"Real thing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confess in humility that I myself acquired the habit of intellectual suspicion toward everybody who does try to do any real thing. I find myself unconsciously sneering at young men who are accomplishing things. Yes, and that is not the worst of it; I find myself sneering at myself." That is pathos—a soul doubting, denying itself. Pathos! yes, it ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... this is the real thing," he explained; "I've had seven years of that in Paris. This is merely a very ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... number of wooden guns, which were painted black, so that, at a distance, they looked exactly like the real thing. Upon his vessel were only six cannon, so when—a short time afterwards—he was chased by a French privateer off the coast of Scotland—he had an excellent opportunity ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the Morning Post, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... not sorry she's going away. Maybe the Lord's sending her hence, either to open her eyes and send her back weary and cloyed with the world she's going into so gaily now, or else to open thine, and show thee plain, stripped of outside glitter, the real thing she is, that thou mayest see what a sorry wife she would make to a Christian man. No, I'm not sorry. And unless I mistake greatly, Tom, the time's coming when thou shalt not be sorry neither. In ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... Gautama,' is on account of its being the result of a Vedic statement, merely an action and dependent on man; that conception of fire, on the other hand, which refers to the well-known (real) fire, is neither dependent on Vedic statements nor on man, but only on a real thing which is an object of perception; it is therefore knowledge and not an action. The same remark applies to all things which are the objects of the different means of right knowledge. This being thus that knowledge also which has the existent Brahman for its object is not dependent on Vedic ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... be called an occult quality, because their existence was never proved. Attraction, on the contrary, is a real thing, because its effects are demonstrated, and the proportions of it are calculated. The cause of this cause is among ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... consisted in setting a ban on the thought of others in the name of Reason: for they believed in Reason as the Catholics believed in the Blessed Virgin without ever dreaming for a moment that Reason, like the Virgin, was in itself nothing, or that the real thing lay behind it. And, just as the Catholic Church had its armies of monks and its congregations stealthily creeping through the veins of the nation, propagating its views and destroying every other sort of vitality, so the Anti-Catholic Church had its Free Masons, whose chief ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... apparently not expecting an answer. "I clamped your coronary artery shut for a few seconds. A post-mortem would never be able to tell it from the real thing ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... a turmoil. Was it all but the floating phantasm of delirium? Or had the horror of the real thing blotted Nils's mind into blankness so far as the events of the night in the Dead Valley were concerned? The latter explanation seemed the only one, else how explain the sudden illness which in a night had struck us both down? I said nothing more, either to Nils or to my own people, but ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... how to find that blind spot in the world of air. The best cover, he maintained, was not in cloud or a wisp of fog, but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy. I recognized that talk for the real thing. It was on a par with Peter's doctrine of 'atmosphere' and 'the double bluff' and all the other principles that his queer old mind had cogitated out of ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... cried, scornfully. "My God, Buddy! Would you let him tell you—? Is he pickin' out women for you like he picks out a dress for me and a hotel for Ma? How does he know what's the real thing?" ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... of riding, for it was only a short two miles walk; and as we did not start until after our last meal, the sun had dipped behind Flag-pole's tall peak, and nearly the whole of our happy valley lay in deep, cool shadow. Besides which, it looked more like the real thing to walk, and that was half the battle with me. The "real thing" in this case, though I did not stop to explain it to myself, must have meant emigrants, Mormons, soldiers on the march, what you will; any thing which expresses all one's belongings ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... stars were made," he cried, "we were made for each other. It is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street. That is the real thing. It is the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... they explained directly there were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said, becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal as you could find, but the Twinklers were the real thing, they said,—real, unadulterated, arrogant Junkers, which is why they wouldn't talk to anybody; for no Junker, said the German ladies, thinks anybody good enough to be talked to except another Junker. The German ladies themselves had ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... do with the real thing worried me no end. Finally I opened it out flat—there were only two sheets—and laid it between two of the advertisement pages of a magazine. I stuck the two pages together round the edge with some gum off an envelope. ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... explored, settled, and organised for him. To the discovery and regulation of this world every race has worked with more or less definiteness of aim, and the total result of the incalculable labours and sufferings of men is the somewhat intangible but very real thing we call civilisation. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... grasshoppers—so to speak— Till we skimmed their carcases off the spring; And they fell so thick in the station creek They choked the waterholes all the week. There was scarcely room for a trout to rise, And they'd only take artificial flies— They got so sick of the real thing. ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... to the other. The sheriff was plainly pleased with what he had seen on his way up Bear Creek. He was also happy to be present at so large a gathering. But to Elizabeth his coming was like a death. Her brother could tell the difference between her forced cordiality and the real thing. She had his horse put up; presented him to the few people whom he had not met, and then left him posing for the crowd of admirers. Life to the sheriff was truly a stage. ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish - hardly worth the twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris took in. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... falling back a pace or two to form the better judgment of his work; 'as near the real thing as sixpenn'orth of halfpence is to sixpence. What a pity that the whole front of the house opens at once! If there was only a staircase in it, now, and regular doors to the rooms to go in at! But that's the worst ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... There is no pretence about him. He doesn't think that plastering his hair with stuff, and wearing ugly, showy clothes, and a hat on the back of his head, or swaggering, or smoking nasty cigarettes, or being insolent to women, are marks of a gentleman. He's the real thing. That's what Hal is, and that's why I'm so proud of him, so—so touchy ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... Georgiana, you bring me a dowry bigger than any I could ask for—the inheritance from such a father as he is—and from the mother who gave you all he left her to give. What are towels and tablecloths—I don't know what it is brides bring!—beside such things as these? Won't you give me the real thing, and let me furnish the ones that don't count? Dear, if you could know the pleasure there is for me in the very thought ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... touched with something higher and brighter through that instant's approach and confidence. If I were to write down his thought as he walked, it would be with phrase and distinction peculiar to himself and to the boy-mind,—"It's the real thing with her; it don't make a fellow squirm like a pin put out at a caterpillar. She's good; but ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... good architect—and good sense!" he said to himself. "It's the real thing; and he did it before Jasmine came on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... but somehow I feel that this time the real thing has come, and with it the real man. I can't tell you, Will, how much different it is, but everything I felt before seems so sort of earthly—and somehow this love that I have for this man is so different. It's ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... very mode of expression itself shows that this term "person" is common to the three when we say "three persons"; for when we say "three men" we show that "man" is common to the three. Now it is clear that this is not community of a real thing, as if one essence were common to the three; otherwise there would be only one person of the three, as also ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... this yere, which seems a mockery while I repeats it now, is like the real thing at the time! I'm a coyote! if it don't affect Texas Thompson so he sheds tears; an' Dan Boggs an' Tutt an' Moore an' Cherokee Hall is lookin' far from bright about the ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... it?" he said, as he cast his eyes around. "She fixed it up. She's got great taste. See that mud sideboard? That's the real thing, A-one mud! None of your cheap rock about that. We fetched that mud for two miles to make that. And look at that wicker bucket. Isn't it great? Hardly leaks at all except through the sides, and perhaps a little through the bottom. She wove that. ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world is after all but a show—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that.'[12] Yes; but deep souls dealing with the practical questions of society, do well to thrust the vision as far from them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... chicken burlesqued man: his thought was too single for that yet. It was long before he thought of the people who came in quietly to see him as anything but shadows, or wished for them to come again. Lois, perhaps, was the most real thing in life then to him: growing conscious, day by day, as he watched her, of his old life over the gulf. Very slowly conscious: with a weak groping to comprehend the sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then forgetting his old life, and the change, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons, and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair shirts, and blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... no hesitation in saying that the secret of enjoying life is to take an interest in it. The opposite of Livingness is Deadness, that is, inertia and stagnation. Dying of "ennui" is a very real thing indeed, and if we would not die of this malady we must have an interest in life that ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... he thought, "I'll know, I'll be sure. It will probably come to me like a flash of lightning whether I love her or not. I shouldn't be so undecided. I think if it were the real thing I feel for her there would be not the shadow of a doubt in my heart concerning it. A man should feel that the woman he wants to marry is the only one in the universe for him. Somehow, I can't feel that about her. But ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... the Riverbank Hotel at eight-forty-five," said Mr. Gubb. "Like it was the real thing. I'm goin' over to my room now, and give him ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... course must not appear. I will march in about five minutes late, ready-dressed, and tell them that you can't come. I have decided that the best plan will be for you to be sent somewhere by me, to make a real thing of the excuse. Our two heath-croppers are in the habit of straying into the meads, and tomorrow evening you can go and see if they are gone there. I'll manage the rest. Now ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... friendship, even when one is indebted to the other for his life. A man may save another from hanging and still be unable to save him from selfishness. And Mr. Winter went his way and Philip went his, on a different basis so far as common greeting went, but no nearer in the real thing, which makes heart-to-heart communion impossible. For the time being, Mr. Winter's hostility was submerged under his indebtedness to Philip. He returned to his own place in the church and contributed ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... must be a little piece of it—this music, I mean. I am almost tempted to make an effort after the real thing. How exquisitely those voices sound! I'm very certain I should enjoy the music, whether I should be able to get along with the rest of the programme or not. What on earth do you suppose they do ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... what these young soldiers had come to—here was the real thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station—and you should see these German women marching out with their men!—you ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... wild indians. The real, live indians, who followed these clowns in delighted crowds, enjoyed thrills of terror at their whoops, fierce glances, and wild antics, and assured us that these actors were, if not the real thing, at least wonderfully accurate impersonations of the natives of the Estados unidos (United ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... he was, in the forefront of the crowd, with his womenkind beside him, and no doubt the discerning reader has already guessed that it was to their cheeks I referred some pages back. There were many grandes dames upon the beach that morning—some the real thing, a little plain, a little faded, rather touching to look upon—others, for the most part articles de Paris, very tall and plump and even handsome, if one likes the gorgeous type, with gowns created by the great costumers and paid for heaven knows how! But I always think with a little ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... waited a long while in the stuffy passage of the Contessa's flat. There were imitation Abyssinian trophies on the walls, lances and daggers and shields of lathe and cardboard and painted paper. The husband was an artillery captain, and his sword stood with the umbrellas in the rack, the only real thing ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... crowd I've ever been in where I was invited, and didn't have to buy tickets, and felt I had a right to say something besides "excuse me," and "I beg your pardon." Of course, I've sat next to them all before in restaurants and at concerts, but this time I felt like the real thing myself, and I shall never forget it! If you or your husband ever want any mining tips, come to me; what my husband don't know about mines ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... a glance at their two faces to see that this was none of those affairs of a season that distract men and women about town; none of those sudden appetites that wake up ravening, and are surfeited and asleep again in six weeks. This was the real thing! This was what had happened to himself! Out ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... drained all the red. There was scant food on the table, and as his gaze went back to it, it seemed to him that, for the first time, he grasped the full meaning of a war for the people of the soil. This was the real thing—not the waving banners, not the bayonets, not the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Dennis rather impatiently, "but that's only a chance, you see. If it is the kitten, it is; and if it isn't, it isn't. But the jackdaws' house is a real thing, and we must settle about the colour. How do you think," he went on seriously, "it would do to have it the same colour that Tuvvy's going to do the elevator? He might let us have some ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... when the number went up. 'If you see anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing—alive an' movin'." ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... Nigel," she said, "do go to the chiffonier there and help yourself to a drink. I hate to see you white to the lips, and trembling as though death itself were at your elbow. Borrow a little false courage, if you lack the real thing." ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kerb till the taxi had whirled out of sight, and once again he asked himself desperately if it were all worth while, if he were not throwing away the real thing for ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... I'd slip in a paragraph about him now and then, always calling him the sculptor poet. The tag stuck. Other papers began to use it; until, first thing I knew, Virgie was getting away with it. Honest, I just invented him. And now he passes for the real thing!" ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... shots rang out, our train was off the rail, and after a crash or two came to a sudden stop, and then a babel arose, while the train was surrounded by armed men. It was laughable. It seemed like an opera bouffe, the real thing, this motley array of brigands, all trying to maintain under ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... no idea the old fellow could be such a bore. I heard him once when I was in college and thought he was the real thing—and it was, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... jurancon wine," said a Bearnais, "the real thing, not what they sell you for jurancon, which comes from Paris; indeed, I know one ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the carpenter and magistrate, "I was sure you would come and give in your name, citoyen Gamelin. You are the real thing. But the Section is lukewarm; it is lacking in virtue. I have proposed to the Committee of Surveillance to deliver no certificate of citizenship to any one who has failed ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... was I with sight and voice of Gods; because indeed This was not sleep, but face to face, as one a real thing sees. I seemed to see their coifed hair and very visages, And over all my body too cold sweat of trembling flowed. I tore my body from the bed, and, crying out aloud, I stretched my upturned hands to heaven ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... is no chance for a drama of truth and beauty there for many years to come, unless we can get it endowed in such a substantial way as shall tide it over—say—the next two decades. What we require is a London theatre undeviatingly devoted to the production of nothing but the real thing, which will go its own way, year in, year out, quite without regard to the great public; and we shall never get it unless we can find some benevolent, public-spirited person or persons who will place it in a position ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... heart, but when we come to the words it leaves behind it, a little warmth, a cinder or two just glimmering under the dead gray ashes,—that is all we can look for. When it comes to the manufactured article, one is surprised to find how well the metrical artisans have learned to imitate the real thing. They catch all the phrases of the true poet. They imitate his metrical forms as a mimic copies the gait of the person he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a good deal of what I have written sounds very cynical, but perhaps my experience has been unfortunate, therefore you must forgive me: certainly it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish between the real thing ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... room are a number of the later and showy painters, such as Carlo Dolci, Lorenzo Lippi, and Francesco Furini, all bold, dashing, self-satisfied hands, in whom (so near the real thing) one can take no interest. Nothing to ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... them down on paper, he works, I suppose, exactly as he would work from nature, only copying the remembered image in his mind, instead of the real thing. He is, therefore, still nothing more than a copyist. There is no exercise of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... tragic, but the real fact is it was a sort of comedy of errors—as a king's doings are when viewed from a safe and convenient distance. De Wolf Hopper's kings are the real thing. Dionysius claimed that Plato owed him money, and so he got out a body-attachment, and sold the philosopher ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Burnett jumped up again and threw back other portieres and they all moved out into a dining-room, with its table spread with a substantial dinner. This time it was the real thing. Candelabra, ice-pails, etc. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... Antonia was eagerly getting a meal ready for her. She looked at these affectionate preparations indulgently, as she might have looked at a child who assured her that a wholly imaginary thing was a real thing. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... man who stole the money which ARNOLD was thought to have stolen. Police, do your duty." (The police—not being the real thing, but only supes in police uniform—do their duty and arrest WILLOUGHBY.) Somebody remarks that ARNOLD is NOT GUILTY. COMIC CONVICT receives a full pardon, and a matrimonial mania seizes upon everybody. About this time it occurs ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... with keen interest and offered to help. "But remember, son," he cautioned, "at best you can only hope to produce an ersatz brain energy—which will be vastly different from the real thing. Don't forget, Tom, the mind of a human being or any thinking inhabitant of our universe is based on a divine soul. No scientist must ever delude himself into thinking he can copy the work ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... so natural, Wood said, that seeing it sudden that way give him a first-class jolt. For a minute, he said, he couldn't help thinking it was the real thing. As for the little man—and he likely would have took matters just the same, and no blame to him, if his feet had been as hard as anybody's—he swallowed the show whole. "Good Heavens!" says he, getting real palish. "What a dreadful thing ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... render it possible that, of all the possible predicates of space (size and relation), certain may belong to reality. But we cannot affirm the converse, that space, as something self-subsistent, can determine real things in regard to size or shape, for it is in itself not a real thing. Space (filled or void)* may therefore be limited by phenomena, but phenomena cannot be limited by an empty space without them. This is true of time also. All this being granted, it is nevertheless indisputable, that we must ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Lloyd with such high fever that she was installed at once in the sanitarium. "It is la grippe that she has," the nurse told Betty. "It is the real thing, and not what people always claim to have with an ordinary cold. The worst will probably be over in a few days, but it will leave her so exhausted and so susceptible to other things that I shall keep her with me for a ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... he knew that the real thing behind their nervousness was their ghastly doubt about what the night was bringing to Naida. But none of them spoke of Naida. So sickening were the possibilities that Kirby would not permit conjecture to occupy even his mind ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... the Caucasus is as common as a Colonel in Kentucky, and in Austria and Germany there are poor Barons in the streets. There was a time in my life when I could have had a foreign title, but I found it ridiculous, and so refused it. But in England, in spite of your amusing radicalism the real thing still counts. It is a valid asset—a tangible security for one's money—from a business point of view. And Americans or foreigners like myself and my niece, for instance, are securing substantial property and equal return, when we bring large fortunes ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... of fashion never wears Woodstock gloves, or gloves with double stitches, or eighteen-penny imitation French kids: his gloves, like himself and every thing about him, are the real thing. Dressy young men of fashion sport primrose kids in the forenoon; and, although they take care to avoid the appearance of snobbery by never wearing the same pair a second day, yet, after all, primrose kids in the forenoon are not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... you be like Harry? He'll be President of the United States some day, and you'll be in jail." But Model Harry sat around all his life being a model. I believe Mr. Webster defines a model as a small imitation of the real thing. Harry certainly was a successful model. He became a seedy, sleepy, helpless relic at forty. He was "perfectly lovely" because he hadn't the energy to be anything else. It was the boys who had the hustle and the energy, ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... its existence. Does not the very necessity we feel of having a reason for the existence, the operation of anything, a large plan in which to gather up all ravelled threads of various objects, proclaim thought as the final end, the real thing, of which action, more especially human action, is but the inadequate visible expression? What kinds of action does Carlyle mean, that are to be the wheels for our obedient thoughts to set in motion? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... these passionately egotistic selves came to her as she sat watching, in attractive or repellent flashes of light. Then she lost the secret again, and they became mere puppets in a moving show. The only real thing was the Casino, and she began to study the large bright face ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened, the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern, that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man naturally brave. A Western ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... a common thing for oxen to sham sick, but this was the real thing, and it seemed they were going to lose the ox, which meant also lose a large part ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... down in the study, Mark was saying: "How did you ever happen to find them, Uncle George?— Mrs. Morrison and Frances, I mean. They are not like—everybody; they are the real thing. That Frances is a regular little princess! How did they happen to ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... smokin' cut plug and dried mesquite leaves mixed when I left," sighed Mustang Taylor, horse wrangler of the Three Elm camp. "They'll be lookin' for me back by nine. They'll be settin' up, with their papers ready to roll a whiff of the real thing before bedtime. And I've got to tell 'em that this pink-eyed, sheep-headed, sulphur- footed, shirt-waisted son of a calico broncho, Sam Revell, hasn't ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... of a small-pox prophylactic was wavering between the monstrous assumption that everybody must necessarily have small-pox, and had better set about it, and the milder notion of vaccine as an antidote, if the real thing should come. The old custom of variolation had not been discarded, and the experience of the Gloucestershire milkmaids had not crystalized into the form of vaccination to be handed down by Jenner. At the beginning of the century ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... scratch they were found wanting. "Which of 'em's got prestige, I ask you, Ma'am, in your country? They may rub along all right, and when it is a question of society I guess they're queens, but which of 'em acts like the real thing in the country, or is respected ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... taking for the thing we want, because the truth is hidden from us. Even if a mere piece of luck brings us straight to it, we shall have no grounded conviction of our success; there are so many similar objects, all claiming to be the real thing. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... how simple the trick was, and that it was blundered upon by accident. But the people of the country at large don't know. Show the trick is done. When they hear about it, broadcast, won't they think that the 'Pollard' is the only real thing in submarines? Use the 'Pollard' type of boat, and no more men need be killed when a boat won't rise. That's the way the people will talk. So, Mr. Farnum, why not write to the editor of each of the biggest daily papers, inviting him to send a representative here on a near date, to see the thing ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... bar of a more-than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will not be for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist on reverence and restraint. If church and preacher offer only a pietized and decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked and unashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form of humanistic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as boresome as it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is essentially ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... collegiate course was not at once marked out and the students forthwith formed into corresponding classes. The reason will appear on a moment's reflection. It is easy to build a college on paper. To produce the real thing requires a variety of material, prepared and shaped for the purpose. There must not only be buildings and apparatus, books and learned professors, but there must be students—students who have passed through a preparatory process which requires not only time, but certain ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... engineers and business men, don't you know—and to the Mirliflores as well, a new club—English, French, Italians, all sorts—lively young fellows mostly, who wanted to pay a compliment to an old resident, sir. But we'll lunch at the Amarilla. Interest you, I fancy. Real thing of the country. Men of the first families. The President of the Occidental Republic himself belongs to it, sir. Fine old bishop with a broken nose in the patio. Remarkable piece of statuary, I believe. Cavaliere Parrochetti—you know Parrochetti, the famous Italian sculptor—was working here ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the company of the tattered, one—if he not in his single self two or three—of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve. This was the region—Chad had been quite distinct about it—in which the best French, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... crust that forms on the wound, leaving the tattooing a little paler. The patterns are rather complicated, and at the present day there are no recognizable representations of real objects; yet there seems no doubt that at one time all the designs represented some real thing. They are carefully adapted to the body, and accentuate its structure. The women who do the tattooing are well paid, so that only the wealthy can afford to have their wives and daughters tattooed all over; and naturally a tattooed ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of experts; not self-styled experts, but the real thing—big men in the automobile business representing all the important motor factories in the United States. Some of these experts inspect the broken down machines and pieces of machines in the salvage grounds, and report whether the wearing out process was due to a chauffeur's mishandling of ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... would do harm: knowing that the labour tended to no useful purpose but merely the turning of a wheel, prisoners would feel degraded, and this feeling would prevent their reclamation! The error here consisted in imagining that the criminal class possessed the feelings of gentlemen; whereas the real thing to be thought of, was to give them labour so excessively toilsome and irksome as to be remembered with salutary horror all the days of their life. For example, no kind of punishment, we believe, has proved so sure a terror as that of the shot-drill in the military prisons. This consists ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... something that was profound, that made of this night's work a sacrilege in touching them—and that poor jewel, clung to all too obviously through adversity for its past associations, was probably the last real thing ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... poverty and listlessness; but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The "Coming of the Lord" swept this side of Death, and came to ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were my last, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, held only one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived. Since then I ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... real nature lover!" she commented, throwing her cushions down into a grassy little hollow under the bank. "But if he would rather hear Kate elocute about it than to lie and listen to the real thing, he's nothing more or less than a nature pirate." She curled herself down among the cushions and stared up through the slender willow branches into the top of an alder that leaned over the bank and dangled its finger-tip branches ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... don't know that there is anything in their coming from Paris, except that one likes to know that they come from the beginning-place of such things. Now if they had been made in Boston, New York, or Baltimore, one would not be certain they were like the right thing; and now we know they are the real thing ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... "You are about to say I repent of folly—or the enticing of a virgin—or that I fell victim to the blandishments of some tricky dame—I know all that cant by rote!—a man always repents until his broken head is mended, but all that is apart from the real thing—which is this:—In what way does my moment with a lady in the dark affect the Viceroy of the Indies? Why should his Excellency trouble himself that Ruy Sandoval has a broken ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... broken, and confused, meant earnest love in her thoughts. No man in his senses, wishing to play a part and produce an impression upon a woman, would have acted as he did, and she knew it. It was the rough, real thing—the raw strength of an honest man's uncontrolled passion that she saw—and it told her more of love in a few minutes than all she had heard or read in her whole life. But while it was before her, alive and throbbing and incoherent of speech, it ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... nor a sign for him. Never. I was carried away. Never! Never! I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed. I had the illusion of having got the spectre by the throat at last. Indeed the whole real thing has left behind the detailed and amazing impression of a dream. Why should she fear? She knew him to be strong, true, wise, brave. He was all that. Certainly. He was more. He was great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had forgotten ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... body, upon the supposition of enthusiasm? It is impossible our Lord's followers could believe that he was risen from the dead, if his corpse was lying before them. No enthusiasm ever reached to such a pitch of extravagancy as that: a spirit may be an illusion; a body is a real thing, an object of sense, in which there can be no mistake. All accounts of spectres leave the body in the grave. And although the body of Christ might be removed by fraud, and for the purposes of fraud, yet without any such intention, and by sincere but deluded ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French call "Christian" milk—milk which has ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... weep over the real thing on the actual stage of life. What are the 'Shadows of London' on the stage to the shadows of London or Chicago as they really exist? Why don't we get excited over the facts as ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... that death was at all a real thing to me or to my brothers and sisters at this time. We lived so near the graveyard that it seemed merely the extension of our garden. We wandered there at will, trying to decipher the moss-grown inscriptions, and wondering at the homely carvings of cross-bones and cherubs and willow-trees on the ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... is painting her portrait, for the famous series?—and draws her profile on the backs of my letters. He recites his speeches to me; he asks my advice as to his fights with his tenants or his miners. In short, I'm adopted—I'm almost the real thing." ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the subtle inner workings of thought are brought into active play; and the temperament becomes daily and hourly more finely strung, more sensitive, more keenly alive to every passing sensation. Of course there are many so-called 'ARTISTS' who are mere shams of the real thing; persons who, having a little surface-education in one or the other branch of the arts, play idly with the paint-brush, or dabble carelessly in the deep waters of literature,—or borrow a few crotchets and quavers from other composers, and ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... Jeff. His kind, persuasive voice was recalling her to some ground of conviction where she could share his certainty that things were going as well as they could. "This is almost the only real thing in the world—the ground. About everything else is a game. This isn't a game. It's making something grow that won't hurt anybody when it's grown. I can't harm anybody by planting corn. And I can sell the corn," said Jeff, with a lighter shade of voice. Lydia ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... the fu'st ov it. Thar's no sorter luck yer don't git yer fair share of, Bill Haines—trust yer fer thet. What I ain't got straight yet, is whar thet stuff cum from so easy. Thet wus the real thing." ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... disturb us, in which the boys impersonated their elders, Brave Bull, Standing Elk, High Hawk, Medicine Bear, and the rest. They painted and imitated their fathers and grandfathers to the minutest detail, and accurately too, because they had seen the real thing all their lives. ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... doing nothing but dreaming about women, but some day or other you will wake up to find yourself captured and fascinated beyond anything you have ever seen in other people, and then you will discover what a desperately real thing it is." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... us hope and even pray that no cannery is ever built, and even if it is that it may soon be abandoned, for though I am myself a fly-fisherman and think that trolling is only a poor imitation of the real thing, yet in this place the great size and number of the fish make up for other deficiencies, fulfilling the desires of the most ardent salmon fisherman, and surely ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... on thinking of the things that might happen to John—Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... thought, man had personified it and called it by a name; that it was an unworthy conception of the Deity to hold Him personal, inasmuch as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible; that the real thing men should worship was the Divine, whereinsoever they could find it; that "God" was but man's way of expressing his sense of the Divine; that as justice, hope, wisdom, &c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the expression which ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... only imitation," he explained, "but it will look just as good as the real thing behind the footlights. But you ought to see the stage when it's fixed up to look like the Hall of the Shields, if you want to see glitter. It's be-yu-tiful! Like the one ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... not help smiling at the grimace with which Dick accompanied this remark. "Which same goes to prove," he went on, "that he is the real thing." ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... real thing that held them together was resentment that the little Crown Prince stood between the Princess Hedwig and the throne. Annunciata was not young, but she was younger than her dead brother, Hubert. And others said it was because the Countess gathered up and ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?'" She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated. Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one sees in ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the cuss line, you two are the real thing. Why didn't you open up sooner?—you shouldn't hide such proficiency from an ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... shaken by deep sobs. She said to Cecil, "I am not coming in to tea—tell mother—I must write some letters," and went up to her room. Then she prepared for action. Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster |
