"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to envelop all humanity, and find a suitable activity in social service. It may be transformed into the love of God, and find an outlet in the religious life of the individual. Or it may be expressed only in language, in which case it may stop at the stage of erotic fantasy and day-dream, or may result in some really great piece of poetry or prose. This last outlet is so common that our language is full of symbolic words and phrases which have a hidden erotic meaning attached ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... valley in Boeotia in the Arcadian day. It was evening. There was no wind. Somewhere a temple, opalescent in the sunset, suggested rather than defined itself. A landscape developed such as Turner in a quiet mood might have evolved, and with it a feeling of fantasy, of remoteness, of pure, true classicism. A note of pipes was in the air, sheep bleated, and Daphne, knee-deep in the grass, surging an answer to the pipes, went down ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... journalism, education, philanthropy, and religion—which had been testified to by so many notable people on that occasion, I hoped to prove that I was not a mere faddist, who could be led away by a chimerical fantasy. I wanted the world to understand that I was a clear-brained, commonsense woman of the world, whose views on effective voting and other political questions were as worthy of credence as her work in other directions had been worthy of acceptance. The greetings ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... a thousand quarrels. The basis of each nature was common sense—shrewd common sense—but such similarity of structure is in itself apt to lead to much violent shocking of opinion; and to this end an adjuvant was found in the dose of fantasy, mysticism, idealism which was inherent in John's character. "Why is he not like other people? Why will he waste his time with a lot of rubbishy Latin authors? Why will he not take up his position in the county?" ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... and even had a sort of mystery added to its imposing grandeur. It is true that the flaming bonfires and the colored lights and the tiny figures of men and women standing in the gorge within the depth of the arch made the scene theatrical, but it was strange and weird and awful, like the fantasy of a Walpurgis' Night or a midnight ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the talking over of plans for John Strang's long-cherished idea of a forest garden at Heartholm, there had been no allusion between mistress and gardener to that far-off fantasy, the life of little Gargoyle. During the autumn the two drew plans together for those spots which next spring were to blossom in the beech glade. They sent to far-off countries for bulbs, experimented in the Heartholm greenhouses with special soils and fertilizers, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... reputed author of a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified existence—Glorias, as they ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... can nor knows how to imagine, nor does he even desire to do good painting, his work mostly differs but little from his imagination, which is generally somewhat worse; for if he knew how to imagine well or in a masterly manner in his fantasy, he could not have a hand so corrupt as not to show some part or indication of his good will. But no one has ever known how to aspire well in this science, except the mind which understands what good work is, and what he can make of it. It is a serious thing, this ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained M. S.'s "decayed human form, standing in the doorway ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... little knots of two and three, which gradually increased and became formidable, joining in murmurs and menaces against the admiral. They exclaimed against him as an ambitious desperado who, in a mad fantasy, had determined to do something extravagant to render himself notorious. What obligation bound them to persist, or when were the terms of their agreement to be considered as fulfilled? They had already penetrated into seas untraversed by a sail, and where man had never before adventured. Were ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... stage. Elizabeth, who has been earnestly watching them to find if Tannhaeuser be of their number, disappointed, sinks upon her knees and sings the touching prayer, "Allmaecht'ge Jungfrau, hoer mein Flehen." As she leaves the scene, Wolfram takes his harp and sings the enchanting fantasy to the evening star, "O, du mein holder Abendstern,"—a love-song to the saintly Elizabeth. Tannhaeuser makes his appearance. A long declamatory dialogue ensues between himself and Wolfram, in which he recites the story of his pilgrimage. The scene is one of extraordinary ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... exhilaration to her mind and thought. She seemed to have taken a leaf out of Paradise and bound it among the dingy pages of her dull and monotonous life. Every thing about her was so quaint and rare, the clothes she wore so rich and fantastic, that she could not control her fancy. Every musical fantasy that had ever crept into her brain seemed to be trooping along its galleries in a mad gallop as her fair fingers flew over the time-stained keys. The little boy stood clinging to her skirt in silent ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... doubtful yet Whether Caesar will come forth to-day or no; For he is superstitious grown of late, 195 Quite from the main opinion he held once Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies: It may be these apparent prodigies, The unaccustom'd terror of this night, And the persuasion of his augurers, 200 May hold him from ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive plaits around her finely-shaped head, and crowned with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... beard) and a banner, also, is suspended above the casket. That containing the body of the Marchesa, his wife (Vittoria Colonna), has an aperture at the top where the wood is worn away and the embalmed form, partly crumbled, may be seen. This seems strange to the verge of fantasy, but it is, apparently, true. The writer of this volume visited the Church of Santa Domenica Maggiore in Naples in December of 1906, and was assured by the sacristan that this sarcophagus contains the body of the Marchesa. Inquiries were then ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... man be rare sweet, gent, and tender, beyond other men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... specimens, and commended the treasure as a whole to the unflagging care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically real and not the fantasy of a ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. "Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who'll ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... wife, by chaste intentions led, Gives thee each night a maidenhead. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well-weav'd bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes; while fantasy discloses Millions of lilies mix'd with roses. Then dream ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat: While Faunus in the vision comes to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep. With thousand such ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... an invention of Scott's (who knew that Salkeld was not met and slain), but a fantasy of the original ballad. Here I have only familiarity with the romantic perversion of facts that marks all ballads on historical themes ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... account of this excursion under the waters, I'm well aware that it sounds incredible! I'm the chronicler of deeds seemingly impossible and yet incontestably real. This was no fantasy. This was what I saw ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the Forsyte advance, addressing Timothy as Field Marshal; and Imogen, whom he had noted at once for 'a pretty filly,'—as Vivandiere; and holding his top hat between his knees, he began to beat it with imaginary drumsticks. The reception accorded to his fantasy was mixed. All laughed—George was licensed; but all felt that the family was being 'rotted'; and this seemed to them unnatural, now that it was going to give five of its members to the service of the Queen. George might go too far; and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not—it is nothing but a scurvy faintness. Raise me! There, 'tis sufficient. Come hither, child; there, rest thy poor troubled head upon thy father's heart, and be at peace. Thou'lt soon be well: 'tis but a passing fantasy. Fear thou not; thou'lt soon be well." Then he turned toward the company: his gentle manner changed, and baleful lightnings began to play ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his own private dream-world, a world of fantasy that had now become Andray Dunnan's reality, in which an Elaine Karvall whom his imagination had created existed only to love him. Confronted by the real Elaine, he ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... For the moment, the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious instinct ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... showed the world to be one of fantasy, one to which the sun did not exist. It was not an utter, pitchy blackness that pervaded the water, but rather a peculiar, dark blueness. No fish schools, Keith noted, scurried from them. They had already left these waters; aware, perhaps, of ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... he was gray at the curling hair which turned up at his broad temples—smiled as if he held it to be a pleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, when any asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off his questioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was such ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Rick declared, "is to provide an escape from the real world into the world of fantasy. So no crime drama for us because that's the real world. We will watch a ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... that ever occupied and captivated the fashionable world of a metropolis of two millions of souls, the head of an empire of two hundred millions. The recollection runs us out of breath. Every hour was a new summons to a new fete, a new fantasy, or a new exhibition of the handsomest man of the forty-two millions of Russia proper. The toilettes of the whole beau monde were in activity from sunny morn to dewy eve; and from dewy eve to waxlighted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus; behold the sorrow of this world! once amiss hath bereaved me of all. O glory, that only sdineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relenting but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity, only when is grace witnessed but in offences? There were no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Hafiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... dewy and icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"—and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"—and in her sleep it seemed to her that her heart stirred and throbbed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy and Heart. Wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his self-love and arithmetical understanding, what will ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... which, more than on any others, the grace and delight of a fine Gothic building depends; one is the springing of its vaultings, the other the proportion and fantasy of its traceries. This church of Santa Croce has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn. And its windows are all of the same pattern,—the exceedingly prosaic one of two pointed arches, with a ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... that child of thirteen, condemned by all the Powers of Europe? By what means could he mount the throne? Who would be regent in his name? A Bonaparte? The forgetful Marie Louise? Such hypotheses were relegated to the domain of pure fantasy. Apart from a few fanatical old soldiers who persisted in saying that Napoleon was not dead, no one, in 1824, believed in the resurrection of the Empire. As for Orleanism, it was as yet a myth. The Duke of Orleans himself was not an Orleanist. ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... dandelion—and twenty herbs beside, for aught I know. It's right unthankful of her not to mend; but childre is that thoughtless! And Roger, he spoils the maid—never stands up to her a bit—gives in to every whim and fantasy she takes in her head. If she cried for the moon, he'd borrow every ladder in the parish and lash 'em ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... more harassed and perplexed than ever. He was singularly confounded by all that he had seen and dreamt, and began to doubt whether his mind was not affected, and whether all that was passing in his thoughts might not be mere feverish fantasy. In his present state of mind, he did not feel disposed to return immediately to the doctor's, and undergo the cross-questioning of the household. He made a scanty breakfast, therefore, on the remains ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... horizons the mountain peaks floated languidly upon the waves of heat. And in all this dispassionate land, from horizon to horizon, there were only My Lady and I, and the beleaguering Sioux. It seemed unreal, a fantasy; but the rocks began to smell scorched, a sudden thirst nagged and my wounded arm pained with weariness as if to remind that I was here, in the body. Yes, and here she was, also, in the flesh, as much as I, for she stirred, glanced ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink ... a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth ... passionately kind and angry ... oppressed with fantasy which hath ever mastered his reason." There must, however, have been far other qualities in a man who could command, as J. undoubtedly did, the goodwill and admiration of so many of the finest minds of his time. In person he was tall, swarthy, marked with small-pox, and in later ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... slender,—such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... spoil, as men might reckon it, but rather what it is least of all the privilege of a tyrant to obtain. (42) I say it truly, I—the love I bear Dailochus is of this high sort. All that the constitution of our souls and bodies possibly compels a man to ask for at the hands of beauty, that my fantasy desires of him; but what my fantasy demands, I do most earnestly desire to obtain from willing hands and under seal of true affection. To clutch it forcibly were as far from my desire as to do myself some ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... little, slyly, silently, she managed to get rid of all my friends. We had not made any difference in our talk because of * her presence. We talked as we always had done in the past, but she never understood the irony or the fantasy of our artistic exaggerations, of our wild axioms, or paradoxes, in which-an idea is travestied only to figure more brilliantly. It only irritated and puzzled her. Seated in a quiet corner of the drawing-room, she listened and said nothing, planning all the while how she should eliminate ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... completed by a sequel, Tommy and Grizel, published in 1900. The effect of this story was somewhat marred by the comparative failure of the scenes in society remote from Thrums. In 1902 he published The Little White Bird, a pretty fantasy, wherein he gave full play to his whimsical invention, and his tenderness for child life, which is relieved by the genius of sincerity from a suspicion of mawkishness. This book contained the episode of "Peter Pan," which afterwards ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the acquaintance of the family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel with you—read ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (A topical fantasy suggested by the decay of our athletic prowess and the apparent apathy of the nation as to the fate that may befall it in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... "It would seem that I was in error. That our young Susan Self was not spouting fantasy. There evidently actually is an underground movement interested in changing our institutions." He stirred in his chair and his scowl went deeper. "And evidently working on a basis never conceived of by subversive organizations of the past. ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... spiritualized abominable vices. What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of devils than of beasts. But in seeking to distinguish its true character, we must take notice of the highly wrought fantasy which seasoned both their luxury and their jealousy, their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... In the sphere of fantasy George Mac Donald has very few equals, and his rare touch of many aspects of life invariably gives to his stories a deeper meaning of the highest value. His Princess and Goblin exemplifies both gifts. ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... really even know not who she was—what were her prospects, her connections, her standing in society. She begged me, but with a sigh, to reconsider my proposal, and termed my love an infatuation—a will o' the wisp—a fancy or fantasy of the moment—a baseless and unstable creation rather of the imagination than of the heart. These things she uttered as the shadows of the sweet twilight gathered darkly and more darkly around us—and then, with a gentle pressure of her fairy-like ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... parabolistic symbols, as Christ himself had sought to render clear his spiritualistic ideas by all kinds of beautiful parables. Hence the mystical, problematic, marvelous, and transcendental in the artwork of the Middle Ages, in which fantasy makes her most desperate efforts to depict the purely spiritual by means of sensible images, and invents colossal follies, piling Pelion on Ossa and Parsifal on Titurel to attain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with narrow-mindedness, and even unintelligence, persons who consider such an ideal of life as a fantasy impossible to realize, or as the product of exalted dreamers who do not know the world. No doubt this ideal cannot be attained by ill-constructed, unnatural beings, tainted by a morbid heredity, or ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... picture, I was fain to close my eyes. I avow that that lonesome room—gloomy in its lunar bath of soft perfumed light—shrouded in the sullen voluptuousness of plushy, narcotic-breathing draperies—pervaded by the mysterious spirit of its brooding occupant—grew more and more on my fantasy, till the remembrance had for me all the cool refreshment shed by a midsummer-night's dream in the dewy deeps of some Perrhoebian grove of cornel and lotos and ruby stars of the asphodel. It was, therefore, in all haste that I set out to share for ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... the long fantasy of the kiss; the ceaseless hunger, ceaselessly, divinely appeased! The aching presence of the beloved's beauty! The ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... up a fantasy of spires, needle-sharp and bare and golden. The long straight range—saw-toothed limestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of the Organ—stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky, till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... daunses haue taken their begynning, from Pagans and Heathen men, which haue then first used them, when they did sacrifyce to their Gods. For beeing plunged into very thick, & as it were palpable dark nesses, after that they had forged and advised Gods according to their owne fantasy, they thought and supposed that they should bee delighted and pleased, with the selfe same delightes and pleasures, wherein, or ...
— A Treatise Of Daunses • Anonymous
... fame, and the last we shall ever hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... little of the darker powers,[FN4] and come across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... humorous chances of their theme, but inspired with an infectious delight in them. It is, for example, a singularly happy touch that the wild oats that Uncle Simon tries to retrieve are not of to-day but from the long-vanished pastures of mid-Victorian London. Of course such a fantasy can't properly be ended. Having extracted (as I gratefully admit) the last ounce of entertainment from him, the authors simply wake Uncle Simon up and go home. As a small literary coincidence I may perhaps ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... with the fact that it was still his mission, the mission of a Chosen People. And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature and broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendary fantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimes touching in its tender mysticism, sometimes almost grotesque in its crude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are bound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in His chastisements ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... by one so new to our councils and deliberations. I never was more fashed in my life; for having hitherto, in all my plans for the improvement of the town, not only succeeded, but given satisfaction, I was vexed to see the council run away with such a speculative vagary. No doubt, the popular fantasy anent education and academies, had quite as muckle to do in the matter as Mr Plan's fozey rhetoric, but what availed that to me, at seeing a reasonable undertaking reviled and set aside, and grievous debts about to be laid on the community for a bubble ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... Thomas; "yet both he and Glaston walk rather A-STRADDLE, methinks. They might have stepped up to thee more straightforwardly, and told thee the trade ill suiteth thee, having little fire, little fantasy, and little learning. Furthermore, that one poet, as one bull, sufficeth for two parishes, and that where they are stuck too close together they are apt to fire, like haystacks. I have known it myself; I have ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... Day-Dream (of The Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... and his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... you into many strange byways, but it would never help you to rise. Art is above all things catholic, and universal. You may be a perfect Herdrine; but Herdrine herself is but a night weed—a thing of no account. Even you cannot make her natural. She is the puppet of a man's fantasy. She ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be certain: Wouldst thou plant for eternity? Then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart. Wouldst thou plant for year and day? Then plant into his shallow, superficial faculties, his self-love, and arithmetical understanding, what will ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hands. Nothing was more improbable than that a being endowed with her self-controlled, serene, sorrow-accepting temperament, should be driven to such an act of unholy madness. Yet Maurice allowed the frightful fantasy to work within his brain until it clothed itself with a shape like reality, and drove him to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... sir," replied Giles Gosling, "and cast not yourself away because a woman—to be brief—IS a woman, and changes her lovers like her suit of ribands, with no better reason than mere fantasy. And ere we probe this matter further, let me ask you what circumstances of suspicion directed you so truly to this lady's residence, or rather to her ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... equipage was turning in from the Trinidad road—an equipage on which leather and varnish shone, and harness brasses flashed, while the dust rolled pompously after it in a freakish fantasy of postilions and outriders. The driver made a great business of his long whip. The horses were sleek and brown. Altogether the vehicle had a lordly air, easily matching that of the individual sitting alone on the purple cushions—a man whose features were not very clear ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... And the other of these two main channels will, I think, be a twisting and delicious stream, which will bear on its breast new barques of poetry, shaped, it may be, like prose, but a prose incarnating through its fantasy and symbolism all the deeper aspirations, yearning, doubts, and mysterious stirrings of the human spirit; a poetic prose-drama, emotionalising us by its diversity and purity of form and invention, and whose province will be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as he dropped back heavily from the back of the wagon, "and it was all a dream. Ugh!" I shuddered. I lay still again, my mind going over the fantasy of the night, which came back so vividly, yet was so strangely mixed and absurd; but all the time Denham slept on, breathing heavily, dead to all the sorrows and horror of ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... the tree accept the little boy's fantasy as fact, Naomi wondered why she'd never thought ...
— Tree, Spare that Woodman • Dave Dryfoos
... But not until I discovered the old pulp science-fantasy magazines, at the age of sixteen, did this general desire become a specific urge ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... an earnest and devout esteem! In that precious incense of praise burned by M. de Balzac, "in honor of that daughter of a foreign soil," he has thus sketched the Polish woman in hues composed entirely of antitheses: "Angel through love, demon through fantasy; child through faith, sage through experience; man through the brain, woman through the heart; giant through hope, mother through sorrow; and poet through dreams." [Footnote: Dedication of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Then a fantasy seized him. "That man stands at our antipodes on the other side of the earth. If the earth were of glass he could look down upon us. But he can see me just as well as I see him. What is he doing? He is catching rattlesnakes, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... is true of many similar passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the free ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... his old Athenian home, A mighty billow rose up suddenly Upon whose oily back the clotted foam Lay diapered in some strange fantasy, And clasping him unto its glassy breast Swept landward, like a white-maned ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... the stake. How stand I then, That have a father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, My thoughts be ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... that I have to say about Mr. Vansittart's "Oriental Fantasy." It deals with a youthful bride who has just been attached to a Persian hareem. In the garden at dusk she finds a young English traveller (who has just told us what a penchant he has for "women, women, women"—he is very insistent about this), and being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... and as they walked hand in hand away from the ancient altar, which surely had never seen so strange a rite, there returned to Morris an idle fantasy which had entered his mind at this very spot when they landed one morning half-frozen after that night in the open boat. But he said nothing of it; for with the memory came a recollection of certain wandering words which that same day fell from Stella's lips, words at the thought ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... sit upon the old sea wall, And watch the shimmering sea, Where soft and white the moonbeams fall, Till, in a fantasy, Some pure white maiden's funeral pall The strange ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... suddenly switching the conversation away from the Italian's fantasy, "you are well acquainted with all the circumstances connected with Sir Alan's murder. Have you formed any theory about the crime, its ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... steps to make, but before she had stopped, confronting Immada, d'Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another universe, as if presented by the fantasy of a fevered memory. He saw her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under lofty ceilings that like a tropical ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand, could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven) that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon it by the natural ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... stagnant inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy of the mind, and one must be always ready to obey the behests of the other. Youth and will can resist excess; but nature silently avenges herself, and the day when she decides to repair her forces, the will struggles to retard her work and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... genius,—ever ardent, ever young,—honours toil as the glorious development of being, and springs refreshed over the abyss of the grave, to follow, from star to star, the progress that seems to him at once the supreme felicity and the necessary law. So be it with the fantasy of each! Wisdom that is infallible, and love that never sleeps, watch over the darkness, and bid darkness be, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... earth can it be? Not, surely, that one should not swear rash oaths in a temper? We have all done that and needed no redeemer. There is no touch of essential veracity in the old legend, a bit of puerile medieval fantasy; there is no sort of proportion between the trivial offence and the appalling punishment; even in an age which thought to oppose the will of the Almighty the rankest blasphemy it can never have been considered eternally ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of science named "Magia Naturalis." It is no fantasy but a fact that each ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... designs cover the two walls. Dragons, scorpions, bulbous nymphs, crossed flags, wreathed anchors, cupids, butterflies, daggers and quaint decorations that seem the grotesque survivals of the mid-Victorian schools of fantasy. Photographs of famous men also cover the walls—Capt. Constantinus tattooed from head to foot, every inch of him; Barnum's favorites, ancient and forgotten kooch dancers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, magicians ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... If the author wouldn't let his favourites off so easily and would give their enemies a better sporting chance, he would more readily sustain the illusion which is of the essence of real enjoyment in this kind of fantasy. But I imagine the normal human boy will find nothing whatever to complain of, and to him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... concerned himself at all with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... turned resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed—a dream, a fantasy, a delirium—something that had left no external things behind it and had only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. He ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... to her, walking with her, meeting her suddenly or unexpectedly in crowded places or at dinner-parties— always her, and no one else—till at last poor Arthur began to wonder if his spirit took leave of his body in sleep and went to seek her, and, what is more, found her. Or was it nothing but a fantasy? He could not tell; but, at any rate, it was a fact, and it would have been hard to say if it distressed or rejoiced ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... mind seems almost immediately to have been turned toward religious meditation. The result of this meditation was an opinion exceedingly unfavorable to the religion of his countrymen. The first statement of this conviction was met rather by ridicule than anger, being considered the fantasy of a dreaming enthusiast, who was little to be dreaded, and unworthy of opposition. We are told that he retired to a cave in Mount Hara, near Mecca, where, as he assured his first proselyte, his wife, he regularly received the visits of the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... wit and humor and clever satire into this airy fantasy of twentieth century life in a way that should add to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... opportunity for expressing his ideas and proving his capacity. It was an ideal chance, and his soul thrilled as he called up the shadowy fabric of scheme after scheme to fill the trial canvas of his fantasy. Nor did he fail to award due credit to Selma for her share in the transaction; not to the extent, perhaps, of confessing incapacity on his own part, but by testifying lovingly to her cleverness. She was ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... objective point he loiters by the way and no doubt enjoys it the more, but it is not fair to put the automobilist down as a scorcher simply because he is pushing on. The best guide-books are caprice and fantasy, if you ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th World ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman |
