"Phantasmagoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... everything which had given reality to my life faded and seemed as far away and as unsubstantial as a dream. Nor has its power over me gone yet. I go about amongst you, I eat, I sleep, or try to; I greet men, talk with women, but it is all unreal, all phantasmagoric, even yourself and your love and, O God, my baby! What is real and distinctive, an absolute part of me and my life, is that shape from the dead, with its ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... from youth to age, from ignorance to knowledge. But the manner of the crossing never became clear in her memory. Details stood out mercilessly. Their relationship, their significance were at the time as phantasmagoric as if she had been lost in the torturing unrealities of a nightmare. Just after her uncle left she was called to the room of Perilla's youngest child who had awakened with a sore throat and fever. Against the protests of the nurse, she sat up with him herself because through ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... draws the rose! The brazen arrogance of pomp, the pearl on a woman's neck, the shimmer of a breaking bubble, the wrinkles in a baby's foot, the beauty of life, the pathos of life, the irony and the lust of life,—he has painted them all, as he saw them all, in the phantasmagoric Procession of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crazy stratification, this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea. It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... conception of what I'm trying for," he said to me, "and not many have read three pages that I've written; but I must dine with them first—they'll find out why when they've time." It was rather rude justice perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, while the phantasmagoric town was probably after all less of a battlefield than the haunted study. He once told me that he had had no personal life to speak of since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him before. ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... occasional visitants of her island; finds her way to Spain, where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of their nuptials; and finally dies in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Madrid!—To complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers; parricides; maniacs in abundance; monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson |
