"Disillusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indubitable that conclusion and the officer's conviction based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of them have their ways of dropping occasionally, or being blown away by convenient winds, or falling off unexpectedly. But this is only the case with the prettier women, the ugly old ones being most particular not to disillusion and ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... two voices, a young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... at first undeceived;—the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sample this last offering, and it was so good, and so delightful, that it flicked the season back for a month. Miss Tempest had a first-night audience that gave the "among-those-present" chroniclers quite a tussle. It seemed like early September, when theatrical hopes run high, and the demon of disillusion is not even a cloud as big as a ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... depressed he had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all. He had a passion for pictures, and why should he not be able to paint as well as anybody else? He wrote to Miss Wilkinson and asked her how much she thought he could live on in Paris. She ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... a heavy head as the result of her unusual entertainment, and she awoke to a sense of disillusion. The room was the same ugly room, but her dreams had fled. So must Cinderella have felt upon awaking after her first ball. The colours had faded; the rapturous consciousness of power had died in the night. Sally ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... longer looks so lovely and shiny as it looks when it is wet. It was found that the sense of disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's naow clawss ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that portrait of Titania ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a keen glance at the girl's flushing cheek. "Well, in one sense it is true. Love is a beautiful thing to look at—an angel to outward show—with the heart, too often, of a fiend; and it is he who leads us to that precipice of which I spoke—the precipice of disillusion and despair." ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... who insists upon mistaking you for the heir of all the Rothschilds used to cost me dear when I was younger. I find the best plan is to take him in hand at the beginning and disillusion him; sweep aside his talk of '84 Perrier Jouet, followed by a '79 Chateau Lafite, and ask him, as man to man, if he can conscientiously recommend the Saint Julien at two-and-six. After that he settles down to his ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... out, the next morning, the tracts in her hand and zeal in her heart. At the very first saloon, she was doomed to disillusion. ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... uncontrolled fury on this exposed peak, minimise the delights of a mountain sojourn. The invasion of an army of jungle rats, behind the walls and above the ceiling of a room sodden and dripping with the afternoon's flood, completes the disillusion, and compels a hasty descent to the warmer damp of the lowlands, for the Equatorial climate, and the general absence of bed-coverings, causes a rheumatic stiffness on rising, which has to be steamed out by the atmospheric vapour-bath ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... believed. Now, however, a new light seemed thrown upon her—there was a touch of something base in her beauty—a flash of cruelty in her smile—a hardness in her eyes. Maryllia looked at her wistfully now and then, and was half sorry she had invited her, the disillusion ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... "I'm sorry to disillusion you," the Master answered, "but my explosive produces an entirely different type of concussion. What we have just heard is the blowing-in of the treasure-crypt door. There's no time to lose, now. Who ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... then at the girl's expression as it changed from bitter disillusion to something akin to awe, ...
— This One Problem • M. C. Pease
... "She's another disillusion. She's idle and dirty. And Potifer never does a stroke of work if he can help it. Moral—don't bother your head about martyrs. There's generally some excellent reason for ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Aeolian Harp has no more than the moderate merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's after-life of disappointment and disillusion—estrangement from the "beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was preparing for ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... have wondered at Ancrum's sense of difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of this apprentices' school for the sons ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her father simply perfect," was Mrs. Wells's reply. "I dread to think what it will cost her when disillusion comes, as come it must. Why! Who is that he is ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... been in the East that we were not continually luxuriating in the rays of a blazing sun and that the skies were always cloudless. The months of December, January and February, spent under the doubtful shelter of two waterproof (?) sheets, would disillusion them; and it is a very serious question whether they would apply the term "luxuriating" to the weather ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... prose realist of France, Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of them. But most men either simply grin and bear it, or carrying ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... replied, hotly, with a subtle rush of disillusion, a dulling of enchantment. "Don't you class me with other men who've kissed you. I wasn't myself when I did it an' I'd have gone on my knees to ask your forgiveness.... But now I wouldn't—an' I wouldn't kiss you again, either—even ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... had no charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket. Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She showed her discomfort ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... even if it stings and anathematizes—there is a triumph in the humiliation, and a tenderness in the strife. This was what she had been expecting, and what she had not got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating. He had not finished, either. He continued in a more ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... where to look for the renewal of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy on ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... manner or grace of speech, her very voice was the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her forbidding exterior there beat a warm, tender, womanly heart, which yearned for some one to love and to cherish. Her mother had died ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... agony within. The change in the character of his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the virtue ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... how to keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, to the ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... animals whose egoism has never escaped their testicles, they are not to be spoken of as men. Their imagination discharges itself through their penis. They are the husbands in the world I have destroyed. They understand neither beauty nor disillusion. The vagina is a door at which they deliver regularly like industrious milkmen. They are the sexual workmen to whom fornication is as much a necessity as poverty ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... rivers, steel in a world of snow—Kelly probably already at Cumberland, and Rosecrans beyond at Wheeling—hunger, cold, winter in the spurs of the Alleghenies, disease, stragglers, weariness, worn-out shoes, broken-down horses, disappointment, disillusion, a very, very strange commanding general—Suddenly confidence, heretofore a somewhat limping attendant of the army, vanished quite away. The shrill, derisive wind, the grey wraiths of snow, the dusk of the mountains took her, conveyed her from ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... that portrait has Simon Perkins studied with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed an infinity of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Secolo of August 11, 1916 how it became generally known that "with the exception of Cervignano and Monfalcone, our soldiers have been received, on the other side of the old frontier, with demonstrations quite the reverse of enthusiastic on the part of the agrarian population. The surprise and disillusion of our troops were very great, for they expected from our unredeemed brothers, who all speak our language, a joyous reception." This frigidity may, however, have been due to the influence of Austrian ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... 1780, were the years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties about finance they were light compared with Washington's. In ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me.... It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her.... ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... war while I am Secretary of State, and I believe there will be no war so long as I live." It has not come out that way; it might have so easily come out that way if only Germany had signed that treaty of his! But he is not disillusioned; nothing can disillusion him; his ideal is still only a day or two ahead of him, and he resigns to fight for it, since fight for it in the Cabinet he cannot ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the moon, but, in sad disillusion, Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion 'Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past; Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals, He's a genius or fool whom ye cheat at two-score, And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a finishing stroke to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... The disillusion was complete. The slices of veal were like boiled boot-soles; a muddy fluid had taken the place of the lobster; the fish-stew was unrecognisable; mushroom growths had sprouted over the soup, and an ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... she had decided to fly, but the presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, she rightly conjectured that he had been walking in a circle, doubtless ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Mrs. Eveleth recognized no familiar faces in the crowd congregated on the dock. When it became further evident that not only was Naomi de Ruyter forgotten in the city of her birth, but that the very landmarks she remembered had been swept away, there was a moment of disillusion, not free ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... know all that? How do you know all that, and who has told you? You know so much that I'm an atom frightened Because you know so little. And what is this? You know the luxury there is in haunting The blasted thoroughfares of disillusion — If that's your name for them — with only ghosts For company? You know that when a woman Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience (Another name of yours for a bad temper) She must have ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the doorway across the sidewalk, pausing for a moment to converse ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... a good and kind magician when we were children," was Hadria's thought, "and now one is grown up, there is no disillusion. He is a good ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... on. From bitter disillusion felt against everything in her world her mind chilled to analysis. Her mother loved her, she believed, and yet—she did not complete her swift thought; indeed, she looked quickly about in fear of her disloyalty. ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... with such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... a rather whimsical smile. "I'll try to disillusion you to begin with. Perhaps if you understand ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... decent outfit to be rolled in the blanket behind his saddle, let them. He'd not disillusion them. Then they'd not come around, embarrassing him and themselves as well, with awkward ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the "Marie Antoinette," what bitter disappointment! In the "Napoleon," what disillusion with the toys of the world in which he had reigned! In the "David"—Biblical subject treated by a modern chisel—what strange impressions and reflections are suggested by that tranquil head and the wonderful frailty of the body! how original the conception of the figure, and the whole ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... that changing rooms may change moods; that many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call. Madame Francesca had once characterised the hour after dinner as "the stick of a sky-rocket, which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it." Hence she postponed it as long as she could, but the Colonel himself gave the signal by moving back ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... dignity of one who for years served Madame la Marquise and indeed indirectly serves her still. I was not therefore acquainted with the events of the tour which followed the two betrothals, until after the return of the expedition; and it was a great disillusion for me to find that the unfortunate gentleman and the less than lady were still in ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... her. She had thrown him and Celeste together in vain. Poor Celeste, poor lovely Celeste, who wore her heart upon her sleeve, patent to all eyes save Donald's! Thus, it was with defined purpose that she had lured him this night into the garden. She wanted to disillusion him. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common sense urged caution. To frighten her now ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... it was a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the actuality ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... our lives through them with steadfast heart and smiling face- surely that is the part of wisdom and of true manliness. The ugly things in life seem much less formidable when thus boldly faced than when we try to shut our eyes to them, with the consequent disillusion at their continual reappearance. Confess frankly the faults of life and it becomes tolerable, is even in a fair way to become lovable. For after all, when its obvious imperfections do not blind us to its good points, it is a dear old world we live in, and the healthy minded man ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the suggestion of such a possibility that had drawn her first to Douglas Falloden. For three golden days she had imagined herself blissfully in love with him. Then had come disillusion and repulsion. What was violent and imperious in him had struck on what was violent and imperious in her. She had begun to hold him off—to resist him. And that resistance had been more exciting even than the docility ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at first is full of disillusion. It has offered abundant material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means "capable of governing," those who are oppressed by present-day conditions will lose ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... sentimental eyes at the people grouped among palm-trees on a verandah, while the girl at the piano sang what was evidently a song about "the dear homeland," to judge from the far-away look in the eyes of all present. It seems a pity to disillusion you, but it isn't at all like that. To begin with, it was quite chilly, and we were very glad of the big fire burning in the grate, and we did not look pensive or far-away, but ate our dinner with great content. I think, perhaps, Christmas ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... but her husband's castle completed her disillusion. She had thought of it as a social point d'appui—she found it in her own words ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... conceived that she was meeting the victorious fleet of Don Miguel, returning from the destruction of the pirates. When at comparatively close quarters the pennon of St. George soared to the Arabella's masthead to disillusion her, the Santo Nino chose the better part of valour, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... that he could settle to nothing till he had seen her again; there was a curious jealousy in his heart about Ashton; he would have given anything he possessed to be able to disillusion her, but knew it was impossible without ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... very rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained nor yet forgiven. ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... weak-willed baby of a thing that was her mother, taking the line of least resistance, the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was remarkable, and will be long read—whether it be poetry or no—by those who find perennial ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... every problem a definitely Spanish flavour. He is unmistakably a Spaniard even when he is trying most rigorously to be unbiased and international. He thinks out everything in Spanish terms. In him, from first to last, one observes all the peculiar qualities of the Iberian mind—its disillusion, its patient weariness, its pervasive melancholy. Spain, I take it, is the most misunderstood of countries. The world cannot get over seeing it through the pink mist of Carmen, an astounding Gallic caricature, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... Thus disillusion had been her misfortune—perhaps it would be more accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion, her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again astonished and dismayed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... they arrived in town; and Bud was made happy in seeing his precious miniature flier safely deposited at his own door. He still had the look of one whose mind was soaring away up in the clouds and Hugh did not have the heart to disillusion him just then. There would be no harm done in letting poor Bud dream a little longer before giving him that rude if ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... weep softly, partly from the pain of the man's unconsciously cruel grasp, partly frotn disillusion, partly from a fear that she had to ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank, more backward from companionship. The disillusion of his first carnal contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious impulses, put a bit in his mouth. He had something to lose which he was afraid of losing, which he was not sure even ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... serve again Although we'd all agree to pay you double. You find it all is vanity and pain— One clump of clover in a field of stubble— One grain of pleasure in a peck of trouble. 'Tis sad, at your age, having to complain Of disillusion; but the fault is whose When pigmies stumble, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called upon her. Now in her great need, she was calling ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... she was certainly a very pretty woman: there was the beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it seemed to him almost a glance of recognition and expectation, came into her dark, languid ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... night as Mr. Aubrey Gilbert left the Haunted Bookshop that evening, and set out to walk homeward. Without making a very conscious choice, he felt instinctively that it would be agreeable to walk back to Manhattan rather than permit the roaring disillusion of the subway to break in upon ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... speculation that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the time of disillusion. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... for example, I enter my house, and see a friend's card lying on the table, I so vividly represent to myself the recent call of my friend, that when I learn the card is an old one which has accidentally been put on the table, I experience a sense of disillusion very similar to that which attends a contradicted perception. The early crude stages of physical science abundantly illustrate the genesis of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... as time went on she could not shut her eyes to Sydney's habit of referring every question to the test of personal expediency. It was her first great disillusion, but the pain which it caused her was on her parents' behalf rather than on her own. They were the chief sufferers; they gave him so much and received so little in return. To be sure, Sydney was only what they had made him. They bade him "take," in language which he ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... mysterious because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion—all silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the light. Yes. Silent. Even desire itself! All ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Denning went to his library and took out his private ledger, a penitential sort of reading which he relished after moods of any kind of enjoyment. Mrs. Denning selected Ethel Rawdon for her text of disillusion. She "thought Ethel had been a little jealous of Dora's dress," and Dora said, "It was one of her surprises, and Ethel thought she ought to know everything." "You are too obedient to Ethel," continued Mrs. Denning and Dora looked with a ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... scales that darkened her eyes. For he was always seeking her out, conversing with her, and it was evident to her mind that he had set himself to bring back that wanderer to the fold. But the very next Sunday brought a great disillusion. As usual her daughter did not go to church in the morning, but when the bells were calling to evening service, and she stood with Fan ready to leave the house, she still lingered, looking very pale, her hands trembling a little with her agitation, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... I know their guilt. Having lost confidence in their own and other people's words, they revere my silence, even as people revere every silence and every mystery. If I were to start to speak suddenly, I would again become human to them and would disillusion them bitterly, no matter what I would say; in my silence I am to them like their eternally silent God. For these strange people would cease believing their God as soon as their God would commence to speak. Their women are already regarding me as ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... and knew that a "giant" was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... incongruous facade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... sense of the Puritans which made them what they were in politics and religion. That a great change should be wrought in the settlers by the circumstances of their position was inevitable; that this change should have had some disillusion in it, that it should have weaned them from the ideal and wonted them to the actual, was equally so. In 1664, not much more than a generation after the settlement, Williams prophesies: "When we that have been the eldest are rotting (to-morrow ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... me up. She did her worst with the best intentions, and you mustn't forget Steve! [She sits beside the table and DICK leans against it to talk to her.] He's my own brother, you know, and I'm so afraid Louise will finally disillusion him and spoil his ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... to disillusion a young man tricked into love for an adventuress. Now, neither as Chancellor nor friend could he make further open protest, unless favored by fate with some striking new development. There were, nevertheless, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... came into the kitchen in time to hear the question, and Rick almost hated to give the answer, knowing that it would disillusion them, and particularly Barby. ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... things nothing is more false than the glamour of Evil, for when on being drawn into it we sin, instead of the hoped-for delight we soon find satiety; instead of exhilaration, fatigue; instead of contentment, disillusion; instead of satisfaction, dust; instead of romance, the greedy claws of the harpy; and the further we go in response to this glamour the more pitiable our outlook; for the sweets and possibilities of Evil are extraordinarily limited. Can any man devise a new sin? No, but ever pursues ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... end of her life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet voices—the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... curiously young, curiously inexperienced. She had expected life to go on as dawn for ever. Everyday light had filled her with bleakness and disillusion. She had had childish fancies; that her husband did not really love her; that she counted for nothing in his life. Yet Sir Hugh had never changed, except that he very seldom made love to her and that she ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... put quite so strong, Was involved in the conclusion Of my lay: Love's disillusion Was the burden of ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... French general, "It was a great day for the Allies!" The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had learned by this time to disregard as unworthy of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... better and worse than that. But let's begin at the beginning. My father was a fairly wealthy man—but a dreamer. He made his money by a clever invention and lost it by an investment little short of idiotic. Like many unpractical men he had rather fancied himself as a man of business and the disillusion killed him. He—shot himself. My mother, my sister and myself were left, with nothing save a small sum in the bank and the deed of the modest house we lived in. Adela was twenty-one and I was nineteen. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... had been was one expressing being that one the one that one had been. The one that one had been was one expressing being completing being willing, being not willing to be winning what she had not been winning. The one that one had been was one expressing disillusion. The one that one had been was one expressing illusion. The one that one had been was one expressing having been such a one the one that one had been, was expressing having been completing willing the thing she had not been winning. The one that one had been was expressing some such thing, was ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... and then after a few seconds—seeing that dinner was certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance which X. had hoped to have left in the jungle until his return. This, and other messes, ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... The Pathway of Black Leaves I-IV Elegy Sequence I-X Disillusion November Afternoon Yareth at Solomon's ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... be disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the failure of a half-belief. I learnt that long ago. But I hate the very word in your mouth. Woe to us both if we cannot be resolute now. I could have waited—had I seen any reason to wait. Time could ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... a boy's love, and she had all mine, poor foolish wretch that I was. There's nothing more pathetic, I think, at this distance, than a boy's passionate purity in his first love—unless it's his disillusionment; for disillusion does no nature good. It would have done mine great harm if I hadn't had a friend like you to ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there is work ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... was producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion: ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... I unwittingly allowed my town acquaintances to believe me to be a chap of means. When I discovered their false estimate I did not have the courage to disillusion them. My true spending-pace was struck on my eighteenth birthday, and inside the year I had wasted my King William ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... often called a pessimist, for his "heavy sadness of disillusion"; but he is never bitter. Finding the universe incomprehensible, he stands baffled and passive, with a tender sympathy, almost an envy, for those who still have faith. He is above all interesting as a sane and characteristic product ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory. He remembered ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the country, the child is very near to Nature's heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... comparatively untouched by the problems of existence in crowded centers, come the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf's would be life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism and disillusion—faith, firm in its nearness to God and the wonder of His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy's, and I love the sea. And as we ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... sudden and characteristic disillusion seized him. "Being elected to Congress, though I am grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected," ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... their tokonoma. The man perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has gone to join the past. Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the breeding of those about him disillusion ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... can I ever do to disillusion you?" he cried in despair. "Oh! what can I ever do? This is too, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... town-residence which somehow manages to produce a sinister effect. For the rest any kind word about The Return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in disillusion. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... assiduously whispered about that her sister, the mother of Ivan, had been married when she was herself a child scarce out of arms. But he wondered to find how very few of his aunt's intimates remembered the age of her daughter, now for many years convent-wrapped. His first moment of disillusion came on the day that his aunt informed him, with considerable asperity, that his pretty cousin was not a person to be mentioned in their circle—the reason given—that "she was not yet out,"—sounding rather flimsy even to his trusting ears. Still, he was given to understand that, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... more often wrong than women. And as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist in ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... heights of unchanging vision, above our "mortal moral strife." Catherine is, as we can see, a woman of many moods—very sensitive, very loving. She shows a touching dependence on those she loves, and an inveterate habit of idealising them, which leads to frequent disillusion. She is extremely eager and intense about little things as well as great; hers is a truly feminine seriousness over the detail of living. She is keenly and humanly interested in life on this earth, differing in this respect ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... will disillusion you," he said, "if you expect something interesting. I simply make notes of things I want to see, or jot down thoughts to recall pictures to my mind. Reading over one's notebook is like glancing over a lot of kodak films. Sometimes one sticks ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... surrounding the city, descend upon us, the fine dust covering our clothes and bidding us direct our coachman to turn his horses' heads towards our hotel. This, however, is not frequent, but when it does occur it brings a certain sense of disillusion akin to that felt by the British holiday-maker when he has gone down to an English seaside place to enjoy the balmy air and finds a bitter east ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the taste of her kisses, on my lips, the sound of her voice lingered in my ears, the touch of her clasp still clung to me, and the burning charm of her tenderness still gratified my senses long after the delight but disillusion of my awakening. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... work of reconstruction! [He sits down on the row or two of bricks.] The young man is still off on his quest for adventure and romance. Life must be giving him a splendid bath of disillusion. I can see him as he returns, his tail between his legs. Now I am working on Sylvette—she, too, will soon be cured. [He takes a letter from his pocket and puts it in the hollow of a tree-trunk. SYLVETTE appears at the back.] It's she! Now ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... it. I think I'll stay with it for a while." Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a while, anyway," ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... confidence of princes. No doubt natures of that sort—simple, disinterested souls are pleasant and agreeable to them, as therein they find contentment such as they greedily prize; but for these unsullied, romantic natures, disillusion, trickery alone is in store. And if Mademoiselle de la Beaumele-Blanc had listened to me, she might have turned matters to far better account; nor, after yielding up her youth to a monarch, would she have been obliged to end, her ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wife. Would he not have the turning of the fair leaves of her book of life? Each page should unfold fresh happiness, hold new surprises as to what life and love could mean. He would know how to guard her from the faintest shadow of disillusion. Even now it was his right to keep her from that. How much, after all, should he tell her of the heart-searchings of these wretched weeks? Last night he had meant to tell her everything; he had meant to say: "I have sinned against heaven—the heaven of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... money, and she knows it is for that, and she has been sufficiently humble to accept him on those terms—she owes him money. If for love—she owes him at least the outside observances of love. If he has pretended love and it is for some other motive, his Nemesis will fall upon himself in the disillusion and contempt he will inspire. But in all cases the woman, through want of intelligence or pure misfortune, has crossed the Rubicon with him; she has allowed him to teach her the meaning of dual life—she has put it into his power with her to create future lives. She cannot, for any price ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... down, down below, in the hollow of the huge depression. Its single row of low whitewashed houses of humble architectural pretensions became less and less impressive and less picturesque as one got nearer. I had by that time grown quite accustomed to this optical disillusion, for it was frequently the case with the work of man in Brazil. It always needed distance—the greater distance the better—to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between Manassas and 100%; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. Manassas is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite of his fifteen ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... I know?"—"What does any one know?"—of this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... philosopher were set to describe the best and the worst of life, he would certainly have a considerable choice before him. But amongst the best he would have to set down love, and amongst the worst he would have to set down love's disillusion. The curse of age is indifference. With the increase of the years you come to a time when nothing matters. Anything which helps hearty youth this way is harmful. In ninety cases in a hundred age is a crime against ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... to tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had always been accustomed to, and couldn't live without. Surely he would not have her apply to papa. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... brave enough to face this misfortune nor bad enough to tamper with that brother's crude ideals for the sake of his own gain. From the length of his own experience, from the present weariness of his soul, he looked upon Alec more than ever as a boy to be shielded from the shock of further disillusion with regard to himself. He had not had Alec's weal a thorn in his conscience for ten months without coming to feel that, if merely for the sake of his own comfort, he would not shoulder that burden again. Now this conception ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... was white and shaken. The reality was even worse than she had expected, and the thought of Cecil's bitterness of disillusion weighed on her like a nightmare. She tried to speak, but her lips trembled and Erskine drew near with a ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... staggered and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that he displays. There had been two of them against God and man; and now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he had expected. And so her death is not only an affliction, but one more disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness. The speech that follows, given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge, not so much for her as for himself. From that time forth there is nothing human left in him, only "the fiend of Scotland," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
