"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I took to bee meare fantasy I finde nowe to bee real; murder is A cryinge sinne, and canot be conceal'd. Yet his ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... have wished me to shun the acquaintance of the family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel with you—read ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... if a phrenzy do possess the brain, It so disturbs and blots the form of things, As fantasy proves altogether vain, And to the wit, no true relation brings. Then doth the wit, admitting all for true, Build fond conclusions on those ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... shall ever hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... brightness! What she was i' th' sun (Where I had enter'd), not through change of hue, But light transparent—did I summon up Genius, art, practice—I might not so speak, It should be e'er imagin'd: yet believ'd It may be, and the sight be justly crav'd. And if our fantasy fail of such height, What marvel, since no eye above the sun Hath ever travel'd? Such are they dwell here, Fourth family of the Omnipotent Sire, Who of his spirit and of his offspring shows; And holds them still enraptur'd with the view. And thus to me Beatrice: "Thank, oh thank, The Sun ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... that is but fantasy. He has a kindly word for all who please his eye. It may be one today and another tomorrow. He ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hardly breathe for delight. The Alps, whether in their Swiss or Italian aspects, were dear and familiar to her. She climbed nimbly and well; and her senses knew the magic of high places. But never surely had even travelled eyes beheld a nobler fantasy of Nature than that composed by these snows and forests of Lake Louise; such rocks of opal and pearl; such dark gradations of splendour in calm water; such balanced intricacy and harmony in the building of this ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... this time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers on being so small and adding that, with so manifest a subordination of matter to mind, ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... he remarks, as the archaeologist excavates below the surface and recovers and puts together the fragments of an antique statue. Much of the material found, however, has only a symbolic value requiring interpretation and is sometimes pure fantasy. Freud now attaches great importance to dreams as symbolically representing much in the subject's mental history which is otherwise difficult to reach.[275] The subtle and slender clues which Freud frequently follows in interpreting dreams cannot fail sometimes to arouse doubt ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... towel. How badly he was hurt— whether he might not even die before Dick's return— she had no way of telling. His inconsequent babble at first frightened her, for she had never before seen a person in delirium, nor heard of the insistence with which one harps upon some fantasy seized upon by a ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... Keats' amusing fantasy, Cap and Bells, the Emperor Elfinan greets Hum, the great soothsayer, and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... pencil worthy of the caricaturist Hoffmann himself, he drew a dreadful picture of Offenbach and his times; of the mighty fiddler beating time upon the well-filled goatskin and sawing away across the strings, his mouth widened with a grin "like some drunken conception of Edgar Poe's, or some fantasy of Hoffmann, while the startled birds flew back to heaven, the moon split herself back to her ears, and the stars giggled behind their cloud-fans." The planetary system only revolved to frisky rhythms, and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard "Tweet-tweet," and "Chirp-chirp." Then he was really angry, but ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred echo of the London life, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... chat. It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical humoreske by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears, pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a girl—light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can resist all appeal and evade all attack—an invincible butterfly, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... they had glimpses through lattice windows of marvelous and fantastic merchandise. Marvelous and fantastic it seemed to Winny at first sight. But when she saw that it was just what they were selling in the shops to-day the delicious confusion in her mind heightened the effect of fantasy and of enchantment. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... vision—whether fantasy or prophecy—could not fail to stir Lilamani Sinclair's Eastern heart to its depths. But she shrank from sceptical comment; and sceptical Nevil would surely be. As for Roy, intuition warned her it was too heady an idea to implant in his ardent brain. So she treasured it secretly, and read ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... mugwort, and dandelion—and twenty herbs beside, for aught I know. It's right unthankful of her not to mend; but childre is that thoughtless! And Roger, he spoils the maid—never stands up to her a bit—gives in to every whim and fantasy she takes in her head. If she cried for the moon, he'd borrow every ladder in the parish and lash 'em together ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... fashed in my life; for having hitherto, in all my plans for the improvement of the town, not only succeeded, but given satisfaction, I was vexed to see the council run away with such a speculative vagary. No doubt, the popular fantasy anent education and academies, had quite as muckle to do in the matter as Mr Plan's fozey rhetoric, but what availed that to me, at seeing a reasonable undertaking reviled and set aside, and grievous debts about to be laid on the community for a bubble as ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... frenzy; cloudland^, dreamland; flight of fancy, fumes of fancy; thick coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... singing like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and the other internal affections can likewise impress upon it divers ideas; what must be understood by the common sense (sensus communis) in which these ideas are received, by the memory which retains them, by the fantasy which can change them in various ways, and out of them compose new ideas, and which, by the same means, distributing the animal spirits through the muscles, can cause the members of such a body to move in as many different ways, and in a manner as suited, whether ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... now!" And home returned, ashamed and sorrowful; Whilst ceaselessly endured that foolish play Moon after moon—the Prince the loser still. Then Damayanti, seeing so estranged Her lord, the praised in song, the chief of men, Watching, all self-possessed, his fantasy, And how the gaming held him; sad, and 'feared, The heavy fortunes pondering of her Prince; Hating the fault, but to the offender kind; And fearing Nala should be stripped of all, This thing devised: Vrihatsena ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom, country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge, disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith, fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief, happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy, justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy, melody, mercy, moon, mortal, nature, noble, night, paradise, parting, peace, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... eyes turned in mute admiration towards the dawning day, it would have required but a slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... talk of dreams Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy; Which is as thin of substance as the air; And more inconstant than the wind. 581 SHAKS.: Rom. and Jul., Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... uplifts cringed low and in the horizons the mountain peaks floated languidly upon the waves of heat. And in all this dispassionate land, from horizon to horizon, there were only My Lady and I, and the beleaguering Sioux. It seemed unreal, a fantasy; but the rocks began to smell scorched, a sudden thirst nagged and my wounded arm pained with weariness as if to remind that I was here, in the body. Yes, and here she was, also, in the flesh, as much as I, for she stirred, glanced at me, and smiled. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... sinful fantasy to work? The Dove, the wing'd Columbus of man's haven? The tender Love-Bird—or the filial Stork? The punctual Crane—the providential Raven? The Pelican whose bosom feeds her young? Nay, must we cut from Saturday till Monday That feather'd marvel with a human ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... her acquainted with the history of her cousin, and willing to aid in some fantasy which was to lead to the present happy restoration of the latter to her ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... said she. "I hate being cooped up in a four-post bed, with all the curtains drawn; and that lumbering thing's no better. Faith'll go, I don't doubt; any thing that's a bit smart and showy!! take her: and Lettice may please herself. I dare say the child will have a fantasy to ride in a caroche ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in remote depths, touch bottom. Enough 'meaning' has been educed from 'Childe Roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a School of Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day. Worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Matteo Palmieri, (two dim figures move under that name in contemporary history,) was the reputed author of a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... being extremely active in its nature, and in continual motion, which produces always some fantasy; above all, melancholy persons, like you, Brutus, are more apt to form to themselves in the imagination ideal images, which sometimes pass to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... writing my Tambourin Chinois.[A] The idea for it came to me after a visit to the Chinese theater in San Francisco—not that the music there suggested any theme, but it gave me the impulse to write a free fantasy ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived him of ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... (1767) were among the best and most popular of the Anglo-Oriental stories that strove to inculcate moral truths. In their oppressive air of gravity, Beckford, with his implacable hatred of bores, could hardly have breathed. One of the most amazing facts about his wild fantasy is that it was the creation of an English brain. The idea of Vathek was probably suggested to Beckford by the witty Oriental tales of Count Antony Hamilton and of Voltaire. The character of the caliph, who desired to know everything, even the sciences which did not exist, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... new-stablished would stand, and be No longer vext of this infirmity. And so that night, ere lying down to sleep, There came on him, half making him to weep And half to laugh that such a thing should be, A mad conceit and antic fantasy (And yet more sad than merry was the whim) To crave this boon of Sleep, beseeching him To send the dream of dreams most coveted. And ere he lay him down upon his bed, A soft sweet song was born within his thought; ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... walls narrowing toward the top, the gate which connected them, the flat sculptures in which order was mingled with gloomy fantasy and piety with cruelty, produced a tremendous impression. It seemed difficult to enter that place, impossible to go out, and a burden to ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... very few steps to make, but before she had stopped, confronting Immada, d'Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another universe, as if presented by the fantasy of a fevered memory. He saw her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under lofty ceilings that like a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... chosen for this ancient controversy. Aucassin's threat that if he loses Nicolete he will not wait for sword or knife, but will dash his head against a wall, is in the very temper of the prisoned warrior-poet, who actually chose this way of death. Then the night scene, with its fantasy, and shadow, and moonlight on flowers and street, yields to a picture of the day, with the birds singing, and the shepherds laughing, in the green links between wood and water. There the shepherds take Nicolete for a fairy, so bright a beauty shines about her. Their mockery, their ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... friend, can your philosophy explain this startling verification, this reflex action of the vision, or the fantasy, or whatever else you may please to term it, whose prophetic shadow fell upon my astonished senses long years before? In all the intervening time, we were separated by great distance, no word or sign passed between us, nor did we even hear of each other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reigning had the Duke of Reichstadt, that child of thirteen, condemned by all the Powers of Europe? By what means could he mount the throne? Who would be regent in his name? A Bonaparte? The forgetful Marie Louise? Such hypotheses were relegated to the domain of pure fantasy. Apart from a few fanatical old soldiers who persisted in saying that Napoleon was not dead, no one, in 1824, believed in the resurrection of the Empire. As for Orleanism, it was as yet a myth. The Duke of Orleans himself was not an Orleanist. Of all the courtiers of Charles X., he was the most eager, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... ago. As if a portion of that Thought By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... herself hardly knowing one end of a horse from the other, might make forty thousand pounds in a year on the Turf, without even her own husband so much as suspecting her activities. The thing isn't likely, is indeed a fantasy of the wildest improbability; but, told with the zest imparted to it here by Mr. Grant Richards, it provides first-rate fun. Some danger of monotony there was bound to be in what is really a variation upon a single theme. Though the author cunningly avoids this, I think it might ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... have a friend? If the worst happens——?" And when he asked, "May I hope that she would some day let me be more than that?" the glow of joy on that stricken face, the cry of rapture, the hand held to him, stirred him so deeply that his old love-longing seemed a boyish fantasy. "Oh, you have made me happy! You have blotted out all my follies and sufferings!" Then the poor tortured ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... but fantasy, for my love lay still In my arms with her tender eyes aglow, And she wondered why my lips were chill, Why I was ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... Infinity A model of their own [11]— Thy will is done, O God! The star hath ridden high Thro' many a tempest, but she rode Beneath thy burning eye; And here, in thought, to thee— In thought that can alone Ascend thy empire and so be A partner of thy throne— By winged Fantasy [12], My embassy is given, Till secrecy shall knowledge be In ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... sourly, "It would seem that I was in error. That our young Susan Self was not spouting fantasy. There evidently actually is an underground movement interested in changing our institutions." He stirred in his chair and his scowl went deeper. "And evidently working on a basis never conceived of by subversive organizations of the past. The fact that they have successfully remained ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... nature was of the kind that rises to the top of the mountains and sinks again to the lowest vales. She had been on the tip-top of the hills of her own fantasy all that evening. When she ran quickly home under the stars she began to realize what she had done She had done something of which her mother would have been ashamed. Not for a moment had Kathleen thought of this way of looking at her escapade until she read ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... faculty of imagination and the force of example are important considerations in the development of the spiritual feelings and the formation of fine ideals. The world of make-believe, of purest fantasy, is just as interesting and just as significant as the every day actualities of life. It makes not the slightest difference to a little boy, or girl, whether the stories you read them, or the acts of hero and heroine, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy; Sleep she as sound as careless infancy: 50 But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Wareburghus filled my mind, As fair a saint as any town can boast, Or be the earth with light or mirk ywrynde,[4] I see his image walking through the coast: Fitz-Hardynge, Bithrickus, and twenty moe, In vision 'fore my fantasy did go. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... quarrel in a straw, When honour's at the stake. How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain?—O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... few gifted or chosen ones. They were split up into different sects, according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant. The "creed of those who know" never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and rules over everything with unlimited ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... impress of the impiety of her[1] who changed her form into the bird that most delights in singing. And here was my mind so shut up within itself that from without came nothing which then might he received by it. Then rained down within my high fantasy, one crucified,[2] scornful and fierce in his look, and thus was dying. Around him were the great Ahasuerus, Esther his wife, and the just Mordecai, who was in speech and action so blameless. And when this imagination ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... many wonderful things that aroused our childish fantasy, when Balint Orzo and I were boys, but none so much as the old tower that stands a few feet from the castle, shadowy and mysterious. It is an old, curious, square tower, and at the brink of its notched edge there ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... derived his material largely from introspection. The story was completed by a sequel, Tommy and Grizel, published in 1900. The effect of this story was somewhat marred by the comparative failure of the scenes in society remote from Thrums. In 1902 he published The Little White Bird, a pretty fantasy, wherein he gave full play to his whimsical invention, and his tenderness for child life, which is relieved by the genius of sincerity from a suspicion of mawkishness. This book contained the episode of "Peter Pan," which afterwards suggested the play of that name. In the meantime Mr Barrie had been ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... fairy tales die hard, it is sometimes no easy task to discriminate between what is solid historical fact, what is fact, moss-grown and flower-covered, like an old, old tomb, and what is mere fantasy, the innocent fancy of a nation in its childhood, turned at last into stone—a lasting stalactite—from the countless droppings of belief bestowed upon it ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the speed-limit, sings "Oh ra-ha-ha-hap-ture !" several times, varied by "What can e-he-he-he-qual a brother's love?" Then, using the same words, they sing as much as possible in unison to the end of the scene, which closes with a fantasy of capricious arabesques and a series of trills on notes seldom heard from any but the ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and the life which they are represented as leading: that he has manufactured his local color to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... teleview showed the world to be one of fantasy, one to which the sun did not exist. It was not an utter, pitchy blackness that pervaded the water, but rather a peculiar, dark blueness. No fish schools, Keith noted, scurried from them. They had already left these waters; aware, perhaps, of ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... heaven of the Siddhas; but these are living beings who have crossed the boundary] There it continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. These fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syadvada—the doctrine of "It may be so",—a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny the existence of one and the same thing. If this be compared with ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... course, I include the great part of those who write literary criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach what they do not know .. . . There are many persons who suppose that the highest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and that anything else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagination. And not only people who seem cultivated, but are not so, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Clodd in Myths and Dreams, [121] Mr. Clodd shows that dreams were necessarily and invariably considered as real events, and it could not have been otherwise, as primitive man would have been unable to conceive the abstract idea of a vision or fantasy. And since during dreams the body remained immobile and quiescent, it was thought that the spirit inside the body left it and travelled independently. Hence the reluctance often evinced to waking a sleeper ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... in the forties, came up, their dark-brown, horseshoe beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo—some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree," which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than the "Merry Widow." ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... the people cry, I listen to their weary truth; Then turn again to fantasy, And the untroubled Land ...
— The Inn of Dreams • Olive Custance
... head (though not his heart) to be in love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... of life remained; not a hoofmark in the snow, nor a bruised blade of grass. And when they climbed to the plateau and looked back, it seemed to Trafford and his companions, as it seemed in after years, that this thing had been all a fantasy. But Hester's face was beside them, and it told of strange and unsubstantial things. The shadows of the middle world were upon her. And yet again when they turned at the last there was no token. It was a northern valley, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is a poem of profound sorrow and the most poignant resignation alternating with despair—has, by some strange torturing, been cited as being in strict sonata-form by one theorist (Harding: Novello's primer), is dubbed a free fantasy by another (Matthews), and is described as being in song-form by another: all of which is somewhat weakened by the dictum of still another theorist that the music is absolutely formless! A form of so doubtful an identity can surely lay small ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained M. S.'s "decayed human form, standing in the doorway with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... humanity, and find a suitable activity in social service. It may be transformed into the love of God, and find an outlet in the religious life of the individual. Or it may be expressed only in language, in which case it may stop at the stage of erotic fantasy and day-dream, or may result in some really great piece of poetry or prose. This last outlet is so common that our language is full of symbolic words and phrases which have a hidden erotic meaning attached ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... by many to be only a land of fantasy and of shadows. But it is not so. Dreams, for the most part, are fantastic; but all are not so. Nearer are we to the world of spirits, in sleep; and, at times, angels come to us with lessons of wisdom, darkly veiled under similitude, or written ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... begins to "pretend." She snatches off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... prayers. Minarets glistered, remote and ethereal, and tall spires lifted themselves like arrows in flight. On the left lay low hills softly outlined against the pearly sky; hills of fairyland that might dissolve and disappear with the falling night; hills on the borderland of fantasy and old romance. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... singing in the book, The Witchery of Archery by Maurice Thompson. To Will and Maurice Thompson we owe a debt of gratitude hard to pay. The tale of their sylvan exploits in the everglades of Florida has a charm that borders on the fay. We who shoot the bow today are children of their fantasy, offspring of their magic. As the parents of American archery, we offer them homage ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... blink. (39) And yet, may Heaven help me! my good sirs, I think, between ourselves, the culprit must have bestowed a kiss on Cleinias, than which love's flame asks no fiercer fuel. (40) So insatiable a thing it is and so suggestive of mad fantasy. (And for this reason held perhaps in higher honour, because of all external acts the close of lip with lip bears the same name as that of soul with soul in love.) (41) Wherefore, say I, let every one who wishes to be master of himself and sound of soul abstain from kisses imprinted ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... amusing allegorical fantasy. All the most interesting Days, grandchildren of Mother Year, came to Mrs. November's dinner party, to honour the ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Sample tattoo designs cover the two walls. Dragons, scorpions, bulbous nymphs, crossed flags, wreathed anchors, cupids, butterflies, daggers and quaint decorations that seem the grotesque survivals of the mid-Victorian schools of fantasy. Photographs of famous men also cover the walls—Capt. Constantinus tattooed from head to foot, every inch of him; Barnum's favorites, ancient and forgotten kooch dancers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, magicians and museum freaks. And a two column article from the Chicago Chronicle ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... and his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... corner my rival and the two moderationists were examining a manuscript without apparent consciousness of my existence. The sudden transposition of affairs made me sensitive. Paul Barr still sat at the piano executing his delirious fantasy, and ever and anon looking back over his shoulder at me. He at least was faithful. But it was not admiration I sought. I wished for respect for my intelligence, and to be considered a promising proselyte of culture. I seemed a few moments ago to have won this recognition from ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... incense of praise burned by M. de Balzac, "in honor of that daughter of a foreign soil," he has thus sketched the Polish woman in hues composed entirely of antitheses: "Angel through love, demon through fantasy; child through faith, sage through experience; man through the brain, woman through the heart; giant through hope, mother through sorrow; and poet through dreams." [Footnote: ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... rise above the river under the cold and witching moon—soon the misty veil of fantasy would lighten the tedious and commonplace life, and behind the veil of mist there would rise in dim outlines another kind ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, just as one happened to catch the glint of them. And she had fascinating ways, too, which the lady of his fantasy could never have displayed, or he would not have abandoned the vision so readily. When she smiled, it was with lips and eyes in unison. When she spoke he heard harmonies not framed in mere words, whereas the other fair dame ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... some scene whose beginning you once saw enacted on a street corner but passed by before the denouement was ready to be disclosed. Recall it all—that far the image is reproductive. But what followed? Let your fantasy roam at pleasure—the succeeding scenes are productive, for you have more or less consciously invented the unreal on the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. "Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... with the talking over of plans for John Strang's long-cherished idea of a forest garden at Heartholm, there had been no allusion between mistress and gardener to that far-off fantasy, the life of little Gargoyle. During the autumn the two drew plans together for those spots which next spring were to blossom in the beech glade. They sent to far-off countries for bulbs, experimented in the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... opened and that we were all three of us, on the threshold of another chamber. At the end of it stood something like a little altar of hard, black stone, and on this altar lay a mass of substance of the size of a child's head, but fashioned, I suppose from fantasy, to the oblong ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces himself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass through unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous power of his grief wielded imagination ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident. Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that Spenser ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... so it was! On the table stood pure water in a silver cup, and by it cakes of bread upon a golden platter. She stretched out her hand, for surely this fantasy was pleasant, and took that ghost of a silver cup, her own cup that Pharaoh had given her as a child, and brought it to her lips and drank, and lo! water pure and cold flowed down her throat, until at length even her raging ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... investments" (how edifying a phrase!) and all except one held on to them. That one was William Waldorf Astor of the present generation, who, we are told, "sold a million dollars worth of unpromising tenement house property in 1890."[156] What fantasy of action was it that caused William Waldorf Astor to so depart from the accepted formulas of his class as to give up these "magnificent investments?" Was it an abhorrence of tenements, or a growing fastidiousness as to the methods? It is to be ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... its tongue. Ultimately the interest on the subject became confined to a few papers which had received the best letters. Those papers that couldn't get interesting letters stopped the correspondence and sneered at the "sensationalism" of those that could. Among the mass of fantasy there were not a few notable solutions, which failed brilliantly, like rockets posing as fixed stars. One was that in the obscurity of the fog the murderer had ascended to the window of the bedroom by means of a ladder from the pavement. He had then with a diamond cut one ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... of delightful things but the delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writer had been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did you own the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature of fantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of my being. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate with robins— English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in a letter what I am now ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... deep significance underlying the myths we present—the poetry and imperishable beauty of the Greek, the strange and powerful conceptions of the Scandinavian mind, the oddity and fantasy of the Japanese, Slavs, and East Indians, and finally the queer imaginings of our own American Indians. Who, for instance, could ever forget poor Proserpina and the six pomegranate seeds, the death of beautiful Baldur, the luminous ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... Sung Periods was in reality the long arm and heavy fist of Confucius emphasizing a truer rationalism than that of his opponents and denouncing the danger of leaving the firm earth to soar into the unknown hazy regions of fantasy. It was Sung scholarship that gave ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Where have our imaginations gone, that we must have real rain upon the stage? Shall we clamor for real snow before long, that must be kept in cold storage against the spring season? A longing for concreteness has befogged our fantasy. Even so excellent an actor as Mr. Forbes-Robertson cannot read the great speech beginning, "Look here, upon this picture and on this," in which Hamlet obviously refers to two imaginary portraits in his mind's eye, without pointing successively to two absurd caricatures that ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... were inside it I laboriously hide it, And a rather pretty sermon you might preach Upon Fantasy, selecting For your "instance" the affecting Tale of me and my proceedings on ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... bestial from the moment, Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day, Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... and picturegraphed 'til the imagination ran riot, and ingenuity and fancy became lost, like ideas in a fantasy of words. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... sound? I could swear I heard the measured tramp of men And ring of mail, yet is it but illusion. Last night I thought I heard it as I lay Awake at dead of night. Mere fantasy Born of long solitude, for here there are ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... fancy. Even when the narrative records no historical series of events, it may express their general significance, and condense into itself something of the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy made a conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasy had been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its wild exaggerations, its reckless departures ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... it is all a fantasy of the imagination, Frank. You had better take a composing draught, and to-morrow will find you more cheerful," ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... the chaos and ferment of an over-stimulated brain, steeped in romantic literature, and given over to the wayward leadings of the imagination. Who can tell what is true, what is false, in a world where fantasy is as real as fact? Emerson's word fell like truth itself, "a shaft of light shot from the zenith," a golden rule of thought and action. His books were bread and wine to her, and she absorbed them into her very being. She ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... followed his track, finding his shoes and fragments of his attire on the opposite side of the run, which was torn up, with the marks of a terrible struggle and many feet. Probably he tore off his own clothes in the fancied fight, drew his knife, struck at "an air-born fantasy," and was finally partially restored by falling into the water, after which he completed his exhaustion by running back to ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... way to the bedroom door, went into the other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it and stepped outside. There was no moon, but there were millions of stars in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his way to the place where he had slept ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... window, or pillar by pillar. It is an advantage of these vast edifices, rising over us and spreading about us in such a firmamental way, that we cannot spoil them by any pettiness of our own, but that they receive (or absorb) our pettiness into their own immensity. Every little fantasy finds its place and propriety in them, like a flower on ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to be concealed: I believe that you already understand to whom I allude, and since you have discovered her weakness, it is right that you should know also her virtue; it is right that you should learn that it was not in her the fantasy or passion of a moment, but a long and secreted love; that you should learn that it was her pity, and no unfeminine disregard to opinion, which betrayed her into imprudence; and that she is, at this moment, innocent of everything but ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
