"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turning corners like a skater on the ice, and all the roar of London in my ears, and no end to the walls of brick and mortar; I thought New York a hamlet, and Liverpool a coal-hole, and myself somebody else: so unreal seemed every thing about me. My head was spinning round like a top, and my eyes ached with much gazing; particularly about the comers, owing to my darting them so rapidly, first this side, and then that, so as not to ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... leaves in a high wind. She saw herself from the beginning—striving without rest—searching—searching—for what? For happiness—for perfection—for the starry flower that she had never found. All was tawdry, all was tarnished, all was unreal. In looking back she saw that the festival of her life was an affair of tinselled splendour and glittering dust. Was this only the impression of Vetch on her mood? Did he possess some magic gift of personality which caused the artificial, the counterfeit, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... reminiscence, which invariably ended in a cough. He painted it in vivid colours, and with the unconscious heightening of effect that comes natural to one who looks back upon a happy past, from which the countless pricks and stings that make up reality have faded, leaving in their place a sense of dreamy, unreal brightness, like that of sunset upon distant hills. He told him of Germany, and the gay, careless years he had spent there, working at his art, years of inspiriting, untrammelled progress; told him of famous musicians he had seen and known, of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... no pedantic or unreal uniformity; and yet, whilst leaving the widest scope for divergencies of individual character and experience, and not asking that a man all diseased and blotched with the leprosy of sin for half a lifetime, and a little child that has grown ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... It was all so unreal, so phantasmal, that I was not surprised in the least when, late in the evening after the ladies had gone to their rooms, and the Cavaliere, Tom, and I were stretched out in chairs on the terrace, smoking lazily under the multitudinous stars, the Cavaliere said, "There is something I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... though vaguely, that he was the object of widespread curiosity. But he had never compared himself with Titanic figures on the planet. It had always seemed to him that his renown was different from other renowns, less—somehow unreal and make-believe. He had never imaginatively grasped, despite prices and public inquisitiveness, that he too was one of the Titanic figures. He grasped it now. The aspect of the papers brought it home ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... a broad, rock-broken bed. It is pleasant to stand by its cool, firm rush, and grow alive to the sound of it and to the pushing of the wind and to the white and blue of clouds and sky framing the sunshine. Cities and city life fall so suddenly out of sight, as an unreal thing, in the presence of these rustlings of ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... lived there once, when the house consisted of only two or three rooms? and was that a picture of her mother, left there she knew not how or why? These were the thoughts crowding each other so fast in her brain when the faintness and pallor crept over her and the objects about her began to seem unreal. But the cold water revived her, and she was soon herself again, listening while Marian talked of heat and sun-strokes, with an evident forgetfulness of the peasant girl knitting in the sunshine; but Jerrie soon recurred to the subject and asked, rather abruptly: 'Was there a stove in that house—a ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... him. It is all very well for the happy and well-to-do to talk scornfully of poetic sentimentality. Those to whom a natural outlet for their affection is denied know better. They instinctively turn to books which are the farthest removed from commonplace and are in a sense unreal. Not to the prosperous man, a dweller in beautiful scenery, well married to an intelligent wife, is Byron precious, but to the poor wretch, say some City clerk, with an aspiration beyond his desk, who has two rooms in Camberwell and who before he knew what he was doing made a marriage—well—which ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... "Sleepless Watchdog" in France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another. All alike live in an unreal world, in its essentials a world of their own creation. With all of them the bark is worse than the bite, and their "Keep" is more disastrous than ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... this point that Kennedy had reason to congratulate himself on donning gymnasium shoes. They gave him that extra touch of lightness which enabled him to dodge blows which he was too weak to parry. Everything was vague and unreal to him. He seemed to be looking on at a fight between Walton and ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... like a dream to the aged. Something uncertain and vaguely sweet. Just think of it—half a century, more than one generation, had passed since these two had met. Their old love story must have seemed to them something all unreal, something they had but read ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... he went straight to the bank. Wright, Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... them and was dragging them at headlong speed athwart the arch of heaven. The air, too, was full of spindrift, to perhaps double the height of the felucca's mast, and that too was luminous with a faint, green, misty light that imparted a weird, unreal aspect to everything it shone upon; an effect which was further heightened by the unearthly screaming and howling of ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... the streets she had known from infancy, had never seemed so familiar, so closely joined to her life. And as the days and weeks and months went by, her London life, when she recalled it, began to seem immeasurably remote in time, or else unreal, like a dream or a story heard long ago; and the people she had known were like imaginary people. Only Mary seemed real and not remote—a link connecting that old and shadowy past with ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... as striking an advance upon Bjornson's early plays as the first of Ibsen's "social dramas" did upon his. Unreal stage conventions have disappeared, the characterisation is convincing, and the dialogue, if more prolix than Ibsen's (as is throughout the case with Bjornson), is always interesting and individual. The emotional theme of the play, the love of an older woman for her adopted ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... or less about this weird, disappearing fleet of vessels that, for some time now, had been acting so mysteriously along the coast of the big bay. Like most of his class, he believed that they were unreal, and possibly but the ghosts of brave vessels that in years gone by may have ploughed the green waters ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... not objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, and even ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in that mood came one who made the drama more poignant. They were hushed, they blinked uncertainly, they found it unreal, unbelievable. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... of its personal appearance, so to speak. But, as I conceived the poem, it consisted entirely of the Gipsy's description of the life the Lady was to lead with her future Gipsy lover—a real life, not an unreal one like that with the Duke. And as I meant to write it, all their wild adventures would have come out and the insignificance of the former vegetation have been deducible only—as the main subject has become now; of course it comes to the same thing, for one ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... husband's death Sylvia Bailey's social circle had become much larger, and there were a number of people who enjoyed inviting and meeting the pretty, wealthy young widow. But just now all these friends of hers in far-away England seemed quite unreal and, above all, ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... he said unreal seemed and strange, Too beautiful to last beyond to-morrow; Then suddenly his features seemed to change,— The mask of joy dropped from the ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... a wonderful scene, and the five scouts could hardly be blamed for thinking they must be dreaming, everything was so unreal, so like a page torn from history in the ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... wholly by surprise. He had been ready to deal with anything—but this. It was unreal, weird, impossible. And yet, why not? The professor had set out to remove forever the screen that had hitherto shrouded the shadow: but what had he revealed? What had the Spot disclosed? Unreality or REALITY? ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... up back into his den. There the suitor refused a cigar and carefully lit a cigarette. Roger noticed again how young the chap was, and marriage seemed so ridiculous! All this feverish trouble was for something so unreal! ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... should have taken place in the mystery of Christ, which would make His body to seem unreal. Now it seems to pertain not to a true but to an unreal body, to be able to go through a closed passage; since two bodies cannot be in one place at the same time. It was therefore unfitting that Christ's body should come forth from His Mother's closed womb: and consequently that she should ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it with the earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for the mass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. They should never be told that the earth is round. It only makes everything unreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat good earth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog of abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes of abstraction, the earth is a great plain, with ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... only one gift we must have before we can learn to know them - we must have imagination. I do not mean mere fancy, which creates unreal images and impossible monsters, but imagination, the power of making pictures or images in our mind, of that which is, though it is invisible to us. Most children have this glorious gift, and love to picture to themselves ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all pricked in on one plane, but, preserving an orderly perspective, draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a gray shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... intermingled with points of fire that glowed steadily in two long rows up to the altar, where fell a single ray of golden sunshine. Helmet in hand, he moved slowly forward, every nerve strung taut with suspense. As his eyes grew accustomed to the curious half-light, he saw that the unreal shadows were men grouped on either side behind rows of torch-bearers. The red flare fell on their fixed, unmoved faces, and threw weird shadows backward and forward among the massive pillars whose capitals faded into the intensified gloom overhead. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... quarter, but the Seven Sisters are as sisters to me. If I had seven real sisters, the relationship would subsist, and marriage would not interfere with it; but, be a woman as amiable, as liberal, as indulgent, as confiding as she may, she could not treat the unreal as she would ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... such a system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving, the individuality of the personal man would at best appear but an evanescent and unreal shadow. Such individuality, however, as we now possess, whatever it be, might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its persistence. And ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... out the diameter of the sun; or rather—since this is what our successors in the school will do,—let us take a line of our earth's longitude which is equally unreal, and measure a degree of this thing which does not exist, and then divide it into equal parts which we will use as a measure or metre. This metre, which is still nothing, as I understand you, is infinitely divisible ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... during the last two years on the fingers of his hands. This relationship, which had promised so much at its inception, was the great mystery of his life, and every succeeding month it became more unreal, more inexplicable. Now he went back in his mind to the time when the bishop's daughter began to take his car rather than another, and conveyed to him in some subtle way the impression of her preference. By little and little he had played the dangerous game that made such an appeal ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden-woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... in the high-walled garden when the convent bells are tolling, and the convent itself, with its iron-barred, Gothic windows, and its gray-green olive-trees that look so unreal and lifeless, is tinged by the last rays of the sun, the whole seems like a vision, or a half-remembered sketch, or a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Why did she seem so strange, so far away? The hovering shadows made him nervous. Always he had been afraid of the dark. His mood now admitted of unreal fancies. ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the park, the gloomy mass of architecture looming up, the regiment of liveried men-servants, with respectfully lowered but excitedly curious eyes, the dark and solemn richness inclosing and claiming him—all this created an atmosphere wholly unreal. As he had not known books, its parallel had not been suggested to him by literature. He had literally not heard that such things existed. Selling newspapers and giving every moment to the struggle for life or living, one did not come within the range ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fogs I ever knew settled upon the ancient town the morning after my arrival. It was impossible to see clearly across streets. This fog increased the gloom which long ago came over these ancient monuments and seemed to add something unreal to the air of solemn greatness that appeared in every street and corner. Chance threw me into Mercury Lane. Here at once was historic ground. On a corner of the lane stands the very old inn that is mentioned by Chaucer as the resort of the pilgrims whose deeds he has celebrated. It is now ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... self-satisfaction with his anticipated success had left him, it was not without some superstitious embarrassment that Israel felt himself encased in a dead man's broadcloth; nay, in the very coat in which the deceased had no doubt fallen down in his fit. By degrees he began to feel almost as unreal and shadowy as the shade whose part he intended ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... as usual, Francis was waiting for her in the matted hall. He did not greet her with a word or a smile. He watched her descend the shallow flight, and together they went down the passage to the clear drawing-room, where the faded water-colours looked unreal and innocent and ignorant ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the small assemblage of merely idle or interested persons gathered for the sale. The sheriff stood facing them under the towering pillars of the portico; his voice rang clearly through the air. To Gordon the occasion, the loud sing-song of the sheriff, appeared unreal, dreamlike; he listened incredulously to the meager cataloguing of his dwelling, the scant acreage, with an innate sense of outrage, of a shameful violation of his privacy. He was still unable to realize that his home and his father's, the clearing that his grandfather ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hand, of course, because I could not help it; but the sympathy I had been prepared to feel for Clara's father was immediately soured by his appearance, and the wheedling, unreal tones ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... excellence an age of progress, and it is in part for the sake of perceiving the laws of progress that we first disentangle from them the laws of rest and make a separate study of these. The world from which change is excluded is unreal, but the static laws which can be most clearly discerned by mentally creating such a world have reality. Every day's transactions are governed by them as truly as a physical element like water in active movement is affected by forces which, if they acted alone, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... miles apart, there yet should be an insuperable barrier between ourselves and those who, for aught we know, may be quite near us. It seems almost as though we must be under a spell which prevents the communication which we long for, and as though almost any day we may wake up to find how unreal the separation is, Kitty buried her face in the pillow and called Toffy's name, and—who knows?—perhaps ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... the high-wrought and conventional Elizabethan Pastoralism, which it would be ludicrous to criticise on the ground of the unshepherdlike or unreal character of some images suggested. Stanza 6 was probably inserted ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Cure to the others, a swift, inquisitive look, then settled back in his chair, and turned, bowing, towards Monsieur Garon. The avocat's pale face flushed, his long, thin fingers twined round each other and untwined, and presently he said, in his little chirping voice, so quaint as to be almost unreal: ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us. We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... dry land makes the sea and all upon it unreal. Five minutes after the traveller is on the C.P.R, train at Vancouver there is no romance of blue water, but another kind—the life of the train into which he comes to grow as into life aboard ship. A week on wheels turns ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... were amusing. As we walked around through the motley crowd, powerless to express ourselves except in the universal language of pantomime, with mountains all around us and the Kanchanjanga still in view, we felt as though we were a part of a play, it seemed so unreal. Later we visited the street bazars, all of them furnished with articles claimed to be antique. In the evening the proprietor of the hotel gave us an interesting description of scenes in Tibet, illustrated with ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... often on the future bent." If force of evidence could authorize us to believe facts inconsistent with the general laws of nature, enough might be produced in favor of the existence of the second-sight. It is called in Gaelic Taishitaraugh, from Taish, an unreal or shadowy appearance; and those possessed of the faculty are called Taishatrin, which may be aptly translated visionaries. Martin, a steady believer in the second-sight, gives the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... rapture at a concert on the evening before. She was talking with this lady when a new announcement fell upon her ear, a name which caused her to start and gaze towards the door. Impossible for her to guard against this display of emotion; the name she heard so distinctly seemed an unreal utterance, a fancy of her brain, or else it belonged to another than the one she knew. But there was no such illusion; he whom she saw ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... different from anything that I knew, something as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who saw nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the new life opening before her, seemed for a long time strange and unreal to Lilias. She used to wake in the morning with the burden of her cottage-cares upon her, till the sight of her pleasant room, and the sunshine coming in through the clustering roses, chased her anxious ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... on his throne, the knights of the Round Table begin their wonderful career of adventure and gallantry. With them the reader roams over a vague and unreal land called Britain or Cornwall, in full armor, the ever ready lance in rest. At almost every turn a knight is met who offers combat, and each detail of the conflict—the rush of the horses, the breaking of lances, the final hand-to-hand with swords—is described with a minuteness which ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... obvious and expressive, yet as impossible of reproduction as their music. Even if the naturalist were to succeed in imparting all their wild extravagances of poise and motion to their inanimate forms, his birds, to say the least, would have a very theatrical or melodramatic aspect, and seem unreal in proportion to their fidelity to Nature. I have seen a Blue Jay alone, saluting and admiring himself in the mirror of a little pool of water from a low overhanging branch, assume so many graceful, novel, as well as ridiculous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... song, so amazingly sweet that it could only be a Christmas message, yet so out of place that the listener stood doubting whether his ears were playing him false, wondering whether the music or the landscape would not suddenly vanish as an unreal thing. The song was continuous—a soft melodious warble, full of sweetness and suggestion; but suggestion of June meadows and a summer sunrise, rather than of snow-packed evergreens and Christmastide. To add to the unreality, ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... Green River lay far behind with its scattered, sparsely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly clouded sky, hung ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... grief beyond all palliation; days when he worked blindly through a grist of tasks that seemed unreal. And at night he sought his room, to sit in darkness, suffering dumbly through the hours. Sometimes ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate remark the Colonel's tongue leaped as from ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A hundred years before Dante, the German poets had gazed with their eyes wide open into that infinite reality which underlies our short existence on earth. To Wolfram, and to many a poet of his time, the human tragedy of this world presented the same unreal, transitory, and transparent aspect which we find again in Dante's "Divine Comedy." Everything points to another world. Beauty, love, virtue, happiness,—everything, in fact, that moves the heart of the poet,—has a hidden reference to something higher than this life; and the highest ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... brethren as if they were his children (unless indeed it is a children's sermon), but that he should handle familiar religious terms with the resolve to make them live and speak to the ordinary hearer. Nothing is more opiate-like than a sentence which is unreal to the hearer because it is mere phraseology. Nothing can be made more interesting than familiar phraseology (supposing it to be true and important) so treated as to speak its meaning out fresh and ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... Let us submit ourselves to His will. Do not think that what I am writing is some delusion of my sick imagination. On the contrary, I am perfectly clear at this moment, and absolutely calm. Nor must you comfort yourself with the false hope that these are the unreal, confused feelings of a despondent spirit, for I feel indeed, I know, since God has deigned to reveal it to me—that I have now but a very short time to live. Will my love for you and the children cease with my life? I know that that can never ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... by his promise, by the deception he must practice, by the dread of what must come. Nevertheless, minute by minute, his pulse quickened. This, God be thanked, would mean the end. The insufferable knot of circumstance, so fantastic, so extravagantly unlivable and unreal, would break, Hugh would tear the tangle of his making to tatters with angry hands when they got back. His difficult trust in Pete's promise would go down under the strain of these long and unexplained hours of Sylvie's absence in his company. It was the last act in the extravaganza, queer ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Mainwaring stayed to tea and when he parted from Lucinda Fairbanks it was after nightfall, with a clear, round moon shining in the milky sky and a radiance pallid and unreal enveloping the old house, the blooming apple trees, the sloping lawn and the shining river beyond. He implored his sweetheart to let him tell her uncle and aunt of their acknowledged love and to ask the old man's consent to it, but she ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... with the twittering of birds in the churchyard. He stood up and stretched himself, with a frown for the painted windows with their unreal saints and martyrs. His footsteps as he walked down the aisle did not arouse the girl, who slept in the corner of the pew, with her loosened hair pencilling, as the dawn touched it, lines of red-gold light upon ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... are thus presented to the organs which, when they occur to men of strength of mind and of education, give way to scrutiny, and their character being once investigated, the true takes the place of the unreal representation. But in ignorant times those instances in which any object is misrepresented, whether through the action of the senses, or of the imagination, or the combined influence of both, for however short a space of time, may be admitted ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... and folding—paid while learning." The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare running toward the East River. Above was the great bridge, unreal, fairy-like in the morning mist. I was looking for Rose Street, which proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. Rose Street was choked with ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... it was. He knew Henry Bannerworth too well to suppose that any unreal cause could blanch his cheek. He knew Flora too well to imagine for one moment that caprice had dictated the, to him, fearful words of dismissal she had ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... upon schemes of which we are conscious that the bare mention would expose us to derision and contempt; we should then remember, that we are cheating ourselves by voluntary delusions; and giving up to the unreal mockeries of fancy, those hours in which solid advantages might be attained by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Charley was only conscious of the swishing waters that surrounded them. He wondered how Skipper Zeb could know the direction with no landmarks to guide him. How vast and mysterious this new world was! How far away and unreal the land from which he had come! He tried to visualize home, and the city streets with crowded traffic and jostling people; and crouching down in the boat a thought of the luxury and comfort of his snug bed, in which he would now have been cozily tucked were he there, ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... day and night! O day and night! whence comes this feeling? For all unreal seem day and night and life and death, And all unreal the hope that sets my senses reeling, And stills my pulse an instant, checks my lab'ring breath. Yet louder rolls the mighty organ thund'ring. And downward ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... you now I see clearly how perfectly preposterous and unreal all this is; and again there comes to me the impulse to tear up this letter, and banish the troop of hob-goblins from my mind. But no, this time I am determined to make a clean breast of the thing—for I see that secrecy and solitude are what it feeds on. If I were happy and busy with ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... length fell into a disagreeable and unrefreshing dose, and were attacked by that hideous phantom, nightmare, which was often the case; starting up in fright from the assassin's knife, which they could scarcely persuade themselves to be unreal; it was pleasant to fix their eyes upon their comical little visitor, with her round shining face, and her jolly companions; all apprehension of mischief immediately vanished, and a truly pleasing effect was produced upon their minds and spirits. The breaking up of the party on the outside, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... libertine,—and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more than intellectual ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The Abana, River of Damascus. How Life is dim, unreal, vain, like scenes that round the drunkard reel; How "Being" meaneth not to be; to see and ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it, is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was supernatural. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... right and left, east, west, north, and south, but those dark, deepening shadows seemed to be creeping after us, and monsters came crawling and stealing up the hill-side, and went we knew not whither. Then a mist gathered over, not deep and blinding, but just enough to make everything look unreal and terrible ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... slavery. Timid and lukewarm people were always denouncing him because he was too extreme; but as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, he worked step by step; and because of this the extremists hated and denounced him with a fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its deification of the unreal and the impossible. At the very time when one side was holding him up as the apostle of social revolution because he was against slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced him as the "slave hound of Illinois." When he was the second time candidate ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... possibly a mistaken one, yet, so curious is our life that, true or false, it was the thing that at this juncture made him spurn all thought of setting aside the reproach of his roused sense of loss as morbid or unreal. He looked to his early realisation of the all-attractiveness of the love of God, not with the rational view that such phase of religion is ordained to fade in the heat of life, but with passionate regret that by his own fault he had turned away from the glory of life. He thought of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... her, waiting for the cue to the joke. She was serious. It was all so unreal, so ridiculous—and yet back there on the floor of the room down the corridor lay Jim Marcum. This mad, sad, heart-rending, adventure must have driven him to insanity. He rubbed his brow, looked out ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... were they hanging back and refusing to come to grips with the crisis? Why did this twilit riverside persist in seeming unreal to him, and the actors, himself included, as figures ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her; in very truth he knew he had loved her; in very truth he knew he had murdered her! But another still stranger truth was forcing itself upon him now; and this was, that the old love of the old old days was arising within him in all its strength once more, and that he loved her still! Unreal and terrible as it seemed, it was nevertheless a fact, that as he gazed upon her tortured face, her beautiful anguished eyes, her phantom form, he felt that he would give his own soul to rescue hers and lift her from the coils of vengeance into love again! Her words awoke vibrating pulsations of ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... motives which inspired the colonizing activity of England at the close of the sixteenth century, the desire to spread the Protestant religion was no unreal one. The war for independence, having taken on the character of a crusade, had touched with emotional fervor the Englishman's loyalty to the national faith. Religion became a national asset when it was thought to be served by an extension of the queen's domain. The pride of patriotism, as ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... began a friendship, and in no unreal sense, even a family relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to every sort of happiness among us, to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... illusion is a misleading or deceptive appearance. The happiness that he had looked forward to was turning out to be false and unreal. ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... between her teeth. She followed silently after Kut-le, Cesca and the rifle at her shoulder and Molly in the rear. It seemed to the girl that of all the strange scenes through which the past weeks had carried her this was of all the most unreal. All about her was a world of vivid rock heaps so intensely colored that she doubted her vision. Away to the south lay the boundless floor of the desert, a purple and gold infinity that rolled into the horizon. Far to the ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked—the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind—moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... stirs nor cries out. She holds her brother's hand tightly in both her own, and prays in an incoherent fashion; and all the time a strange unreal ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... moorland, growing mistier and a little unreal in the failing light. To his left, clustering roofs round a church tower, was a village, so silent that none but the dead might have been its inhabitants. Not a labourer plodded homewards from his toil in the fields; not a horse, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... him appeared unreal. The trees and the earth itself wavered. His head began to ache and his stomach was weak. Had the finest of food been presented to him he could not have eaten it. He had an extraordinary ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stepped out of the tub and dried myself and dressed, I returned mentally to the curious, mythical adventure in the mythical city. It was still impossible for me to feel that it was unreal, it had ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... than their ears, or, at the most, effects a shallow lodgment on the surface of their minds. So many feet pass along the path, and beat it into hardness, that the truth has no chance to take root. Habitual indifference to the gospel, masked by an utterly unmeaning and unreal acceptance of it, and by equally habitual decorous attendance on its preaching, is the condition of a dreadfully large proportion of church-goers. Their very familiarity with the truth robs it of all penetrating power. They know all about it, as they suppose; and so they listen to it as they would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... desert with his fervent beams until the uplifts cringed low and in the horizons the mountain peaks floated languidly upon the waves of heat. And in all this dispassionate land, from horizon to horizon, there were only My Lady and I, and the beleaguering Sioux. It seemed unreal, a fantasy; but the rocks began to smell scorched, a sudden thirst nagged and my wounded arm pained with weariness as if to remind that I was here, in the body. Yes, and here she was, also, in the flesh, as ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... soft languish? Why that drawling tone? Art sick, art sleepy? Get thee hence: begone. I laugh at all thy pretty baby tears, Those flutt'rings, faintings, and unreal fears. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the account which I have to give of some savage and ungrateful words in the British Critic of 1840 against the controversialists of Rome: "By their fruits ye shall know them.... We see it attempting to gain converts among us by unreal representations of its doctrines, plausible statements, bold assertions, appeals to the weaknesses of human nature, to our fancies, our eccentricities, our fears, our frivolities, our false philosophies. We see its agents, smiling and nodding and ducking to attract attention, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... as she had plenty of money to pay their wages. But that the negro should vote had always seemed to her incredible and monstrous, and she laughed to herself when she met on the streets the smartly dressed coloured folk out for a walk. They seemed farcically unreal, travesties on the people to whom a discriminating Almighty had given the world. To her the entire race were first slaves, then servants, entitled to all kindness so long as they kept their place, but to be stepped on the moment they presumed. She recoiled ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... to have had the echo of these lines still in his ear, when he described imagination as 'that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal.' Essays, ed. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... visions, but not more substantial; yonder, a black sea-going steamer passed out between the far-off islands, and at last left in the sky above those reveries of fortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory of battle; to the right, on some line of railroad, long-plumed trains arrived and departed like pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern; even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, seemed to have no ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... knowledge of time. When one first learns that it can never be turned backward upon itself to permit the correction of past sins and the rightings of wrongs transfixed and forever unalterable. Grief is the frantic, futile beating of hands against a barrier without substance, both obscenely unreal and yet the only reality. Grief is the knowledge that we cannot step backwards before the death of loved ones and see those precious half-forgotten dream faces once again. Grief is the knowledge that time ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... roundabout make-believe of preliminary and preparatory steps, as if he was introducing his hearers to what they had never heard of; make-believe difficulties and objections were overthrown by make-believe answers; an unnatural position both in speaker and hearers, an unreal state of feeling and view of facts, a systematic conventional exaggeration, seemed almost impossible to be avoided; and those who tried to escape being laboured and grandiloquent only escaped it, for the most part, by being vulgar or slovenly. The strong severe ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... hodgepodge of technicalities, was dismayed and distrustful. These men spoke a language evidently familiar to them, which he, although a professional scientist, found a meaningless jargon. The whole thing seemed unreal, had a purely theoretic or literary quality about it that made him question even their premises. In the tainted air of the council room, listening to these little pot-bellied Professoren from Amsterdam and Muenich, doubt assailed him, doubt even ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... distinguish,' answered Gotthold, leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers. 'There are various kinds of popularity; the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician's, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all. Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you as to pat a dog; and were you a saw-miller you would ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some soft material fell in graceful folds about her form. She had entered with such a soundless step, that when Maurice saw her sitting before him, he started, and his breath grew labored, as though, for a second, he fancied that he gazed upon some unreal shape. The flowing white drapery, and the delicate azure folds of the shawl helped the illusion, which her musical voice would scarcely have dispelled, but for the sense of reality produced ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... way. It was for all the world like a scene in a play. The shaded room, the two nervous diplomats registering anxiety and strain, the old functionary who was to stay behind to guard the archives and refused to be moved from his calm by the approaching cataclysm. It seemed altogether unreal, and I had to keep bringing myself back to a realisation of the fact that it was only ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... mind—reflections of a set sun, wrapping in their calm, beautiful light, all things, even the graves of those we love.... I have thought that the murmur of the brook was the voice of Silence. Moonlight expresses to the eye—silence.... 'All this unreal?' I beg your pardon; I claim for my feelings the same reality that you claim for yours. Is only what is gross real? Is not the sky as real as the mountain that pierces it? Is there more reality in the chink of the dollar than in 'the music of the spheres'? This first is, I acknowledge, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the warm night air, out in the courtyard, under the stars, and the awful danger from which Malipieri had saved her and himself looked unreal, after the first few moments of liberty. She got his watch out of her glove where it had been so many hours, and by the clear starlight they could see that it was nearly twenty minutes past two o'clock. Malipieri ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of spearmen parted right and left, and Mr. Travers and d'Alcacer walked forward alone looking unreal and odd like their own day-ghosts. Mr. Travers gave no sign of being aware of his wife's presence. It was certainly a shock to him. But d'Alcacer advanced smiling, as if the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... beneath the glances of the moon the little company sped, transient as a rainbow, elusive as a dream. I saw her maidens bound and sandalled, with all their everlasting flowers; and advancing soundless, unreal, the silver wheels of that unearthly chariot amid the Fauns. On, on they gamboled, hoof in yielding turf, blowing reed melodies, mocking water, their lips laid sidelong, their eyes aleer along ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... beginning of the present century introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of shore was marked distinctly there; the blue and violet of rippling seas were blended with unreal hues; there were mountains upthrust and, on the horizon, a range of volcanic peaks that poured forth flashing eruptions half-blanketed ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... move people since there can be no enthusiasm when men know they simulate unreal people and unreal passions?" I answer, that the first step towards becoming a great actor is to fling aside that knowledge and hand yourself over the willing victim of a delusion. You must not act but live your part: ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... was to {x} form the art temperament of the Renaissance. The practical side gave it the firm foundation of rationalism and reality on which it rested; the mystical guided its endeavour to picture the unreal ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediaeval horror with the mediaeval reverence, and the knight ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... thoughts concerning prayer in some directions, the same has surely to be said about the ethical temper of the age, as shown in our enlarged conceptions of God. To put it bluntly, much of the language about what used to be called "special providences" has become unreal and ceased to be edifying for us. On this whole subject some words of Principal Adeney's ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... cautious. All conclusions as to the effects of causes are necessarily based, implicitly, if not explicitly, upon the assumption "other things being equal." This method of reasoning, which some people appear to find so irritating in the economic sphere, and as they say so "theoretical" and "unreal," is one which they adopt readily enough in every other department of life. No one, for instance, objects to the statement that the sun, when it comes out, makes a room warmer, although it may very well happen, if a fire is dying ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... as if they were part of a curious moving-picture, not as if they were little living beings taking life as seriously as other children do. The great, wide desert stretching far! The bare, solid rocks beneath their feet! The curious houses behind them! It all seemed unreal to Margaret, like a great picture-book spread out for her to see. She turned from gazing and found Gardley's eyes upon her adoringly, a tender understanding of her mood in his glance. She thrilled with pleasure to be here with him; a soft flush spread ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... least sufficiently clear and distinct for all practical purposes. And to my mind, all discussion about Good is for this reason rather factitious and unreal. I don't mean to say, of course, that it isn't amusing, among ourselves, to pass an hour or two in this kind of talk; but I should think it very unfortunate if the habit of it were to spread among the mass of men. For inquiry does tend in the long run ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... sentence, "the man is wise," "the man" is the subject; "is wise" is the predicate. This may be simply an interplay of thoughts, without the presence of the object thought of; or the things thought of may be imaginary or unreal; while observation, induction and testimony always go back ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... saying, as you are wont to do, that this wise man of ours is nowhere to be found; we do not invent him as an unreal glory of the human race, or conceive a mighty shadow of an untruth, but we have displayed and will display him just as we sketch him, tho he may perhaps be uncommon, and only one appears at long intervals; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... in the rest. I loved in a dream. I made myself the father of this Hilda in my shadowy visions; I made in my thoughts a mother for her, like her, dead long ago, whom I had loved. I talked with a shadow, I loved a shadow, and the unreal phantasm I loved grew to be like Hilda herself— so like that when I saw they were the same, last night, here upon this very spot, I knew that I must die and quickly. The shadow was the living wife of him for whom I would give all, of my only friend, of my only kinsman, of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her, always to be ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Masonry is mystical as music is mystical—like poetry, and love, and faith, and prayer, and all else that makes it worth our time to live; but its mysticism is sweet, sane, and natural, far from fantastic, and in nowise eerie, unreal, or unbalanced. Of course these words fail to describe it, as all words must, and it is therefore that Masonry uses ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... that age was a profoundly religious country. There was ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but there was faith—a faith that itself worked true miracles, even while it believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those devotional movements began among the clergy in France, which from time to time occur in national churches, without it being possible for the historian to assign ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... take care of themselves; it is the short story in which I am chiefly interested. Better criticism and greater freedom for fiction might vitalize our overabundant, unoriginal, unreal, unversatile,—everything but unformed short story. Its artifice might again become art. Even the more careful, the more artistic work leaves one with the impression that these stories have sought a "line," and found an acceptable formula. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... were lost, it would be lost through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts, the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... abstract lines. Workmanship when separated by too wide a gulf from fresh thought—that is, from design—inevitably decays, and, on the other hand, ornamentation, divorced from workmanship, is necessarily unreal, and quickly falls into affectation. Proper ornamentation may be defined as a language addressed to the eye; it is pleasant thought expressed in the ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... considerable weakness, not merely in composition, but in invention. Yet the qualities which won him reputation are by no means despicable. He evidently felt the charm of fairyland, and peopled it with droll little folk who are neither too human nor too unreal to be attractive. He joined the staff of Punch when but nineteen, and soon, by his political cartoons, and his famous "Manners and Customs of y^e English drawn from y^e Quick," became an established favourite. His design for the cover ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... in earnest about warning us that to profess these principles and talk about them is one thing—to act up to them quite another. He draws a humorous picture of an inconsistent and unreal philosopher, who—after eloquently proving that nothing is good but what pertains to virtue, and nothing evil but what pertains to vice, and that all other things are indifferent—goes to sea. A storm comes on, and the masts creak, and the philosopher screams; and an ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... faces around him, as the tracing of some one who was dearly loved. There was nothing stranger in it all than his own certainty that the Power that pursued him was tender. And here he crossed the division between the Real and the Unreal, because his present consciousness of this Power was as actual as his consciousness of the chairs and tables that filled the reading-room. That was the essential thing that made the supreme gulf between himself and his companions. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... prevails, where the great mass of the people are uneducated, and where there is but little of that salutary influence which hereditary rank and great wealth exercise in Great Britain."[60] Their position had an apparent but unreal strength, because they knew that the older type of Colonial official, the entire British Conservative party, and the Church of England, at home and abroad, supported them. As late as July, 1839, Arthur, the representative of the Crown in Upper Canada, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... enclosure. Other figures in marble, bronze, wood and stone, representing dolphins, storks, cows, camels, monkeys and the various fabulous monsters of the Hindu mythology, are scattered in apparent confusion about the temple courtyard, producing an effect as bizarre as it is bewildering. It is so unreal, so incredibly fantastic, that I felt that I was looking at the papier-mache setting for a motion picture spectacle, such as Griffith used to produce, and that the director and the cameraman would appear shortly ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... be shed by a Roman Consul, secretly and without legal warrant. Henceforward he took his place as the special leader on whom popular feeling at Rome more and more pinned its hopes. As Pontifex Maximus he gained (B.C. 63) a shadowy but far from unreal religious influence; as Pro-praetor he solidified the Roman dominion in Spain (where he had already been Quaestor); and on his return (B.C. 60) reconciled Crassus, the head of the moneyed interest, with Pompey, the darling of the Army, and by their ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "vale of tears," this "wilderness" of distress and woe. It let us light-hearted children too quickly down from the higher key of mirth to which our careless thoughts were pitched. We knew that we were happy, and sorrow to us was unreal. But somehow we did often get the impression that it was our duty to try to be sorrowful; and that we could not be entirely good, without being ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... instant he leaped into the sight of all of them. He stood between them and Britt. He pulled his weapons. His blood-spotted face seemed a vision of the unreal; but the guns were unmistakably the agents which a human being would employ in an emergency. And there was a businesslike click in his tone. "Stand back, the whole of you! This is a show-down. Tasper Britt ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... lingering and persistent feeling that this whole amazing business was unreal; that he had been dreaming it or at least reading a meaning where there was none. He knew that he could see trees and the stars in Hawley's pond when there were none there. Might not this be the same? He had expected sometime ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... imperial form is the very reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal. To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal, and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore, there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is their flag, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the French. But whether we like or dislike this French capacity, or merely appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt about the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spirit that is so often regarded as wildly Utopian and unreal. The cause is in the abstract creed of equality and citizenship; in the possession of a political philosophy that appeals to all men. In truth men have never looked low enough for the success of the French Revolution. They have assumed ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... apparently as real as Republicans and Democrats were to Papa, I wished that I knew a little more about them. But how could I tell in those days that I would ever be darting about in a country where George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would seem more unreal than the Swabian Emperors, the Marquesses of Montferrat, and the Princes of Savoie ever did to ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... things he heard people say in such a placid fashion, with the open smiles of children. Accordingly he tried to absorb himself in his thoughts and listen to nothing. "O God!" he prayed, "grant that my reason may be annihilated, that I may no longer desire to understand, that I may accept the unreal and impossible." For a moment he thought the spirit of inquiry dead within him, and allowed the cry of supplication to carry him away: "Lord, heal our sick! Lord, heal our sick!" He repeated this appeal with all his charity, clasped his hands, and gazed fixedly at the statue of the Virgin, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... pleasure, which pull instead of drive. What will one not do for the loved one? What will one not do to the hated one? The child who does not love his teacher gets little good from school while under that teacher. Moreover, school work is often a failure because it is so unreal, has so little relation to an actual world, and seems foreign to any real needs of the child. No one is going to work very hard unless the work is prompted by desire. Our desires come from our needs. Therefore, if we are to enlist the child's feelings in the service of his education, we must make ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Wisdom had come in their place; knowledge was hers, but faith had rotted. Time was when the sight of a drunken man filled her with terror; now the one beside her scarcely awakened disgust. Bad women had seemed unreal—phantoms of another world. Now she brushed shoulders with them daily, and her own maidenhood was soiled by the contact. She was a girl only in name; in reality she was a woman of the streets, or so she viewed herself in the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... is to know that nothing is; that there is neither being nor not-being, nor yet the becoming. After this wholesale iconoclasm the only possible object in life for the sage is the negative one of avoiding pain, which though as unreal as anything else, interferes with his meditations on its unreality. To this negative end the only aid he can expect is from other sages who have gone farther in self-cultivation. Self, therefore, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... fairy story. The strange cart sliding and slipping over the stones which were as smooth as ice, and the colored house fronts and the palms and strange plants. The darkness made it all the more unreal— There was a governor's palace buttressed and guarded by sentinels in a strange uniform and queer little cafe's under vines—and terraces of cannon, and at last a funny, pathetic little casino. It was such a queer imitation ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... zenith of the sky was a huge black cloud bearing a curious resemblance to a gigantic hand, the long lean fingers of which were stretched threateningly out as if to grasp the land and drag it back into the lurid sea of blood; altogether a cruel, weird-looking scene, fantastic, unreal, and bizarre as one of Dore's marvellous conceptions. Suddenly on the red waters there appeared a black speck, rising and falling with the restless waves, and ever drawing nearer and nearer to the gloomy cliffs and sandy beach. When within a quarter of a mile of the shore, the speck resolved ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... days, did not find their way to the Mendip villages. But the girl lived in her own world of romance, and peopled it with airy phantoms, as many a maiden has done before her. Her prosaic aunt and the two or three cronies who paid visits to Bishop's Farm were much more unreal to her than the creations of her ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... Christian as if these ladies, though thoroughly ladylike in manner, which was very grateful to her innate sense of refinement, all dressed after one fashion, and talked mostly about the same things. To her, ungifted with the blessed faculty of small talk, the conversation appeared somewhat frivolous, unreal, and uninteresting. She hardly knew what to say or how to say it, yet was painfully conscious that her every word and every look were being sharply criticised, either in the character of Edward Oakley's daughter ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik |
