"Dreamlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plunges from a bridge's parapet, As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled; Another wades in slow with purpose set 10 Until the waters are above him furled; Another in a boat with dreamlike motion Glides drifting down into the desert ocean, To starve or sink from out ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... beauty of it is more theatrical than the beauty of Doughoregan Manor; for although the latter is the older of the two, the former is not only spectacular by reason of its spaciousness, the delicacy of its architectural details, and the splendor of its dreamlike terraced gardens, but also for a look of beautiful, dignified, yet somehow tragic age—a look which makes one think of a wonderful old lady; a belle of the days of minuets and powdered wigs and patches; a woman no less wonderful in her declining years ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... in the deep blue night where the strange light of gems plays over coral, shells and moving creatures of dreamlike form, till day revealed ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... restless multitudes for ever 2080 Around the base of that great Altar flow, As on some mountain-islet burst and shiver Atlantic waves; and solemnly and slow As the wind bore that tumult to and fro, To feel the dreamlike music, which did swim 2085 Like beams through floating clouds on waves below Falling in pauses, from that Altar dim, As silver-sounding tongues breathed an ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was forty-six when Louis Fourteenth died. The Assembly, as one man, spontaneously rose, and did reverence to the Eldest of the World; old Jean is to take seance among them, honourably, with covered head. He gazes feebly there, with his old eyes, on that new wonder-scene; dreamlike to him, and uncertain, wavering amid fragments of old memories and dreams. For Time is all growing unsubstantial, dreamlike; Jean's eyes and mind are weary, and about to close,—and open on a far other wonder-scene, which shall be real. Patriot Subscription, Royal Pension was ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to a Florentine used to the mellow unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of exquisite amusements, (Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... has taken the place of the good fairies of former times, had gratified M. Wilkie's every longing in a single night. Without any period of transition, dreamlike as it were, he had passed from what he called "straitened circumstances" to the splendid enjoyment of a princely fortune. Madame d'Argeles's renunciation had been so correctly drawn up, that as soon as he presented his claims and displayed his credentials he was placed in possession ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... a town in that valley, sturdy houses of logs behind a stockade. He had seen towns vaguely like it before, yet it had a dreamlike quality as if it were not as ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... to thee, Through her, the secret of all happiness. Her task was hard; she loved thee, it may be, Yet must she break thy heart, so fate decreed. She knew the world, she taught it unto thee, Another reaps the fruit of her misdeed. Pity her! dreamlike did her love disperse, She saw thy wound—nor could thy pain remove. All was not falsehood in those tears of hers— Pity her, though ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... his palette of straw. The scene in the strange building already seemed dreamlike, but the fear was still there. "I couldn't remember," he said softly. "I couldn't remember who I was nor why I had gone to that ... that place. And when I remembered, ...
— Viewpoint • Gordon Randall Garrett
... finally looked about it seemed to him that he had lived a long time and was very old. Gray lay motionless where he had fallen, and his body was twisted into a shockingly unnatural posture. He was bleeding. Allie Briskow was bending over him. Other dim, dreamlike figures were swarming out of the gloom and into the radiance of the derrick lights; there was a far-away clamor of shouting voices. Buddy Briskow felt ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... for. So of her curled fronts: Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular. Occasionally, indeed, Mrs. Glegg wore one of her third-best fronts on a week-day visit, but not at a sister's house; especially not at Mrs. Tulliver's, who, since her marriage, had hurt her ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... dreamed of a sinister mark on a face that she had never before seen—a face going into bronzed young manhood with quick brown eyes looking eagerly at her. And before her wondering look it faded, dreamlike, into a soft mist, and where it had been, a man lay, lifting himself on one arm from the ground—his sleeve tattered, his collar torn, his eyes half-living, half-dead, his hair clotted, his lips stiffened ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed returned to her. She adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and then went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more personal packing. She found Peters exercising all that indecisive helplessness which is characteristic of ladies' maids the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... It seemed dreamlike. A phantasmagoria of blows and staggering steps. A nightmare with only the horrible vision of this goggled helmet always before ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... through the warm September landscape: dreamlike the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes—not a soul to meet us at the train—where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's—" ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... the wild bees made A dreamlike murmuring in the shade, And on me the warm-fingered hours Pressed with the drowsy ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale, in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that nocturnal landscape—a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on earth—no ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sportive imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... aneath us and the coming tide, I saw, or thought I saw—for the tale is so dreamlike that the whole might pass for a vision of the night,—I saw the form of a man; his plaid was grey, his face was grey; and his hair, which hung low down till it nearly came to the middle of his back, was as white as the white sea-foam. ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... It seemed dreamlike, that such a scene as her imagination, pictured was really passing in the next room, where all was so quiet save for the calm voice talking at the telephone, and Angela could not help listening anxiously, hoping ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in the chair he had vacated. She had never felt quite like this before in her life. Everything seemed dreamlike. The splashing of water in the bathroom came faintly to her, and she realized that she had been on the point of falling asleep again. She got up and opened the window, and once more the air acted as a restorative. She watched the activities of the street with a distant interest. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... sensual and less wealthy, he might have sought to become the founder of a new religion. As it was, his energies were checked by his pleasures. Besides, however, the vague love of this moral sway (vanity so dear to sages!) he was influenced by a singular and dreamlike devotion to all that belonged to the mystic Land his ancestors had swayed. Although he disbelieved in her deities, he believed in the allegories they represented (or rather he interpreted those allegories anew). He loved to keep alive the worship of Egypt, because ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open in ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... of my entering Switzerland till my arrival in Paris my spirits, which had sunk into a dreamlike apathy, rose gradually to a level of freedom and comfort that I had never enjoyed before. I felt like a bird in the air whose destiny is not to founder in a morass; but soon after my arrival in Paris, in the first week of June, a very palpable ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... it was all absurd and dreamlike. He had never hurt a man before in his life. Martindale knew it. Why could he not go back, face them, give up his gun, wait for the law ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... If it seemed dreamlike to us, so near at hand, how could the people in America, three thousand miles away, feel its reality or grasp its meaning? They could not do it then, and many of them have not ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... cloud-shadows from the skies above. Orr's Island, with its blue-black spruces, its silver firs, its golden larches, its scarlet sumachs, lay on the bosom of the deep like a great many-colored gem on an enchanted mirror. A vague, dreamlike sense of rest and Sabbath stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky fingers; and the small tide-waves that chased each other up on the shelly ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... endless summer behind at last, and the cooler breezes of the north swept the long, blue ridges over which they travelled. They came into a more frequented, less dreamlike sea, but though many vessels passed them, they were seldom near enough for greeting. And Stephanie came to understand that it was not Pierre's desire to hold much converse with the outer world. Yet she knew that they were heading straight for England, and their isolation ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... like unto the evening. Summer was still to be our companion, and, as the evening of our coming to Cohocton had been the most dreamlike of all the ends of our walking days—had, so to say, been most evening-spiritual, so the morning of our Cohocton seemed most morning-spiritual of all our mornings, most filled with strange hope ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... mind was "salver." It was the silver salver on which Thompson brought in visitors' cards. But it was a plate as well; and, being a plate, he remembered vaguely something about a collection. The association of ideas worked itself out in a remote and dreamlike way; he felt in his pocket for a shilling, a sixpence, or a threepenny bit, and wondered for a second where the big, dark building was to which all this belonged. Something was changed, it seemed. His clothes, this ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... early that night and it flooded the mountains with a glory of silver mists. The shoulders of the peaks stood out in blue barriers, strong, abiding, beautiful. In the valleys it was all a nocturne of dove grays and dreamlike softness. The stars, too, shone down in a million splinters of happy light, but the radiance ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... consciousness of a former life." And again, he says: "How strange is it that at times a feeling comes over us as we gaze upon certain places, which associates the scene either with some dim remembered and dreamlike images of the Past, or with a prophetic and fearful omen of the Future. Every one has known a similar strange and indistinct feeling at certain times and places, and with a similar inability to trace the cause." Poe has written these words on the subject: ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... tradesmen's carts and pitiful street singers broke the monotony; in a Paris chambre a garcon, au sixieme, where the view was roofs and the noise of the city was attenuated to a murmur; in country houses which looked out on sweeps of hill, down, vale and sea, so changeable and lovely that they were dreamlike and as a dream abide in the memory.... Here I have quick human life just below my window, and—up the Gut—a view of the sea unbroken hence to the horizon; a patch of water framed on three sides by straight walls and on the fourth by the sky-line; ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... traveling over stone. There was the paradoxic gentleness of all the jeep's motions because of the low gravity. Cochrane even noted the extraordinary feel of an upholstered seat when one weighs only one-sixth as much as back on Earth. All his sensations were dreamlike—but he felt that headachy exhaustion that comes of overwork too ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of that first week, in which the stun and shock were reacting in prompt, cheerful, benevolent organizing and providing,—in which, through wonderful, dreamlike ruins, like the ruins of the far-off past, people were wandering, amazed, seeing a sudden torch laid right upon the heart and centre of a living metropolis and turning it to a shadow and a decay,—in which human interests and experiences came to mingle that ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... felt something she could not explain. And that something was scarcely owing to this young man's pitiful position between duty to his father and love for his country. It had to do with his blazing eyes; intangible, dreamlike perceptions of him as not real, of vague sweet fancies that retreated before her introspective questioning. What alarmed Lenore was a tendency of her mind to shirk this revealing analysis. Never before had she been afraid ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... large trees, whose cleft leaves frame the indescribably blue sea, which breaks in snowy lines in the lava-boulders below. Far off, I can see Malekula, with its forest-covered mountains, and summer clouds hanging above it. It is a dreamlike summer day, so beautiful, bright and mild as to be hardly real. One feels a certain regret at being unable to absorb all the beauty, at having to stand apart as an outsider, a patch on the brightness rather ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... seemed somewhat abstracted, and answered many questions that were put to him at haphazard, without knowing, or possibly caring, whether his replies were intelligible or incoherent. His thoughts were dreamlike and brilliant with fairy sunshine. He understood at last what poets meant by their melodious musings, woven into golden threads of song—he seemed to have grasped some hitherto unguessed secret of his being—a secret that filled him with as much strange pain as pleasure. He felt as though ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... we sighed and turned away, And left the mystery to the summer day That made as if it understood, and could Have read the riddle to us if it would: The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass; The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon, Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune Of insects, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... . . I don't seem able to take it in at all! Other brides have so much of external paraphernalia to emphasise the fact they have closed one chapter of life, and begun another. But except for that dreamlike half-hour in church, you and I seem merely to have come away together for an everyday outing; and there is nothing anywhere, . . . except this,"—she lifted the third finger of her left hand,—"to make me realise that we are actually ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... splash of the oars in the water, there mingled a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard carissima, a moment afterwards amore. Then the poison in which the tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in her. ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... to it has ceased. What is seen on the neutral surface (it will be shown later why we studiously avoid speaking of 'white light') is no outwardly existing colour at all. It is the activity of the eye itself, working in a dreamlike way from its blood-vessel system, and coming to our consciousness ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Somewhat dreamlike Wordsworth's views may be, but his belief is clearly not in transmigration. To the educated Hindu, who may not consciously have rejected the idea of transmigration, the doctrine is really now no more than a current and convenient explanation of any misfortune that has ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... did not trouble herself about this. As if already set free from everything earthly, she remained completely indifferent to everything that was going on around her. The more insensible her body became, paralysed by the penetrating damp and chill, the more indefinite and dreamlike became all the impressions of her senses. She seemed to have lost all foothold, to be flying on the wings of the storm, free from all restrictions of corporeal gravity, through unlimited space. All the rushing, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... back to back, with one's partner. Berenice, in her lithe, rhythmic way, seemed to him the soul of spirited and gracious ease—unconscious of everybody and everything save the spirit of the dance itself as a medium of sweet emotion, of some far-off, dreamlike spirit of gaiety. He wondered. He was ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... haven't saw anything as nice as them flowers. They tell ye of the country, and its quiet over here. Ye get too much of a good thing sometimes out among the white buildings. It's sort o' dreamlike over ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... never losing a chance of getting a new bit of rigging," said Harek, laughing; for he seemed none the worse for the things of last night, which indeed began to seem ghostly and dreamlike to us all. "But what good ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... Hill with a shadow upon him, like a man who has passed through a sudden danger, or who has had a sudden glimpse into the dark realities of life. But the whole experience was so strange and dreamlike, so apart from the wholesome current of his life, that his fears troubled him less than he had supposed; still, a kind of hatred for the quiet valley began to creep over him, and he found himself sitting long over his books, looking down ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day will Burrell lose the memory of that march with Necia through the untrodden valley, and yet its incidents were never clear-cut nor distinct when he looked back upon them, but blended into one dreamlike procession, as if he wandered through some calenture where every image was delightfully distorted and each act deliriously unreal, yet all the sweeter from its fleeting unreality. They talked and laughed and sang with a rush of spirits as untamed as the waters in the course ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... glorious sun, its verdure tolerates no trace of age. No ill or sour vapours contaminate its breath. Bland and ever fresh breezes preserve its excellencies untarnished. It typifies all that is tranquil, quiet, easeful, dreamlike, for it ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the wild music of hounds, and horns, and hollas, vieing with each other in mirth and loudness; the breathless interest of the start; the emulous pant of the coursers; the excitement of the moment when the fox appears; the sweeping tumult of the pursuit; the dreamlike rapidity with which five-barred gates are cleared, the yellow or naked woods are passed, and the stubble-ridges "swallowed up in the fierceness and rage" of the rushing steeds; the indifference of those engaged ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... same, came at last to think of other things than the road which they were traveling. Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance. The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... laughter. Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around them; And o'er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness,— Strange forebodings of ill, unseen, and that cannot be compassed. As, at the tramp of a horse's hoof on the turf of the prairies, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck |
