"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vying with her in exceeding the speed-limit, sings "Oh ra-ha-ha-hap-ture !" several times, varied by "What can e-he-he-he-qual a brother's love?" Then, using the same words, they sing as much as possible in unison to the end of the scene, which closes with a fantasy of capricious arabesques and a series of trills on notes seldom heard from any but ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... friend, can your philosophy explain this startling verification, this reflex action of the vision, or the fantasy, or whatever else you may please to term it, whose prophetic shadow fell upon my astonished senses long years before? In all the intervening time, we were separated by great distance, no word or sign passed between us, nor did we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await individual souls. Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the material of art. Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the 'Republic' (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the frescoes of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... impossible for even his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great man's fancy by an anecdote which depends for its point upon some trait of baseness, cynicism, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... felt as if they were the two points of an electric chain, which being joined, an instantaneous effect must follow. Earnestly, as he would have looked forward to this moment (had he in sober reason ever put any real weight on the fantasy in pursuit of which he had wandered so far) he now, that it actually appeared to be realizing itself, paused with a vague sensation of alarm. The mystery was evidently one of sorrow, if not of crime, and he felt as if that sorrow ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'again' has its 'credibilizing' effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—''tis but our fantasy!' upon which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... his imperturbable and melancholy calm. "And now, little one," he said, dropping on one knee before the half-frightened Polly, "child of Jenkinson, now that thy perhaps too excitable sponsor has, in a poet's caprice, abandoned thee for some newer fantasy, confide in me thy distress, to me, thy Knight, and tell the story ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... have impressed him. At any rate, on the night after the reading of it, just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy, including the command with which it ends. With a particular clearness did he seem to see the picture of the Great White Road, "straight as the way of the Spirit, and broad as the breast of Death," and of the little Hare travelling towards the ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... waking hours. I knew it was a dream, for of course I hadn't been in black water, I hadn't strained toward a light upon the flood, and of course, I hadn't really heard Nicholas Jelnik calling my name; and the kiss was part of the fantasy. I watched him stealthily, this cool, collected, impersonal young man, to whom even the efficient nurse was astonishingly respectful, and pure laughter seized me at the idea of his crying aloud, being as agitated, as passionate, as fiercely insistent, as he ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... and the Bear, gives this wonderful Swedish writer's presentation of the iron industry as a factor in our growth from savagery to civilization. The third story, The Giant Energy and Fairy Skill, by Maud Lindsay, gives the program its climax in fantasy and contrast. ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... 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 him ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist's imagining? We shall never know. Borrow called his Lavengro 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... 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 ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... "that my spirit is changing within me. I feel as if I had never known life until now. In vain I say unto myself that this must be a mere fantasy of mine; I, who am marked with the 'frost of eild,' who will soon be—let me see—seven-and-thirty years old. What think you ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... at the letter on the table before him, then folded it and put it in his pocket. It was well, he thought. His latest book of fairy tales and fantasy had enjoyed good acceptance. And the check in the letter had been of satisfactory size. He smiled to himself. There were compensations in this job of his. It seemed to be profitable to have a purpose other than ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... and everything Polish were at that time the rage in Paris. The young Polish master found ready entrance into the highest musical and literary circles of this most delightful city of the world. All was romance, fantasy, passion, which fitted with Chopin's sensitive and romantic temperament. Little wonder that he became inspired by contact with some of the greatest in the world ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl's fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... A fantasy in which Pierrot, Columbine, and the Grecian shepherds of Theocritus display their varied ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... 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, shaggy-maned, heavy in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... slaughter both by the promuschleniki and marauding foreigners; punishing and banishing the worst offenders against the Company's laws; encouraging the faithful, and sharing hardships with them that sent memories of former luxuries and pleasures scurrying off to the realms of fantasy. But his rule would be incomplete and his efforts end in failure if the miserable Russians and natives in the employ of the Company were not vitalized by proper food and cheered with ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... it is 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
... improvisatrice Corilla, was nothing more than a strong wine with which she refreshed and strengthened her fatigued poetic powers for renewed exertions; it was in a manner the tow which she threw upon the expiring fire of her fantasy, to make it flash up ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... divine, of fantasy And frenzied mem'ry wrought, advance From out the shades; O spectral utterance, Untwine thy chains, thy fair autocracy Unveil, have being, declare Thy ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... 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 ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... inside it I laboriously hide it, And a rather pretty sermon you might preach Upon Fantasy, selecting For your "instance" the affecting Tale of me and my proceedings on ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... 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 ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... and tall spires lifted themselves like arrows in flight. On the left lay low hills softly outlined against the pearly sky; hills of fairyland that might dissolve and disappear with the falling night; hills on the borderland of fantasy and old romance. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... said Sir 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
... be most kind of you to give us the pleasure of your company for a day or two during our theatrical season, which concludes on the 15th of June. We could then chat and make music at our ease (with or without damages, ad libitum), and if the fantasy took us, why should we not go to some new Fantasie of leisure on the "Traum- lied (dream song) of Tony, [No doubt meaning Baron Augusz, Liszt's intimate friend at Szegzard, who died in 1878.] for instance, at the hour when our peaceable inhabitants are sleeping, dreaming, or thinking of nothing? ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... imagination than most people, because he's a cripple, and he could go off on a crazy tangent because he's upset about Charlie. The thing to do is give him a logical explanation instead of letting him think his fantasy is ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions, especially if chiming in with favorite preconceived ideas; and then I called ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... sort of peace between the old Persian and the 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; whether the wine of which he sings ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... throughout the country. He rose 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 of the last night's provisions, and then wandered out into the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... on the contrary, was a product of Nature, reared in free intercourse and unrestrained relation with her genius and Nature. A powerful passion and a mighty fantasy made of her a poetess and an artist. These two qualities were manifested in her intense and deep feeling for the beauty of Nature, in her power of invention, in a harmonious equilibrium between idealism and realism. Her fantasy overbalanced her reason, impeding its development and thus relegating ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... or new caprice of the monarch has led his affections away, know how to endure a fantasy which you have not the power to remove. Despatch yourself with a good grace; and let the world believe that sober reflections have come to you, and that you return, of your own free will, into the paths of independence, of true glory, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Rhine,—Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier, Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the young men heard the moon sing silvery—you remember De Musset!—and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. "Away with the gray- beards," cried he of the scarlet waistcoat, and all France applauded "Ernani." Pity it was that the romantic infant had to die ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... appealed to the Committee for their poetry. "The Funeral of John Bixby," by Stephen Vincent Benet, and "The Duke's Opera," by "Jacques Belden" (the first an allegorical fantasy and the second a poetic-romance) are at the head of this division. With these should be included Don Marquis's "Death and Old Man Murtrie," for its sardonic allegory, and "The Designs of Miramon," by James Branch Cabell, for its social satire. Individual ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... tell him?" said he who was more ready of speech than the others. "Sorrow be his whoever speak of it or whoever tell him! 'Tis fantasy that you say, since there is not so costly a beast in this forest, neither stag nor lion nor wild boar, one of whose limbs were worth more than two pence, or three at the most; and you speak of so great wealth! Foul sorrow be his who believe you, or whoever ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... interest. I have particularly enjoyed certain stories, such as "The Forgotten Planet," "The Jovian Jest" and "The Planet of Dread," in which genuine imaginative quality was combined with good writing. Many other tales, not so well written, I have enjoyed for their fantasy, their ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... had been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... from introspection. The story was 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 suggested ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... with the shifted Poise and footing of my thought! I brake through thy doors of sunset, Ran before the hooves of sunrise, Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies Wild and wilful As a poet's hand could twine them; Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice The Bow, as its cataract of colours Plashed to thee downward; Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning, Celestial dawning Over the ultimate marges of the soul; Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me, And like a windy arras waved with ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... 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 ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... "again" has its credibilising effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—"'tis but our fantasy!" upon which Marcellus ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... in fact a very happy performance, and Roderick had risen to the level of his subject. It was thoroughly a portrait, and not a vague fantasy executed on a graceful theme, as the busts of pretty women, in modern sculpture, are apt to be. The resemblance was deep and vivid; there was extreme fidelity of detail and yet a noble simplicity. One could say of the head ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... simulating a loaf of bread, a coffee-pot to hold matches, and in a casket a complete set of doll's jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, ear-rings set with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, a microscopic fantasy that seemed to have been executed ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... its environing scenes disappeared behind Mousehole and St Clement's Isle, Baptista's ephemeral, meteor-like husband impressed her yet more as a fantasy. She was still in such a trance-like state that she had been an hour on the little packet-boat before she became aware of the agitating fact that Mr Heddegan was on board with her. Involuntarily she slipped from her left hand the symbol ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... with the history of her cousin, and willing to aid in some fantasy which was to lead to the present happy restoration of the latter to ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... To my high fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will, like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the Sun and the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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 lest the heathen ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... quay, and emerging from the ultramarine waters about it a silhouetted metropolis of spires, domes, and minarets. It was 1921, and that generation thus received its first glimpse of the alien landscape of The Blind Spot and the baroque beauty of an immortal woman of fantasy fiction. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... child's nature the faculty of imagination and the force of example are important considerations in the development of the spiritual feelings and the formation of fine ideals. The world of make-believe, of purest fantasy, is just as interesting and just as significant as the every day actualities of life. It makes not the slightest difference to a little boy, or girl, whether the stories you read them, or the acts of hero and heroine, are reasonable or not. (And ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... moment that I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... epoch when man experiences an insatiable hunger for love, and for want of a woman will nourish some monstrous fantasy, or even, like the prisoner of Saintine, become enamoured ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... was what your strong, solid, sensible fellows always came to; they paid, in this particular, a larger tribute to pure fancy than the people who were supposed habitually to cultivate that muse. Blanche Evers was what the French call an article of fantasy, and Gordon had taken a pleasure in finding her deliciously useless. He cultivated utility in other ways, and it pleased and flattered him to feel that he could afford, morally speaking, to have a kittenish wife. He had within himself ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... close of the season was seriously ill, and it was late in autumn before she could be taken abroad to Monaco. Here, under the associations of the place, Dilke wrote his very successful political fantasy, Prince Florestan. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... 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
... with a crystalline glittering substance, like molten glass sprayed on and allowed to harden. Behind this glasseous protective surface, paintings and carvings spread a fantasy of strange form and color, but the light was too dim to make much of it, except that it was alien to my experience, and exceedingly well done, speaking of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... edge in Near Eastern warfare, was basically city bred. The gloss of desert training might take on him, but the bedouin life itself was not in his experience, and it was hard for him to trace the dividing line between possibility and fantasy. ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... have seen, if he had taken the trouble, but obsessed with his fantasy the man from Tarascon marched straight ahead, his vision limited to searching for these monstrous felines, of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury—nothing of the might of Durham;—no Daedalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond's invitation, for though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed. The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not altogether reputable, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; "thick coming fancies" [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the fire-lighted wall. In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort. The fantasy occurred to me that she was some desolate kind of a creature, doomed to wander about in snowstorms; and that, though the ruddiness of our window panes had tempted her into a human dwelling, she would not remain long enough to melt the icicles out of her hair. Another conjecture likewise came ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you!' And all the people repeated aloud: 'God bless you, all saints and angels protect you!' The dignified lady stooped with a heavenly smile to her son, pressed a tender kiss upon his golden locks, and repeated the same words aloud. This, general, was the fantasy which suddenly appeared before my eyes when the patient spoke those words to-day. It seemed to me as if I perceived all at once a long-silent song of home. I heard the wonderful voice of the exalted lady ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once a miss has bereaved me of all. Oh! glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relentings but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but in offences? There was no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy; Sleep she as sound as careless infancy: 50 But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... fantasy to work? The Dove, the winged Columbus of man's haven? The tender Love-Bird—or the filial Stork? The punctual Crane—the providential Raven? The Pelican whose bosom feeds her young? Nay, must we ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... am tempted often to look upon men and women as shadows that have no longer any connection with me. I am very weak and feeble and I wish to sleep.... But the love of God continues, and through Jesus Christ, the love of men. It is the only truth—love of God, love of man—the rest is fantasy and unreality. Look up, my son, bear this with patience. God is standing at your shoulder and will be with you to the end. This is training for you. To show you, perhaps, that all through life you have missed the most important ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... was that in his attitude that sent a stab of wonder through her. Was it—was it Guy kneeling there in an abandonment of despair? Had he followed her like a wandering outcast now that his master Kieff was gone? If so, but no—but no! Surely it was a dream. Guy was far away. This was but the fantasy of her own brain. Guy could never have come to her thus. And yet, was it not Guy's voice that had called her ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... its corpse, or is something vital without sight, hearing or speech, and so is blind, deaf and dumb, soaring about and cogitating. Self-love entertains many other insanities with which nature, in itself dead, inspires its fantasy. Such is the effect of self-love, which regarded in itself is love of the proprium. Man's proprium, in respect of its affections which are all natural, is not unlike the life of a beast, and in respect of its perceptions, inasmuch as they spring from these affections, ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... a phrenzy do possess the brain, It so disturbs and blots the form of things, As fantasy proves altogether vain, And to the wit, no true relation brings. Then doth the wit, admitting all for true, Build fond conclusions on those ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... dim figures move under that name in contemporary history—was the 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 ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... bewildering range and penetration, sober argument and high poetic eloquence alternating with coruscations of insanely apposite slang—the earthiest jape anon shooting up into the empyrean and changing into the most ethereal fantasy—the stalest and most vulgarised forms of speech gaining brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto undreamt-of application—and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill diffusing itself from the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sets up socially is intolerable. It sounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chief reliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are, or are not, as they are gowned! The worst of this fantasy is not only that it forces too much attention from useful women, but that it gives such poise and assurance to the ignorant and useless! If you look like the women of a set, you are as "good" as they, is the democratic standard of many a young woman. If for any reason she is not able to produce ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... make his parties different from others by some childish fantasy or other. He especially delighted in a surprise. He often took the trouble (for instance) to have a telegram sent to every one of his guests during the course of the evening. Each of these wires contained some personal chaff or practical joke. At other times he would give everyone ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... only incidentally in the myths as recounted are elaborated almost infinitely in what might best be termed folk fantasy. ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... are hard to kill." Here is fact, not fantasy. Lizard yarns no less sensational than this Mystery Story can be found between the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... but a 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... comfrey, and bugloss, and hart's tongue, and borage, and mugwort, and 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 together ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... itself as might the bound Prometheus rid himself of his fetters and leave the rock to which he is chained, but we shall look back on the institutions of force, the state, the hangman, et al, as ghosts of an anxious fantasy. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... Like the mocking fantasy of a dream as seen in the instant of waking, Elaine and her company had gone, as if to return no more. Only two chapters were yet to be written, and he knew, vaguely, what Elaine was about to do when he left her, but his pen had lost ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... that direction. But the East was too remote and strange, and its languages were too little known, for this attempt to be carried far; the imitation of Chinese and Persian models was practised chiefly by way of fantasy and joke. The study of the neglected and forgotten matter of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was undertaken by serious scholars. The progress of the mediaeval influence reproduced very exactly the successive phases of the Classical Renaissance. ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakspeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... Exquisite art unlike that of any other living writer. Rabindranath Tagore is one of the magicians of modern literature—a transcendently great genius who brings to mammon-worshipping Western minds the fantasy, the enchantment, and the wonder of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... reality or human interest in such a fantasy. The only pleasurable parts of the poem are its detached passages of great melody or beauty; and the chief value of the work is as a modern example of Titan literature. Many poets have at various times represented mankind in the person ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... from Harvard University in 1908 and spent the next two years in Germany, studying during 1909 at Gottingen and during 1910 at the University of Berlin. Since his return to America he has been connected with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. His first volume, "The Human Fantasy", 1911, attracted attention by the faithfulness with which it depicted the motley life of New York. His second was "The Beloved Adventure", 1912; followed by "Love and Liberation", 1913, and "Dust and Light", 1919. The last volume, from which the selections in this anthology are ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... errands. The sum total of these expenses amounted to only eighteen cents, which left me two cents over for emergencies." Balzac somewhat exaggerates his poverty and reduces his expenses to suit the pleasure of his poetic fantasy, but undoubtedly it was a brusque transition from the bourgeois comfort of family life to the austerity of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... danger," said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... stands by itself. It is like nothing else I have written, and if one should seek to give it the name of a class, it might be called an historical fantasy. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished, and she found herself almost overpowered by the warm benevolence of his look. But the fantasy would not quit her that the original Puritan, of whom she had heard so many sombre traditions, had now stepped ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... totem.' Distinguo! A savage does not name himself after his totem, any more than Mr. Frazer named himself by his clan-name, originally Norman. It was not as when Miss Betty Amory named herself 'Blanche,' by her own will and fantasy. A savage inherits his totem name, usually through the mother's side. The special animal which protects an individual savage (Zapotec, tona; Guatemalan, nagual; North America, Manitou, 'medicine') is not ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... retorted with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake praying for her—hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin' over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth 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? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the sights, the sorrows, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... what is not so usual, a quite intelligible fantasy in mime—The Magic Pipe: Pierrot, faithless mistress, despair, sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... were also the custom among the Romans, Medes, Canaanites, Babylonians, and other Eastern nations, with the exception of the Israelites and Egyptians. The Scandinavians killed their offspring from pure fantasy. The Norwegians, after having carefully swaddled their children, put some food into their mouths, placed them under the roots of trees or under the rocks to preserve them from ferocious beasts. Infanticide was also permitted among the Chinese, and we saw, during the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... the facts of nature.... To-day the fallacy of that creed is properly recognized, and the artists on whom we have to depend in the immediate future for memorable works have substituted for it something much more reasonable.... There runs through this new school a vein of romantic fantasy which all thinking people can appreciate, because it leads to the production of pictures which appeal, not only to the eye by their attractiveness of aspect, but also to the mind by their charm of sentiment.... It is because Mr. Young Hunter and his wife have carried ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... recalled afterwards that she said, "This all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered, hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood |
