"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Vorstellung[Ger], excogitation[obs3], "a fine frenzy"; cloudland[obs3], dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; "thick coming fancies" [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey[obs3], whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest[obs3], geste[obs3], extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne[Fr]; Utopia, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... incident, ingeniously imagined and staged, with swift movement, undoubtedly is. If the author wouldn't let his favourites off so easily and would give their enemies a better sporting chance, he would more readily sustain the illusion which is of the essence of real enjoyment in this kind of fantasy. But I imagine the normal human boy will find nothing whatever to complain of, and to him I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... to shun the acquaintance of the family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel with ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... danger," said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would enable you to found a good family. Are you sufficiently well ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... very little of himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single part only,—coiffure, or robe, or hand,—of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of late to work on church pictures. I like the thought of ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... through prism spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... between us," said he, a vague uneasiness urging him to take refuge behind the quaint fantasy, "You are the daughter of fire, and I the descendant of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... But since even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our poet, "much that we resigned"—much, too, that we prized. No girl, in our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of "superiority." ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Such a vision—whether fantasy or prophecy—could not fail to stir Lilamani Sinclair's Eastern heart to its depths. But she shrank from sceptical comment; and sceptical Nevil would surely be. As for Roy, intuition warned her it ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... lose Thy joy for a gem once dear to thee, Methinks thou dost thy mind abuse, Bewildered by a fantasy; Thou hast lost nothing save a rose That flowered and failed by life's decree: Because the coffer did round it close, A precious pearl it came to be. A thief thou hast dubbed thy destiny That something ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... the shifted Poise and footing of my thought! I brake through thy doors of sunset, Ran before the hooves of sunrise, Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies Wild and wilful As a poet's hand could twine them; Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice The Bow, as its cataract of colours Plashed to thee downward; Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning, Celestial dawning Over the ultimate marges ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... it hadn't been too long since airplane flight was considered an idiot's dream. This scene here at La Guardia would have seemed pure fantasy in 1900—thc huge Constellations and DC-6's; the double-decked Stratocruisers, sweeping in from all over the country; the big ships at Pan-American, taking off for points all over the globe. We'd come a long way in the forty-six years since the ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected in a pearly sea—a silvery city of fantasy like an exquisite shadowy drawing of some foreign land. . . . They sat silent, entranced. How long the vision lingered neither of them knew. . . . Then a breeze fanned their faces and in a twinkling ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... whole affair appeared a queer fantasy. With a light heart I put on a sola hat like the sahebs, and drove out to my work. I was to have written my quarterly report that day, and expected to return late; but before it was dark I was strangely drawn to my house—by what I could not say—I felt they were all waiting, and that I should ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... cried. "Hath some far planet sent us a messenger. The dame is loyal in all her fantasy. Say, my Lord of Nottingham, hath the woman a frenzy, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the Jewish world was a little plain, and God a loving Father. He held you in his arms, he spoke to you in every dream, in every fantasy, in every accident. Life was very short—but a little trial—you had only to be patient, and nothing mattered. Society did not exist—only your neighbor existed. Knowledge did not exist, nor was it needed—the world ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... slender, not so tall, and she owned a wealth of brown hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, just as one happened to catch the glint of them. And she had fascinating ways, too, which the lady of his fantasy could never have displayed, or he would not have abandoned the vision so readily. When she smiled, it was with lips and eyes in unison. When she spoke he heard harmonies not framed in mere words, whereas the other fair dame ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... Minarets glistered, remote and ethereal, and tall spires lifted themselves like arrows in flight. On the left lay low hills softly outlined against the pearly sky; hills of fairyland that might dissolve and disappear with the falling night; hills on the borderland of fantasy and old romance. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Socialists." How far a father is to share in directing his children's upbringing is "a matter of detail," we are told. The phrase suffices to show that whatever we are dealing with here is either sheer fantasy or else thinking of so crude a kind as to be unworthy of the name. Since early in the history of the fishes paternal responsibility has been a factor of ascending evolution. It has ever been a more and more ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... sympathy with "common" people, common flowers, common music. One of his most original and most captivating poems is The Tramp Transfigured, an Episode in the Life of a Corn-flower Millionaire. This contains a character worthy of Dickens, a faery touch of fantasy, a rippling, singing melody, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... itself as might the bound Prometheus rid himself of his fetters and leave the rock to which he is chained, but we shall look back on the institutions of force, the state, the hangman, et al, as ghosts of an anxious fantasy. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... public taste. Highwaymen and women of the town are not romantic figures, but Gay made the highwaymen handsome and lively, and the women of the town beautiful and attractive, and over them all he cast a glamour of romance and sentimentalism. Even Newgate seemed a pleasing place, for in this fantasy the author was careful to omit anything of the horrors of a prison in the early eighteenth century. Gay, in fact, did for the stage with "The Beggar's Opera" what, a century later Bulwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... stake. How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain?—O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody or be ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... can't. I wander around and wander around until I am weary and feeble, and when I rouse myself I find I am here, in the very same place. There is the monastery and the belfry, and the clock strikes the hour. And it's all like a dream, a fantasy. You close your eyes, and it does not exist. You open them, and it's there again. Sometimes I go out into the fields at night and close my eyes, and then it seems to me there is nothing at all existing. Suddenly the quail begin to call, and a wagon rolls down the road. Again a dream. For if you ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... uttered words, made promises, and taken engagements on himself which no one demanded of him. No conduct could have been more ridiculous. Happily, nothing was lost. He had yet time to give his love that subordinate place which this sort of fantasy should occupy in the life of man. He had been imprudent; but this very imprudence might finally prove of service to him. All that remained of this scene was a declaration—gracefully made, spontaneous, natural—which subjected Madame de Tecle to the double charm of a mystic ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She snatches off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... lost. Many a man, no doubt, who called himself a "Gnostic" was but a sorry rogue; many another was but a student of the letter, not of the life; many another was but a spiritual swashbuckler, pompous in his demeanour and cryptic in his utterance; some, led by an abhorrent fantasy, may have wandered along the path that goes to the Venus-berg and have striven to lisp a formula that would transform the earth into Gehenna rather than into Heaven. But, beside this mass of imposture, of folly, of ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... away her burdensome life with violent hands. Nothing was more improbable than that a being endowed with her self-controlled, serene, sorrow-accepting temperament, should be driven to such an act of unholy madness. Yet Maurice allowed the frightful fantasy to work within his brain until it clothed itself with a shape like reality, and drove him to the verge ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... than get the book. It is, in its way, a little masterpiece, and its grace and fancy, and beauty of line and colour, cannot be over-estimated. The Greeks gave human form to wood and stream, and saw Nature best in Naiad or in Dryad. Mr. Crane, with something of Gothic fantasy, has caught the Greek feeling, the love of personification, the passion for representing things under the conditions of the human form. The flowers are to him so many knights and ladies, page-boys or shepherd- boys, divine nymphs or ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... I have to say about Mr. Vansittart's "Oriental Fantasy." It deals with a youthful bride who has just been attached to a Persian hareem. In the garden at dusk she finds a young English traveller (who has just told us what a penchant he has for "women, women, women"—he is very insistent about this), and being caught in conversation with him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... calmer. Apparently they had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after the villages. ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... sphere of fantasy George Mac Donald has very few equals, and his rare touch of many aspects of life invariably gives to his stories a deeper meaning of the highest value. His Princess and Goblin exemplifies both gifts. A fine thread of allegory runs through the narrative of the adventures of the young miner, ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding, and night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' Only a fantasy, and yet how he bends Nature to suit the curve of his own temperament. And who has not felt the involuntary exhilaration, appalling from its very depth, that possessed him, crossing a bare common, on a bleak October afternoon, sunless and chill, with gray winds sweeping by—'I was glad to the brink ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... strayed so far Into the realm of fantasy, - Let thy dear face shine like a star In love-light beaming over me. My melting soul is jealous, sweet, Of thy long silence' drear eclipse; O kiss me back with living lips, To life, love, ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... truth beyond the seeming. This is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to come as a revelation to the searcher. He may first find it in some pure lyric such as Shelley's "Skylark," or in some mystical fantasy such as Moore's "Lallah Rookh" or Coleridge's "Christabel," or in some story of human abnegation such as Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," or some wail of a soul in pain, as in Shelley's "Adonais," or in some outburst of exultant grief ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... things to be done, such as running errands, at which she hoped to earn some pence here and there. The white riband seemed no impossible fantasy to Loveday when she started ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... with hope. That Alice should have been brought to think of her engagement with him in a spirit of doubt and with a mind so troubled, that she had been inclined to attempt an escape from it, had been very grievous to him; but it had been in his mind a fantasy, a morbid fear of himself, which might be cured by time. He, at any rate, would give all his energies towards achieving such a cure. There had been one thing, however, which he most feared;—which he had chiefly feared, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... Tupper's, and we had then nearly ten miles to go before reaching Constable's Camp, where we were to stop for the night. I worked hard all day, but in a kind of dream, as if the dead weight I carried with weariness were only the phantom of something, and I were a fantasy carrying it;—the actual had become visionary, and my imaginings nudged me and jostled me almost off the path of reason. But I had no time for a seance with my daemon. The next day I devoted with the guides to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... worthy of the caricaturist Hoffmann himself, he drew a dreadful picture of Offenbach and his times; of the mighty fiddler beating time upon the well-filled goatskin and sawing away across the strings, his mouth widened with a grin "like some drunken conception of Edgar Poe's, or some fantasy of Hoffmann, while the startled birds flew back to heaven, the moon split herself back to her ears, and the stars giggled behind their cloud-fans." The planetary system only revolved to frisky rhythms, and the earth herself, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in all respects opposed to the genius of the English drama. They do not even pretend to be representations of human life and human character, but are pure fantasy pieces, in which the personages are a heterogeneous medley of Grecian gods and goddesses, and impassible, colorless creatures, with sublunary names, all thinking with one brain, and speaking with one tongue,—the conceitful, crotchety brain, and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... constantly falling back to its corpse, or is something vital without sight, hearing or speech, and so is blind, deaf and dumb, soaring about and cogitating. Self-love entertains many other insanities with which nature, in itself dead, inspires its fantasy. Such is the effect of self-love, which regarded in itself is love of the proprium. Man's proprium, in respect of its affections which are all natural, is not unlike the life of a beast, and in respect of its perceptions, inasmuch ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... from the window, and seated herself, in her impulsive way, at the organ. Her fingers touched the keys timidly at first as she began a trembling prelude of her own fantasy. In music her pent-up feelings found congenial expression. The fire kindled, and she presently burst out with the voice of a seraph in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... one occasion Frohman produced a play for the mere pleasure of doing it. He put on a certain little dramatic fantasy. It was foredoomed to failure and held the boards ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... learned author of THE GOLDEN BOUGH, the irreligion of the Arunta and northern tribes (if these be really without religion) is the result of their form of speculation, wholly occupied by the idea of reincarnation, while the Arunta form of totemism is the consequence of an isolated fantasy about their peculiar sacred stones. Meanwhile the Euahlayi, as Mrs. Parker proves, entertain, in a limited way, not elsewhere recorded in Australia, the belief in the reincarnation of the souls of uninitiated young people. They also, like the Arunta, recognise ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... the same names as the five parts of classical rhetoric.[134] The first part of rhetoric, he says, is "Invencyon," the classical inventio. It is derived from the "V inward wittes," discernment, fantasy, imagination, judgment, and memory. Anyone, however, who is familiar with the inventio of classical rhetoric, concerned as it is with exploring subject matter, will be at a loss to see the connection with Hawes. ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... know no sin. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well weaved bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes, while fantasy discloses Millions of Lilies mix'd with Roses. Then dream, ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat; While Faunus in the vision comes, to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep: With thousand such enchanting dreams, that meet To make sleep ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... many to be only a land of fantasy and of shadows. But it is not so. Dreams, for the most part, are fantastic; but all are not so. Nearer are we to the world of spirits, in sleep; and, at times, angels come to us with lessons of wisdom, darkly veiled under similitude, or ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... of the next meeting the ladies of the Club gathered in the dingy and inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no "specimens," no varnished pine cones, no "Rock of Ages," ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life. She eats too much, does not exercise enough, and considers it amusing to let others wait upon her, and do for her the things she should do for herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder, a fantasy of dirty clothes, a sequinarium of unmentionables—that is, if the care of it is left to herself. The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame she will allow no visitor to enter the apartment if she can help it. Concrete selfishness is her chief ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... they had spiritualized abominable vices. What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of devils than of beasts. But in seeking to distinguish its true character, we must take notice of the highly wrought fantasy which seasoned both their luxury and their jealousy, their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... also been symbolized and picturegraphed 'til the imagination ran riot, and ingenuity and fancy became lost, like ideas in a fantasy of words. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... improvisatrice Corilla, was nothing more than a strong wine with which she refreshed and strengthened her fatigued poetic powers for renewed exertions; it was in a manner the tow which she threw upon the expiring fire of her fantasy, to make it flash up in clear ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... cabin vibrated with a screeching note. The floors trembled. Madness! That's all it was! He'd awaken in a moment. Find himself in his own bed at home. He'd dreamed of adventures before now. But never of such as this! It just couldn't happen! A nightmare—fantasy of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... that the first of the above extracts must have impressed him. At any rate, on the night after the reading of it, just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy, including the command with which it ends. With a particular clearness did he seem to see the picture of the Great White Road, "straight as the way of the Spirit, and broad as the breast of Death," and of the little Hare travelling ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... That happened in this case to be nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms, foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was on the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... absurdity, carried along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... to the unflagging care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically real and not the fantasy of a disordered imagination. ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... need to dress excepting to go to the libraries and do a few errands. The sum total of these expenses amounted to only eighteen cents, which left me two cents over for emergencies." Balzac somewhat exaggerates his poverty and reduces his expenses to suit the pleasure of his poetic fantasy, but undoubtedly it was a brusque transition from the bourgeois comfort of family life to the austerity of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... life; and the poignant bitterness of her death. It was to this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his tone poems; the "Saturnalia of the Red ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Bridget's had found himself at home at daybreak, seated in his own armchair, the fire out,—and—the tankard of ale out too! Who had drunk it?—where had he been?—how had he got home?—all was mystery!—he remembered "a mass of things, but nothing distinctly;" all was fog and fantasy. What he could clearly recollect was, that he had dug up the Grinning Sailor, and that the Saint had helped to throw him into the river again. All was thenceforth wonderment and devotion. Masses were sung, tapers were kindled, bells were tolled; the monks of St. Romuald had ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... and arms. For herself she had but one ambition—to hear men say, "This woman is the wife of the great Quintus Drusus." That would have been Elysium indeed. Cornelia, in fact, was building around her a world of sweet fantasy, that grew so real, so tangible, that the stern realities of life, realities that had hitherto worn out her very soul, became less galling. The reaction following the collapse of the plot against Drusus had thrown her into an unnatural cheerfulness. For the time the one thought when ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... average sonata. In it, in fact, Beethoven may be said to have broken away from form, for after the word sonata he adds the qualifying phrase "quasi una fantasia," signifying that, although he calls the work a sonata, it has the characteristics of a free fantasy. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Character, and believe themselves to be striving for the reality of the one, when the fantasy of the other alone stimulates their desires. Reputation is the opinion entertained of us by our fellow- beings, while Character is that which we really are. When we labor to gain reputation, we are not even taking a first step toward ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions, especially if chiming in with favorite preconceived ideas; and then I ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. I was therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... use exactly as it is to-day, and although we have no records, it probably was in use for ages previously. Noah, possibly, had one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa is made like a basket and then coated with bitumen. This type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the scenery of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially when filled with watermelons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests Abraham attempting the role of Sinbad the Sailor for ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... a spy for the FBI—the Fantasy Bureau of Investigation! Learning of a monster meeting of science fiction "fen" in New York, I teleported myself 3,000 miles from the Pacificoast to check the facts on the monsters. And it was true—the 14th ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman
... sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... the obiter dicta of persons like these, partly on the still more tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawn from his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in Thackeray's admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as a creature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical character. It is astonishing how this Fielding ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it harmoniously with the best vitalities ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... first eight years of his married life saw in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary and art criticism and biography, poetry, fiction (or rather fantasy), light essays and religious philosophy. All these were so full at once of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its high spirits, as to recall another thing Gilbert said: that Dickens ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... And soon I heard the bell to matins ring, And up I rose, no longer would I lie. But now, how trow ye? such a fantasy Fell me to mind, that aye methought the bell Said to me, 'Tell on ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... through change of hue, But light transparent—did I summon up Genius, art, practice—I might not so speak, It should be e'er imagin'd: yet believ'd It may be, and the sight be justly crav'd. And if our fantasy fail of such height, What marvel, since no eye above the sun Hath ever travel'd? Such are they dwell here, Fourth family of the Omnipotent Sire, Who of his spirit and of his offspring shows; And holds them still enraptur'd with the view. And thus to me Beatrice: "Thank, oh thank, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... top had been stripped clean by the winds of countless years. Rocks, black, brown, even blood-red, were naked to the pitiless glare of the sun. Their colors were mingled in a weird fantasy of twisted lines that told of the inferno of heat in ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated divinity"? ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... at last? As he walked by Robin's side on the moor, as he dined with her, talked with her, sat and watched her at her sewing, more than ever each hour he believed that her dream was no ordinary fantasy of the unguided brain. She had in some strange way seen Donal. Where—how—where he had come from—where he returned after their meeting—he ceased to ask himself. What did it matter after all if souls could so comfort and sustain each other? The ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... an unequivocal representation of the laws of life, it would invariably justify and support the moral will; it would be idealistic. It is the art of desultory and irresponsible fancy that is a source of danger. There is a species of romantic art that is guarded by its very excess of fantasy; it being impossible to mistake it for a representation of life. But where romantic art is not thus clear in its motive, it becomes what is called "sensational" {207} art, in which the wages of sin are not paid; in which ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... in the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that whenever she appeared people irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made private acknowledgments to the effect that something was to be said even for an impious fantasy which gave her so unique an opportunity. To Arnold her vivid embodiment of an incident in that which was his morning and evening meditation made special appeal, and though it was in a way as if she had thrust her heathen torch into his Holy of Holies, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... the conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Hafiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; whether the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... thus haunt my sense, Striving to breed destruction in my spirit? When I would sleep, the ghost of my sweet love Appears unto me in an angel's shape: When I'm awake, my fantasy presents, As in a glass, the shadow of my love: When I would speak, her name intrudes itself Into the perfect echoes of my speech: And though my thought beget some other word, Yet will my tongue speak nothing ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... know not who she was—what were her prospects, her connections, her standing in society. She begged me, but with a sigh, to reconsider my proposal, and termed my love an infatuation—a will o' the wisp—a fancy or fantasy of the moment—a baseless and unstable creation rather of the imagination than of the heart. These things she uttered as the shadows of the sweet twilight gathered darkly and more darkly around us—and then, with a gentle pressure of her fairy-like ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which never touched a question without enlightening it thoroughly. Aramis smiled, as he had long known that in diplomacy D'Artagnan acknowledged no master. Colbert, who, like all proud men, dwelt upon his fantasy with a certainty of success, resumed the subject, "Who told you, M. d'Artagnan, that the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... of such fantasy and variety of color that the two boys were spellbound. Elephants and camels, llamas and horses, all richly caparisoned in Eastern silks, passed along with their riders. Guards with curved swords and many-thonged whips formed a double hedge between those in the procession and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... things that aroused our childish fantasy, when Balint Orzo and I were boys, but none so much as the old tower that stands a few feet from the castle, shadowy and mysterious. It is an old, curious, square tower, and at the brink of its notched edge there is a shingled helmet which ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Geoffrey's success with her had been steadily rising. He and Geoffrey had indeed been at cross-purposes, if Geoffrey really believed what he seemed to believe! But it was nothing—it could be nothing—but the fantasy of a lover, starting ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney, the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins, Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... loves it he will soon be a knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He will admire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedly respectable and commonplace people in the world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman who professes ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... gentry are hard to kill." Here is fact, not fantasy. Lizard yarns no less sensational than this Mystery Story can be found between the covers of ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... valley. All was still. Not a trace of life remained; not a hoofmark in the snow, nor a bruised blade of grass. And when they climbed to the plateau and looked back, it seemed to Trafford and his companions, as it seemed in after years, that this thing had been all a fantasy. But Hester's face was beside them, and it told of strange and unsubstantial things. The shadows of the middle world were upon her. And yet again when they turned at the last there was no token. It was a northern valley, with sun and snow, and cold blue shadows, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... can also conceive of a critic who in general and offhand looks upon the presentations of this book as the out-pourings of a fantasy run wild or as dreamy thought-pictures. Yet all that can be said in this respect is contained in the book itself, and it is explicitly shown that sane and earnest thought not only can but must be the touch-stone of all ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... we shall ever hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing well whatever ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... deluding yourself into thinking that you knew about it in advance. False memory is a fairly common thing, in cases like this. Even the little psychology I know, I've heard about that. There's been talk about rockets to the Moon for years. You included something about that in your future-history fantasy, and then, after the event, you convinced yourself that you'd known all about it, including the impromptu christening ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... but fantasy, for my love lay still In my arms, with her tender eyes aglow, And she wondered why my lips were chill, Why I was silent and kissed her so. A year has gone and the moon is bright, A gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe; I sit by a new-made grave to-night, And ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... must it last, this life in manacles? Do you remember Job? Job? Aye, doubtless Jehovah was sitting at some jovial feast when he conceived that fantasy of a drunken brain, to let Satan loose upon a happy man. Job? His seven sons and daughters, and his cattle, and his calves were restored unto him, but we read nothing of any compensation made him for the jest itself. He ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... easily realize the chaos and ferment of an over-stimulated brain, steeped in romantic literature, and given over to the wayward leadings of the imagination. Who can tell what is true, what is false, in a world where fantasy is as real as fact? Emerson's word fell like truth itself, "a shaft of light shot from the zenith," a golden rule of thought and action. His books were bread and wine to her, and she absorbed them into her very being. She felt herself ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... or reason, of a choice, I say, divested of the aim of wisdom and goodness, is regarded by many as the great privilege of God and of intelligent substances, and as the source of their freedom, their satisfaction, their morality and their good or evil. The fantasy of a power to declare one's independence, not only of inclination, but of reason itself within and of good and evil without, is sometimes painted in such fine colours that one might take it to be the most excellent thing in the world. Nevertheless it is only a hollow ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... yoke. But she shall not succeed. She has made an alliance with England, Russia, and Saxony. I have united with France and Bavaria, for the protection of Charles the Seventh. This, you see, Fredersdorf, is war. Our life of fantasy and dreaming is over. I have given you a little dish of politics," said the king, after a pause. "I wish to show you that I have need of you, and that we have much to do. We must arrange my private accounts, we have many letters to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... despite certain obvious faults of imagination and style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... charming and, what is not so usual, a quite intelligible fantasy in mime—The Magic Pipe: Pierrot, faithless mistress, despair, sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... higher upward, by the Virgin's lamp that twinkled on the summit. Feeble as it was, in the broad, surrounding gloom, that little ray made no inconsiderable illumination among Kenyon's sombre thoughts; for; remembering Miriam's last words, a fantasy had seized him that he should find the sacred ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... actual; if he show us a cross-section of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have originality and ingenuity. If to compression, originality, and ingenuity he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better. It may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression, and that most of those who have succeeded in this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... poets, and he speaks after the manner of prophets and seers. 'Cogita et visa,'—this title of one of his books might be the title of all. His process is that of the creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. . . . There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... carry this spirit over into its music. And yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... was that sound? I could swear I heard the measured tramp of men And ring of mail, yet is it but illusion. Last night I thought I heard it as I lay Awake at dead of night. Mere fantasy Born of long solitude, for here there are No soldiers nor ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... to make his parties different from others by some childish fantasy or other. He especially delighted in a surprise. He often took the trouble (for instance) to have a telegram sent to every one of his guests during the course of the evening. Each of these wires contained some personal chaff or practical joke. At other ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... delightful things but the delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writer had been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did you own the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature of fantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of my being. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate with robins— English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in a letter what I am now going to ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... always seemed to be "moving about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much firmer ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... again at the letter on the table before him, then folded it and put it in his pocket. It was well, he thought. His latest book of fairy tales and fantasy had enjoyed good acceptance. And the check in the letter had been of satisfactory size. He smiled to himself. There were compensations in this job of his. It seemed to be profitable to have a purpose other than the obvious and ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... Dream, His faith new-stablished would stand, and be No longer vext of this infirmity. And so that night, ere lying down to sleep, There came on him, half making him to weep And half to laugh that such a thing should be, A mad conceit and antic fantasy (And yet more sad than merry was the whim) To crave this boon of Sleep, beseeching him To send the dream of dreams most coveted. And ere he lay him down upon his bed, A soft sweet song was born within his thought; But if he sang the song, or if ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... domes that house the antennae of the most modern radar in the world. The entire collection of buildings and domes are one color, solid white, from the plastering of ice and snow. The picture that the outpost makes could be described as fascinating, something out of a Walt Disney fantasy—but talk to ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... he'll be home before us;— 'Tis the most wayward cur e'er mumbled bone, Or dogg'd a master's footstep.—Bingo loves me Better than ever beggar loved his alms; Yet, when he takes such humour, you may coax Sweet Mistress Fantasy, your worship's mistress, Out of her sullen moods, as soon as Bingo. The Dominie And ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... were delivered into the hand of Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill- omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... are boldly asserted by him concerning fantasies or imaginations are very opposite to Fate. For desiring to show that fantasy is not of itself a perfect cause of consent, he says, that the Sages will prejudice us by imprinting false imaginations in our minds, if fantasies do of themselves absolutely cause consent; for wise men often make use of falsity against the wicked, representing a probable ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... class, to achieve a set purpose of making them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished, she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be shining? There was no sky, there ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... were not away These trees, this south-wind and this dreary day Would all be mad with joyous ecstasy; But you are gone, so mourning they with me Find bitter-sweet in idle fantasy. How glad, how mad, how gay, If you were ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... to do so, and I do not for a moment believe that there is another dramatic author in America who can, they will be the first to grant the difficulty of the achievement. With an apparently inexhaustible fund of fantasy and wit Mr. Hopwood passes his wand over certain phases of so-called smart life, almost always with the happiest results. With a complete realization of the independence of his medium he often ignores the realistic conventions and the traditional technique of the stage, but his touch ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy, that man can hold property in man! In vain you appeal to treaties, to covenants between nations. The covenants of the Almighty, whether the old or the new, denounce such unholy pretensions. To those laws did they of old refer, who maintained the African trade. Such treaties did they ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... got a lot more imagination than most people, because he's a cripple, and he could go off on a crazy tangent because he's upset about Charlie. The thing to do is give him a logical explanation instead of letting him think his fantasy ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... from her, his dreams certainly should have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy of ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of all fantasy. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... such things," Hallett said, feebly; "it is a dream, a mere fantasy. It doesn't seem to me, at present, a possibility that such a meal could ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... I walk around as in a fog...Therefore—I'm thinking right now—therefore, that which, I meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides—even all the world—therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since I have stopped? ... Once again, I don't understand anything ...Sergei Ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life—help me, then, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... lived in a tunnel on the Underground and employed himself in helping distressed passengers. Well, what I in my brutal way want to know is whether this is a joke, or what. Because if I have to credit it, over goes the rest of the plot into frank make-believe. And fantasy of this kind consorts but ill with a scheme that embraces such realities as heart-failure and typhus. Not in any case that Miss DELAGEEVE'S plot could be called exactly convincing. "Preposterous" would be the apter word for this society ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... opposite to us had opened and that we were all three of us, on the threshold of another chamber. At the end of it stood something like a little altar of hard, black stone, and on this altar lay a mass of substance of the size of a child's head, but fashioned, I suppose from fantasy, to the oblong shape ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... pale and emaciated, from want of rest, and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions, that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. "Come," I said, "this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind. Compare her with the beautiful women of your own world, and this false enchantment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... believed her acquainted with the history of her cousin, and willing to aid in some fantasy which was to lead to the present happy restoration of the latter to ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... In a moment they gave him their compassion, jocularly, contemptuously, or surlily; and at first it took the shape of a blanket thrown at him as he stood there with the white skin of his limbs showing his human kinship through the black fantasy of his rags. Then a pair of old shoes fell at his muddy feet. With a cry:—"From under," a rolled-up pair of canvas trousers, heavy with tar stains, struck him on the shoulder. The gust of their benevolence sent a wave of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... has no objective point he loiters by the way and no doubt enjoys it the more, but it is not fair to put the automobilist down as a scorcher simply because he is pushing on. The best guide-books are caprice and fantasy, if you ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... drede of the syght that I had sene wenyng to me all had be trew Actuelly done where I had bene That batyll holde twene Vyce & Vertew But when I see hit hit was but a whew A dreme a fantasy & a thyng of nought To study thereon I ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous
... fared so ill at the hands of the critics. Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile criticism the one thing lost sight of is the fact that a poet ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... events of the story of Florinda, about which so much has been said and sung by chronicler and bard: for the sober page of history should be carefully chastened from all scenes that might inflame a wanton imagination; leaving them to poems and romances, and such-like highly seasoned works of fantasy ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Lane big scenes and ballets more full of competing colour and restless movement than of controlled design. But the Hall of Fantasy, with its spiral staircases reaching to the flies, was an ambitious effort crowned with success. The dance of the eight tiny zanies was the best of the ballet. The Shakspearean pageant at the end might be (1) shortened, and (2) brightened by the characters throwing a little more conviction into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... his strongest passion, although the world, according to its custom, conspires against his instinct by interrupting him with love and war and business, and in the end hustles him away before he has had time to make anything more lovely or lasting than a reputation as a hero. In the amazing fantasy The Cream of the Jest Mr. Cabell has embodied the visions of the romancer Felix Kennaston so substantially that Kennaston's diurnal walks in Lichfield seem hardly as real as those nightly ventures which under the guise ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren |
