"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rain-drops will occasionally be heard to patter against my window-panes, which look forth upon one of the quietest streets in a New England town. After a time, too, the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out, before the clock shall strike bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials, as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one was to be seen. Rosalind had gone away with her uncle for a few days. Belle amused herself by imagining that Rosalind's having been there at all was a dream, and she succeeded in producing a bewildering sense of unreality in her own mind. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... arms rippled with motion and Lea gaped, horrified as the hairs there writhed and stirred as though endowed with separate life. His chest rose and fell rapidly, deep, gasping breaths racking his body. Lea could only stare through the dim redness of unreality and wonder if she was going mad ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... in quick succession by the representatives of France and Austria, and with their coming a certain sense of restraint passed away from the brilliant assemblage. Before there had been a certain sense of unreality in the whole thing. The tone of the rejoicings had been feverish—who could tell but that in a week this thing might not have passed away like a mirage. Now a heartier note altogether prevailed, especially amongst the ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... them into the verandah, and stood smiling and waving her hand to them as they rode away, with a composure born of a stunned sense of the unreality of it all. Theo was just going down to the Lines, and he would be back to tiffin as a matter of course. Nevertheless, half an hour later the rims of her eyes were again reddened with weeping: and donning a sun-hat, she hurried out to a point where she could watch ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the hearth, and sat down opposite him, leaning her arm on the window-sill and her chin on her hand. The moonlight caught her cheek where she had just renewed the powder, caught her fair crinkly hair; it caught the plush of the furniture, and his own khaki, giving them all a touch of unreality. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... From unreality lead me to the real, from darkness to the light, from death to immortality. [Footnote: Asatoma sadgamaya, tamasoma jyotirgamaya, mrityorma mritangamaya.] But how can one hope to have this prayer granted? For infinite is the distance that lies between truth and untruth, between death and ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... made for practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for reality ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... that look of wanting lunch which characterizes all picture-gallery-goers at home and abroad, stood faint before a certain large Venetian subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very name of which he spat out of his mouth with loathing for its unreality. He passed them with a sombre glance, as he took his way toward the retired spot where his ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... he was a half hour in reaching the valley, where, through the trees, he saw the Indian village. He felt that he was rash, but wishing to see, he crept closer, the cover still holding good. He was, in a way, fascinated by what he saw. It had the quality of a dream, and its very unreality made him think less of the danger. But he really did not know how expert he had become as a woodsman and trailer through his long training as a trapper, where delicacy of movement and ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the same. St. Preux, Rene, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins,—so much easier is it to caricature life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint it in its noble simplicity; so much cheaper is unreality than truth. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... one of her children had fallen into the hot copper, for which reason she was running so fast to fetch the doctor. Tom had a profound contempt for this nonsense of Maggie's, smashing the earwig at once as a superfluous yet easy means of proving the entire unreality of such a story; but Lucy, for the life of her, could not help fancying there was something in it, and at all events thought it was very pretty make-believe. So now the desire to know the history of a very portly toad, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it was ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... impressed Hilary more than ever before with the conviction of all she was to him; likewise, all he was to her. More, much more than even a few short weeks since. Then, intense as it was, the love had a dream like unreality; now it was close, home-like, familiar. Instinctively she clung to his arm; she had become so used to being Robert's darling now. She shivered as she thought of the wide seas rolling between them; of the time when she should ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... to attend upon the Cardinals in the Abbey; and as he awoke that morning, it seemed to him once more as if he were living in a dream of strange and intoxicating unreality. Everywhere in the house, as he passed along the corridors, as he gave and received last instructions before starting, there seemed the same tension of expectancy. Finally, as he went up to the Cardinals' rooms to announce the start, he found the two prelates, both ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... and confused Ruth Dale. The expression of face, voice and language swept away the sense of unreality and detachment. Here was a vital trouble. A tangible human call. It might be that she, instead of Ralph Drew or Constance, or any other person, might touch and rescue this girl who was finding herself among the ruins of ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... imitative and because it stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities. Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led to unreality, and, if not to untruth, at least to an unwholesome ignoring of a part of truth. There was, therefore, an inevitable reaction to the naturalism described with such verve and gusto by Fra Lippo Lippi. But this is, after all, social history in terms of art, and to Browning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... his introduction was over, Mrs. Alison had shown him his room—a simple sweet-smelling apartment, all pale green and white and as fresh as a daisy—and they were all four seated in a cool parlour about a hearty tea, did the feeling of unreality ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... bit of conversation with Mrs. Haverford took on the unreality of the rest of that twenty-four hours. But one part of it stood out real and hopelessly true. There ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... development."[20] "The idea of Socialism will conquer the world, for this idea is nothing but the real, well understood interest of mankind."[21] "Its principles will carry the whole human race to a higher state of perfection."[22] "It is the great modern protest against unreality, against the delusive shams which now masquerade as verities."[23] "Socialism is of the character of a historical discovery."[24] "Socialism, the inspiring principle of all Labour Parties, whether they know it ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... through the grottos about you—grottos haunted by weird forms of the deep, from graceful to grotesque, from almost colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ocean he could hardly feel more detached from the ordinary ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... peace, and there was glory; but she could not divest herself of a sense of unreality. She could not feel as if it were really and truly Gilbert, and she were mourning for him. All was like a dream—that solemn military spectacle—the serene, grave sunshine on the fortress-harbour stretching its mailed arms into the sea—the roofs of the knightly ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be. To burn powder hour after hour and day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober, uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about themselves—the ghastly unreality of the proposition left ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... in the middle; when a haze ripples the skyline like a waving ribbon of faded blue; when the winds and the grasses stop and listen for the first on-rush of winter, then it is that the rangeland takes on a certain intoxicating unreality, and range-wild blood leaps with desire to do something—anything, so it is different and irresponsible and not measured by precedent ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... A few palpably deserted huts, nothing else. Beneath us, snugly anchored there on the ledge, was our power house. No unreality here. Its aerials were mounted; its external dynamos were visibly revolving; from its windows blue shafts of light slanted out; and from it rose the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... true satisfaction of men, which is to be found only in the society of the Gods, in sacrificing to them and propitiating them. Like a Christian ascetic, Plato seems to suppose that life should be passed wholly in the enjoyment of divine things. And after meditating in amazement on the sadness and unreality of the world, he adds, in a sort of parenthesis, ...
— Laws • Plato
... connection with the powerful enemy who controlled more and more even the normal and reasonable doings of the patient. My first impression was decidedly that of a paranoiac. Yet in some ways the case suggested another view. There had remained an insight into the unreality of the obsession. The patient did not really believe the theory of the telepathic hypnotic influence. He felt it more as an idea which he could not get rid of and he did not know clearly himself whether he requested hypnotic treatment on my ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... bunch hung straight down without the slightest oscillation. Such lack of motion and life amid the close stewing heat of the lazaret threw a glamor of unreality over the whole affair. The schooner might well have been warped to a dock in some port of the dead. The very newness of everything accentuated its ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... not yet profess it in the form of the State, for its attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not yet the actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it still operates upon the unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this human kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its instrument, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of the constituent elements of daylight? What judgment will foreign countries and future times pass on the labours of the most acute and accomplished of the philosophers who have been parties to so portentous an unreality? Here are professors gravely lecturing on medicine, or history, or political economy, who, so far from being bound to acknowledge, are free to scoff at the action of mind upon matter, or of mind upon ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... a fountain in that interior court added to a feeling of unreality. It was a stage set for a play. Palm trees and many flowering plants grew in profusion and The Merriweather Girls, unused to the luxuriant verdure of the south, stood ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... use. Failure to obtain phenomena that could be verified might subtly awaken skepticism in the simple-hearted Hindus around her. But this secret confession, which might be repudiated if necessary, raised my whole siege at once.[3] And the confession itself, while it admitted the unreality of the miracles, left a marvel,—namely, her power to cause the hallucinations. I remembered the legend of Glam, from whom came our word "glamour," and had a droll feeling of being defeated, like Grettir, in the moment of his victory over that moonshine-giant. As says the Saga, "even as ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... enough so far as words went, but she was too stunned and confused to take in their full meaning; and in truth her presence there at all had only been another unfamiliar element in this bewildering whirl of events, imparting an additional sense of unreality. But when she mentioned Madame Lavaux, the name linked itself at once with recent memories and emotions, and its accustomed association with her every-day life made it a rallying point, as it were, for her scattered ideas. Madame Lavaux had been cross and unkind to ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... senses, for this evidence is not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. That which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... long-earned holiday. He lunched at his club, speaking in a more than usually friendly manner to the few men with whom at times he had found it a pleasure to associate, and finally, with that sense of unreality growing stronger and stronger, he found himself once more in the Park, in his usual chair, looking out with the same keen sympathy upon the intensely joyous, beautiful phase of life which floated around him. The afternoon ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... With a sense of unreality she perceived that the night had gone. Over the quiet street below there brooded that strange, metallic light which ushers in the dawn of a fine day. A cold breeze whispered to and fro. Above the house-tops the sky was ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... ought to be its mirror. Such art was not congenial to the English atmosphere; it might be suitable in Madrid; but when forcibly transplanted to the London stage, we feel that the performance has not the simple earnestness by which alone it can be justified. The sentiment has a certain unreality, and the naivete suggests affectation. The implied belief is got up for the moment and has a hollow ring. And therefore, the whole work, in spite of some eloquence, is nothing better than a curiosity, as an attempt at the assimilation of a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... expected to believe that most of our poor unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... unreality held me thralled and my brain refused me service. Like an hypnotic subject I walked back to my study, followed by my terrible visitor, who reclosed the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... and picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers. But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the great castles, palaces, and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... her ride down the hillside and join one of the little groups dotted about outside the cover-side, with a curious sense of unreality. After a while he broke into a little laugh, and, shaking his reins, lit a cigar. This was a new character for him altogether. He knew himself that no man had kept his life more blameless than he! If anything, he felt ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The days and weeks of an unusually smiling summer brought autumn, and with it the cutting of golden grain; but the bustle and custom of harvest failed to draw Joan among her kind. Human life faded somewhat, even to the verge of unreality with her. Silence fell upon her, and a gravity of demeanor which was new to the beholders. Uncle Chirgwin and Mary were alike puzzled at this sign, and, misunderstanding the nature of the change, feared that the girl's spiritual development must be meeting ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality—of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere—is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the Philippics. In the epoch of the Verrines and the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Maggie's superiority and the faint rebellious reaction which had come upon him with regard to his personal religion. Certainly he had had Mass said for Amy this morning; but it had been by almost a superstitious rather than a religious instinct. He was, in fact, in that state of religious unreality which occasionally comes upon converts within a year or two of the change of their faith. The impetus of old association is absent, and the force of ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... impudence of the rogue intensified the atmosphere of unreality, which was most distracting. Doggedly my bewildered brain was labouring in the midst of a litter of fiction, which had suddenly changed into truth. The impossible had come to pass. The cracksman of the novel had come to life, and I was reluctantly witnessing, in comparative ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... and 'Blackwood' in particular criticised it at considerable length, calling it 'the least successful of her works.' The subject, while half challenging comparison with Milton, lends itself only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett's genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship.' It must have been a little mortifying to the authoress ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was that of unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound for that of the human voice; or else that it was ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... purely philanthropic and unselfish cause. And yet in spite of herself, Marguerite seemed unable to shake off that curious sense of mistrust which had assailed her from the first, nor that feeling of unreality and staginess with which the Frenchwoman's attitude had originally ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... without words—two black figures themselves, arms together, leaning forward, staring with burning hearts and tranquil faces out of a dream, as if they did not exist, had never existed; as if in the snow and night they had become an unreality, walking deeper into mists—yet never quite vanishing but growing only more unreal. Snow and two lovers walking together with the world like a dream over their heads, with life lingering in their eyes like a delicately absent-minded guest—the thought ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the promises of Prince Michael Obrenovitch to rise en masse. These promises were never fulfilled, and the insurrection was put down with great barbarities by the neighbouring Albanian levies. This single fact is tolerably conclusive as to the unreality of a south Slavonic insurrection, of which so much has been said, and to promote which so much trouble has been taken. Even were the discontent tenfold as deep-rooted as it now is, the Turkish Government might rely on the Mussulman population and the Arnauts to suppress ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... shrank from giving us any inducement to lay bare our own religious emotions. To him and to our mother the needless revelation of the deeper feelings seemed to be a kind of spiritual indelicacy. To encourage children to use the conventional phrases could only stimulate to unreality or actual hypocrisy. He recognised, indeed, the duty of impressing upon us his own convictions, but he spoke only when speaking was a duty. He read prayers daily in his family, and used to expound a few verses of the Bible with characteristic ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... her right the elevated and the docks were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled her marrow ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... moon was battling its way through the clouds. His eyes travelled from heaven to earth. There was a spirit of unreality in it all. Something made him mistrust himself, his very existence. He longed to have done with dreams and speculation, to feel something tangible, warm, and real within his grasp. "I can't go on like this!" he cried. "I can't!" He turned from the window and walked hurriedly up and down the ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... salon of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date marks the highest point of feminine activity ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... weird feeling of unreality; as he hung there helplessly, to see one of the screens on the bulkhead pick ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... had not taught him, he would have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old hearts that are still young for his Dream Life and his Reveries of a Bachelor, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had "a way ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... one, and a steamy wind on what at sea I should have called the starboard bow, as I pressed forward to the distant hill, had a curiously subduing effect on my thoughts, and filled the forest glades with a tremulous unreality like to nothing on our earth, and distinctly embarrassing to a stranger in a strange land. Small birds in that quaint atmospheric haze looked like condors, butterflies like giant fowl, and the simplest objects of the forest like the imaginations of a disordered ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... English victims whom he had thus got possession of lived, meanwhile, in a condition of what we may term unreality. They could not absolutely credit their senses. They felt strangely impelled to believe that a hideous nightmare had beset them—that they were dreaming; that they would unquestionably awake at last, ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... feeling in me. No, I will affect nothing. In a manly way I will, with God's blessing, do my duty. I will not, as far as I can help, dishonour His service by any strangeness or extravagance of conduct, any unreality of words, any over-softness or constraint of manner; but they shall see that the fear of God only makes those who cherish it more respectable in the world's eyes as well as more heavenly-minded. What a blessed return ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... got a start, and although Foster did not mean to give up the chase, he felt depressed as the train sped through the forests of Ontario. It was not long since he had come that way in high spirits, looking forward with pleasure to a holiday. Now he looked back, with a feeling of unreality, on his wanderings among the Scottish bogs. All he had done seemed ridiculous and fantastic. Nobody was the better for it, while he had involved himself in a horrible tangle. The police were probably on his track and Featherstone suspected him; he had acted like a romantic boy and ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the time are Atterbom, Hammarskoeld, and Palmblad. The works of Atterbom (b. 1790) indicate great lyrical talent, but they have an airy unreality, which disappoints the healthy appetite of modern readers. Hammarskoeld (1785-1827) was an able critic and literary historian, though his poems are of little value. Palmblad, besides being a critic, is the author of several novels and translations ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Father Payne. "I'm drunk and drugged with unreality. I will go and have a look round the farm—no, I won't have any company, thank you. I shall only go on fuming and stewing, if I have sympathetic listeners. You are too amiable, you fellows. You encourage me to talk, when you ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cried in intense relief as she recognized the well-known landmarks. Long before the train could possibly draw up, she got up and stood by the door with the handle in her hand, a sense of strangeness, of unreality, growing upon her. She felt as though she were some one else, some one older and more experienced, who was accustomed to moving amidst tragedies and the serious events of life. Even the old familiar platform, the white palings, the 'bus and ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... way contradicts the fact that the {250} fullest life under present conditions involves contact with evil. Innocence must be tragic if it is not to be weak. Jesus without the cross would possess something of that quality of unreality which attaches to Aristotle's high-minded man. But this does not prove that life involves evil; it proves only that life will be narrow and complacent when it is out of touch with things as they are. Since evil is now real, he who altogether escapes it ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... its grey windows, its iron-hung gas-lamps, its ugly desk and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange shapes and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the part of Miss Burney sometimes appeared to me a little overwrought and designed to conceal a sharpness of wit and observation which she feared to exercise in courtly circles. In this resolve she was doubtless discreet, but it gave her conversation a turn of unreality which impressed as might the use of some perfume of Araby to conceal a less romantic odour. It affected my own candour disagreeably. Possibly the praise received by the author of "Evelina" might cause her to abandon ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... matters worse these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams. One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The ego which must gauge itself by external bearings is temporarily adrift and lost. Suicidal thoughts are ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... great planes circled above the harbor. The thought that they did not know where they were lent a touch of unreality and, romance to it all. The boats full of men went gayly off, the soldiers singing, calling, and whistling back to ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... hero and in which girls he knew and those he imagined were the heroines, but at the same time, standing aloof as it were, another part of him seemed to watch his own reactions until "I nearly went crazy." He became obsessed by a feeling of unreality and adopted a Berkleyan philosophy of idealism: nothing seemed to exist except his own consciousness, and that seemed of doubtful existence. He took long walks by himself, read philosophy and science with avidity, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the glowing room. He had forgotten its aspect—the ghostly unreality around him. He too—his body, like Harl's and Tina's—was of the same wraith-like substance.... Then, suddenly, Larry's viewpoint shifted. The room and its occupants were real and tangible. And outside the glowing bars—everything out there ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... like the ordinary run of the believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them. The dim light, the unhealthy commerce of fictitious ghosts, the unreality of act and sentiment, the unwonted abandon, form an atmosphere in which these second-hand mystics float away into a sphere where the morals and the manners are altogether different from ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... of verbs or of numbers or merely of dates, in consequence of an accident. The localization of all the particles of thought has been proved nowadays; what then would there be surprising in the fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations should be destroyed for the ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... business, and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made the situation more and increasingly difficult was the fact that, next to their love for each other, the emotion that most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each knew ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... professor's thin, sneering face, the hideous anger of the cripple, the blow, the dead body, Rutherford's arrest. And when her brain was sick, it would turn for relief to the noble story of Hugh's self-sacrifice, only to be balked by a sense of unreality. What the detective had told, briefly and dryly, lived in her mind convincingly; but Hugh's romance, that had glowed on his tongue, now lay lifeless on her fancy. Back her mind would go to the bookshop, the ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... he should by some incantation be projected forward only fifty years in time, still in the place of his birth, the effect of unreality would be even more startling, especially if those things should have happened which prophets predict and toward which all progress tends. Conditions would be unendurable, manners offensive. No man would seem quite a man. No woman would ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... Borrow was content to give us the wonderful, without taking that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this exaggeration of Borrow's, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to some of the most ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... this with geranium lips slightly parted on flawless teeth, and nodded slowly. The westering sun striking through the window overlooking the Common illuminated her with a flat gold unreality. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... She glared at him across the narrow table, and, in the moment, each had a sense of unreality. The quarrel was like a bolt from the blue, as startling and unexpected—as most quarrels are—the bitterest and most lasting. Then she sprang to her feet and hurled a taunt at him some Imp of Darkness must ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... significance—suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth. Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth. The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language, the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic expression of the resplendent vagaries of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality, corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... mean you've been saving me again from myself, from my silliness, from my romanticism, that you've given me another revelation of the falsity, the unreality of my attitude toward ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... under criticism, is quite as common to her more carefully-guarded, tradition-hedged German sisters? No, it is not that. Is it any thing in these emerald and opal tinted skies, which seem so unreal to the American eye, and for the first time explain what seemed the unreality of German art? in these mysterious yet restful Rhine fogs, which prolong the twilight, and hang the curtain of romance even over mid-day? Surely not. Is it not rather, O Herr Professor profound in analogy and philosophy!—is ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... disclosed that all these were in reality as one person who had unceasingly plotted to my destruction, and William Beveledge Greyson would stand revealed in the guise of a malevolent vampire. Truly that development has at this moment an appearance of unreality, and worthy even of pooh-pooh, but thus is the warning spread by your own printed papers and the records of your Halls of Justice, and it would be an unseemly presumption for one of my immature experience to ignore the outstretched and warning ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... delusions!" But I think that this danger need not be contemplated seriously. The Historical Novel exists primarily as Fiction, and, even though in our waking moments we may be persuaded of the unreality of that "dream" which a Scott or a Dumas has produced for us, we shall still be able to place ourselves again and again under the spell of their delightful influence. Moreover, while admitting Dumas' carelessness of exact detail, it would hardly be contended by the most sceptical ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... was aware of a faint reflection of the zed-light—a gray Cathedral shaft crossing the helio-room and falling upon the opposite wall. An unreality there, as the zed-light faintly strove to penetrate the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... hardly aware that he had asked her a question. She was suffering that momentary sense of unreality which comes to us when the years roll away and we are thrown abruptly hack into the days of our childhood. The logical side of her mind was quite aware that there was nothing remarkable in the fact that Wally ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a terrific adventure. What most frightened her, perhaps, was her own astounding audacity. She was alarmed by something within herself which seemed to be no part of herself and which produced in her curious, disconcerting, fleeting impressions of unreality. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... sensation of unreality passed away for the moment, and Richard Frayne flung himself upon his knees beside his cousin, to raise his head, after hurriedly taking out and folding a handkerchief to form a bandage; while, after eagerly watching him for a few moments, one of the two pupils turned and dashed ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... moving through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... adult forms of worship and service diminutized, and juvenile copies of mature experience encouraged. Junior brotherhoods and junior societies thus have tended to destroy the genuine, natural, spontaneous religious life of boys, and have unconsciously aided the culture of cant and religious unreality. ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... future, conjoined with a professed belief in endless torment, savors to me somewhat of unreality. The two things do not hang together. Surely, if such torment is but realized, it would cast a pall of gloom even over heaven's joy. But let such torment be abolished in fact and in conception, and the last vestige of gloom goes along ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... experience of the importance of Puritan ways of thinking to overcome one's feeling of the unreality of their beliefs. I had pretty well forgotten how real to them "the man in the next street" is, till your citation of their horribly absurd dogmas reminded me of it. If you can persuade them that Paul is fairly interpretable in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... community, which is strong enough to save our community; but which has not yet got a name. Let no one fancy I confess any unreality when I confess the namelessness. The morality called Puritanism, the tendency called Liberalism, the reaction called Tory Democracy, had not only long been powerful, but had practically done most of their work, before these actual names were attached to them. ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... lack of humor that we owe such stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram and all the high-born, ill-bred company who gather in Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from Madame Tussaud's ingenious workshop, and against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips, contrast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack of humor, too, which beguiled her into asserting that the forty "wicked, sophistical and immoral French novels" which found their way down to lonely Haworth gave her "a thorough idea ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... is possible that even had Mr. Tutt put in no defense whatever the jury might have refused to convict, for there was a curious air of unreality surrounding the whole affair. It all seemed somehow as if—assuming that it had ever taken place at all—it had occurred in some other world and in some other age. Perhaps under what might have been practically a direction of the court a verdict of conviction might have been returned—but ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... brushed scrupulously as always, with the little limp, yet as always dignified and erect, he came to stand before her, and she stood up, and their hands met. Flushed and a little confused, she followed him to an inconspicuous table in a corner of the dining room. Then the dreamlike unreality and beauty of their hours together began again. Cherry felt adjusted, untrammelled, at ease; she felt that all the uncomfortable sensations of the past two hours were ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... or vegetation. Occasionally we passed small towns with a few planted trees. The latter part of the way seemed almost like a desert; there being little to observe, one had time to reflect, and, in some inscrutable manner, the immensity of China, its extreme age, its teeming population, and its unreality, judged by Western standards, began to dawn on me. I had previously failed to realize that I was actually in China. Having seen the Chinese at several points before reaching Hong-Kong, that city with its English environment did not impress me greatly. Canton seemed an unrelated place, a kind ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Christina Rossetti to anything produced by her gifted brother, who place Jean Ingelow above Elizabeth Barrett, who find more pleasure in Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia than in all the poems of Matthew Arnold, and who cannot be interested in even the best of Pre-Raphaelite verse because of its unreality. Many men, many minds! Time has not yet recorded its verdict on the Victorians, and until there is some settled criticism which shall express the judgment of several generations of men, the best plan for the beginner is to make ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... eternal, I have stated a mental thing. That is the fact. Its opposite, that is, the opposite of Life, is death. One opposes the other. But God is Life. Is God also death? He can't be. Life is the fact. Then death must be the illusion. That being so, Life is the reality, and death is the unreality. Very well, what makes death seem real? It is just because the false thought of death comes into the human mind, and is held there as a reality, as something that has got to happen. And that strong belief becomes externalized in what mortals call death. Don't you see? Is there a person ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... right sure of that. There was such mystery, such an unwonted sense of unreality a-quiver in this silence, that he wanted, very much, to learn what it was all about. Then, ever and ever so cautiously, he slipped down off the bed. His dimpled toes went patting daintily across the polished floor, and presently he had stolen forth ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... her sing, or that voice would have melted all his resolutions, instead of which, he boldly dashed down the proffered cup, and on her offering to give him a kiss, he dealt her a box on the ear, which upset her like a card figure, when he became so horrified at the spectral unreality of the objects about him, that he ran off as fast as his legs would carry him, fiddling like mad as he went along. In his frantic flight he passed by streams of water that seemed to be nothing but tinfoil, and rocks that looked as if ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... daylight, tended to steady him further. The hotel clerk, busy about his uninspired duties; the impassive waiters in black and white; the solid-looking Englishmen and their wives who began to make their appearance, lent a sense of unreality to the events ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to any existence in which she ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard dies ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... second night, a night without wind or cloud, they camped in the heart of the great glacier: and all about them,—touched to ethereal unreality by the light of moon and stars,—were unnumbered crests and pinnacles, fantastically carven; black mouths of caverns, shaggy with icicles; sudden fissures and vast continents of shadow, like ink-stains on unsullied purity; ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... voice, and Betty turned her head and stared in amazement, for the great building had vanished as completely as had Miles himself, and nothing was to be seen but a wall of darkness. On every side she heard the movement of invisible forms, but their very unreality added to the sense of desolation which possessed her. It was terrible even to think of venturing alone ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... professionally "pious" stories, sentimental or unreal stories, ought to be rigorously excluded. A great deal of fiction specially written for children ought to be left severely alone; it is cheap, shallow and stamped with unreality from cover to cover. It is as unwise to feed the minds of children exclusively on books specially prepared for their particular age as to shape the talk at breakfast or dinner specially for their stage of development; ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... distorted and concealed by its intervention. The groundcar was a mechanical bug, an alienness with which timorous man had allied himself; allied with it against reality, she and Nuwell were hastened by it through reality, unseeing, toward the goal of a more comfortable unreality. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... call the spirit thus engendered 'professional conservatism'; the fact being that change is not objected to—is even welcomed, however frequent it may be, provided only that it is suggested from inside. An immediate result is 'unreality and formalism of peace training'—to quote a ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but we had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is hardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the "literary elect" in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if it exists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature which comes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than the permanent state of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... at her. There was an unreality about him for which I could not account. Like a mirage of the park he seemed. In a twinkle of the incandescents, I thought, he might vanish. The girl from Marmelstein's looked at him as if fascinated. Romance had come and touched her heart with a magic wand. She sniffed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as of Nonoalca, that is, Maya origin, are distinctly not of the latter tongue, but are Nahuatl. And the introduction of the mystical city of Tula is of itself enough to invest the story with the garb of unreality. ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression. There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her engagement had failed ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... We have already seen the identity of theory between French Masonry and French Socialism in the nineteenth century. It was thus that, although in France one experiment after another demonstrated the unreality of Socialist Utopias, the lodges were always there to reconstruct the mirage and lead humanity on again across the burning desert sands towards the same phantom palm-trees and illusory ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... on its general merits, to ignore the reasonable concessions on points of detail which it embodied, or to explain away the patent fact that no measure less stringent would satisfy the people. There was therefore an air of unreality about this debate, spirited as it was, nor is it easy to understand what practical object enlightened men like Peel could have sought in prolonging it. He well knew, and admitted in private correspondence, that reform was inevitable; he must have known that a sham ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... and shadowy my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality about our life at B——. Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant from Paris,—less than an hour by train,—the country round about our camp seemed to be quite cut off from the rest of the world. With the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... than choose her." Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... support of ceiling or roof, by way of corbel, a figure is seen joining its knees to its breast, which out of its unreality makes a real pang rise in him who sees it, thus fashioned saw I these when I gave good heed. True it is that they were more or less contracted according as they had more or less upon their backs; and he who had most patience ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman of London Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleep by reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographical nature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye.’ Such incidents as these shed an air of unreality ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... travellers which tends to make Switzerland not only more celebrated but more opulent every year. It, is one of the few romances written in the epistolary form that do not oppress the reader with a sense of languor and unreality; for its creator poured into its pages a tide of passion unknown to his frigid and stilted predecessors, and dared to depict Nature as she really is, not as she was misrepresented by the modish authors and artists of the age. Some ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... down the middle with a yellow line that was the highway up which Casey had driven the morning before. The inimitable magic of distance and high desert air veiled greasewood, sage and sand with the glamour of unreality. The mountains beyond, unspeakably desolate and forbidding at close range, and the little black buttes standing afar, off—small spewings of age-old volcanos dead before man was born—seemed fascinating, unknown islets anchored ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... ornately furnished; indeed, the room in which we sat more closely resembled a scene from an Oscar Asche production than a normal man's study. There was something unreal about it all. I have since thought that this unreality extended to the person of the man himself. Grossly material, he yet possessed an aura of mystery, mystery of an unsavoury sort. There was something furtive, secretive, about ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... fine, white fingers gracefully annexed a piece of buttered bread and the tale went on. They had decoyed him to a dreary downtown haunt. They were all there, all armed with revolvers. In a moment it would be all night with Mr. Willie Dart. Enter Red, the game kid. A scene of thrilling unreality in which the game kid temporarily disabled or permanently crippled every man of the would-be assassins. Mr. Dart finished the tale and his bit of bread together, offering the thoughtful, concluding remark, that so much powder smoke in the close room ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... was strained attention to every word that was spoken. The most insignificant question seemed to be carefully noted, not only by the jury but by the spectators. But to Paul there was a sense of unreality in everything. All these same questions he had heard before. All these witnesses had appeared at the Coroner's inquest and before the Brunford magistrates. It seemed to him, too, that the way the counsel for the prosecution dwelt on ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... metaphysical tedium vitae which is peculiar to {39} reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too much questioning and too little active responsibility ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Yes, and a pretty job-lot of second-hand nobles you've scraped together! PRINCE (doubtfully). Pretty, you think? Humph! I don't know. I should say tol-lol, my love—only tol-lol. They are not wholly satisfactory. There is a certain air of unreality about them—they are not convincing. COST. But, my goot friend, vhat can you expect for eighteenpence a day! PRINCE. Now take this Peer, for instance. What the deuce do you call him? COST. Him? Oh, he's a swell—he's the Duke of Riviera. ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... terrible blankness—this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving—yes. But what to take its place—what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul? What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... with a dazed sense of unreality. He followed her immediately; his hand, hard and muscular, grasped her arm. He led her up the wooden steps all shining and slippery in ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... The sense of unreality disappeared with the brilliant dawn, though the night itself with the battle in the moonlight seemed to be almost a dream. Yet the combat had been fought, and he had met Harry Kenton and his friends. The empty saddles ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from pounding a typewriter in a city office to jogging through the wilderness, lost beyond peradventure, her only company a stranger of unsavory reputation. Yet she was not frightened, for all the element of unreality. Under other circumstances she could have relished the adventure, taken pleasure in faring gypsy fashion over the wide reaches where man had left no mark. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... as an attempt to achieve holy ends by unholy means, but really and radically the apotheosis of falsehood and unreality to the dethronement of faith in the true, the genuine and the real, a deliberate shutting of the eyes to the truth, a belief in a lie in the name of God, a belief in symbols and formulas as in themselves sacred, salutary, and divine, fiction superseding fact, and fancy faith ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... make this unreality real and mighty in the life of the individual and of the Church is the purpose of this book, that is eminently sane and practical, and will appeal with force to every thoughtful and earnest ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colorful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times. Earlier in the evening ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... three doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background. These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e. Delusion, or the Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness. I find a recent pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection. In the ninth century, she writes, Sankarachargya, the great upholder of Pantheism, "took up and defined the [now] current catch-words—maya, karma [the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... It took him back to the day when he had huddled close to her, hiccoughing with grief and anger, and yet deeply, deliriously happy because she was sorry for him. It made him giddy with a sense of unreality, as though the present and the intervening years were only part of one of his night stories, which, after their tiresome, undeviating custom, had got tangled up in a monstrous, impossible dream. And ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie |
