"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... species large tufts of delicate bright-coloured feathers spring from each side of the body beneath the wings, forming trains, or fans, or shields; and the middle feathers of the tail are often elongated into wires, twisted into fantastic shapes, or adorned with the most brilliant metallic tints. In another set of species these accessory plumes spring from the head, the back, or the shoulders; while the intensity of colour and of metallic lustre displayed by their plumage, is not to be equalled by any other birds, except, perhaps, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... jollity, Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides:— Come, and trip it as you go On the light fantastic toe; And in thy right hand lead with thee The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew, To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight And singing ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... this second gyration. Even as the stairway canted he lost his balance; they were both thrown violently through the open hatchway, and swept off into the boiling surf. Under such conditions thought itself was impossible. A series of impressions, a number of fantastic pictures, were received by the benumbed faculties, and afterwards painfully sorted out by the memory. Fear, anguish, amazement—none of these could exist. All he knew was that the lifeless form ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... be extracted from the present state of things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... which a pair of folding doors admitted us into a broad corridor that ran round the interior of the Abbey. The windows of the corridor looked into a quadrangular grass-grown court, forming the hollow centre of the pile. In the midst of it rose a lofty and fantastic fountain, wrought of the same gray stone as the main edifice, and which has been well described ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... off and coasted the estate by the side of the marsh, till I came to the causeway. There I found a new cleared field, and stopped to admire the beautiful appearance of the stumps of the trees scattered all about it, and wreathed and garlanded with the most profuse and fantastic growth of various plants—wild roses being among the most abundant. What a lovely aspect one side of nature presents here, and how ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... roofs, and yet now and then would come a high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable. I forgot my grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague expectation of wonders. Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that romance and I shall at last compass a meeting. Perchance some princess is in need of my arm, or some affair ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... river. The ladies were seated in the pilot-house, observing the scenery, which by this time had become a little monotonous, though the scene was always delightful, for we had only the varying breadth of the river, and the forest. Occasionally we saw a few old red cedars, whose fantastic forms excited attention for a time, with their trunks divided like an inverted V, near the surface of the water. The bluffs, when there were any, were covered with blackberry vines, all in blossom, so that they looked like snow banks ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... slipped the ring on his little finger. The thing was fantastic, but he did it reverently; nor did it appear in the least as weakness, for his face was, strong and cold. "Till death us do part, so help me ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... of words and phrases, is an innovation, which, with the opulence of our present language, the English philologer is most jealous to allow; but we have puritans or precisians of English, superstitiously nice! The fantastic coinage of affectation or caprice will cease to circulate from its own alloy; but shall we reject the ore of fine workmanship and solid weight? There is no government mint of words, and it is no statutable offence to invent a felicitous or daring expression ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... mile or more their road ran through fantastic-looking mangrove trees rooted in the mud, that in the mist resembled, Alan thought, many-legged arboreal octopi feeling for their food, and tall reeds on the tops of which sat crowds of chattering finches. Then just as the sun broke out, strongly, cheering them with its warmth ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... had split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... not get the answer to his question immediately. The woods all around him were stirring, and bearded men in homespun, carrying fantastic rifles, were casually walking toward him. The Barbarian pushed himself up to his feet without any show ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... dreams I hear that fountain flowing; Beyond all seeing and beyond all knowing; Still in my dreams I see those wild walls glowing With hues, Aurora-kissed; And through huge halls fantastic phantoms going. Vast shapes of snow and mist,— Sonorous clarions of the tempest blowing,— That trail dark banners by, Cloudlike, underneath the sky Of the caverned dome on high, Carbuncle and amethyst.— Still I hear the ululation ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... A really fantastic figure came in behind this specimen of "Louis XIV.'s light infantry"—a nickname given by the Bonapartists to these venerable survivors of the Monarchy. To do it justice it ought to be made the principal object in the picture, and it is but an accessory. Imagine a lean, dry ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... with mixed terror and delight to the picturesque legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they sat at their work out of doors on September moonlight evenings—to all the traditional ghost-stories of the "Black Valley," as she fancifully christened the country round about. Tales were these of fantastic animals and goblins, the grand'-bete and the levrette blanche, Georgeon, that imp of mischief, night apparitions of witches and charmers of wolves, singing Druidical stones and mysterious portents—a whole fairy mythology, then ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... resemble, in their general aspect, the well-known Giant's Causeway on the northern coast of Ireland, and the Isle of Staffa off the western coast of Scotland. The latter, which, around its whole sea-girt outline, presents ranges of basaltic columns, some of them disposed in curious fantastic groups, most nearly resembles the Sicilian pair. These differ from it chiefly in their having the columns piled in terraces, one above another. Staffa, however, can boast of a far more striking feature —the celebrated ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... a vague recollection of passing into one of the council chambers, attracted possibly by the lights. Tumult was in his heart, chaos in his brain; rage and exultation, unbelief and credulity. He floated, drifted, dreamed. His father! It was so fantastic. That cynical, cruel old man here in Quebec!—to render common justice! . . . A lie! He had lied, then, that mad night? There was a ringing in the Chevalier's ears and a blurring in his eyes. He raised his clenched hands, only to drop them limply, impotently. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... forest, thick and black, spread away, he knew, for hundreds of miles, and neither city nor town broke it. A fervent imagination leaped up and peopled it with weird beings. Nor would imagination go down before will and knowledge. Boughs twisted themselves into fantastic, hideous shapes, and the moan of the wind was certainly like the cry of ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manager over our entire establishment, and he is one of the most active and useful men I ever saw—bright, quick, characteristically American. I think you'll like him. That place over there"—cutting his whip toward an old frame house scalloped and corniced in fantastic flimsiness—"was sold the other day at about thirty per cent more than it would have brought a few ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket, worn and patched, and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was very poor. She was not stout but squarely built and ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... up on the bed, feeling mechanically at the place where the handle of his sword would have been but two hours since, feeling his hair stand on end, and a cold sweat began to stream down his face as the strange fantastic being step by step approached him. At length the apparition paused, the prisoner and he stood face to face for a moment, their eyes riveted; then the mysterious stranger spoke in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... not quite convincing. The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of the Puritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birth named Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, was probably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantastic suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also been made,—attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the strangest creature among the terrestrial fauna of Provence: a slim, swaying thing of so fantastic an appearance that uninitiated fingers dare not lay hold of it. The children of my neighbourhood, impressed by its startling shape, call it "the Devilkin." In their imaginations, the queer little creature savours of witchcraft. One comes ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... top of the cliff she looked back, and saw that he was still standing—a squat, fantastic figure like a goblin out of a fairy-tale—outlined against the shining sea behind him, a blot ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... This fantastic, savage vengeance was a thing dreadful to hear; what it must have been to see I can only guess. I know that I wished I might have fled from it and that I pleaded with Jodd for mercy on these men. But neither he nor his companions would ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... shade, behold once more the beloved being in the midst of infernal fires, and receive from his hands the enchanted and avenging sword. Armed Valkyrias cross the sky; ravens comment on the actions of men; the tone is sad and doleful, sometimes so curt and abrupt that, in order to follow the poet's fantastic imaginations, a marginal commentary would be necessary, as for the "Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, in whom lives again something of the spirit ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... character,—not so far indeed as that a bona fide individual should be described or imagined, but yet so that the features which give interest and permanence to the class should be individualized. The old tragedy moved in an ideal world,—the old comedy in a fantastic world. As the entertainment, or new comedy, restrained the creative activity both of the fancy and the imagination, it indemnified the understanding in appealing to the judgment for the probability of the scenes represented. The ancients themselves acknowledged the new comedy as an exact copy of ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Roger Stephen Osborne Hamley. She let the squire exhaust himself in wondering as to the particulars of every event, helping him out in conjectures; and both of them, from their imperfect knowledge of possibilities, made the most curious, fantastic, and improbable guesses at the truth. And so that day passed ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... models he affected chiefly Gladstone, Balfour, and Joe Chamberlin. In hours of thought he made drawings of Our Lord with a crown of thorns or nailed to a cross—these suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic drawings or lecture notes. As the mind wandered and lingered the fingers followed it, and as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would even draw on the top of his own notes. He had always had facility and that facility increased, so that in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... foreign in conception to the rest of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of the windows of some church in an advanced stage of fantastic design at ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... form a long chain, the extreme end of which was brought up by old Onucz in whose hand he placed a slender conducting rod which hung down from the altar. Then he recited the fantastic oath before them all once more, whilst they repeated every syllable of it after him. The comedy was concluded by a violent electric shock which instantly sent a spasm of pain through the muscles and sinews of every member of the living chain. The poor untaught creatures all imagined ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... resplendent social manner cast the eye of favor on Dolly Travers, after having remarked her unquestioned superiority with the light fantastic toe, Skippy felt exactly the way the Vicomte de Bragelonne did when royalty appeared to claim the hand of Louise de la Valliere. Hickey was in the heavy middleweight class while he was still a bantam. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... time when, as children, we first encounter the words, in geographical compilations disguised as books of travel, what visions do they not summon up! Visions of the realm of the Frost King and of his Regent, the White Tzar, as fantastic as any of those narrated of tropic climes by Scheherezade, and with which we are far more familiar than we are with the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... effected an interchange of this sort with Sir W. ROBERTSON NICOLL; the Editor of The British Weekly devoting himself to the composition of poems, while the poet assumed editorial control of the famous newspaper. If the theory thus crudely stated sounds somewhat fantastic the arguments on which it is based are extraordinarily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... my shoes and pulled on a pair of boots. They fitted perfectly. Evidently I had been tapped for this job as soon as word of Silas Cumshaw's death had reached Luna and there must have been some fantastic hurrying ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... into the dimness leapt a tall, dark figure that sang in a rich, sweet voice, and capered among the shadows with a fantastic dancing step, then grew suddenly silent and still. And in that moment the moon shone out again, shone down upon a strange, wild creature, bareheaded and bare of foot. A very tall man he was, with curling gray hair that hung low upon his shoulders, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... told that your poor father's house, long before you were born, was in danger of being reduced to ashes by candles and candlesticks? And when Young England and his companions began to put their shirts on, over their clothes, and to play all sorts of fantastic tricks in them, why didn't you come and tell your poor father and me, like a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... others in the same category that follow here. But I am none the less convinced that these old-time favourites, not yet unknown, though familiar to city children in the present generation mainly in their variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime form, were in Scotland and England alike in the last century more essentially the books of childhood than any others known and read beyond the walls of the school-room. The travelling stationers and packmen carried them ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... sufficiently tired of eating and drinking, we all got up to dance; and the mild splendour of the moon was utterly eclipsed, by the glittering dazzle of some hundreds of lamps; red, green, yellow, and blue; the rainbow burlesqued; all mingled, in fantastic wreaths and forms, and suspended among the foliage; that the trees might be as fine as ourselves! The invention, disposition, and effect, however, were highly applauded. And, since the evil was small and the mirth great, what could a man do, but shake his ears, kick his heels, cut ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... enfranchised. Congress decided to recommend that the representation of the South should be greater or less according to the extent to which the Negro population were admitted to the franchise or excluded from it. This clause was re-cast more than once in order to satisfy a fantastic scruple of Sumner's concerning the indecency of mentioning the fact that some people were black and others white, a scruple which he continued to enforce with his customary appeals to the Declaration of Independence, until even his ally Stevens ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... best testimony to her real ability. For the reader of to-day they are of incomparably more interest than anything to be found in the poems. There is often the most condensed and telling expression; a swift turn that shows what power of description lay under all the fantastic turns of the style Du Bartas had created for her. That he underrated them was natural. The poems had brought her honor in the old home and the new. The meditations involved no anxious laboring after a rhyme, no straining a metaphor till it cracked. They were natural thought ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... mainland that no swimmer could stem it; and then I come up here, and look down from above upon it. It's the finest point on all our Cornish coast, this point we stand on. It has the widest view, the purest air, the hardest rock, the highest and most fantastic tor ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... rapid stream runs, between two lines of hills towards the valley of the Dhoon. It is an overhanging rock, about 50 feet high, through which water pours from above, in innumerable little streams, like a perpetual shower of rain! The never-abating action of the water has worn the rock into many fantastic shapes; and, crusting round the moss and fibres of the roots of trees, has given to it almost the appearance of a spar cavern. In several places the water has worn little reservoirs for itself, which are always full. It is cool, clear, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... dirty, grasping little man, cruel enough to have been made out of its scraps. It was a hard, remorseless little door, that took in a visitor at a gulp and closed after him with a bite. If the luckless caller happened to be a debtor, the fantastic barbarity of his reception was positively infernal. The jerk of grotesque ferocity that greeted him was like the "hoop la!" of a demonized gymnast. The straight-backed chair looked like a part of the stiff, angular man. The yellow-wash on the wall seemed to ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... opposing both to the best of my ability. Mr. Booth's system appears to me, and, as I have shown, is regarded by Socialists themselves, to be mere autocratic Socialism, masked by its theological exterior. That the "fantastic" religious skin will wear away, and the Socialistic reality it covers will show its real nature, is the expressed hope of one candid Socialist, and may be fairly conceived to be the unexpressed belief of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the angular crags, and pierced, in long, level rays, through their fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up red, splintered masses of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless, slept, in the blue sky, the utmost ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... drawn to a new phenomenon—the serpents of the outer air. These were long, thin, fantastic coils of vapour-like material, which turned and twisted with great speed, flying round and round at such a pace that the eyes could hardly follow them. Some of these ghost-like creatures were twenty or thirty ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sound of an approaching multitude. They looked out of one of the windows and perceived the house surrounded by the galley-slaves, in number, apparently, about a hundred. They were all dressed in a most fantastic manner with whatever they could pick up: some had fire-arms, but the most of them were supplied with only swords or knives. With them came also their cortege of plunder: carts of various descriptions, loaded with provisions of all sorts, and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have come from the fantastic anvils of ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... upon the lake was beautiful. One side of it is bordered by a steep crag, from which hung a thousand enormous icicles all glittering in the sun; on the other side was a little wood, now exhibiting that fantastic appearance which the pine trees present when their branches are loaded with snow. On the frozen bosom of the lake itself were a multitude of moving figures, some flitting along with the velocity of swallows, some sweeping in the most graceful circles, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... eye, might see a history written there of a sorrow that went deeper than that—a sorrow not tempered by any pleasure. On ordinary occasions this was the predominant expression of his countenance—mixed however at all times with something of a humorous aspect, a half fantastic sense of the ludicrous, and perhaps a few reliques of that sternness which at one time was said to have had some place in the composition of his character. But this had long given way to the influences of time and the ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... occurred. A man might be seen in a jacket with one sleeve, because the other was not yet finished; or others went about in duffel jackets with sleeves of cotton of various colours; gowns like Joseph's coat were worn, and dresses of such fantastic shapes, that to tell the fashion of the same would have been ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... transformation scenes a less extravagant episode, in which the heath dimly appeared behind the general brilliancy of the action. She was dancing to wondrous music, and her partner was the man in silver armour who had accompanied her through the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet being closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic. Soft whispering came into her ear from under the radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in Paradise. Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... processes. But when they are thus conglomerated and consolidated outside the conscious mind, and function automatically, involuntarily, by themselves, then they have become dangerous to the mental stability. Their pressure and influence may be felt in the conscious life—in fantastic imaginations, in fears, phobias, and obsessions—in morbid dreams—in morbid emotional and moral reactions throughout the entire psycho-physical life. It is these automatic, self-acting complexes which originate many of the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... house, or the news that some one dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be similarly destroyed—and that in no very great space of time—in all neutral ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is on the rampage the only thing for a rational man to do is to climb a tree and let the cataclysm go by. And so, some time ago, when the word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed there. I ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... was meagre. It was that they found keener delights and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight, who had played the game in its biggest and most fantastic aspects, found that here, on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it was still the same old game. Man had still work to perform, forces to combat, obstacles to overcome. When he experimented in a small way at raising a few pigeons for market, he found no less zest ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... in Jesus Christ? The Church's "saint" seems to mean less than the world's "man of honour."' God forbid that it should be fancied that Christian sainthood is more tolerant of evil than worldly morality, or has any fantastic standard of goodness which makes up for departures from the plain rule of right by prayers and raptures. But surely there may be a principle of action deep down at the bottom of a heart, very feeble in its present exercise and manifestation, which yet is the true man, and is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... slightly specialized, animistic belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in the civilized communities of today. Those modern ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... tempted to contract is so intensely personal, and the vows made under the influence of its transient infatuation so sacred and enduring, that only an atrociously wicked man could make light of or forget them. What is more, as the same fantastic errors are inculcated in men, and the conscientious ones therefore feel bound in honor to stand by what they have promised, one of the surest methods to obtain a husband is to practise on his susceptibilities until he is either carried away ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... I have said, has all the attributes of government in common with her stouter and more famous sisters. She has a governor, and an upper house and a lower house of legislature; and she is somewhat fantastic in the use of these constitutional powers, for she calls on them to sit now in one town and now in another. Providence is the capital of the State; but the Rhode Island parliament sits sometimes at Providence and sometimes at Newport. At stated times also ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... stars, swinging about in the sky, like incandescent bulbs strung on a wire, made their appearance here and there. They came out rapidly, by twos and threes, by scores and hundreds. In clusters and fantastic figures they swam ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... origin of species, but in all the great problems of biology a new era began. So unexpected was the discovery that many naturalists were convinced it was untrue, and at once proclaimed Mendel's conclusions as either altogether mistaken, or if true, of very limited application. Many fantastic notions about the workings of Heredity had been asserted as general principles before: this was probably only another fancy ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... no one of the fantastic legends here recorded; possibly they were not believed by their very fabricators. They are useful only as tending to show the moral atmosphere of the house and its occupants. There is sometimes ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester Warehousemen, and so forth, had its place of business in a very narrow street somewhere behind the Post Office; where every house was in the brightest summer morning very gloomy; and where light porters watered the pavement, each before his own employer's premises, in fantastic patterns, in the dog-days; and where spruce gentlemen with their hands in the pockets of symmetrical trousers, were always to be seen in warm weather, contemplating their undeniable boots in dusty warehouse doorways; which appeared to be the hardest work they did, except now ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... sprains, burns, or dislocations, to which popular credulity ascribed unfailing efficacy[50]. Charms, however, against spiritual enemies, were yet more common than those intended to cure corporeal complaints. This is not surprising, as a fantastic remedy well suited ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... plans and landscapes, and write verses, and rear temples, and dig grottoes; and he will stand in a clear summer night in the colonnade before the hall, and gaze on the deer as they stray in the moonlight, or lie shadowed by the boughs of the huge old fantastic oaks; and he will repeat verses to his beautiful wife, who will hang upon his arm;—and he will be ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... This hour enjoyment more intense Shall captivate each ravish'd sense, Than thou could'st compass in the bound Of the whole year's unvarying round; And what the dainty spirits sing, The lovely images they bring, Are no fantastic sorcery. Rich odors shall regale your smell, On choicest sweets your palate dwell, Your feelings thrill with ecstasy. No preparation do we need, Here we together ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... if he is of a philosophic turn, he comes, like Oken, to write a scheme of creation under a 'sort of inspiration,' but it is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. The whole world of nature is laid for such a man under a fantastic law of glamour, and he becomes capable of believing anything; and he is able, with a continually growing neglect of all the facts around him, with equal confidence and equal delusion, to look back to any past and to look on to ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... mourning. Her father had died in the year previous to that, of a still more curious and enthralling complication of ailments.[9] Jos, his son, carried on the Wrackgarth Works, and Emily kept house for Jos. She with her own hand had made this pudding. But for her this pudding would not have been. Fantastic! Utterly incredible! And yet so it was. She was grown-up. She was mistress of the house. She could make or unmake puddings at will. And yet she was Emily ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... had brought me into a strange old haunted forest, and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled mossy root of a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes and capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queen or ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... what sort of men lived in this fantastic city. So far, he had seen no one. The streets below had been filled with moving vehicles of some kind, but it had been difficult to tell whether there had been anyone walking down there ...
— Viewpoint • Gordon Randall Garrett
... He could not imagine that these magnificent promises were real when he looked upon the coarse cloak with which he was covered, the furniture, and the fantastic utensils of his landlord. The latter, after having been some moments lost in reflection, thus resumed ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... it follows true conscience. I knew, in her, that conscience,—and know it in these fantastic shadows cast by her light. If you do also, be assured that the light ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... ALVA. Fantastic dreams! No more. A boy's ambition, too, perchance To play some lofty part! What can he less? These thoughts will vanish when he's called ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... no petitions were presented against granting the suffrage to women. These numbers were undoubtedly a surprise to many members of parliament who were inclined to look upon woman suffrage as an "impracticable fad," "the fantastic crochet of a few shrieking sisters." But the collection and arrangement of the signatures took up incalculable time, and after a few years this method of agitation was discarded to a great extent in the large political centres. Friends ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... sense of unreality, of incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy, pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed with dangling foxtails,—creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... some haunted spot, shunned of men. The twisted ivy stems clambered everywhere, hiding everything away beneath a luxuriant green mantle. Moss and lichens, brown and gray, yellow and red, covered the trees with fantastic patches of color, grew upon the benches in the garden, overran the roof and the walls of the house. The window-sashes were weather-worn and warped with age, the balconies were dropping to pieces, the terraces in ruins. Here and there the folding shutters hung by a single hinge. The crazy ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... full of vivid fancy and quaint originality. In its most fantastic imaginings it carries with it a sense of reality, and derives a singular attraction from that combination of simplicity, originality, and subtle humour, which is so much appreciated by lively and thoughtful children. Children of a larger ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... the gigantic form of two men strangely merged into one, there uprose on that summit a figure so odd, weird, and grimly fantastic, it was small wonder I gazed, never thinking it could be other than the Evil One. It was unclothed from head to heel, and, gleaming ghastly white beneath the moonbeams, it brought no Indian suggestion to mind. High above the head, causing ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... in a thin and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious, concentrated quality and a strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also the impression—was it too fantastic—of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... there is no supreme sense of right to which the agitated nature can cling and steady itself to quiet endurance, one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague clutching after any deed that will change the actual condition. Poor Hetty's vision of consequences, at no time more than a narrow fantastic calculation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was now quite shut out by reckless irritation under present suffering, and she was ready for one of those convulsive, motiveless actions by which wretched men and women leap ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... lipping over, at their crests, fell in a roar of foam that hissed a deep sigh on the pebbles of the beach, and left the silence greater than before. Masses of ice floated here and there on the surface of the deep, the edges and fantastic points of which were tipped with light. Not far from the northern extremity of the sand-bank a large iceberg had grounded, from the sides of which several pinnacles had been hurled by the shock and now lay stranded on ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... landscape. Looking from the drawing-room windows of the house, you saw in the near foreground the pretty French garden, with its fantastic parti-coloured beds, and its broad gravelled walks and terrace; proudly promenading which, or perched on the stone balustrade might be seen perchance a peacock flaunting his beauties in the sun. Then came the carefully kept gardens, bounded on the one side by the Long Walk ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... fantastic changes took place in the costumes of courtiers and their followers. At the restoration, the dress most common to women of all ranks consisted of a gown with a laced stomacher and starched neckerchief, a sad-coloured cloak with a French hood, and a high-crowned hat. Such habiliments, admitting ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the month of March the pupils at the Villa Camellia celebrated a carnival of their own. It coincided with a local festival at Fossato, on which occasion the inhabitants were wont to make merry, dressing themselves in fantastic costumes, parading the streets, and letting off fireworks. Originally the girls had been taken to see the gay doings, but the town was often so rough that Miss Rodgers had decided it was an unsuitable entertainment for young ladies, and, to prevent disappointment, made the happy suggestion that ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... idea. The Foanna had transported them all to the deck of Torgul's cruiser after asking him to picture it for her mentally. And to all outward appearances the Baldy ship before them now was twin to the one which had taken him once on a fantastic voyage across a long-vanished stellar empire. Such ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... officers, shipping agents, and stevedores with trollies drawn by little Corsican ponies. There were shops selling strange sweetmeats. Smoke enshrouded huts where seamen were cooking. There were merchants selling monkeys, parrots, rope, sailcloth and fantastic collections of bric-a-brac where, heaped up pell-mell, were old culverins, great gilded lanterns, old blocks and tackle, old rusting anchors, old rigging, old megaphones, old telescopes, dating from the time ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... uncommon; rare, curious, odd, extraordinary, out of the ordinary; strange, monstrous; wonderful &c 870; unexpected, unaccountable; outre [Fr.], out of the way, remarkable, noteworthy; queer, quaint, nondescript, none such, sui generis [Lat.]; unfashionable; fantastic, grotesque, bizarre; outlandish, exotic, tombe des nues [Fr.], preternatural; denaturalized^. heterogeneous, heteroclite [Gramm.], amorphous, mongrel, amphibious, epicene, half blood, hybrid; androgynous, androgynal^; asymmetric &c 243; adelomorphous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition was repeated on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... fantastic round of dissipation, who eagerly seek pleasure in the lofty dome, rich treat, and midnight revel—tell me, ye thoughtless daughters of folly, have ye ever found the phantom you have so long sought with such unremitted assiduity? ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... because they were absorbed by the study of the underlying laws which must hold for every one. It is hardly surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries. Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life and experience had been disregarded. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... for the night. We found there Lieutenant F—— and an escort of twenty horse, which had been sent to meet us from Fort Laramie. They had our tents pitched for us, and everything ready. A wild, lonely place was this green valley, with its fantastic waterworn bluffs that bore a grotesque resemblance to turtles, seals and other great sea-beasts, and it was delightful to see trees again and to hear the sound of running water. The children at once pulled off shoes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of stones, that rise up singly or in clusters, here and there; presenting sometimes the fantastic appearance of old ruined castles or giant graves, ...
— Dream Life and Real Life • Olive Schreiner
... the great, winged, human-headed bulls, which flanked the principal doorways. The one herewith given (Fig. 19) is from Sargon's palace at Khorsabad. The peculiar methods of Assyrian sculpture are not ill suited to this fantastic creature, an embodiment of force and intelligence. One special peculiarity will not escape the attentive observer. Like all his kind, except in Sennacherib's palace, this bull has five legs. He was designed to be looked at from directly in front or from the side, not from an intermediate ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... which they fold and drape over the figure, that are the same in all times. If the expression of the figure through the draperies is sought by the painter, a permanent quality will be given in his work, whatever fantastic shapes the cut of the garments ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... yes. When I was your age I twirled the light fantastic with the best. But gradually, Lennan, one came to see it could not be done without a partner—there was the rub! Tell me—do you regard women as responsible beings? I should like to have your ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Dress'd in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... coast, for it was ten miles from the sea, though enchanting views of the Channel were frequent and exquisite. It was a palace built in old days upon the Downs, but sheltered and screened from every hostile wind. The full warmth of the south fell upon the vast but fantastic pile of the Renaissance style, said to have been built by that gifted but mysterious individual, John of Padua. The gardens were wonderful, terrace upon terrace, and on each terrace a tall fountain. But the most peculiar feature was the park, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... decidedly of a different opinion from him, they have not only a power and a right, but they are bound in conscience to bring in a verdict accordingly.' BOWELL. The World is described by Gifford in his Baviad and Marviad, as a paper set up by 'a knot of fantastic coxcombs to direct the taste of the town.' Lowndes (Bibl. Man. ed. 1871, p. 2994) confounds it with The World mentioned ante, i. 257. The 'popular gentleman' was Fox, whose Libel Bill passed the House of Lords in June 1792. Parl. Hist. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... he was dangerous; and would ask in an alarming manner, "Who are you?" Any fantastic, much more any suspicious-looking person, might fare the worse. An idle lounger at the street-corner he has been known to hit over the crown; and peremptorily despatch: "Home, Sirrah, and take to some work!" That the Apple-women ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... managed that one of the city officials was on the point of offering a reward for the discovery of the missing Diedrich. This little man in knee-breeches and cocked hat was the germ of the whole "Knickerbocker legend," a fantastic creation, which in a manner took the place of history, and stamped upon the commercial metropolis of the New World the indelible Knickerbocker name and character; and even now in the city it is an undefined patent of nobility to trace descent from ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... guests passed on into the room of the new-born child—la camera del Puttino. Here the walls were hung with brocades of the Sforza colours, red, white, and blue, and tapestries, embroidered with all manner of beasts and birds and fantastic designs. But the golden cradle itself, which had been made in Milan, was the most beautiful thing of all, with its four slender columns and pale blue silk canopy enriched with gold cords and fringes. "Truly rich and elegant beyond anything that I have ever seen!" writes the ecstatic maid ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... drenched leaves o'erhead, nor crowns cast off, Violet and parsley crowns to trample on— 75 Sings, pausing as the patron-ghosts approve, Devoutly their unconquerable hymn. But you must say a "well" to that—say "well!" Because you gaze—am I fantastic, sweet? Gaze like my very life's-stuff, marble—marbly 80 Even to the silence! Why, before I found The real flesh Phene, I inured myself To see, throughout all nature, varied stuff For better nature's birth by means of art: With me, each substance ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... bookman of the party: the most iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar, provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, who curried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments, clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... everybody can see the sort of house the brother and sister lived in, though they can never imagine the absurdities into which a clever builder dragged the ignorant pair,—new inventions, fantastic ornaments, a system for preventing smoky chimneys, another for preventing damp walls; painted marquetry panels on the staircase, colored glass, superfine locks,—in short, all those vulgarities which make a house expensive ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... and legs, and moving onwards. I saw my uncle ahead; and the green trees, with their vast stems and intricate tracery of sepos and vines, with numberless parasites hanging from them of every variety of fantastic form, on either side of me; and the bright blue sky overhead; and birds of gorgeous plumage, uttering strange notes, flying backwards and forwards. Here and there, tall trunks had fallen prostrate, or were inclining at various angles, and suspended by a network ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston |
