"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will-o'-the-wisp, is fading into the ultimate dark. Aileen, within the hour of her greatest triumph, had seen love die. It was useless to tell herself, as she did sometimes, that it might come back, revive. Her ultimately realistic temperament told her this could never be. Though she had routed Rita Sohlberg, she was fully aware that Cowperwood's original constancy was gone. She was no longer happy. Love was dead. That sweet ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... India, in which the forces of the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical phenomena, and to become moral beings; but in some measure a realistic naturalism, the love of nature for herself, the vivid impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that man knows, when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears her commune with him concerning his origin and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... we plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and A Fragment, June 28, 1819. The motif, a lamentation over the decay and degradation of Venice, re-echoes the sentiments expressed in the opening stanzas (i.-xix.) of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. A realistic description of the "Hour of Death" (lines 37-55), and a eulogy of the United States of America (lines 133-160), give distinction ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... realistic than this bounteous feast? It is just here that we differ most from the etherealists. They claim that it is unnecessary to imagine food; but we have found that for the maintenance of life we must thrice daily ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... kike," I goes on, maybe more realistic than I meant, "I got you right, ain't I? And all I got to do is push in a half-arm jolt ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... produced his best work in California. It is now nearly forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds, realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried others to the grave with them. Now and ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... the young hero give a realistic touch to one of the most providential occurrences ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... to the realistic, from the chimerical to the actual, from the child's poetic interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on. It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of princes and princesses. It was to be expected that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux, the author of Marianne, was of the school of Richardson before Richardson ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Naturphilosophie", Jena, 1809.) Danish philosophers, such as Treschow (1812) and Sibbern (1846), have also broached the idea of an historical evolution of all living beings from the lowest to the highest. Schopenhauer's philosophy has a more realistic character than that of Schelling's and Hegel's, his diametrical opposites, though he also belongs to the romantic school of thought. His philosophical and psychological views were greatly influenced by French naturalists and philosophers, especially by ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... if too dry add a little stock, gravy, or extract. Turn into greased basin and steam at least 3 hours. An almost too realistic imitation of "liver" is contrived by substituting chopped mushrooms for the lentils. It may also be varied by using crushed shredded wheat biscuit crumbs in place of the oatmeal. Any "remains" will be found very toothsome, if sliced when cold, ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... Septimius's sister; and it may have been the difficulty of adjusting this change to the portion previously written, that discouraged Hawthorne from completing the romance. But the work suffers also from a tendency to exaggeration. The name of Hagburn is unpleasantly realistic, and Doctor Portsoaken, with his canopy of spider-webs hanging in noisome festoons above his head, is closely akin to the repulsive. The amateur critic who averred that he could not read Hawthorne without feeling a sensation as if cobwebs were drawn across his ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... painter—respectively representing the coasting packet Hannah M., Eri Hedge, Master, and the fishing schooners, Georgie Baker, Jeremiah Burgess, Master, and the Flying Duck, Perez Ryder, Master, were shrouded in a very realistic fog of the same dust. Even the imposing gilt-lettered set of "Lives of Great Naval Commanders," purchased by Captain Perez some months before, and being slowly paid for on an apparently never-ending installment plan, was cloaked with it. The heap of ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all the realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetually represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoning the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... novelist famous in his own country and very soon afterwards in England and France, where it was the first of his works to be translated. In America d'Annunzio was already known as the author of a powerful realistic novelette, "Episcopo & Co.," which was published in Chicago in 1896, two years before "The Child of Pleasure" appeared in London. As has so often happened since, America led the way in introducing into the English language a writer who is one of the foremost ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... that clients are their slaves, witnesses theirs for vivisection, courts their playthings, and juries their dupes. More mummery has thrived in law than in even medicine or theology. The disenchanting and discriminating tendency of a realistic age has, however, somewhat reformed the bar. Fluency, without force, is discounted in our courts. The merely smart practitioner finds his measure quickly taken and that the conscientious members of his calling hold him at arm's length. Judges are learning that they are ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of the selections in this volume will reveal the rich variety of the material. Specimens are to be found of folk literature and modern literature, of the romantic, of the realistic, of the crude and naive, of the artistic and sophisticated, of the humorous and the pathetic. The editor has tried to find specimens presenting as many themes, as many interests, as many emotions as possible, characteristic specimens ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a weakness in the knees, he muttered: "They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out of them that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the 'stuffed monstrosities' mentioned in the page out of the log. No wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of then do ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... must, it is clear, lack many of the qualities which are usually associated with the dramatic art; there is no room in it for variety of character-drawing, for delicacy of feeling, or for the realistic presentation of the experiences of life. Corneille hardly attempted to produce such effects as these; and during his early years his great gifts of passion and rhetoric easily made up for the deficiency. As he ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... throughout all its details, on status, and the tie, or bond, was sentimental. In our modern state, and in the United States more than anywhere else, the social structure is based on contract, and status is of the least importance. Contract, however, is rational—even rationalistic. It is also realistic, cold, and matter-of-fact. A contract relation is based on a sufficient reason, not on custom or prescription. It is not permanent. It endures only so long as the reason for it endures. In a state based on contract ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... the Foreign Office if he had at the time believed in the least that there was any possibility of a plot for political assassination being carried on in an English country-house. Soame Rivers reasoned, like a realistic novelist, from his own experiences only. He regarded the notion of such things taking place in an English country-house as no less an anachronism than the moving helmet in the 'Castle of Otranto' or the robber-castle in the 'Mysteries of Udolpho.' Not that we mean to convey ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... possible and practical method of human generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... from the beginning of the fifteenth century, into the Renaissance period. But, unlike the Italian, the Belgian Renaissance was at first only very slightly affected by the study of the classics. It was more realistic in its aims than the mediaeval period. It revelled in the display of harmony, whether in sound, colour or form, and abundance of tracery, but as far as the subject was concerned it remained ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... influence which had already attracted his attention while he was writing Madeleine Ferat. The scheme was further attractive in as much as it lent itself readily to the system of treatment to which he had applied the term naturalisme, to distinguish it from the crudities of the realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience, or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the word of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... easily have been mistaken for a mob of vagrants which had pillaged a seventeenth-century arsenal. With a few slight changes in costuming for the sake of historical fidelity, we would have served as a citizen army for a realistic motion-picture drama depicting an ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... I think, may be not unfitly described as a highly magnified realistic freethinker. Iago and Edmund are also realistic freethinkers, the former slightly magnified, the latter unmagnified, though both may be somewhat idealized. And both of them speak and act strictly in that character. Accordingly all religion is in ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this the case with others. 'The Horse and the Fly' states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed. The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running over an only child; and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his toys a bare suggestion of the object, and not a lifelike representation that will be of interest to the critical adult. Refinement of finish and realistic representation are entirely wasted on the child. A massive wooden dog or bird is better than a furry or feathery one. It is enough of a dog or bird, so far as the child is concerned, and if it can stand rough handling, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... All it tells him is that one of the characters inside will be called John or Esther—a matter, probably, of indifference to him. Phyllis is a better title, because it does give a suggestion of the nature of the book. No novel with a tragic ending, no powerful realistic novel, would be called Phyllis. Without having read Phyllis I should say that it was a charming story of suburban life, told mostly in dialogue, and that Phyllis herself was a perfect dear—though a little cruel about ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... quartz, set in a bronze sheath, which forms the eyelids; in the center of each there is a bit of rock-crystal, and behind this a shining nail" [Footnote: Musee de Gizeh: Notice Sommaire (1892).]—a contrivance which produces a marvelously realistic effect. The same thing, or something like it, is to be seen in other statues of the period. The attitude of Ra-em-ka is the usual one of Egyptian standing figures of all periods: the left leg is advanced; both feet are planted flat on the ground; body and head face squarely forward. The ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... exciting, realistic—the tendency of the tales is to the formation of an honorable and manly character. They are unusually interesting, and convey lessons of pluck, perseverance and ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... and thrilling story of early frontier life in Kentucky was originally published in the year 1837. The novel, long out of print, had in its day a phenomenal sale, for its realistic presentation of Indian and frontier life in the early days of settlement in the South, narrated in the tale with all the art of a practiced writer. A very charming love romance runs through the story. This ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... goat-coats for this last item, and with animal masks fixed by elastic, bears, wolves, elephants, etc., it was distinctly realistic. ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... one of the films, was in progress, and there, depicted on the canvas, amid many figures, he saw himself, the most pronounced in that realistic group. And Betty Dalrymple saw the semblance of him, also, for she gave a slight gasp and sat more erect. In the moving picture he was running away from ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... convey in a realistic way, the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion. Stories like these are impressed upon the memory and their reading is ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... notice; and, unless you shut your door fast, and double-lock it, they will be sure to come in:—Popular literature, the scrappy trivialities that are put into some periodicals, what they call 'realistic fiction'; modern Art, which has come to be largely the servant of sense; the Stage, which has come—and more is the pity! for there are enormous possibilities of good in it—to be largely a minister of corruption, or if not of corruption at least ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... let loose, all the bonds of discipline were in a moment consumed. A wild rush was made for the officers' cabins. The captain tried to break his way out, was wounded, and driven back; the men swept in, and, to quote the realistic official account, "seated in his cabin the captain was stabbed by his own coxswain and three other mutineers, and, forced out of the cabin windows, was heard to speak as he went astern." With mutiny comes anarchy. The men made no distinction between their officers, cruel or gentle; not only ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... publication of the songs a review appeared in the Phoenix which had a remarkably realistic ring to the ear of the layman. As a matter of fact it was merely an underhanded attempt at assassination. The thing was signed with a big, isolated "W." Wurzelmann, the little slave, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... are too realistic. THINE and MINE do not necessarily refer to self, as they do when I say your philosophy, and my equality; for your philosophy is you philosophizing, and my equality is I professing equality. THINE and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the most varied and often most unpromising sources are derived those important details which make it possible to attain an exact and realistic conception of Babylonian and ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Pozzuoli. The priests must either have become used to the fumes, or have learnt some means of counteracting them; otherwise their lives can hardly have been more pleasant than that of the unfortunate dog which used to be exhibited in the Naples grotto, though the control of these very realistic entrances to the kingdom of Pluto must have been a very profitable business, well worth a little personal inconvenience. Others are mentioned by Strabo at Magnesia and Myus,[52] and there was one ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... him to try the realistic school: the old-time philosophies had lost the high place they once held, and to gain the attention of to-day writers must have snap and vim. Another recommended popular science made easy and attractive to general readers, something ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... of realistic, mawkishly foul novelists, who hold that Love excuseth all, would have taken delight in the passionate rendering of ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... be old, and I am inclined to think that it is native; that is, if any stories may be called native. Several facts point to the primitiveness of the tale: (1) the local color and realistic touches, slight though they are; (2) the non-emphasis of the comic possibilities of the situations; (3) the somewhat unsystematic arrangement of incidents, the third demand and exchange (iron rod for dead dog) not appearing to be an upward progression; (4) the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... sense of the word, of Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the other. Yet another will cite ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... glare, pretty girls in doorways looked like actresses in a costume play, waiting in the wings to "go on." But no yells of a stage mob ever were so realistic as those of the unrehearsed band who howled over my poor Gloria as she deposited her passengers at the fonda; and Ropes and I pushed her through a wall of human beings to a stable-garage, where her flywheel gushed a protest of fiery sparks on the high ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... whiskey standing at his elbow, and turning to an onlooker, said, "Just run along the deck and see if any ice has come aboard: I would like some for this." Amid the general laughter at what we thought was his imagination,—only too realistic, alas! for when he spoke the forward deck was covered with ice that had tumbled over,—and seeing that no more information was forthcoming, I left the smoking-room and went down to my cabin, where I sat for some time reading again. I am filled with sorrow to think I ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... the outset Brown's characteristic traits—independence of British materials and methods. It is in substance a powerful tale of ventriloquism operating on an unbalanced and superstitious mind. Its psychology is acute and searching; the characterization realistic and effective. His second book, 'Ormond: or the Secret Witness' (1799), does not reach the level of 'Wieland.' It is more conventional, and not entirely independent of foreign models, especially Godwin, whom Brown greatly admired. A rapid writer, he soon had the MS. of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... chosen with the greatest care, and will embrace representative tales of all classes,—narrative, realistic, scientific, imaginative, and historical. They will be illustrated by songs and black-board sketches. Terms for the Series (Twenty ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... out, by Mrs. Traquair. From time to time a great artist interests himself in designing and decorating a piano, but the rank and file, when they decide to build an extraordinary piano, achieve lumpy masses of wood covered with impossible nymphs and too-realistic flowers, pianos suggestive of thin and sentimental tunes, but ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... really were true about our society some hundred and thirty years ago. The best instance of his belated state is his perpetual assertion that the supernatural is less and less believed. It is a perfectly true and realistic account—of the eighteenth century. It is the worst possible account of this age of psychics and spirit-healers and fakirs and fashionable fortune-tellers. In fact, I generally reply in eighteenth century language to this ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... sense of Sin and the doctrine that the vicarious blood-shedding essential to remission must be connected with a New Baptismal Birth unto Righteousness. The Mithraists carried out this idea by the highly realistic ceremonies of the Taurobolium; the penitent neophyte standing beneath a grating on which the victim was slain, and thus being literally bathed in the atoning blood, afterwards being considered as born again [renatus]. It thus evolved a real and heartfelt devotion to the Supreme ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... mind the fact that these are works depending largely for their effect on the mind to their poetic qualities. There is in them both a large and thoughtful contemplation of life, but with a constant reference to its passion, sentiment and ideal aims. If they are realistic it is not to the exclusion of spiritual elements; and the poetic, sentimental phases of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Thucydides; see also Grote's History of Greece, Chap. XLIX. Of the great plague of London (1665) the most realistic description is Defoe's Journal of the ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... of which (i.e. two in the first half, and one in the second) usually began with the same sound or letter. The musical effect was heightened by the harp with which the gleeman accompanied his singing.. The poetical form will be seen clearly in the following selection from the wonderfully realistic description of the fens haunted by Grendel. It will need only one or two readings aloud to show that many of these strange-looking words are practically the same as those we still use, though many of the vowel sounds were pronounced differently ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... story is not so startling as the title would indicate. It is a strongly moral one, showing in a vivid, realistic manner the result of evil thinking. The Devil in this story is evil ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... not true. In plain words you act a lie. Can any possible good come from such a course? In the second, can you do it? Picture to yourself what it will be. You will be the affianced wife of a man whom you do not know, and if you are to act the part in such a way as to make it in the least realistic, you must be on more than friendly terms with him. You must show a certain warmth of manner, to say the least of it, in response to his demonstrations of affection. Philippa, you can't do it! You can't! Imagine yourself in ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... retell in seven ponderous volumes. In Caelia the religious rationalization of the tragic action is subdued, Johnson apparently preferring to stress the social and moral aspects of his subject, and to this end he resolutely refused to expunge or modify the boldly realistic brothel scenes, against which a ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... inconsistent with the breadth of the author's views. But they reflect him truly in this essential fact, that he considers art as subordinate to life, and only valuable in so far as it expresses it. This means, not that his standard is realistic: but that it is entirely human; it could scarcely be otherwise in a mind so devoted to the study of human life; but these very poems display also, on Mr. Browning's part, a loving familiarity with the works of painters, sculptors, and musicians, and a practical ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... we took the stage back to Bismark, she with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of regret that I had not been able to push my investigations deeper. There was a big theme here, but I had small faith in my ability to handle it. It required an epic poet, rather than a realistic novelist. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic. She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores, contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas; and—sturdy old Philistine that she is—she ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... seen in Shimane. At an agricultural show in the city of Tottori the varieties of yam and taro were so numerous as to deceive the average Westerner into believing that he was seeing the roots of different kinds of plants. A feature of the show was a large realistic model of a rice field ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the "hall bedroom" and upon previously unknown phases of business life in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... has often been described, but never, we think, with more lively appreciation of its humorous features than by Frederika Bremer. In the following passage we recognize something of that realistic power which makes the charm of her novels. The details are touched as vividly and picturesquely as in ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities—a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... emotions,—which I have taken from congregational hymn-books,—and I suppose there may be more of them,—call for delicacy of treatment. A Lamentation, for instance, which might seem at first sight as if it would gain force by volume, will, if it is realistic or clumsy, become unmanly, almost so as to be ridiculous, and certainly depressing to the spirit rather than purifying. In fact while many of the subjects require beautiful expression, they are also more properly used when offered as ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... autumn manoeuvres, and was mainly intended to test the value of the new tactics which Germany proposed to use next spring against a more serious foe. It was more realistic to experiment upon Russians than among themselves, and Von Hutier was selected to make the demonstration. The advance began in the last days of August, and on 1 September Von Hutier forced the passage of the Dvina at Uexkll, eighteen miles above Riga, which the Russians ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... delegated, were termed first, second, and third 'blowers,' or strikers, and in the shanty he sang 'Blow the man down.' 'Knock' or 'kick,' as I have recently seen in a printed collection, was too crudely realistic for him. In like manner the humorous title, 'Hog's-eye,' veiled the coarse intimacy of the term which it represented. And that is where, when collecting shanties from the 'longshore' mariner of to-day, I find him, ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... to be haunted by fragmentary, prophetic visions—confused but realistic in detail, and horridly probable—of his ejectment from the hotel, perhaps arrest and trial. He wondered what they did in Italy to people who "beat" hotels; and, remembering what some one had told him of the dreadfulness of Italian jails, ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... personal ill-will that every member of it bore to the prisoner, was not going to run the smallest risk. Earlier in the night he had amused himself by shouting insults of various kinds through the door of the cellar. Later on he had given the prisoner a vivid and realistic description of the way in which men are hanged, but Neal had made no sign of hearing a word that was said to him, so the occupation grew uninteresting. Now he whistled a few of his favourite airs, speculating on the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... almost realistic eloquence in the very first phrase, in the two contrasting strains, the love-motive striving upwards in the oboe, and its variant fading downwards in the 'cello. The union of the two produces a harmony of extraordinary expressiveness, which I have already ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... it upon the stage in Dresden, on the 4th of Nov. 1888 under the leadership of one of the ablest of modern interpreters of music, Director Schuch.—Its representation was {26} a triumph. Though Berlioz can in nowise be compared with Wagner, whose music is much more realistic and sensuous Wagner may nevertheless be said to have opened a path for Berlioz' style, which, though melodious differs widely from that of the easy flowing Italian school, being more serious as well as more difficult for the musical novice to understand. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... of her gloomy mood, and she found herself looking at something very dark as she stood holding Miss Robinson's expensive roses. For, after all, what was going to become of her? The final depth shaped itself to-day in more grimly realistic fashion than ever before: what was she going to do with herself, in the last resort, unless something happened? Her mind dwelt upon all the visible alternatives. There was philanthropic lunch-going and lunch-giving spinsterhood in Boston; there was spinsterhood in Europe, semi-social, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... change in taste, or of whom it would be more just to say, have set present taste, so that to-day not only the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Trials, although it opens with the trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I have said that Faustus is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... best made with a wire frame, on which soft hay is wrapped till it is of proper size and shape, then all is covered with open burlap. A few touches of white and black make it very realistic. ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... mention this fact to his cousin, after this voyage was concluded. It loomed up as large as the Rock of Gibralter just then, even as a dream may at the moment of awaking, but which later on begins to lose its realistic effect until it seems ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... can see it all. It will be hideously realistic. All women and children will have to leave ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... time he understood the advantages of the realistic method. On one occasion he stated as his creed, "that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... realistic. We are not going to influence all the experiment stations to do this work. It is not going to be practicable for them. They probably would very much like to do it, but it's not in the picture, as I see it now. Therefore, we are not going to wait, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... These are: first, that Defoe possessed an unparalleled knowledge— a knowledge wider than even Shakespeare's— of the circumstances and details of human life among all sorts, ranks, and conditions of men; secondly, that he gains his wonderful realistic effects by the freest and most copious use of this detailed knowledge in his works of imagination; and thirdly, that he possessed a vocabulary of the most wonderful wealth. His style is strong, homely, and vigorous, but the sentences are long, loose, clumsy, and sometimes ungrammatical. Like ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... adventures. The woman is always a different one. The story is of the kind always accompanying such circumstances—one of waxing or waning attraction, of suspicion and jealousy, of incrimination and recrimination, of intrigue and counter-intrigue. The atmosphere is realistic, but the actuality implied is sharply limited and largely superficial. There is little attempt at getting down to the roots of things. There is absolutely no tendency or thesis. The story is told ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... how a native American subject, strictly realistic, may be treated in various manners adapted to the requirements of different magazines, thus combining Art-for-Art's-Sake with Writing-for-the-Market. Read at the First Dinner of the American Periodical Publishers' Association, in Washington, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... "It is too realistic," said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it was over, and he was helping Margaret ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... thought they were part of the picture!" exclaimed Ruth. And so she had. Often, to make a moving picture seem more realistic, a manager will not tell the actors all he has prepared. Thus he gets the element of surprise. Both Ruth and Alice, in this case, thought the local police had been brought into the scene at the last moment to add a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... played chords to him. She was kind and would not speak ill of anybody; but that did not keep her from doing so, and while she blamed herself for her malice, when she laughed at anybody, she had a fund of mocking humor and that realistic and witty gift of observation which belongs to the people of the South; she could not resist it and drew cuttingly satirical portraits. With her pale lips she laughed merrily to show her teeth, like those of a puppy, and ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... death bleatings and buttings of the quadrupedal offering of antiquity have been polished by the hands of time and of civilization, and, as a result of this process, we get the dying whisper of Rachel in the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and the fearfully realistic "kicking" of the modern Croisette in the poisoning scene of The Sphinx. But, whereas the descendants of Themistocles gladly receive, whether captive or free, all the changes and improvements considered as such by modern taste, thinking them to be ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... in our country immediately after the war with France for the possession of Canada. A fight with the Indians and the French in a snowstorm is especially realistic, and the entire book carries with it ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... characteristic roadside views, and incidents of travel generally, which would do more for realism than can any word-picture. We often see specimens of artists' work purporting to represent a "'49er" emigrant train on the overland journey—some of them very clever; but seldom are they at all realistic to ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... overview: The Guyanese economy exhibited moderate economic growth in 2001-02, based on expansion in the agricultural and mining sectors, a more favorable atmosphere for business initiatives, a more realistic exchange rate, fairly low inflation, and the continued support of international organizations. Growth then slowed in 2003 and came back gradually in 2004, buoyed largely by increased export earnings. Chronic ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... thought of as a system, as it contained a theory of history and a definite conception of the Old Testament, finally, as it was composed of objective and subjective ethical considerations and included the realistic elements of a national religion (wrath of God, sacrifice, reconciliation, Kingdom of glory), as well as profound psychological perceptions and the highest appreciation of spiritual blessings, the Catholic doctrine of faith as it was formed in the course ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art, but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without intermediate means is in a direct line from God, and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... secondary character; she is not a personage in the play at all. She is merely mentioned casually by Benvolio and then by Mercutio, and even Mercutio is not the protagonist; yet his mention of her is strikingly detailed, astonishingly realistic, in spite of its off-hand brevity. We have a photographic snapshot, so to speak, of this girl: she "torments" Romeo; she is "hard-hearted"; a "white wench" with "black eyes"; twice in four lines she is called now "pale," now "white"—plainly ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Living Perkins was asked to decorate one of the black-boards and Rebecca the other. Living, who was the star artist of the school, chose the map of North America. Rebecca liked better to draw things less realistic, and speedily, before the eyes of the enchanted multitude, there grew under her skillful fingers an American flag done in red, white, and blue chalk, every star in its right place, every stripe fluttering in the breeze. Beside ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... encroachments made while Parsifal is lost in a meditative dream, the burning kiss which recalls him to himself, the fine touch by which this kiss, while arousing in him the stormiest feelings, causes a sharp pain, as of Amfortas's own wound, piercing his very heart—all this is realistic, if you will, but it is realism ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... romantic figure, and the glimpses of the struggle in the Bush that he had given her had appealed to her imagination. She could feel the thrill of it when she saw it through his eyes with all the unpleasantly realistic features carefully wiped out, but it was different now that he had come back to her with the dust and stain of the conflict fresh upon him. The evidences of his strife were only repulsive, and she shrank from them. She watched him with a growing impatience ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... Japanese should not be able to paint wonderfully in oil by following their own particular methods of artistic expression. But their attempts to follow Western methods have even risen to mediocrity only in studies requiring very realistic treatment. Ideal work in oil, according to Western canons of art, is still out of their reach. Perhaps they may yet discover for themselves a new gateway to the beautiful, even through oil-painting, by adaptation of the method to the particular needs of the race-genius; but there is yet ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... poor, involving improbable incidents and catastrophes. She is always unfortunate in her attempts to extricate her heroes and heroines from entangling difficulties. Invention is not her forte; she is weak when she departs from realistic figures. She is strongest in what she has seen, not in what she imagines; and here she is the opposite of Dickens, who paints from imagination. There was never such a man as Pickwick or Barnaby Rudge. Sir Walter Scott created characters,—like Jeannie Deans,—but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... time Madison stood there in his room, motionless, staring unseeingly before him—and then, as one awakening from a dream that had brought dismay and a torment too realistic to be thrown from him on the instant, his brain still a little blunted, he took up his hat mechanically, went out from the room, descended by the back stairs to the rear door of the hotel, and took the road ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... carefully in the Holy Scriptures. Like the young Timothy, he would know them from early childhood. The song of Zacharias reveals a vivid and realistic familiarity with the prophecies and phraseology of the Scriptures; and as the happy parents recited them to his infant mind, they would stay to emphasize them with impressive personal references. What ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... of a crime or other misdemeanor tends by suggestion to the imitation of the wrong by others; it is a well-known fact that a sensational story of suicide or murder is likely to provoke others in the same manner. It is a grave question whether the realistic fiction so much in vogue and published in such quantities is not a baneful text-book on modern society. But when it chooses the press becomes an instrument of immense value to the public. It can turn the light of publicity on dark and dirty ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... but the glory that we find in nature and the grandeur that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his virtue. Realism does not mean the unattractive. A rose is as real as a toad. And a realistic novel of the days of Caesar would be worth more than ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... will read this story with eager and unflagging interest. The episodes are in Mr. Henty's very best vein—graphic, exciting, realistic; and, as in all Mr. Henty's books, the tendency is to the formation of an honorable, manly, and even heroic character." ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... our knowledge is that which comes to us through experience and assimilation. It is a permanent possession. When an author's experience, either in an ideal or a realistic form, is introduced in his work, it becomes an interesting biographical element. It presents a part of his life, and often it exhibits the transforming and glorifying power of his genius. In the drama "She Stoops to Conquer," for example, Goldsmith has turned to excellent account a humiliating ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... unavailing grief over the locks of raven hair they left with me on the morning of their departure. But to marry a real, live, omnipresent man—a man, with red hair, sound lungs, and no wars to go to! My aspiring soul shrank from the realistic vision. ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he befriended the Russian novelist Tourgueneff and Emilie Zola, as well as many of the protagonists of the realistic school. He wrote considerable verse and short plays. In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, le Gil Blas, le Gaulois ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... of metre is only a part of his too deliberate novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down in the most modern words and with the help of the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the same category may be referred the horrible, but singularly striking, series of Latin poems edited from a MS. at Berne, which set forth the miseries of monastic life with realistic passion bordering upon delirium, under titles like the following—Dissuasio Concubitus in in Uno tantum ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... term strangely compromised, seems to proclaim itself under the banner of materialism, while the Real, implying the idea of the True, cannot be contained in simplisme. It is a most pernicious evil that writers, calling themselves realistic, still concentrate their talent upon the painting of vicious types and characters drawn in an ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... great personal regard for Fra Filippo, up to that painter's death in 1469, Sandro being then twenty-two years old. He may probably have got only good from him; anyhow he would get a strong turn for Realism,—i.e. the treatment of sacred and all other subjects in a realistic manner. He is described in Crowe and Cavalcaselle from Filippino Lippi's Martyrdom of St. Peter, as a sullen and sensual man, with beetle brows, large fleshy mouth, etc., etc. Probably he was a strong man, and intense ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the lift, was altogether barely five minutes. And as yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... amorphousness called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual's ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately naive, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical manner—this taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... that the imitation which Reynolds supposes to be characteristic of the Dutch School is that which gives to objects such relief that they seem real, and that he then speaks of this art of realistic imitation as corresponding ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... decided that frankness was best. "There certainly were occasions when your recollections were somewhat realistic." ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... peculiar, individual, unprecedented, that he committed to canvas with all the vehemence of his talent. Compare his "Last Supper," at San Giorgio—its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground- -with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's work ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... going on toward realms of burning light. The tone variety ranges from as soft and smooth as possible to a virile, orchestral fff. The melody of the piece is very beautiful and the whole thing has a curious icy clearness about it that is remarkably realistic. The last seven bars contain music as tender and serene as ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... realistic conceptions through pictures, we influence the child to read eagerly the text, to discover the whole story, of which such a fascinating hint is given in the portion illustrated. These first pictures must satisfy the child's love of action ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... And now she was to wind it all up by marrying Joseph Tank, who had made a great deal of money out of the manufacture of paper bags. This from her—who had always believed she would end her days in New York, or perhaps write a realistic novel exposing ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... shade of meaning, that they became utterly oblivious to our presence or to Hawkinson's steady grinding of the camera. In the war-dance the participants, who were Moro fighting men, and were armed with spears, shields, and the vicious, broad-bladed knives known as barongs, gave a highly realistic representation of pinning an enemy to the earth with a spear, and with the barong decapitating him. The first part of the dance, before the passions of the savages became aroused, was, however, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Recloses had long been an art pilgrimage. It contains, or at least should contain, some of the most wonderful wood carvings in France; figures and groups of figures highly realistic in the best sense of the word. These sculptures, unfortunately, we were not able to inspect a second time; exhibited in the Paris Exhibition they ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Karatoff to indicate to Errol what it was that he was to do. But a gasp went up from some one as he took another step and it was evident that it was Marchant whom he had singled out. For just a moment Errol poised the rubber dagger over his "victim," as if gloating. It was dramatic, realistic. As Errol paused, Marchant smiled at the rest of us, a sickly smile, I thought, as though he would have said that the play ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... faculty of painting in the soul of the listener or reader a realistic picture whose sublimity of conception impresses the understanding with awe and admiration, and impels the mind to rise involuntarily for the time to an elevation out of and above the inconsequent contemplation of the common and sordid things ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase—as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound, but it might be ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... time the camp would be in form, fires lit with parched shrubs gathered during the last stage of the journey, a meal cooked, and every one settled down to rest until sunset, when, if there was no evening march, the Arabs and negroes would sing, and perhaps indulge in amazingly realistic sword-play, while the dozen sailors brought from the yacht would watch the combatants or engage in a sing-song on ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... essences" of Plato. They are the eternal, immutable principles which are discernible to the eye of the soul, as the sensible objects they represent are discernible to the eye of the body. Modern metaphysics may deem them mere abstractions, but a higher realistic philosophy will treat them as substantive forms, of which the objective reality ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... His very clowns are transcendental, with scraps of wisdom springing out of their foolishest speech. Chaucer, lacking Shakspeare's excess and prodigality of genius, could not so gloriously err, and his creations have a harder, drier, more realistic look, are more like the people we hear uttering ordinary English speech, and see on ordinary country roads against an ordinary English sky. If need were, any one of them could drive pigs to market. Chaucer's characters are ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... something fresh and interesting around every corner. The white elephants delighted him, particularly where green creepers had grown round their trunks, giving them a realistic effect of enjoying a meal. The handles off very common English chests-of-drawers, that were set along a rail enclosing a sleeping Buddha, pleased him like a child, as did the bits of looking-glass with "Black ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... eldest son of Sakyamuni by Yasodhara. Converted to Buddhism, he followed his father as an attendant; and after Buddha's death became the founder of a philosophical realistic school (vaibhashika). He is now revered as the patron saint of all novices, and is to be reborn as the eldest son ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... was thinking of this and because she was obviously a realistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman is basically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and so had always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would be thinking that I was a realist myself ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... processional as recessional about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age-period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent. of the total. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... an idea just ponder for a moment some of the doctrines of the Calvinistic theology. To get a realistic idea of the matter, think of God bringing into the world one soul whom He destined for everlasting torment. That is no overstatement. For if there was no Atonement of Christ for that soul, there could be no possible escape for it. That soul was doomed from ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... were shown, one in a barnyard full of cows being especially realistic. Then came the scene inside the railroad station at Oak Run, and all of the boys and Dora laughed heartily when they saw the look of astonishment on old Ricks' face as he peered through his ticket window at the actor who had ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... making my merriment as realistic as I could. "It's all ridiculous nonsense, Max," I said. "You made life miserable to her and she was ready to say anything. She may have been worried over something, and you imagined all sorts of things. Maybe it was something about her education that worried ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan |
