"Make-believe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... portrait of the Old Senior Surgeon. "I had to," she said at last. "When a person is born with absolutely nothing—nothing of the human things a human baby is entitled to—she has to evolve something to live in; a sort of sea-urchin affair with spines of make-believe sticking out all over it to keep prodding away life as it really is. If she didn't the things she had missed would flatten her out into a flabby pulp—just skin ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... for me and sign some make-believe name to it, so I can hold my head up with Polly. She will never let me rest if she thinks she got a ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... and first time; so the King and Queen were married almost before they knew it themselves, and certainly before the people discovered that somebody was really being married at last. This, however, was not at all surprising, for the real wedding was very much the same as all the make-believe ones, except that it took a little longer because the King and Queen were not so used to being married as the people were to ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a moment's respite was allowed, a moment's make-believe, and then again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking, making ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... stoppers for heads, with faces marked on the sides, the rest, only wads of paper or cloth fastened on the ends of sticks that reached down into the bodies. A strip of cloth tied around each neck, below the bulge, served as make-believe arms, suitable for all ordinary purposes, and, with a little assistance, capable of saluting an officer or waving to ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... me, In pretty make-believe of revelry, So the night long said Death With his magniloquent breath; (And that remembered laughter Which in our daily uses followed after, Was all untuned to pity and to awe): "A cup of chocolate, One farthing is the rate, You drink it ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... special thought to this matter, most of us grown-ups do not appreciate how very real the child's world of make-believe is to him, and how essential to his happiness that we do not break into it rudely. When one of my boys was two and a half years old he was one day playing with an imaginary baby sister. A member of the household came into the room, whereupon he immediately broke out in wild screaming ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... solemnly, as if it were her own parishioners in the garden who lifted up their voices. A cheerful robin began a loud solo in one of Dr. Leslie's cherry-trees, and the little girl laughed aloud in her make-believe meeting-house, and then the gate was opened and shut, and the doctor himself appeared, strolling along, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... won't be Saxon,' said Paula. 'And then in time to come, when I have passed away, and those stones have become stained like the rest, people will be deceived. I should prefer an honest patch to any such make-believe of Saxon relics.' ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Alas! he showed Not like the one Mazeppa rode; Scant-maned, sharp-backed, and shaky-kneed, The wreck of what was once a steed, Lips thin, eyes hollow, stiff in joints; Yet not without his knowing points. The sexton laughing in his sleeve, As if 't were all a make-believe, Led forth the horse, and ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... those days, the last of romanticism, the make-believe 'Orientales'; 'Odes' and 'Ballads', by the dozen; 'Comes d'Espagne et d'Italie', with their pages, turrets, chatelaines; bull-fighters, Spanish ladies; vivandieres, beguiled away from their homes under the pale of the church, "near a stream of running water, by a gay and handsome chevalier," ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... my personality can inspire fear or respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it. Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was Bedlam at full moon ever scared by ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... our hostess leads us through an open French window into the drawing-room, and we follow her, with a pleased and yet bashful sense of expectancy. Into the drawing-room, mark you! and a real drawing-room, too; not a visible make-believe, like the library in our shanty. This is a large room, furnished as people do furnish their best reception-chamber in civilized lands. Pictures hang on the varnished walls; books and book-cases stand here and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... as excited as if the expected "guest" were one in fact, as well as name. It was fun to be playing a game of make-believe, in which ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... and drink and amusement at uncontrolled prices of which the government took its usual lion's share. The angle in this place was astronomy. The ceiling was a blue haze a-glitter with slowly wheeling constellations, and the strippers began with make-believe spacesuits. There were some rather good murals on the walls depicting various stages of the conquest of space. Lancaster was amused at one of them. When he'd been here three years ago, the first landing on ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... that old story of the way in which the prisoners in the time of the French Revolution used to behave? The tumbrils came every morning and carried off a file of them to the guillotine, and the rest of them had a ghastly make-believe of carrying on the old frivolities of the life of the salons and of society. And it lasted for an hour or two, but the tumbril came next morning all the same, and the guillotine stood there gaping in the Place. And so it is useless, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... their own phrases. They know that man, the drunkard, values intoxication more than food, and so they try to pass themselves off as an intoxicant. As a matter of fact, but for the sake of man, woman has no need for any make-believe." ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... our simple Eve Seen through the make-believe! Had she but known the Pretender he was! Out of the boughs he came, Whispering still her name, Tumbling in ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... deepest depths, but without ever a thought, without being aware of it, as the ocean swallows up a river.—What is my love to you? What is any one's love to you? The word has too often been profaned, and the sentiment too often a make-believe.—I do not offer you love. But surely you will not refuse the humble tribute of devotion that my spirit offers up to a being nobler and higher ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... that recent history had discounted popular interest in the monarchies of make-believe; in other words, that when real sovereigns have been behaving in so sensational a manner one might expect a slump in counterfeits. But it appears that Mr. H.B. MARRIOTT WATSON is by no means of this opinion. His latest story, The Pester Finger (SKEFFINGTON), shows him as Ruritanian ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... by this strange vision, though it was no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... much, you see, that was puerile, even ridiculous; and every now and then some one would open the door of the dusky auditorium, and a shaft of sunshine would fly in from the outside world to remind me further how unreal was all this gloomy make-believe. Nay, during the entr'acte I went out, like everybody else, and lunched off ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... rather stern and white. Considering that it was the last day before Lent, and Carnival time, Prince Ferdinand William Otto felt vaguely defrauded, rather like the time he had seen "The Flying Dutchman," which had turned out to be only a make-believe ship and did not fly at all. To add to the complications, Miss Braithwaite ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... very wicked!" she answered, waving them back with her small hand. "'Tis only that they play at make-believe in love, the princess and her betrothed! But after all, it is far more sensible than real love-making, where if the pleasure be more acute, the pangs are therefore the greater. She addresses to him the tenderest counterfeit verses; he returns them in kind. She even simulated ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... animal life; viz., among insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles. Indeed, the most gifted letisimulants in the entire animal kingdom are to be observed in the great snake family. The so-called "black viper" of the middle United States is the most accomplished death-feigner that I have ever seen; its make-believe death struggles, in which it writhes and twists in seeming agony and finally turns upon its back and assumes rigor mortis, cannot be surpassed by any actor "on the boards" in point ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... waited for her tried his soul. The Governor was the one man who had ever roused in him a deep affection, and the dread of finding that under his flippancy, his half-earnest, half-boyish make-believe devotion to the folk of the underworld, he was really an irredeemable rogue, tortured him. These were disloyal thoughts; he hated himself for his doubts. It was impossible that a man of the Governor's blood, his vigor of mind and oddly manifested ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... further lightened that afternoon when she was made the special messenger to carry to Miss Almira Belt the very lavender and white wrapper which she and Patty had picked out that day when they were doing the make-believe shopping. Marian, of course, told Mrs. Hunt all about it, and as one of the Guild which looked after such things, it had been voted to give Miss Almira some such present, and Mrs. Hunt had gone with Mrs. Perkins to select it. They had all agreed that Marian's choice was such ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... go knocking your head against rocks, for you might happen to come up against so ungracious a rock that it would put an end to the penance altogether. If the knocks on the head are necessary, I should content yourself, seeing that this madness is all make-believe, with striking your head on some softer thing, and leave the rest to me, for I will tell your lady that I saw you strike your head on the point of a rock that was ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of make- believe raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... or three love-stories,—when I set out with the intention of repeating instructive, useful, or entertaining discussions, naturally alarms me. It is quite true that many things which look to me suspicious may be simply playful. Young people (and we have several such among The Teacups) are fond of make-believe courting when they cannot have the real thing,—"flirting," as it used to be practised in the days of Arcadian innocence, not the more modern and more questionable recreation which has reached us from the home of the cicisbeo. Whatever comes of it, I shall tell what ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... would indeed sir. I shant never do myself justice at soljering, sir: I cant bring myself to think of it as proper work for a man with an active mind, as you might say, sir. Arf of its only ousemaidin; and the other arf is dress-up and make-believe. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... with bishops for patrons, did I hear some one say? Well, blowing a bugle, no matter how discordantly, is certainly an attraction for a boy; and wearing a military cap set jauntily on one side of the head is attractive, too, while the dragging of a make-believe cannon through the streets may perhaps please others. But Tom, Dick and Harry from below care for none of these things, for they are "make-believes," and Tom, Dick and Harry want something real, even if it is vulgar, something with a strong competitive element in it, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... against his wife for more than a week after the scene at Richmond, feeding it with reflections on what he called her disobedience. Nor was it a make-believe anger. She had declared her intention to act in opposition to his expressed orders. He felt that his present condition was prejudicial to his interests, and that he must take his wife back into favour, in order ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... worship images, and take off and put on garments at your prayers, and kneel down in a make-believe, profane way: and don't you turn ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... harm in that? How does he know what's in your heart? He doesn't need to understand that your action is make-believe, and not sincere. You'll see, after such actions, he'll believe in you so much that even though you made love before his very eyes, ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without it Newton would never have found the law of gravitation, nor Columbus have discovered America. The world of make-believe is filled with delight for the small child. He loves stories of imaginary adventure that he can act out in ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts, that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... eyes. They were certainly not fixed directly on the preacher, but surely the boy must be listening, or he would never be so quiet. Grace, however, was in the secret, and knew better. Walter had confided to her that he had got such "a jolly make-believe" to think about in church. The great chandelier which hung from the centre of the church ceiling, with its poles, and chains, and brackets, was transformed in his imagination to a ship's mast and rigging, where he climbed and swung, and performed marvellous feats, also in imagination, be ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... the whole, it is better to hold one's peace about it. I flung myself down on sofas here,—for my little Wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and I had only to lie down: there, in reading books, and other make-believe employments, I could at least keep silence, which was an infinite relief. Nay, gradually, as indeed I anticipated, the black vortexes and deluges have subsided; and now that it is past, I begin to feel myself better for my travels after all. For one thing, articulate speech having ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when, the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... at night, always lay Jack's own splendid suit of make-believe soldier clothes. It was hard sometimes for him to think that they were make-believe clothes, while the suit of blue his mother had sent to G. W. were real, true ones, and worn by the dusky little soldier who lived in his dear father's tent. There often seemed to him an unendurable ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... if we lay awake in the night, are caused by mice running about and playing behind the wainscot: and what reasonable person would suffer themselves to be alarmed by such little creatures as those? But it is time I should return to the history of my little make-believe companion, ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... so glad! You're one can make-believe everything lovely, too! I see it. What fun we'll have! Let's begin at once. We're in the enchanted forest. We've been enchanted ourselves. But the fairy king has come and shown us where to find the magic treasure that will unlock the whole world for us and make us back into the ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... Look at your father. He has fought and beaten men like Neuman. Look at the wheat farmers in my country. Look at the I.W.W. They all fight. Look at the children. They fight even at their games. Their play is a make-believe battle or escaping or funeral or capture. It must be then that some kind of strife was implanted in the first humans and that it is necessary ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... papers of Irving's: "I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing." All Irving's histories are not "make-believe," and some day you will read Irving's "Life of Columbus," and "Life of Washington," completed just before his death in 1859, without thinking of them as histories. He wrote the "Life of Columbus" in Spain. Can you tell me why that was the best place ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... Mary whose biography he believes to be purely mythical. At any rate, he can tell his consultants with a good conscience that if they pray to Mary for grace they will receive it. But what is the good of this make-believe? And, if it is part of a transaction in which the worshipper pays money for assistance which he believes to be miraculous and only obtainable through the good offices of the Church, is it even morally honest? The worshipper ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... twelve years of age have passed the "make-believe" stage of play; they want the "real," but of their own kind and age. After little children have made and played with toys and foreshadowed the needs of the actual home, the time has come for the youth to have his demands, which ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... if we had lived like real sisters and not make-believe ones, Margaret and I would have had a little chamber to ourselves in our father's castle, and we could have talked to each other, and told our secrets if we wished, and have comforted one another when our hearts were sad. And ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... they lived in a fairy world of freedom, of dreams and make-believe. They talked of great hunters and discussed the best methods of attacking all manner of ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... of make-believe in medicine," he said; "but I'm one of those poor devils who can't help telling a patient the truth. There's nothing whatever the matter with you, Mr. Westoby, except that your skin has a slightly abrased look, and I seem to notice an abnormal sensitiveness ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... even worse, disgusting to look at, much more to eat; so that it will be necessary to have recourse to some artifice to cure me; and this can be easily effected if only thou wilt make a beginning, even though it be in a lukewarm and make-believe fashion, to pay court to Camilla, who will not be so yielding that her virtue will give way at the first attack: with this mere attempt I shall rest satisfied, and thou wilt have done what our friendship binds thee to do, not only in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... remembered the old childish make-believe! How many scores of times had they played it together, these three, in the woods around Boisveyrac!—when Dominique and Bateese were bold huntsmen, and she kept house for them, cooking their imaginary ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that he had not believed in it. He had gone about listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever did such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was amazed! Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness. "If I don't go now, at once," thought Razumov, with a start of fear, "I shall never go." He rose without a word, and the anxious Kostia ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... and dat was pow'ful little. In hot weather chillun played on de crick and de best game of all was to play lak it was big meetin' time. White chillun loved to play dar too wid de little slave chillun. Us would have make-believe preachin' and baptizin' and de way us would sing was a sight. One of dem songs us chillun loved ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... adventure, keenly. He had no objections to fighting on the side of rascals, or against rascals. He objected to them only in the calmer moments of private life; and as he was of course ignorant that the expedition was only a make-believe, he felt a certain respect for his fellow-conspirators as men who were willing to stake their lives for a chance of better fortune. But that their bravery was of the kind which would make them hesitate to rob and ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... overwhelming all resistance, the full tide of a pure passion poured itself into his heart. There was no pretence or make-believe about it; the bold that sped from Angela's grey eyes had gone straight home, and would remain an "ever-fixed mark," so long as life itself ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... things in Roman villas. The Italians have always had, at all periods, a great fondness for statues and mosaics. Not very particular about the quality, they made up for it by the quantity. And when they could not treat themselves to the real thing, it was good enough to give themselves the make-believe in painting. I can imagine easily enough Verecundus' house, painted in fresco from top to bottom, inside and out, like those houses at Pompeii, or the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... sin!" his spiritual adviser gave him the answer, "You long to be without sin, and you have no real sin. Christ is the forgiveness of real sins, such as parricide and the like. If Christ is to help you, you must have a list of real sins, and not come to Him with such trash and make-believe sins, seeing a sin in every trifle." The manner in which Luther gradually raised himself above such despair was decisive for his whole life. The God whom he served was at that time a God of terror. His anger was to be appeased only by the means of grace which the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... that the men were leaving the island before the installation of the new Governor. Straightway they started a game of make-believe—the make-believe of electing the Governor ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... hint for another year," murmured Ethel Blue to Ethel Brown. "We can have a make-believe county fair and charge admission, and ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... thought this was going to be something exciting," replied Tom, motioning toward the book he had discarded. "But say! the make-believe adventures that fellow had, weren't anything compared to those we went through in the city of gold, or while rescuing ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... lumps of soil or apples or potatoes at me now; but he would often make-believe to be about to hurl something, and if he could not get away because of his work ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... considered approvingly. "And never a line fence to cut your way through. It's near paradise, this land, wherever it isn't just fair hell. No half way business; no maudlin make-believe." But all of a sudden his face darkened. "Poor little kid," he said. "If Bruce could only loan me half a dozen ready-mixed, rough and ready, border ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... overwrought nerves were deceiving him, and picked up another handful. It behaved exactly in the same way. It glinted and flashed yellow in a way that no sand could ever do. All at once it dawned upon him. This was no trick of sunlight on wet sand. This was no make-believe of tired nerves. ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Crosspatch is always waiting for children to get out of bed backwards. And when they do, she catches them by the heels and turns everything topsy-turvy all day long; but when you get out of bed toes first, I'll be there to start you on a pleasant day and Witchy Crosspatch will have to return to Make-Believe Land and hide her head!" "Sure enough, I did crawl out of bed ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... insisted. "I saw my mother in a dream." "Is she alive yet?" I told a lie. I said my mother was long dead. "And what did she tell you?" "She said that . . . ." "Tell me, tell me!" "I cannot repeat that in Russian." "Then say it in Yiddish." I looked with make-believe surprise at Anna. "She said: 'I shall come to Anna at night and choke her, if she doesn't give up abusing you.'" At this Anna turned red. I continued: "And she said also, 'Anna ought to have pity on ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... Their dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. He now knew why. Men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had lost the way so utterly. It truly was amazing. He no longer quite understood how such feverish strife ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... was in the form of fiction that Zeus wooed her. The sole result was that she grew sick of the sight of novels, and found a perverse pleasure in reading history. These dry details of what had actually happened were a relief, she told herself, from all that make-believe. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... sir, a terrible row. You see Mr Walters couldn't forget that he had been an officer, and Jarette couldn't forget he had been a fore-mast man, and feel jealous of Mr Walters, who used to make-believe amongst the men that he was the real captain of the ship, and that everything depended upon him. So at last there was a terrible row about something in the navigation, and Mr Walters told Jarette that he didn't know anything about it. Then the Frenchman hit him, kind ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... immortal works from the transient was sincerity, single-heartedness, reality of intention and love of the work for the work's sake. That was only a partial view of the truth. It is right in a measure, since that sincerity, that absence of make-believe, in the literary creation is a prime necessity; but it is not sufficient. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because it means that the superlative writer must write at first hand of things genuinely ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the line of argument in The Prophetical Office of the Church was taken by Mr. Newman. It was certainly no make-believe, or unreal argument. It was a forcible and original way of putting part of the case against Rome. It was part of the case, a very important part; but it was not the whole case, and it ought to have been evident from the first that in this controversy we could not ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Toby, quickly; "but you see that was a real one, an' this of ours is only a little make-believe for three cents. We want to get you to let us have the lot between the barn an' the road to put our tent on, an' then lend us old Whitey. We're goin' to have Jack Douglass's hoss that's blind, an' we've got a three-legged cat, an' one without ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... deny that these words spoken from under the brim of her hat (oh yes, certainly, her head was down—she had put it down) gave me a thrill; for indeed I had never doubted her sincerity. It could never have been a make-believe despair. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... play soldier," suggested Floppy. "Pinky can be a prisoner and we'll make believe capture her, and then we'll rescue her, and shoot off make-believe guns, and—" ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... have him out of harm's way; for I had a forewarning, the brute, that his mouth war a-watering after the Dew beasts in the pinfold, and after the brown horse in partickelar! And so I loaned him a horse, and sent him off to Logan's. Well, sir, and what does the brute do but ride off, for a make-believe, to set us easy; for he knew, the brute, if he war in sight of us, we should have had guards over the cattle all night long; well, sir, down he sot in ambush, till all were quiet; and then he stole back, and turning my own horse among the ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... creation. They could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them. They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence—this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... me besides!' said Barnaby. 'Such care, mother! He watches all the time I sleep, and when I shut my eyes and make-believe to slumber, he practises new learning softly; but he keeps his eye on me the while, and if he sees me laugh, though never so little, stops directly. He won't ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... flagrant mistranslation of a corrupt and probably interpolated passage. And yet the glory of Handel's music, the glamour of association overcame one. But now that it is cut ruthlessly away from those moments in life when man can least afford any make-believe with himself or his fellows—now that music alone declaims and fathers it—there is the strangest relief! One feels, as I have said, the joy that comes from something difficult and righteous done—in ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... draw some water from a spring about a hundred yards from the hut; and off he went, led by the children of our hostess. His young guides, completely naked, and their heads shaved, rode on bamboo-canes as make-believe horses, and pranced along in ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... no difficulty in crossing the frontier. The little Roumanian train took us over a river, and all at once we were out of the make-believe country where the stage always seems set for opera-bouffe There were no more pretty Tziganes, with disheveled hair and dirty, bare breasts, to offer you baskets of roses and white lilies. There were no Turks in red fezes squatting in the dust, hunting among their ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... she gave orders for the evening meal. If she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did not mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was folding her napkin, ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys. "A third or more of all the amusements of ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... hopped down, and waved both ears backward and forward, and made a low bow to a make-believe crowd of people, only, of ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... only a make-believe, after all," observed Jack Windy, as he tossed off his grog, dinner ...
— Sunshine Bill • W H G Kingston
... wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree, a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination—at least, in his later period. And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent a matter of make-believe. He loved to take a simple conversation, and, by introducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of hieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believe that it ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... masterless torpedo, alternately leaping forward through the air and shooting along on, or just under, the surface—switchbacking, they call it; and that, I dare to fancy, if it proves anything, proves that the coyness was only make-believe, and that she had allowed the daring admirer to catch her up and force her to act as if she were already vanquished and using the last arts of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... last year's swallow nest, or proclaiming with much flourish and flutter that they have taken the wren's house, or the tenement of the purple martin; till finally nature becomes too urgent, when all this pretty make-believe ceases, and most of them settle back upon the old family stumps and knotholes in remote fields, and go ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... unscrupulous outsider the opportunities for illicit gain afforded by the service made an irresistible appeal. Sham gangs and make-believe press-masters abounded, thriving exceedingly upon the fears and credulity of the people until capture put a term to their activities and sent them to the pillory, the prison or the fleet they pretended to ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... report, and then another, brought them back rudely from a make-believe wood near Athens to a peril-haunted park in an English county. For the second time that night Sylvia knew what fear meant. Intuitively, she shrank close to the strong man who seemed destined to be her protector; and when an arm clasped her again, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... of corn, and a garden in which to grow a few vegetables. Our life was to be spent in continual contemplation, one praying while the other engaged in active duties. All was done with religious gravity and decorum. If we went out, the make-believe continued even in the street; the two hermits would say the Rosary, using their fingers to count on, so as not to display their devotion before those who might scoff. One day, however, the hermit Therese forgot herself—before ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... sprouting. I was never even make-believe good before. The relapse will be a winner when it comes. If I could only steady down to something like a normal ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... situation which you can fill with advantage, I will not fail to let you know, and I hope that your father and the Colonel will approve of your accepting it; you know that I mean what I say, and therefore do not look upon it as a mere make-believe promise." ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... to be the last piece of violence before both red and white threw aside make-believe and settled down to the ghastly struggle for supremacy. Hunters bound for Kentucky had suffered none from the Indians except as they had a brush with small raiding-parties. But when Daniel Boone undertook ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... It's CLIMBING weather. I wish you were here to climb the hills with me. I am missing you dreadfully, Jervie dear, but it's a happy kind of missing; we'll be together soon. We belong to each other now really and truly, no make-believe. Doesn't it seem queer for me to belong to someone at last? It ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... make-believe dudes," he shouted. "That's the kid old Skin Flint Crawford took out of an orphan asylum. He's a kid that old Crawford took up with because he was too mean t' have t' Lord bless him with one o' his own. That's straight, fellers. I was Crawford's ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... and heat that struck him when he stepped, out into the open brought Garry in a flash from the world of horror and make-believe into the world he knew. He wanted to shout for sheer joy; but more than all else he wanted to leap at the ugly thing who stood blinking his eyes in the mouth of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... me most about her, and the thing that has set me writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows it as willingly or unwillingly as you or I follow our respective ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... less skilful. There must be a struggle for existence among opinions, as among all other things, and the egoist is content to send the children of his thought into the thick of the fray, confident that the fittest will survive. Only he is not so childish as to make-believe that an impersonal dignified something-not-himself that makes for the ink-pot is speaking—and not he himself, he "with his little I." The affectation of modesty is perhaps the most ludicrous of all human shams. I am ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... molten iron kneaded like dough, and planed and shaved like wood; he gets the dead and dissected body in the one case; he sees and feels the living spirit and body working as one, in the other. And upon all this child's-play, this mere make-believe, our good-natured nation is proud of spending some half-million of money. Then there is that impertinent, useless, and unjust system of establishing Government Schools of Design in so many of our towns, avowedly, and, I believe (though it is amazing that clever men should ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... devices. It might be that he would buy toy pistols and paper caps for himself and his following of urchins; or that his whim would lead him to expend all the money in tin flutes. In one case the group he so incongruously headed would be for that one day a gang of make-believe banditti; in another, they would constitute themselves a fife-and-drum corps—with barreltops for the drums—and would march through the streets, where scandalized adults stood in their tracks to watch them go by, they all the while making weird sounds, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have been a trick?" said I, recalling the victim's own make-believe at the Albany. And not only did Camilla appear to embrace that theory with open arms; she had the nerve to pretend that it really was what she ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly built his Khan-baligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear of modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since those days invested Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never really possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too great ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... don't care for any one but Martin. I never did." Her next: "Why did I ever think I did?" And her next: "Why did I ever do this?" She knew with a strange calm certainty that from this moment she would never be rid of Martin's presence again. She had maintained for more than a year a wonderful make-believe of indifference. She had fancied that by, pushing furiously with both hands one could drive things into the past. But Fate was cleverer than that. What he wanted to keep he kept for you—the weaving of the pattern in the carpet might be your handiwork, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... a real gentleman, he is," Bob would say; "and not one of your make-believe gentry. It is all along of him and Spot and the little 'un, Tim, that I don't hate Sundays; but he comes reg'lar, does the squire; and he brings some rare good books with him; and Tim curls himself up on my blanket, and Spot ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... garb only till we be through London," resumed Humphrey. "The Canon Thurstan bid me wear it only so far. He said naught of what should be done later. And once we leave London I will be again Humphrey the serving-man, and no make-believe priest. I like ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... fool. Lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... England," and not deathless valour merely, but "noble patriotism" as well; "a true English heart breathes, calm and strong through the whole business ... this man (Shakespeare) too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that." I find no valour in it, deathless or otherwise; but the make-believe of valour, the completest proof that valour was absent. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... submission is only pretended or make-believe. There was something of the roar of the lioness in her last words. Did you notice how ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... do not make-believe. I am in love with him myself, and have been any time since Nelson and the Nile. As for you, Dolly, since he went away six months ago, you have been positively in the megrims. I shall date your loss ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has necessarily been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries to make out a plausible case when it speaks of Britain, because so much of the record here is lost that there is more room for make-believe; and having made it out, the tale of a German and barbaric England, his false result will powerfully affect modern and immediate conclusions upon our common civilization, upon our institutions, and their nature, and in particular upon the Faith and ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of ruminations she would in general be governed by—which were quite such as fell in with his own taste. They hadn't natural relations, she and her father, she had explained; so they wouldn't try to supply the place by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways and hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enough—but a marriage was an intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and kin—you asked them over and above. But you didn't ask them ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... without a light, and describing what she ought to have seen. Believing her, however, to be there on such good authority, we were getting very sorry for Bellini's mother, when we were unexpectedly relieved, by finding it was only a bit of make-believe; for it was now divulged, che questa madre che piangea il suo figlio, was not in fact his personal mother, but "Italy" dressed up like his mother, and gone to Paris on purpose to weep and put garlands on the composer's tomb, amaranth and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and night—a night of self-revelations. Never that he could remember had he so deeply felt the sting of conscience. He, the Grand Duke Peter Nicholaevitch, in love with this little rustic? Impossible! It was the real Peter, tired of the sham and make-believe of self-restraint and virtue, who had merely kissed a country girl. He was no anchorite, no saint. Why had he tied himself to such a duty from a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... dells and gnome-frequented caves. It was she who invented the plays which were the most delightful. Mary was rather tiresome when it came to anything more than sober facts. She would play very nicely with the dolls, but, when it came to make-believe creatures, she was sadly wanting, and the best response Molly could expect to get when she built a fairy dwelling was: "Oh, I say, that is a proper little house, isn't it?" or "What a duck of a tree that is you are planting; it is ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... when the sun was shining broadly and the silken tassels of the corn were shrivelling up into make-believe tobacco for bad little boys to smoke, there was a heavy step on the garden walk, and Tom felt the signal "Snuggle!" Then he hugged as close as he could to his mother's side, and the gardener with his sharp knife cut off all Tom's ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... knowledge, a suitor. He is, however, fond of the society of women, especially those older than he. He has a somewhat effeminate voice and walk. Though he has begun of late years to smoke and drink a little, these habits sit rather oddly upon him. When a child, one of his favorite make-believe games was to pretend that he was a famous woman singer. At school he was always found ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... chatter of the women over some new arrivals was as deafening as ever. Our good guide Poc considered it was not to be borne any longer, so having counted the women and their asses, he cleared a space in preparation for a mock sale at which they were all to be put up, and having got us in front as make-believe purchasers, proceeded with the business, which ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... other kinds less good down to what was bad; but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction that there was no limit to Rebecca's power of make-believe. In this, and in yet greater things, little as she realized it, the law of compensation was working in her behalf, for in those anxious days mother and daughter found and knew each other as never before. A new sense ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... coming; they had hardly thought of this before and were not at all prepared for it. But it was still warm, for the June afternoon lingers long and far into the evening. Then they fell to eating strawberries again, for make-believe tea where everything is water and sand is not very satisfactory. After the strawberrying they came back to the shore again, and little Bo, now quite disheartened began to make a noise which sounded a little like crying, it ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... Vanderdecken. From earliest girlhood she has heard his tale and brooded over it; and self-sacrifice being her hobby, she has evidently worked herself up into a morbid state of mind and resolved to "redeem" the unfortunate man should the opportunity occur. This is honest work, not Scribe make-believe. Cases in which men and women have wrought themselves into an exalted mood and planned and achieved deeds, great or small, noble or ignoble, but always more or less mad, are common enough in history to justify a dramatist in taking a specimen as one of the persons ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman |
