithered over the rocks in a series of metallic clanks. Then it was gone—or so it seemed in the confusion of Eddie's mind; but he had seen nothing. Probably a fantasy of his overworked brain, or only the surf breaking against the sea wall. He turned his ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... quite the ton now in England. Corri the composer has published "The Feast of Erin, a fantasy for the piano-forte," in which the original Irish airs of 'Flanerty Drury,' 'The Summer is Coming,' 'Erin go Bragh,' and 'Fly not Yet' are introduced. Mr. C. (says the reviewer) has displayed some judgment in the selection of these airs, particularly in Erin go Bragh, which is one of the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would enable you ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... him had begun to realize itself. And, all the time, his hopes as to Geoffrey's success with her had been steadily rising. He and Geoffrey had indeed been at cross-purposes, if Geoffrey really believed what he seemed to believe! But it was nothing—it could be nothing—but the fantasy of a lover, starting ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... himself in helping distressed passengers. Well, what I in my brutal way want to know is whether this is a joke, or what. Because if I have to credit it, over goes the rest of the plot into frank make-believe. And fantasy of this kind consorts but ill with a scheme that embraces such realities as heart-failure and typhus. Not in any case that Miss DELAGEEVE'S plot could be called exactly convincing. "Preposterous" would be ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... fugue, nor yet in its complement, the prelude of Bach's days. The same is true of many similar passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the free expression, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... any more appeal to the collectors of "curious literature" than the Ecclesiazusae or the Thesmophoriazusae. On the mere grounds of taste I can see an at least equally good case made out for the Birds. That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... the earth, like sister twins lay down On one fair mother's bosom:—from that night She fled,—like those illusions clear and bright, Which dwell in lakes, when the red moon on high Pause ere it wakens tempest;—and her flight, 3025 Though 'twas the death of brainless fantasy, Yet smote my lonesome heart more than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... first fed my childish fantasy, Whose mountains were my boyhood's wild delight, Whose rocks, and woods, and torrents were to me The food of my soul's youthful appetite; Were music to my ear—a ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... have read of a prince who falls in love with a White Cat; in the story of "The Runaways" we come upon the old, old ruse of magic barriers interposed between pursuer and pursued; and Andersen's charming fantasy of "The Woodcutter's Child" who disobeyed her Guardian Angel has scarcely a more delicate pathos than the ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... Sung Periods was in reality the long arm and heavy fist of Confucius emphasizing a truer rationalism than that of his opponents and denouncing the danger of leaving the firm earth to soar into the unknown hazy regions of fantasy. It was Sung scholarship that gave the death-blow ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... their marriage, and as they walked hand in hand away from the ancient altar, which surely had never seen so strange a rite, there returned to Morris an idle fantasy which had entered his mind at this very spot when they landed one morning half-frozen after that night in the open boat. But he said nothing of it; for with the memory came a recollection of certain wandering words which that same day fell from Stella's lips, words at the thought of which his ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... because of the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life. It is in the songs of the greener plains that the depths of passion and heights of ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... had said that hers was the only house upon the island; it mattered not that Captain Jabe had said nothing of his neighbor; in truth, nothing mattered. One sister of the House of Martha had come to this place; why not another? What I had seen in the woods had been no fantasy. Sylvia ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... passion. Over his bosom's mistress he did exercise a certain marital control,—which was, for instance, quite sufficiently fixed to enable him to look down with thorough contempt on such a one as Bishop Proudie; but he was not a despot who could exact a passive obedience to every fantasy. His wife would not have written the letter for him on that day, and he knew very well that she would not do so. He knew also that she was right;—and yet he regretted his want of power. His anger at the present ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... ships, at first in little knots of two and three, which gradually increased and became formidable, joining in murmurs and menaces against the admiral. They exclaimed against him as an ambitious desperado who, in a mad fantasy, had determined to do something extravagant to render himself notorious. What obligation bound them to persist, or when were the terms of their agreement to be considered as fulfilled? They had already penetrated into seas untraversed by a sail, and ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who may be—and, I rejoice to say, is—in this world, but certainly is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... entered into Tanqueray's head (though not his heart) to be in love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to say, of trying to marry her. Nina had the thing called temperament, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... from the window, and seated herself, in her impulsive way, at the organ. Her fingers touched the keys timidly at first as she began a trembling prelude of her own fantasy. In music her pent-up feelings found congenial expression. The fire kindled, and she presently burst out with the voice of a seraph in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... living beings who have crossed the boundary] There it continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. These fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syadvada—the doctrine of "It may be so",—a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny the existence of one and the same thing. If ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... rendered fertile and green by some outburst of fresh water from the rocks. Emerging upon it in midst of the barren desolation through which they had been toiling for hours, blinded by alkali dust, jolted down that dangerous decline, it seemed like some beautiful dream, a fantasy of imagination. ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... wouldn't let his favourites off so easily and would give their enemies a better sporting chance, he would more readily sustain the illusion which is of the essence of real enjoyment in this kind of fantasy. But I imagine the normal human boy will find nothing whatever to complain of, and to him I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... head, broke the silence of the canyon with a great sigh of content. It pierced the dull fantasy of Hare's mind; it burst the gloomy spell. The sigh and the snort which followed were Silvermane's triumphant signals when ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... into the East during this period of Leighton's career, gave him new subject-matter, new tints to his palette, and added something of an oriental fantasy to the classic sentiment of his art. The sketches of Damascus and other time-honoured eastern cities, mosques, gardens, and courtyards, which figured largely among Sir Frederic's studies, were made for the most part in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... us had opened and that we were all three of us, on the threshold of another chamber. At the end of it stood something like a little altar of hard, black stone, and on this altar lay a mass of substance of the size of a child's head, but fashioned, I suppose from fantasy, to the oblong shape of a ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... commended the treasure as a whole to the unflagging care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically real and not the fantasy of a disordered imagination. ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... in this worldly state Is sweet and pleasing unto living sense, Or that may dayntiest fantasy aggrate Was poured ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... All wealth is intrinsic, and is not constituted by the judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the body; we know, that no force of fantasy will make stones nourishing, or poison innocent; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind. We are easily—perhaps willingly—misled by the appearance of beneficial results obtained by industries addressed wholly ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... bearded, hollow-eyed, swarthy features, which travelling, fatigues of war, and advanced age, had bestowed on the original. The Baron joined in the laugh. 'Truly,' he said, 'that picture was a woman's fantasy of my good mother's (a daughter of the Laird of Tulliellum, Captain Waverley; I indicated the house to you when we were on the top of the Shinnyheuch; it was burnt by the Dutch auxiliaries brought in ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... our infatuation a higher place than Truth is a sign of inherent slavishness. Where our minds are free we find ourselves lost. Our moribund vitality must have for its rider either some fantasy, or someone in authority, or a sanction from the pundits, in order to make it move. So long as we are impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self- government. Whatever may be our condition, we shall either need some ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... Paulmann gave a grim look at him; but Registrator Heerbrand laid a music-leaf on the frame, and sang with ravishing grace one of Bandmaster Graun's bravura airs. The student Anselmus accompanied this, and much more; and a fantasy duet, which Veronica and he now fingered, and Conrector Paulmann had himself composed, again brought all into the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... The reproductive function cannot go on without this biological thrust towards the proper object. By Narcissism is meant the formulation that a new development is taking place in the infantile Oedipus fantasy. The child cannot hold on to the mother image. He passes it to others nearer his own age. He does it first through his own identification with the female. His bisexuality permits this. Similarly the infantile father protest must be supplanted by an evolved brotherly love. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... valley. All was still. Not a trace of life remained; not a hoofmark in the snow, nor a bruised blade of grass. And when they climbed to the plateau and looked back, it seemed to Trafford and his companions, as it seemed in after years, that this thing had been all a fantasy. But Hester's face was beside them, and it told of strange and unsubstantial things. The shadows of the middle world were upon her. And yet again when they turned at the last there was no token. It was a northern valley, with sun and snow, and cold ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... from the past and faced the future. It was as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed—a dream, a fantasy, a delirium—something that had left no external things behind it and had only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... That haill[25] hall he had set into a fire; A great rafter he had into his hand. Wallace as then no longer would he stand. Of his good men full great marvel had he, How they were tint through his feil[26] fantasy. Trust right well that all this was sooth indeed, Suppose that it no point be of the creed. Power they had with Lucifer that fell, The time when he parted from heaven to hell. By sic mischief if his men might be lost, Drowned or slain among the English host; Or what it was in likeness of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... A work of art may stand very far from Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is true to his fantasy. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... And home returned, ashamed and sorrowful; Whilst ceaselessly endured that foolish play Moon after moon—the Prince the loser still. Then Damayanti, seeing so estranged Her lord, the praised in song, the chief of men, Watching, all self-possessed, his fantasy, And how the gaming held him; sad, and 'feared, The heavy fortunes pondering of her Prince; Hating the fault, but to the offender kind; And fearing Nala should be stripped of all, This thing devised: Vrihatsena she called— Her foster-nurse and faithful ministrant— ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... this book is a work of genius and, as always with works of genius, it is difficult to analyze the elements that have gone to make it. There is poetry here and fantasy and humor, a little pathos but, above all, a number of creations in whose existence everybody must believe whether they be children of four or old men of ninety or prosperous bankers of forty-five. ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... two features, on which, more than on any others, the grace and delight of a fine Gothic building depends; one is the springing of its vaultings, the other the proportion and fantasy of its traceries. This church of Santa Croce has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn. And its windows are all of the same pattern,—the exceedingly prosaic one of two pointed arches, with a ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... ——and Belief Fantasy and Imagination, Fatalism and Providence, Fathers, the, Faust, Fees, Barristers' and Physicians', Fielding and Richardson, Fine Arts, Patronage of the, Flaccus, Valerius, Flogging, Food, Fox and Pitt, French, the, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, just as one happened to catch the glint of them. And she had fascinating ways, too, which the lady of his fantasy could never have displayed, or he would not have abandoned the vision so readily. When she smiled, it was with lips and eyes in unison. When she spoke he heard harmonies not framed in mere words, whereas the other fair dame ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... that is to say, the enunciation of the theme (subject), its answer by another voice or part, recurrence of the subject in another part which, in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the complexity of the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Bede? Go you, and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy; Sleep she as sound as careless infancy: 50 But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... truly be considered as "schoolmaster" to Merimee and Gautier and Gerard de Nerval and all their fellows), may be, without violence or exaggeration, said to be a new form of the French fairy-tale, divested of common form, and readjusted with the help of the German Maerchen and fantasy-pieces. Le Diable Amoureux had, no doubt, set the fashion of this kind earlier; but that story, charming as it is, is still scarcely "Romantic." Nodier is so wholly; and it is fair to remember that Hoffmann himself was rather ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished, and she found herself almost overpowered by the warm benevolence of his look. But the fantasy would not quit her that the original Puritan, of whom she had heard so many sombre traditions, had now ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... There is no other expression for her—aerial! She does not walk, she glides! If she had the fantasy, with one little kick of her heel, she could raise herself lightly over the heads of those two tall fellows with spears, cross the Place de la Concorde, and go and place herself on the pediment of the Chamber of Deputies. Look at ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... as he dropped back heavily from the back of the wagon, "and it was all a dream. Ugh!" I shuddered. I lay still again, my mind going over the fantasy of the night, which came back so vividly, yet was so strangely mixed and absurd; but all the time Denham slept on, breathing heavily, dead to all the sorrows and horror of our ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sense of the mysterious, of the feeling of the wind-swept mountain and its roaring fires, the thing is undeniably impressive. But in other less expert hands it would become ludicrous. There is one tale of finer texture than the others. It is called Wayfarers, and is a quite beautiful little fantasy on the old theme that love is longer than life. This is what Mr. BLACKWOOD can do to perfection. It redeems a volume that, for all its originality, does not otherwise display his ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... in contemporary history—was the reputed author of a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for God nor for his enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy, about which the Florentine intellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... fantasy, colour and cheery humanity the Prince drove through the town, which seems to have the air of brooding over its past, to the exhibition ground, which he opened, and where he presented medals to ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... is that he never joined the pessimists, or the party which professed pseudo-peasant tendencies, and followed Count L. N. Tolstoy's ideas, but has always preserved his independence. His first work, a delightful fantasy, entitled "Makar's Dream," appeared in 1885. Korolenko has been sent to Siberia several times, but now lives in Russia proper,[48] and publishes ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... printing in his deepest wit, He thereon feeds his hungrie fantasy, Still full, yet never satisfyde with it; Like Tantale, that in store doth sterved ly, 200 So doth he pine in most satiety; For nought may quench his infinite desyre, Once kindled ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... rather enamelled. I think they had no qualities, as a generation (or rather as several generations, which, of course, they were); men and women then were, in the main, the same as men and women to-day, I see nothing but individuals. The rest is all the fantasy of the foolish, who love to generalise, till they cannot see the trees for the wood. Generalisations make me dizzy. I see nothing but the separate trees. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... imagined he was imitating that poet, though it is really no more in the style of Chaucer than is the roughly accentual measure in which the eclogue is composed. For the 'March' Spenser recasts in English surroundings Bion's fantasy of the fight with Cupid, without however achieving any conspicuous success. In the April eclogue Hobbinol recites to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... gave him their compassion, jocularly, contemptuously, or surlily; and at first it took the shape of a blanket thrown at him as he stood there with the white skin of his limbs showing his human kinship through the black fantasy of his rags. Then a pair of old shoes fell at his muddy feet. With a cry:—"From under," a rolled-up pair of canvas trousers, heavy with tar stains, struck him on the shoulder. The gust of their benevolence sent a wave of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... two my mind constantly reverted to the incidents of the voyage home. I was perfectly convinced that the curtain had been partially raised upon some fantasy in which Professor ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his very body ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... being done with, the Classics and pure fantasy are drawn upon; the incredulous being finally knocked down by a citation from Pliny, and a polite request not to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... new-stablished would stand, and be No longer vext of this infirmity. And so that night, ere lying down to sleep, There came on him, half making him to weep And half to laugh that such a thing should be, A mad conceit and antic fantasy (And yet more sad than merry was the whim) To crave this boon of Sleep, beseeching him To send the dream of dreams most coveted. And ere he lay him down upon his bed, A soft sweet song was born within his thought; But if he sang the song, or if 'twas nought But the soul's longing whispered ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... confided in her to any great extent, but that was certain to come later. It was his grandmother's love and the affection he was already beginning to feel for her which, during these first lonesome, miserable weeks, kept him from, perhaps, turning the running away fantasy ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... too long since airplane flight was considered an idiot's dream. This scene here at La Guardia would have seemed pure fantasy in 1900—thc huge Constellations and DC-6's; the double-decked Stratocruisers, sweeping in from all over the country; the big ships at Pan-American, taking off for points all over the globe. We'd come a long way in ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... Brett, suddenly switching the conversation away from the Italian's fantasy, "you are well acquainted with all the circumstances connected with Sir Alan's murder. Have you formed any theory about the crime, its ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... this point in his fantasy, a breath of the practical entered, and Jimmy began to consider the more sensible problem of what sort of information this sheaf of ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... wove their magic webs, and a world apart from the world of actual experience came to life. But it was not all myth, nor all fantasy; there was a basis of truth and reality at the foundation of the mystic growth, and a true criticism will not rest content with wandering in these enchanted lands, and holding all it meets with for the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... black, their nose pendants—a pebble hung on a deer-sinew—swinging against their greasy lips as they shouted plaudits or derision. But best I can see Pemaou, dancing between me and the sun like some grotesque dream fantasy. He was in full war bravery, his body painted red, barred with white stripes to imitate the lacing on our uniforms, and his hair feather-decked till he towered in height like a fir tree. I say that he was grotesque, but at the time I did not think of his appearance; ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... dream?" At the same time the sultaness called the princess's women, and after she had seen her get up, and begin dressing, went to the sultan's apartment, told him that her daughter had got some odd notions in her, but that there was nothing in them but idle fantasy. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... tattoo designs cover the two walls. Dragons, scorpions, bulbous nymphs, crossed flags, wreathed anchors, cupids, butterflies, daggers and quaint decorations that seem the grotesque survivals of the mid-Victorian schools of fantasy. Photographs of famous men also cover the walls—Capt. Constantinus tattooed from head to foot, every inch of him; Barnum's favorites, ancient and forgotten kooch dancers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, magicians and museum freaks. And a two column article from the Chicago ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... and I were ghosts in love We'd climb the cliffs of Mystery, Above the sea of Wails. I'd trim your gray and streaming hair With veils of Fantasy From the tree of Memory. 'Tis there the ghosts that fall in love ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... reclaimed, how a little woodland fairy, Jacqueline, worked out a scout fantasy, and how a very modest deed won the first Bronze Cross, makes the first volume of this series a book calculated to inspire as well as to fascinate ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... the prison-world ye knew before Hewing in twain the door, To thralls of custom and of circumstance We preach deliverance. O self-imprisoned ones, be free! be free! These fetters frail, by doting ages wrought Of basest metals—fantasy and fear, And ignorance dull, and fond credulity— Have moldered, lo! this many a year; See, at a touch they part, and fall to naught! Yours is the heirship of the universe, Would ye but claim it, nor from eyes averse Let fall ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those "gates ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... world had been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn was delicately sifted over, and the top of every ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... Betsinda dancing with her plum-bun in "The Rose and the Ring." The burlesque drawings of that delightful child's book are not its least attraction. Not arriving at the prettiness of Mr. Tenniel, and the elegance of Mr. Du Maurier, and falling far short of their ingenious fantasy, they are yet manly delineations of great adventures. The count kicking the two black men into space is a powerful design, full of action; and it would be hard to beat the picture of the fate of Gruffanuf's husband. These and the rest are old friends, and there ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... vigor of glad life even so I love thee! What sayest thou of Heaven? ... Heaven is here—here on this bridal field of Ardath, o'er-canopied with stars! Come, sweet one, . . cease to play this mystic midnight fantasy—I have done with dreams! ... Edris, be thyself! ... for them art Woman, not Angel— thy kiss was warm as wine! Nay, why shrink from me? ." this, as she retreated still further away, her eyes flashing with unearthly brilliancy, . . "I will make thee a queen, fair Edris, as poets ever make ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of peace between the old Persian and the conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Hafiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; whether the wine of which he sings really runs red, and the love he describes is really ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the favour to remark, in full confidence, "I have my curiosity, and I have my chagrins. You are not more than ordinarily honourable, perhaps?" I announce myself, "Madame, a gentleman from the birth, and a gentleman to the death; but NOT more than ordinarily honourable. I despise such a weak fantasy." Thereupon she is pleased to compliment. "The difference between you and the rest is," she answers, "that you say so." For she knows Society. I accept her congratulations with gallantry and politeness. Politeness and little gallantries are inseparable from my character. She then ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... interesting passage in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Mrs. Wynne's symphony of thrills and shudders, which will not have died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it before. Mr. Millet's sketch is of a quality akin to that of Mr. McVickar's slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both are "in the midst of men and day," and command such credence as we cannot withhold from any well-confirmed report in the morning paper. Mr. Rice's story is of like temperament, and so, somewhat, is Miss Hawthorne's, and Mr. Brown's, and Miss Bradley's, while Miss Davis's romance ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... understand, Ivan. What does it mean?" Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile. "Is it simply a wild fantasy, or a mistake on the part of the old man—some ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position; whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man's brain, only slightly or not at ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rhythmic current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical humoreske by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears, pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a girl—light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can resist all appeal and evade all attack—an invincible ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the great singers, but it is not of the great singers that I wish to speak here. I fancy that it is with others as with myself, and, in my early days at least, music wrought its chief enchantments and most perfectly allied itself with the great world of fantasy and imagination when I heard it in my own home, or at least quietly and privately, and when its influence was of a constant and regular kind. Why is it that literature, which enshrines so much of what is personal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... among the frozen figures of the Sieges Allees. I do not want to be an idolator, still less an idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all for coming back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetised, either by mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew what it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... to. He's developing his imagination, and he may be finding more stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy—or whatever you call it—is the essence and mainspring of those scientists, musicians, painters, and poets who amount to something in later life. They are ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... few errands. The sum total of these expenses amounted to only eighteen cents, which left me two cents over for emergencies." Balzac somewhat exaggerates his poverty and reduces his expenses to suit the pleasure of his poetic fantasy, but undoubtedly it was a brusque transition from the bourgeois comfort of family life to the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... and although we have no records, it probably was in use for ages previously. Noah, possibly, had one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa is made like a basket and then coated with bitumen. This type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the scenery of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially when filled with watermelons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests Abraham attempting the role of Sinbad the Sailor for ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... the best and most popular of the Anglo-Oriental stories that strove to inculcate moral truths. In their oppressive air of gravity, Beckford, with his implacable hatred of bores, could hardly have breathed. One of the most amazing facts about his wild fantasy is that it was the creation of an English brain. The idea of Vathek was probably suggested to Beckford by the witty Oriental tales of Count Antony Hamilton and of Voltaire. The character of the caliph, who desired to know everything, even the sciences which did not exist, is sketched in the spirit ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Anthropophagi, Spectra, Diaboli, What scared St. Anthony, Hobgoblins, Lemures, Dreams of Antipodes, Night-riding Incubi Troubling the fantasy, All dire illusions Causing confusions; Figments heretical, Scruples fantastical, Doubts diabolical, Abaddon vexeth me, Mahu ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... who plays so many parts incites envy and ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... "and if you find him among those soldiers who attend us, I will indeed lean to thine opinion, and think that fantasy had the chief share in the evils I have endured the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... bad painter neither can nor knows how to imagine, nor does he even desire to do good painting, his work mostly differs but little from his imagination, which is generally somewhat worse; for if he knew how to imagine well or in a masterly manner in his fantasy, he could not have a hand so corrupt as not to show some part or indication of his good will. But no one has ever known how to aspire well in this science, except the mind which understands what good work is, and what ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... An amusing allegorical fantasy. All the most interesting Days, grandchildren of Mother Year, came to Mrs. November's dinner party, to honour the birthday of her ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... worth while to dwell on the very many churches which adorn the northern capital, because, with few exceptions, there is nothing in point of art which merits to be recorded. Yet I can scarcely refrain from again referring to the fine fantasy played by many-coloured domes against the blue sky. The forms are beautiful, the colours decorative. The city in its sky outline presents a succession of strange pictures, at one point the eye might seem to range across a garden of gourds, at other positions peer above house-tops groups which ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... she managed to get rid of all my friends. We had not made any difference in our talk because of * her presence. We talked as we always had done in the past, but she never understood the irony or the fantasy of our artistic exaggerations, of our wild axioms, or paradoxes, in which-an idea is travestied only to figure more brilliantly. It only irritated and puzzled her. Seated in a quiet corner of the drawing-room, she listened and said nothing, ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakspeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... rafters, when a light glanced suddenly in his face, and flashed on the wet roof above him. Looking fearfully down, Aristides beheld between the interstices of the rafters, which formed a temporary flooring, that there was another opening below, and in that opening a man was working. In the queer fantasy of Aristides's dream, it took the aspect of a second pocket and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man, and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled. Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy, I was frozen to the spot with terror. The black door, which I thought no more of than the lid of an empty box, began slowly to open, impelled from within by a human hand. And President Kruger himself came out into ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... all other writing mortals we esteem him who, like Barrie, treads with sure feet the borderland 'twixt fact and faery, stepping now on this side, now on that. One must write with moist eyes many pages of such a fantasy as "A Kiss for Cinderella." There are tears that are not laughter's, nor grief's, but beauty's own. A lovely landscape may bring them, or a strain of music, or a written or a ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... He always took off his hat before the windows of the manor house, even if he saw no one there. The crown of it all is The Wedding. The bridal pair's visit to the graves of by-gone loves is a gem of fantasy. But behind all the humor and satire must not be forgotten, in view of what was to follow, the undercurrent of courageous democratic protest which finds its keenest expression in the "Free Note" to Chapter Six. Fixlein appeared ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... despite certain obvious faults of imagination and style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of conventional thought, and is prepared ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... done," he said. He picked the second headband from the desk and put it on. Abruptly, both he and his wife were aware of a fuzziness in their thoughts and senses. The walls, the floor, and the furniture seemed to blur and waver, like the fantasy world of delirium. He put his hand up and adjusted the controls. The room returned to normal, and their senses were abruptly sharp and clear again. He ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... too, the little Child-heart must be glad— Being so young, nor knowing, as we know. The fact from fantasy, the good from bad, The joy from woe, the—all that hurts us so! What wonder then that thus It hides away from us?— So weak a little ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... certain respects, "for so the French and Spanish translators have not done";[270] Hoby says of his translation of The Courtier, "I have endeavored myself to follow the very meaning and words of the author, without being misled by fantasy or leaving out any parcel one or other, whereof I know not how some interpreters of this book into other languages can excuse themselves, and the more they be conferred, the more it will perchance appear."[271] ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... the old negro's disposition to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions—especially if ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... forcibly than it did those to whom the tales were told and for whom they were written down. It is a kaleidoscope of the errors and failings and virtues of the men whose daily life it records; it is also a picture of the wonderfully rich fantasy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... covered with a crystalline glittering substance, like molten glass sprayed on and allowed to harden. Behind this glasseous protective surface, paintings and carvings spread a fantasy of strange form and color, but the light was too dim to make much of it, except that it was alien to my experience, and exceedingly well done, speaking of a culture second ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... separation from human intercourse—the infringible taciturnity imposed upon themselves—and the terrible severity of their penances, are certainly circumstances more resembling the visionary indulgence of fantasy and fiction, than actual realities to be met with among living men, and in the ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... my interests and work in so many other directions—in literature, journalism, education, philanthropy, and religion—which had been testified to by so many notable people on that occasion, I hoped to prove that I was not a mere faddist, who could be led away by a chimerical fantasy. I wanted the world to understand that I was a clear-brained, commonsense woman of the world, whose views on effective voting and other political questions were as worthy of credence as her work in other directions had been worthy of acceptance. The greetings of my many friends from all parts ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... face angelical, Or herb or flower, or lofty cathedral, Upon these sheets below doth lie y-spred, In quaint devices deftly blazoned. Lord, in this tome to thee I sanctify The sinful fruits of worldly fantasy. ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... merchandise. Marvelous and fantastic it seemed to Winny at first sight. But when she saw that it was just what they were selling in the shops to-day the delicious confusion in her mind heightened the effect of fantasy ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and the life which they are represented as leading: that ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... cleared away from Ned's mind and it all came back, the terrible and treacherous slaughter of his unarmed comrades, his own flight through the timber his swimming of the river, and then the blank. But these were his best friends. It was no fantasy. How and when they had come he did not know, but here they were in the flesh, the Panther, Obed White, Will Allen, "Deaf" ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo—some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree," which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the "Merry Widow." I thanked Heaven ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... concerned himself at all with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, above ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... intellect free itself as might the bound Prometheus rid himself of his fetters and leave the rock to which he is chained, but we shall look back on the institutions of force, the state, the hangman, et al, as ghosts of an anxious fantasy. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... before reaching Constable's Camp, where we were to stop for the night. I worked hard all day, but in a kind of dream, as if the dead weight I carried with weariness were only the phantom of something, and I were a fantasy carrying it;—the actual had become visionary, and my imaginings nudged me and jostled me almost off the path of reason. But I had no time for a seance with my daemon. The next day I devoted with the guides to bushing out the carry across to Forked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... wish from her, his dreams certainly should have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... fantasy? Why, reading the facts of what happened in 1929, it is already prognosticated. The fishing banks off the Coast of Newfoundland have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable, snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances of a hundred miles on the Grand ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of his spite, which that in vain Doth seek to force my fantasy, I am professed for loss or gain, To be thine own assuredly; Wherefore let my father spite[334] and spurn, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... in all respects opposed to the genius of the English drama. They do not even pretend to be representations of human life and human character, but are pure fantasy pieces, in which the personages are a heterogeneous medley of Grecian gods and goddesses, and impassible, colorless creatures, with sublunary names, all thinking with one brain, and speaking with one tongue,—the conceitful, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various |
