"Dreamlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... usual prayers. She could not remember anything but Jack's entreaty—"Kiss me, mi madre! Bless me, mi madre!" She could not see anything but that last rapid turn in the saddle, and that piteous young face, showing so weird and dreamlike through the gray mist ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... extending their trade, and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most brilliant things where nature puts the nut-kernel,—inside. I shall advert to but one other recollection of this period. I have a dreamlike memory of a busy time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my father's house, and fill my newly acquired pockets with coppers; and how they wanted, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... moon. For hours—and with increased zeal as the comet rose in the sky—they gave themselves up to the soothing and encouraging pleasure of singing; but one by one the voices died away and their peaceful hymn was borne down the river to the sea, by degrees more low, more weary, more dreamlike. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... consternation only augmented the instinctive recurring emotion. She felt something she could not explain. And that something was scarcely owing to this young man's pitiful position between duty to his father and love for his country. It had to do with his blazing eyes; intangible, dreamlike perceptions of him as not real, of vague sweet fancies that retreated before her introspective questioning. What alarmed Lenore was a tendency of her mind to shirk this revealing analysis. Never before had she been afraid to look into herself. But now she was finding ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Chronicle. There had been, so Forster tells us, a previous very shadowy love affair in his career,—an affair so visionary indeed, and boyish, as scarcely to be worthy of mention in this history, save for three facts: first, that his devotion, dreamlike as it was, seems to have had love's highest practical effect in inducing him to throw his whole strength into the study of shorthand; secondly, that the lady of his love appears to have had some resemblance to Dora, the child-wife of David Copperfield; and thirdly, that he met her again ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... "assembled jockeyship of half a province;" the wild music of hounds, and horns, and hollas, vieing with each other in mirth and loudness; the breathless interest of the start; the emulous pant of the coursers; the excitement of the moment when the fox appears; the sweeping tumult of the pursuit; the dreamlike rapidity with which five-barred gates are cleared, the yellow or naked woods are passed, and the stubble-ridges "swallowed up in the fierceness and rage" of the rushing steeds; the indifference ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... other excellence of the Snark, upon which I must brag, namely, her bow. No sea could ever come over it. It laughs at the sea, that bow does; it challenges the sea; it snorts defiance at the sea. And withal it is a beautiful bow; the lines of it are dreamlike; I doubt if ever a boat was blessed with a more beautiful and at the same time a more capable bow. It was made to punch storms. To touch that bow is to rest one's hand on the cosmic nose of things. To look at it is to realize that expense cut no figure where it was concerned. And every ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... It seemed dreamlike. A phantasmagoria of blows and staggering steps. A nightmare with only the horrible vision of this goggled helmet ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... during the long astral day and night, helping to work out intricate problems of cosmic government and the redemption of prodigal sons, earthbound souls. When the Hiranyaloka beings sleep, they have occasional dreamlike astral visions. Their minds are usually engrossed in the conscious state of highest ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... multitudes of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery may tend to destroy habits of clear thinking, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... she had gone to bed to sleep in happy dreamlessness. The hotel bedrooms with their litter of trunks suggesting imminent flight had held no restfulness. To Gillian the transitory sensation had strained already over-excited nerves and heightened the dreamlike feeling that made everything seem unreal. But here, the visible evidences of travel removed, the deep silence of a large country house penetrating her mind and conducing to peace, she could think at last. The surroundings were helpful. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... only ones who knew enough Arabic to catch their meaning. His question was answered. And this was not a stage. Those shouting men were not supers in the wings. They were in earnest. Foolish and dreamlike and utterly unreal as it seemed, their hearts were hot with savage anger against men and women of an alien race: and though what they might do to us would be visited on their own heads to-morrow, they were not thinking of to-morrow now. As for us—it was just possible that owing to this silly ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... first time at women with uncovered necks and arms emerging white as wax from their diaphanous or glittering gowns. To me they were radiant, transported to a sphere of existence beyond my own, something I never would attain to. I recall them as a vague, dreamlike spectacle. In all of it there is but one incident that I remember clearly; and that is, when whirling out of the crowd and into an empty space, that the dancers had left clear for a moment, came a couple—a large blond girl and a young man, a boy, hardly as old ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... knowing more about Mr. Smith than I know! Perhaps more than Mrs. Ellsworth knows!" exclaimed Annesley, forgetting the strain of expectation—the dread that a pair of mysterious, nightmare men might break up the dreamlike dinner-party for two. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... windows wave wreaths of ivy, and slender harebells shake their blue pendants, looking in and out of the lattices like little capricious fairies. There are fragments of ruins lying on the ground, and the whole air of the thing is as wild, and dreamlike, and picturesque as the poet's fanciful heart ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... has ceased. What is seen on the neutral surface (it will be shown later why we studiously avoid speaking of 'white light') is no outwardly existing colour at all. It is the activity of the eye itself, working in a dreamlike way from its blood-vessel system, and coming to our ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... were seeing the end of the Golden Age. Oh, those lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day's shock of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied fields; I can drift once more with ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Here we see him wandering restlessly through the vast silences of nature, in search of a loved dream-maiden who shall satisfy his love of beauty. Here Shelley is the poet of the moonrise, and of the tender exquisite fancies that can never be expressed. The charm of the poem lies in its succession of dreamlike pictures; but it gives absolutely no impressions of reality. It was written when Shelley, after his long struggle, had begun to realize that the world was too strong for him. Alastor is therefore the poet's confession, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the following work, designing to put in a form somewhat permanent my recollections of experiences in the great war, believing it may be a source of satisfaction to my children in later years. Already many of those scenes begin to appear dim and dreamlike, through the receding years, and many faces, once so clearly pictured in memory as seen around the camp-fire, in the march, and on the field of battle, have faded quite away. These things admonish me that what is done ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to a Florentine used to the mellow unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of exquisite amusements, (Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... is on the sea: A soft and still repose Steals o'er the untroubled lea That darkly glows. Hushed in their ocean caves The winds their sleep prolong, Or mourn along the waves In dreamlike song. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... midnight when the party rode past the Church of the Cristo de la Vega, and faced the long hill that leads to the gate Del Cambron. Above them towered the city of Toledo—silent and dreamlike. Concepcion had ceased singing now, and the hard breathing of the horses alone broke the silence. The Tagus, emerging here from rocky fastness, flowed noiselessly away to the west—a gleaming ribbon laid across the breast of the night. In the summer it is no uncommon thing for travellers to ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... from a bridge's parapet, As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled; Another wades in slow with purpose set 10 Until the waters are above him furled; Another in a boat with dreamlike motion Glides drifting down into the desert ocean, To starve or sink from ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... James' Varieties of Religious Experience, will find an even deeper meaning in it all. The sociologist, meanwhile, will point to the force of custom and tradition, as colouring the whole experience, even when at its most subjective and dreamlike. But each according to his bent must work out these things for himself. In any case it is well that the end of a book should leave ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... "Psychologists have pointed out to us the fact that if a human being were born without sense organs, no matter how perfect a brain he might have, his life would be little more than that of a plant. Such a person would exist merely in a dreamlike state, with only the very faintest manifestations of consciousness. His consciousness would not be able to react in response to the impact of sensations from the outside world, for there would be no such impact. And as consciousness depends almost ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on some unfooted lawn Whose air the unrisen sunbeams fear to fret Lives a ghost's life of ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was pounding on the glassite panel. I joined him. Everything was dreamlike, blurring as though ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... mountain-range. The moon had now risen high in the heavens, and her beams performed odd tricks of shadow play as they danced through these colossal halls of emptiness and silence. Nothing seemed real or substantial; these enormous masses of masonry and iron looked almost dreamlike, the ghosts of a forgotten past, shadows that must surely ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... it. It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and solid-looking in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short feathery antennae, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being afraid of a ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... gently drag their boats Of ivory; bright beams Glimmer as through a veil of agate; And coral-wrought, the crowns Shine on fair locks like amber gleaming. A pearl lake dreamlike lives With water lilies studded. Azure-browed Fairies revelling Quaff wine of honey gold; And mighty riders steal away With brides thrice-beautiful. But thou, an archer mightier, Risest unmaking all The multitudes ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old way, precisely as though there had been no break ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... something for the aesthetic education of those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it merely as a naked ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... it seemed to him that he had lived a long time and was very old. Gray lay motionless where he had fallen, and his body was twisted into a shockingly unnatural posture. He was bleeding. Allie Briskow was bending over him. Other dim, dreamlike figures were swarming out of the gloom and into the radiance of the derrick lights; there was a far-away clamor of shouting voices. Buddy Briskow felt himself growing ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... how shall I more fittingly conclude than with the name of her whose generous heart and enlightened mind were the impulse which has given to what had long been hope deferred and a dreamlike vision, existence ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... was waked from her heavy sleep by Martha bringing in the warm water, the sun was shining, the wind had abated, and those hours of suffering in the night seemed unreal and dreamlike, in spite of weary limbs and aching eyes. She got up and began to dress with a strange feeling of insensibility, as if nothing could make her cry again; and she even felt a sort of longing to be down-stairs in the midst of company, that she might get rid of this ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to Lilamani that any trouble in Europe could invade the sanctities of her home, or affect the shining destiny of Roy. That he was destined to shine, her mother's heart knew beyond all doubt. And round that knowledge, like an aura, glimmered a dreamlike hope that perhaps his shining might some day, in some way, strengthen the bond between Nevil's people and her own. For the problem of India's changing relation to England lay intimately near her heart. Her poetic brain saw England always ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Thereat sleepfray'd, dreamlike the God takes Wing And soars to his own skies, while Psyche strives To clasp his foot, and fain thereon ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of my passion, from the hour of my dreamlike vision up to that when we had plighted ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... it seemed, a passion had actually commenced in his boy's heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... demoniac laughter. Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around them; And o'er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness,— Strange forebodings of ill, unseen, and that cannot be compassed. As, at the tramp of a horse's ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... large trees, whose cleft leaves frame the indescribably blue sea, which breaks in snowy lines in the lava-boulders below. Far off, I can see Malekula, with its forest-covered mountains, and summer clouds hanging above it. It is a dreamlike summer day, so beautiful, bright and mild as to be hardly real. One feels a certain regret at being unable to absorb all the beauty, at having to stand apart as an outsider, a patch on the brightness rather ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... with the light as he was, which made a glorification in the brown locks of his hair and gleamed about "pleasant outlines" standing as fixed and still as a statue. But they were not statue eyes which looked into hers, and Faith's dreamlike gaze was only for a moment. Then every line of her face changed with joy—and she sprang up to hide it in Mr. Linden's arms. He stood still, holding her as one holds some rescued thing. For Faith was too weak to be just herself, and weariness and gladness had found their own very unusual expression ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... was one well calculated to sustain and to rivet romance. The cast of her beauty was so dreamlike, and yet so varying: her temper was so little mingled with the common characteristics of woman; it had so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence of all jealous and all angry feeling; it was so made up of tenderness ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an actual part ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... literature. Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage. There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he cannot ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... like unto the evening. Summer was still to be our companion, and, as the evening of our coming to Cohocton had been the most dreamlike of all the ends of our walking days—had, so to say, been most evening-spiritual, so the morning of our Cohocton seemed most morning-spiritual of all our mornings, most filled with strange hope and thrill and glitter. We were afoot earlier than usual. The sun had hardly ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... life was enough while it lasted. Perhaps—But I will tell you how I find myself when I do my best to recall it all. I don't remember anything clearly until I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea. I had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up—fresh and vivid—not a bit dreamlike—because the girl had stopped ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... magnificent—yet efficient—seat of learning in the world. For once, college professors were to be paid adequate salaries, and alluring provision for their declining years was to be made. New Haven should become a very hotbed of culture. Art galleries, libraries, museums and theatres of a dreamlike splendor were to rise whenever and wherever I should will. Why absurd? Was it not I who would defray the cost? The famous buildings of the Old World were to be reproduced, if, indeed, the originals could not be purchased, brought to this country and reassembled. Not far from New ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the door and was pulling it: it dragged against the ground as such old doors often do, and Baldassarre, startled out of his dreamlike state, rose from his sitting posture in vague amazement, not knowing where he was. He had not yet risen to his feet, and was still kneeling on one knee, when the door came wide open and he saw, dark against the moonlight, with the rays falling on one bright mass of curls and one rounded ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... tighter. He seemed to be floating away, and her hand steadied him. The sounds of the fighting sounded very distant now—all blurred and confused and dreamlike. Only the girl's nearness seemed real—the touch of her little body against his as ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... breathing, and his muttering of something once or twice. Then he lay gazing at the old lawyer, thinking how comical it was, and what a change from Guilford Street in busy London, till it all seemed to be dim and strange and dreamlike. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... nowadays has taken the place of the good fairies of former times, had gratified M. Wilkie's every longing in a single night. Without any period of transition, dreamlike as it were, he had passed from what he called "straitened circumstances" to the splendid enjoyment of a princely fortune. Madame d'Argeles's renunciation had been so correctly drawn up, that as soon as he presented his claims and displayed ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... all the summer night. The woods in the distance stand motionless in the wealth of their massed foliage, keeping guard over the unbroken silence that reigns in all their branching aisles. Beyond the far-spreading waters lie white and dreamlike, and tempt the thought to the fairylands that sleep just beyond the line of the horizon. A sweet and restful mystery, like a bridal veil, hides the face of Nature, and he only can venture to lift it who has won the privilege by long ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie |
