"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of last night put him into a very realistic mess that he couldn't dodge! Will it ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the love affairs of Chip and Delia Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of the ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... put off taking action on the warning he had received from the Foreign Office if he had at the time believed in the least that there was any possibility of a plot for political assassination being carried on in an English country-house. Soame Rivers reasoned, like a realistic novelist, from his own experiences only. He regarded the notion of such things taking place in an English country-house as no less an anachronism than the moving helmet in the 'Castle of Otranto' or the robber-castle ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... entry gives the number of males and females age 15-49 fit for military service. This is a more refined measure of potential military manpower availability which tries to correct for the health situation in the country and reduces the maximum potential number to a more realistic estimate of the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... realistic!" said Mr. Scogan. "In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they're past working or breeding ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... afternoon I visited the American Ambulance for the third time. I paid particular attention to the pathological department. I was shown a piece of spine with an imbedded bullet visible, and other specimens entirely too realistic for me to look at. I was shown an electric apparatus for locating bullets and shells, without X-ray treatment, I saw a badly wounded soldier undergoing the Carrel treatment. Dr. Sherman, chief surgeon of the Carnegie Steel Company, had spent two months in France investigating this treatment. ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... been a satisfactory conclusion to the great drama. This element is furnished in characteristically concrete form by the epilogue of the book, in which Job's prosperity is restored in double measure and he is personally assured of Jehovah's favor. The severe and realistic author of the great poem, however, knew that in ordinary life such solutions are rare. In the speeches of Jehovah he does not introduce an altogether new element, but emphasizes motifs already developed ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... 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, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... was in a sense an accident, just as many other works of great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination of circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my introduction to "Dead Souls" (1) how Gogol created his great realistic masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations to come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place as "Don Quixote" or "Pickwick Papers"; and how this combination of influences joined to his own genius produced ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... that moved my wings, any more than I can explain by what process I was preserved alive in worlds of fire, in worlds of ice, and in worlds without air. But the sight of all these things was as real to me as the dreams of the night, and it must be admitted that dreams are often as realistic as the acts of ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... both mind and matter? There is only one way in which such a combination seems clearly thinkable by us, i.e. when we represent matter as either in the idealistic sense the thought or experience of mind, or (after the fashion of ordinary realistic Theism) as created or produced by mind. But if you insist on something more than this, if you want to think of the qualities of matter as in some other way included in the nature of the ultimate Reality as well as those of mind, at all events we could still urge ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... happily arrived old friend, the Lord Lieutenant Governor of the Golden Californias, to corroborate his statement. Colonel Pendleton started, and grasped Paul's hand warmly. Paul turned to the already half-mollified Director with the diplomatic suggestion that the vivid and realistic acting of the admirable company which he himself had witnessed had perhaps unduly excited his old friend, even as it had undoubtedly thrown into greater relief the usual exaggerations of dramatic representation, and the incident terminated ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... the last two centuries, we might have developed adequate measures before we had been so far reduced in numbers and area as to be unable to produce and employ the new weapons our laboratories have belatedly developed. Now we must be realistic; there is no ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is, however, one memorable exception. Tam o' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to Ellisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a transcript of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tam o' Shanter he had let loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imaginative ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... pouted, and asked me for the Globe, behind which she buried herself. She kept murmuring aloud extracts from the Globe's realistic description of the weather, and then ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... with the modern demand for fine realistic accuracy in art, the Adapter, previous to making his delineation of Mr. BUMSTEAD public, submitted it to the judgment of a physician having a large practice amongst younger journalists and Members of the Legislature. