"Real life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he been able to assume that childish air and play the part with me, a shrewd, calculating observer of men, whose advice he always sought? Such villainy seemed to me to be beyond the art of any actor, and it certainly seemed to be a superlative degree of crime and deception impossible in real life. I remembered that he had shown some uneasiness that night when I started for the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and there was the card of the notorious undertaker, the ally of some of our worst criminals. Still, this was not connected with him and could not be regarded as ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something which has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensible cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a multitude of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and work and work and work and work: everyone talked about their work, and everyone else listened and watched for the chance to begin to talk about theirs. This is real life, my dear. I am so glad I'm beginning to know people. Miss Voscoe is very queer, but she's a dear. She's the one who caricatured me the first day. Oh, we shall do now, ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... all their motives and acts humanized, provided it is not done covertly and under the guise of a real history. We are never at a loss how to take Kipling in his "Jungle Book;" we are pretty sure that this is fact dressed up as fiction, and that much of the real life of the jungle is in these stories. I remember reading his story of "The White Seal" shortly after I had visited the Seal Islands in Bering Sea, and I could not detect in the story one departure from the facts of the life-history of ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... influence of at least one such friend. It may be a good habit, the first interest in some life-loved pursuit or favourite author, some pretty feminine art, or delicate womanly counsel enforced by those narratives of real life that are more interesting than any fiction: it may be only the periodical return of gifts and kindness, and the store of family histories that no one else can tell; but we all owe something to such an aunt or uncle—the fairy godmothers ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... had been inoculated with selfishness. The germs of Parisian political economy, latent in his heart, would assuredly burst forth, sooner or later, whenever the careless spectator became an actor in the drama of real life. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... succeeded better with his men is a commonplace of all masculine writers, not that women always succeed with their sex, but to many masters of imaginative literature woman is usually a poet's evocation, not the creature of flesh and blood and bones, of sense and sentiment, that she is in real life. Conrad opens no new windows in her soul, but he has painted some full-length portraits and made many lifelike sketches, which are inevitable. From the shining presence of his mother, the assemblage of a few traits in his Reminiscences, to Flora de Barral ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... before in your mind to appreciate this word. God has a plan for every life, and all your sickness, your disappointment, your discipline, is for something. There must be a "then" for you. It is the call of God and the answer to it that makes real life. Compare Gideon the farmer with Gideon the soldier, and you will see the difference in a human life. Let one, however low or ignorant, but hear the voice of God and respond to it, and when such an one answers God's ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... Oxford Road, who'd have become my accomplice, and known all about how to do it, and probably broken into Michael's house at night and found nothing but a waxwork image; and then blackmailed or murdered me. But here, in real life, I might walk the streets till I dropped dead, and none of the criminal classes would look near me. Though, to be sure, there is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Augustine meant when he wrote, "I should not believe in the Gospel if I had not the authority of the Church for so doing." If the documents are stuffed with the authority of the Church, these Gospels cannot be utilized for a history of the real life of Jesus. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... type of Sanskrit treatise, showing how different kinds of lover should be treated in poetry and illustrating the correct attitudes by carefully chosen verses. In all these writings the standard of reference was human passion. The lovers of poetry might bear only a slight relation to lovers in real life. Many of the situations envisaged might rarely, if ever, occur. It was sufficient that granted some favourable accident, some chance suspension of normal circumstances, lovers could be imagined as acting ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... Irene to the theatre, instinctively choosing the modern Society Plays with the modern Society conjugal problem, so fortunately different from any conjugal problem in real life. He found that they too always ended in the same way, even when there was a lover in the case. While he was watching the play Soames often sympathized with the lover; but before he reached home again, driving with Irene in a hansom, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bows, she had made, washed, fluted and put up. All the fancy, pretty work about the bed was hers; and the bunches of forget-me-nots that adorned the chamber-set, looked as though they had sprung into real life on the snowy surface, instead of having been stuck and artistically plastered on. Oh, it was all lovely, and beyond improvement, every one said, and Bea laughed and ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... climbing a real telegraph-pole to tap the wire and telegraph the girl he loves that he is dead, so that she can marry his rich rival and go to Europe and cultivate her gift for sculpture, they feel that they have got real life." ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... unionists, saloonkeepers, policemen, wash-women, newsboys, walking delegates, waitresses, ward heelers, local bosses, anarchists—the procession seems endless and the medley beyond all hope of disentanglement. But it is real life and no parade of puppets."—New ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... comic dramatist's mirror—the "Muses' Looking-glass"—and are holding it up to nature without the intervention of the conventionalities of the stage. The company to which we are introduced is, no doubt, pursuing a somewhat artificial vocation; but it is pursuing it in the way of real life, as many live men and women have pursued it. The mask itself may be of their trade and class; but it is taken off them, and they are not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... more noble, or happier persons than our old maid can married life present? Is she not more worthy of imitation than the "Celias" and "Daphnes" whose delicate distresses have formed the staple of circulating libraries, or than those feeble spirits in real life, who, mistaking selfishness for sensibility, turn thanklessly from the blessings and coldly from the duties of life, because they have been denied the gratification of some ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... task. But it is a task which receives its final sanctification, when the teacher himself honestly tries to add a rill to the great stream of scientific discovery. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with Nature. We may, it is true, have good and instructive lectures from men of ability, the whole ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... novels, and (when abroad) was a perfect Baedeker, or Murray, or Mr. Augustus Hare: instructing through correspondence. So the matron complained, but this was not the worst of it. There was an unhappy family history, of a kind infinitely more common in fiction than in real life. To be explicit, even according to the ideas of the most abject barbarians, the young people, unwittingly, were ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... very thoughtful and urgent to find some satisfactory explanation. To be sure, thinks I, marriage is but the beginning of a woman's real life, and so one may not reasonably expect her to be what she was as a thoughtless child. And 'tis no less natural that a young wife should love to be alone with her husband, rather than in the midst of people who must distract his thoughts from her; as also it is right and proper she should wish to ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... he could not feel that a job as waiter at a New York hotel was an adequate job for an exceptional man. Of course, the root of the trouble lay in the fact that the fellow could not remember what his real life-work had been before the war. It was exasperating to reflect, as the other moved away to take his order to the kitchen, that there, for all one knew, went the dickens of a lawyer or doctor ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... until luncheon. Nothing pleased her. The novels were stupid. She was tired of love tales—why could not people find something else to write about? She was sick of such namby-pamby sentimentality; and then they were so untrue to life. Stories in real life did not always end happily, or there would not be so many old maids in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... me from the brilliant eyes! "Smart trick, eh?" they telegraphed. I had to turn away, or I should have laughed. Surely never before, on stage or in story—to say nothing of real life—was the villain and blackmailer a mischievous, schoolboy imp, who made his victims giggle at the very antics which caught them in his toils! But, come to think of it, I am a villain, and next door to a blackmailer! Yet I always see myself (unless I stop to reflect on my sins) as a girl like other ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were designed, lay here and there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... to me is considerable, from the sketches which it contains of particular men and women, most of whom I knew and could, if necessary, identify. The story, too, is taken generally from real life, and perhaps Carlyle did not finish it, from the sense that it could not be published while the persons and things could be recognized. That objection to the publication no longer exists. Everybody is dead whose likenesses have been drawn, and the incidents ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... marred, dilapidated countenances that you feel a peace steal into your heart? And whoever the painter was, he must have loved his work, for Saint Gregory could never have been more dignified in real life than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... often that heroines of real life possess the adventitious attractions of a pretty name, or a charming person; but Grace Darling has both. She would unquestionably have been loved and admired as heartily had she been Dorothy Dobbs, with a wide mouth, snub nose, and a squint; but it is ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... law or political life. The examples used throughout the book and the exercises and questions suggested for argument are drawn from matters in which young people from eighteen to twenty-two have a natural, lively interest and which they argue about in real life. The aim of the book is to develop habits of analysis and effective presentation of facts which will serve the student in the practical concerns of later life. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... empress, who had shown particular interest in his career. The present gaikwar was placed upon the throne in 1874 by Lord Northbrook, when he was Viceroy of India, to succeed Malhar Rao, one of those fantastic persons we read about in fairy stories but seldom find in real life. For extravagant phantasies and barbaric splendors he beat the world. He surpassed even those old spendthrifts of the Roman Empire, Nero, Caligula and Tiberius. He spent a million of rupees to celebrate the marriage ceremonies of a favorite pigeon ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... fragrance of roses; it was as if a door into a dream had suddenly opened, and he had passed out of the night and the cold into a place where all was colour and fragrance and pleasant magic. The other was real life—life for all but the happy few, he found himself thinking—this was merely the enchanted fairy-ring where children played at ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the principle which has lain at the root of all religions, whatever their name or outward