"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not think, Mr. Bond, that we must take things as they are? Granted that there is a great deal of unreality in the church, what are we going to do about it? Can one man who sees the point work a revolution in the whole church? Must we not just take conditions as they are and ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... he said, with a strong Milesian accent. And before the still-amazed girl could comprehend the meaning of his abrupt challenge, or his equally abrupt departure, he had resumed his monotonous pace in the moonlight. Indeed, as she stood looking after him, the whole episode, the odd unreality of the moonlit landscape, the novelty of her position, the morbid play of her thoughts, seemed to make it part of a dream which the morning light might dissipate, but could never ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... in this state, I saw that for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... the romance of the play were still warm and vital, in his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type, illuminated with their hundreds ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... are the conditions which seem to make the reading of the Bible different from other reading? Is there a sense of unreality about it as a book? What are ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... and bore against the trigger. There was no explosion. A depressing sense of unreality rolled over the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... silence that was broken only by his sobs. He rose late the next day, after a sleep that was one prolonged nightmare, full of agonised, abortive striving after something that always eluded him, he knew not what. And when he woke—after a momentary breath of relief at the thought of the unreality of these vague horrors—he woke to the heavier nightmare of reality. ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... night, cool, raw, moist, with a hint of spring in its freshness, a line of soldiers plodded along the lonely, melancholy lanes. Wan starlight showed in the rifts between the clouds. Neither dark nor light, the midnight hour had its unreality in this line of marching men; and its reality in the dim, vague hedges, its spectral posts, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life. When he thought round, Miriam shrank away. There was a vague, unreal feel about her. And nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not. It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Christian Science,—namely, that there are no sickness, sin, and death in the divine Mind. What seem to be disease, vice, and mortality are illusions of the physical senses. These illusions are not real, but unreal. Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else. In a moment you may awake from a night-dream; just so you can awake from the dream of sickness; but the demonstration of the Science of Mind-healing by no means rests on the ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... floundering through inky shadows, feeling a way through this miry chaos, when aloft, as far as the eye could see, the sky was lit. This phantom city of twinkling beacons gave one a sense of acute unreality, for it was an empty city, a city the work of which went on almost without the aid of human hands. The very soul of it was mechanical. Only here and there, where a drill crew was at work, did an occasional human figure move back and forth in ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... to assume their level while magnetically deferring, without adulation or humility, to such superiority, regardless of its reality or unreality, for the end in view, applying ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence and showy unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where there is no insatiable ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... that I am innocent," answered the man. He held his head high, almost defiantly. I could not but admire his courageous bearing, and yet there was an air of unreality about the whole thing. I felt almost as if I were dreaming it, but I knew that this was not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... of despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... fallen into the hot copper, for which reason she was running so fast to fetch the doctor. Tom had a profound contempt for this nonsense of Maggie's, smashing the earwig at once as a superfluous yet easy means of proving the entire unreality of such a story; but Lucy, for the life of her, could not help fancying there was something in it, and at all events thought it was very pretty make-believe. So now the desire to know the history ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... difference between reality and unreality. The Professor is real enough, more real in some minor points—dialogue, for instance—than Jane Eyre. The difference is that The Professor is a transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and Jane Eyre is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... literally practicable to a greater extent than most men think. It ought to be practicable universally. At the same time there is no disguising the fact that large numbers of men to-day find themselves in circumstances to which such a doctrine cannot without palpable unreality be applied. The structure of existing society under modern industrial conditions forces multitudes, by an evil economic pressure, into mechanical, uncongenial, and soul-destroying occupations: and the conditions of some ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... was a friend of the people, but he indulged in no enthusiasm for liberty. He never dilated on the beauties of virtue, or complimented, as Cicero did, a Providence in which he did not believe. He was too sincere to stoop to unreality. He held to the facts of this life and to his own convictions; and as he found no reason for supposing that there was a life beyond the grave he did not pretend to expect it. He respected the religion of the Roman state as an institution established by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... always, Betsy, when friends suddenly come to know each other. All other days sink to unreality like the memory of snow upon a day of August. We wonder how the flowering meadows were once a field of white. Our past selves, Betsy, walk apart from us and, although we know their trick of attitude and the fashion of their clothes, they ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... cases, the intellectual manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture. Mary Runnel is the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by his earlier works. The book teems with character sketches drawn from real life in quarters which few could penetrate, and although they are often extremely eccentric, they are never grotesque, and never strike the mind with a sense of merely invented unreality. Here and there occur illuminating outbursts of reflection in philosophic accent which reveal in startling style the working of Borrow's mind. The linguistic lore is phenomenal, as in all his books. But though ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Hume's philosophy. It is just as obvious, however, that the very principle thus re-affirmed at the latest stage of modern physical science was already firmly established by Hooke, when he sought to prove to his contemporaries the unreality of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... unreal to him about that night ride eastward across the dusty moonlit plain. He never forgot that night. The unexpectedness of it was only a part of the unreality. What pulled him up short was a new quality in the general unexpectedness of life. Life had always been, like the trip from which he was returning, more or less of a lark. Whereas it suddenly appeared that life might, perhaps, be very little of a lark. So far as he had ever pictured life ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... have the charm of romance without its unreality. The book illuminates, with lifelike portraits, the history of ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... broken up; all the world appeared shattered by the blow that had fallen on her, and nothing could startle her now. She felt dimly that some stupendous catastrophe had taken place; yet it did not appear unnatural. A strange sense of unreality possessed her; everything seemed an illusion, as if she were a shadow in a land of shadows. The thought came to her that she was dead, and that her spirit was passing over the dim ghost trail to the shadow-land. She tried to shake off the fancy, but all was so vague and dreamlike that she hardly ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, of non-existence, ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... aims, to consider what his motives really were, how far he could choose, how much he could prevail, to what extent he could really do as he hoped and desired. He was often haunted by a sense of living in a mechanical unreality, of moving simply on lines of easy habit. That was a tame, a flat business, perhaps; but it was ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Russians, and yet I am as sure of the absolute truth of that unfortunate doctor in "La Cigale," who builds up his heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the essential unreality, except in dialect and manners, of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,— the Russian does not ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... knowledge or Science to be the very reality of things: on such a view there is no impossibility of an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be found in the individual spirits themselves; ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... great part in his life; and even gratified ambition would have been ill-paid by high place and sounding titles, when these were accompanied by baffled hopes, and by the sight of his ideals fading into unreality. But his difficulties were now to be increased, as he saw the nation gradually drifting into war, under the promptings of a selfish and reckless faction, who exploited national jealousies for their own purposes, and, mistaking a spirit of boastful bluster ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... awakened memories—the silence of the great house, the mysterious rustling of the heavy hangings around the black oak four-poster on which he lay, the faint pricking of something deadly at his throat—these things rolled back the curtain of unreality, brought him acute and painful consciousness of a situation almost appalling. He opened his eyes, and although a brave and callous man he lay still, paralysed with the fear which forbids motion. The dim light of a candle, recently ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... light thrown by the Title on Pilate's action. It shows his sense of the unreality of the charge which he basely allowed himself to be forced into entertaining as a ground of condemning Jesus. If this enigmatical prisoner had had a sword, there would have been some substance in the charge against ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange shapes and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... is a paradox in many ways, and in none more than in the false reputation of the "English" of that day. As I have indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who has presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But there was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britain before the Conquest under what ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... double existence he was compelled to lead—that of a laborious and clear-brained man of business in office hours, that of a hungry rascal in the time which was his own—not only impressed him with a sense of danger, but made him profoundly dissatisfied with the unreality of what he called his enjoyments. What, he asked himself, had condemned him to this kind of career? Simply the weight under which he started, his poor origin, his miserable youth. However carefully regulated ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... stronger. Further parallels between two ages and systems so unlike as those of Charlemagne and his imitator are of course superficial; and Napoleon's attempt at impressing the imagination of the Germans seems to us to smack of unreality. Yet we must remember that they were then the most impressionable and docile of nations, that his attempt was made with much skill, and that none of the appointed guardians of the old Empire raised a voice in protest while he imposed ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with the brutal indifference of his uncle. She kept hoping against hope that something might happen to prevent his arriving here. Devoutly she wished that she might awake and find that it was all a terrible mistake, a hideous unreality, and that the "Friends of the Air" were not in any way ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... in their box, swathed in tissue-paper, had a gossamer unreality about them that even the sense of touch could not dispel. No—no! The bride of to-morrow was surely, ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... confabulation for about a quarter of an hour. Julian sat with his back turned towards them and his ears closed. In this atmosphere of government, his own position seemed to him weird and fantastic. A sense of unreality cumbered his thoughts. Even this brief pause in the actual negotiations filled him with doubts. He could scarcely believe that it was he who was to dictate terms to the man who was responsible for the government of the country; that it was ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unconscious years we learn to make of touch, of the third dimension, the test of reality. The child is still dimly aware of the intimate connection between touch and the third dimension. He cannot persuade himself of the unreality of Looking-Glass Land until he has touched the back of the mirror. Later, we entirely forget the connection, although it remains true, that every time our eyes recognise reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... the meaning that we think we see, Sends forth the beauty we are taking in. O Soul of nature, if thou art not, if There dwelt not in thy thought the primrose-flower Before it blew on any bank of spring, Then all is untruth, unreality, And we are wretched things; our highest needs Are less than we, the offspring of ourselves; And when we are sick, they are not; and our hearts Die with the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... leave gracefully and went away through the enthralling, glittering unreality of it all leaving a young girl thrilled, excited, and deeply impressed with his ease and bearing amid awe-inspiring scenes in which she, too, desired most ardently ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the quaint, picture-book town with its mediaeval simplicity and ruggedness combined; his eyes tried to keep pace with the things that his fertile brain was seeing beyond the glimmering lights and dancing window panes—for the whole scene danced before him with a persistent unreality that made him feel his own pulse in the fear that some sudden, insidious fever had seized ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... that impression. But the opening lines of The Village point to a different origin. It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of The Village he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head. The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... had never thought of being bitten by a rattler. He had seen so many of them that he had come to look upon them only as targets at which he might shoot when he thought he needed practice. And now he was bitten. The unreality of the incident surprised him. He looked around at the silent hills, at the sun that swam above the mountain peaks, at the great, vast arc of sky that yawned above him. Hills, sky, and sun seemed also unreal. It ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... legitimate; it is a part of every one's heritage. But nonsense which is confused with reality is vicious,—the more so because its insinuations are subtle. So far as their content is concerned, it is chiefly as a protest against this confusing presentation of unreality, this substitution of excitement for legitimate interest, that these stories have been written. It is not that a child outgrows the familiar. It is rather that as he matures, he sees new relationships ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... occurrences of the evening had possessed an Arabian Night's quality of unreality, he felt no misgivings for the love he had announced and pledged. It was not as though he looked back on a record of broken promises. He had no troubling memories to sweep from his conscience before his heart should be clear for a new entry. He had come away from the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the Church, I never saw a word from him on that subject. He drew the line at religion. He did not mind acting his part in things secular, for his performances were, I am sure, mostly histrionic, but there he stopped. The unreality of his character was a husk surrounding him, but it did not touch the core. It was as if he had said to himself, "Political controversy is nothing to me, and, what is more, is so uncertain that it matters little whether I say yes or no, nor indeed does it matter if I say yes AND no, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... condition of mortals. This idea has found expression, not only in the cynical exclamation of the misanthropist that most men are fools, but also in the cry of despair that sometimes breaks from the weary searcher after absolute truth, and from the poet when impressed with the unreality of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... market-baskets on their arms; very pretty French school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced, spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a moment's pause, but rushed him instantly through the whole series of Anthony Trollope's novels, which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... distrusted his favourite argument of ignorance and early prepossessions, and felt that there was presumption and unreality in tendering such explanations to men like the Bollandist De Buck, De Rossi, whom the Institute elected in preference to Mommsen, or Windischmann, whom he himself had been accused of bringing forward as a rival to Moehler. He would ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... vague and shadowy my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality about our life at B——. Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant from Paris,—less than an hour by train,—the country round about our camp seemed ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now—on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... real lawful wife, and that her own marriage had been a sin, a vile pretence and horror. For the first time in her life the grandest words of confidence that have expressed and interpreted the clinging faith of humanity seemed an unreality. Rose had never known the faintest temptation to doubt Providence before this miserable evening. She resented with her whole being the idea that possibly she had been the cause of the grossest wrong to an injured wife. And there was ground in reason for such ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... presence was very comforting; and when the wounded lad had been drawn to the summit of the cliff by the strong, willing arms of the retainers, and his hurts rudely dressed by kindly hands, and his parched throat refreshed by deep draughts of cold water, he began to shake off the sense of unreality which had made him feel like one in a dream, and to marvel at the unexpected appearance on the lonely fell of ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America. Each day brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new friends. Mrs. Newbold was full of charm, and the devotion between the ill mother and ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought romance at the price of esteem and of peace. Then suddenly the whole matter slipped into unreality, and she could not credit it. Was it possible that she, a respectable matron, a known figure, the mother of adult daughters, had fallen in love with a man not her husband, had had a secret interview ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... course, only partial; for we are equally susceptible to the negative suggestions of the whiteness of the marble and the smallness of the outline of the tree. Every work of art represents a sort of compromise between reality and unreality, belief and disbelief. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... enough so far as words went, but she was too stunned and confused to take in their full meaning; and in truth her presence there at all had only been another unfamiliar element in this bewildering whirl of events, imparting an additional sense of unreality. But when she mentioned Madame Lavaux, the name linked itself at once with recent memories and emotions, and its accustomed association with her every-day life made it a rallying point, as it were, for her scattered ideas. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... to contemporaries Edward seemed a king regardful of his honour and mindful of his plighted word. If his generosity verged on extravagance, and his affectation of popular manners and graciousness on unreality, Englishmen of the fourteenth century were no severe critics of a crowned king. It was only when in his later years Edward laid aside the soldier's life, and abandoned himself to the frivolous distractions and degrading amours[2] which provoked ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... right sure of that. There was such mystery, such an unwonted sense of unreality a-quiver in this silence, that he wanted, very much, to learn what it was all about. Then, ever and ever so cautiously, he slipped down off the bed. His dimpled toes went patting daintily across ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... would be there. He thought of Renan, who declares that on the Acropolis at Athens beauty and wisdom do exist, really exist, as external powers. He did not aspire to beauty or wisdom, but he prayed to be delivered from the shadow of unreality that had begun to darken the world. For it was as if some power had pronounced against him—as if, by some heedless action, he had offended an Olympian god. Like many another, he wondered whether the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... sensations which are indistinguishable from false, cannot be partly perceptions, partly not. The following two assertions they strive to prove, (1) sensations are partly true, partly false, (2) every sensation which proceeds from a reality, has a form which it might have if it proceeded from an unreality (41). To prove these propositions, they divide perceptions into those which are sensations, and those which are deduced from sensations; after which they show that credit cannot be given to either class (42). [The word "perception" is used to mean ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... loneliness, was coming forth at the sound of Abel's voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk within them one would almost certainly wear one's self ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... shown me; and if I had been perfectly candid, I should have admitted that, so far from striking me as interesting, it seemed to me absurdly, incredibly dull and uninteresting; so much so as to have a guise of unreality to me. But my letters ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... as showing a lack of gentlemanlike feeling. But those who take this view forget that he was writing to an intimate friend of a matter which had greatly occupied his own mind for a year; that he mentioned no names, and that he threw such an air of humorous unreality about the whole story that the person who received it never dreamed that it recorded an actual occurrence until twenty-five years afterwards, when, having been asked to furnish it to a biographer, she was warned against doing so by the President himself, who said there was ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... regarded as an attempt to achieve holy ends by unholy means, but really and radically the apotheosis of falsehood and unreality to the dethronement of faith in the true, the genuine and the real, a deliberate shutting of the eyes to the truth, a belief in a lie in the name of God, a belief in symbols and formulas as in themselves sacred, salutary, and divine, fiction ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... up in the words of the old-fashioned tag, "If our friends in front are pleased, then Manager and Author are satisfied." But, if objection be still taken to the unreality of the Parliamentary setting of the picture, then "please remember," apologises 'ENRY HAUTHOR, "that 'it's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... bunch hung straight down without the slightest oscillation. Such lack of motion and life amid the close stewing heat of the lazaret threw a glamor of unreality over the whole affair. The schooner might well have been warped to a dock in some port of the dead. The very newness of everything accentuated ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... asked, scarcely recognising his own voice. And striving to shake off the unreality of it all with a laugh: "You look like some pretty ghost from dreamland—with your white gown and arms and face. Shall we descend ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... futilely on the outcome of the strange plight she was in. It was a far cry from pounding a typewriter in a city office to jogging through the wilderness, lost beyond peradventure, her only company a stranger of unsavory reputation. Yet she was not frightened, for all the element of unreality. Under other circumstances she could have relished the adventure, taken pleasure in faring gypsy fashion over the wide reaches where man had left no mark. As ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... peculiar stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious fervour, or dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable trifling, so the mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough unreality. Every one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play philanthropy, apathy to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for love of country; and, to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar minds of all Europe now directs ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... inhaling the tonic air of hill and forest, half wished he were well away from this uncanny house and its eccentric inmates. And yet, despite the mystery which enshrouded it, there was a charm, a fascination, he could not deny. It was the dream-like unreality of his surroundings—unreal, because different from all that he had ever known. Should he suddenly find himself a dozen miles removed, he felt certain that he would ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... admitting so scant a meed of sunlight that no one of its worshippers had ever read the legends on the walls, and even the stations were but deeper bits of shade, would attune her mind to holy things, and throw a mantle of unreality over those ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... before the leadership of the House of Commons. But Pitt was not ungrateful. He was merely astute. He read Shelburne as perhaps no other of his contemporaries was able to read him, and he gauged him at his true value or want of value. Shelburne's glittering unreality, his showy unreliability, were to have no place in Pitt's scheme of things. Abandoned by Temple, abandoning Shelburne, Pitt went his own way, doing the best he could in the face {237} of tremendous odds and doing it very well. One of his first acts of office was to bring in an ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... down the hillside and join one of the little groups dotted about outside the cover-side, with a curious sense of unreality. After a while he broke into a little laugh, and, shaking his reins, lit a cigar. This was a new character for him altogether. He knew himself that no man had kept his life more blameless than he! If anything, he felt sometimes that he had erred upon the other side in thinking and speaking too ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... confused Ruth Dale. The expression of face, voice and language swept away the sense of unreality and detachment. Here was a vital trouble. A tangible human call. It might be that she, instead of Ralph Drew or Constance, or any other person, might touch and rescue this girl who was finding herself among ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... But being limited and specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch with the interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community. In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constant tendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrill it. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two political parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which is sincerely anxious, if only it ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... dumbly, aware in war. It is that there is something going on in the world which demands primary allegiance, and the putting second of every self-interest. At the front men hardly know what it is. They are suspicious of rhetoric and unreality in talk about liberty and international equity, and right against might. They only know—a wonderful majority of them—that something great and righteous wants them and requires of them their help. So, reluctantly, with grumblings and insistent longing for ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... heard of all this from his youth up to the day of setting his foot, for the first time, on English ground. He has tried to believe it, as in things seen, temporal and tangible. But in doing this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of unreality—a feeling that there has been great poetical exaggeration in the matter. A patent fact lies at the bottom of this incredulity. The forefathers of New England carried no wild bird with them to sing about their cabin homes in the New World. But they found beautiful and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... tempted often to look upon men and women as shadows that have no longer any connection with me. I am very weak and feeble and I wish to sleep.... But the love of God continues, and through Jesus Christ, the love of men. It is the only truth—love of God, love of man—the rest is fantasy and unreality. Look up, my son, bear this with patience. God is standing at your shoulder and will be with you to the end. This is training for you. To show you, perhaps, that all through life you have missed the most important thing. You ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... picture of an unrepentant sinner. From the woods floated the far, faint cries and light-hearted laughter of the camp youngsters at play. In spite of his attempt to imitate the Governor's jauntiness Archie felt again, as so often since he left Bailey Harbor, the unreality of the events through which he had been projected with his singular companion, who had drawn him so far out of his orbit that it was hard to believe that he would ever slip into it again. Their affairs had never presented so many problems as now, when the Governor was predicting and planning the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... bodies and make them fine instruments of the mind and the spirit. Only thus, when the body becomes an aid instead of a hindrance to human expression may we attain any civilization worthy of the name. Only thus may we create our bodies a fitting temple for the soul, which is nothing but a vague unreality except insofar as it is able to manifest itself in the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... revolutionary doctrines flashing out here and there, will yet be struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas ventilated in the Compagnon du Tour de France can reconcile no reader to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure. For her socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dispassionate examination of what she actually inculcated, leaves but little warrant, in the state of progress now reached, for echoing the mighty outcry raised against ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... contradicts the fact that the {250} fullest life under present conditions involves contact with evil. Innocence must be tragic if it is not to be weak. Jesus without the cross would possess something of that quality of unreality which attaches to Aristotle's high-minded man. But this does not prove that life involves evil; it proves only that life will be narrow and complacent when it is out of touch with things as they are. Since evil is now real, he who altogether escapes it is ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... was cleverer, despite a certain laziness of disposition—more brilliant and more amusing. He had always been to a great extent the chosen one; and yet it was with a certain surprise and sense of unreality that she found what she had drifted into. She saw the diamond ring, and looked upon it with the beautiful emotions aroused by those small stones in the female breast; but she did not seem to recognise her own finger within the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he was he solely by virtue of being she. He had got a trick of singing operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality. Exquisitely ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rushing, all tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... wanted to go, and that only fear for our safety and comfort made him hesitate. The day before Anne Ford was due we went. It was the day, too, after our sail in the moonlight that I half believed, remembering its lovely unreality, had been a dream. But as we sailed out, there lay Sir Richard Leigh's yacht to prove it, smart and impressive, shining and solid in the sunlight as it had been ethereal the night before. I gazed at ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... hours of utter despair, in spite of the double excitement of these past weeks, for it has seemed to me that I was no nearer to you than I had been in the beginning. There was a sense of unreality about the whole affair. At first it seemed to me the most romantic thing that could happen to any man, and it was incredible that I had been chosen the hero of such an extraordinary romance—intensified, if anything, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... unreality, partially dispelled, began to return. Benson dropped to the floor and stood beside the table, getting a cigarette out of his ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... Leader says:—"The stories are very well told. There is enough of the uncanny about them to give a pleasant thrill to the reader's nerves, while the supernatural element is not so overdone as to make its unreality palpable. . . . They are vividly told, and attest Mrs. Molesworth's remarkable range ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... schools but also as the most popular and generally beloved writer in Scandinavia? She entered Swedish literature at a period when the cold gray star of realism was in the ascendant, when the trenchant pen of Strindberg had swept away the cobwebs of unreality, and people were accustomed to plays and novels almost brutal in their frankness. Wrapped in the mantle of a latter-day romanticism, her soul filled with idealism, on the one hand she transformed the crisp actualities of human experience by throwing about them the glamour ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... not let you fall." There was a note of irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... carefully-guarded, tradition-hedged German sisters? No, it is not that. Is it any thing in these emerald and opal tinted skies, which seem so unreal to the American eye, and for the first time explain what seemed the unreality of German art? in these mysterious yet restful Rhine fogs, which prolong the twilight, and hang the curtain of romance even over mid-day? Surely not. Is it not rather, O Herr Professor profound in analogy ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a candle proceeds from the combustion of its constituent elements. The flame is never the same for two consecutive moments. It seems to have a perpetuated identity, but that is only an illusion, and the same unreality pertains to the soul. It is only a succession of thoughts, emotions, and conscious experiences. We are not the same that we were an hour ago. In fact, there is no such thing as being—there is only a constant becoming. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed that ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of unreality impressed itself upon Mark Brendon after this stage in his inquiry. A time was coming when the false atmosphere in which he moved would be blown away by a stronger mind and a greater genius than his own; but already he found himself ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... It is the thought of parting that checks my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with; that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it, steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short a time. I have had nothing ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... there was an air of unreality about the landing, as if this planet wasn't really Earth at all, despite its orbit around the sun, despite its familiar moon. It looked too ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... Lane stayed for the night on her way west, there was the usual constant bustle of arriving and departing people. The heat, the crowd, the luxury of this cliff-city with its throngs of much-dressed men and women overwhelmed Isabelle with a sense of startling unreality. It was not simply that she had been removed from the noise of city life for a number of months, secluded in the quiet of open spaces, and that the latest novelty in New York hotels contrasted sharply with primitive Grosvenor. But she found herself ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Failure to obtain phenomena that could be verified might subtly awaken skepticism in the simple-hearted Hindus around her. But this secret confession, which might be repudiated if necessary, raised my whole siege at once.[3] And the confession itself, while it admitted the unreality of the miracles, left a marvel,—namely, her power to cause the hallucinations. I remembered the legend of Glam, from whom came our word "glamour," and had a droll feeling of being defeated, like Grettir, in the moment of his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world, St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and, if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss Bronte to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the fierce yet self-governed passion of Jane herself, pouring out, as in a secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of abandonment,—all ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... a child than most women of nineteen. A clever and accomplished young lady, but, one would say, with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired pretty little habits and ideas than character; a childish woman of the world, a bright, light handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides the confusion, the unreality due to precipitation of events and change of scene, the sense that she had (how long ago—days, weeks, or years? in such a state time becomes a great muddle and mystery) been actually married by proxy, that she had come the whole way from Paris, through Venice and ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... The sense of unreality disappeared with the brilliant dawn, though the night itself with the battle in the moonlight seemed to be almost a dream. Yet the combat had been fought, and he had met Harry Kenton and his friends. The empty ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... opposite to hers. The chafing-dish was between them. He was filled with a curious sense of unreality. It was a little scene, this, out of a story or a play. It didn't actually concern him. It wasn't Nora who sat within a few feet of him, bending down over the chafing-dish and stirring ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... work from him for a while; he was going abroad to take a long-earned holiday. He lunched at his club, speaking in a more than usually friendly manner to the few men with whom at times he had found it a pleasure to associate, and finally, with that sense of unreality growing stronger and stronger, he found himself once more in the Park, in his usual chair, looking out with the same keen sympathy upon the intensely joyous, beautiful phase of life which floated around him. The afternoon breeze rustled pleasantly among the cool green leaves above his ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... aspirations. In his immortal 'Don Quixote,' Cervantes held its extravagances up to ridicule. In Ariosto's day no one believed any longer in the heroes or the ideals of chivalry, nor did the poet himself; hence there is an air of unreality about the poem. The figures that pass before us, although they have certain characteristics of their own, are not real beings, but those that dwell in a land of fancy. As the poet tells these stories of a bygone age, a smile of irony ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... She glared at him across the narrow table, and, in the moment, each had a sense of unreality. The quarrel was like a bolt from the blue, as startling and unexpected—as most quarrels are—the bitterest and most lasting. Then she sprang to her feet and hurled a taunt at him some Imp ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... exercise on the imagination of young children. While we listened, a new world seemed to open before us, and anything like doubt as to the reality of these beings never existed. What was reality or unreality to young children of four and five? How few people know what real reality is, even after they have reached the age of fifty or sixty. For children, such names as reality and unreality do not exist, nor the ideas which they express. They listen to what their father tells them, and they ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... that she had won the distinguished hero of the age, and had for years preserved him, even after time had taken from love its usual nourishment. Her own feeling was as entire as at its birth. Five years had failed to destroy the dazzling unreality of passion. Most men ruthlessly destroy the sacred veil, with which the female heart is wont to adorn the idol of its affections. Not so Raymond; he was an enchanter, whose reign was for ever undiminished; a king whose power never was suspended: follow him through ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... filled with the sense of your smallness, and "unreality"—know you that so long as you are "held in the Mind of God," then so long are you "remembered" by Him. And so long as you are remembered by Him, no real harm can befall you, and your Reality is second ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... historian is always suspicious of dramatic events.[1] They may be true, but they are more liable to be afterthoughts, like the bright answers we could have made to our opponents if we had only thought of them at the time. You never lose the sense of unreality in the very construction of a drama. Life cannot be crowded into two or three hours, and justice does not come out as the drama makes it do. So that at most important points of the Scripture dramatic writing does not appear. The account ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... emanated from her like a breath. It took him back to the day when he had huddled close to her, hiccoughing with grief and anger, and yet deeply, deliriously happy because she was sorry for him. It made him giddy with a sense of unreality, as though the present and the intervening years were only part of one of his night stories, which, after their tiresome, undeviating custom, had got tangled up in a monstrous, impossible dream. And then a new fancy took possession of him. He wanted to bend ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... consequence of all which was, that when at last, after many years, he did begin to develop some individuality, he could not, and never did shake himself free of those weary models; his thoughts, appearing in clothes which were not made for them, wore always a certain stiffness and unreality which did not by nature belong to them, blunting the impressions which his earnestness ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... holding my arm and looking into my face. That sense of the unreality of things which had haunted me since that moment at the dance came over me with renewed intensity. Life had ceased to be a rather grey, orderly business in which day succeeded day calmly and without event. Its steady stream had broken ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... eyes dwelt upon was tinged with something of the beatitude that stirred his senses. Every step he took was something of an unreality. And every whispering sound in the scented world through which he was passing found an echo of music ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... took place. Americans are such habitual organisers of huge demonstrations, and are so generally accustomed to say, publicly, without reserve, what they think, that the expression of what to them may appear perfectly natural runs the risk of creating elsewhere an air of exaggeration and unreality. But if we consider that great American States like Minnesota, Ohio, and Michigan contain more inhabitants than some of the kingdoms of Europe, and that their Governors are men likely to occupy the very highest positions in the government of America, we can realise how ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... performance of the journalist, have only to compare the Falstaff of "The Merry Wives" with the Falstaff of the two parts of "Henry IV." But if we take it for granted that "The Merry Wives" was done in haste and to order, can any inference be fairly drawn from the feebleness of Falstaff and the unreality of his love-making? I think so; it seems to me that, if Falstaff had been a creation, Shakespeare must have reproduced him more effectively. His love-making in the second part of "Henry IV." is real enough. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... it, what they felt there in the strange unreality of the moonlight, and what hushed their profound enmity, none can tell. Ordinarily the wolf hates both fox and dog, and kills them whenever they cross his path; but to-night the foxes were yapping an answer ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... his manner impressed Hilary more than ever before with the conviction of all she was to him; likewise, all he was to her. More, much more than even a few short weeks since. Then, intense as it was, the love had a dream like unreality; now it was close, home-like, familiar. Instinctively she clung to his arm; she had become so used to being Robert's darling now. She shivered as she thought of the wide seas rolling between them; of the time when ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... low margin, distinct, yet with a coercive conviction of unreality, the figure of a man drawn in lines of vague light paced slowly to and fro; an old man, he would have said, bent and wizened, swaying back and forth, in expressive contortions, a very pantomime of woe, wringing gaunt hands and ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... little overwrought and designed to conceal a sharpness of wit and observation which she feared to exercise in courtly circles. In this resolve she was doubtless discreet, but it gave her conversation a turn of unreality which impressed as might the use of some perfume of Araby to conceal a less romantic odour. It affected my own candour disagreeably. Possibly the praise received by the author of "Evelina" might cause her to abandon the common modes of conversation and talk ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... unreality she was suddenly conscious of a voice speaking to her. "Florence," it said, "Florence Baker, you know before I say a word the thing I wish to tell you, the question I wish to ask. You know, because more than once I've tried to speak, and at the last ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... which he could not see, was flooding the roofs of Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist, like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality, which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day broke, and left the harsh outlines and the blackened chimneys of the town unsoftened by any shadow of illusion. Presently, as the sunlight fell aslant the winding streets, there was a faint ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Designed to avoid unreality, lukewarmness, and dry dogmatism, as well as compromise and controversy—and not unmindful of things temporal, whilst chiefly directed to things eternal—it is hoped that it may assist to refresh the faithful, correct the erring, and ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot—within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tinkling ripple of a fountain in that interior court added to a feeling of unreality. It was a stage set for a play. Palm trees and many flowering plants grew in profusion and The Merriweather Girls, unused to the luxuriant verdure of the south, stood looking about ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... attend upon the Cardinals in the Abbey; and as he awoke that morning, it seemed to him once more as if he were living in a dream of strange and intoxicating unreality. Everywhere in the house, as he passed along the corridors, as he gave and received last instructions before starting, there seemed the same tension of expectancy. Finally, as he went up to the Cardinals' rooms to announce the start, he found the two prelates, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... ignore the reasonable concessions on points of detail which it embodied, or to explain away the patent fact that no measure less stringent would satisfy the people. There was therefore an air of unreality about this debate, spirited as it was, nor is it easy to understand what practical object enlightened men like Peel could have sought in prolonging it. He well knew, and admitted in private correspondence, that reform was inevitable; he must have known that a sham reform would ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... face, and tried to understand the scene of ruin and carnage that surrounded me; for, with the cessation of the turmoil and excitement of battle, everything seemed suddenly to assume the inconsequence and unreality of a dream. I could not quite realise that the shot-torn, blood-bespattered wreck over which my gaze wandered wonderingly was the erstwhile smart and dainty little schooner of which I had been so proud, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... and fine features, and he has the "average figure," so that he serves as manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. It is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand sewer. Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises. Messengers arrive every ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of remoteness—or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... the very idea of an analogy between the separate works of God leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less importance is economically or sacramentally connected with the more momentous system[2], and of this conclusion the theory, to which I was inclined as a boy, viz. the unreality of material phenomena, is an ultimate resolution. At this time I did not make the distinction between matter itself and its phenomena, which is so necessary and so obvious in discussing the subject. Secondly, Butler's doctrine that Probability is the guide of life, led me, at least ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them. It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short. It was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real power, everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand. Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... something which cheats the senses; whether it be in the air, the sunshine, or in the ocean breeze, or in all three combined, I cannot say. Certainly the climate is not the home-made common-sense article of the anti-Rocky Mountain States; and unreality is thrown round life—all walk and ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... the pit vanished. A clear light sprang up in the big room. Simultaneously, Halder felt the nightmare immobility draining from him and the sensation of dreamlike unreality fade from his mind. He turned to the right, found Kilby's eyes already on him, saw the Rellis couple sitting beyond her ... Rane, no longer disguised, looking like a mirror image ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... so easily and lightly by this man and woman, had a nightmare quality for Henrietta. It had the confusion, the exaggerated horror of an evil dream, without the far-away consciousness of its unreality. Here she was, in the presence of the man she loved and it was wicked to love him. She had longed to meet him and now she wished she might have kept his memory only, the figure on the horse, the man ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... appointments, instituted by Henry VIII, as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was required for the completeness of an election which her own choice had already determined, not because the bishops obtained any gifts or graces in their consecration ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to feel that all things about us are not changed. We cannot imagine ourselves falling into the old daily routine again. The death of one dear to us gives us a shock which seems to unsettle the very foundation of things. A sense of insecurity and unreality pervades all that concerns us. We shrink from the thought that the old pleasures will charm us again, that daily cares will occupy our minds to the exclusion of to-day's sadness, that time will heal the wounds that ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... detonations could be heard the bursting of shrapnel, the bubbling of frying oil, the grinding of a coffee-mill, and the incessant crackling of rifle-fire. Fleecy clouds were floating over the fields, giving to near objects the indefinite lines of unreality. The sun was a faint spot seen between curtains of mist. The trees were weeping fog moisture from all the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
