"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, that it began with the nationalization of telegraphs, expresses, railroads, mines, and all large industries operated by stock companies. This at once struck a fatal blow at the speculation in values, real and unreal, and at the stock-exchange, or bourse; we had our own name for that gambler's paradise, or gambler's hell, whose baleful influence penetrated every ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... and Indignation. Realities themselves, in this Paris, have grown unreal: preternatural. Phantasms once more stalk through the brain of hungry France. O ye laggards and dastards, cry shrill voices from the Queues, if ye had the hearts of men, ye would take your pikes and secondhand firelocks, and look into it; not leave your wives and daughters to be starved, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... maintained me. There are likewise, in this mysterious state of life, paroxysms and intervals of disordered consciousness, which memory refuses to acknowledge or record; the epileptic's waking dream is one—an unreal reality. And similar to this was my impression of the late events. They lacked substantiality. Memory took no account of them, discarded them, and would connect the present only with the bright experience she had treasured up, prior to the dark distempered season. I could not hate my benefactor. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... curious preoccupied stillness hush of the power-house which makes the false world of the stage so singularly unreal by contrast when watched from the back. The house was packed from floor to ceiling, for the Palaceum's policy of breaking away from revue and going back to Mr. Mackwayte called "straight vaudeville" was ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... the charm of a dream. Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal. ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... escape, even although a threatened general calamity should take place. All the possibilities of deliverance are sought after in such a disposition of mind, and are, by imagination, easily changed into probabilities and realities, because just that is wanting which proves them to be improbable and unreal, viz., the consciousness of a living, omnipotent God. Thus men free themselves from fear, and with it, from the troublesome obligation of escaping from it in another and a legitimate way, viz., by true conversion. Now, it is this levity which the prophet opposes. He shows that ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... the moon. Slowly she mounted upwards, peeping down at me through whispering leaves, checkering the shadows with silver, and turning the brook into a path of silver for the feet of fairies. Yes, indeed, the very air seemed fraught with a magic whereby the unreal became the real and things impossible ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... remembered that I repeated stupidly, again and again: "What? what? what?" Then the grey sky slowly fell away as though it were pushed by some hand and I saw the faint evening blue, with (so strange and unreal they seemed) silver-pointed stars. I caught my breath and realised that now the whole right corner of the barn was gone. The field stretched, a dark shadow, to the edge of the yard. In the ground ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... 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
... satisfaction in the sequence; as from another world, they listen to the poet's song, wondering, admiring, but powerless over the great instrument of human speech, from whose 15,000 keys their touch can draw but the dull, tuneless prose of daily question and answer; as in a mirage of things unreal, they see the great deeds that are done in their time for love or hate, for race or country, for ambition and for vengeance, but though they see the result, and know the motive, the inward meaning and spirit of it all escapes them. It is theirs to be, and existence is in itself their all. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... life sometimes appear to you, Miss Barton, more distorted and unreal than a dream? I know it does to me. The spectacle we have just witnessed was a part of the ages that believed in the godhead of Christ and the divine right of Kings; but it seems to me strange that such barbarities should be permitted ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... through my grated windows, and coiled around my heart in frightful dreams, again had me in his possession. Thus began one of the most maniacal and terrible drunks of my life. I became possessed of the wildest and most unreal thoughts that ever entered a crazed brain. I abused and misrepresented my best friends, and cursed everything but the thrice cursed liquor which was burning up my body and soul. I told absurd and terrible stories about the places where I had been, ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fifth day an immense melancholy descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who had beset him, unreal and terrible, like jibbering and obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling feebly in their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an allegorical statue, looking on with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the very spot; here was the semicircle of railing, the camp-stools, the white cabin-wall against which he had leaned. But the blackness of night had so utterly past away that it seemed as though the deed done in it must in some manner have vanished likewise. What is fact at one time looks unreal at another. It must be associated with all times and moods before it can be ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the 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 of her pillow. She ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... was a maze of strange colour, strange motion and stranger perfume to Skag; not penetrating his conscious nature at all—feeling unreal to him. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... avoid death. Embodied creatures, from inability to attain the knowledge of Brahman and from their connection with earthly enjoyments, are obliged to sojourn in a cycle of re-births, up and down and around. The natural inclination of man towards pursuits that are unreal is alone the cause of the senses being led to error. The soul that is constantly affected by the pursuit of objects that are unreal, remembering only that with which it is always engaged, adoreth only earthly enjoyments that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... dissociation of faith and morality; he had seen, and still saw, how deep and permanent, both by its inherent evil and by the recoil that follows, is the wound inflicted upon true religion by overstrained professions, unreal phraseology, and the form without the substance of godliness. He saw clearly, what many have failed to see, that righteousness is the principal end of all religion; that faith, that revelation, that all spiritual aids, that the incarnation of the Son of God and the redemption He has brought, have ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... at intervals, a girl who stole through the obscurity of the pitching corridors guiding him from one faint blue light to the next—a girl who groped out the way with him at night to the deck by following the painted arrows under foot. Also sometimes she sat at his bedside through the unreal flight of time, her hand clasped over his. He knew that he had been brutal to her during ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... just 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 daughter's young lover, ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... ordinary dangers. His motives were certainly pure, and his subsequent exertions to rally his men and bring them to face the foe, were as great as could have been made by any one; but disheartened by the fear of unreal danger, and in the trepidation of a flight, deemed to be absolutely necessary for their safety, they could not be readily brought to bear the brunt of battle. The efforts of a few cool and collected individuals, drove back the pursuers, and thus ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... fantastic, unreal. There was—nothing, and yet a man, living, breathing, but invisible, was speaking! Chris could not understand; but it was at least a little relief to know he had a human to deal with. For with humans, strategy can ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... again and there seemed something unreal in the broad pavement, the frowning houses, the glow of the gas lamps. The harmless little key burned his flesh. All the passionate acuteness of life seemed throbbing again in his veins. He retraced his steps, making ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... am looking at something immemorially old, something belonging to the unrecorded beginnings of this Oriental life, perhaps to the crepuscular Kamiyo itself, to the magical Age of the Gods; a symbolism of motion whereof the meaning has been forgotten for innumerable years. Yet more and more unreal the spectacle appears, with its silent smilings, with its silent bowings, as if obeisance to watchers invisible; and I find myself wondering whether, were I to utter but a whisper, all would not vanish for ever save the grey mouldering court and the desolate temple, and the broken statue of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... part of the dream interval," he interrupted, a little out of countenance, "everything was absurdly unreal. Are you going to be nice ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... had pen in hand, but although I could not recite a line of this I can see it all. I can feel it. I can hear it. It calls me in my dreams and whispers when I am closest to you. And you—you—are its inspiration. You have liberated all that was locked from my imagination before. I lived in an unreal world until I knew, lived with you. Knowing that so well, I believed that my deserted muse would either take herself off in disdain, or be smothered dead. Art has always been jealous of mortal happiness. But the emotions I have experienced ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... a little way in silence, watching the lights that fell in long lines across the campus, hearing through the soft night the tinkling of mandolins and the thrumming of guitars, a vibrant, feverish life that suddenly seemed unreal to him. They were fast approaching the Lodge. A sudden fear came to him that she would go without understanding what the one, the only night had ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... more in that 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 ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal—a picture from ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... promissory note, where again the common law regarded the contract as inseparable from the paper on which it was written, but the reasoning was general, and soon was extended to other written contracts, and various absurd and unreal grounds of policy were invented to account for the ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal look, more lovely than a dream. At dawn—and Dick would often start for the reef before dawn, if the tide served—the picture was as beautiful; more so, perhaps, for over the island, all in shadow, and against the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... I would assoil him. Father! 'Tis said, upon the giddy verge of life The eye grows steady, and the soul sees clear Thought guiding action in all human things, Not in the busy, whirling masque of life, Reality unreal, but in truth. Then the eye cuts as the chirurgeon's knife Mocks the poor corpse. I saw not when he died: Yet last night was a scaffold, there! all black, And one stood visor'd by, with glittering axe Who struck the bare neck of a kneeling form— Methought ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... this discontent is apparent. There is something in the commonplaces of fashionable life which turns woman from the real to the unreal, from the substantial to the superficial, which smothers all originality of thought, and makes her a simple reproduction in appearance, if not in disposition, of the "Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty and ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... coincidence of their meeting, he told it as he had not told it to McDowell or even to Miriam Kirkstone. A third time the facts were the same. But it was John Keith now who was telling John Keith's story through the lips of an unreal and negative Conniston. He forgot his own breakfast, and a look of gloom settled on Wallie's face when he peered in through the door and saw that their coffee and toast were growing cold. Mary Josephine leaned a little over the table. Not once did she interrupt Keith. Never had ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... differs from Comte's as the work of a poet differs from that of a philosopher, as that of a woman differs from that of a man. His positive religion gives the impression of being invented; it is artificial, unreal. Hers is, at least, living and beautiful and impressive; it is warm, tender and full of compassion, He invents a new symbolism, a new hierarchy, and a new worship; that is, he remodels Catholicism ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... party had wandered back to the Farm the day of Isabelle's marriage. Below the brick terrace, elaborate gardens, suggesting remotely Italy, had been laid out on the slope of the New England hill. The thin poplars, struggling to maintain themselves in the bitter blasts of an American winter, gave an unreal air to the place as much as anything. The village of Grafton, which had once been visible as a homely white-dotted road beyond the meadow, had been "planted out." There was a formal garden now where the old barn stood, from which the Colonel's ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... disjointedly, her breath coming quick. 'You shall not talk me into forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh, I do not recognize you at all—you seem another man. We are not children; have you forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is foolish, unreal—I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has happened to you?' She was half sobbing. 'How can these sentimentalities come from a man like you? Where is ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... would find Torpenhow, and come as near to the old life as might be. Afterwards he would forget everything: Bessie, who had wrecked the Melancolia and so nearly wrecked his life; Beeton, who lived in a strange unreal city full of tin-tacks and gas-plugs and matters that no men needed; that irrational being who had offered him love and loyalty for nothing, but had not signed her name; and most of all Maisie, who, from her own point ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... would drink in the warm air and the music of the goat-bells, borne on the gusty wind, and the smell of the new-mown hay and the warm resin. And they would dream together of the past and the future, and the present which seemed to them to be the most unreal and intoxicating of dreams. Sometimes Antoinette would be infected with her brother's jolly childlike humor: they would chase each other and roll about on the grass. And one day he saw her laughing ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... romance. Yet they went on—ten miles, fifteen sometimes, though rarely twenty miles a day. Women fell asleep, babes in arms, jostling on the wagon seats; men almost slept as they walked, ox whip in hand; the cattle slept as they stumbled on, tongues dry and lolling. All the earth seemed strange, unreal. They advanced as though in a dream through some ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... 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
... English houses. (I recommend the study of Mr. Railton's work with a good deal of reservation, however. While it is admirable in respect of textures and fascinating in its color, the values are likely to be most unreal, and the mannerisms are so pronounced and so tiresome that I regard it as much inferior to that of Mr. Pennell, whose architecture always appears, at least, to have been ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... Religion was life to the one and an insurance to the other, and this had been a mystery to us all our young lives, as far as we had ever reflected on the contrast between the practical failure and success of each. Our mother, on the other hand, viewed Clarence's tendencies as part of an unreal, self-deceptive nature, and regretted his intimacy with Miss Newton, who, she said, had fostered 'that kind of thing' in his childhood—made him fancy talk, feeling, and preaching were more than truth and honour—and might lead him to run after Irving, Rowland ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a strange dream ever looked out more wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his uncle's house without the woman who had reigned in it for nearly two years as ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... all the seven years of his married life he had somehow supposed himself to be superior, as a man, to his struggling rivals. He had regarded them with easy toleration, as from a height. And now he saw himself tumbling down among them, humiliated. Everything seemed unreal to him then. The studio and the breakfast-room were solid; the waving trees in Regent's Park were solid; the rich knick-knacks and beautiful furniture and excellent food and fine clothes were all solid enough; but they seemed most disconcertingly ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... here and there, the movement of a lizard under the dry grasses gave a low, crackling rustle. He wondered almost which was the dream and which the truth: that old life that he had once led, and that looked now so far away and so unreal; or this which had been about him for so many years in the camps and the bivouacs, the barracks and the battlefields. He wondered almost which he himself was—an English Peer on whom the title of his line had fallen, or a Corporal of Chasseurs who ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... fitted upon the person that the functions of life are restrained; late hours, filled with excitement and feasting; free draughts of wine, that make one not beastly intoxicated, but only fashionably drunk; and luxurious indolence—are the instruments by which this unreal life pushes its disciples into valetudinarianism and the grave. Along the walks of high life Death goes a mowing—and such harvests as are reaped! Materia medica has been exhausted to find curatives for these physiological devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions, gout, and ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... {12}?" said the old man, shrugging up his shoulders. "How should I know? The church has power, Don Jorge, or at least it had power, to punish for anything, real or unreal; and as it was necessary to punish in order to prove that it had the power of punishing, of what consequence whether it punished for sorcery or ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... exercise of the imaginative faculty that, more than anything, tend to wean the man of genius from actual life, and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at length, the heart ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... but common and cheap products of the earth to which in a few moments or years we return. Spinoza's chief aim is to free us from this sorrow, and to free us from it by THINKING. The emphasis on this word is important. He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we cannot imagine it. His own science, mathematics, affords him examples of what MUST be, although we cannot picture it, and he believes that true consolation lies in the region of that which cannot be ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... from an inspiring force into a repressive force. One learnt as a child to think of it, not as a great moving flood of energy and joy, but as an awful power apart from life, rejoicing in petty restrictions, and mainly concerned with creating an unreal atmosphere of narrow piety, hostile to natural talk and laughter and freedom. God's aid was invoked, in childhood, mostly when one was naughty and disobedient, so that one grew to think of Him as grim, severe, irritable, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... given the glorious gift of imagination, and dull, sordid, lonely San Pasqual, squatting there in the desert sands, cannot rob her of her dreams. Rather has she grown to tolerate the place, for at her will she can summon up a host of unreal people to throng its dreary single street; she can metamorphose the water tank into a sky-scraper, the long red lines of box cars on the sidings into rows of stately mansions. She reads and dreams much, for only between the arrival and departure of trains is she kept busy. She sends for books that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... thirst for knowledge; my passion for holding converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations; any power of forgetting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future, the distant, and the unreal. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me." So little was Macaulay aware that, during the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Gordon's office in Administration moving slowly, one arm hanging loosely by his side, the other clutching the book. The corridor stretched ahead into B Wing with its laboratories flooded with the glow of mid-morning sunshine, bright and unreal. His mind was dazed, his thinking processes stopped in a kind of stunned unbelief. He could not even quit now. An undercurrent of fear ran close to the surface of his confused mind. It was the end of science, the end of all his work. All of the stifling, strangling restrictions ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... might 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 united influence was raised ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... on which epic poetry must always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell his stories very well, but even more because their substance (not, of course, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, The Faery Queene is outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegory requires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is more important, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is a long way ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... nostrils checked his riotous impulses. It was one thing to ride out to meet the foe, it was another matter when the foe was known to be near. A half mile nearer and the acrid taste in the air turned to a defined veil of smoke, intangible and unreal, at first, which merely seemed to hang about the trunks of the mighty trees and make them seem dim and far away. Nearer yet, and the air grew hard to breathe, the smoke was billowing through the foliage of the pines, which sighed wearily and moaned in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... For the time being doubts were forgotten, everything seemed straight and plain. Then, being Esmeralda, the wayward, the undisciplined, the mood of exultation faded, and depression held her once more. The heavenly help and guidance seemed far-off and unreal. She was seized with impetuous necessity to act at once, to act for herself. Pixie's proposals failed to satisfy her ardent desires. To wait weeks or months for the reward she craved was beyond endurance. She must contrive something big, something soon, something that ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... Weird and unreal it seemed to Ethel as she gazed down upon the flare of huge fires built upon the bank, the tiny flash of lanterns and the flicker of torches, where the men swarmed out upon ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... not an enthusiast over cacti. While a cactus in bloom is a marvelous sight, so gorgeous in fact that it is almost unbelievable and unreal, I prefer flowers a little less fervid ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... subject shall I next address you? Elves, goblins, ghosts, real and unreal; dreams, witchcraft, second-sight? Bless me! the field of marvels seems more thronged, as I approach it closer. The spirits I have evoked begin to scare me with their numbers. How on earth shall I ever get them fairly laid? But ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... been said, created a sensation and endless controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel, the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and impartial men such as Dostoevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the type unreal. It is impossible that Bazarov was not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live....—From "An Outline of Russian ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... to the 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. ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... as solid crystal, breathless, clear, And motionless; and, to the gazer's eye, Deeper than ocean, in the immensity Of its vague mountains and unreal sky." ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... moment and think what all that means! Nothing came into the life of the girl but clear, certain truth. The false, the unlovely, the hideous, the deceitful, the unreal, never came in to distort her view while she was a child, and so, when she later learned of the sadder side of life, through her extensive reading, she was well prepared to sympathize with those whose youth was not so well favored as ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... merely to be amused, is doubtless better than no reading at all, it is unquestionably true that over-much reading of fiction, especially at an early age, enervates the mind, weakens the will, makes dreamers instead of thinkers and workers, and fills the imagination with morbid and unreal views of life. Yet the vast consumption of novels is due more to the cheapness and wide diffusion of such works, and the want of wise direction in other fields, than to any original tendency on the part of the young. People ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... dreaming lay in some far-distant region, All the fairer, all the brighter, that its glories were but guessed; And the daily round of duties seemed an unreal, airy legion— Nothing true save Philip's letters and ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... Lemuel in the reception-room, that he recoiled in dismay from the girlish figure that turned timidly from the window to meet him with a face thickly veiled. He was vexed, too; here, he knew from the mystery put on, was one of those cases of feminine trouble, real or unreal, which he most ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... composed herself. The voice could be nothing but sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It would not appear that she mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret as a child, in that wavering between the real and unreal, the world not realised of childhood, would keep, in mingled shyness and awe, uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of vision, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... basin, the wicket in the door, and all that is fragile in my cell flies to pieces, and, with the broken glass from the window, covers the floor. In spite of the feverish haste with which I accomplish this sad task, my heart is not in the work. All this is so unexpected, so unreal, so violent, that it bewilders me. But through the bewilderment the questions, "Is it possible? And why?" continue to force their way. Then I say to myself, "If this man, this soldier, has really killed Ivanoff, it was, perhaps, in a fit of drunkenness; or, perhaps, his gun ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his mind balances the poetical, and by giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has strange ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Cicero expressed what was probably a common feeling, when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed the book, the reasonings seemed to lose their power, and the world of spirits grew pale and unreal. If Ennius could elicit the plaudits of a theatre when he proclaimed that the gods took no part in human affairs, Caesar could assert in the senate, without scandal and almost without dissent, that death was the end of all things. Pliny, perhaps the greatest of all the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance, unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... any investigation of a psychological nature. If, instead of a perception impregnated with memory-images, nothing survived from the past, then we should have "pure" perception, not coloured by anything in the individual's past history, and so a kind of impersonal perception. However unreal it may seem, such a perception is at the root of our knowledge of things and individual accidents are merely grafted on to this impersonal or "pure" perception. Just because philosophers have overlooked it, and because they have failed ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... upon the past. But every other feeling as it rushed upon his was thrown into abeyance by pity, deep respectful pity, for the man who sat before him—already so bruised, going forth with sad blind resignedness to an unreal sorrow, while a real one was close upon him, too far beyond the range of common trial for him ever to have feared it. His own agitation was quelled by a certain awe that comes over us in the presence of a great anguish, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... affectionate intercourse with a beautiful young woman, and carry it on as he might do with a friend of the other sex. In his very heart Greystock despised this woman; he had told himself over and over again that were there no Lucy in the case he would not marry her; that she was affected, unreal,—and, in fact, a liar in every word and look and motion which came from her with premeditation. Judging, not from her own account, but from circumstances as he saw them and such evidence as had reached him, he did not condemn her in reference to the diamonds. He had never for a moment conceived ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... blinked lazily down upon the scene, illumining it without the effect of brilliance. A half moon hung idly in the mists above the cypress trees, and long, languorous shadows streaked the silvered ground with black. In the dark jungle of elder bushes there opened long vistas of silver light, as unreal as the black tops of the far-away trees. In the unreality of the night the earth itself seemed unreal, all things appeared as shadows swimming in a ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... the silent garden, the deepening shadows, the darkening sky. Above her head, now, high in the air were the faintly rustling palm leaves. Behind the palms stretched the wall, high and blankly impassable. She felt strange, unreal.... ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy under Louis XIV affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent growth of Imperial Britain—so unobserved that it presents itself even now as an unreal, a transient thing—a force intrudes into the State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future, has few, if ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Her response was unreal. My well-beloved was I knew in possession of some terrible secret which she dared not betray. Yet why were her lips ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... find upon this bare mountain-top, among cloud solitudes so profound as these, such overpowering evidence of the labor and strength of man, sent thrilling through our breasts a wonder that was akin to awe. It seemed unreal, impossible, that in such a place such work could be accomplished; and the very tangible reality of it made it seem to me one of those prodigies of man's creation which old stories tell of as having been wrought by a league ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... ounce, would contain from 200 to 400 of these perits. Thus, anybody unable to buy a whole tulip, could buy a perit or two, and have what the lawyers call an "undivided interest" in a root. This way of owning shows how utterly unreal was the pretended value. For imagine a small owner attempting to take his own perits and put them in his pocket. He would make a little hole in the tulip-root, would probably kill it, and would certainly obtain a little bit of utterly ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... is far more important than that of the real shapes, for it is they and they alone that we see and that can be reproduced by photography or in pictures. In certain cases there is more truth in the unreal than in the real. To present objects with their exact geometrical forms would be to distort nature and render it unrecognisable. If we imagine a world whose inhabitants could only copy or photograph objects, but were ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... a few minutes, both gazing down on the evening desert. The reflected light, strong and clear, drew abrupt, keen-edged contrasts between the black, triangular shadows of the peaks and the gray of the range. Something elusive, awesome, unreal was in the air about them. The rugged mountain-side with its chaos of riven boulders, its forest of splintered rocky spires, silver cold in the twilight, its impassive bulk looming so large, yet a mere segment in the circling range, was as a day-dream of some ancient Valhalla, clothed ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... down into the transparent depths below; and when my eye, wandering from the bewitching scenery around, fell upon the grotesquely-tattooed form of Kory-Kory, and finally, encountered the pensive gaze of Fayaway, I thought I had been transported to some fairy region, so unreal did everything appear. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... asserting that virtue is not a thing to be taught, why are we making it unreal? For if teaching produces it, the deprivation of teaching prevents it. And yet, as Plato says, a discord and false note on the lyre makes not brother go to war with brother, nor sets friends at variance, nor makes states ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... no brain nutriment. Reading such degenerates the mental powers. Stimulants or excitants are hurtful to the physical system. All fictitious, exciting tales are hurtful to the mental system. We are persuaded it were better if the unreal, fairy stories were excluded from our common school readers and supplanted by something real. Select such literature as is pure. Reading that produces pure thought in the child's mind not only improves his moral state, but furnishes ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... left my room to join Margie, who was waiting for me, I saw two things which caused me to feel that the horrors of the night were not all unreal. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... insist on 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 up at its mother's knee, 'in the nurture and admonition ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of it, the real now became unreal. The mile tramp and the pitching of camp by the edge of the stream seemed like a passage in a nightmare. She cooked the meat, fed the dogs, and unlashed the packs as in a dream, and it was not until Canim began to sketch his next wandering that ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... That detestable decree of 1790 is the ruin of lease-holders. It has thrown the villages into a state of consternation. The nobles reap all the advantage of it. . . Never will redemption be possible. Redemption of unreal claims! Redemption of dues that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... try another plan; I called to him. My voice had a thin weak sound, far away and quite unreal, and there was no answer to it. Hark, though! There was something that might have been a very faint voice ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of to-day for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow. To those who have faith in thy promises, the most extravagant fictions are possible; and the unreal becomes material and tangible. The artist who placed thee upon the rock with an anchor for a leaning post, could never have experienced any of thy vagrant propensities. He should have invested thee with the rainbow of Iris, the winged feet of Mercury, and the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... roaring crowd, with a fantastic dream-sense of a night-sky and a great stone building, dark with age and solemnity, and unreal figures perched on railings and points of vantage, and hurrahing hordes that fused themselves with the procession and became part of its marching. She yearned forwards to vague glories, aware of a poor past. She ran with the crowd. How they cheered her boy! Her boy! She saw him ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... man's soul with sickening finality. And as he realized it, and compared it with the fact of his youth, he groaned. What an infernal fool he had been! What fools all such fellows were who, like him, wasted everything in their determination to make the unreal, real. He did not now desire to be a drivelling repentant; he wanted, God knew he really wanted, a chance to be decent and live; but in order to live he must go on acting a part ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... with the immovability of surprise. So rapid and noiseless had been the apparition of the stragglers that he imagined he must still be dreaming. There could be no danger in this unreal situation; it was all a lie. And he remained in his place without understanding the deputy who was ordering his departure with roughest words. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... puzzled the gentlemen on the stock exchange, but he was himself surprised at the extent of his indifference. As it seemed only to increase, he made an effort to combat it; he tried to interest himself and to take up his old occupations. But they appeared unreal to him; do what he would he somehow could not believe in them. Sometimes he began to fear that there was something the matter with his head; that his brain, perhaps, had softened, and that the end of his strong ...
— The American • Henry James
... have dreamed of wisdom in council, and of providence in law; of gladness of parents, and strength of children, and glory of grey hairs. And at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held them for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable. What have we accomplished with our realities? Is this what has come of our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? this, our mightiest possible, against their impotent ideal? ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... and fostered among thieves, pickpockets, and blackguards, in our back slums and sink gutters. Strip the 20,000 men, women, and children of the word "Gipsy," moving about our country under the artificial and unreal association connected with Gipsy life, so-called, of the "red cloaks," "silver buttons," "pretty little feet," "small hands," "bewitching eyes," "long black hair," in nine cases out of ten in name only, and you, at a glance, see the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... at the lovely room in which she had expected to find compensation in dreams, the setting for an unreal ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But le vin est verse, il faut le boire, and I must cite a couple more instances before ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... as though humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the soul—those ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... of her victims, as though they were in the realms of the impious, she raises horrible spectres and monstrous phantoms and various pains, and whirls the miserable soul about and persecutes it. They rise, and, instead of making light of what is unreal, they fall into the hands of quacks and conjurers, who say, 'Call the crone to expiate, bathe in the sea, and sit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the unreal consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until she was carelessly served against her expressed wishes with mayonnaise. She was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she valued, making faces at Roddy because he had ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... mind, which this kind of continual drawing upon one's own feelings entails, bruised and jarred by the unflinching positiveness which met them at every turn, I gave up the attempt in despair. I did my duty; I performed the deeds required of me; but the words, the unsubstantial, but not unreal, part of our daily lives, of our busy minds,—which must assert itself in some shape or other,—which must find vent in some form, or recoil upon ourselves in moral or physical suffering,—that half of my being remained closed to him, whom ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... sitting opposite to him, saw the old man's hair gleaming like threads of silver in the moonlight. The stillness was scarcely troubled by the sound of the far-off thunder of traffic along the boulevards; the clear night air and everything about us combined to make a strangely unreal scene. ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... imagination may also betray something unreal and morbid—this is a more serious fault and means trouble coming. It generally points to a want of focus in the mind; because self predominates in the affections feeling and interest are self-centred. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... to fit in all his many-levelled experiences—I believe we have the way of approach to which religion to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which—agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense—makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is already a ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... eighteen years old, and at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be commenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvellous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dream-scenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... to arise from this tenacity to life. When they see themselves cut off from every possibility of real existence they struggle after a life which is still within their reach, even if it is only an ideal—that is to say, an unreal one. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... life of this woman bare in his hand. No other human power could ever come near her; he was secure in possession. She had put him from her;—it was better for both, perhaps. Their paths were separate here; for she had some unreal notions of duty, and he had too much to do in the world to clog himself with cares, or to idle an hour in the rare ecstasy of ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... ashamed, for she was conscious that she was offering something unreal to extenuate the fault of her brother—her hopes rather than ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... her? What had been the outcome of that terribly incriminating clue, her name on the garments composing that sloughed chrysalis of yesterday? Was it possible that her comrades of the studio (Heavens! how historically remote and almost unreal seemed that well-hated chapter of existence) had become anxious enough to notify the police of her long absence? In such cases, she believed, something called a general alarm was issued—a description of the absentee was read to every member of the metropolitan police ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... false witness; forced her to listen with mingled shame and admiration to narrow criticism of his faults, from natures so palpably inferior to his own that her moral sense was confused and shaken; gave her two distinct lives, but so unreal and feverish that, with a recklessness equal to his own, she was at last ready to merge them both into his. For the first time in his life Mr. Hamlin found himself bored at the beginning of an affair, actually hesitated, and suddenly disappeared ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... why we heard nothing but good spoken of the dead, while of the living it is never without some exception. It should be answered, because from the former we have nothing any more to fear, while the latter may still, here or there, fall in our way. So unreal is our anxiety to preserve the memory of others—generally no more than a mere selfish amusement; and the real, holy, earnest feeling would be what should prompt us to be more diligent and assiduous in our attentions toward those who still are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... killed my old horse "Jack," one coolie, and very nearly extinguished me rendering it imperative that I should seek a change of climate in England. And what a dream-like change it is!—past events appear unreal, and the last few years seem to have escaped from the connecting chain of former life. Scarcely can I believe in the bygone days of glorious freedom, when I wandered through that beautiful country, unfettered by the laws or customs ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... distinguished national service. Such, however, is no longer the case; although their hatred is not one whit diminished, or their depredations less frequent than of old, they mask them under the garb of a feigned neutrality and an unreal friendship. Thus they protest, in the face of the most damning proofs to the contrary, their innocence of all connivance with the Herzegovinian rebels. Corpses of those who have been recognised as accredited leaders they declare to be Uskoks, proscribed brigands, whom it ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... to have no more than a nightmare vision of the city—an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that haunted him for long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like flight of the pure child-mind to whom the unreal ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... always from the garden of that old place, always trying with loving, merry efforts to reach Philip from out of it—always holding to him the red-ribboned key. Like a wary hunter the big boy lay—knowing it unreal, yet living it keenly—and watched his chance. As the little figure glided close to him he put out his hand suddenly, swiftly for the key—he was awake. As always, the dream was gone; the little ghost was baffled again; the two worlds might ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... all these practical details the whole adventure seemed curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been concerned as witness, and ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that protection. It was a delusion: many houses in London and Paris undertook to introduce silken goods into this country at half the duty. The revenue and the trade were robbed by the smuggler; and the manufacturer was deluded by an unreal protection. With respect to silks, he proposed, therefore, to adopt a new principle. The general rule would be, enumerating each article of silk manufacture, to levy a duty of so much per pound, giving an option to the custom-house officers of levying for every L100 value of silk, a duty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... his natural surroundings—at the mouth of his cave in which the Woman watched and exulted in his blows, enclosed by the primeval forest and beside the ashes of his fire. There could be nothing strange or unreal about this scene to Beatrice. It was more true than any soft vista of a far-away city could possibly be. It was life itself,—man battling for his home and his woman against the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... from the supposed damnation of the heathen is unreal. We may stir up a quasi enthusiasm; we may be moved for the time; but we are not by any means moved to the level of the fate which we deplore. If we really believed it, as so many profess, we would spend our last dollar, and make all but superhuman efforts, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... 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 ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... does the very spirit of immortality, an utter incapacity to change. As the act was, as the word had been spoken, so would act and word be for ever and for ever. And now this undying thing must be caged and cast about with the semblance of death and clouded over with the shadow of an unreal forgetfulness. Oh, it was bitter, very bitter! What would it be now to go away, quite away from him, and know him married to her own sister, the other woman with a prior right? What would it be to think of Bessie's sweetness slowly ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... in common life; this was one of them. The little room with its waxed, inlaid floor, the light falling bloodily in at the crimson curtains and throwing unreal shadows upon the spent fire, the disordered furniture, the unmade bed; and there were the two actors, suffering in their little sphere what only seems more suffering in prisons and upon scaffolds, and playing with each other's ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... she reached the street, and for a few blocks walked along scarcely conscious of the direction she was taking. Her mind was in turmoil. The night seemed to have been one of harrowing hallucination; it seemed as though it were utterly unreal, like one dreaming that one is dreaming. And then, suddenly, she looked at her watch, and the straight little shoulders squared resolutely back. The hallucination, if she chose to call it that, was not yet over! It was twenty minutes of one, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... fashion to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran sluggishly, as in 'The Battle of Life,' for example, which has always seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream of 'The Carol,' which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in 'The Chimes,' runs thinner in 'The Haunted Man,' and in 'The Battle of Life' is lees and mud. 'Nickleby,' again, is a young man's book, and as full ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... intensity, casting inky shadows of the spars and cordage across the deck, making the light in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood swept over the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossy foliage and broken facade—it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, palpable waves across the water, accompanied by the owl's fluctuating cry. The sense of imminence increased, of a genius loci unguessed and troublous, vaguely ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... after her, and five shillings—a large sum for him—found its way from his kind hand to hers. Now the common ending might have come; now starvation, the slow, unwilling, recourse to more shame and deeper vice; then the forced hilarity, the unreal smile, which in so many of these poor creatures hides a canker at the heart; the gradual degradation—lower still and lower—oblivion for a moment sought in the bottle—a life of sin and death ended in a hospital. The will of Providence turned the frolic of three voluptuaries ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the widow, "have I not told you of our loving Father in Heaven? Have I not told you that the gods of the heathen are unreal beings which the vain imaginings of fools have endowed with all the weaknesses and crimes of humanity? Can you not understand how silly it is to pray to stones? What power can reside in these frail figures of brass ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... concerning the river and the places along the shores abound, of course; and into this general background is woven the tale of a Prince of Orange and a little maiden called the Anglore, two of the curiously half-real, half-unreal beings that Mistral seems to love to create. The Prince comes on board the fleet, intending to see Orange and Provence; some day he is to be King of Holland, but has already sickened of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Dr. Burrow calls the subjective phase. Now we understand why the patient in an acute alcoholic hallucinosis almost invariably hears voices making homosexual accusations. The unreality complex is translated into sexual terms and he is accused of unreal love. I have been struck in dream analysis by the almost constant coincidence in dreams of Mutterleib symbols in the same dream that on analysis proved to be homosexual in principle. I can quote one dream that demonstrates dramatically every point which ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... dying beliefs are unreal. When divine Science is universally understood, they will have no power over man, for man is immortal and lives ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... her style, and privileged to refuse eligible suitors! Some other self must have met Rupert Ashley in the little house at Southsea and promised to become his wife! From the standpoint of the present it seemed to her as if an unreal life had ended in an unreal romance that was bringing to her, within a day or two, an unreal hero. She was forced again face to face with that fact that the man who was coming to marry her was, for all practical knowledge ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... quality of love; she felt rather towards them as a patient feels towards the doctors and nurses to whose ministrations he owes his return of health and the removal of the fever which, while it lasted, came between himself and the whole world, making all things strange and unreal. And then, just for a moment, a little shudder passed over her as she thought of the sharp-edged, shining streets of Paris through which she had passed with downcast, averted eyes that morning, going ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... strive to gratify him in all his whims! Then she thought of Adelaide Houghton and the letter; and she thought also of those subsequent visits to Berkeley Square. But still she did not in the least believe that he cared for Adelaide Houghton. It was impossible that he should like a painted, unreal, helmeted creature, who smelt of oils, and was never unaffected for a moment. At any rate she would never, never throw Adelaide Houghton in his teeth. If she had been imprudent, so had he; and she would teach him how small errors ought ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... passed—what wonders wrought Along the Mississippi's mighty stream! The changes time's transforming wand hath brought Seem but the unreal visions of a dream! Where stretched in vast expanse to western sea The pathless forest and the trackless plain, Great States and teeming millions soon should be, And orchards fair and fields of waving grain And every art of peace through ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... genuine interest in them and their affairs, and to feel quite as though one had known many of them personally for years, and been distinctly the better, too, for that knowledge. Such boys stand at the antipodes alike of the unreal abstractions of an effeminate sentimentalism—the paragons who prate platitudes and die young—and of the morbid specimens of youthful infamy only too frequently paraded by the equally unreal sensationalism of to-day to meet the ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... past adventures, the unreal wonder of their present situation, the bewildering possibilities and impossibilities of their future plans—all these conspired to banish sleep until long past midnight. It was not until, speeding due north with the unswerving obedience ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... designs, growing every moment more confused, more complicated, more hideous and terrible. Unable to bear longer the distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens, his eyes, and dissolves the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again unconsciously into another dream-land where another unreal inferno is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... offered three goals and shot one. The cheering of the St. Moritzers sounded in his ears as if it were a long way off. He saw the disappointed, friendly grin of little Mavorovitch as the last whistle settled the match at five goals to four against Davos, but everything seemed cloudy and unreal. He heard ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... Harvey. It was a rude shock to her to find herself thus suspected; though perhaps it was one which she needed. She had never, since one first trouble ten years ago, known any real grief; and had therefore had all the more time to make a luxury of unreal ones. She was treated by the simple folk around her as all but inspired; and being possessed of real powers as miraculous in her own eyes as those which were imputed to her were in theirs (for what are real spiritual experiences but daily miracles?) she was just in that temper ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... because it still left the sensible unaccounted for. Not only did it fail to tell us whence came these sensations which, however transitory and unreal, constantly saluted our consciousness and largely constituted our Experience; it failed also to show us how they could be brought into relation with ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... ignes fatui, eternally diverging from the right line of sober discretion, sparkle with step-bewitching blaze in the idly-gazing eyes of the poor heedless Bard, till, pop, "he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again." God grant this may be an unreal picture with respect to me! but should it not, I have very little dependence on mankind. I will close my letter with this tribute my heart bids me pay you—the many ties of acquaintance and friendship which I have, or think I have in life, I have ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... fancied they were gaining ground in her good graces, and that this unwonted gaiety was the result of her being pleased with them. Her mother watched her with alarm and surprise; her cheek was flushed, her eye bright, her smile beaming on all around her. Was this real or unreal? Could one so fair and good be without heart, and indifferent to the unworthiness of him to whom she had given ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... pores as if to purge away every haunting association, or by night, when the mantle of darkness hung tenderly above it, and seemed to collect the dear remembrances again,—that his fancy by degrees grew morbid, and its pictures unreal. "It is impossible," he one day thought to himself, "that she should have lived in that room so long, sat in that window, dreamed on that couch, reflected herself in that mirror, breathed that air, without somehow detaching invisible fibres of her being, delicate films of herself, that ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... upon her hips, refusing to seat herself at table, she extolled the beauty Of the world as it existed for her: not the beauty wherein human beings have no hand, which the townsman makes such an ado about with his unreal ecstasies.-mountains, lofty and bare, wild seas-but the quiet unaffected loveliness of the level champaign, finding its charm in the regularity of the long furrow and the sweetly-flowing stream—the naked champaign ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... to pay a final tribute. The burial service was the same as he himself had always used, only read now by his successor, and the Bishop of the Diocese. To his friends and beloved people it all seemed passing strange if not unreal. Frail beings that we are, we had never sensed more than a vague possibility that his ministry would one day terminate. It was not past human knowing, of course, but it was beyond the grasp of human imagining that the day would come when Frank Nelson would ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... but at that moment anything warmer or brighter would have been unreal and utterly repellent to me. I hardly took in the meaning of his words, but it was as if a hand had been stretched out to me, struggling in the deep mire, by one who himself felt solid ground beneath him. Where he ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... deformed girl on crutches should be smiling as gaily as though the wedding were her own, and that yellow, wrinkled old women should wilfully come to remind themselves of their long-dead youth. His whole world seemed suddenly desolate and unreal, and it was only borne in upon him slowly that there was no need now for his journey to London in search of Poppy, and that henceforth her movements could possess no interest for him. He ranged himself quietly with the bystanders and, not without a ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... matter, and, in a more general way, metaphysical problems. Philosophy has, of course, never been completely separated from science; but in times past many physicists dissociated themselves from studies which they looked upon as unreal word-squabbles, and sometimes not unreasonably abstained from joining in discussions which seemed to them idle and of rather puerile subtlety. They had seen the ruin of most of the systems built up a priori by daring philosophers, and deemed it more prudent ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare |