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... certainty only one, the Colossus of Rhodes. I was doubtful about Mount Vesuvius. I remembered not a single one of the seven deadly sins, and, at first, could place only two of the ten commandments—the ones on filial obedience and on the Sabbath. Later I thought of the newest realistic hit at the Park Theatre; that brought back one more commandment. On the other hand, it was a relief to call the three Graces ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... human figures are delineated. The patterns in such cases are all rigidly geometric and exhibit stepped outlines of a pronounced kind. With impacting and increased refinement of fillets the stepped character is in a considerable measure lost sight of and realistic, graphic representation is to a greater extent within the workman's reach. It is probable, however, that the idea of weaving complex ideographic characters would not occur to the primitive mind at a very early date, ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... boys will read this story with eager and unflagging interest. The episodes are in Mr. Henty's very best vein—graphic, exciting, realistic; and, as in all Mr. Henty's books, the tendency is to the formation of an honourable, manly, and even ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... drills are to be a touch less realistic. However, I am pleased to tell you that, under the able direction of Fire Chief Witherspoon, we emptied the building in ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... Rose," I said, laying down my egg spoon (the egg spoon really had nothing to do with this speech, but it imparted such a delightfully realistic flavor to the scene), "I'm not to blame ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips Andover. It was Shore Acres, and I have not yet forgotten, after a quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as if my grandfather's kitchen had been put ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... superstructure of his famous allegory upon the slender foundations of a dream. But just as the immortal work of John Bunyan had a very real support in truths and influences of the highest power and the deepest meaning, so the pages which record Mr. Runciman's "Dream of the North Sea," have an actual, a realistic, and a tragic import in the daily toil, sufferings, and hardships of the Deep Sea Trawlers. Moreover, the blessed work of healing the bodies, cheering the minds, and enlightening the souls of these storm-beaten labourers ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... round about you to force 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Good 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 in that ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... the house of a clergyman off Madison avenue and presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by a realistic romance of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... better-known wild beasts, describing their appearance, character and habits, and the position they hold in the animal kingdom. The text is printed in a large, clear type, and is admirably illustrated with powerful, realistic pictures of the various creatures in their native state by that eminent animal ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... power is not capable of precise definition.[1278] * * * Thus, while the constitutional structure and controls of our Government are our guides equally in war and in peace, they must be read with the realistic purposes of the entire instrument fully in mind. In 1942, in the early stages of total global warfare, the exercise of a war power such as the power 'To raise and support Armies, * * *' and 'To provide and maintain a Navy; * * *,' called for ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... throughout all its details, on status, and the tie, or bond, was sentimental. In our modern 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 ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... expensive creations. These types were chiefly furnished by the gladiatorial shows and the hunting of wild beasts. Even the former and earlier amusement had had a history of little more than a hundred years. It was believed to be a relic of that realistic view of the after life which lingered in Italy long after it had passed from the more spiritual civilisation of the Greeks. The men who put each other to the sword before the eyes of the sorrowing crowd were held to be the retinue which ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... not design like art, however realistic she may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences which God alone can allow ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... stations, either with him or for him. Mr. Gilmour's journal of this work is not only a record of the willingness with which he added gladly to his own heavy labours in order to assist a colleague; but it also gives some most realistic pictures of what ordinary life in China is like, and under what conditions evangelistic itineration there is carried on. Some of the districts visited had just been devastated by ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... sawdust arena. The red man is a born actor, a dancer and rider of surpassing agility, but he needs the great out of doors for his stage. In pageantry, and especially equestrian pageantry, he is most effective. His extraordinarily picturesque costume, and the realistic manner in which he illustrates and reproduces the life of the early frontier, has made of him a great, romantic, and popular attraction not only here but in Europe. Several white men have taken advantage of this fact ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... 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 his origin and his destiny. The legend of Merlin mirrors this ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... singular power of selecting just the 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 pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... heard it whispered as an instance of "second sight" that some years before he had any reason to anticipate such a death he was once startled by the ghostly opening of a door in the apartment where he was sitting alone, and by the apparition, horribly distinct and realistic, of a bloody head rolling slowly toward him across the room; till it rested at his feet. The glassy eyes were upturned to his, and the bonny locks were clotted with blood: it was as if it had just rolled from under the axe of the executioner; and the features, plainly discerned, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... 