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Realistic   Listen
adjective
Realistic  adj.  Of or pertaining to the realists; in the manner of the realists; characterized by realism rather than by imagination.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books



... into two or more groups and are equipped with fencing outfits. One group is designated as the defense and is placed in trenches. The other groups are the attackers. They may be sent forward in waves or in one line. To make their advance more realistic they have to get over or around obstacles. To take in all phases the attackers are made stronger than the defense and the defense retires—whereupon the attackers endeavor to disable them by thrusting at the kidneys. Likewise the defense is made strong ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... yourself, you are too realistic. THINE and MINE do not necessarily refer to self, as they do when I say your philosophy, and my equality; for your philosophy is you philosophizing, and my equality is I professing equality. THINE and MINE oftener indicate a relation,—YOUR country, YOUR parish, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly, hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short all the purely realistic with all the purely idealistic art of the fifteenth century. We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp hair and strongly developed ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... faculty of true philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably inferior both to Voltaire and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression, he was as far their superior in breadth and reality of artistic principle. He was the originator of a natural, realistic, and sympathetic school of literary criticism. He aspired to impose new forms upon the drama. Both in imaginative creation and in criticism, his work was a constant appeal from the artificial conventions ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... delicacies of the saying, or whether the barbarian mind is inherently devoid of true balance, this person was panged most internally to hear one say to another as he went out, "Do you know, I really think that Herbert's was much the better answer of the two—more realistic, and what you might expect ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... In the latter case, the ampechonion was naturally at least three times as long as it was wide. In antique pictures women sometimes wear a second shorter chiton over the other. A great many varieties of dress, more distinguishable in the vase-paintings, representing realistic scenes, than in the ideal costumes of sculptural types, we must omit, particularly as, in most cases, they may be reduced to the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... incidents and catastrophes. She is always unfortunate in her attempts to extricate her heroes and heroines from entangling difficulties. Invention is not her forte; she is weak when she departs from realistic figures. She is strongest in what she has seen, not in what she imagines; and here she is the opposite of Dickens, who paints from imagination. There was never such a man as Pickwick or Barnaby Rudge. Sir Walter Scott created characters,—like ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual's ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately naive, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical manner—this taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... in. Look upon the physical self as only a false claimant for the Ego. Hold only the good in your field of vision, and let disease and evil fade out to their native nothingness, from lack of standing-room. Even a warfare against evils as objective realities, tends to make them more realistic. At convenient seasons, bar out the external world, and rivet the mind tenaciously to the loftiest ideals and aspirations, and for the time being forget that you possess a body. Oh, victim of nervous prostration and insomnia, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... A realistic story of the days of the French Revolution, abounding in dramatic incident, with a young English soldier of fortune, daring, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... not the only influence which acted upon Ibsen at this moment, was that of the great Danish tragedian, Adam Oehlenschlaeger. It might be fantastically held that the leading romantic luminary of Scandinavia withdrew on purpose to make room for his realistic successor, since Oehlenschlaeger's latest play, Kiartan and Gudrun, appeared just when Ibsen was planning Catilina, while the death of the Danish poet (January 20, 1850) was practically simultaneous ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... Thiselton's sharp ear detected some speculative remarks about herself and Morgan, tinged with facetiousness and gore. She thereupon suggested she was pining for something mystic and spiritualistic, being quite tired of this realistic interior. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... himself).—"Before we plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or strong walking shoes; ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the Inquisitor, Galileo or King Richard. Your heart is involuntarily contracted and you feel a respect for these witnesses of elapsed ages. This same impression came to me in Ta Kure, perhaps more deep, more realistic. Here life flows on almost as it flowed eight centuries ago; here man lives only in the past; and the contemporary only complicates and prevents ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... them a more positive mode of action and a more edifying habit of thought. The policy seeks to make headway towards the most far-reaching and thorough-going democratic ideals by the taking advantage of real conditions and using realistic methods. The result may wear to advanced social reformers the appearance of a weak compromise. The extreme socialist democrat will find a discrepancy between the magnificent end and the paltry means. "Why seek to justify," he will ask, "a series of proposals for economic and institutional reform ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... front of Stela B (famous for the realistic representations of the Indian elephant at its upper corners), one of the ancient Maya monuments at Copan, Central America (after Maudslay's photograph and diagram). The girdle of the chief figure is decorated both with shells ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... that they became utterly oblivious to our presence or to Hawkinson's steady grinding of the camera. In the war-dance the participants, who were Moro fighting men, and were armed with spears, shields, and the vicious, broad-bladed knives known as barongs, gave a highly realistic representation of pinning an enemy to the earth with a spear, and with the barong decapitating him. The first part of the dance, before the passions of the savages became aroused, was, however, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... reading. I have been much pleased and interested lately in reading Mark Twain's, Mrs. Oliphant's and Andrew Lang's books about Joan of Arc. The last two are far the best, Mrs. Oliphant's as a genuine sympathetic history, Lang's as a fine realistic story ("A Monk of Fife"). Jeanne was really perhaps the most beautiful character in authentic history, and the one that most conclusively demonstrates spirit-guidance, and both Mrs. Oliphant and A. Lang bring this out admirably.... —Yours ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... Ben-Hur and other high-class books of the same style. The description of the flight of the children of Israel from Egypt, and their subsequent wanderings in the desert, are placed before the reader in a startlingly realistic manner. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... church service," replied Denison. "I notice that the Doctor has brought with him a book of sermons and a Bible. Then we have an organ, and the best choir I ever heard. The Doctor or Professor can act as parson; and, to make the thing realistic and homelike, I will pass the ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... have another Manville Fenn book, full of realistic characters who get into positions of great suspense—the usual formula for ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn

... achieve success in business, he took to journalism on the staff of the Melbourne Argus, with brilliant results. He wrote two novels, Long Odds and For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), the latter, which is generally considered his masterpiece, dealing in a powerful and realistic manner with transportation and convict labour. He also wrote many short tales and dramatic pieces. After a turbulent and improvident life he d. at 35. In addition to the works above mentioned, he wrote Lower Bohemia in Melbourne, The Humbug Papers, The ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... Still the Public, as becomes a first night, maintained a dignified and critical reserve. When the President of the Board of Trade, in full court costume, appeared upon the scene, in the midst of the very realistic long-haired sea-ladies, the audience was half shocked for a moment by the utter incongruity of the situation; but after a while they began to discover that the incongruity was part of the joke, and they laughed quietly a sedate ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... clever than Sam in artistic and realistic disguises. His smooth face was skillfully covered by a beard, short-cropped, his nose was given the slightest rosy tint, and putting on a light overcoat, the studious young gentleman of half an hour ago was transformed into ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton

... geste most undoubtingly related: nor to the strange history, geography, and chronology, for the two divisions are very much on a par there also. But strong as the fantastic element is in them, the chansons de geste possess a realistic quality which is entirely absent from the gracious idealism of the Romances. The emperors and the admirals, perhaps even their fair and obliging daughters, were not personages unknown to the contemporaries of the Norman conquerors of Italy and Sicily, or to the first Crusaders. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... gone, Warburton took up The Art World, which his friend had left, and glanced again at the photogravure of "Sanctuary." He knew, as he had declared, nothing about art, and judged pictures as he judged books, emotionally. His bent was to what is called the realistic point of view, and "Sanctuary" made him smile. But very good-naturedly; for he liked Norbert Franks, and believed he would do better ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... in the habit of associating modern French writing with the materialistic view of life and the realistic method, will find themselves refreshed and encouraged by the vigorous protest of men like Scherer and other French critics against the dominance of these elements in recent ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... the painted ribbon bows in the designs given varies in the different cards in blue, pink, yellow and violet, and where the loop ends extend over the edge they are cut out, making the ribbon look more realistic. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips

... script here). The death bleatings and buttings of the quadrupedal offering of antiquity have been polished by the hands of time and of civilization, and, as a result of this process, we get the dying whisper of Rachel in the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and the fearfully realistic "kicking" of the modern Croisette in the poisoning scene of The Sphinx. But, whereas the descendants of Themistocles gladly receive, whether captive or free, all the changes and improvements considered as such by modern taste, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece and India, in which the forces of the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical phenomena, and to become moral beings; but in some measure a realistic naturalism, the love of nature for herself, the vivid impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that man knows, when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears her commune with him concerning ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... one of those realistic Zolaesque stories I would describe the crick in the back that—but let ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... exercised a demoralising influence upon the Maoris. It was not easy for the missionaries to consort, upon terms of intimacy, with their fellow-countrymen whose relations with the Natives were such as they must strongly condemn. Earle's narrative is interesting because it conveys a realistic description of the Maoris before their national customs and habits had undergone any material change through association with white settlers. In dealing with Maori names, Mr. Earle, having at that period no standard of orthography ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle

... how a native American subject, strictly realistic, may be treated in various manners adapted to the requirements of different magazines, thus combining Art-for-Art's-Sake with Writing-for-the-Market. Read at the First Dinner of the American Periodical Publishers' Association, in Washington, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... remote past, or a delineation of what has actually come under his notice. Norham at twilight, with the solitary warder on the battlements, and Crichtoun castle, as Scott himself saw it, instantly commend themselves by their realistic vigour and their consistent verisimilitude. Any visitor to Norham will still be able to imagine the stir and the imposing spectacle described in the opening stanzas of the first canto; and it is a pleasure to follow Scott's minute and faithful picture of Crichtoun by examining the imposing ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... man who resorts to fiction that his adventures may be the more interesting. And as (for the sake of argument) the man of books affected to praise him, remarking that any soulless fool can tell the bald truth whereas it requires an artistic temperament to adorn a tale with realistic embellishment (!), his friend turned to him eagerly. Being encouraged, he confessed that his Large Copper was not all that it appeared to be. In short, the bookman discovered that he had secured it himself while on a summer tour in Switzerland, and with the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... Tennyson, and Browning have but skimmed the surface of the great tragedy of human life. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Faust, and Wilhelm Meister, Beatrice Cenci, the sad, sad story of Guinevere, and the awful shadows of the Ring and the Book—how luridly realistic are all these studies of the downfall of souls and the desolation of character! If they had expressed all there is of life it would be only a long, repulsive tragedy; but happily there is another side. To that brighter ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... Oken.[197] Danish philosophers, such as Treschow (1812) and Sibbern (1846), have also broached the idea of an historical evolution of all living beings from the lowest to the highest. Schopenhauer's philosophy has a more realistic character than that of Schelling's and Hegel's, his diametrical opposites, although he also belongs to the romantic school of thought. His philosophical and psychological views were greatly influenced by French naturalists and philosophers, especially by Cabanis and Lamarck. He praises the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... read realistic descriptions of troops on the march in South Africa, the writer using all his cunning to depict the war-worn dirty condition of his heroes, seeming to glean satisfaction from their grease-stained khaki. It must be admitted that the South African War is responsible for ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson

... mingling of worldly aplomb and rustic innocence; her perfect self-control and experienced acceptance of his gallantry under the simulated attitude of simplicity—all now struck him as perfectly comprehensible. He recalled the actress's inimitable touch in certain picturesque realistic details in the dairy—which she had not spared him; he recognized it now even in their bowered confidences (how like a pretty ballet scene their whole interview on the rustic bench was!), and it breathed through their entire conversation—to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... much less romantic and much more realistic. I have already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen. But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage, there ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... state, and in the United States more than anywhere else, the social structure is based on contract, and status is of the least importance. Contract, however, is rational—even rationalistic. It is also realistic, cold, and matter-of-fact. A contract relation is based on a sufficient reason, not on custom or prescription. It is not permanent. It endures only so long as the reason for it endures. In a state based on contract sentiment is out of place in any public or common affairs. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... out for that," the manager replied. "In fact, I don't know but what it would be good business to have you fall in. It would seem more realistic." ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope

... having had enough of horrors in the rooms of the dreadful Catherine, we were ushered, by our voluble guide, into those of her son, Henry III. In order to make the terrible story of the murder of the Duke of Guise quite realistic, we were first taken to the great council chamber, before one of whose beautiful chimney places Le Balfre stood warming himself, for the night was cold, eating plums and jesting with his courtiers, when ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... country until the progress of the war made it possible to return to such comforts as had not been destroyed by the British soldiers. The "Memoirs of Eliza Morton," afterward Mrs. Josiah Quincy, but a child eight years of age in seventeen hundred and seventy-six, gives a realistic account of the life of such Whig refugees. Upon the occupation of New York by the British, her father, a merchant of wealth, as riches were then reckoned, was obliged to burn his warehouse to save it from English hands. Mr. Morton then gathered together in the little country village ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... this fact to his cousin, after this voyage was concluded. It loomed up as large as the Rock of Gibralter just then, even as a dream may at the moment of awaking, but which later on begins to lose its realistic effect until it seems next ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy

... the chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton, combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a modern man and author of the whole, the result would ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... explain that the conception of the picture which now hangs in its gilded frame is far from the conception with which I started—was, in fact, the ultimate stage of an evolution—for I began with nothing deeper in my mind than to image a realistic Christ, the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem, or walked about the shores of Galilee. As a painter in love with the modern, it seemed to me that, despite the innumerable representations of Him by the masters of all ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... know, as I do, that that basis is as uncertain as the shifting sands of the sea, inasmuch as in the setting forth of these episodes I have narrated them as faithfully as the most conscientious realist could wish, and am therefore myself a true and faithful follower of the realistic school. I cannot be blamed because these things happen to me. If I sat down in my study to imagine the strange incidents to which I have in the past called attention, with no other object in view than ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... closer to nature than when he collects any number of scientifically approved data to maintain some view of life which he has derived from books. Compare Flags are Flying with Arne, and you will see my point. The longer book is ten times as realistic in treatment, and about one-tenth as true ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Ambrose Philips, and Fontenelle (indeed, his statement is a paraphrase of Fontenelle's), and in opposition to the school of Rapin, Pope, and Gay, who argued for a portrait of the Golden Age. Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity of an age when ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney

... the opposite upon your notice; and, unless you shut your door fast, and double-lock it, they will be sure to come in:—Popular literature, the scrappy trivialities that are put into some periodicals, what they call 'realistic fiction'; modern Art, which has come to be largely the servant of sense; the Stage, which has come—and more is the pity! for there are enormous possibilities of good in it—to be largely a minister of corruption, or if not of corruption at least of frivolity—all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... alabaster, of bronze or of gold, some of them almost Greek in form and design. Along with the reform in religion there had gone a reform in art. The old conventionalized art of Egypt was abandoned, and a new art had been introduced which aimed at imitating nature with realistic fidelity. ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce

... incident, the phrase, the gesture, the feature of the landscape which make you exclaim with a start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type. There is incident in it too—as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various

... were part of the picture!" exclaimed Ruth. And so she had. Often, to make a moving picture seem more realistic, a manager will not tell the actors all he has prepared. Thus he gets the element of surprise. Both Ruth and Alice, in this case, thought the local police had been brought into the scene at the last moment to add a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope

... a voice that came with softness but unmistakable clearness to the inner spirit of man, a soundless voice. Sometimes in a dream, a more realistic vision of the night or of the day time; again, in the form of a man, thus foreshadowing the future great coming. This One who came to them in various ways, this Jehovah has come to men as Jesus. This ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... stamp. One of the best of the late commentators on Shakespeare (Professor Dowden), makes the height and aggregate of his quality as a poet to be, that he thoroughly blended the ideal with the practical or realistic. If this be so, I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life. I should say the invisible foundations and vertebrae of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystical, abstract, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... the lad fell upon a hobbledehoy who had just given a highly diverting pantomime representing the hanging of a man, with realistic details, and, having beaten him in fair fight, broke his collar-bone with an atrocious fall. For this outrage Jim o' Mill End was called upon to answer to the law, and, the answer he had to give being considered wholly unsatisfactory, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and almost ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... was more established, she might think of it. It was still quite early. There would be nearly half an hour before the first worshippers would be likely to arrive: just time enough to jot down a few notes. If she did ever take to literature it would be the realistic school, she felt, that would appeal to her. The rest, too, would be pleasant after her long walk from Westminster. She would find a secluded seat in one of the high, stiff pews, and let the atmosphere of the ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme artist like Tolstoy to appreciate ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... branch of the realists may serve to remind us of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All representative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of fiction; to those who can read between the lines—for it is obvious that the commonplace and the slightly vulgar no more exhaust the field of society in the United States than elsewhere. But to me Mr. Howells, even when in his most realistic and sordid vein, always suggests the ideal and the noble; the reverse of the medal proclaims loudly that it is the reverse, and that there is an obverse of a very different kind to be seen by those who will turn the coin. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... been brought up on stories as Georgina had. He had had few of this kind, and none so breathlessly realistic. It carried him out of himself so completely that as they rowed slowly back to town he did not see a single house in it, although every western window-pane flashed back the out-going sun like a golden mirror. His serious, brown eyes were ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... In Caelia the religious rationalization of the tragic action is subdued, Johnson apparently preferring to stress the social and moral aspects of his subject, and to this end he resolutely refused to expunge or modify the boldly realistic brothel scenes, against which a fastidious ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore

... tract, which forms part of the Senchus Mor, and is supposed to be a portion of the Brehon code, and traceable to the time of St. Patrick, speaks of land in a poetically symbolic, but actually realistic manner, and says, "Land is perpetual man." All the ingredients of our physical frame come from the soil. The food we require and enjoy, the clothing which enwraps us, the fire which warms us, all save the vital spark that constitutes life, is of the land, hence it is "perpetual man." ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... to Lady Merivale's ball, which he described in detail to Lady Constance; adding many little realistic touches concerning the fair hostess and Adrien, till he had convinced her—as he thought—that there was a great deal more between them than was really the case. For Vermont, as had been said before, was "no fool"; and he realised only too well in what direction ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... literary schools which have given us deformed, superhuman, poetical, pathetic, charming or magnificent pictures of life, a realistic or naturalistic school has arisen, which asserts that it shows us the truth, the whole truth, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... Realistic gas drill was indulged in occasionally at night because the enemy had an irritating habit of putting over a few rounds of gas, either shell or T.M., at irregular intervals. He caught out a few of the East Lancs. by this trick, which naturally produced a state of "wind" in the division so ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson

... does not differ from that previously used except in the matter of procedure with empty nuts. It is felt that the items included are weighed in a realistic manner and that difficulties in scoring have been due to methods of handling the samples rather than in the scoring schedule itself. It does not seem likely that this schedule or any schedule will be valuable unless used by experienced operators who are willing to take the precautions indicated. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various

... the Electric Scenic Theater, which may be regarded as a triumph of the modern progress in the electrical science. It depicted the changes of a beautiful Swiss Alpine scenery as such are gradually occurring from dawn till night—representing the magical and most wonderfully realistic effects ever ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... be used, miniature cannon, ships, bridges, etc., may be placed in position and a realistic explanation of the battle given. This would require more time and the whole story ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... economy of thinking, and in the Kritik endeavoured to explain pure experience in relation to knowledge and environment. He discovers that statements dependent upon environment constitute pure experience. This philosophy, called Empirio-criticism, is not, however, a realistic but an idealistic dualism, nor ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... "No. But if I could, and dream all that again! Poor old Bob!" I murmured to myself as a peculiar sensation of warmth began to creep through my numbed limbs, and once more I lay thinking about that strangely confused and realistic dream of which fragments began to flit before me, and for a time made me more wakeful, but not for long. Then the morning, the thoughts of my coming fate, the recollection of the night-alarm which seemed to have put an end to what must have been intended ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... Both pictures accepted, and the portrait will be on the line in the big room—the other very well hung, too, in one of the later rooms. Lucky dog! Millais came up and spoke to me about him—said he heard we had discovered him. Of course, there's lots of criticism. Drawing and design, modern and realistic—the whole painting method, traditional and old-fashioned, except for some wonderful touches of pre-Raphaelitism—that's what most people say. Of course, the new men think it'll end in manner and convention; and the old men don't quite know what to say. Well, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rather than perpetual reproductions of the marriage failures. The novel should more often show how many people save, so as by fire, the dreams of youth in rescue of their married life from threatening ills. Such portrayal would not be against a realistic ideal of art, but a more perfect and balanced use of realism. The rise of people on "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things" is quite as dramatic as the succession of falls that land them in the pit of despair. The struggles that succeed are quite as capable ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... the walls which attracted him was a large and splendidly-framed oil-painting of a ruined castle, in the midst of a sombre forest, through which cows were strolling. In the tower of the castle was a clock, and this clock was a realistic timepiece, whose fingers moved and told the hour. Two of the oriel windows of the castle were realistic holes in its masonry; through one of them you could put a key to wind up the clock, and through the other you could ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... the inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... him simple, clear, realistic conceptions through pictures, we influence the child to read eagerly the text, to discover the whole story, of which such a fascinating hint is given in the portion illustrated. These first pictures must satisfy ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... ultra conservative aristocratic, nearly feudal system of absolute monarchy, an understanding that this had become obsolete and had no value except perhaps in it purely external beauty—to a realistic approach of a form of Christian socialism and the brotherhood not only of man ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff

... that "my friend Smollett . . . has certainly a talent for invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work." Lady Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly think of as Smollett's was the ability to work over his own experience into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett's vigorous personality, which in his earlier works was present to give life and interest to almost every chapter, were it to describe a street brawl, a ludicrous situation, a ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... spinsterhood. This hope, the necessity for such hope, was the final depth of her gloomy mood, and she found herself looking at something very dark as she stood holding Miss Robinson's expensive roses. For, after all, what was going to become of her? The final depth shaped itself to-day in more grimly realistic fashion than ever before: what was she going to do with herself, in the last resort, unless something happened? Her mind dwelt upon all the visible alternatives. There was philanthropic lunch-going and lunch-giving spinsterhood in Boston; there was spinsterhood in Europe, semi-social, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... and thrilling story of early frontier life in Kentucky was originally published in the year 1837. The novel, long out of print, had in its day a phenomenal sale, for its realistic presentation of Indian and frontier life in the early days of settlement in the South, narrated in the tale with all the art of a practiced writer. A very charming love romance runs through the story. This new and tasteful edition of "Nick ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... dead leaves on the ground were of a colour he could not name. At the same time he discovered the use of his third eye. By adding a third angle to his sight, every object he looked at stood out in greater relief. The world looked less flat—more realistic and significant. He had a stronger attraction toward his surroundings; he seemed somehow to lose his egotism, and ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... but fine symbolism that somehow touches something of possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature—its motives tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have—always with a vein ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... gave to their temples, to use the language of an ancient architect, a "heavy, mean, straggling, and clumsy appearance." The Latins found in the rich stores of Greek art but very little that was congenial to their thoroughly realistic tastes; but what they did adopt they appropriated truly and heartily as their own, and in the development of the polygonal wall-architecture perhaps excelled their instructors. Etruscan art is a remarkable evidence of accomplishments mechanically acquired and mechanically ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic and exalted. ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... upon her knees, and her spectacles on—she wore spectacles when she had to look fixedly at very dark objects. The room was ugly in a pleasant Putneyish way, with a couple of engravings after B.W. Leader, R.A., a too realistic wall-paper, hot brown furniture with ribbed legs, a carpet with the characteristics of a retired governess who has taken to drink, and a black cloud on the ceiling over the incandescent burners. Happily these surroundings did not annoy him. They did ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... economy has exhibited moderate economic growth since 1999, based on an expansion in the agricultural and mining sectors, a more favorable atmosphere for business initiatives, a more realistic exchange rate, fairly low inflation, and the continued support of international organizations. Chronic problems include a shortage of skilled labor and a deficient infrastructure. The government is juggling a sizable external ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... insisted Josie. "There has been too much coincidence in this reality for it to go down as fiction. All the teachers of story writing would tell you that. They might allow one bit of coincidence but not so much as has occurred in this realistic plot. It wouldn't even go down as a detective tale. I have had too much lost motion in my plans for even that. I needn't have taken the job of canvasser in the first place. That was plain foolishness and if I hadn't have run against that peach of a girl, ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson

... only subsists between objects, that is between the immediate object and objects known indirectly. The object always pre-supposes the subject, and so there can be between those two no relation of reason and consequent. Therefore the controversy between realistic dogmatism and doctrinal scepticism is foolish. The former seeks to separate object and idea as cause and effect, whereas these two are really one; the latter supposes that in the idea we have only the effect, never the cause, and never know the real ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... branches of intellectual activity, Belgium enters decidedly, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, into the Renaissance period. But, unlike the Italian, the Belgian Renaissance was at first only very slightly affected by the study of the classics. It was more realistic in its aims than the mediaeval period. It revelled in the display of harmony, whether in sound, colour or form, and abundance of tracery, but as far as the subject was concerned it ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been trying for months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying—perhaps you didn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it—to find a job.—Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, it occurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... violent tension which can endure only for an instant. Yet the face is free from contortion, free from any trace of effort, calm and beautiful. This shows that Myron, intent as he was upon reproducing nature, could yet depart from his realistic formulae when the requirements of beautiful ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... his everlasting stories, full of people who talk a great deal and amount to nothing. I like the older novels best, and enjoy some of Scott's and Miss Edgeworth's better than Howells's, or any of the modern realistic writers, with their elevators, and paint-pots, and every-day people," said Alice, who wasted little time on ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... Paul Wayland Bartlett A powerful and most realistic group. The poor animal is in the last agony - ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some measure of preparation. A young writer may produce a brilliant and very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the outset. For this work he needs experience and observation, not so much of others as of himself, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... transfixed enemy, jerked his weapon out, and stood quivering, ready for any foe that dared to approach. The savage ferocity of his face, the fierce energy in his every movement, culminating in that last vicious leap and stamp, altogether constituted such a dramatic and realistic representation of actual fighting that the whole line burst into a very unsoldierly but very hearty applause, which, however, the sergeant major immediately and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a soul as Henry. I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the first realisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seems romantic in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... display, more complete by far than any before known, the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and the more scholastic color-notions of Europe. There was young Munich with Mueller's lions and the anti-realistic figures of Schwanthaler; Austria with Monti's veiled heads, henceforth to be credited to Lombardy; Prussia with Rauch; and Denmark with Thorwaldsen—all pure form, copied without color from Nature, from convention ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... the Royal Slave is indisputedly Mrs. Behn's masterpiece in prose. Its originality and power have singled it out for a permanence and popularity none of her other works attained. It is vivid, realistic, pregnant with pathos, beauty, and truth, and not only has it so impressed itself upon the readers of more than two centuries, but further, it surely struck a new note in English literature and one which was re-echoed far and wide. It ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... but evidently decided that frankness was best. "There certainly were occasions when your recollections were somewhat realistic." ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic "realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating him. And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the dialogue between Mr. ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... illustrated with reproductions from old maps—old primitive maps, with a real Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Eden, with Pillars of Hercules guarding the Straits of Gibraltar, with Paradise in the east, a realistic Jerusalem in the centre, the island of Thule in the north, and St. Brandon's Isles of the Blest ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... have to spend about so much money every year, in a continual attempt to amuse myself, and it might as well be this way as another. I have a document, signed and solemnly sealed, by which I am to back him against the field in the interest of romantic and realistic literature, and in return he is to give me a third of the net profits of his writings. I don't know that I have done so badly. Perhaps you may live to see Cutt & Slashem pay us a ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter

... wasted in various aestheticisms. He explained the difference between the romantic and realistic methods in the reviews; he played with a poetic drama to be called The King of the Beggars, and it was not until the close of the third year that he settled down to definite work. Then all his energies were concentrated on a new play—The ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore

... Parson Lawson is so realistic and emblematic of the times in which he lived, that we reproduce some of his own expressions. Thus, he says, "Now, I having for some time before attended the work of the Ministry in Salem Village, the report of those great afflictions came quickly to my notice, the more so, because the first ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... curious fact that so many of the voices of what is called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction. It has produced its Gissing without producing its Scott. Everything that is most sad and scientific, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... superior quality of our gray matter. When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion, we hint at our mysteriousness—a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... their nearly impossible but always vulgar smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"—The Tale of the House it might be called—when he affords us realistic ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood

... be compared where they are really comparable, i.e. in that portion which both narrate at approximately the same length, the older redaction will be found fuller of incident, the characters drawn with a bolder, more realistic touch, the presentment more vigorous and dramatic. Ferdiad is unwilling to go against Cuchulain not, apparently, solely for prudential reasons, and he has to be goaded and taunted into action by Medb, ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... the superior, of that of Tom and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made the prison in Amelia as horribly and disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in Roderick, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... Nevertheless William went on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I longed to leap to my ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... like stars and representing the "three wise men," at the climax of the mass were worked on wires so that they floated overhead along the auditorium, and finally came to rest above the altar, which had been transformed into a manger, the more realistic on account of the pigs, ducks, and chickens manufactured out of paper that ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... professional capacity. He repeatedly ridicules the craze for foreign travel. {42b} To Italy, it is true, and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment. But the fact that he represents Valentine in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (I. i. 71) as travelling from Verona to Milan by sea, and Prospero in 'The Tempest' as embarking on a ship ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... Mural Paintings under the Arches of the Nations, the two by Edward Simmons in the arch on the east are an allegory of the movement of the peoples across the Atlantic, while those by Frank Vincent Du Mond in the western arch picture in realistic figures the westward march of civilization to the Pacific. Historically, the picture on the southern wall of the Arch of the Nations of the East comes first. Here Simmons has represented the westward movement from the Old World through natural emigration war, conquest, commerce ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... this poem add much to its effect; the grey sea, the black land, the yellow moon, the fiery ringlets, the blue spurt of the match, the golden light of morning. The sounds and smells are realistic; one hears the boat cut harshly into the slushy sand; the sharp scratch of the match; one inhales the thick, heavy odor radiating from the sea-scented beach that has absorbed all day the hot rays ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... for it is an ideal play for children to act. If we throw in 'Chevy Chace' and the 'Nut Brown Maid' and the 'Robin Hood Ballads,' we shall not be lacking for poetry. For the interest which we now seek in a realistic novel we might well go to the Paston Letters. There are not a few nations of Europe which might be well pleased if they could show, century by century, as good a record as this. It is only in fact the ill-fortune which placed it midway between ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... Turgenef devotes to this lieutenant; but this making him despise women under the appellation of half-sour, half-sweet conglomerate of egg-and-vegetable salad, describes the lieutenant in two lines more faithfully than pages of scientific, realistic photography. (3) Before the ruin of poor Liza becomes known, and while the prince, her seducer, is still on the height of lionization, he is challenged to a duel by Liza's faithful lover. The superfluous man wounds the prince's cheek; the prince, who ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... which are treated with less than realism. Thus there might be a panel representing a Window-opening with an architectural framing, with a Flower-vase on the sill, and a Landscape-background. The first part to be reduced in realistic rendering would be the Background, the second would be the Framing, leaving the third, the Flower-vase, as the survival. This is a Scale of reduction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various

... ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to work to paint. He appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired by any one of them; but he had no conception of the possibility of knowing nothing at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired directly by what is within the soul, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... manuscript, and expressed a desire to see him. When Haydn presented himself, the countess was so struck by his shabby appearance and uncouth manners that it occurred to her he must be an impostor! But Haydn soon removed her doubts by the pathetic and realistic account which he gave of his lowly origin and his struggles with poverty, and the countess ended by becoming his pupil and one of ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... of school and camp life, out-door sports and European travel is found in these winning tales of Merilyn and her friends at boarding school and college. These realistic stories of the everyday life, the fun, frolic and special adventures of the Beechwood girls will be enjoyed by all ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley

... quoting is an interesting one, on the work and character of Origen, the great Alexandrian of the third century A.D., with whom Augustine is contrasted, as in an earlier age we might contrast Seneca with Philo; the Latin writers rhetorical, practical, realistic; the Greek authors idealistic and fervent, apt to see deep moral significance in all human life. And this is really the manner and mental attitude of all the famous Latin fathers: of Lactantius, the clear, precise Ciceronian, whose every page shows the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... Indian, after a minute, smiling down at them with the sunny look in his eyes. "I'm beginning to think I had a dream. Only"—he dipped his fingers into the pocket of his shirt and brought up the flattened bullet—"that is pretty blamed realistic—for a dream." His eyes searched involuntarily the rim-rock with a certain incredulity, as if he could not bring himself to believe ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... see her perfectly plainly. It seemed a thoroughly realistic proceeding, and she was wiping her eyes as she read, while, at the same moment, the doctor entered the room with the willow pollard from the bottom of the garden; and lifting it up he called him an ungrateful boy, and struck him a severe ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn

... things before our minds we say that the race has shown a remarkable growth in the essentials of true Christian manhood. Their notions may, in some things, be crude; their conceptions of truth may be realistic; they may be more emotional than ethical; they may show many imperfections in their religious development; nevertheless is it true that their religion is their most striking formative characteristic. So susceptible are they ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... right the wrongs of the helpless, to hear him in low tones glibly telling of villainous performances, often furtively glancing at me as if fearing I might catch the drift of his talk, made me heartsick with growing mistrust and painful forebodings. Uncle's narratives had been so realistic that I began to dread Pierre's departure. My face must have expressed some of these feelings, for when Pierre left, Uncle Thomas looked me straight in the eyes ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... could not fully understand nor appreciate Beethoven, whose works are full of lion-marrow, robust and masculine alike in conception and treatment. He did not admire Shakespeare, because his great delineations are too vivid and realistic. Our musician was essentially a dreamer and idealist. His range was limited, but within it he reached perfection of finish and originality never surpassed. But, with all his limitations, the art-judgment of the world places ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... volume encouraged Melville to proceed in his work, and 'Omoo,' the sequel to 'Typee,' appeared in England and America in 1847. Here we leave, for the most part, the dreamy pictures of island life, and find ourselves sharing the extremely realistic discomforts of a Sydney whaler in the early forties. The rebellious crew's experiences in the Society Islands are quite as realistic as events on board ship and very entertaining, while the whimsical character, Dr. Long Ghost, next to Captain ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... in the reading as it was on the stage under his triumphant management. Mr. Eugene Walter's "The Easiest Way," at the last moment, was released from publication in the Drama League Series of Plays; it still stands as America's most cruelly realistic treatment of certain city conditions. In the choice of Mr. Augustus Thomas's "In Mizzoura"—"The Witching Hour" having so often been used in dramatic collections—the Editor believes he has represented ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: - Introduction and Bibliography • Montrose J. Moses

... sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting, not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist, she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of graduated passion which begins ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... interest. No doubt he talked with Joseph Frobisher in his quaint home on Beaver Hall Hill. Simon M'Tavish, too, was living in a new-built mansion under the brow of Mount Royal. This 'old lion of Montreal,' who was the founder of the North-West Company, had for the mere asking a sheaf of tales, as realistic as they were entertaining. Honour was done Lord Selkirk during his stay in the city by the Beaver Club, which met once a fortnight. This was an exclusive organization, which limited its membership to those who dealt in furs. ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood

... shoulders. Whether this figure is the fancy of the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... story is not so startling as the title would indicate. It is a strongly moral one, showing in a vivid, realistic manner the result of evil thinking. The Devil in this story ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... England, inconceivable as the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said, not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... have done a good deal to encourage local writers, but the most powerful influence has been that of 'The Bulletin', started in Sydney in 1880. Its racy, irreverent tone and its humour are characteristically Australian, and through its columns the first realistic Australian verse of any importance — the writings of Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson — became widely known. When published in book form, their verses met with phenomenal success; Paterson's "The Man from Snowy River" (1895) having already attained ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... flowers. A large and superb picture of a sylvan dell in the side of a rock, was one exception. Its deep, cool shadows, and the pellucid water, which a wandering sunbeam accidentally revealed, were strikingly realistic. Nearly all of the pictures were upon panels of crystal that were set in the wall. The light shining through them gave them an exceedingly natural effect. One picture that I especially admired, was of a grape vine twining around the body and ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... the famous noel in which the crowing of a cock alternates with the note of a nightingale; each verse beginning with a prodigious cock-a-doodle-d-o-o! and then rattling along to the gayest of gay airs. The nightingale was not a brilliant success; but the cock-crowing was so realistic that at its first outburst I thought that a genuine barn-yard gallant was up in the organ-loft. I learned later that this was a musical tour-de-force for which the organist was famed. A buzz of delight filled the church after each cock-crowing ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... in character and included, among other things, a realistic fire scene. When the time came for rehearsal the manager of the theater said that it could not be done, because the fire laws would ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... "The Pirate Planet" took first place in the February number. The story was very well written and the characters very realistic. It deserves to be put in book form, also in the talkies. It would be much ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... du Cire he is frightfully stung by myriads of bees, during his attempt to obtain as a trophy for his lady a quantity of honey from this well-nigh inaccessible place. The kind of criticism that is appropriate for realistic literature is here quite out of place. It must be said, however, that the episode is far from convincing. Calendau compares his sufferings to those of a soul in hell, condemned to the cauldron of oil. Yet he makes a safe escape, and we never hear of the physical consequences ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... up to the appearance of Mr. Aylmore, M.P., in the witness-box. And Spargo knew and felt that it was that appearance for which the crowded court was waiting. Thanks to his own vivid and realistic specials in the Watchman, everybody there had already become well and thoroughly acquainted with the mass of evidence represented by the nine witnesses who had been in the box before Mr. Aylmore entered it. ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... lucidity. Yet there is a dignity and vigor, and a large consistency in the treatment of the theme, that is epic. Ten Brink says:—"The poet's intensity is not seldom imparted to the listener.... The portrayals of battles, although much less realistic than the Homeric descriptions, are yet at times superior to them, in so far as the demoniac rage of war elicits from the Germanic fancy a crowding affluence of vigorous scenes hastily projected in glittering lights of grim half gloom." In addition to its great poetic merit, 'Beowulf' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... convey in a realistic way, the wonderful advances inland and sea locomotion. Stories like these are impressed upon the memory and their reading ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman

... to the hour of their death, because they are fools. We, in Russia, have no fools; that is well known. That is what distinguishes us from foreign lands. Consequently these transcendental natures are not found amongst us in their pure form. The idea that they are is due to our "realistic" journalists and critics of that day, always on the look out for Kostanzhoglos and Uncle Pyotr Ivanitchs and foolishly accepting them as our ideal; they have slandered our romantics, taking them for the same transcendental sort as in Germany or France. On the contrary, the characteristics ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky

... "Without true realism and genuine romanticism—actuality and ideals—good work was never done, nor did any writer ever rise to be an author."[6] "No worthy work of fiction may properly be labelled romantic, realistic or symbolic, since every great work of art contains all these in some proportion. Love and fighting are not necessarily romance; nor are soup-kitchens and divorce courts necessarily realism.... Malice, futility and ugliness—the dreadful monotony of existence—are ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... chiaroscuro. Each of the prints has a complete harmony of colors; the single color blocks— over ten can be counted in each print— which show in their separate tones the extraordinarily cultivated taste of the artist, give the composition a decorative effect far from any realistic imitation of nature.... The relief impressed with the blocks is so strong that, going beyond all other prior attempts of the kind, it represents an essential factor of the composition through its ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen

... intaglio features, which are executed in the plastic clay, and the latter comprise figures in color, penciled or painted upon the surface. Each style of work embodies its own peculiar class of conceptions. Relief work is generally realistic or grotesque; incised work is almost exclusively geometric, and embraces combinations of lines usually recognized as archaic. An occasional example is easily recognized as imitative. Painted figures are both geometric and imitative, the two forms ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... It is surely not necessary, even for a clever Norwegian man of letters in a realistic social drama, to make quite such a fool of himself as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various

... needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art, but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without intermediate means is in a direct line from God, and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO are one ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... cantered across the platform on a chair and won applause by her realistic interpretation of western riding. Bobby convulsed the room with her imaginary efforts to cut and fit a dress, her mistakes being glaring ones, for Bobby never touched a needle if she could help it. Clever Constance ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson

... short-lived; another army was sent from Peking, this time against him, and he fled into Russian territory, dying there soon afterwards of smallpox. This campaign was lavishly illustrated by Chinese artists, who produced a series of realistic pictures of the battles and skirmishes fought by Ch'ien Lung's victorious troops. How far these were prepared under the guidance of the Jesuit Fathers does not seem to be known. About sixty years previously, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles



Words linked to "Realistic" :   pragmatic, hardheaded, true-to-life, real, hard-nosed, existent, down-to-earth, vivid, practical, graphic, unrealistic, pictorial, realist, realism, veridical



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