form, which once burnt with divine lustre in that Catholicism which was now to pass away: the fundamental axiom of all real life, that the service which man owes to God is not the service of words or magic forms, or ceremonies or opinions; but the service of holiness, of purity, of obedience to the everlasting laws ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... lay upon the streets, and there were few discordant sounds, few passers-by, to break the chain of his thought. He had movement, silence, space. And as is usual with active-brained dreamers, he had little or no eye for the real life about him; he was not struck by the air of comfortable prosperity, of thriving content, which marked the great commercial centre, and he let pass, unnoticed, the unfamiliar details of a foreign street, the trifling yet significant incidents ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... delusion a beautifully rationalized one. As far as Malone was concerned, it made more sense than most of real life. ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... before whom to set his face in resolute optimism, he beheld, and half admitted that he beheld, his way of life as incredibly mechanical. Mechanical business—a brisk selling of badly built houses. Mechanical religion—a dry, hard church, shut off from the real life of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat. Mechanical golf and dinner-parties and bridge and conversation. Save with Paul Riesling, mechanical friendships—back-slapping and jocular, never daring to ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... entangle a young man of wealth or high rank into a secret engagement with her daughter, who she knows is no suitable wife for him, is neither honest to him nor kind to her child. Such unequal marriages seldom answer in real life. There must be sympathy, and a certain community of interests to make ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... writings and the readers of two centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century, Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr. Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... given us studies from real life which must be the result of a lifetime of patient, sympathetic observation.... No one has done the same kind of work so lovingly ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... little man, taking the unexpected attack with bland indifference. "You don't appreciate our position in this matter. We are not judges, but guessers. We sit in the stalls of a theater, watching people on the stage of real life playing four acts of a tragedy, and it is our business to construct the fifth, which is produced in court. Let me give you a wildly supposititious version of that fifth act now. Suppose some neurotic fool was in love with ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... writing of photoplays, where the author has no description to rely on to explain who and what his characters are, there is especial need of names that will help to indicate the social status of his different characters. In real life, a bank president is as likely to be a Casey or a Smith as he is to be a Rutherford or a Pendleton, but the chances are that, when given to a great banker, either of the last two names would make a greater impression on "popular" spectators. Again, certain names instantly ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister. A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... they answer purely and simply, the Word of God speaks through them. This is not degrading the sacraments—nay, but raising all human life—nay, raising the sacraments as well, for it brings them into relation with real life, and transforms the poor magical abstractions into ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... "Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... quickly, her face flushing at the thought of the new vista of life now opening. "Yes, I have always longed to be a part of the real life of this world; the life of constant action—meeting new people every day, and prominent people. Balls, receptions, teas, theater parties, afternoon drives, plenty of money and plenty of gayety are what I want. I'm not a bit like Hope Georgia, who thinks these ideas are extravagant because ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... learned that this independent writer was named in real life Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and that he was a naval officer. This very fact, that he was not a writer by profession, added indeed to his success. He actually had seen that which he was describing, he had lived that which he was relating. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... fallacies by which some of these authors have been misled. The Ratiocinative half, dealing with matters which had already been well handled by Dutrieu and other scholastic logicians, invests their dead though precise formalism with a real life and application to the actual process of finding and proving truth. But besides thus working each half up to perfection, Mr Mill has performed the still more difficult task of overcoming the repugnance, apparently an inveterate repugnance, between them, so as ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... my certain knowledge, they do not neglect. Theocritus knew it well enough. But, in a general way, he is niggardly with the precious commodity of kisses; he seems to have thought that in literature, if not in real life, one can have too much of a good thing. Also, being a southerner, he could not have trusted his young folks to remain eternally at the kissing-stage, after the pattern of our fish-like English lovers. Such behaviour would have struck him as improbable; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... certainly. I like Susan as well as ever, and begin now not to care at all about Cecilia; she may stay at Easton Court as long as she likes. Henry Mellish, I am afraid, will be too much in the common novel style—a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young man (such as do not much abound in real life), desperately in love and all in vain. But I have no business to judge him ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... and Edward got up and strolled away to compliment the participants in the program, leaving Ethel Blue more excited than she had ever been in her life, even just before she went up in an aeroplane, because she was touching the edges of an adventure in real life. ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no critic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate forerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from a Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words, and of whom I knew nothing until ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... diminishing it? But it never should be lost sight of, that such a one is only an abstraction after all, for which, not only in the transition to practice, but even in finished theory, we must turn to the infinite variety of real life.(167) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the two persons I loved best in the world, had been the enemies who had always successfully conspired against me. "Do have done with your Fixed Period and nonsense," she had said to me only yesterday. "It's all very well for the Assembly; but when you come to killing poor Mr Crasweller in real life, it is quite out of the question." And then, when I began to explain to her at length the immense importance of the subject, she only remarked that that would do very well for the Assembly. Should I abandon it all, take the good things with which God had provided me, and ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... from the charge of irresolution, on the ground that it was but "the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded;" and he urges, that "he had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life." But this explanation does not account for the want of steadiness which prevented Collins from accomplishing the objects he meditated. His mind was neither "broken nor confounded," nor had he experienced the bitter pangs ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... It was not that they doubted their friend's veracity, but the country, the men, and therefore the happenings were so strange to the lads that they seemed to have an existence only in books and not to be possible in real life. But now Mick showed the stuff he was made of. When he had found out all there was to learn, about what the blacks had done, and exactly what position the party was left in, he stopped thinking about ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children "dressing up," disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... attention of medieval investigators. It was, however, much mixed up with alchemy, a false science which the Middle Ages had received from the Greeks, and they, in turn, from the Egyptians. The alchemists believed that minerals possessed a real life of their own and that they were continually developing in the ground toward the state of gold, the perfect metal. It was necessary, therefore, to discover the "philosopher's stone," which would turn all metals into gold. The alchemists never found it, but they learned ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... and did the same work at the same hours as formerly. It seemed to me that I was stifling in this atmosphere. I gasped for breath, and thought that anything would be preferable to this semblance of existence, which was not real life. I was thinking of applying for the 'good situation,' which had so often been mentioned to me, when one morning I was summoned into the steward's office—a mysterious and frightful place to us children. He himself was a stout, ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the solid shore, plunge into uncertain, into possibly treacherous depths. "I see something else," she went on; "I've an idea that greatly appeals to me—I've had it for a long time. It has come over me that we're wrong. Our real life isn't here." ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... not easily be imagined how much Shakespeare excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authours. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Preacher, you're at it again," laughed Gloria. "You belong to the pulpit of real life, not the Army. Go on, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... course. The ordinary and inexperienced mind will be, if not contaminated, at least weakened and this alone is disastrous in a leader. Many changes, many transformations, we know, take place in the mind of youth as it emerges "from collegiate visions into the rough path of real life." As Morley wrote, "We know after the event, the tremendous changes of thought . . . of conception of life, that coming years and new historic forces were waiting to unfold before the undergraduate when he had once floated out beyond the college bar." ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... began to more fully understand what the creating for one's self of an atmosphere meant. The story he and his friend were fashioning fastened upon him like some strange, determined shadow from the realms of real life, gripped him more and more closely, held him for long spells of time in a new and desolate world. For the book so far was a deepening tragedy, and although, at times, Henley strove to resist the paramount influence which the genius of Trenchard began to exercise ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... their real life until they leave their bushes," said the Prince. "You will notice they are all attached to the plants by the soles of their feet, and when they are quite ripe they are easily separated from the stems and at once attain the powers of motion ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... produced the effect which might naturally have been expected; that is to say, it brought D'Harmental back from imaginary to real life. He had forgotten this man, who made such a strange and perfect contrast with the young girl, and who must doubtless be either her father, her lover, or her husband. But in either of these cases, what could there be in common between the daughter, the wife, or the mistress ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... simple explanation," said Pennington, K.C., and added, "which you will hear presently from the defendant. Doubtless it will commend itself to you as experienced men of the world. You cannot but have perceived that such things are constantly happening in real life, that they are of daily occurrence. I am almost ashamed to stand up before you and endeavour to rebut a story so plausible and so essentially convincing. I feel that my task is well-nigh hopeless. Nevertheless, I must do ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... aunt and the other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church, from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms. Certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are learned by the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... as a drama, bearing the same sort, though not the same degree, of relation to eternity, as an hour spent at the theatre, and the fictions there exhibited ... do to the whole of real life. Nor is there any thing in this passing pageant worth the sorrow that we lavish on it. Now, when my children or friends leave me, or when I shall be called to leave them, I consider it as merely parting for the present visit, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... despised, hated, and persecuted by an unreasoning world. If he followed the beaten track, whither would it lead? To a position of comfort and respectability, in which the first duty was to throw a veil over one's own heart and those of others: to suppress all doubt and inquiry, and to deaden all real life in the individual, so that the whole machine might continue its regular movements without noise or friction. But truth was a two-edged sword, sharp and shining as crystal. When the light of truth broke into the heart of man, it caused an ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... yet he knew that the end would be as she had said. She would be the wife of the man she did not love. Fate had given her to him when the world was young; there was no escape. In story-books, perhaps, but not in real life. And how he had ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... being. We moderns, however, see the absurdity of it. In real life no one thinks aloud or in an empty room. The up-to-date dramatist must at all costs avoid this hall-mark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... the work for him. One should write what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, look up and into the sky of real life itself. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... asks, "Are you falling then into atheism?" one may assume an indignant tone, and say: "We have never denied God: whoever says we have is a slanderer!" So God remains, for the necessities of poetry and art. But as we cannot know either what He is, or whether He is, real life goes on in complete and entire independence of Him. The taking up of this position with regard to religion may, in certain cases, be a literary artifice. In other cases it is seriously done. There are certain ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... had just thrown down a daily paper, and even as he spoke I read on the upturned page the glaring headline: "Romance in Real Life." His recent literature was the evident ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... wandering out afterwards into the bare and desolate garden, I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... the woman had one upon her other arm, and none upon that where the thing was hanging." Having seen the gown of a female figure in a print hanging obliquely, the same child said, "The wind blows that woman's gown back." We mention these little circumstances from real life, to show how early prints may be an amusement to children, and how quickly things unknown, are learnt by the relations which they bear to what was known before. We should at the same time observe, that children are very apt to make strange mistakes, and ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... paper was written by Mr. Thomas Warton, who is said to have sketched from a character in real life, distantly related to himself.—Drake's Essays, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... particular she played one episode, the trying over of a new song, in a winningly natural manner. I found the way in which she flapped her eyelids a subject of puzzled study. I have not observed that maidens in real life indulge in these calisthenics. This is perhaps as well; they are evidently very deadly. Within a fortnight of their being brought into action poet Quintard is in the Kamerad stage. Not Anne Whitfield herself exhibits more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... was square-shaped with a stage and galleries, for a jargon-company sometimes thrilled the Ghetto with tragedy and tickled it with farce. Both species were playing to-night, and in jargon to boot. In real life you always get your drama mixed, and the sock of comedy galls the buskin of tragedy. It was an episode in the pitiful tussle of hunger and greed, yet its humors were ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... some mighty real dreams in my time. In a dream all things is possible. In real life a system ain't possible. Now, I ain't never been to college, but I'm plum justified in sizin' up this gamblin' orgy of ourn as ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... others passed away in old age. At length all dropped their weary burdens, and their toils and sorrows ended. Not one of the hundreds that sailed out of Marseilles on that sunny afternoon ever saw Europe again. Rarely in the history of the world has a story in real life been freighted with so much woe as fell to the lot of the victims of the strange madness which swept over Europe less than seven hundred years ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... had he settled down in his new country home, than a strange piece of good fortune, such as happens more often in a story-book than in real life, enabled him at one stroke to double his little estate, to keep off the unwelcome approach of the speculative builder, and to give himself scope for the newly-discovered delights of the garden. The sale of the house in Marlborough ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... blue law stories, but as many great authors have taken the liberty of depicting things just as they found them in real life, my humble self has availed itself of the same prerogative. These tragic little tales of the divorce colony should be dear to you as they are to me; they are most appealing ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... twisted. I fully realize the treacherous nature of the ground on which walks one who tries to compare the two sexes concerning their relative attitudes towards love, but certain it is that the novelist's descriptions of men as the leaders and aggressors in love is not fiction but the common fact of real life. Man's tendency towards leadership in love is not scientifically explained by any superficial assumption that established social conventions have repressed an original spontaneity of women. On the contrary, ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... far less artistic in spirit. They impress one as if the soft, luxurious court atmosphere had passed over them, and taking away their strong points, had left them only a general air of being well-bred and well-kept persons, of little importance to the real life of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... In real life, however, development so regular as this is hardly ever known, and many a man has occasional flashes of astral consciousness without any awakening of etheric vision at all. And this irregularity of development is one of the principal causes of man's extraordinary liability to error ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... probably have left unmolested, relying on the goodwill of the great mass of peasants who owed their proprietorship to the action of the Czar. There were, however, politicians at Moscow and St. Petersburg who believed that the deep-lying instinct of nationality would for the first time be called into real life among these peasants by their very elevation from misery to independence, and that where Russia had hitherto had three hundred thousand enemies Milutine was preparing for it six millions. It was the dread of this possibility in the future, the apprehension that material interests ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... come to Warrington, and chief among them in later years good John Howard with MSS. for his friend Dr. Aikin to correct for the press. Now for the first time Mrs. Barbauld (Miss Aikin she was then) saw something of real life, of men and manners. It was not likely that she looked back with any lingering regret to Knibworth, or would have willingly returned thither. A story in one of her memoirs gives an amusing picture of the manners of a young country lady of that day. Mr. Haines, a ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... released from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your real life," he added. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of our old church three years, and while I desired to live a Christian life, I could never feel that a long face, and solemnly pronounced words made any difference in my real life. Father did not believe any more in long faces than I did, still, I think from fear of neglecting any part of his duty, he maintained a serious demeanor from the break of our Sabbath days to their close. He had an unusually beautiful way of asking a blessing that always gave me a happy feeling. ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... question of the influence of any particular literary tendency. Their works sprang out of the native environment of the authors, whose vision, despite a limited horizon, was often vivid. They convey true impressions of real life. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... a favourite with Henry VIII. and his court; wrote farces, the characters of which were drawn from real life, presumably not hard to identify at the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... lancers, with their plumes, pennons, and tassels, representing the sprites and sylphides of the pantomime, are succeeded by men who look real life. Big bearded men, habited in homespun; some wearing buckskin, others blanket coats; all carrying guns, bowie-knives, and pistols; the first smoking at the muzzles, as freshly fired, the last held in hand, ready to be discharged as soon as somebody ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in "American Women Writers", that Mrs. Wiggin was "a popular writer who expressed what her contemporaries themselves thought of as 'real life'" (p. 413). "The Village Watch-Tower" I think is a perfect example of that observation; it captures vividly a few frozen moments of rural America, right at the twilight of the 19th century. Most of it was written in the village of Quillcote, ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sketch from real life. He was a petty officer in the service at the same time with me, and notwithstanding his rambling life, was a man of good education and strong mind. His life was a striking illustration of the truth of the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... very good and looked the part to perfection. In real life I am told he is a Don Juan himself. If the list of his victims has not yet reached mille et un the fault cannot be laid at his door. His stage victims were all fat German Frauen. Zerlina wore a blond wig, showed very black eyebrows and red lips. Her golden molars showed from afar. Our visit ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space. In any case, he generally contents himself with a very slight embroidery of outward manners,—the faintest possible counterfeit of real life,—and endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject. Occasionally a breath of nature, a rain-drop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... tell you no woman could: though you'll say I've told enough. I shall burn with shame when I think of it. I could go on my knees to have your arms round me once. I could kill myself for saying it!—I should feel that I had one moment of real life.—I know I ought to admire you. They say a woman hates if she's refused. I can't: I wish I were able to. I could have helped the Radnors better by staying here and threatening never to go to him unless ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arrows on their margins. In nothing does Mr. Howells more clearly show his "Americanism" than in his almost divinely sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards commonplace, erring, vulgar humanity. "Ah, poor real life, which I love!" he writes somewhere; "can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face!" We must remember in reading him his own theory of the duty of the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call ideal characters. I think ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... books. Charlotte, the wife of Howard, though in comparative solitude, drew her enjoyment from society. There was not a family in the village near, that did not, in some way or other, promote her happiness. Her information was gathered from intercourse with living beings—her knowledge from real life. If the two sisters had changed situations, the one might have become a mere bookworm; the other, from the liveliness of her disposition, and the warm interest she took in characters, a little of a gossip. ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... seemed unreal and dreadful, like the illusions of troubled sleep. And so Ishmael left the drawing room and went up to the office, to see if perhaps he could find real life there. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... he rose from his elbow, and supported himself at arm's length from the ground, one hand resting on the turf, the other at liberty, if required, for oratorical action—"what is worse, this place which woman occupies in art is but a fair reflection of that which she fills in real life. Just heavens! what a perpetual wonder it is, this living, breathing beauty! Throw all your metaphors to the winds—your poetic raptures—your ideals—your romance of position and of circumstance: look at a fair, amiable, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... tells of the strange adventures of real life, which, more than the fancies of the novel writer, ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... man comes from a certain refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had, and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the man's nature, a gift of not having to ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... thought.—"You remember the story which Trevanion (I beg his pardon, Lord Ulswater) told us the other night. That gives you something of the romance of real life for your plot—puts you chiefly among scenes with which you are familiar, and furnishes you with characters which have been sparingly dealt with since the time of Fielding. You can give us the country squire, as you remember ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... which this work more particularly refers, and must equally interest the general reader, with whom, in this country, the records of the higher classes have always possessed a peculiar attraction. The anecdotes of the Aristocracy here recorded go far to show that there are more marvels in real life than in the creations of fiction. Let the reader seek romance in whatever book, and at whatever period he may, yet nought will he find to surpass the unexaggerated reality ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... new cousin and Lloyd are away with Clark the Missionary on a school inspecting malaga, really perhaps the prettiest little bit of opera in real life that can be seen, and made all the prettier by the actors being children. I have come to a collapse this morning on D.B.: wrote a chapter one way, half re-copied it in another, and now stand halting between the two like Buridan's donkey. These sorts of cruces always are to me the most insoluble, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the black-list. Moreover, the advisability of taking the field at once was strongly and incessantly urged by a priest, Mongaku, who, after a brief acquaintance, had impressed Yoritomo favourably. This bonze had been the leading figure in an extraordinary romance of real life. Originally Endo Morito, an officer of the guards in Kyoto, he fell in love with his cousin, Kesa,* the wife of a comrade called Minamoto Wataru. His addresses being resolutely rejected, he swore that if Kesa remained obdurate, he would kill her mother. From this dilemma the brave woman determined ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... wrought by delays in the old Court of Chancery, which defeated all the purposes of a court of justice. Many of the characters, who, though famous, are not essential to the development of the story, were drawn from real life. Turveydrop was suggested by George IV., and Inspector Bucket was a friend of the author in the Metropolitan Police Force. Harold Skimpole was identified with Leigh Hunt. Dickens himself admitted the resemblance; but only in so far as none of Skimpole's vices could be attributed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... she was, it must be allowed, for it is not easily to be conceived that such another heroine will ever appear, unless in a novel, where a latitude is given to that extravagance of character which she attempted to bring into real life." Beloe, in the "Sexagenarian," borrowed the scurrilous abuse of the "Biographical Dictionary," which was furthermore accepted by almost every history of English literature and encyclopaedia as the correct estimate of Mary's character and teachings. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... keeping a boy young as long as possible, and I have never hurried you by putting you in an important place, though at one time I thought of having a third officer, and assigning you to the position, for the practice it would give you in real life; but I concluded that you had better not ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... the course of a common law case. Instead of having our characters always at hand, at the proper moment, to do the business of the artist, like so many puppets, each working on a convenient wire, and waiting to be whistled in upon the scene, we shall find them sometimes absent, as we do in real life when their presence is most seriously desired, and when the reader would perhaps prefer that they should come in, to meet or make emergencies. Some are gone whom we should rather see; some present, whose absence, in the language of the Irishman, would be the best company ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and sometimes in real life, beautiful young women are fallen in love with, and then trouble is liable to begin," explained ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is that Greek myths of this character were inherited from the period of savagery, when ideas of metamorphosis and of the kinship of men and beasts were real practical beliefs. Events conceived to be common in real life were introduced into myths, and these myths were savage science, and were intended to account for the Origin of Species. But when once this train of imagination has been fired, it burns on both in literature and in the legends of the peasantry. Every one who ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... he does!" Serge Rnine declared. "It is quite obvious that in actual life he entertains for Rose Andre personal feelings which are quite out of place in a nameless servant. It is possible that, in real life, no one has any idea of such a thing; but, on the screen, when he is not watching himself, or when he thinks that the actors at rehearsal cannot see him, his secret ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... of the map turned out in real life to be all manner of abominable tracks. Some few were metalled, some were cart-ruts merely, some were open lanes of rank grass; and along most there went a horrible ditch, and in many fields the standing water proclaimed desolation. IN so far as I can be said to have had a way ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... does not concern us now to investigate, Kentucky, under the dominion of the white man, has continued to justify its native name of "Dark and Bloody Ground," in being the scene of a remarkable number of tragedies in real life. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... o'er the wild, I sung My fancies to the wood. I mourned the linnet-lover's fate, Or turtle from her murdered mate, Condemned the widowed hours to wail: Or while the mournful vision rose, I sought to weep for imaged woes, Nor real life believed a ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of his dreams was by far more perfect than the Rosa of real life. Not only did the Rosa of his dreams speak of the tulip, but also brought to him a black one in a ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Prince would choose such a one. Dad pointed him out to us in the dining-room last night—a thing of mustachios and eyes—just the kind one sees at the vaudeville, but which I hadn't the least idea existed in real life.—Oh!" she cried, with a little start, "there he is now, almost ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and "The Adventure of Dying," a theme which has never ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... language what marmalade, according to the label on the pot, is to butter, "an excellent (occasional) substitute." But its powers as an interpreter of thought are limited. At least, in real life they are so. As regards a ballet, it is difficult to say what is not explainable by pantomime. I have seen the bad man in a ballet convey to the premiere danseuse by a subtle movement of the left leg, together with some slight assistance from ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... should be an Ambassador, perhaps a Prime Minister some day, and she would be my wife—and yet without her it wouldn't be worth anything to me. Ernshaw, isn't it a bit too much to ask a man on the threshold of his real life to give up all that for the sake of an idea—well, a ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... into her discourse, "with work and pleasure travelling along side by side, Dora was called upon to face a situation that would have brought her gay and prosperous career to a sad and shameful end in any well-constructed Sunday School book; but please notice that it did nothing of the sort in real life. Did she lose her job? She did not. Or her health or reputation? Nothing like that. After she got over the first shock of surprise Dora decided to go through with the thing, and, being tall and thin, got away with it successfully. No one suspected that the illness which kept her away from her ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... season has come and gone and now we settle down to the real life of the winter. Plans innumerable are under way for winter activities, and the children are on tiptoe over the prospect of approaching Christmastide. Their jubilations fill the house, and writing is even more ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... myself. I was full of some song or bit of poetry. I tell you again, Mary, if you have not found it out for yourself, real life is not like a book. Hector Garret is not the man to beg and implore, and wait patiently for a score of years. I wish you saw how he manages his strong horse. He sits, and does not yield a hair's breadth. Though it paws and rears, he just holds ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... never towered in a fit of passion as she did now in real life, as her ungovernable feelings broke ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... population. Mr Kipling has failed to make Simla interesting, because Simla is Biarritz and Monte Carlo or any place which in fiction is frequented by people who behave naughtily and enjoy themselves, and in real life is frequented by the upper middle classes mechanically passing the time. Mr Kipling's ingenious pretences regarding Simla are amusing, but they cannot long conceal from his readers that these tales, apart from literary exhibition, were really not worth the telling. ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's supreme truth lies. He represents real life. His drama teaches as life teaches,—neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics, as Nature does, on right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make Nature more systematic than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil; in the unmerited ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... life that would apply with equal truth to King Mancho, or any one of his sable subjects, will be necessary that you write him down the hero of adventures he never dreamed of, and leave out the score of delinquincies his real life is blemished with. If you do this, wise men will set you down a scribbler ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... believe in fairies any more," said Hermione, with a little sigh. "I believed in them once,—it was so nice. I want stories of real life now,—sad ones, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... impression as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... of nature which are never to be met with in pictures seem to us unreal, and give us the impression that nature is unnatural, or vice versa; whereas phenomena of nature which occur with too much frequency in pictures seem to us hackneyed, and views which are to be met with in real life, but which appear to us too penetrated with a single idea or a single sentiment, seem to us arabesques. The view from the Princess's favourite spot was as follows. On the further side of a small lake, over-grown with ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy |
