"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Moreland' is the sequel and conclusion. Mr. Bennett seems to delight in that field of action and adventure, where Cooper won his laurels; and which is perhaps the most captivating to the general mind of all the walks of fiction. There has been, so far, we think, a steady improvement in his style and stories; and his popularity, as a necessary consequence, has been and is increasing. One great secret of the popularity of these out-door novels, as we may call them, is that ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the gospel plan, he considered right and justifiable. Herder had become a Protestant, and knew enough about the truth to be aware that Christians are bound to forgive their enemies. He also was convinced that the saints cannot hear prayer, that purgatory is a fiction, and that confession should be made to God and not to man. But he had no grace in his heart. He prided himself greatly on having visited old Moretz and expressed himself ready to become his friend. Moretz, on the other ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... means foreign to my present designs. (35) Would that the Indians also would believe me to be a god! (36) Wars are carried through by prestige, falsehoods that are believed often gain the force of truth." (Curtius, viii,. Para, 8.) (37) In these few words he cleverly contrives to palm off a fiction on the ignorant, and at the same time hints at the ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... decidedly not in the style of Mozart. But Soliva, who is a young man and full of the warmest admiration for Mozart, has imbibed certain tints of his colouring. The rest is too outrageously ridiculous to be quoted. Whatever Beyle's purely literary merits and his achievements in fiction may be, I quite agree with Berlioz, who remarks, a propos of this gentleman's Vie de Rossini, that he writes "les plus irritantes stupidites sur la musique, dont il croyait avoir le secret." To which cutting dictum may be added a no less cutting one of M. Lavoix fils, who, although calling ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of his own writings. He recognizes repeatedly the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R. H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who love his exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporeal substance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of his chill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with which ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... was moved as he gazed intensely on the angelic creature now before him. This was no artful fiction, no solemn mockery of woe: a few words had worked that dreadful revolution in her mind. Perhaps there is at times an indescribable cruelty in love that prompts a man, in a certain degree, to enjoy the misery which is wrought by an excess of affection ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... after fiction would "lie down on the pavement the whole of the night before the tickets were sold, generally taking up their position about ten." There would be free fights, and the police would be ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... opens up rather a large field, which lies somewhat outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and, to tell you the truth, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... desiring to maintain this opinion as founded on any sufficient grounds. The alarm of the islanders, on the present occasion, had been in great measure excited by a paragraph in a Mexican newspaper, recently imported, which contained a new version of the English fiction. The mistrust, however, did not long subsist. My assurances of friendship, and the particularly good behaviour of the whole crew, by which they were advantageously distinguished from those of the other ships lying here, soon attracted towards us the confidence and esteem of the natives ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... of "Minnegrey," as well as Miss Braddon's "Aurora Floyd" and "Henry Dunbar." The perusal of books by Ainsworth, Scott, Lever, Marryat, James Grant, G. P. R. James, Dumas, and Whyte Melville gave me additional material for storytelling; and so, concocting wonderful blends of all sorts of fiction, I spun many a yarn to my schoolfellows in the dormitory in which I slept—yarns which were sometimes supplied in instalments, being kept up ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... children is suspended by his right of subsequent restoration by postliminium; for on escape from captivity a man recovers all his former rights, and among them the right of paternal power over his children, the law of postliminium resting on a fiction that the captive has never been absent from the state. But if he dies in captivity the son is reckoned to have been independent from the moment of his father's capture. So too, if a son or a grandson is captured by the enemy, the power of his ascendant is provisionally ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... effort to be beautiful and failed!" jauntily replied Rebecca, but she was too miserable to keep up the fiction. "Oh, Aunt Miranda, don't scold. I'm so unhappy! Alice and I rolled up my hair to curl it for the raising. She said it was so straight I ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fiction. Ask the Regular Army man who has soldiered in the far-off corners of the earth, gone "over the top" in action, and has experienced the thrill of service in the tropics or ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... of the lengths to which the public madness went in this matter, the curious will find in the British Museum copies of at least one farcical work of fiction written and published with considerable success, as burlesques of that very invasion which had now occurred, of the possibility of which this loyal servant in particular had so earnestly and so ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... walk in summer through the cool and sea-blown town, From the childhood of its people comes the solemn legend down. Not in vain the ancient fiction, in whose moral lives the youth And the fitness and the freshness of an ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... works of historical fiction comprise only a selection from a very large number of books suitable for supplementary reading. For extended bibliographies see E. A. Baker, A Guide to Historical Fiction (new ed., N. Y., 1914, Macmillan, $6.00) and Jonathan Nield, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... played apprehensively in the hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted, impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent, to be as still as death and to move with the silence ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the planters of Thomas Jefferson's day lived. We must depend upon fiction to give a sort of romantic impression of it. And fifty years from now no one will know how the farmers and brickmasons, grocers and merchants, managed their affairs in our own times. We shall be obliged to accept the sensational accounts left by a few ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... got a set of duplicates for you. Thought you might like to keep them. The office tells me," he concluded modestly, "that they are attracting lots of attention, but are looked upon as being a rather clever sort of fiction." ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... naked, so, to the writer, a book about them without any attempt at foliage and flowers would seem unnatural. The modern chronicler has transformed history into a fascinating story. Even science is now taught through the charms of fiction. Shall this department of knowledge, so generally useful, be left only to technical prose? Why should we not have a class of books as practical as the gardens, fields, and crops, concerning which they are written, and at the same time having much of ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... that Mrs. Hilliard aimed to be cosmopolitan, and it is pertinent to add that one of the chiefest delights of this, her annual pilgrimage, was to ride the livelong day in hansom cabs. People in the sort of fiction she was fondest of "called a hansom" ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the briskly moving intrigue supposed to be going on there. I say "supposed," because, to be frank, Miss FOX SMITH'S story, good fun as it is, hardly convinces like her setting. You may, for example, feel that you have met before in fiction the lonely hero who rescues the solitary maiden, his shipmate, from undesirable society, and falls in love with her, only to learn that she is voyaging to meet her betrothed. At this point I suppose most novel-readers would have given fairly long odds against the betrothed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... caught his fancy,—historical events and personages under allegorical masks, beautiful ladies, chivalrous knights, giants, monsters, dragons, sirens, enchanters, and adventures enough to stock a library of fiction. If you read Homer or Virgil, you know his subject in the first strong line; if you read Caedmon's Paraphrase or Milton's epic, the introduction gives you the theme; but Spenser's great poem—with the exception of a single line in the prologue, "Fierce warres and faithfull ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... could I? I always fancied I treated her with the utmost kindness. But why should we worry about it? No doubt it was a mere girlish fancy, a distaste," playfully, "to the terrible mamma-in-law of fiction. Such monsters do not exist now. She will learn that by degrees. You will bring her to stay with me for awhile on ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... must in part create the standards by which it is to be judged. Her works are so different from the common type of modern novels that they demand to be looked at from a different point of view. The present standard of excellence in prose fiction seems to be the conformity of character and incident to what is actually seen in life. It is a good test for all mere stories, but is manifestly not the test by which to gauge the recent works of "Ouida." She does not aim at this pre-Raphaelite delineation of men and things as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... to-night, and with her wild, mysterious eyes gloating on thy entrancing scenery, doth she not resolve to dwell awhile, 'mid thy embowering vines, thy dewy-petalled flowers, mournfully-musical cedar-groves, and web a fiction from the thousand tangled threads which complicate and ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... school-times, it was too small. I felt it keenly. It was nothing like so high above the wall as I had hoped. It was another of the many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, London. HIS Tower was a fiction, but this was a reality—and, by comparison, a short reality. Still, it looked very well, and very strange, and was quite as much out of the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be. The quiet air of Pisa too; the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... to paint for you what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life, and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas of men, which are—it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms—are actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites: these are my theme; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... much for her people; she was doing much. Fiction might add that they adored her, worshipped her very footprints!—echoes all of ancient legends of a grateful tenantry that the New World believes ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the "ins and outs" of boy nature by heart, is one of the most entertaining and at the same time one of the most instructive of living writers of juvenile fiction. In his younger days a teacher by profession, he has made boys and their idiosyncrasies the absorbing study of his life, and, with the accumulated experience of years to aid him, has applied himself to the task of preparing for their mental delectation a diet that shall be at once wholesome and ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... described in the following pages? The series of shipwrecks extends from 1793 to 1847, a period of fifty-four years; and tragic scenes are described, many of them far exceeding the imaginary terrors of fiction, and all of them equal in horror to anything that the Drama, Romance, or Poetry has ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main: From the writing & Pictures of Howard ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... seem to have their easy-going ways. For current smoking room fiction relates that last spring after a troop of French soldiers had been hauled out to be shot for refusing to go into battle under orders, a whole division revolted and demanded new officers—and got new officers—before ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... almost as disagreeably as did a sight of the man himself; therefore it was with intense resentment that he read the article in which it appeared. It was a vividly written account of the former's experience during the flood, and, due no doubt to Gray's personal touch, it read a good deal like fiction. The man had a unique turn for publicity, a knack for self-advertising that infuriated Nelson. To read this anybody would think that he was one of the dominant figures in the oil industry, and that his enterprises were immensely successful. With a sneer Nelson ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... been for Hitty Hyde, if with the legal fiction had chimed the actual existent fact!—happy indeed for Abner Dimock's wife to have laid her new joy down at the altar, and been carried to sleep by her mother under the mulleins and golden-rods on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... no longer say that this famous axiom "No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law" is a fiction. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... of space. Ever hear that old fable about the blind men examining an elephant? Well, that's the way most people were; each of them groping around and trying to determine the exact shape of things to come. A few of us even made a little money from it for a while, writing science fiction. That's how ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction May 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright ...
— We Didn't Do Anything Wrong, Hardly • Roger Kuykendall
... friend— I saw the meeting of two Gifted women.[22] The one, Brilliant with recent renown, Young, unpractised, had told With a master's accent her feign'd Story of passionate life; The other, maturer in fame, Earning, she too, her praise First in fiction, had since Widen'd her sweep, and ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of his creatures, was thus skillfully concealed from Hardy's eyes, whose generous instincts were still alive. Soon did this loving and tender soul, whom unworthy priests were driving to a sort of moral suicide, find a mournful charm in the fiction, that his sorrows would at least be profitable to other men. It was at first only a fiction; but the enfeebled mind which takes pleasure in such a fable, finishes by receiving it as a reality, and by degrees will submit to the consequences. Such was Hardy's moral and physical state, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... not strange," said I to the Councillor, for when there was no one in sight or very near us I rode with him instead of behind him, "that the man who shakes at every breeze among the aspens should take such pains to create the fiction and shadow of terror about him, when the substance and reality is dominant all the while in his ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... advice of the States, he granted the city as a reward for its suffering a ten days' annual fair, without tolls or taxes, and it was further resolved that a university should, as a manifestation of the gratitude of the people of Holland, be established within its walls. The fiction of the authority of Philip was still maintained, and the charter granted to the university was, under the circumstances, a wonderful production. It was drawn up in the name of the king, and he was gravely made ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... euphonious name, made confusion worse confounded by transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways. Schoolcraft's volume, which he chose to entitle "The Hiawatha Legends," has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Taronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and his comrades form the staple of its contents. But it is to this collection that we owe the charming poem of Longfellow; and thus, by an extraordinary ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... appreciate. But many Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied that ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... something seen upon the stage. He would not have detracted anything from the commonness and cheapness of the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... more sacred edifices being nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed locality, than I have read of practised thieves with the appearance and manners of gentlemen—a popular phenomenon which never existed on earth out of fiction and a police report. Again: I wonder why people are always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other piece of water! Why do people get up early and go out in groups, to be blown into the Surrey Canal? Do they say to one another, 'Welcome death, so that we get into ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... which it may itself be made the predicate of a proposition. That the employment of it as a copula does not necessarily include the affirmation of existence, appears from such a proposition as this, A centaur is a fiction of the poets; where it can not possibly be implied that a centaur exists, since the proposition itself expressly asserts that the thing has ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow. "Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... he calls "an elegant finish," and suggests that a slight indication of a young and lovely heiress in connection with himself would give pleasure to the thoughtful reader. But I do not mean at the last moment to depart from the exact truth, and dabble in fiction just to make a suitable conclusion. If I must write something more, I must beg that it will be kept in mind that if further details concerning the robbery are now added against my own judgment, they will rest on Charles's ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... writer, was visiting a western city where he was invited to inspect the new free library. The librarian conducted the famous writer through the building until they finally reached the department of books devoted to fiction. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... Green, and a hasty view of the Fitzwilliam Museum and "the backs of the Colleges" (which are to Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford sufficient materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford. The picture daubed by the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as unrecognisable. He makes himself and his friends too large, too noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious. They seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate figures, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled sea,—the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating world, the great throughfare of nations,—and thus has prejudiced the moral sense and the fancy against his fiction still more inevitably than his judgment, and in a way that was perfectly needless; for the change brought along with it ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... some hope to borrow, by thinking it a "sell" By fancying it a fiction, my anguish to dispel. Poem before the Iadma of Harv. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... intended for young girls, for what the English call "bread-and-butter misses." But nobody is compelled to write exclusively for schoolgirls, and it has yet to be proved that there is any necessity to feed them on fiction as well as ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... same image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common. Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to a dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: it persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each time ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... its humor, set all the heart strings to vibrating by its pathos, flood one's being in the great surge of patriotism ... a story that vastly enriches American fiction."—Albany Times-Union. ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... very few books at a time, and let your little home-library grow gradually. Never buy a book that you have your doubts about. Emerson's advice to buy only a standard work, which has been out for years, has its good and safe quality. Avoid too much fiction and a superabundance of periodical literature. One popular magazine is enough. The money which you have for reading-matter should be confined chiefly to books, and they ought to be the ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst
... the same period the works of many of the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio and Boccaccio, were translated into English; Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction. Thomas Hoby translated Castiglione's 'Courtier' in 1561. As a proof of the extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:—'Even Guicciardine's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... selections from English dramatic literature, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; choice extracts from the writings of the great essayists; selections from famous English allegories; a volume of elegies and elegiacal poetry; studies of English prose fiction, with illustrative specimens, etc. Each volume will contain copious notes, critical, explanatory, and biographical, besides the necessary vocabularies, glossaries, and indexes; and the series when complete ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... age of story-telling. Never before has the world turned so attentively to the shorter forms of fiction. Not only is this true of the printed short-story, of which some thousands, more or less new, are issued every year in English, but oral story-telling is taking its deserved place in the school, the home, and among clubs specially ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... all real autobiographies were like this piece of admirable fiction! If we were to express the genuine feelings of delight and admiration with which we have perused this work of Mr. GALT, we should be thought guilty of extravagance. It has impressed us with so high an opinion of his genius, that it would be with hesitation ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... surpass All fiction, painting, or dumb shew of horror, That ever ears yet heard, or ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... contained in M. de Voltaire's world-famous Account (for the other side has been heard since that); and so of quitting a painful business. The principal mendacities—deducting all that about "POE'ShIE" and the like, which we will define as poetic fiction—are:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... children of a rich Chinese merchant, attended by a train of Chinese and Malay servants, came to see Mrs. Shaw. There were a boy and girl of five and six years old, and two younger children. A literal description of their appearance reads like fiction. The girl wore a yellow petticoat of treble satin (mandarin yellow) with broad box plaits in front and behind, exquisitely embroidered with flowers in shades of blue silk, with narrow box plaits between, with a trail of blue silk flowers on each. Over this there was ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... pamphlets that species have undergone changes and modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from fiction. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions. But it fills these conceptions with real and vivid character, so that the gods of Homer are as clearly presented to us as any personalities of history or fiction. They are, indeed, endowed not only with the form, but with the passions, and some even of the weaknesses of mankind; and for this reason the philosophers often rejected as unworthy the tales that the poets told of the gods. But even an artist such ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... letters Lincoln bemoaned his sad fate and referred to "the fatal 1st of January," probably the date when his engagement or "the understanding" with Mary Todd was broken. From this expression, one of Lincoln's biographers elaborated a damaging fiction, stating that Lincoln and his affianced were to have been married that day, that the wedding supper was ready, that the bride was all dressed for the ceremony, the guests assembled—but the melancholy bridegroom failed to come ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... worth of the service performed by Cervantes—not in abolishing romance, as has been absurdly said, still less in discrediting chivalry, as with even a more perverse misconception of his purpose has been suggested, but in purging books of fiction of their grossness and their extravagance, and restoring romance to truth and to nature—we have to consider the enormous influence exercised by this pernicious literature over the minds of the people of Spain in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... of fiction, the peasant in fabula whom we all know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose talk and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing save the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying tasks and rewards. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... is much moved at the recital," continued the doctor, "and no wonder, for it is a fact much stranger than fiction. But I will defer the conclusion of my story to some other day. You are too much excited to hear ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... spoke her hand rested upon the little sack of tobacco, which responded accusingly to the touch of her restless fingers; and she found time to wonder why she was building up this fiction for Mr. Arthur Russell. His discovery of Walter's device for whiling away the dull evening had shamed and distressed her; but she would have suffered no less if almost any other had been the discoverer. In this gentleman, ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... know how the anxious sentry, particularly if he is new to the soldier's trade, will often imagine that he sees lights before him. Sometimes the pickets will be so convinced of the fact that they see lights that they will fire upon the fiction of the imaginations. These facts make it seem probable that the Jack-o'-lantern and his companion, the Will-o'-the-wisp, are ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... according to Aristotle; from the word [Greek text], which signifies to make or feign. Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. For the fable and fiction is, as it were, the form and soul of any ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... of two kinds, one asking a question and the other making a statement. The question was, whether there was any foundation of truth in the story; the statement challenged him to say that there was. The letters seemed to show that a large proportion of readers prefer their dose of fiction with a sweetening of fact. This is written to furnish that condiment, and to answer the question ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... her. The marital unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... early natural tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of the gods:—"Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales." Thus the "Decamerone" was appearing much earlier than we suppose. DESCARTES, while yet a boy, indulged such habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by his companions "The Philosopher," always questioning, and ever settling ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... admitted. "In the book the wild young man drinks without ever getting drunk. Maybe there is a difference between life and the book. In the book you enjoy your fun, but contrive somehow to escape the licking: in life the licking is the only thing sure. It was the wild young man of fiction I was looking for, who, a fortnight before the exam., ties a wet towel round his head, drinks strong tea, and passes easily with honours. He tried the wet towel, he tells me. It never would keep in its place. Added to which it gave him neuralgia; while the strong tea gave ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Have read bold fables of enormity, Devised to make men wonder, and confirm The abhorrence of our nature; but this hardness Transcends all fiction." "Law ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... The fiction of two churches in Ireland, one the Anglo-Irish acknowledging the authority of the Pope, the other the Irish fighting sullenly against papal aggression, has been laid to rest by the publication ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... gazing upon the paper, lost in wandering thoughts and wild, fantastic dreams. He threw his pen aside, and tried to lose himself in the beautiful creations of his favorite poet, all things in nature and fiction seemed alike vain. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... that have to be true—the sort that cannot be fabricated by a ready fiction-reckoner. And by the same token there are some men with stories to tell who cannot be doubted. Such a man was Julian Jones. Although I doubt if the average reader of this will believe the story Julian ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... who know more about writing than about running engines would only go out there for a year and keep their eyes and ears and brains open, and mouths shut, they could come home and write us some true stories that would make fiction-grinders exceedingly weary. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... studious of the bottle than the book; but I will not prejudge the youth, for I remember what he was while under my tuition. If he be as cunning now and assiduous in the prosecution of letters as I found him—if he be as cunning, as ripe at fiction, and of as unembarrassed brow as he was in his schoolboy career, he will either hang, on the one side, or rise to become lord chancellor or a ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... it a case, timorously; that made it much more serious. But Alston, in that instant, was thinking how strange it was that the shabby old office, witness of his unwilling drudgery and his life-saving excursions into the gardens of fiction, should be looking now on her, seated there in her earnestness and purity, and that he should at last be recognising her. She was a part of him, Alston thought, beloved, not because she was so different but so like. There was no assault of the alien nature upon his own, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... literature of the day; which at that time consisted of little books covered with gilt paper, adorned with "cuts," and filled with tales of fairies, giants, and enchanters. What draughts of delightful fiction did we then inhale! My sister Sophy was of a soft and tender nature. She would weep over the woes of the Children in the Wood, or quake at the dark romance of Blue-Beard, and the terrible mysteries of the blue chamber. But I was all for enterprise and adventure. I burned ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... of the man in it, too. There was a large plain wooden bookcase filled to overflowing with a choice collection of reading matter. There were rows of classics in several languages, there was modern fiction of the better kind, there were many volumes of classical verse. In short it was the collection of a student, and might well have been a worthy addition to many a ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... to show that a course of action called forth by the peculiar situation of one family, would be copied by another in a similar emergency, without being aware of its ever being done before. Were I engaged in a work of fiction, I might let fancy reign and endeavor to amuse, but this is not the object. Let us endeavor then to be content with truth, and not murmur with its reality. When we take a survey of the astonishing regularity with which they construct ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the war the discontent in Cape Colony became less obtrusive, if not less acute, but in the later months of the year 1900 it increased to a degree which became dangerous. The fact of the farm-burning in the conquered countries, and the fiction of outrages by the British troops, raised a storm of indignation. The annexation of the Republics, meaning the final disappearance of any Dutch flag from South Africa, was a racial humiliation which was bitterly resented. The Dutch papers ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the ablest weekly papers in the world; the admirable scholarship of its articles and reviews in departments of special knowledge might well be a subject of pride to any American. But its inadequate reviews of current fiction add nothing to its value, and its habitual tone of condescending depreciation in treating imaginative literature of indigenous origin is one of the strongest discouragements to ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... It appeared that the huge tomes of the Talmud were not the only books he read these days. He spent much time, clandestinely, on little books written in the holy tongue on any but holy topics. They were taken up with such things as modern science, poetry, fiction, and, above all, criticism of our faith. He made some attempts to lure me into an interest in these books, but without avail. The only thing connected with them that appealed to me were the anecdotes that Naphtali would tell me, in his laconic way, concerning their ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... might be possible to prove them. The curses uttered against the old squire were bitter and deep, but during this time he was still supposed to be lying at death's door, and did not, in truth, himself expect to live many days. The creditors, of course, believed that the story was a fiction. None of them were enabled to see Captain Scarborough, who, after a short period, disappeared altogether from the scene. But they were, one and all, convinced that the matter had been arranged between ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... fiction has no such afflatus, no such high pitch of life, as to outward circumstance, in his representation of it, as the poet has; and therefore his may seem to the academic critic the lesser art—but it ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... crowd against the railings, with his arm hooked in Annette's, Soames waited. Yes! the Age was passing! What with this Trade Unionism, and Labour fellows in the House of Commons, with continental fiction, and something in the general feel of everything, not to be expressed in words, things were very different; he recalled the crowd on Mafeking night, and George Forsyte saying: "They're all socialists, they want our goods." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... every-day things, of the prospect of snow, of the next church sociable, of the loves and quarrels of Starkfield. The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... with such lamp in hand As Glencoe's horror, thou hast England true. Why let Froude fiction haze thy vivid view? Put not thy light out for sound sleep, but stand And answer, when the mother, whom thou drew Thy soul from, cries ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... what appears to us to be their "nearness." ... From these same thrifty French have come great things. They have always been great soldiers; they have led the world in the arts, especially in poetry, painting and fiction— perhaps, too, I should add architecture. So that men who are careful of their pennies are not necessarily small in their ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... he is Holmlock Shears, that is to say, a sort of miracle of intuition, of insight, of perspicacity, of shrewdness. It is as though nature had amused herself by taking the two most extraordinary types of detective that fiction had invented, Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq, in order to build up one in her own fashion, more extraordinary yet and more unreal. And, upon my word, any one hearing of the adventures which have ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... was that, as she knew perfectly well, Laurie was rather an exceptional person. He was not at all the Young Fool of Fiction. There was a remarkable virility about him, he was tender-hearted to a degree, he had more than his share of brains. It was intolerable that such a person should ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... point of the fact that her taste was the extreme of conservatism, refusing to acknowledge hardly any fiction that was not almost classic. Even Stevenson aroused ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... His father, at any rate, was a great man at the bar, and must have left something decent. And the only other thing in the world I know about him is that he's a great friend of that clever gossip Margaret Winchfield—which goes to show that however obscure he may be as a scribbler of fiction, he must possess some redeeming virtues as a social being—for Mrs. Winchfield is by no means the sort that falls in love with bores. As you 're not, either—well, verbum sap., as my little brother ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... of mine," Dick said, "who would wish everything to be respectably done, though they cannot themselves take any part." "I understand, sir," said the man, who put the most natural interpretation upon the strange commission, and did not believe in any fiction about Dick's "friends." Dick called him back when he had reached the door. "You can see the things of which this person writes, and choose some small thing without value, the smaller the better, to send as he proposes to—the people she belongs to." This seemed the last precaution ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... deeds of daring and might such as only the immortals could inspire and favor, the connecting link between these and ordinary humanity—as that gloaming, uncertain, shifting, but not altogether unreal streak of time is the borderland between Heaven and Earth, the very hot-bed of myth, fiction and romance. For of their favorite heroes, people began to tell the same stories as of their gods, in modified forms, transferred to their own surroundings and familiar scenes. To take one of the most common transformations: if the Sun-god waged war against the demons of darkness ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... fiction you please to tell me in the stead of truth, and which proves your love to be the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... would vainly attempt to subdue them individually; they would instinctively unite in a common defence, and they would derive a ready-prepared organization from the share of sovereignty which the institution of their State allows them to enjoy. Fiction would give way to reality, and an organized portion of the territory might then contest the central authority. *t The same observation holds good with regard to the Federal jurisdiction. If the courts of the Union violated an important ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... notorious that in moments of tension, when the mind has been stimulated to too great an activity by unhealthy excitement, you think of the most curiously assorted things—in fact, of absurd things which are quite out of place. I have been thinking the whole time of something very stupid which is only fiction: That a Zulu, named Umslopagas, rode and ran one hundred miles in a single night and then refreshed himself sufficiently by a couple of hours' sleep to deliver battle with such vigour at the head of a marble staircase, that he ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... some of its forms the development was unpleasing and discouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies of Andreas Munch (Salomon de Caus, 1855; Lord William Russell, 1857) was, for instance, an irritating step in the wrong direction. The new-born school of prose fiction, with Bjoernson as its head (Synnoeve Solbakken, 1857; Arne, 1858), with Camilla Collett's Prefect's Daughters, 1855, as its herald; with Oestgaard's sketches of peasant life and humors in the mountains (1852)—all ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Science Fiction Book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... was circulated of the eldest son of Lord Cassilis (Lord Kennedy) having shot at a boy in a tree and killed him. There was no boy, and no tree, and no shooting, and no possible account how such an entire fiction could ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... By reason's star he guides our aching sight; The bounds of knowledge marks; and points the way To pathless wastes, where wilder'd sages stray; Where, like a farthing linkboy, Jennings stands, And the dim torch drops from his feeble hands. Impressive truth, in splendid fiction drest,[55] Checks the vain wish, and calms the troubled breast; O'er the dark mind a light celestial throws, And sooths the angry passions to repose; As oil effus'd illumes and smooths the deep,[56] When round the bark the foaming surges sweep.— ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald
... then who tell us that, in these scientific days, all the poetry and mystery of Nature is being destroyed. This is not only untrue, but stupid. All that science has done is to substitute truth for legend, and truth is generally more beautiful and wonderful than fiction. Those who will turn to the great Book of Nature humbly, and with an open mind, will learn nothing but what is helpful ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... man: he was about twenty-eight, and he was writing some work of fiction. He was a small, sturdy, rubicund creature, with beady eyes and pink cheeks, cherubic in aspect, entirely good-natured and lively, full of not very exalted humour, and with a tendency to wild and even hysterical giggling. I used ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a term of contempt applicable to all reformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulous writings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable to actualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted to fiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popular mind. Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In this are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis,—the writer's ideal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was paying for time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about the poor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of the firm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promoted to vice-president without any question of whether or not ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... the last new sensation.' 'I was always fond of him, but I am fonder than ever now.' This plunge into the immortal romances seems really to have discouraged Murray; at all events he says very little more about attempts in fiction of his own. 'I am a barren rascal,' he writes, quoting Johnson on Fielding. Like other men, Murray felt extreme difficulty in writing articles or tales which have an infinitesimal chance of being accepted. It needs a stout heart to face this almost fixed certainty of rejection: a man is weakened ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... to train not only the reasoning powers, but also the imaginative faculty of his children; he delighted in good poetry and fiction, and read aloud well, and his daughter writes: 'From the Arabian Tales to Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and the Greek tragedians, all were associated in the minds of his children with the delight of hearing passages from them first read by ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... duration, which settled at once and, let us hope, for ever the question as to who were henceforth to be masters here. But it is a bitter pill to the Spaniards; and even now they can scarcely realize that it does not belong to them. The Spanish people are continually being buoyed up with the pleasant fiction, that it is only lent to its present proprietors; for in all documents relating to Gibraltar, or in all questions raised in the Spanish parliament touching that place, the British are referred to as being only ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... of the author that "the generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline. Which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for varietie of matter then for profite of the ensample." The Faerie Queene is, therefore, according to the avowed purpose of its author, a poem of culture. Though it is one of the most highly artistic works in the language, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... philosopher of Konigsberg supposed himself to be analyzing a necessary mode of thought: he was not aware that he was dealing with a mere abstraction. But now that we are able to trace the gradual developement of ideas through religion, through language, through abstractions, why should we interpose the fiction of time between ourselves and realities? Why should we single out one of these abstractions to be the a priori condition of all the others? It comes last and not first in the order of our thoughts, and is not the condition precedent of them, but the last ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... at Government House,—we exiles of the Temperate Zone,—keeping up to the last the fiction that New Year's Day under a tropic sky and within sound of the tiger's wail was really January first. But every remembrance and association was, in our homesick thoughts, grouped about an open arch fire, with the sharp, crisp creak of sleigh-runners ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... brought even a church deacon to Gallows Hill, in old witch times, should now be considered too grotesque and extravagant for timid maids to tremble at. Though it was past supper time, I detained them a while longer on the hill, and made a trial whether truth were more powerful than fiction. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