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 ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... than realistic factors were at work in the Palestinian colonization movement, which proceeded on a parallel line with the American emigration, as a small stream sometimes accompanies a large river. The ideas preached by the first "Lovers of Zion" were but slowly assuming concrete ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... considered the father of poetry, his no less celebrated contemporary and compatriot, Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg, has an equally good claim to be called the foremost master of modern Hebrew prose. Ginzburg is the creator of a realistic Hebrew prose style, though he was permeated to the end with the style and the spirit of the Bible. Whenever the Biblical style can render modern thoughts only by torturing and twisting it, or by resorting to cumbersome circumlocutions, Ginzburg ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... By Carolyn Verhoeff. Milton Bradley Co., Springfield, Mass. Valuable for kindergartners as a supply of realistic stories with practical lessons ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... 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 ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... at once made the novelist famous in his own country and very soon afterwards in England and France, where it was the first of his works to be translated. In America d'Annunzio was already known as the author of a powerful realistic novelette, "Episcopo & Co.," which was published in Chicago in 1896, two years before "The Child of Pleasure" appeared in London. As has so often happened since, America led the way in introducing into the English language ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... contains many words he did not use, on the ground that it reflects his art. For it shows in brief the change which came over Tragedy under Euripides' guidance. It is exciting, it seizes the tragic moment, the one important night, it has some lovely lyrics, the characters are realistic, the gods descend to untie the knot of the play or to explain the mysterious, some detail is unrelated to the main plot—Paris exercises no influence on the real ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... by James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the season. It is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to nature and life in its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, in its incidents; indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must become classic. It is difficult to give an outline of the story; ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and Esau stories contain marvellously exact and realistic portraits of the two races (the Israelites and the Edomites) that they respectively represent. Of the two brothers, Esau is in many ways the more attractive. He suggests the open air and the fields, ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... the so-called Realistic School is in the ascendant among novelists, it seems strange that little authentic information should have been published in the English language about the great French writer, Honore de Balzac. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he dared to claim the interest ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... with his customary thoroughness before he formally presented her with the gun. She had never had occasion to turn the stunner on a human being, but she'd used it on game. If this cloak and dagger business became too realistic, she'd already decided she would use ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... environment; for his teachings which so delighted—or scandalised, as the case might be—the world, were merely the expression of the dreams of his fellow-countrymen. So was it also with the lofty thoughts of the philosopher Soloviev, the macabre tales of Dostoievsky, the realistic narratives of Gogol, or the popular ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... and they are models of the new dramatic species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting article on the Palais Royal in The Nineteenth Century. This new style of comic play may be termed realistic farce—realistic, because it starts from every-day life and the most matter-of-fact conditions; and farce, because it uses its exact facts only to further its fantasy and extravagance. Consider La Boule. Its first act ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... of our most exalted customers complain of the quality of these goods, considering them too crude and glaring in their effect, we have prepared, with the help of our Ambassador at Washington, a special glass which provides a less realistic reflection. Sold in various shapes—the Kaiser mirror, the Dernburg reflector, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion—or even ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... know you'll make blots when I come to the cymbals," said Helen; and she doubled up her fists and hummed the passage, and gave so realistic an imitation of the cymbal-clashes in the great dirge that it almost upset the chair. Afterwards she laughed one of her merriest laughs and kissed her ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... realistic, by all means, but beware, O story-teller, of being too realistic. Avoid the shuddering tale of 'the wicked boy who stoned the birds,' lest some hearer should be inspired to try the dreadful experiment and see if it really ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... realistic reports of the two parties which had returned it was evident that Madigan and his companions, Close and Whetter who had set out on the 12th to the west were having a bad time. But it was not till the 23rd, after a week of clear skies, low ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... swords of a Roman Augustus, St. Louis, 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
... manifestations; whereas an examination into causes might prove them to be no worse tempered than that man is a bad sleeper who lies in a biting bed. If a sagacious instinct directs them to discountenance realistic tales, the realistic tale should justify its appearance by the discovery of an apology for the tormented souls. Once they sang madrigals, once they danced on the green, they revelled in their lusty humours, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fiction, but not what we have been used to call fable. We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this the case with others. "The Horse and the Fly" states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed. The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... situations more vividly. Was he a realist? The late Stephen Crane was called a realist. Than whom no more impressionistic writer ever painted with words. What then is the heart of this term still often used as an expression almost of abuse? To me, at all events—I thought—the words realism, realistic, have no longer reference to technique, for which the words naturalism, naturalistic, serve far better. Nor have they to do with the question of imaginative power—as much demanded by realism as by romanticism. For me, a realist is by no means tied to naturalistic ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances? Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an interfusion of philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard, but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman. Further thinking of it, she revived ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fallen into a contented and utterly comfortable doze in his chair when Ann sat down to read her grandmother's letter. The old woman always wrote at length, giving many details and recording village events with shrewd realistic touches. Throughout their journeyings, Ann had been followed by a record of the estate and neighborhood of Temple Barholm which had lacked nothing of atmosphere. She had known what the new lord of the manor did, what people said, what the attitude of the gentry ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Beecher, impressed by the growing sophistication of the toolmakers, described the hand tool in a most realistic and objective manner as an "extension of a man's hand." The antiquarian, attuned to more subjective and romantic appraisals, will find this hardly sufficient. Look at the upholsterer's hammer (accession 61.35) seen in figure 45: ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... picturesque story of California in the days of the Forty-niners which is "not only entertaining, but also impartially realistic."—Chicago Inter-Ocean. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... William Dunlap are very careful to indicate in realistic fashion the fact that he had but one eye. When a boy, one of his playmates at school threw a stone, which hit his right eye. But though he was thus early made single-visioned, he saw more than his contemporaries; for he was a man who mingled much in the social ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... 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 ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... deep apologies to Mrs. de Vere Carter, who was already in the middle of the first act. Her already low opinion of William sank to zero. Their next choice was little Red Riding Hood, and William was lured, by glowing pictures of a realistic costume, into consenting to take the part of the Wolf. Every day he had to be dragged by some elder and responsible member of his family to a rehearsal. His hatred of Cuthbert was only equalled by his hatred of Mrs. ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... awful whirlpool in which Europe seemed to be perishing. It was not cowardice that held her back: her sons had done enough during the four terrible years of civil conflict in which her whole manhood was involved to repel that charge for ever. Rather was it a realistic memory of what such war means that made the new America eager to keep the peace as long as it might. There was observable, it is true, a certain amount of rather silly Pacifist sentiment, especially in those circles which the Russians speak of as "Intelligenzia," and Americans as ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. ROBINSON CRUSOE is as realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... group of villagers moved off, contented. Just when the last of them passed out of sight the longest tongue I ever saw in man emerged from the cook's mouth, and the rascal put his finger to his nose in a derisive gesture. Those portents were succeeded by a realistic cock-crow. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... self-command). It is surely not necessary, even for a clever Norwegian man of letters in a realistic social drama, to make quite such a fool ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without a hero." It was also a novel without a plot—in the sense in which Bleak House or Nicholas Nickleby had a plot—and in that respect it set the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in real life, people drop ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... but extremely realistic in effect, filled with humorous situations and singular plots, and peopled with eccentric characters that afford amusement on every page. His most successful writing is done when he explains contrivances upon which his story depends. He is an original and inventive expert juggler ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... 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
... seems to proclaim itself under the banner of materialism, while the Real, implying the idea of the True, cannot be contained in simplisme. It is a most pernicious evil that writers, calling themselves realistic, still concentrate their talent upon the painting of vicious types and characters drawn in an ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does. And where Irene seems hard and cruel, as in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Goupenor Gallery, she is but wisely realistic—knowing that the least concession is the inch which precedes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Marwitz leaned back. She closed her eyes. The car had climbed to the entrance of Les Solitudes and the fuchsia hedge was passing on each side. Mrs. Talcott, looking at her companion, saw that she had either actually fainted or was simulating a very realistic fainting-fit. Mercedes often had fainting-fits at moments of crisis; but she was a robust woman, and Mrs. Talcott had no reason to believe that any of them had been genuine. She did not believe that this one was genuine, yet she had to own, looking ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of the excellent dame, suiting the action to the word with great dramatic skill, he commenced trundling his imaginary mop and sweeping back the intrusive waves of the Atlantic with an air of resolute determination and an appearance of increasing temper. The scene was realistic in the extreme, and was too much for the gravity of the most serious. The house rose, the people cheered, and tears of superabundant laughter trickled down the cheeks of fair ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... the enterprise I met the leading citizens of the United States socially, and never lost an opportunity to "talk up" the Western country, which I believed to have a wonderful future. I worked hard on the program of the entertainment, taking care to make it realistic in every detail. The wigwam village, the Indian war-dance, the chant of the Great Spirit as it was sung on the Plains, the rise and fall of the famous tribes, ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... Granger, failed to move Secretary of the Navy Dan A. Kimball.[19-38] The secretary insisted that integrating these installations might jeopardize the fulfillment of the Navy's mission, dependent as it was on the "efficiency and whole-hearted cooperation" of the employees. "In a very realistic way," he told Walter White, the Navy must recognize and conform to local labor customs and usages.[19-39] Answering Rosenberg's inquiry on the subject, the Navy ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... 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
... eldest son of Sakyamuni by Yasodhara. Converted to Buddhism, he followed his father as an attendant; and after Buddha's death became the founder of a philosophical realistic school (vaibhashika). He is now revered as the patron saint of all novices, and is to be reborn as the eldest son of every future Buddha. Eitel, p. 101. His mother also is to be ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... there the incidents of each successive day, as if in anticipation of its possible service by way of piece justificative, should such become necessary, attesting hour by hour their single-hearted devotion to soldierly duty. Had a draughtsman equally truthful or equally "realistic," as we say, accompanied them and made a like use of his pencil, he might have been mistaken at home for an artist aiming at "effect," by skilful "arrangements" to tickle people's interest in the spectacle of war—the sudden ruin of a village street, the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... are," declared Mr. Ringold. "I have my sea drama all ready for the films now. I don't know what to do about a wreck, though. I'm afraid I can't make it realistic enough. I must make other plans about that scene. But get your cameras in good shape, boys, for there ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... idealists, quite realistic, nevertheless, in their introduction to one another, and in the attachment which follows, are the chief actors in the plot. Gabriel Strong, the dreamy son of a prosperous English squire, falls in love with Joan Gildersledge, the equally dreamy daughter of a bestial ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... poster I ever saw was in Capetown in March, 1914. It was an admirably got-up enlargement of a funeral card, with a deep black border, adorned with a realistic picture of a hearse, and was worded "Unionist Opposition dead. Government dying. Electors of the Liesbeck Division drive your big nails into the coffin by voting for Tom Maginess on Saturday." Whether it was due to this novel form of electioneering ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and motive. The dwarf, unkempt weeds cloak a meek, weak, shrinking crab, whose frail claws and tufted legs are breeched with muddy moss, and whose oddly-shaped body is obscured by parasitic vegetation and realistic counterfeits thereof. Inspection, however critical, makes no satisfactory definition between the real and the artificial algae, so perfectly do the details of the moving marine garden blend with the fringes and fur of the animal's rugged and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... 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
... to a considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so far as our sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from the crowd, and turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed, to a picture, smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled me with an irrational, an exultant sense of superior advantage. Consider the wonder of it! All that I had said, and thought, and done since the stuff had begun to work in my veins had happened, so far as those people, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... find my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely. There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down now the broad ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... really trying to write a new kind of book, and the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of David Copperfield. In his last book, Dombey and Son, we see a certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... book strikes a new note in literature. It is a realistic romance of the folk of the forest—a romance of the alliance of peace between a pioneer's daughter in the depths of the ancient wood and the wild beasts who felt her spell and became her friends. It is not fanciful, with talking beasts; nor is it merely an exquisite idyl of the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... convey in a realistic way the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion. Stories like these are impressed upon the memory and their reading ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... climates; poor pay, working conditions, and alleged nepotism in the promotion of officers have been problems in the past, as reflected in the 1995 and 2003 coups; these issues are being addressed with foreign assistance aimed at improving the army and its focus on realistic security concerns; command is exercised from the president, through the Minister of Defense, to the Chief of the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in the presence of an innumerable people, I assisted in the performance of strange rites. Such scenes come to me most vividly in my dreams at night; and there are occasions when those dreams are so realistic that when I awake I am puzzled to decide which is the dream and which the reality. And—strangest thing of all—on all these occasions I have spoken the language which I spoke with Vilcamapata to-day! I recognised him, or rather ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... seems fairly evident from the early realistic dramatic literature of various countries, no special horror of speaking plainly regarding the sacro-pubic regions and their functions existed among the general population until the seventeenth century. There is, however, one ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stirring incidents crowded within the covers of a novel. The scene is laid in Paris and the country, and some of the most striking events of the times are vividly reproduced. The reader is given a very realistic glimpse of Paris, and part of the action takes place in that historic prison, the Conciergerie, where nobles and others accused of crimes against the French Republic were confined. History and fiction are adroitly mingled in the excellent novel, which may be termed a double love story in that ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... it which was very different from the hard white glare of the kind of daylight I was used to. Its radiance was strong and clear, but at the same time it was singularly soft, and spiritual, and benignant. No, it was not our harsh, aggressive, realistic daylight; it seemed properer to an enchanted land—or ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the turf, and the old Michel advanced into the moonlight from the gloom of the trees, emitting mechanical and not very realistic groans. He had been hard put to it to find any one before whom he could pour out his tale of heroism and suffering. Coira O'Hara looked upon him coldly, and the gnome groaned with renewed and somewhat ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike "knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt. This does not mean ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Guard—Strength (Numbers employed depend upon size of force protected and tactical situation; Strategical Advanced Guard enables Tactical Advanced Guard to be reduced)—Distance—In Advances (Dash and resolution required but interests of Main Body paramount)—In Retreats—Training must be realistic—Tactical Principles (Vanguard for Reconnaissance; Main Guard for Resistance; Communication essential; Error at Sulphur Springs; Success at Fredericksburg and First Battle of the Marne; False tactics of Prussian Advanced Guards in 1870-1871; Excellent work at Nachod)—Advanced ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... The old Professor was himself lured into it, and loudest in his praise of Hedrick's realistic art; and I yet recall him at the orgie's height, excitedly repulsing the continued slurs and insinuations of the clammy-handed Sweeney, who, still contending against the old man's fulsome praise of his more fortunate ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... in the least; but their conversation at this moment was interrupted by a roar of applause from all quarters of the house as Tom Taffrail, with a realistic blow from the shoulder, laid his persecutor ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... neatly rolled and strapped, canteens, haversacks, etc., lay near upon the ground. In the background, a deck of cards and two piles of Confederate money had evidently been thrown down and deserted to "watch the pot." We learned that this most realistic arrangement was the work of a "Yankee boy," whose father had served in the Federal army,—a loving tribute to the people among whom he had come ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... recovery from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase—as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound, but it might be edifying for once, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... first its usual realistic course. She was there near the waterfall waiting for him; they had very little to say to one another. She was depressed to-night, and he fancied that she had been crying. She was not so attractive to him in such a mood. He liked her best when ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... of the most realistic, grimmest, and at the same time most entertaining books ever given to the public.... The Road to En-dor is a book with a thrill on every page, is full of genuine adventure.... Everybody ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic:[22] both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure with great names, and, in ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... realistic Marionette piece, with a quaint, foreboding and sardonic spirit, the little climax ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... the day were soon to elbow out of Persis' thoughts the visions of the night. As she stepped out on the porch for a whiff of the invigorating morning air, her eyes fell upon a unique figure coming toward her across the dewy grass. In certain details it gave a realistic presentment of an Indian famine sufferer. In respect to costume, it was reminiscent of a ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... economy exhibited moderate economic growth in 2001-02, based on 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. Growth then slowed in 2003 and came back gradually in 2004, buoyed largely by increased export earnings. Chronic problems include a shortage of skilled labor and ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Adj. real, actual &c (existing) 1; veritable, true; right, correct; certain &c 474; substantially true, categorically true, definitively true &c; true to the letter, true as gospel; unimpeachable; veracious &c 543; unreconfuted^, unconfuted^; unideal^, unimagined; realistic. exact, accurate, definite, precise, well-defined, just, just so, so; strict, severe; close &c (similar) 17; literal; rigid, rigorous; scrupulous &c (conscientious) 939; religiously exact, punctual, mathematical, scientific; faithful, constant, unerring; curious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent. There was an American character in this piece too—a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector of pictures—presumably a dramatically fair and realistic drawing of a wealthy, successful, art-loving American. I have forgotten now whether he was supposed to be one of our meaty Chicago millionaires, or one of our oily Cleveland millionaires, or one of our steely Pittsburgh millionaires, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... said he, "you are always right on practical affairs. But, you see, this is an artistic affair. My books are realistic and radical. They teach the doctrine of the universal level, that no man can be above other men. They have made poverty, perhaps not exactly popular, but at least romantic. My villains are always rich and my heroes ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... shook his head. "I have just enough energy left to be realistic. I can't read your writing. Suppose I put down the headings. Location, date of sighting, time of sighting, direction of sighting, number of persons who ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... irate uncle of one of the girls, none other than Frank Haley, and Allen as the brother of the other girl, who also demanded satisfaction, and the mix-up in the courtroom was most realistic. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred" compliment worth the cruel wounds, the ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... thrilling and realistic intensity, worked out with a masterly insight and command of psychology, the whole to conclude with a new and original denoument—unavoidably postponed to a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... WORK TO WOMEN OR FOOLS." The reason of this remark was, that in all his writings, his first copy, his first thought, was always the best and the most powerful. Like many a painter who will go on improving and touching up his picture till he has destroyed the likeness, and the startling realistic nature of his subject, so would Sir Richard go on weakening his first copy by improvements, and then appeal to me to say which was the best. I was almost invariably obliged, in conscience, to induce him to stick to the first thought, which had grasped the whole ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... society in a common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is common in the works of George Sand. Andre is a refreshing contrast, in its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of Lelia and Jacques. It was an initial essay, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... upon her ultimatum, a-quiver with righteous anger, even to the realistic cherries in her hat. The girl rose also, outwardly composed, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... autumn manoeuvres, and was mainly intended to test the value of the new tactics which Germany proposed to use next spring against a more serious foe. It was more realistic to experiment upon Russians than among themselves, and Von Hutier was selected to make the demonstration. The advance began in the last days of August, and on 1 September Von Hutier forced the passage of the Dvina at Uexkll, eighteen miles above Riga, which the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... if I leaned forward and thrust my hand between those brass rails, to clutch his foot, I should clutch—nothing. He wasn't tangible. He was realistic. He wasn't real. He was ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... to Cadiz in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... a 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, without ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of mischief dancing in her eyes, the young teacher listened appreciatively but apprehensively as she noted the amazed expression on the faces of the teachers of adjacent classes when Amarilly's treble tones were wafted toward them. Fortunately, the realistic rendering of Lord Algernon's declaration of love was interrupted by the accompaniment to a song, which was followed by the ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... fashionable circles at decent intervals. Later, Peter learned to know their redoubtable relatives as "Rabbits" and "The Grampus," and he once saw a terrifyingly truthful portrait of "Rabbits" sketched on a skittish model's bare back, and a movingly realistic little figure of "The Grampus" modeled by her dutiful nephew in a moment of diabolical inspiration. It was explained to him that God, for some inscrutable purpose of his own, generally pleases himself by bestowing only the most limited human intelligence upon the wealthy ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... influence which had already attracted his attention while he was writing Madeleine Ferat. The scheme was further attractive in as much as it lent itself readily to the system of treatment to which he had applied the term naturalisme, to distinguish it from the crudities of the realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience, or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the word of ultimate ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... Brother born for adversity—a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother—a great and glorious Being, ever gracious, ever merciful. His trust in God was child-like in its simplicity, firm and unwavering. His conversation partook of it and was eminently realistic. He had no more doubt of God's daily, hourly, loving care and superintending providence over him and his than he had of any material fact with which he was familiar or which was self-evident to him. He entirely realized that God was his ever present friend. There seemed to be that close, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... subterranean passage. Not 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 he was summoned to attend the King. Henry, with his cut-throats at ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... to declare that the belief was a mistake. Nevertheless, he argues, the clergy of former times did right to preach hell hot and strong, stuff it with fire, and keep it burning for ever. They had coarse and ignorant people to deal with, and were obliged to use realistic language. Besides, it was necessary to exaggerate, in order to bring out the infinite contrast between heaven and hell, the elect and the reprobates, the saved and the damned. Mr. Mivart maintains, therefore, that the old representation of hell "has not caused the least practical error or misled ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... full of thrilling romance, with innumerable happenings to a giddy young married woman of New York and a bachelor from Boston. Plenty of rich, spicy dialogue—it is replete with up-to-date expletives. Lovers of realistic fiction will revel in this ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... solemn discoursings, he suddenly introduces an episode in which his peculiar power is at its height. There is no better instance of this than the passage in the second Book of the Excursion, where he describes with a fidelity, at once realistic and poetic, the worn-out almsman, his patient life and sorry death, and then the unimaginable vision in the skies, as they brought the ancient man down through dull mists from the mountain ridge to die. These hundred and seventy ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... to correspond to the "spiritual essences" of Plato. They are the eternal, immutable principles which are discernible to the eye of the soul, as the sensible objects they represent are discernible to the eye of the body. Modern metaphysics may deem them mere abstractions, but a higher realistic philosophy will treat them as substantive forms, of which the objective reality is ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... found in Italy the scientific and realistic development which has marked it in all other countries. The romantic school came distinctly to a close there with the close of the long period of patriotic aspiration and endeavor; but I do not know the more recent work, except in some of the novels, and I have not attempted to ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... this case, is not far to seek. Measure for Measure is, like nearly every play of Shakespeare's before Coriolanus, essentially realistic. The characters are real men and women; and what happens to them upon the stage has all the effect of what happens to real men and women in actual life. Their goodness appears to be real goodness, their wickedness ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 to guide him, followed the example of ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... stove furniture may be modeled in clay. Electric light bulbs of clay suspended by cords from the ceiling have a realistic air. Paper shades of appropriate color add to the ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... disturbed: a series of dreadfully realistic dreams danced through his brain. First he seemed to be standing upon a high mountain peak with eternal snows stretched all about him. He looked down, past the snow line, past the fir woods, into the depths of a lovely lake, far down in the valley below. It was a lake of liquid ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... went to the window where Elfrida was supposed to have watched the young king's coming, before she ran down to the gates and directed the murder which was planned to give her own son the kingdom. It made the story seem almost too realistic, because, as you often tell me, my imagination carries me too fast and too far. There's nothing easier than to send it back ten or twelve centuries in the same number of minutes—and it's such a cheap way of ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... believes this is, for man, the best of all possible worlds. To be humanly idealistic it is by no means necessary to be super-humanly utopian. But neither is Spinoza a shallow Schopenhauerian pessimist. Spinoza's realistic appraisal of man's worldly estate is entirely free from all romantic despair. This world is no more the worst than it is the best of all possible worlds for man. Although man cannot completely alter his evil estate, he can better it. And the wisdom of philosophy ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza |
