"Make-believe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reality. It had been all right as a provision merchant, but when it fancied itself capable of higher things it had deceived itself. Foolish little image with its brave dreams and its swelling words from Browning! All make-believe of the feeblest. He was a coward, running away at the first threat of danger. It was as if he were watching a tall stranger with a wand pointing to the embarrassed phantom that was himself, and ruthlessly exposing its frailties! ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... hands, feet, betray the social grade of the candidates for portraiture. The picture tells no lie about them. There is no use in their putting on airs; the make-believe gentleman and lady cannot look like the genuine article. Mediocrity shows itself for what it is worth, no matter what temporary name it may have acquired. Ill-temper cannot hide itself under the simper of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on his side, the quick response of unmistakable passion. It had not come, and she had nothing left but to loathe herself. She did so, violently, for a long time, in the dark corner of the box, and she felt that he loathed her too. 'I love you!'—how pitifully the poor little make-believe words had quavered out and how much disgust they must have represented! 'Poor man—poor man!' Laura Wing suddenly found herself murmuring: compassion filled her mind at the sense of the way she had used him. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... was pronounced its owner gave a ceremonious little bow such as is always used in make-believe introductions, and the newcomer bowed gravely to each in acknowledgment. Then she turned again to ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... it! I'm much better-looking." Tad's honest, round, freckled face was winsome but not handsome, and the girls laughed at this make-believe vanity. ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... sleep in peace, without setting us here to taste of every pain and mortification, to become acquainted with every grief, and then to perish miserably?" Old questions these, which the sprightly critic justly condemns as morbid and futile, and not to be dangled before a merry world of make-believe. Perhaps he is right. It is better to play at marbles on a sepulchre than to lift the lid and peep inside. But, for all that, they will arise when we sit alone at even in our individual wildernesses, surrounded, perhaps, by mementoes of our broken hopes and tokens of our beloved dead, strewn ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... both acted their parts very well. He rushed to the arms of the old woman for protection, and screeched small, while the widow shouted "millia murther!" at the top of her voice, and did not give up her hold of the make-believe young woman until her cap was torn half off, and her hair streamed about her face. She called on all the saints in the calendar, as she knelt in the middle of the floor and rocked to and fro, with her clasped hands raised to ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... exclaimed Babe, as soon as she could control her laughter, "that rock didn't tetch ole Blue. He's sech a make-believe, I'm a great mind to hit him a clip jest to show you how he can ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... series of "Wonder Tales" there is a capital air of make-believe, which imposes upon you most delightfully, and makes you accept the most incredible doings, as you accept them in a dream, as the most natural thing in the world. In the later series, where the didactic tale becomes more frequent ("The Pine Tree," "The Wind's Tale," "The Buckwheat"), ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... game of make-believe. All sorts of liberties are taken, the clock is put forward or back at the command of the general, a great enemy army is created in the twinkling of an eye, day is turned into night and a regular game of ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... marriage Crawley, developing the explanation rejected by Fustel de Coulanges, regards the fundamental fact to be the modesty of women, which has to be neutralized, and this is done by "a ceremonial use of force, which is half real and half make-believe." Thus the manifestations are not survivals, but "arising in a natural way from normal human feelings. It is not the tribe from which the bride is abducted, nor, primarily, her family and kindred, but her sex"; and her "sexual characters of timidity, bashfulness, and passivity are ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... another part of this record alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureat on the other side of the Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Don't you worship images, and take off and put on garments at your prayers, and kneel down in a make-believe, profane way: and don't you turn ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... make-believe nose dive, Skyrider," she chirped down at him, looking over the edge through Johnny's goggles, and hoping that he would accept her play as a tacit reconciliation, so that they could start all over again without any fussing. No doubt dad had fixed things up with Johnny and everything would be ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his guest and read in his eyes a defiant dislike and a repressed ferocity, but he chose to ignore it. The long-fostered urbanity of his make-believe must last a little longer. But at that moment Stuart's eyes met those of Conscience and he acknowledged a ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could conceivably be that ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Debby affectionately. "I have often wished to myself, only a make-believe wish, you know, not a real wish, if you understand what I mean, for of course I know it's impossible. I sometimes sit at that window before going to bed and look at the moon as it silvers the swaying clothes-props, and I can easily imagine they are great tropical palms, especially when an organ ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... they had often rushed forward to the footlights, pouring into the helpless mass before them repeated volleys of explosive crotchets. But this was a very different chorus that now saluted his eyes. It was the real thing, instead of the make-believe, and, in the opinion of Signor G——, at least, very much inferior to it. Instead of the steeple-crowned hat, jauntily feathered and looped, these irregulars wore huge sombreros, much the worse for time and weather, flapped over their faces. For the velvet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... about twice a week, and I've heard her say, "Goodness me, there's that tiresome old bachelor again." But she treats him just as polite as she does anybody; and when he brings her candy, she says, "Oh, Mr. Martin, you are too good." There's a great deal of make-believe about girls, ...
— Harper's Young People, June 8, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Paderewski himself might have envied. I wound up with a lively trill in the high notes and took my whistle from my lips with a hearty laugh, for the whole thing had been downright good fun, the playing itself, the make-believe which went with it, the surprise and interest in the children's faces, the slow-breaking smile of the little girl with ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... enter into communion with other persons and other living things, but also, in some sort, to identify his life with theirs. Watch him when he is playing with other children, or even when he is alone, except for the companionship of his dolls and toys. He is pretty sure to be acting, playing at make-believe, pretending to be something that he is not, some grown-up person of his acquaintance, some hero of history or romance, some traveller or other adventurer, some giant, dwarf, or fairy, some animal, wild or tame. He plays the part of one or other of these, and his playmates play other parts, and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... "You were just make-believe. I was the real thing—a real thief. No, let me go on; it's easier if you don't interrupt. Yes, I'll tell you my name, but it won't mean anything. I'm nobody. I'm Sarah Manvers. I'm a shop-girl out ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... were ready to brave the very Gods themselves when their blood was up. A few centuries pass away, and under the influence of civilization the descendants of these men are "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought"—frank pessimists, or, at best, make-believe optimists. The courage of the warlike stock may be as hardly tried as before, perhaps more hardly, but the enemy is self. The hero has become a monk. The man of action is replaced by the quietist, whose highest aspiration is to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... "You ought to have seen that monkey's face when he bit on those make-believe cherries on Flossie's hat!" ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... about me. I'm going to die and I know it—and before long.... There, there," as his caller uttered a protest, "don't bother to pretend, Kendrick. We aren't children, either of us, although you're a good many years younger than I am; but we're both too old to make-believe. I'm almost through. Well, it's all right. I've lived past my three score and ten and I'm alone in the world and ought not to mind leaving it, I suppose. I don't much. It's an interesting place and there are two or three matters I should like to ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... strong on the young lady's part, a marriage was out of the question. It was a romance on the pattern of Paul et Virginie. Mme. Blondet did what she could to teach her son to look to the Troisvilles, to found a lasting attachment on a children's game of "make-believe" love, which was bound to end as boy-and-girl romances usually do. When Mlle. de Troisville's marriage with General Montcornet was announced, Mme. Blondet, a dying woman, went to the bride and solemnly implored her ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... conspicuous object at the top of the hill above the town, as you turn off towards the Rope-walk. The firemen, of course, wear an appropriate uniform, with brazen helmets and shoulder-straps and a neat axe apiece, suspended in a leathern case from the waistband. But the spirit of make-believe has of necessity animated all their public exercise, if I except the 13th of April, 1879, when a fire broke out in the back premises of Mr. Tippett, carpenter. His shop was (and is) situated in the middle of the town, and ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... him. Yet he never made an effort to combat it, partly I think from pride, for he hated everything that savoured of earwigging; he was not going to put constraint upon himself that his following might be more enthusiastic. There was no make-believe about him, and he was never one who liked ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... especial pleasure in bombarding all France with his toy gun from his grotto; and as he then felt very bitter indeed because of his treatment at home, you may be sure the French army was horribly butchered in the boy's make-believe battle ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... by taking you back to a summer day fifteen years ago, when I was a boy of thirteen and Mark a young man of twenty-five. His whole life was make-believe, and just now he was pretending to be a philanthropist. He sat in our little drawing-room, flicking his gloves against the back of his left hand, and my mother, good soul, thought what a noble young gentleman he was, ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... there is so little safe amusement to be had in camp, and none in the village." These poor youngsters go from this "safe amusement" under the loving care of "lady workers," this life of limitation, make-believe and spiritual servitude that a self-respecting negro would find intolerable, into a warfare that exacts initiative and a freely acting intelligence from all who take part in it, under the bitterest penalties ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a contemptuous laugh. "They're going to join us, knowing, as they do, that the game is all up at Kimberley; but they put on all this make-believe. They want to be able to say that they were forced to serve, so as to hedge—so as to make it all comfortable with their consciences, as they ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... to what was bad; but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose rather to its full height ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... material for a fetching robe of state in all the world, and no altar cloth or priestly robe could possess excelling beauty and not owe a debt to Spain. Someone has said that women are compounds of plain-sewing and make-believe, daughters of Sham and Hem, and, without questioning the truth of the statement, the same remark might be applied to both the clergy and the women of this period at least, if "fine-sewing" be substituted for "plain-sewing" in the epigram. Isabella herself, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... one kind and another in the management of the industries they are connected with. Some of them are directors, for example, but they are always paid for their services before there is any distribution of profits. Even when their "work" is quite perfunctory and useless, mere make-believe, like the games of little children, they get paid far more than the actual workers. But there are many people who own stock in the company you work for, Jonathan, who never saw the foundries, who were never in the city of Pittsburg ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... been made of the contents of the living-room of just such a cottage as had obviously been buried beneath the rubbish heap upon which he sat. Those children of the stricken country-side entered with keenness into the spirit of the make-believe. The little girl, searching for an appropriate stone to place on the imaginary table for imaginary bread, thrust her hand down among the debris and, withdrawing it, exposed a relic. It was the faded remnant of a baby's shoe, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... truth and nothing but the truth, I'm rather proud of it. My dear, the old lady thinks so high of me that she couldn't abear to see and hear me coming out as a reg'lar brown one. Couldn't abear to make-believe as I meant it! In consequence of which, we was everlastingly ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... exactly. They had a steamboat, you know, to carry over the telegraph from England to France; but we haven't got a steamer—not even a plank to make-believe one. Cousin Sam says that a good workman can do his work with almost any tools that come to hand. As we have no tools at all, we will improve on that and go to ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... certain that all this was pure "make-believe," but they did not communicate their conviction to each other by look or suggestion of any kind. They played their part very well, and it is quite possible that Langford, peeking through his eyewinkers, ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... stardom away from him and generously submerged his own talent in order to enhance her triumph, or it is but another proof of the statement that husband and wife do not make convincing lovers in the realm of the make-believe. It was surely due to no lack of ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... work takes place gradually. Children become dissatisfied with play and make-believe, and have a growing need to be useful, to make things well, and, therefore, to acquire a sense of industry. They also learn to win recognition by producing things. Through play they advance to new stages of real mastery in the use of ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... an inspiration for our plot. It was the arrest of a make-believe Italian female organ-grinder, whose offence appeared to be that she was carrying about in a cradle attached to the organ an infant that did not belong to her. And as the infant brought her in much more money ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... maintained his anger against his wife for more than a week after the scene at Richmond, feeding it with reflections on what he called her disobedience. Nor was it a make-believe anger. She had declared her intention to act in opposition to his expressed orders. He felt that his present condition was prejudicial to his interests, and that he must take his wife back into favour, in order that he might make progress with her father, but could hardly bring himself ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... for an instant, the divine impulse of creation. They could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them. They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence—this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... dead theology. It is sentimentalism and make-believe. Perfectly scriptural doctrines are cast aside while others are arbitrary retained. Vague talk about "Christ and him crucified" takes the place of time-honored dogmas, logically deduced from the "Word of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... unworthy the palates of true Bohemians. He invited Charmian to take part in various bats, for the purpose of shocking the Pymantoning propriety of Cornelia, and they got such fun out of it as children do when the make-believe of their elders has been thinned to the most transparent pretence; but Charmian, who knew he was making fun of her, remained as passionately attached to the ideal he mocked as ever; and Cornelia had the guilty pang of wondering what he would think of her if he knew all ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... producing the single relic of a well-remembered set of olden times. "And please, please, Aunt Ermine, let me sit up to make it for him. I have not seen him all day, you know; and it is the first time he ever drank tea in our house, except make-believe with Violetta ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... called the Rolling Elephant. "Santa Claus and the workmen are coming in and they must not see us at our make-believe play. Quick! To your ...
— The Story of a Nodding Donkey • Laura Lee Hope
... imagine," he exclaimed, "that I could go on with make-believe—that I could bring myself to put faith in you ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... remains that nobody might see! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance, but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?" was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three frail ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... unquestioned, unblamed. He thought with a pitying horror of what his life had previously been—the tangle of small engagements, the silly routine work, in which no one believed; they had all been bound on a kind of make-believe pilgrimage, carrying burdens round and round, and putting them down where they had ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... way to talk to 'em!" cried Dr. Rollinson, who had overheard the whole of this conversation, and who now appeared with his broad figure, his gouty legs, and his gruff chuckle. "Books are very well for make-believe, but when it comes to downright earnest, use a tongue of your own—eh?" and he clapped the boy kindly on the shoulder. "Yes, yes, she'll marry you fast enough when she sees you making eyes at some other ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a friendly, make-believe farewell—auf wiedersehen! ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... don't ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your tummy chilled from time to time—because you know it's all make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. It gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever. It's always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... now going into business, sport, social events, frivolities, make-believe and the deliberate destruction of waste and war could be directed to planning, utilizing, beautifying on the circumferences and at the centers of population concentrations, immense forward strides could be taken ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... never speak of it again. Islington, where is that? you must say if Islington should happen in the conversation, which is not likely. I always told you that you'd have to throw your family over. We want you, not your family. Chaperons nowadays are a make-believe. Lady Duckle will suit you very well; she'll feel ill when you don't want her, when you do she'll be all there. She's an honest old thing, and will do all that's required of her for the money you pay her. Thirty pounds a month, that's it, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettiedness, we call THE WORLD; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... path; and the smallest girl in proportion to the baby she carried that I ever saw in that England where small girls seem always to carry such very large babies, tilted back and forth with it in her slender arms, and tried to make-believe it was going ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography. ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... said Miss Stuart, "that we ladies so seldom have the sunlight on our faces. I think we might agree to Mr. Green's proposal to go out somewhere and see where the sunbeams really are made. We shut them out with our curtains, and turn night into a make-believe day." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... answered, waving them back with her small hand. "'Tis only that they play at make-believe in love, the princess and her betrothed! But after all, it is far more sensible than real love-making, where if the pleasure be more acute, the pangs are therefore the greater. She addresses to him the tenderest counterfeit verses; he ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 'The time for make-believe is past,' he was saying. 'We have fenced with each other. I have told you only half the truth, and you have always kept me at arm's length. But you knew in your heart, my dearest lady, that there must be the full truth between us some day, and ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... ever very civil to me. I tell you, so far from rewarding him for being of the true sort, you do nothing but snub him, that I can see. He looks to me as good for work as any man I know; but you'll give your livings to any kind of wretched make-believe before you'll give them to Frank. I am aware," said the heir of the Wentworths, with a momentary flush, "that I have never been considered much of a credit to the family; but if I were to announce my intention of marrying and settling, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... absurdities of a made-up theology and a make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... that was all. Nothing startling, nothing dramatic, just simple, natural, like her! I gave her hand back, I put it on her breast myself, and crossed the other on it. She looked as if she were sleeping, with that faint color hovering in her face, which was not wasted, but I did not make-believe about it; I accepted the fact of her death. In your 'Quests of the Occult,'" Alderling broke off, with a kind of superiority that was of almost the quality of contempt, "I believe you don't allow yourself to be daunted by a diametrical difference of opinion ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... principle the line of argument in The Prophetical Office of the Church was taken by Mr. Newman. It was certainly no make-believe, or unreal argument. It was a forcible and original way of putting part of the case against Rome. It was part of the case, a very important part; but it was not the whole case, and it ought to have been evident from the first that in this controversy we could ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... faith has reckoned done will be done, the death-stroke will be given to "the old man," sin will die, and the heart will be clean indeed, and wholly alive toward God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It will not be a mere "make-believe" experience, but a gloriously ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... do not make-believe. I am in love with him myself, and have been any time since Nelson and the Nile. As for you, Dolly, since he went away six months ago, you have been positively in the megrims. I shall date your loss of appetite from George Austin's vanishing. No, my dear, our family require entertainment: ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... desired psychophysical effect. The patient who by merely mental inhibition has lost his voice for weeks may get it back as soon as the physician has looked into his larynx with a mirror and has held an electrode without battery connection on the throat. Another way of helping by make-believe methods is to give the impression that a decided improvement is noticeable. The uneducated patient believes it easily when the physician at his very entrance into the office expresses his surprise about the external symptoms ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... I got to the theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an "adaptation" from ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... know you're only talking just because it is nice to make-believe. I like to hear you, too; but what is the use when it's ONLY make-believe? You know what father's health really is; you know how nervous he is. Doctor Powers told me he must not be overexcited or—or dreadful things might happen. You saw him ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... anything worse to her than let her flounder; but he was willing to do that so long as it mightn't prevent his seeing at least where he was. He seemed still to see where he was even at the minute that followed her final break-off, clearly intended to be resolute, from make-believe talk. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... as if the expected "guest" were one in fact, as well as name. It was fun to be playing a game of make-believe, in which the elders ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street. Reality is always difficult to face. The great popularity of the cinema is due to this human desire for make-believe. Cinema-going is a regression to the infantile; we return to the childish phase where the wish was all powerful. In the cinema the villain is always worsted; the wronged heroine always falls into the hero's ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... sort of make-believe wedding," replied Mrs. Clifford; "that is all. And since you are to be bridesmaid, Dotty, I wonder if I cannot find a pair of white slippers for you. I remember Grace had a pair some years ago, which she ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man's faith; but it is too much to ask that I should respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for English history could see something poetic and national about the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... eyes?'—'Never but my first sweetheart's, Sally Malkins,' said I. But then he turned gruff, and would say, 'Pshaw!' for he never could be pleased with any body praising Mrs. Isabel, but himself and that make-believe good young Lord with a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... were times when the country of make-believe was swept down by a whirlwind, a whirlwind of realization which crashed through Katie's consciousness and knocked over the fancyings. Those whirlwinds would come all unannounced; when Ann seemed ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... These objections seem to fall as a rule under two main heads. First, there are those who object to any stimulation of the fanciful in children, and who would have us confine ourselves to what they call realities. They would eliminate as far as possible all the imaginings of children. The make-believe world so dear to infancy has no place in their creed. Second, there are those who doubt the moral tendency of all fairy tales. They observe that many of these tales come to us from a cruder and coarser ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... considered it was not to be borne any longer, so having counted the women and their asses, he cleared a space in preparation for a mock sale at which they were all to be put up, and having got us in front as make-believe purchasers, proceeded with the business, which ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... rouse herself to any great effort. She is quite inaccurate in arithmetic, and only fair in other school studies. Emotions normal. In many ways appears normally childish. Her interest in fairy tales and in the type of make-believe plays in which she engages with her younger sisters seems mixed with her wonderment in regard to sex life. There is a distinct tendency ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... tell you!" She spoke in a low voice surcharged with emotion. "I will give you candour for candour, and make an end of all this make-believe." ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... left. But the man who had talked with her was not a Mexican. No one but a white man—and a range man, she added to herself—would say, "Uh course I knowed yore voice." And he had not really had a cold. Mary V's ears were sharper than her dad's, for she had caught the make-believe in the hoarseness. She knew perfectly well that Johnny Jewel might be hoarse as a crow and never talk that way. Johnny never said "Uh course I knowed," and Johnny would choke before he'd ever call her sweetheart. He wouldn't have let that man do it, either, had Johnny been ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... Sawdust Doll over in this chair where she can see us," said Dorothy. "My Doll can eat make-believe things when I have a play party, but we won't pretend that now. We'll just eat the ...
— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope
... a 'parallel of latitude' is, because I learned it in my geography," said Dodo, who had been pouting since Nat teased her about the cracked ice; "it's a make-believe line that runs all round the world like the equator. But what ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... her make-believe stronger than we have. She play-acts his existence very well. But suppose someone asks her what he eats, or where he gets his exercise, or some other personal question. She hasn't the command of logic to improvise a ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... bride of a millionaire and adoring duke; the peerless Berengaria wrought havoc with the peace of Lord Arthur, and had more suitors than she could count on the fingers of both hands. It was a fascinating make-believe; but, as Ruth plaintively remarked, it did come with somewhat of a shock to be ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... indignation against a perpetrator of some mean or cruel act, when as a matter of fact his feeling is much more one of compassion for the previously liked offender. In this way we impose on ourselves, disguising our real sentiments by a thin veil of make-believe. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when, the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... without a light, and describing what she ought to have seen. Believing her, however, to be there on such good authority, we were getting very sorry for Bellini's mother, when we were unexpectedly relieved, by finding it was only a bit of make-believe; for it was now divulged, che questa madre che piangea il suo figlio, was not in fact his personal mother, but "Italy" dressed up like his mother, and gone to Paris on purpose to weep and put garlands on the composer's tomb, amaranth and crocus, and whatever else was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... fawther's esteet; or ould Dan rises and says the Irish women are the loveliest, the Irish men the bravest, the Irish land the most fertile in the world: and nobody believes anybody—the latter does not believe his story nor the hearer:—but they make-believe to believe, and solemnly do ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sitting-room of that most comfortable cottage one can imagine the gifted but somewhat ill-fated author sitting down comfortably after breakfast to his "copy," when his host had ridden forth with his overseer to make-believe to inspect the flocks, but in reality to ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... notions of humour were somewhat forced. It is thus almost startling to read his extravagant praise of a passage about Sapsea which the author discarded in Edwin Drood. Nothing better showed Boz's discretion. The well-known passage in The Old Curiosity Shop about the little marchioness and her make-believe of orange peel and water, and which Dickens allowed him to mend in his own way, was certainly ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do not even care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceive of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... together as if it were a picnic. She had never seen him so cheery and inconsequent. It was as if he also were engaged in some species of make-believe. Or was it the enchantment of spring that had fallen upon them both? Dinah could not have said. She only knew that she had never felt so happy in all ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... lurking—"was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington!—it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and talk ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the glamour of a romance as tender as any he disclosed to delighted audiences in the world of make-believe. His father, Henry Frohman, was both idealist and dreamer. Born on the pleasant countryside that encircles the town of Darmstadt in Germany, he grew up amid an appreciation of the best in German literature. He was ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... or a fool. Then came the militia battalion, a rather shamefaced lot of young men who seemed to be painfully aware that they were not at all real heroes like the soldiers in the carriages, but merely make-believe imitations. The patriotic societies followed, genuine and non-genuine, resplendent in ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... it well, I wis; The place was sadly swollen; And then he took a willing kiss, And made believe 't was stolen; Then made another make-believe, Till thefts grew past concealing, For when love once begins to thieve There grows ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... replied Billie. "We always call him Prince to his face, and his daughter as the Princess Lucia. Of course, it is all make-believe, but it is one way ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... most about her, and the thing that has set me writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows it as willingly or unwillingly as you ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... would have enjoyed the adventure, as an adventure, keenly. He had no objections to fighting on the side of rascals, or against rascals. He objected to them only in the calmer moments of private life; and as he was of course ignorant that the expedition was only a make-believe, he felt a certain respect for his fellow-conspirators as men who were willing to stake their lives for a chance of better fortune. But that their bravery was of the kind which would make them hesitate to rob and deceive a helpless girl he very much doubted; for he knew that ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... and there are even more in India than elsewhere who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among others. There are few fighting-men among that host. They are priests for the most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed and shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk roads, where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen marching in eight-hundred-man battalions. They prefer to dream along the byways, and set other ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... Clotilde was accused of not having gave a stir of deep gratitude. Dear, pretty little mother! Not only knowing full well the existence of this swelling heart and the significance, to-day, of its every warm pulsation, but kindly covering up the discovery with make-believe reproaches. The tears started in her ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... safety. Very often dreams would break up about them in this fashion, and they would be separated, to endure awful adventures alone. But the most amusing times were when he and she had a clear understanding that it was all make-believe, and walked through mile-wide roaring rivers without even taking off their shoes, or set light to populous cities to see how they would burn, and were rude as any children to the vague shadows met in their rambles. Later in the night ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Flipp being invisible, grandma and I were left together to enjoy a small fire in the dining-room, so I took this opportunity of inquiring how Jim Clay had managed to capture her. This sort of thing interested me; I liked life in the actuality where there was no counterfeit or make-believe to offend the sense of just proportions. Not that I do not love books and pictures, but they have to be so very very good before they can in any way appease one, while the meanest life is absorbingly interesting, invested as it must ever be with the dignity ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin |
