"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible difference?" She forced herself to think tenderly of Arthur; but during the last few months the image of Arthur had receded an immeasurable distance from her life. His remoteness and his unreality distressed her; but try as she would, she could not recall him from the gauzy fabric of dreams to the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... house, a portly, worthy, unimaginative figure, humming "Silver Threads among the Gold." He casually considered, "Might call up Paul." Then he remembered. He saw Paul in a jailbird's uniform, but while he agonized he didn't believe the tale. It was part of the unreality of this ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... sank down upon the breech of the nearest gun, mopped the blood and perspiration from my 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, or that those maimed and disfigured forms lying ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... houses are so ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in upon himself. In his own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... found that that bit of conversation with Mrs. Haverford took on the unreality of the rest of that twenty-four hours. But one part of it stood out real and hopelessly true. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... surprisingly handsome and brave and unselfish and everything that they should be; and they stand out like heroes against the mob of cowardly little Taurians in the Herdsman's speech. Yet they have none of the unreality that is usual in such figures. The shadow of madness and guilt hanging over Orestes makes a difference. At his first entrance, when danger is still far off, he is a mass of broken nerves; he depends ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... the night shadows a nymph seemed to be floating toward him. For a moment he had a sense of unreality, that the flow and rhythm of her movement were born of the imagination. But almost at once he knew that this was June in ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... put to our positive moralists—these questions they have themselves suggested, and the grotesque unreality of this vague optimism will be at once apparent. Never was vagary of mediaeval faith so groundless as this. The Earthly Paradise that the mediaeval world believed in was not more mythical than the Earthly Paradise believed in by our exact thinkers now; and George Eliot might just as well ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... disclosed that all these were in reality as one person who had unceasingly plotted to my destruction, and William Beveledge Greyson would stand revealed in the guise of a malevolent vampire. Truly that development has at this moment an appearance of unreality, and worthy even of pooh-pooh, but thus is the warning spread by your own printed papers and the records of your Halls of Justice, and it would be an unseemly presumption for one of my immature experience to ignore the outstretched ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... could he call Les Miserables the greatest novel of France, he the writer of Anna Karenina—the antipodes of that windy apotheosis of vapid humanitarianism, the characteristic trait of Hugo's epic of pity and unreality. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 few minutes with ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... 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 talk ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... possibilities to other earnest searchers after truth. Not until this new field has been faithfully examined and explored and proved to be sterile, shall I cease to recommend it to the attention of all who would fain see reason to believe that the Ethical Ideal is no Unreality, but rather the innermost Reality of the real universe itself. I speak only to those who have souls to hear and to respond; let the rest listen to Dr. Royce, and be dupes of his "professional warning." But ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... professor's thin, sneering face, the hideous anger of the cripple, the blow, the dead body, Rutherford's arrest. And when her brain was sick, it would turn for relief to the noble story of Hugh's self-sacrifice, only to be balked by a sense of unreality. What the detective had told, briefly and dryly, lived in her mind convincingly; but Hugh's romance, that had glowed on his tongue, now lay lifeless on her fancy. Back her mind would go to the bookshop, the gibing professor, the ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... over whom there had come a new and strange sense of unreality as he stood and listened to cold-blooded murder being thus calmly, coolly planned, as though it were some afternoon's pleasure trip that was being arranged, so that he hardly knew whether he did, in fact, hear this smooth, low, ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... that it had to be destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality, peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. And so the Hegelian statement through ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... A sense of unreality seized her. It could not be deadly earnest, she thought. It was so exactly like some movie thrill, planned carefully in advance, rehearsed perhaps under the critical eye of the director, and done now with the camera man turning calmly the little crank and counting ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale, he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external things which a position of strange unreality will ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 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 but pleasure ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... flushed with pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan Women at this moment of the ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... stage scene, we say, without a hint of the stage's unreality; for the side and rear fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, call for more careful management than the front and are often charmingly treated. (Page 174.) (See, for an example of a side fence ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... good-night," 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 ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... at one time and in one place not persisting at another time and in another place is not observed to be invariably accompanied by falsehood, and hence mere non-persistence of this kind does not constitute a reason for unreality. To say, on the other hand, that what is is real because it persists, is to prove what is proved already, and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... glowing screen was clear and finely detailed. It was, Bart thought, as though one were looking through a window into the Nipe's nest itself. Only the tremendous depth of focus of the lens which caught the picture gave the illusion a sense of unreality. Everything—background and foreground alike—was ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner's bill. And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly. Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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 make ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... enveloped us. And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling together. He heard me and paused. Then we walked toward one another whistling and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the ship—the Gilded Youth whose many millions had made him shimmer. He was not shimmering there on the sloppy hillside. He was ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... 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 Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... an embarkation camp, not to a pier. There passed several days of restlessness and unreality ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... 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 reality wherever ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... sub-group of the latter, belongs any particular people, tribe, or man. This will appear hazy and incomprehensible to the many who know nothing of ethnic varieties of nerve-aura, and disbelieve in any "inner-man" theory, scientific but to the few. The whole question hangs upon the reality or unreality of the existence of this inner-man whom clairvoyance has discovered, and whose odyle or nerve-emanations Von Reichenbach proves. If one admits such a presence and realizes intuitionally that being closer related to the one invisible Reality, the inner type must be still more pronounced ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... did 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
... thought surprised at 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 book, where I meet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. We meet on almost every page with lines ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant."[457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered familiar to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... new turn revealing untold wonders and giving an added stimulus to the leader's lively imagination. And indeed the forest was a place in which anyone might expect to meet a fairy or a goblin behind every tree. The happy sense of unreality lent by the uncertainty of distances, the airy unsubstantial appearance of the leaf-grown earth; the dazzling splashes of golden light on the green, the sudden appearance of open glades choked with blossoms; and through all the ringing harmony of a hundred songsters combined to ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... substance to that which as principle has no existence. So long as this negative action of thought continues so long will it produce its natural effect; whether in the individual or in the mass. The experience is perfectly real while it lasts. Its unreality consists in the fact that there was never any real need for it; and the more we grasp the truth of the all-embracingness of the ONE Good, both as Cause and as Effect, on all planes, the more the experience of its opposite will cease to have ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... 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 dance ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... ghost among them; for he himself was dead, that is, his former self, which he recognized as himself, had passed away, as they were. In the study everything looked as formerly, yet with a sort of unreality, as if it would dissolve and vanish on being touched; and, indeed, it partly proved so; for over the Doctor's chair seemed still to hang the great spider, but on looking closer at it, and finally touching ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for each other, the emotion that most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each knew that the other had seen ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... window-panes, which look forth upon one of the quietest streets in a New England town. After a time, too, the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike bedtime to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies that the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Halifax, and immediately found ourselves in the whirl of intercolonial travel. Why people should travel here, or why they should be excited about it, we could not see; we could not overcome a feeling of the unreality of the whole thing; but yet we humbly knew that we had no right to be otherwise than awed by the extraordinary intercolonial railway enterprise and by the new life which it is infusing into the Provinces. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... impossible 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 ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... the recollection of proper names, or of verbs or of numbers or merely of dates, in consequence of an accident. The localization of all the particles of thought has been proved nowadays; what then would there be surprising in the fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations should be ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... his feeling of unreality. The problem, the real problem, he told himself, was how to stop ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... hour, with its smooth floor of sand, the pillared roof overhead, and the prevalent illumination of the lamps, wore an air of unreality, like a deserted theatre or a public garden at midnight. A man looked about him for the statues and tables. Not the least air of wind was stirring among the palms, and the silence was emphasised by the continuous clamour of the surf from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... small table and writing with a ghoul-like avidity that made my flesh creep, were each and all as fixed an element in the remarkable scene before me as the splendor of the surroundings which made their presence such a nightmare of discord and unreality. ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression of the unreality of the material universe,—of Buddhist illusion. Even these adamantine records of death, rising on every side to challenge him,—even these might recombine their particles before his very eyes,—might shiver into mist and float down to ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... 'was a blank' at twenty or thereabouts, and of whose dark imaginings,' as Macaulay says, the waste was prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists', mystics and sceptics to whom everything is a 'sham,' an 'unreality'; Who tell us that the world stands in need of a great 'prophet,' a seer,' a 'true prophet', a large soul,' a god-like soul,'*—who shall dive into 'the depths of the human consciousness,' and whose 'utterances' shall rouse the human mind from the 'cheats ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... characterizations. And in general his sculptural sense, his self-control, his perfect power of expressing what he deemed worth expressing, are really what are noteworthy in his pictures, far more than their monotonous coloration and the coldness and unreality of the pictures themselves, considered as moving, real, or significant compositions. In admiration of these it is impossible for us nowadays to go as far as even the romanticist, though extremely catholic, Gautier. They leave ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... but said nothing for the moment, exerting himself the while in trying to fan the flickering flame into a stronger glow, and with such success that the horrible feeling of unreality began to pass away, with its accompanying confusion, and Dallas ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... a burlesque Arabian Night—it was all a dream—a fairy fortune that, like fairy gold, would change to dull slate stones at light of day. She would never be Lady Catheron, never be mistress of this glittering Aladdin's Palace. It grew upon her day after day, this feeling of vagueness, of unreality. She was just adrift upon a shining river, and one of these days she would go stranded ashore on hidden quicksands and foul ground. Something would happen. The days went by like dreams—it was the middle of September. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... interest and picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers. But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... 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, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her possession and portion of her natural inalienable heritage—filled her with confident security and with a restful, wondering calm. So that the shame publicly put on her to shed its bitterness, her horror of the watching crowd departed, fading out into unreality. Though still shaken, still quivering inwardly from the ordeal of the past hour, she already viewed that shame and horror as but accidents to be lived down and disregarded, by no means as essential elements in the adventurous and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... into four chapters: (i) Agama (scripture), (2) Vaitathya (unreality), (3) Advaita (unity), (4) Alatas'anti (the extinction of the burning coal). The first chapter is more in the way of explaining the Ma@n@dukya Upani@sad by virtue of which the entire work is known as Ma@n@dukyakarika. The second, third, and fourth chapters are the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... him so. I mean to make no concessions to Tibby. If Tibby wants to live with me, he must lump me. I mean to love YOU more than ever. Yes, I do. You and I have built up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There's no veil of mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers are over tangible things—money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven will work ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... knelt there without unreality, with the river running swift behind us; for we knelt where a holy child had once knelt before a radiant vision, and with even more reason; for even if the one, as some say, had been an hallucination, were those sick folk an hallucination? Was Pierre de Rudder's mended leg an hallucination, or ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... of all this was not wholly depressing. Enigmatic, disdainful, with a touch of melancholy and a world of gaiety and courage, Berenice heard at times behind joy the hollow echo of unreality. Here was a ticklish business, this living. For want of light and air the finest flowers might die. Her mother's error was not so inexplicable now. By it had she not, after all, preserved herself and her family to a certain phase ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... are out of the current of these things, in the office or the store, or in the field of industry and business, announcements from the great laboratories of the world seldom reach us, and when they do, they have an impractical sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if in a speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis, not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief words can alter the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... annihilate Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses: which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the actual, living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... at the habitation of him—the undoubted perpetrator of the deadly deeds—for whom they had sought so long. The peaceful aspect of their moonlit surroundings suddenly smote the minds of all with a strange sense of unreality, as full realization of the sinister import of their errand came home to them. In uncanny telepathy with their disturbed feelings sounded the owl's derisive hooting, and the persistent mocking raillery ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... lizards. It all seemed a trifle odd and uncanny. It was as if among the several phenomena, objective and subjective, that made the sum total of the incident there had been an uncertain element which had diffused its dubious character over all—had leavened the whole mass with unreality. I did ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of invisibility. The interior of the ship faded to its gruesome green darkness. My senses reeled as the current surged through me. Lashed in my chair, I sat straining my adjusting eyes, straining my hearing to cope with this gruesome unreality. And my heart was pounding. Would Jetta and I succeed? Or was our love—unspoken love, born of a glance and the pressure of our hands in that moonlit Nareda garden—was our love star-crossed, foredoomed to tragedy? A few ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... 