"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his matrimonial views, Mr. Van Brunt turned off into the barn-yard, leaving Ellen to go home by herself. She felt as if she were walking on air while she crossed the chip-yard, and the very house had a seeming of unreality. Mechanically she put her flowers in water, and sat down to finish the beans; but the beans might have been flowers and the flowers beans for all the difference Ellen saw in them. Miss Fortune and she shunned each other's faces most carefully for a long time; Ellen felt it impossible to meet her ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... with life, and yet there was borne in upon the ape-man a sense of unutterable loneliness, a sensation that he never before had felt in his beloved jungles. There was unreality in everything about him—in the valley itself, lying hidden and forgotten in what was supposed to be an arid waste. The birds and the monkeys, while similar in type to many with which he was familiar, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... holding my arm and looking into my face. That sense of the unreality of things which had haunted me since that moment at the dance came over me with renewed intensity. Life had ceased to be a rather grey, orderly business in which day succeeded day calmly and without event. Its steady stream ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... well" of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the swish of water against the dividing hull of the 'Fulvia' sounded like a call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams. These dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had dropped out from the promenade to talk ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... empty. A few palpably deserted huts, nothing else. Beneath us, snugly anchored there on the ledge, was our power house. No unreality here. Its aerials were mounted; its external dynamos were visibly revolving; from its windows blue shafts of light slanted out; and from it rose the low hum ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... says:—"The stories are very well told. There is enough of the uncanny about them to give a pleasant thrill to the reader's nerves, while the supernatural element is not so overdone as to make its unreality palpable. . . . They are vividly told, and attest Mrs. Molesworth's remarkable range ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... an idiot," admitted Mr. Blunt, in the same matter-of-fact voice. "But she confessed to myself only the other day that she suffered from a sense of unreality. I told her that at any rate she had her own feelings surely. And she said to me: Yes, there was one of them at least about which she had no doubt; and you will never guess what it was. Don't try. I happen to know, because we ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... on his way to the stable they left a chill moisture upon his bare feet. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and to his cloudy gaze the familiar objects of the barnyard assumed grotesque and distorted shapes. The manure heap near the doorway presented an effect of unreality, the pig-pen seemed to have suffered witchery since the evening before, and the haystack, looming vaguely in the drab distance, appeared to be woven of some ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... had come to Orham with the unbelievable unreality with which it had come to the great mass of the country. Ever since the news of the descent of von Kluck's hordes upon devoted Belgium, in the fall of 1914, the death grapple in Europe had, of course, been ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... veil lying in their box, swathed in tissue-paper, had a gossamer unreality about them that even the sense of touch could not dispel. No—no! The bride of to-morrow was surely, ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... material to feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... came back to Dick as a horrible nightmare of unreality, that tragic night's events and those which followed. The grim setting of the coroner's jury, where men with bestial, bruised, and discolored faces sat awkwardly or anxiously, with their hats on their knees, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... variety of results. All the things of life, no matter how simple in appearance, are a complex combination of action and reaction. Our housewife's symptoms are no exception, whether they are mainly pains, aches, and fatigue, or the deeply motivated doubt or feeling of unreality. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... in his tracks and stared incredulously, then he smiled. "A shell-game, running wide open on the main street of the town!" This WAS the frontier, the very edge of things. With an odd sense of unreality he felt the world turn back ten years. He had seen shell-games at circuses and fairgrounds when he was much younger, but he supposed they had long since been abandoned in favor of more ingenious and less discreditable methods of robbery. Evidently, however, there were some gulls left, for ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... of unreality increased. The elements themselves had conspired to lend to everything a tinge weird and sinister to the last degree. There was a lull for a little in the wind and rain, but Andiatarocte was heaving, and great waves were chasing one another over ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... trust my uncle. He's been pretty wild to-day, and who shall blame him? Things like this crashing into his life leave him guessing. He's very shaken, and has lost his mental grip, too. Reality's played him such ugly tricks that he may be tempted to fall back on unreality now." ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... she had not seen in many years, she had known immediately, and now remembered. And Naida had taken her white-gloved hand shyly, whispering constrained formalities, then had disappeared into the unreality ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... And in human character it is the same. St. Preux, Rene, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins,—so much easier is it to caricature life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint it in its noble simplicity; so much cheaper is unreality than truth. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... be quite resisting and firm. From the roof chains of roses hung, concealing small lights—while from above the screen of lilac-bushes in full bloom the moon in all her glory mingled with the rose-shaded lamps and cast a glamour and unreality ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... automata existed similar to animals in all respects, both external and internal, it would be absolutely impossible to distinguish them from real animals. If, however, they were made to resemble human bodies, two signs would indicate their unreality—we would find no communication of ideas by means of language, and also an absence of those bodily movements which take their origin in the reason (and not merely in the constitution of the body). The only thing which ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... goads himself into inappropriate frenzies and sometimes betrays a suspiciously close acquaintance with the most disgusting details of the worst vices of the age. But though he had something of the unreality of the rhetorician, and though his character may, perhaps, not have been free from serious blemish, he is never a hypocrite; nor, though he paints exclusively the darkest side of society, is there the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... memories—the silence of the great house, the mysterious rustling of the heavy hangings around the black oak four-poster on which he lay, the faint pricking of something deadly at his throat—these things rolled back the curtain of unreality, brought him acute and painful consciousness of a situation almost appalling. He opened his eyes, and although a brave and callous man he lay still, paralysed with the fear which forbids motion. The dim light of a candle, recently ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman of London Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleep by reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographical nature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye.’ Such incidents as these shed an air of unreality ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... never had any real possession or experience of spiritual things amid all his formal observances of religious duties, and he has little or no difficulty, therefore, in adding another formality or two to his former life of unreality. And thus the transition is easily made from a comparatively innocent and unconscious formalist to a conscious and studied hypocrite. 'An hypocrite,' says Samuel Rutherford, 'is he who on the stage represents a king when he is ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... and closed doors. Whatever servants might be in attendance were evidently in a distant part of the building. Not a sound was to be heard. Still without any lack of courage, but oppressed with that curious sense of unreality, she turned almost automatically towards the door on the left and opened it. Again it closed behind her noiselessly. She realised that she was in one of the principal reception rooms of the house, dimly lit as the hall from a dome-shaped globe set into the ceiling. She moved a yard or two across ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... although it was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too, was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back, a half-senseless heap, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... in the portraits of that time look, as it were, like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and problems we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than their laughter, our restraints are larger ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... soft snow. The surface was worse than we would expect to face on land or barrier-ice. The motor warped itself back on a 500-fathom steel wire and was taken aboard again. "From the mast-head the mirage is continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud-banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... its general merits, to ignore the reasonable concessions on points of detail which it embodied, or to explain away the patent fact that no measure less stringent would satisfy the people. There was therefore an air of unreality about this debate, spirited as it was, nor is it easy to understand what practical object enlightened men like Peel could have sought in prolonging it. He well knew, and admitted in private correspondence, that reform was inevitable; he must ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... to be floundering through inky shadows, feeling a way through this miry chaos, when aloft, as far as the eye could see, the sky was lit. This phantom city of twinkling beacons gave one a sense of acute unreality, for it was an empty city, a city the work of which went on almost without the aid of human hands. The very soul of it was mechanical. Only here and there, where a drill crew was at work, did an ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... grazing and to hear the sheep calling to one another in the old plaintive way! It was almost difficult to believe that she had ever left Herondale that Laburnum Villa was anything but a nightmare and the Herons a dismal unreality. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... flattery. The series of fourteen speeches delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality—of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere—is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the Philippics. In the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... I know, call it unreality. But I've heard you paradoxing upon the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me, constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... reason that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... bank and across the open space to the store door with a sense of the strangest unreality all about her. It was herself who walked and moved, yet all the time she seemed to stand aside and let another self think and feel and act. A composite odour of groceries, bacon, tobacco, and cheap clothes met her as she entered the rough, homely ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... those once romantic, but certainly superannuated ideas of Country, Justice, Truth, and Patriotism. All real progress tends toward simplification; and how simple are the idea of party and the associations clustering around this sacred word, compared with the confusing and embarrassing unreality of those ideas and juvenile feelings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... It was a far cry from pounding a typewriter in a city office to jogging through the wilderness, lost beyond peradventure, her only company a stranger of unsavory reputation. Yet she was not frightened, for all the element of unreality. Under other circumstances she could have relished the adventure, taken pleasure in faring gypsy fashion over the wide reaches where man had left no mark. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... have let him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had—tried to regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of these last ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices of violin and clarinette. To the contrasted passions of our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... "Row" which one is bound to take away whether the point of observation be the top of a passing omnibus or the sidewalk adjoining the stone wall guarding the boundaries of the Park. That is of a mysterious unreality, due, perhaps to the shades being always lowered and the curtains tightly drawn. In considerable excitement an immaculately garbed little old gentleman was one day seen to descend hurriedly from the Imperiale of the snorting monster by which he had designed to travel down to Washington Square. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... On the ground that harmony is the truth of being, the Science of Mind-healing destroys the feasibility of disease; hence error of thought becomes fable instead of fact. Science demonstrates the reality of Truth and the unreality of the error. A self-evident proposition, in the Science of Mind-healing, is that disease is unreal; and the efficacy of my system, beyond other systems of medicine, vouches for the validity of that statement. Sin and disease are ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... Homer and Vergil. 'He cannot perceive that the divine interventions which are admissible in the quarrel of Aeneas and Turnus are ludicrous when imported into the struggle between Scipio and Hannibal. Who can help resenting the unreality when at Saguntum Jupiter guides an arrow into Hannibal's body, which Juno immediately withdraws, or when, at Cannae, Aeolus yields to the prayer of Juno and blinds the Romans ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's character. She is really a good girl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by those limitations of temper which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was aware of a faint reflection of the zed-light—a gray Cathedral shaft crossing the helio-room and falling upon the opposite wall. An unreality there, as the zed-light faintly strove to penetrate the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... feeling. But those who take this view forget that he was writing to an intimate friend of a matter which had greatly occupied his own mind for a year; that he mentioned no names, and that he threw such an air of humorous unreality about the whole story that the person who received it never dreamed that it recorded an actual occurrence until twenty-five years afterwards, when, having been asked to furnish it to a biographer, she was warned against ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... said nothing for the moment, exerting himself the while in trying to fan the flickering flame into a stronger glow, and with such success that the horrible feeling of unreality began to pass away, with its accompanying confusion, and Dallas began to ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in upon himself. In his own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre-doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... took aim and bore against the trigger. There was no explosion. A depressing sense of unreality rolled over the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... as sure of the absolute truth of that unfortunate doctor in "La Cigale," who builds up his heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the essential unreality, except in dialect and manners, of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,— the Russian does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with the dreariness of life, and his obsession ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of England did but represent the state of all Northern Europe. Wherever the Teutonic language was spoken, wherever the Teutonic nature was in the people, there was the same weariness of unreality, the same craving for a higher life. England rather lagged behind than was a leader in the race of discontent. In Germany, all classes shared the common feeling; in England it was almost confined to the lowest. But, wherever it existed, it was a free, spontaneous growth in each separate ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... hand, he should by some incantation be projected forward only fifty years in time, still in the place of his birth, the effect of unreality would be even more startling, especially if those things should have happened which prophets predict and toward which all progress tends. Conditions would be unendurable, manners offensive. No man would seem quite a man. No woman would seem modest. Clothes, customs, beliefs, ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... The first unreality of the roots was their rigidity. I stepped from one slender tendon of wood to the next, expecting a bending which never occurred. They might have been turned to stone, and even little twigs resting on the bark often proved to have grown fast. And this was the more unexpected because ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... strange scenes, we feel as if all were unreal. This is but the perception of the true unreality of earthly things, made evident by the want of congruity between ourselves and them. By and by we become mutually adapted, and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... included in the regular (p. 249) editions of his novels. In it he made in some measure another effort to reproduce the social life of New York city. The previous failure was repeated. An air of ridiculous unreality is given to this part of the story in which the impossible talk of impossible people is paraded as a genuine representation of what takes place in civilized society. The autobiographical form which he had first adopted in this tale he continued in the two series of "Afloat and Ashore." These appeared ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... weeds and thistles and wild oats to the dilapidated stones under the oaks. Magdalena had imagined her conflicting emotions when she visited the graves of her youthful heroines; among other things the delightful sense of unreality. But the unreality was of another sort to-day. They were a part of an insignificant past. Trennahan elevated one foot to a massive stone and plucked the "stickers" ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... never more affectionate, never more solicitous about her comfort and her pleasure, and it was almost enough to see Margaret happy, radiant, expanding day by day in the prosperity that was illimitable, only there was to her a note of unreality in all the whirl and hurry of the busy life. She liked to escape to her room with a book, and be out of it all, and the two weeks away from her country life seemed long to her. She couldn't reconcile Margaret's love of the world, her tolerance of Carmen, and other ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... canst not say that the visible world is only like the transitory enjoyment of one who smells a wreath of flowers; however closely it is scanned, there is no overpowering evidence of its unreality [to preclude the presumption founded on experience]; it continually manifests itself to us as eternal in its stream of ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin
... awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now—on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another class whose ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams. One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The ego which must gauge itself by ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... gazed out over the scene at his feet where the great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted away ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... aspect. The mind connected such almost dapper freshness and excellent taste only with unexaggerated incidents and a behavior which almost placed the stamp of absurdity upon the improbable in circumstance. The vision of disorderly and illegal possibilities seemed actually to fade into an unreality. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this land of unreality she was suddenly conscious of a voice speaking to her. "Florence," it said, "Florence Baker, you know before I say a word the thing I wish to tell you, the question I wish to ask. You know, because more than once I've tried ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... one of those large pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a face, each figure bears a neat oval with its index number legibly inscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Science to be the very reality of things: on such a view there is no impossibility of an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be found in the individual spirits themselves; yet the system, if known to none of them, seems to fall outside the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... deck, moving dazedly, with a strange sense of unreality upon her, as if she had somehow wandered into a cold, ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... happened. Trenchard was not with us, as he was sent about midday with some sanitars to bury the dead in a wood five miles from M——. That must have been, in many ways, the most terrible day of his life and during it, for the first time, he was to know that unreality that comes to every one, sooner or later, at the war. It is an unreality that is the more terrible because it selects from reality details that cannot be denied, selects them without transformation, saying to his victim: "These things are as you have always seen them, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... every new turn revealing untold wonders and giving an added stimulus to the leader's lively imagination. And indeed the forest was a place in which anyone might expect to meet a fairy or a goblin behind every tree. The happy sense of unreality lent by the uncertainty of distances, the airy unsubstantial appearance of the leaf-grown earth; the dazzling splashes of golden light on the green, the sudden appearance of open glades choked with blossoms; and through all ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... night shadows a nymph seemed to be floating toward him. For a moment he had a sense of unreality, that the flow and rhythm of her movement were born of the imagination. But almost at once he knew that this ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... that that bit of conversation with Mrs. Haverford took on the unreality of the rest of that twenty-four hours. But one part of it stood out real and hopelessly true. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... numbers or merely of dates, in consequence of an accident. The localization of all the particles of thought has been proved nowadays; what then would there be surprising in the fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations should be destroyed ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... and terror just left behind at the King's palace, this weird hush was uncomfortably impressive, and gave a sense of fantastic unreality to the scene. The sleepy, mesmeric radiance of the full moon, shining on the delicate traceries of the quaintly sculptured houses on either hand, made them look brittle and evanescent; the great heavy, hanging orange- boughs and the feathery ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... Payne. "I'm drunk and drugged with unreality. I will go and have a look round the farm—no, I won't have any company, thank you. I shall only go on fuming and stewing, if I have sympathetic listeners. You are too amiable, you fellows. You encourage me to talk, when you ought to stop your ears and run from me." And Father ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to pay the milliner's bill. And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly. Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the current of their endeavours ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... window-panes, which look forth upon one of the quietest streets in a New England town. After a time, too, the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike bedtime to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies that the things without ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... standing on the perron of her stately home, felt but little sorrow at leaving it to-day: she had hardly had the time in one brief year to get very much attached to it: the sense of unreality which had been born in her when her father led her through its vast halls and stately parks had never entirely left her. The little home in England, the tiny sitting-room with its bow window, and small front garden edged with dusty evergreens, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... He had never seen anything at once so heathenish and so exquisite. To one hampered and restricted as he was in bodily freedom, the absolute grace was marvellous, but the uncanny words and the girl's apparent seriousness gave a touch of unreality to the scene. Presently, from sheer inability to further control himself, the looker-on gave a laugh that rent the stillness of the afternoon ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... is divided into four chapters: (i) Agama (scripture), (2) Vaitathya (unreality), (3) Advaita (unity), (4) Alatas'anti (the extinction of the burning coal). The first chapter is more in the way of explaining the Ma@n@dukya Upani@sad by virtue of which the entire work is known as Ma@n@dukyakarika. The second, third, and fourth chapters are the constructive ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... religion, does not yet profess it in the form of the State, for its attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not yet the actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it still operates upon the unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this human kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... truths; and statements are to be found in every stage of approach to this final condition. Every time there is an impotency or unreality in their enunciation, they are borne a step nearer the sepulchre. If the smirking politician, who wishes to delude me into voting for him, bid me his bland "Good-morning," not only does he draw a film of eclipse over the sun, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... surprised and confused Ruth Dale. The expression of face, voice and language swept away the sense of unreality and detachment. Here was a vital trouble. A tangible human call. It might be that she, instead of Ralph Drew or Constance, or any other person, might touch and rescue this girl who was finding herself among ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... between the pieces, in the promenades. The house presented, as before, that appearance in which reality forsook it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The audience supported the notion of its unreality by having exactly the character of the former audiences, and impressed you, despite its restlessness and incessant agitation, with the feeling that it had remained there from the first day, and would always continue there; and it was only in wandering upon its borders through ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... intervention. The groundcar was a mechanical bug, an alienness with which timorous man had allied himself; allied with it against reality, she and Nuwell were hastened by it through reality, unseeing, toward the goal of a more comfortable unreality. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... power of the chemical batteries began to wane. David Lester, hovering close to Helen, muttered to himself, or to her. Rodan, still marching quite strongly, retreated into an unreality of his own. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... would not suddenly vanish as an unreal thing. The song was continuous—a soft melodious warble, full of sweetness and suggestion; but suggestion of June meadows and a summer sunrise, rather than of snow-packed evergreens and Christmastide. To add to the unreality, no ear could tell where the song came from; its own muffled quality disguised the source perfectly. I searched the trees in front; there was no bird there. I looked behind; there was no place for a bird to sing. I remembered the redstart, how he calls ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... with an indefinable air of boredom. He rose from his seat and began to pace up and down. The whole situation had a suggestion of unreality. In pleading with Helen for a chance to talk to Hilmer he had a sense of crossing swords with some intangible and sinister shadow; his wife seemed suddenly to have arrived at a state toward which she had been traveling all these last uncertain weeks ... fading, fading from the ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time—the novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content with giving the reflection, in his ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... muddle and trouble here by suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my poor old mother's worn and grimy face, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... ideal heroes de roman than any other characters in Euripides. They are surprisingly handsome and brave and unselfish and everything that they should be; and they stand out like heroes against the mob of cowardly little Taurians in the Herdsman's speech. Yet they have none of the unreality that is usual in such figures. The shadow of madness and guilt hanging over Orestes makes a difference. At his first entrance, when danger is still far off, he is a mass of broken nerves; he depends absolutely on Pylades. In the later scenes, ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... ugly desk and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange shapes and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... sickness which sometimes will overtake a man in the midst of the work he likes best, when the unpleasant parts of it crowd upon him, and his own efforts, especially those made from the will without sustaining impulse, come back upon him with a feeling of unreality, decay, and bitterness, as if he had been unnatural and untrue, and putting himself in false relations by false efforts for good. I know this all came from selfishness—thinking about myself instead of about God and my neighbour. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... had to be present at the inquiry as to the cause of death. He did so like a somnambulist, in a kind of vision which showed him men and things as in a dream, in a cloud of intoxication, with that sense of unreality which perplexes the mind at the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... return. The sixth, represented in the following, is caused only by the imbecility and unreality of the body, which is in continual motion, mutation, and change, the operations of which must follow the condition of its faculty, the which is a result of the condition of its nature and being. How can immobility, reality, entity, truth be contained in that which is ever different, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... this unreality real and mighty in the life of the individual and of the Church is the purpose of this book, that is eminently sane and practical, and will appeal with force to every ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... come into our community, which is strong enough to save our community; but which has not yet got a name. Let no one fancy I confess any unreality when I confess the namelessness. The morality called Puritanism, the tendency called Liberalism, the reaction called Tory Democracy, had not only long been powerful, but had practically done most of their work, before ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the place, we see something quite different from what is there, then we are to paint that—nay, we must paint that, whether we will or not; it being, for us, the only reality we can get at. But let us beware of pretending to see this unreality ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of unreality, as though she were just awakened from an evil dream, Wilhelmine found herself once more in her pretty yellow-hung saloon. Maria, the maid, kneeled beside her, bathing the wounds in her palms made by the rough surface of the grotto walls. Slime from the moss-grown stones was ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... and for a time he was unconscious. Shrill neighing aroused him, and, hastily gaining his feet, he saw Pat running lightly, well-contained, to meet the swiftly advancing gray stallion. Then events moved with a terrible unreality. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... on its feet, with the world-rocks under it, and looking free towards all the winds and all the stars. He goes about suppressing platitudes, ripping off futilities, turning deceptions inside out. The realm of Disorder, which is Unveracity, Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy. Honest soul, and he seemed to himself such a stupid fellow often; no tongue-learning at all; little capable to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He cannot argue in articulate logic, only in inarticulate bellowings, or worse. He ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... over all the actual high-life and pierced the golden door of the enchanted palaces and gardens of the Fairy Paribanu, who, enraptured by him, took him for her spouse."[1] In fact Becquer, speaking of the unreality of the numerous offspring of his imagination, says in the Introduction to his works, written in June, 1868: "It costs me labor to determine what things I have dreamed and what things have happened to me. My affections are divided between the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... presents, these assertions lack support. All the names he quotes as of Nonoalca, that is, Maya origin, are distinctly not of the latter tongue, but are Nahuatl. And the introduction of the mystical city of Tula is of itself enough to invest the story with the garb of unreality. ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... barnacled fragment of one of the great galleons of the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would pass through the antique group, if a damp newspaper should suddenly be spread to dry before the fire! They would feel as if either that printed sheet or they themselves must be an unreality. What a mysterious awe, if the shriek of the railway-train, as it reaches the Warwick station, should ever so faintly invade their ears! Movement of any kind seems inconsistent with the stability of such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... was probably done for the sole purpose of making sure of the comfortable berth in which the physician's credulity had placed them. Hers, on the other hand, was the deceit of an irresponsible mind, of one living in such an atmosphere of unreality that she could readily persuade herself that the knockings, candle dancings, book openings, and similar acts were the work not of her own hands but of the ghosts which tormented her. Indeed, researches of recent years in the field of abnormal psychology show it ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... sketchy fashion; his figures became silhouettes and quite flat. There was also a singular carelessness in finish—a mere outline served for a face. The result was a monotony and similarity of treatment, with a certain unreality and grotesqueness which are like nothing in life. In this, however, he may have been inspired by the grotesque personages he was put to illustrate—the ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... Designed to avoid unreality, lukewarmness, and dry dogmatism, as well as compromise and controversy—and not unmindful of things temporal, whilst chiefly directed to things eternal—it is hoped that it may assist to refresh the faithful, correct the erring, and win ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... But a sense of unreality was creeping back. It was almost better to remember the Napoleon past. There were books about that. He pictured again the dead Ram-tah in trappings of royalty. If he could only see himself, and be sure. But that was out of the question. It was no good wishing. After all, he was Bunker Bean, a poor ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... all. If it is a rule of morality imposed by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past two centuries many fine-souled ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... him a weird feeling of unreality; as he hung there helplessly, to see one of the screens on the bulkhead pick up ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... possibilities to other earnest searchers after truth. Not until this new field has been faithfully examined and explored and proved to be sterile, shall I cease to recommend it to the attention of all who would fain see reason to believe that the Ethical Ideal is no Unreality, but rather the innermost Reality of the real universe itself. I speak only to those who have souls to hear and to respond; let the rest listen to Dr. Royce, and be dupes of his "professional warning." But the cause of philosophical reform will not be stayed ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... about them in his shy, clumsy way. A very subtle and sweet warmth emanated from her like a breath. It took him back to the day when he had huddled close to her, hiccoughing with grief and anger, and yet deeply, deliriously happy because she was sorry for him. It made him giddy with a sense of unreality, as though the present and the intervening years were only part of one of his night stories, which, after their tiresome, undeviating custom, had got tangled up in a monstrous, impossible dream. And then a new fancy took possession of him. He wanted ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... these ideas is, of course, only partial; for we are equally susceptible to the negative suggestions of the whiteness of the marble and the smallness of the outline of the tree. Every work of art represents a sort of compromise between reality and unreality, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers. But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; but he loved the old villages ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... misted over with a quality of unreality. In the east rose the moon, shining incredibly on the tree tops, showering down through the little rifts in the withholding branches, enchanting the place as by the weaving of a dream. The moon madness caught up Ben like a flame, enthralling ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... who beamed mischievously at him. She had the delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous noises of the market in the plaza without. Bell had a sense of utter unreality as Isabella's good ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... formula. If absolution be not a living truth, it becomes a monstrous falsehood; if you take absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our lives, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... why she had hidden herself in a corner. Then some member of the class would call to her excitedly, reminding her not to be late at the picnic luncheon, or begging her to be early at the class party in the evening. All this had an air of unreality to Rebecca. In the midst of the happy excitement of the last two days, when "blushing honors" had been falling thick upon her, and behind the delicious exaltation of the morning, had been the feeling that the condition was a transient one, and that the burden, the struggle, the anxiety, would ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... served merely to stress the sense of unreality: for, obviously, only the heroine of a true fairy tale could have broken from a chrysalis stage of sordid Soho to the brilliant butterfly existence of a Russian princess domiciled in the most aristocratic quarter of London and attended ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... children. To some it is a God-given gift; others may acquire it, as Jack London tells us, by "going into the waste places, and there sitting down with our souls." There comes then, the overwhelming realization of the charms and beauties of nature—man is a pygmy, an abstraction, an unreality. This had come to our hero. Added to the strength of his inner life Livingstone had the deep sympathy with Nature in all her moods. He became enthusiastic when he described the beauties of the Moero scenery. The splendid mountains, tropical ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... When he slept, however lightly and briefly, he was pretty sure to dream; and if awakened suddenly, his dream would often prolong itself, and mingle with passing events, which would themselves put on the semblance of unreality. On the present occasion the sound of Helwyse's voice had probably crept through the door, and insinuated itself into ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... possession and portion of her natural inalienable heritage—filled her with confident security and with a restful, wondering calm. So that the shame publicly put on her to shed its bitterness, her horror of the watching crowd departed, fading out into unreality. Though still shaken, still quivering inwardly from the ordeal of the past hour, she already viewed that shame and horror as but accidents to be lived down and disregarded, by no means as essential elements in the adventurous and precious whole. Presently they would altogether ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Jennie heard nothing more from any of the actors in the little comedy, and the episode began to take on in her thoughts that air of unreality which remote events seem to gather round them. She went on with her daily work to the satisfaction of her employers and the augmentation of her own banking account, although no experience worthy of record occurred in her routine for several weeks. But a lull in a newspaper ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... bathed in mist, rose out of the night with its many roofs, which cut the sky in a straight line; its turrets, its lofty factory chimneys; and amidst the silence of the dawn, the city and the landscape suggested the unreality and the motionlessness of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... and Mme. Dudevant have painted Chopin somewhat as a sickly sentimentalist, living in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality. Yet this was not precisely true. In spite of his delicacy of frame and romantic imagination, Chopin was never ill till within the last ten years of his life, when the seeds of hereditary consumption developed themselves. As a young man he was lively and joyous, always ready for frolic, and ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... her to touch it, but some nervous movement was necessary to her. Yet she was less self-conscious than she had been with Louis at her elbow. She felt, however, a very slight sense of peril—of the unreality of the plush fauteuil on which she sat, and those rows of vaguely discerned faces on her right; and the reality of distant phenomena such as Mrs. Maldon in bed. Notwithstanding her strange and ecstatic experiences with Louis Fores that night in the dark, romantic town, the problem of ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... subject, and to contemporaries Edward seemed a king regardful of his honour and mindful of his plighted word. If his generosity verged on extravagance, and his affectation of popular manners and graciousness on unreality, Englishmen of the fourteenth century were no severe critics of a crowned king. It was only when in his later years Edward laid aside the soldier's life, and abandoned himself to the frivolous distractions and degrading amours[2] which provoked the censure ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... reluctantly abandoned the design. At any other time he would have parted from it with a pang, thinking of all he had learned there, of the many hours he had passed there; for the love of his very dreams. But there was no Pecksniff; there never had been a Pecksniff, and the unreality of Pecksniff extended itself to the chamber, in which, sitting on one particular bed, the thing supposed to be that Great Abstraction had often preached morality with such effect that Tom had felt a moisture in his eyes, while hanging breathless on ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the fame which Borrow had already secured by his earlier works. The book teems with character sketches drawn from real life in quarters which few could penetrate, and although they are often extremely eccentric, they are never grotesque, and never strike the mind with a sense of merely invented unreality. Here and there occur illuminating outbursts of reflection in philosophic accent which reveal in startling style the working of Borrow's mind. The linguistic lore is phenomenal, as in all his books. But though the wild, passionate scenes make the whole ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot—within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... herself a blue muslin dress, and her mother was hemming the ruffles. There was a cheap blue shade on the lamp, and Maria herself was clad in a blue gingham. All the blue color and the shade on the lamp gave a curious pallor and unreality to the homely room and the two women. Mrs. Atkins's hair was strained back from her hollow ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cognition comes to an end. But the circumstance of something which is seen at one time and in one place not persisting at another time and in another place is not observed to be invariably accompanied by falsehood, and hence mere non-persistence of this kind does not constitute a reason for unreality. To say, on the other hand, that what is is real because it persists, is to prove what is proved already, and requires ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... exclamation of the misanthropist that most men are fools, but also in the cry of despair that sometimes breaks from the weary searcher after absolute truth, and from the poet when impressed with the unreality ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk within them one would almost certainly wear ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... only one paragraph of many, and the tone of all was the same. Ernestine's words had come true—he was already a man of note. A few months had changed his life in the most amazing way—when he looked back upon it now it was with a sense of unreality—surely all these things which had happened were part of a chimerical dream. It was barely possible for him to believe that it was he, Scarlett Trent, who had developed day by day into what he was at that moment. For the man was changed in a hundred ways. His grey ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... acceptance of the situation, without one wrinkle in her placid brow to indicate that any future problems annoyed her, did not arouse his wonderment or cause him to question the depths of her emotions; it only added one more element to the unreality of the entire affair. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America. Each day brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new friends. Mrs. Newbold was full of charm, and the devotion between the ill mother and the blooming daughter was an attractive sight. Yet ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews |
