"Fictitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... present social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of all alike is the same—to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... London when the fictitious "popish plot" of Titus Oates had set England "stark staring mad," promising the countess that he would apprise her should any danger menace the Earl of Derby or herself. He had learnt that Bridgenorth was on the island with secret ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... On such fictitious incidents in the romances of past ages, Shakespeare undoubtedly built many of his dramas. The story of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is found in an old English ballad. I will quote a few stanzas to indicate the identity of Shylock and "Germutus, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. Nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had been established between beings evidently similar. Nevertheless these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and on ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... was required of him. He had been member of Parliament for the county of Hants, and had been placed at the head of the list of his father's attempt at a House of Lords, and he allowed greatness to be thrust on him in a quiet acquiescent way. He dismissed the fictitious parliament that his father had summoned, and then offended the strict and godly of the army by promoting soldiers of whom they disapproved. "Here is Dick Ingoldsby," he said; "he can neither pray nor preach, and yet I trust him before ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the elder Brutus, for some virtuous purpose, not only debases his own soul, but acts as a traitor to Heaven, by denying the divinity that is within him. I am neither an affected imitator of Don Quixote, nor, as I trust in Heaven, visited by that spirit of lunacy so admirably displayed in the fictitious character exhibited by the inimitable Cervantes. I have not yet encountered a windmill for a giant, nor mistaken this public-house for a magnificent castle; neither do I believe this gentleman to be the constable; nor that worthy practitioner to be Master Elizabat, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... railroad in the matter of rebates. The law should make it clear so that nobody can fail to understand that any kind of commission paid on freight shipments, whether in this form or in the form of fictitious damages, or of a concession, a free pass, reduced passenger rate, or payment of brokerage, is illegal. It is worth while considering whether it would not be wise to confer on the Government the right of civil action against the beneficiary of a rebate for at least twice the value of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... forwards, primed their guns, or lighted the match of the lock, drew their swords and screamed, making bare the right arm, as if prepared for awful deeds. The others took up position behind low rocks, unslung their fire-arms, and screamed not. Presently a real or fictitious recognition took place, the guns on both sides were fired up in the air, and swords were brandished for very joy. Both parties rushed into each other's embraces, smiling and kissing ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... seemed, when such intellectual apprehension accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly. Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... millions of dollars, were either unknown or in an inchoate or rudimentary state. Invention, if we may put it so, was just blossoming forth. Hand labor was largely prevalent. Huge combinations were undreamed of; paper capitalization as embodied in the fictitious issues of immense quantities of bonds and stocks was not yet a part of the devices of the factory owner, although it was a fixed plan of the bankers and ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... performance it will be asked, how it was possible in 1784 to have had an idea of what did not take place till the year 1790? The solution is simple. In the original plan the legislator was a fictitious and hypothetical being: in the present, the author has substituted an existing legislator; and the reality has only made the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... admiration and envy. A soldier of fortune, a planter of colonies, an admiral, a courtier, a statesman, a wit, a scholar, a chemist, an agriculturist, he was eminent as each of these, and his exploits in Guiana read like some fantastic tale of fictitious adventure. His History of the World, although but a fragment of what he intended it to be, is nevertheless a monument of prodigious learning, sobriety, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... atom from start to finish. It may be expendible, like paint, or non-expendible, like an anvil. You feel despairingly that a pound of paint, born at Kimberley, and now at Mafeking, is disappearing somewhere and somehow; but you have to endow it with a fictitious immortality. An anvil you feel safer about, but then you have to use it somewhere, and account for its surplus, if there is any. Any one with a turn for metaphysics would be at home in Ordnance; Aristotle would have revelled ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... nature before the footlights, fall on your knees and acknowledge God! Rum had been driven from a saloon near this theater. "Thank God," said Beecher, "let us pray silently for the space of two minutes. What a history has been here. A place of fictitious joys but of real sorrows has been reformed. It is open for God's people to sing and pray in. God be thanked that Heaven's gates have been opened in this ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... require; the amount being entered on the papers (serki) of the purchasers, to be reckoned against their wages. To avoid the exposure, should the document fall into the hands of the Government or European consuls, the amount is not entered as for the purchase of a slave, but is divided for fictitious supplies—thus, should a slave be purchased for 1,000 piastres, that amount would appear on the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... himself:—"But what is to be done when the Crown is in a deliquium? It was intended, he had heard, to set up a man with black brows and a large wig, a kind of scare-crow to the two Houses, who was to give a fictitious assent in the royal name—and this to be binding on the people at large!" The following remarkable passage, too, in a subsequent Speech, is almost too well known to be cited:—"The other House," he said, "were not yet perhaps recovered from that extraordinary ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... we can not yet flatter ourselves that this may be accomplished, as advances toward it the establishment of the principle that the friendly flag shall cover the cargo, the curtailment of contraband of war, and the proscription of fictitious paper blockades— engagements which we may reasonably hope will not prove impracticable— will, if successfully inculcated, redound proportionally to our honor and drain the fountain of many a ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... or reader. The Fable partly agrees with, and partly differs from both of these. It will contain, like the Tale, a short but real narrative; it will seek, like the Parable, to convey a hidden meaning, and that not so much by the use of language, as by the skilful introduction of fictitious characters; and yet unlike to either Tale or Parable, it will ever keep in view, as its high prerogative, and inseparable attribute, the great purpose of instruction, and will necessarily seek to inculcate some moral ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... Author, composing his Olimpiade, felt himself suddenly moved, even to tears, in expressing the separation of two tender lovers. Surprised that a fictitious grief, invented too by himself, could raise so true a passion, he reflected how little reasonable and solid a foundation the others had, which, so frequently agitated us in this state ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... remember, was a solicitor," Mrs. Milvain interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people. "But you wouldn't ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and nobody else. It is of no consequence however to the world whether this is really my name or an assumed one. If it is the first, it is a matter of some importance to take care of it and defend it; if it is a fictitious one, it is equally so to preserve my incognito. I may not choose to give my card, and may not desire to be known. A satirist, like an Irishman, finds it convenient sometimes to shoot from behind a shelter. Like him, too, he may ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... readily enough, and there, scenting by some happy instinct that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that confidences beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest and suggestion from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third whisky of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a propos of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched and left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will and motion, break the ice. "It was like that ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of attack directed against the poets by the lovers of naked truth may be repelled by a two-fold defence: either that even in an unseemly subject-matter we may learn a charming fashion of speech, or that where a fictitious but becoming subject is handled, natural or historical truth is pursued under ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... to get them; he could not value them for less than P80 apiece. Or, if they are captives, he describes the fatigues of his march and the imminent danger to which he was exposed during the attack, together with such other reasons, mostly fictitious, as would tend to enhance their value and thereby avoid subsequent haggling. He then delivers the other goods demanded.[10] Where two slaves had been asked he gives two kinds of goods,[11] say a lance and a bolo, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... and "driving circuit," and even later, the Circuit mess was a very popular institution with circuiteers, and was made the occasion of much merriment. After the table had been cleared a fictitious charge would be made against one of the barristers present, and a mock tribunal was immediately constituted before which he was arraigned and his case duly set forth with all solemnity. The victim was invariably fined—generally ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... marvel at the rapid growth of this athletic sport." Further on, on the same topic, Mr. Bell says very truly: "While base ball has advanced with great strides, its growth has been normal and healthy. Its success is not the result of a boom, giving it a fictitious value, its prosperity is not as an inflated balloon that will collapse when torn by the knife of adversity. It is but a creation of man, and while its life has been one of unequaled prosperity it has suffered, as do all things of this ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... building as if wondering whether he had not committed some sort of crime in thus offending a man who had put so much money in it. He had not, however; for in advertising in this way Gowdy's wrong to one girl, he ended forever his sly approaches, under the excuses of getting her some fictitious property, saving his soul, and the like, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... published by the Society for Psychical Research (Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 547), and are here used for reference. But I think the matter will be more intelligible if I narrate it exactly as it came under my own observation. The names of persons and places are all fictitious, and are the same as those used in the documents ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... is difficult to determine whether the impudence of the writers or the simplicity of certain readers is most astonishing. Yet these rude and ill digested compilations, filled with absurd anecdotes, fabricated speeches, fictitious crimes or virtues, and disfigured by numerous anachronisms, instead of being consigned to just contempt and speedy oblivion, have been pushed into notice by speculators, and have found zealous ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... record makes but brief mention. The silence with which the early period of the life of Jesus is treated by the inspired historians is impressive; while the fanciful accounts written in later years by unauthorized hands are full of fictitious detail, much of which is positively revolting in its puerile inconsistency. None but Joseph, Mary, and the other members of the immediate family or close associates of the household could have furnished the facts of daily life in the humble home at Nazareth; and from these ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... as the ladies[257] were going away, Dr. Johnson would stand up. He insisted that politeness was of great consequence in society. 'It is, (said he,) fictitious benevolence[258]. It supplies the place of it amongst those who see each other only in publick, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. I have always applied to good breeding, what Addison in his Cato[259] ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... 1536, and that Goldastus followed it. 4. That there was an additional reprint of the tract at London in 1603. (Schelhornii, Amoen. Hist. Eccles., tom. i. pp. 15. 849.) But I am anxious to make three inquiries relative to this really important document and its fictitious preface. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... indeed, I am in some dubitation whether it ever existed at all, and is not rather the waggish invention of certain audacious Scottishers, who have taken advantage of the insular ignorance and credulity of the British public to palm off upon it several highly fictitious kinds of unintelligible gibberish! ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... religion we had only to do (as some would perhaps contend) with obvious enforcements of common morality and kindness, there might be a possibility of getting over the difficulty, because man would possess some kind of criterion whereby to distinguish what was fictitious, by the simple process of considering whether any given statement bore on morals or not. Such a test would not indeed go very far, because the human race is by no means agreed on all moral questions; nor does it always find it easy to say what is, and what is not, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... was the nature of the Wit himself; the set of instincts and prejudices which to him seemed to be so normal that they must be natural. Their standards of taste, if artificial to us, were spontaneous, not fictitious; the Wits were not wearing a mask, but were exhibiting their genuine selves with perfect simplicity. Now one characteristic of the Wit is always a fear of ridicule. Above all things he dreads making a fool of himself. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... like an honest man; and he was the only specimen of the genus homo (who sported trowsers) that was above the weakness of tugging up his suspenders and stretching his broadcloth for the contemptible purpose of giving a fictitious, Wellingtonian ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... shown—what indeed needed no demonstration—that it is impossible to prevent inferences being made, both at home and abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The most talked- about play of the present year (1909), An Englishman's Home, has for its main interest an invasion of England by a fictitious power which is understood, as it is meant to be understood, to represent Germany. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a soldier. The Lord Chamberlain ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... matters. My sub-consciousness must have filmed the words, and especially the girls' names. After the scene suited me, it suddenly came back to me that those names were the real names of the runaway girls. They had given Mr. Gray fictitious names, of course. When I sent him out to find them, he was just too late. The girls had ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... vegetative soul would be united to the body by means of the light of the sidereal heaven; the sensible soul, by means of the light of the crystal heaven; and the intellectual soul by means of the light of the empyrean heaven. Now all this is fictitious and ridiculous: for light is not a body; and the fifth essence does not enter materially into the composition of a mixed body (since it is unchangeable), but only virtually: and lastly, because the soul is immediately united to the body as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... floats out full fair, but flows O'er crumbling bastions, in fictitious state: Who stands a siege Cornwallis full well knows, Plays at a ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... long avenues of roulette tables, each with an excited, undignified crowd about it; in another a yelping Babel of white-faced women and red-necked leathery-lunged men bought and sold the shares of an absolutely fictitious business undertaking which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten per cent and cancelled a certain proportion of its shares by ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... idolized, was not happy. "In general," Mademoiselle Avrillon says with justice, "the public has a very faint knowledge of the real feelings of those in the highest station. Being often on show, they are obliged to assume a fictitious character, just as they dress themselves for great ceremonies. I have seen the Empress's sufferings, whom nothing could console for her separation from her children, whom she loved above everything. Ambitions were less to her than maternal love, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... walk from the veranda. I knew the rocky trail that climbed the mountain to the springs, twisting between giant boulders. I knew the arid garden, deep in the wayside dust, with its hurriedly planted tropical plants, already withering in the dry autumn sunshine, and washed into fictitious freshness, night and morning by the hydraulic irrigating-hose. I knew, too, the cool, reposeful night winds that swept down from invisible snow-crests beyond, with the hanging out of monstrous stars, that too often failed to bring repose to the feverish guests. For the overstrained neurotic workers ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Dante's lussuria had no better foundation. It gave him a chance to turn a period. He gives no particulars, and his general statement is simply incredible. Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello long ago pointed out the trifling and fictitious character of this "Life." Those familiar with Dante's allegorical diction will not lay much stress on the literal meaning of pargoletta in Purgatono, XXXI. 59. Gentucca, of course, was a real person, one ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... 544; disguise &c (mask) 530. V. have a false meaning. Adj. untrue, false, phony, trumped up; void of foundation, without- foundation; fictive, far from the truth, false as dicer's oaths; unfounded, ben trovato[It], invented, fabulous, fabricated, forged; fictitious, factitious, supposititious, surreptitious; elusory[obs3], illusory; ironical; soi-disant &c (misnamed) 565[Fr]. Phr. se non e vero e ben trovato[It]; "where none is ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rival adventurers, who, in that spirit which arrogance always asserts over ignorance, would make their king a puppet and themselves mere vassals. And this the wily adventurers did, by professing great friendship for the king and his people, then setting up a fictitious claim to a voice in the affairs of the kingdom, and finally demanding for such service, which any knave or fool might have rendered, not one, but all his islands. In truth, the Kingdom of the Kaloramas, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Screens were beaten and torn to pieces. With the heavy mirror she turned on him, seeking vengeance for her imagined wrongs. Iemon narrowly escaped injury as he dashed in to grapple with her. He succeeded in dragging her away from the lamp. Thus did this wild battle rage in the half dark room. The fictitious strength of the ill woman gave out. He held her on the floor, as one subdued. As she relapsed into a sleep, almost of unconsciousness, he ventured to release her. Going to a closet he placed the mirror beside the bamboo stick; both ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the secret of Anna and Sanderson. The honeymoon at the White Rose had been prolonged to a week, but no suspicion had entered the minds of Mrs. Moore or Mrs. Standish Tremont, thanks to Sanderson's skill in sending fictitious telegrams, aided by so skilled an accomplice ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... scholar, Salmasius, on the sufficiently important and interesting, and then novel, subject of the execution of Charles I. Was it justifiable? Salmasius, a scholar and a Protestant, though of an easy-going description, was employed, or rather, as he had no wages (Milton's hundred Jacobuses being fictitious), nominated by Charles, afterwards the Second, to indict the regicides at the bar of European opinion, which accordingly he did in the Latin language. The work reached this country in the autumn of 1649, and it evidently became the ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the name by which the substance is generally known is said to be of Arabic origin. Much of the material which under the name of "tabasheer" finds its way to Syria and Turkey is said, however, to be fictitious or adulterated. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... death of Lord Rutherford is assigned to the year 1685. Such is the melancholy story as it may be gathered from Scott's preface. In writing his novel that great master of the art of fiction,—never yet displaced from his throne or deprived of his sceptre,—adopted fictitious names, invented fresh circumstances, amplified and elevated the characters, judiciously veiled the localities, and advanced the period of those tragical incidents to about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The delicate taste ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... a hope that the loan was only delayed, and the certainty that the decision was final, crushed him. "My ruin's known," he thought, and feeling that his strength was deserting him, he poured out a brimming glass of Madeira, which he emptied at a single draught. The wine lent him fictitious energy. Fury mounted to his brain; he lost all control over himself, and springing up, with his face purple with rage, he exclaimed: "It's a shame! an infamous shame! and Trigault deserves to be severely punished. He has no business to keep a man in hot water for three days about such a trifle. ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... time together. Duane made up a short fictitious history about himself that satisfied the outlaw, only it drew forth a laughing jest upon Duane's modesty. For Fletcher did not hide his belief that this new partner was a man of achievements. Knell and Poggin, and then Cheseldine himself, would be persuaded of this fact, so ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... hastening to a rendezvous. The cavernous chill and odor which I had before noted as coming from some sarcophagus of larder or oven, where "funeral baked meats" might have been kept in stock, began to oppress me. The hollow and fictitious domesticity of this common board had never before seemed so hopelessly displayed. And Tom, the waiter, his napkin twisted in his hand and his face turned with a sudden dark abstraction towards the window, appeared to be really "lying low," and waiting for something ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fuse." Yet, Twain added elsewhere, "Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive." That is, perhaps, the final comment. Much could be urged against Harte's stories: the glamor they throw over the life they depict is largely fictitious; their pathetic endings are obviously stylized; their technique is overwhelmingly derivative. Nevertheless, so excellent a critic as Chesterton maintained that "There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... support of many preachers in the rapidly increasing country congregations. And here they made an amazing business blunder. Instead of cutting their coat according to their cloth, they relied on a fictitious capital supposed to exist on the Continent. At one time John Wesley paid a visit to Fulneck, saw the buildings in course of erection, asked how the cost would be met, and received, he says, the astounding answer ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... him for three years in England. Not contented with his bargain, the chapman attempted to underlet to another speculator, the liberty of showing him, and poor Cotter resisting this nefarious transaction, was saddled with a fictitious debt, and thrown into a spunging house in Bristol. In this situation he was, happily for him, visited in prison by a gentleman of the city, who, in compassion to his distress, and having reason to think that he was unjustly detained, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... beginning to slow down at Johannesburg, in spite of the fictitious agitation by the Rhodesian party. The war had come as a relief to everybody, and afforded the magnates the opportunity which they had been longing for, to enforce order and economy upon a stringent scale in their mines and to begin modelling their ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... lies the most successful solution of the problem of interest in teaching. We have too long persisted in the "sugarcoating" conception of interest. We have regarded it as a process of "making agreeable." Interest has therefore been looked upon as a fictitious element introduced into teaching merely to inveigle the mind of the student into a consideration of what we are offering it. Our modern psychology teaches a truer conception of interest: a feeling ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... land. In the "Comedy of Errors," when Dromio of Syracuse says, "There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature," [Hear, O Rowland! and give ear, O Phalon!] his master replies, "May he not do it by fine and recovery?" Fine and recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a transfer was made of the title in an entailed estate. In "Love's Labor's Lost," almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare wrote, on Boyet's offering to kiss Maria, (Act ii. Sc. 1,) she declines the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... devices, and had suspected his intentions? Would they not, in that case, have realised that our suspicions were aroused? and might they not have merely feigned to have fallen into Joe's trap, and have confided to him a purely fictitious statement of their plans, concocted for the express purpose of throwing us off our guard and leading us astray? Taking into account the deep guile that had prompted them to adopt and consistently maintain a course of the most orderly and irreproachable ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Dick, in a tone of lively protest, which was a little fictitious. And Chatty, though she did not say anything, gave her mother ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... years—she had printed for private circulation the remarkable little work to which allusion has already been made, entitled "Idomen, or the Vale of the Yumuri." It is in the style of a romance, but contains little that is fictitious except the names of the characters. The account which Idomen gives of her own history is literally true, except in relation to an excursion to Niagara, which occurred in a different period of the author's ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of "Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story is swept into the stream of large ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... has sometimes occurred to us—Suppose one of these foreign books were suddenly proved to be of genuine home production—suppose the German, or the Dane, or the Frenchman, were discovered to be a fictitious personage, and all the genius, or all the rant, to have really emanated from the English gentleman, or lady, who had merely professed to translate—presto! how the book would instantly change colours! What a reverse of judgment would there be! What secret misgivings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... "and you go on indulging in those doses of fictitious sentiment until—But I am afraid the night air is too cold for ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... future, whilst thunder boomed high over the Bell House, I determined to withhold from Dr. Damar Greefe the true nature of my mission. In fact already I regretted having told him my name—although to have given a fictitious one would have been a gross ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the arms from the hall to an upper-chamber. The Hero then confers with Penelope, to whom he gives a fictitious narrative of his adventures. Euryclea, while bathing Ulysses, discovers him by a scar on his knee, but he prevents her communication ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... caused us to think more soberly and feel more deeply; but the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial still make a strong appeal to us. We are quite happy to wear paste diamonds, provided only that they sparkle. So long have we been substituting the fictitious for the genuine that we have contracted the habit of loose, fictitious thinking. So much does the show element appeal to us that we incline to parade even our troubles. Simplicity and sincerity, whether in dress, in speech, or in conduct, have so long been foreign to our ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... general estimate that Walter Scott formed of the capacity of our author. "We readily grant to Smollett," he says, "an equal rank with his great rival, Fielding, while we place both far above any of their successors in the same line of fictitious composition." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... told her that it almost broke his heart to see her performing such menial labor, and all such sweet fictitious stuff, and she glanced at him admiringly from under her long, curling lashes, and the "rebel rose hue dyed her cheek," and he told her about the great court where he had been reared, and she whispered that her papa was the rich priest of Midian; then they clasped ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... same characteristics as the former one, in the seasons and the appearance of the stars. ... This bird was brought to Rome in the censorship of the Emperor Claudius... and was exposed to public view.... This fact is attested by the public Annals, but there is no one that doubts that it was a fictitious phoenix only."(1) ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... maintained Abel's ground, and when Enos endured all miseries for the same: For indeed this makes spectators believe that religion is more than a fictitious notion: The hardships, miseries, and blood of the saints, will make men, otherwise heedless, consider ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... his diligence, exemplary conduct, and demeanor. He kept a minute record, still preserved, of all the trials and proceedings of the moot courts, presided over by Professors Greenleaf and Story, and pages of authorities are cited where "R. B. Hayes" appears as counsel for the fictitious plaintiff or defendant. It might have been safely assumed that a young man of his quick perceptions while in the atmosphere of Boston would make the most of his opportunities and advantages. He attended the lectures of Prof. Longfellow on the literature of foreign ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... fashion. And he recounted the whole chain of circumstances which had so exasperated his father and baffled his brother, from the first panting appearance of frowzy old Mother Van Horn on his own mother's door-step down to the forfeiture of the fictitious bail-bond by her two grandnephews. He gave his narrative in a series of light, graphic, delicate touches. He almost saw it print itself before his very eyes, like a page from one of those beautiful little volumes made by Hachette or by Lemerre—those ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... which are said to have happened in the second and third centuries are recorded for the first time about a hundred years after the alleged date of their occurrence. [279:4] But Christianity derived no substantial advantage from these fictitious wonders. Some of them were so frivolous as to excite contempt, and others so ridiculous as to afford matter for merriment to the more ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... all considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... this produced no good effect. The value of money sunk in the exchange to such a degree, that a guinea was reckoned adequate to thirty shillings; and this public disgrace lowered the credit of the funds and of the government. The nation was alarmed by the circulation of fictitious wealth, instead of gold and silver, such as bank bills, exchequer tallies, and government securities. The malcontents took this opportunity to exclaim against the bank, and even attempted to shake the credit of it in parliament; but their endeavours proved ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... show you that the floodgates of (financial) abuse have been opened even to a much larger extent than I have described. We are getting into a system under which Parliament is treated, and the country is treated, to the exhibition of fictitious surpluses of revenue over expenditure."—Mr. Gladstone (at Hastings) on Mr. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... portrait. It is of little consequence whether every trait is an exact copy from his own features, but it is so obvious that many of the lines are direct transcripts from nature that we may believe the same thing of many others. Let us compare his fictitious hero's story with what we have read ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it, but couldn't,' he said. 'My conscience smote me, and I took the old bone back to St. Mary's. Going to do my duty like a man, you see, but it wouldn't work. New verger on the job! I weakened. Then I put it in a box and had it addressed to a fictitious man in Bristol, and sent my valet to get it off by express. It went on, and was returned for a better address. You see, my valet—officious ass!—had left his address at the express office. How gauche ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... such a personage were to meet me now? To imagine Him—as has been too often done—as doing deeds, speaking words, and even worse, entertaining motives, which are not written in the four Gospels, is as unfair morally, as it is illogical critically. It creates a phantom, a fictitious character, and calls that Christ. It makes each writer, each thinker—or rather dreamer—however shallow his heart and stupid his brain—and all our hearts are but too shallow, and all our brains too stupid—the measure ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... deal in aliments fictitious And teaze the poor with soups nutritious. Of bones and flesh I make dilution And belong to the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... This fictitious correspondence of mine is to blame for the foregoing digression. I was about to pursue the statement that on my twenty-first birthday I gave a party, and She was there. It was a beautiful party. There was not a single animate or inanimate object connected with it (except the company and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... sure to be conspicuous in such places as Maxim's," Lanyard explained. "The names, then, are probably fictitious." ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... short, there are things which can in no wise be bought: sleep, for instance, knowledge of the future, talent. He who offers them for sale must be considered a fool or an impostor. And yet there are gentlemen who coin money by such traffic. They sell what does not belong to them, and their dupes pay fictitious values in veritable coin. So, too, there are dealers in pleasure, dealers in love, dealers in miracles, dealers in patriotism, and the title of merchant, so honorable when it represents a man selling ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... everywhere necessitated as an essential qualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always fatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... produced and inspected, and again tied up by the Gitana, who then requests the other to open the chest, which done, she formally places A BUNDLE in it; but, in the meanwhile, she has contrived to substitute the fictitious for the real one. The chest is then locked, the lady retaining the key. The Gitana promises to return at the end of three weeks, to open the chest, assuring the lady that if it be not unlocked until that period, it will be found filled with gold and silver; but threatening that ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... lately been written from a wider point of view than Mrs. Opie's, though she indeed was no ungenerous advocate. Her novel seems to have given satisfaction; 'a beautiful story, the most natural in its pathos of any fictitious narrative in the language,' says the 'Edinburgh,' writing with more leniency than authors now expect. Another reviewer, speaking with discriminating criticism, says of Mrs. Opie: 'She does not reason well, but she has, like most ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. I have been tempted sometimes to try the effect upon a larger scale; but meanwhile these short sketches, ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tell me anything more ghastly than taking a system of canned exercises in the morning or at night in one's bedroom or bathroom, or elsewhere, with no other incentive than some physical gain that, when you come to sum it up, is largely fictitious in value—or comes inevitably to be thought so—I would like to have you step forward and name it. I have been all through that phase of it, and I know; and I also know by heart the patter of the persons who recommend it. Further, I know the person ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... Thackeray's greater insight and power of portraiture, who sees in English manners here represented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as a result of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his having lived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintances have revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes more intelligible,—for him at last the book is a work of art. So any work may be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; it may be a point of departure, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... black viands[80] of thy liver. To such labors look thou for no termination, until some god shall appear as a substitute in thy pangs, and shall be willing to go both to gloomy Hades, and to the murky depths around Tartarus. Wherefore advise thee, since this is no fictitious vaunt, but uttered in great earnestness; for the divine mouth knows not how to utter falsehood, but will bring every word to pass. But do thou look around and reflect, and never for a moment deem ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... history of each bale. But Mr. Stanton, who surely was an able lawyer, changed all this, and ordered the obliteration of all the marks; so that no man, friend or foe, could trace his identical cotton. I thought it strange at the time, and think it more so now; for I am assured that claims, real and fictitious, have been proved up against this identical cotton of three times the quantity actually captured, and that reclamations on the Treasury have been allowed for more than the actual quantity ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... this Subject by the following Letter, which, though subscribed by a fictitious Name, I have reason ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sea-board the outline of the chain is on either side sharply defined, and forms a prominent and shapely feature in the landscape. From the low-lying central flats of the county the Mendips have a quite fictitious impressiveness. Nowhere does their altitude reach 1100 ft., and their ridge-like summit is nothing but an extended plateau, in places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified by little ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... sad for an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... addition to this official household were the tutors charged with James's education, two of them being members of the Erskine family, abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, though those titles were no doubt merely fictitious, meaning only that the "temporalities," the endowments of the extinct monasteries, were in their hands. The other and principal masters of James were Sir Peter Young and Mr. George Buchanan. Young was "gentle, loth to offend ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... states; and the real responsibilities thus existing for us, are unnaturally inflated for us by fast-growing tendencies toward exaggeration of our concern in these matters, and even toward setting up fictitious interests in cases where none can discern them except ourselves, and such continental friends as practice upon our credulity and our fears for purposes of their own. Last of all, it is not to be denied that in what I have been saying, I do not represent the ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... lived and wrote at this early date, and had conversed with these first disciples, are not without importance, even though his own mental calibre may have been small. But the speculations of the Tuebingen school have invested them with a fictitious interest. Was he, or was he not, as these critics affirm, a Judaic Christian of strongly Ebionite tendencies? The arguments which have been urged in defence of this position ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... dance they form the vocal strain, Till Hesperus leads forth the starry train; And now he raises, as the daylight fades, His golden circlet in the deepening shades: Three vases heap'd with copious fires display O'er all the palace a fictitious day; From space to space the torch wide-beaming burns, And sprightly damsels trim the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... or proposes for your imitation any model outside yourself: yours is a pattern reign. This would have been difficult had your goodness of heart not been innate, but merely adopted for a time; for no one can wear a mask for long, and fictitious qualities soon give place to true ones. Those which are founded upon truth, become greater and better as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... of power by water may occur in another form. The motive force to be transmitted may be employed for working pumps which raise the water, not to a fictitious height in an accumulator, but to a real height in a reservoir, with a channel from this reservoir to distribute the water so raised among several motors arranged for utilizing the pressure. The author is not aware that works have been carried out for this purpose. However, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... extended upon a bed from which she would no longer be compelled to rise for the watch and the march and the vigil. Her labor was over. Now came the reaction. Rapidly she yielded. It seemed as though joy had killed her. Not so. A great purpose had given her a fictitious strength; and now, when the purpose was accomplished, the strength departed, and a weakness set in commensurate with the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... she was, under a name that Louise electrically decided to be fictitious, seemed unable to find her voice at first in their mutual defiance, and she made a pretence of letting her strange eyes rove about the shop before she answered. Her presence was so repugnant to Louise that she ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... more of the cordial down his throat, which gave him a fictitious strength for a moment, and he answered in a little stronger voice, with a ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... betray the Prince's identity with her lover," went on the King, "and no one else knows it. In fact, you will be the very person best qualified to tell her of his departure, and—in due time, of his fictitious death!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... passing minutes. They spoke no more, however, on the forbidden subject. Christopher presently explained to her the visible mechanism of the car and on a stretch of clear road let her put her hands on the wheel beneath his own and feel the joy of fictitious control. Before the sun quenched itself in the sea they stood on the Cliff Edge and looked out across the shining waters into the great space, where a thought-laden air renews itself, reforming, cancelling and creating in the crucible of Life. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... predecessors. The source for the greater part of it is in a work known as the "Annals of the Four Masters," a compilation put together in the sixteenth century, from documents now no longer existing, and which must unfortunately, be regarded as largely fictitious. Were names, indeed, all that were wanting to give substantiality there are enough and to spare, the beginning of every Irish history positively bristling with them. Leland, for instance, who published his three sturdy tomes in the year 1773, and ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... only a fictitious sentiment; I realize it today. It is not with her that I am in love, it is with a woman created by my imagination, and whom I see clearly within this unfeeling marble shape. When we have meditated for a long time, our ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... time not a week went by that Field did not invent some marvellous tale respecting Emma Abbott, once the most popular light-opera prima donna of the American stage—every yarn calculated to widen the circle of her popularity. Upon an absolutely fictitious autobiography of Miss Abbott he once exhausted the fertility of his fancy in the form of a review,[1] which went the rounds of the press and which, on her death, contributed many a sober paragraph to the newspaper reviews of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... It is more than likely that, in answering your note as she did, Mlle. d' Armilly was influenced solely by caprice. If she should ask me after the performance who was my companion, I have only to give you a fictitious name and she ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... and admired?—those same old letters which he fetches in every morning? Have you seen it? Have you seen him show off? It is THE sight of the national capital. Except one; a pathetic one. That is the ex-Congressman: the poor fellow whose life has been ruined by a two-year taste of glory and of fictitious consequence; who has been superseded, and ought to take his heartbreak home and hide it, but cannot tear himself away from the scene of his lost little grandeur; and so he lingers, and still lingers, year after year, unconsidered, sometimes snubbed, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... her uncle Descoings; for in the same week (or rather, we should say decade, for the Republic had then been proclaimed) he was imprisoned on a hint from Robespierre given to Fouquier-Tinville. Descoings, who was imprudent enough to think the famine fictitious, had the additional folly, under the impression that opinions were free, to express that opinion to several of his male and female customers as he served them in the grocery. The citoyenne Duplay, wife of a cabinet-maker with whom Robespierre lodged, and who looked after the affairs of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... times, was something rare in life, and perhaps happily so. That mechanical admixture of black and white qualities without coalescence, on which the theory of men's characters was based by moral analysis before the rise of modern ethical schools, fictitious as it was in general application, would have almost hit off the truth as regards Captain De Stancy. Removed to some half-known century, his deeds would have won a picturesqueness of light and shade that might have made him a fascinating subject for some gallery of illustrious historical personages. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... religious matters, will not do the best offices. For besides that he is himself very hard and precise, those who in this country are hard and precise have made a dead set at him, and tried to make him devoted to their cause, through many fictitious and untruthful means." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... blind as to substitute falsehood in the place of truth, directed themselves, for the like aid, to fictitious and deceitful deities, who were not able to answer their expectations, nor recompense the homage that mortals paid them, any otherwise than by error and illusion, and a fraudulent imitation of the conduct ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... whom, in your kind and careful revision of it, this unfinished work has suggested many questions which, alas, I cannot answer, as to the probable conduct and fate of its fictitious characters, will readily understand my reluctance to surrender an impression seemingly so well justified. I did not indeed cease to cherish it, until reiterated and exhaustive search had failed to recover from the "wallet" ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... virtuous contempt. Before reaching the station the prisoner agreed to give him a check for ten thousand dollars and remain ironed in the willows along the river bank until it should be paid. As this only provoked new derision he would say no more, merely giving an obviously fictitious name. When he was searched at the station nothing of value was found on him but a miniature portrait of Mrs. Barwell—the lady of the house at which he was caught. The case was set with costly diamonds; and something in the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... reserve, I cannot but feel that the disputes to which I have alluded prove the necessity of bringing scientific precision of language into the whole domain of thought. If the discussion had been confined to a few, and other philosophers had analyzed the subject, and showed the fictitious character of the discussion, or had pointed out where opinions really might differ, there would be nothing derogatory to philosophers. But the most suggestive circumstance is that although a large proportion of the philosophic writers in recent times have devoted ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the Canal, to the detriment of our labour market. Gordon recognised that it was too late for the mistake to be remedied, but he was most anxious that we should attach more importance to our hold on the Cape, as the natural route to India in the event of war, and not be deceived by the fictitious advantages of the Suez Canal, which only offers the saving of a ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... numerous and scarcely less notorious than the assignation houses. The proprietors of these "convenient" hotels invariably keep the hotel register required by law, but agreeably fail to ask their lodgers for the time being to chronicle either their own or even a fictitious name, thus, day after ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... legislators with eggs, to prevent their passing any law fixing a rate for the sale of eggs. This is a serious charge, and we do not vouch for it. It is probable that farmers who are sharp enough to get a corner on eggs, by which they can be run up to a fictitious value, are sharp enough not to lay themselves liable for bribery by giving eggs directly to the members, but there are ways to avoid that. They can send them to the residences of the members, where they are worth their ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... with a touch of self-contempt, with an attempt at his old cynicism; but Stafford understood the fictitious character of the laugh, and as he leant his chin in his hand, he gave ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... of these matters, though Caesar thought it of great consequence to become master of the town as soon as possible, and to transfer the cohorts to his own camp, lest any change should be wrought on their inclinations by bribes, encouragement, or fictitious messages, because in war great events are often brought about by trifling circumstances; yet, dreading lest the town should be plundered by the soldiers entering into it, and taking advantage of the darkness of the night, he commended ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... Mamie Kipp, who formerly belonged to Priest Sander's church, but disappeared from Brooklyn very mysteriously, and whose whereabouts had been unknown to her family and her friends, until it was learned that she was living on this stock farm at Far Hills, N.J., and bore the fictitious name by ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... than the regular information which I might have expected from such correspondents as mine;—their expressions are like those of men who walk in their sleep, and speak by snatches of what passes in their dreams. It is said, a plot, real or fictitious, has been detected among the Catholics, which has spread far wider and more uncontrollable terror than that of the fifth of November. Its outlines seem utterly incredible, and are only supported by the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... doctrinam deos spernentem natus'), cf. iii. 20, 5; viii. 11, 1. He retains the old belief in prodigies and portents, every war being introduced by a list of them, but recognizes that many reported instances were fictitious: xxi. 62, 1, 'Multa ea hieme prodigia facta, aut, quod evenire solet motis semel in religionem animis, multa nuntiata ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds. There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always been a ruling class of Jews who ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... that this charge will prove nothing," replied Wilton. "As far as I know, though he acted imprudently, there was not anything in the slightest degree criminal in his conduct. The days, I trust, are gone by when fictitious plots might be got up, and the blood of the innocent be sold for its weight of gold. It may have been judged necessary to secure his person, and yet there may not be the slightest probability of his ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... out a gibe, or what was still more wonderful, went on with a complete unaffected indifference, as if all this was natural. I tried to disengage my arm in horror and dismay, but he held me fast with a pressure that hurt me. 'That's the question,' he said. 'What have we to do with it? Your fictitious consciousness makes it painful to you. To me, on the contrary, who take the view of nature, it is a pleasurable feeling. It enhances the amount of ease, whatever that may be, which I enjoy. I am in no pain. That ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... vivid reflection of those scenes which are passing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty. Thus the coat-of-mail of our ancestors, and the triple-furred pelisse of our modern beaux, may, though for very different reasons, be equally fit for the array of a fictitious character; but who, meaning the costume of his hero to be impressive, would willingly attire him in the court dress of George the Second's reign, with its no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes? The same may be urged, with equal ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... not appreciated by her who used it. Nothing could much more have astonished or shocked Barbara Polwhele [a fictitious person]—than whom no more uncompromising Protestant breathed between John o' Groat's and the Land's End—than to discover that since she came into the room, she had twice invoked the assistance of Saint Mary ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... public has too often been imposed upon by fictitious stories, and some of a very late date, so that I think myself obliged by the usual respect which is paid to candid and impartial readers, to acquaint them, by way of introduction, with what they are to expect, and what they may depend upon, and yet with this caution too, that it is an indication ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... us that Josephine, when she became Empress, brought about the marriage between her niece and La Vallette. This is another fictitious ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman in Westmoreland, not designing any deception (nor so much as any concealment) with respect to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this case it would have been so natural to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... looking at things with eyes hypothetically inverted,—an orientation for the sake of argument. After a while, insensibly and at no one moment, hypothesis merged into reality: I myself was inverted. That occasional and fictitious inversion had never, I believe, superposed this true inversion; rather a true inversion, those many years dormant, had simply responded finally to a stimulus strong and prolonged enough, as a man awakens when he is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