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 with her lover, and was anticipating, not a retreat, but an advance? And she thought, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... room with an indefinable air of boredom. He rose from his seat and began to pace up and down. The whole situation had a suggestion of unreality. In pleading with Helen for a chance to talk to Hilmer he had a sense of crossing swords with some intangible and sinister shadow; his wife seemed suddenly to have arrived at a state toward which she had been traveling all these last uncertain ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... be noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... her immanent God, and subject to rigid demonstration. Where historical events externalized only the evil motives of the carnal mind, he must contrive to omit them entirely, or else present them as unreality, the result of "bad thoughts" and forgetfulness of God. In other words, only as he assumed to be the channel through which God spoke to her could he hope for success. To impart to her a knowledge of both good and evil was, at least at present, impossible. To force it upon ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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; yet the system, if known to none of them, seems to ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... we proceeded in the light of a full moon. It needed only this to give to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. Long since I had lost all sense of direction. It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but it held to no level. At times, concealed by walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, like woodchucks, dived into earthen burrows. For a long distance we crawled, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... whole, had not enjoyed last night's dance at the Court. Barbara had been there, and she had gone home with her and Monkton after it, and on waking this morning a sense of unreality, of dissatisfaction, is all that comes to her. No pleasant flavor is on her mental palate; there is only a vague feeling of failure and a dislike to looking into things—to ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Arthur and Uncle John accepted his explanation unquestioningly. Nevertheless, in the embarrassing dilemma in which Jones would presently be involved, the story would be sure to bear the stamp of unreality to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... shafts before him stretched the pillared aisles of Ashley Church! He was riding as in a dream, and when a figure suddenly slipped across his pathway from a column-like tree trunk, he woke with the disturbance and sense of unreality of a dream. For he saw Lady ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... venture to say that, while St Paul's tone about the Lord of Calvary is of course immeasurably different in the highest respects from what mine might be had I to speak of the makers of European history of 1866, it is in one respect just the same. It is as completely free from the tone of legend unreality, uncertainty. With the same entire consciousness of matter of fact with which I might write of the statesmen or generals of my early manhood, he writes of One who, in his early manhood, overcame death by death, and "shewed Himself ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... interwoven with the sentimental interest of the plot itself that readers inevitably "hug their delusions!" But I think that this danger need not be contemplated seriously. The Historical Novel exists primarily as Fiction, and, even though in our waking moments we may be persuaded of the unreality of that "dream" which a Scott or a Dumas has produced for us, we shall still be able to place ourselves again and again under the spell of their delightful influence. Moreover, while admitting Dumas' carelessness of exact detail, it would hardly be contended by the most sceptical that his works ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... who at the first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came along with the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as she drew nearer paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose behind the quiet expression of her open countenance, and a sort of unreality in her splendor betrayed itself for which Ann Veronica could not recall the right word—a word, half understood, that lurked and hid in her mind, the word "meretricious." Behind this woman and a ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... boy of that age, the things that stood out were not, of necessity, the right things and any unreality that it might have had was due perhaps to his fastening on the incidental, fantastic things that a small child notices, always more vividly than a grown person. In the very first instant of Stephen's speaking to the man with the muffler it was Dicky the Fool's open ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... CHAMBERLAIN should have been on view. But JOSEPH not yet come up out of Egypt. Had he been here, and House a little fuller, the new chapter would have gone off capitally. As things turned out, there was a fatal unreality in situation, which House quick to realise. Pretty to see Members, as BIRRELL struggled with his notes, involuntarily sniffing, as if they recognised familiar whiff ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... Fogarty's Fairy, and his Sorcerer, whenever he wishes to bring about a sudden and otherwise inexplicable transition from one mental attitude to another, and entirely opposite. But for the earnestness of the actors, this reductio ad Fairydum would have imparted an air of unreality to the characters and incidents which does not belong to them. The plot is a model of neat construction; and, to everyone at all in doubt as to where to pass an agreeable evening, I say, "Go to the Garrick Theatre." By the way, a Correspondent ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... some mocking illusion, like some phantom of unreality that jeered at him, it seemed now, he had lived for a few short weeks in a dreamland of wondrous happiness, a happiness that all his own great wealth had never been able to bring him, a happiness that no wealth could ever buy—the joy ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home, his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated, destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... matters worse these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams. One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The ego which must gauge itself by external ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... 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
... Chou Nu served merely to stress the sense of unreality: for, obviously, only the heroine of a true fairy tale could have broken from a chrysalis stage of sordid Soho to the brilliant butterfly existence of a Russian princess domiciled in the most aristocratic quarter of London and attended by a ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the long, cool church, its narrow high windows 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
... way. A very subtle and sweet warmth 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 ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... the senses like blows that wasted no breath in subtler argument! Naked shoulders gleamed at every turn beneath their diamonds! Silk stockings bared their sheen at each new rompish step! And through the dizzy mystery of it all—the haze, the maze, the vague, audacious unreality,—grimly conventional, blatantly tangible white shirt-fronts surrounded by great black blots of men went slapping by—each with its share of fairyland in ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... 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 ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... on the window-sill and her chin on her hand. The moonlight caught her cheek where she had just renewed the powder, caught her fair crinkly hair; it caught the plush of the furniture, and his own khaki, giving them all a touch of unreality. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... in the 'monster' whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the 'born devil,' or in the more monstrous ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... watch in one hand, but his gaze, curiously ironical, followed the direction of Charles's irresolute eyes, and the five minutes had not elapsed before he realized—and a touch of triumph mingled with his immense contempt of the man and his pompous unreality—that Charles's ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... firm on its feet, with the world-rocks under it, and looking free towards all the winds and all the stars. He goes about suppressing platitudes, ripping off futilities, turning deceptions inside out. The realm of Disorder, which is Unveracity, Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy. Honest soul, and he seemed to himself such a stupid fellow often; no tongue-learning at all; little capable to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He cannot ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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. But just because Falstaff was ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... about at the shelves of books, mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and children, but never meant for a man with a man's ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone. Then the sense of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe that Mattie stood there for ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... he would have a large family of brothers and sisters, and kill them all by a plague. But, besides the want of further incident, this idea did not seem to him sufficiently sad. Either from its unreality, or from their better faith, the idea of death does not possess the same gloom for the young that it does for those older minds that have a juster sense of the value of human life, and are, perhaps, more heavily bound in the chains ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The series of fourteen speeches delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality—of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere—is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the Philippics. In ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Trenchard was not with us, as he was sent about midday with some sanitars to bury the dead in a wood five miles from M——. That must have been, in many ways, the most terrible day of his life and during it, for the first time, he was to know that unreality that comes to every one, sooner or later, at the war. It is an unreality that is the more terrible because it selects from reality details that cannot be denied, selects them without transformation, saying to his ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... 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 it at the time. No doubt ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... library table in East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled her marrow and curdled ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the effect which a sudden shock is apt to have, of inducing a sense of curious unreality. I neither read nor slept, nor even thought coherently. I was just aware of disaster and fear. I was alone in my compartment. Sometimes we passed through great, silent, deserted stations, or stopped outside a junction for an express to ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lovers moved without words—two black figures themselves, arms together, leaning forward, staring with burning hearts and tranquil faces out of a dream, as if they did not exist, had never existed; as if in the snow and night they had become an unreality, walking deeper into mists—yet never quite vanishing but growing only more unreal. Snow and two lovers walking together with the world like a dream over their heads, with life lingering in their eyes like a delicately absent-minded guest—the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Mina last night. I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do, and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... believed—those who trust in him more than that—who believe without the sight of the eyes, without the hearing of the ears. They are blessed to whom a wonder is not a fable, to whom a mystery is not a mockery, to whom a glory is not an unreality—who are content to ask, "Is it like Him?" It is a dull-hearted, unchildlike people that will be always putting God in mind of his promises. Those promises are good to reveal what God is; if they think them good as binding God, let them have it so for the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... his memory leapt these things and took him back to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to comprehend ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells |
