"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A slight fiction; but the boat had turned into the bay, and was following the curve of its shores, which certainly led down deep into the land from ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... unnecessary to say that the tale is pure fiction, and an example of brilliant exaggeration. As a matter of fact the maelstrom is a whirlpool lying where Poe places it, and it has been made noted by many other accounts than this of Poe, most of which are exaggerated, but none of them so brilliant in execution as Poe's. The difference ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... who saw them. When our national life, our own soil, is so rich in adventures to record, what need is there for one to call upon his invention save to draw, if he can, characters who shall fit these strange and dramatic scenes? One cannot improve upon such realities. If this fiction is at all faithful to the truth from which it springs, let the thanks be given to the patience and boundless hospitality of the Army friends and other friends across the Missouri who have housed my body and instructed my mind. And if the stories entertain the ignorant ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... chiefly stood in the way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics, a Franco-Russian alliance. He divined the probability, almost the inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would have thought it an absurd fiction. Thus, in January 1856, both the French and English Governments were in a phase of opinion which promised nothing to Italian aspirations. The question was, Would it be possible for one capable brain to bend them to its purposes'? In the first instance, Cavour believed ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Cassius himself; but he made his escape by taking to a boat. Two three-banked galleys were taken besides. Intelligence was shortly after received of the action in Thessaly, so well authenticated, that the Pompeians themselves gave credit to it; for they had hitherto believed it a fiction of Caesar's lieutenants and friends. Upon which intelligence Cassius departed with his fleet from ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... girls, pointing to himself, then off to the schooner, and, shaking his head, said, "Annay, annay!" Kit did the same. They then both shook hands with them, shaking their heads all the time very mournfully, and still repeating the sad "Annay!" It is no poetic fiction to add, that the little black eyes of the pretty savages were glistening with tears. Kit and Wade then got into the boat, and we shoved off amid sorrowful cries from the ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Jioto-Monin, and who is especially famous as having been the patroness of our authoress. Murasaki Shikib married a noble, named Nobtaka, to whom she bore a daughter, who, herself, wrote a work of fiction, called "Sagoromo" (narrow sleeves). She survived her husband, Nobtaka, some years, and spent her latter days in quiet retirement, dying in the year 992 after Christ. The diary which she wrote during her retirement ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... be its Servant, and that He never showed Himself more completely the Prince of Life and the Conqueror of Death than when He gave up His life and died, not because He must, but because He would. There is a scene in a modern book of fiction of a man sitting on a rock and the ocean stretching round him. It reaches high upon his breast, but it threatens not his life, till he, sitting there in his calm, bows his head beneath the wave and lets it roll over him. So Christ willed to die, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... was born at Renella, a small village near Naples, in 1615. There is so much fiction mingled with his early history, that it is impossible to arrive at the truth. It is certain, however, that he commenced the study of painting under his brother-in-law, Francesco Fracanzani, that he passed his early days ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... their discourse about the youth. The account is so strangely inserted in the Appendix to the volume, without comment or reference, that, had I not previously known the circumstances above names by Mr. Arundell, I should have fancied it a fiction of De Foe himself, like the story {242} of the ghost of Mrs. Veal, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... of this is to be found in "Truth Stranger Than Fiction: A Narrative of Recent Transactions involving Inquiries in Regard to the Principles of Honor, Truth, and Justice, which Obtains in a Distinguished American University," by Catherine E. Beecher, New ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... took everybody captive. Its power could neither be denied nor resisted. There were growls of disapprobation from novel-readers, that Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale were subjected to cruel punishments unknown to the jurisprudence of fiction,—that the author was an inquisitor who put his victims on the rack,—and that neither amusement nor delight resulted from seeing the contortions and hearing the groans of these martyrs of sin; but the fact was no less plain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... your sister out of the Back Bay biographies and she used the accident of Mrs. Jordan's death to get in with it... the rest was all fiction." ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... which Constantine most solemnly affirmed he saw in the heavens, near midday, is a subject involved in the greatest obscurities and difficulties. It is, however, an easy thing to refute those who regard this prodigy as a cunning fiction of the Emperor, or who rank it among fables; and also those who refer the phenomenon to natural causes, ingeniously conjecturing that the form of a cross appeared in a solar halo, or in the moon; and likewise those who ascribe the transaction to the power of God, who intended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... of this Fiction, the Author attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed. This woman is neither a Clarissa, a Lady G——, nor a[A] Sophie.—It would be vain to mention the various modifications of these models, as it would to remark, how widely artists ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... that kind of Abolition. Oh, it does seem to strike at one of the principal roots of the matter. I have commenced since I read Solomon Northrup. Oh, if Mrs. Stowe has clothed American slavery in the graceful garb of fiction, Solomon Northrup comes up from the dark habitation of Southern cruelty where slavery fattens and feasts on human blood with such mournful revelations that one might almost wish for the sake of humanity ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... written in history and fiction concerning the archery of the North American Indian, strange to say, very little has been recorded of the methods of manufacture of their weapons, and less in ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... gashed the bird with his knife and drank the blood, and then gave the flesh to the dog, while he crept to the pool again for another draught. Ah! think not, reader, that although we have treated this subject in a slight vein of pleasantry, because it ended well, that therefore our tale is pure fiction. Not only are Indians glad to satisfy the urgent cravings of hunger with raw flesh, but many civilized men and delicately nurtured have done the same—ay, and doubtless will do the same again, as long as enterprising ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... victory, together with the embalmed body of the gallant general to whom it was due. Though the event was celebrated there with bonfires and shouts of triumph, yet the nation's tears could not be restrained. "The incidents of dramatic fiction," writes Walpole in his Memoirs of George II., "could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exultation, than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Fontaine. Fifteen moral and political sentences are illustrated in a series of apologues: but the composition is intricate, the narrative prolix, and the precept obvious and barren. Yet the Brachman may assume the merit of inventing a pleasing fiction, which adorns the nakedness of truth, and alleviates, perhaps, to a royal ear, the harshness of instruction. With a similar design, to admonish kings that they are strong only in the strength of their subjects, the same Indians invented the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... as a vivid piece of fiction, but it does not accord with fact, since Dion Cassius was undoubtedly incorrect in his statement. We now know from the evidence furnished by the excavations that none of the people were destroyed in the theatres, and, indeed, that there were very few who did not ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... essentially essays, of which the preface to "Joseph Andrews" on the "Comic Epic in Prose," is a favorable specimen. The novel which it introduces was begun as a parody on Richardson's "Pamela," and the preface gives Fielding's conception of this form of fiction.] ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and body, (except for the toothache,) and a very amusing person to know, with no quarrel against life in general or anybody in particular. Indeed, I find one advantage in the very credulous and inquisitive gossip against which I memorialize; for I think I may expect fact to be believed, when fiction is swallowed whole; and I feel sure of seeing, directly on the publication of this document, a notice in the "Snapdragon," the "Badger," or the "Coon," (whichever paper gets that number of the magazine first,) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... wound, the other from the mouth Breath'd a thick smoke, whose vap'ry columns join'd. Lucan in mute attention now may hear, Nor thy disastrous fate, Sabellus! tell, Nor shine, Nasidius! Ovid now be mute. What if in warbling fiction he record Cadmus and Arethusa, to a snake Him chang'd, and her into a fountain clear, I envy not; for never face to face Two natures thus transmuted did he sing, Wherein both shapes were ready to assume The other's substance. They in mutual guise So answer'd, that the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... what's all the world but a fiction? I say, the assembled wisdom; an Act of Parliament is the sifted wisdom of the wise—the essence of an essence. Very well; know you not the mystic, the medicinal effects of printer's ink? The devil himself isn't proof to a blister of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the reader may better understand those incidents of our narrative which we are about to relate, it may be well to say a word of the geographical features of the region to which he has been transported, in fiction, if not in fact. At the southern extremity of the American continent is a cluster of islands, which are dark, sterile, rocky, and most of the year covered with snow. Evergreens relieve the aspect of sterility, in places that are a little sheltered, and there is a meagre vegetation in spots that ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... those at Johnston's Island, Camp Morton, Camp Chase and other places were to be released by their friends, and then all were to be immediately placed under the command of rebel generals sent here for the purpose of heading the rebellion, when it once broke out. This may seem like fiction to some; the idea of rebel generals being here in the North for the purpose of aiding and taking the lead of the conspirators; but it is nevertheless true, as disclosed by one of the prisoners taken ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... rude realities of life. The Peruvian annals may be deemed to show somewhat of the effects of this union, since there is a tinge of the marvellous spread over them down to the very latest period, which, like a mist before the reader's eye, makes it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... upon but briefly in the short space of four acts. All this is narrated in the novel with a wealth of fascinating and absorbing detail, making it one of the most powerfully written and exciting works of fiction given ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... shrewdness, her knowledge of life, in his search for the man Clover? His air of professional eagerness, his nods, winks, and flattery so wrought upon the girl that she ceased to harbour suspicion. Her primitive mind, much fed on penny fiction, accepted all she was told, and in the consciousness of secret knowledge affecting lords and ladies she gave up without a sigh the air-drawn vision of being herself actually a ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate operations of the ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... the most powerful of contemporary fiction and the most efficient of anti-slavery tracts is a double triumph in literature and philanthropy, to which this country has heretofore seen ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... "Is your Hari also in the pillar?" "Hari, Hari," cried the boy, and the pillar burst asunder, and the mighty form came forth and slew the Daitya that doubted, in order that he might learn the omnipresence of the Supreme. A story? facts, not fiction; truth, not imagination; and if you could look back to the time of those struggles, there would seem to you nothing strange or abnormal in the story; for you would see it repeated with less vividness in the smaller struggles ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... tell her that this was as good as impossible—that she quite lacked the qualities necessary for that. Instead, he reassured her with the chivalrous fiction that he, at least, would like her as well as if she were a boy. And, indeed, as a girl, she was not wholly unsatisfactory. True, she played "school" (of all things!) in preference to "wild animals," ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Bononia, Pavia, Paris, and Osnaburg, in Hanover. These became centres for propagating the new sciences. The Normans, too, shared in the general progress of learning, and carried with them their attainments into England. The wild imagination of the Saracens kindled a love of romantic fiction, wherever their influence was felt. The crusades made the Europeans intimately acquainted with the literature of the Arabs. Says Marton, who maintains that romantic fiction originated in Arabia, in his "History of English Poetry," "Amid the gloom of superstition, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... she invented none upon this occasion; she merely told her guests she was summoned to London upon an affair of importance; and though she saw their curiosity, not being at liberty to satisfy it with the truth, she attempted not to appease it by fiction, but quietly left it to its common fare, conjecture. She would gladly have made Henrietta the companion of her journey, but Henrietta was the last to whom that journey could give pleasure. She only, therefore, took her maid in the chaise, and, attended by one servant on horseback, at six o'clock ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... the "ins and outs" of boy nature by heart, is one of the most entertaining and at the same time one of the most instructive of living writers of juvenile fiction. In his younger days a teacher by profession, he has made boys and their idiosyncrasies the absorbing study of his life, and, with the accumulated experience of years to aid him, has applied himself to the task of preparing for their mental delectation a diet that shall be at ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... is introduced to an intimate acquaintance with the Indian races of the countries which He east and west of the Rocky Mountains. The savage warrior and hunter is presented, stripped of all the decorations with which writers of fiction have dressed him. He is seen in his ferocity and gentleness, in his rascality and nobility, in his boyhood, manhood, and old age, and in his wisdom and ignorance. The attentive reader will learn ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... here to moralise! If the esteemed reader and his humble servant could but know—could but write down in a book—could but publish, with illustrations, a collection of the lies which have been told regarding each of us since we came to man's estate,—what a harrowing and thrilling work of fiction that romance would be! Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more. Not long since the kind postman brought a paper containing a valuable piece of criticism, which stated—"This author states he was born in such ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the Plague:—once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... fiction? Oh, yes; what kind did he want, nihilistic or psychological? The Fire and Sword kind, whatever that was; the second volume of the trilogy, if they had it in stock? Sure they had; but had he read the first volume? No; he didn't want that; he would begin in the middle ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the 'lost was found.' He is now known in our camp as the 'peddler of soap.' The heroic conduct of these ladies will live in history, and they will become the heroines of many a thrilling story of fiction, in years to come." ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... fiction would be hard at work on this case, now," he said, smiling, "but I don't even pretend to be. I am at a standstill and I don't care who ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... abstract of the history of Barbarossa and Alexander, in 'Fiction, Fair and Foul,' 'Nineteenth Century,' November, 1880, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Delaware Bay, with nothing to do except to be beautiful and gracious, as befitted a well-born woman. It pleased him, in a lofty, generous way, that his father (whom she had taught him to reverence as the most chivalric of gentlemen) had left him wholly dependent upon her. It was a legal fiction, of course. He was the heir—the crown prince. He had always been liberally supplied with money at school and at Harvard. Her income was large. No doubt the dear soul mismanaged the estates fearfully, but now he would have leisure to take care ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... and without any grievance; universal liberty prevails, every man's property and person are safe, the laws are well administered and duly obeyed; so far from there being any unredressed grievances, the imagination of man cannot devise the fiction or semblance of a grievance without there being a rush to correct it. The only real evil is that the rage for correction is too violent, and sweeps all before it. What is it, then, which menaces the existence ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... which one extrinsic and utterly inadmissible fact has had upon their minds; viz. the fact, that the court below had actually affirmed the validity of the two bad counts. They speak of its being "against notorious facts"—against "common probabilities," a "palpably incredible fiction"—to conclude from the language of the record, that the "offences" there mentioned did not include the pseudo offences contained in the sixth and seventh counts. In this particular case, it did undoubtedly happen, in point of fact, that the court below decided ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used - that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... Governor to turn out the State's armed forces and set them in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W. Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... not entirely neglect the pen. In spite of the dust and heat of the wheat rieks I dreamed of poems and stories. My mind teemed with subjects for fiction, and one Sunday morning I set to work on a story which had been suggested to me by a talk with my mother, and a few hours later I read to her (seated on the low sill of that treeless cottage) the first two thousand words of "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... is a pleasing fiction, and highly creditable to the light and airy fancy of the Moors. It almost makes one sigh that an astrologer so fertile in resources is not still extant. It is difficult to conceive, indeed, of a more felicitous arrangement for a monarch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... has been a matter of observation with me that a plain man like myself scarcely ever refers to his love affairs. At my time of life, now nearing my alloted span, I have little sympathy with the great mass of fiction which exploits the world-old passion. In no sense of the word am I a well-read man, yet I am conscious of the fact that during my younger days the love story interested me; but when compared with the real thing, the transcript is usually a poor one. My wife and ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes of ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... both conception and execution, the original of the above Chapter, in Mr. DICKENS's work, is, perhaps, the least felicitous page of fiction ever penned by the great novelist; and, as this Adaptation is in no wise intended as a burlesque, or caricature, of the style at the original, (but rather as a conscientious imitation of it, so far as practicable,) the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic. She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... gloom and misery as I believe neither painter nor poet ever conceived in the saddest of their musings. This is not the first instance in which it has been my lot to verify the wisdom of the saying, that truth is sometimes wilder than fiction. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Ashcroft a bachelor fellow realized abruptly that he had never been loved by one of the opposite sex, although he had reached the age of two score and two, and had a great longing to have one included in his assessable personal property. Now, as truth is stranger than fiction, the discovery staggered him. What was wrong? What machinery required adjusting? He had the sensation of a boycotted egg, and was in danger of spoiling before reaching the consuming market. So one day he perched ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... useful work in stimulating the interest not only of Frenchmen but of all civilised nations, with regard to the lesser known regions of our globe. He has broadened knowledge and guided study. During the years following 1865 he even, for a time, deserted his favorite field of labor, fiction, and devoted himself to a popular semi-scientific book, now superseded by later works, entitled "The Illustrated Geography of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... which is true in essentials—so real that one is tempted to doubt whether it is fiction at all—doubly welcome and doubly important.... It would be difficult indeed to find a book in which the state of mind of the German people is pictured so cleverly, with so much understanding and convincing detail.... ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... it differs wholly in style from the "Arcadia." Sidney's "Arcadia" has literary interest as the first important example of the union of pastoral with heroic romance, out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fiction. But the genius of its author was at play, it followed designedly the fashions of the hour in verse and prose, which tended to extravagance of ingenuity. The "Defence of Poesy" has higher interest as the first important ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... obnoxious to you, are to me a source of great interest. You know that I love to study character—curious occupation for a young man, isn't it?—but I do. Well, in my small experience, I have never yet, either in fiction or in real life, come across such a fascinating display as is reflected in those letters. There I can, and often do, trace in minutest detail the agony of a strong mind, can see the barriers of what people call religion, early training, self- ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... supernaturalism, with the whole apparatus of sacerdotal magic, as the 'Gospel for human needs.' All protection against the grossest superstitions was thus swept away. With no fixed standard of reference to distinguish fact from fiction, it was possible to argue that 'whatever suits souls ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of Sara's were the children's delight; for she had the faculty of making them more interesting than fiction, as she told them in simple, vivid language, with her sweet, full voice, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... wrote a review of it in one of the leading newspapers under the symbol XXX (a signature of his known only to the initiated), in which he called attention to its exquisite moral tone, which had no counterpart in fiction since the writings of Miss Edgeworth were on every parlor table. In conclusion he said: "Whatever the too captious critic may say of the dramatic interest of the story, it is indeed a triumph for a young writer, and that ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the two skippers are admirably drawn. Mr. Hyne has now secured a position in the first rank of writers of fiction ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... effect on the Americans. Hitherto the Hessians had been looked upon as invincible; but to show that this was a mere fiction Washington dispatched the prisoners to Philadelphia, and caused them to be paraded through the town. His troops were now soon augmented, and those whose time was expired agreed to remain a little ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... though it extends through a period of two and a half hours, although on general principles a two-hour program is probably long enough. But one made up mostly of people who have had very little musical training, who read little except the daily newspaper and the lightest sort of fiction, and whose chief amusement is probably attendance upon the picture show,—such an audience must not be expected to listen to a program that is either too heavy or too long; and our judgment is that for such a group a program an hour and a half long is probably more ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... are some circumstances, which are sufficient to raise a question, but I think none of them are conclusive, and upon the whole I have little doubt of its authenticity. I shall be much mortified if it proves a fiction, not on account of the importance of the letter, but the stain that a practice so disingenuous will bring upon America. When I first left America, such a fiction, with all its ingenuity, would have ruined the ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... find room in the Vedanta-texts for the non-intelligent pradhana, the fiction of the Sa@nkhyas; because it is not founded on Scripture. How so? Because the quality of seeing, i.e. thinking, is in Scripture ascribed to the cause. For the passage, Ch. Up. VI, 2, (which begins: 'Being only, my dear, this was in the beginning, one only, without a ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... Shepherd. He had written some years before "A Pastoral Dialogue between Patie and Roger," published as usual in a sheet for a penny, and no doubt affording much pleasure to the great popular audience to whom the "new piece" was as the daily feuilleton, that friendly dole of fiction which sweetens existence. It was evidently so successful that after a while the poet composed a pendant—a dialogue between Jenny and Peggy. These two fragments pleased the fancy of both the learned and the simple, and no doubt called forth many a flattering inquiry after the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... us, it tends to grow less prominent as we grow older. The young child is either very trusting or entirely suspicious, and when his suspicions are overcome by acquaintance and simple bribes, he yields his fortunes to any one. (It is a pleasant fiction that children and dogs know whom to trust, by an intuition.) But as life proceeds, the most of us find that our judgment of character is poor, and we hesitate to pin anything momentous on it. Only where passion blinds us, as in sex love, or when our self-love ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress. It was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... Rome were anxiously expecting some conciliatory manifesto which should precede the Pope's return and restore peace and prosperity; and they were mortified beyond measure by receiving only the letter in which this theological fiction was announced by his Holiness. The people cried for the bread of constitutional liberty, and the holy father gave them the stone of a religious dogma to which they were wholly indifferent; thus demonstrating the incompatibility of the functions of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... future glory preach, Themselves alike the victims fall Of law that mesmerizes all - Each subject unto each - Though all is well if all obey And all have humble heart, Nor dare to hold in cursed doubt Those gems of truth the church lets out; But where's the apple-cart, And where's the sacred fiction gone, And who's to have the blame When any upstart takes a hand And, scorning what the priests have planned, Plays Harry with ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Randolph for the latest brief doings in current fiction; and usually in the background—and often long in abeyance—was something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could fill the empty hours ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... returned from an evening meeting, which I had not attended, and told me of a woman who had come to him in great distress. She had been an earnest Christian worker, but love for light, trashy fiction had so grown upon her as to work havoc in her Christian life. She had come to Keswick three years in succession, hoping to ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... a work of fiction, is filled with interesting and truthful descriptions of the curious ways of living of the good people of the land ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... cavernous chimney, where the soot hung long and black. It was very lonely. Willie Denner, of course, had long ago gone to bed, and unless the lawyer chose to go into the kitchen for company, where Mary was reading her one work of fiction. "The Accounts of the Death Beds of Eminent Saints," he had no one to speak to. Many a time before had he sat thus, pondering on the solitude of his life, and contrasting his house with other Ashurst homes. He glanced about his cold bare room, and thought ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... favourite old works, which, though containing much that has instructed and delighted our predecessors, are, nevertheless, but ill adapted in their original form for general perusal. Among these may be reckoned some works of fiction, the excellencies of which are often obscured by a grossness of style not uncommon at the time when they were composed, but which justly excludes them from family-reading in the present day. Such works would be acceptable if freed ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... Christ came Questioning England, Awake! Be not attached An Episode The Voice of the Voiceless Time's Defeat The Hymn of the Republic The Radiant Christ At Bay The Birth of Jealousy Summer's Farewell The Goal Christ Crucified The Trip to Mars Fiction and Fact Progress How the White Rose Came I look to Science Appreciation The Awakening Most blest is he Nirvana Life Two men Only be still Pardoned Out The Tides Progression Acquaintance Attainment The tower-room Father The ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had been made for a boat landing and Colonel Howell's canoe was lying carelessly against the steep bank. Both Norman and Roy felt somewhat disappointed. While neither was bothered with the romantic ideas usually attached to the woodland cabins of fiction, each had expected a smarter camp. Nor were they very favorably impressed with the two men who appeared on the bank. They were not exactly tidy in appearance and their figures and faces suggested that they had spent a winter of comparative ease among ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... to Giovanni upon Donna Tullia's originality," said old Saracinesca. "It is charming; it shows a talent for fiction which the world has been long in realising, which we have not even suspected—an amazing and ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... sincerity. He was not lying consciously; he believed what he was saying. To him, his initial statements were facts, and whenever he enlarged a statement, the enlargement became a fact too. He put his heart into his extravagant narrative, just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his earnestness disarmed criticism—disarmed it as far as he himself was concerned. Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... days. And Johnnie had said his father's name was Josiah Childs. He, Josiah, was this model husband who neither smoked, swore, nor drank. He was this seafaring man whose memory had been so carefully shielded by Agatha's forgiving fiction. He warmed toward her. She must have changed mightily since he left. He glowed with penitence. Then his heart sank as he thought of trying to live up to this reputation Agatha had made for him. This boy with the trusting blue eyes would expect it of him. Well, he'd ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... human virtue in both these battles. But there is no romance in the battles of the last Italian campaign, in which mere feebleness and distrust were on one side, mere physical force on the other. And even in fiction, the opponents of virtue, in order to be romantic, must have sublimity mingled with their vice. It is not the knave, not the ruffian, that are romantic, but the giant and the dragon; and these, not because they are false, but because ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... and its influence on the discourse, poetry, history, drama, philosophic writing, and fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on the writers of today—Coffee ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the Pyramid. Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into "The Story of an Untold Love," calling it The Philomathean. According to the hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... high life was the general formula of this work, for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted circles. She adored, in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted for her the romance of the world or, what is more to the point, the prime material of fiction. Their beauty and luxury, their loves and revenges, their temptations and surrenders, their immoralities and diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on her writing-table. She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable novel, she had ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... years. As a prose writer he admires him, less, it is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very high, and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of the Stuarts and gentility. What book of fiction of the present century can you read twice, with the exception of "Waverley" and "Rob Roy?" There is "Pelham," it is true, which the writer of these lines has seen a Jewess reading in the steppe of Debreczin, and which a young Prussian Baron, a great traveller, whom he ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... you mean," he added after a pause; "you have probably read some fiction of old times when the workers went on strike ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... de Voltaire's world-famous Account (for the other side has been heard since that); and so of quitting a painful business. The principal mendacities—deducting all that about "POE'ShIE" and the like, which we will define as poetic fiction—are:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... grew apace in the eighteenth century. A famous book, the "Work of Tobiah," was written at the beginning of this period by Tobiah Cohen, who was born at Metz in 1652, and died in Jerusalem in 1729. It is a medley of science and fiction, an encyclopedia dealing with all branches of knowledge. He had studied at the Universities of Frankfort and Padua, had enjoyed the patronage of the Elector of Brandenburg, and his medical knowledge won him ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... The fiction as to Lee's forces is the most remarkable in the history of modern wars. Whether McClellan was the victim or the accomplice of the inventions of his "secret service," we cannot tell. It is almost incredible that he should be deceived, except willingly. I confess to a contempt for all ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Kaffirs go on to say that Kruger, Joubert, and Steyn stood together on Mount Moriah (Loskop) to witness the battle, the addition may be only picturesque. It would be well if that were the worst fiction credulity swallowed. One of the head nurses from Intombi told me to-day that the Boers had bribed an old herbalist—she thought at Dundee or somewhere—to reveal a terrible poison, into which they dipped their cartridges, and even the bullets inside their shrapnel! To this she attributed the suppuration ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no role at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's truest ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... given in the text of this Chinese pagoda has much the air of a fiction; yet we can hardly conceive the author would venture to report to Shah-Rokh what must have been contradicted by his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... times when, had I been at home, or a private man, I could have taken to my bed with as good a right to be sick as any one ever had, I have not done so, and have worn off the attack through sheer necessity. It's no fiction that will power is the best of tonics, and theatrical people understand that they must keep a good stock ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... since Lauderdale, and confirmed the connection of Scotland with the services in India. But, politically, Scotland, till the Reform Bill, had scarcely a recognisable existence. The electorate was tiny, and great landholders controlled the votes, whether genuine or created by legal fiction—"faggot votes." Municipal administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was terribly corrupt, and reform was demanded, but the French Revolution, producing associations of Friends of the People, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... reached in his voyage, and though some of the particulars he mentions may be fabulous, or irreconcileable with one another, yet it seems carrying scepticism too far to reject, on these accounts, his voyage as altogether a fiction. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... the way when she was under his roof; the conflict between inclination to unbend and stubborn coldness towards his family made him too uncomfortable. Vivaciously tactful in this as in all things, Irene had invented a pleasant fiction which enabled her to meet Mr. Hannaford without embarrassment; she always asked him "How is your neuralgia?" And the man, according as he felt, made answer that it was better or worse. That neuralgia was often a subject of bitter jest between Mrs. Hannaford and Olga, but it had entered into ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... to be found, set forth in simple words, the most beautiful lessons and warnings, to show men how to live wisely and peacefully among bad people in the false and wicked world. Truth which none would endure, but which no man could do without, was clothed there in pleasing colours of fiction. For this work, however, Luther had very little time; we possess only thirteen fables of his version. He has rendered them in the simplest popular language, and expressed the morals in many ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... not care to dispute with "They" his superior information—even if we could find him; for he seems to reside permanently in the aforesaid mists himself; only issuing forth, like a valiant knight, to rescue the fair maidens—Fact, or Fiction—from the jaws of the dragon Oblivion! What he is, we leave to the learned, who could no doubt dispose of him suitably in connection with the highly convenient solar myths, as a Potent Rescuing Power! As for us, we meddle ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Monarch or citizen which the annals of any age or any nation can present to us. He seems, indeed, to be the realisation of that perfect character, which, under the denomination of a sage or wise man, the philosophers have been fond of delineating, rather as a fiction of their imagination than in hopes of ever seeing it reduced to practice; so happily were all his virtues tempered together, so justly were they blended, and so powerfully did each prevent the other from exceeding its proper bounds. He knew ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... fancy of illiterate and uncritical persons who wrote in the earlier ages of the Church? It sees no merit in blind faith, but rather distrusts it. It looks forward to an improvement in the popular canon of credibility for a decision between fact and fiction. It does not consider itself bound to believe fables and falsehoods that have been invented for ecclesiastical ends. It finds no argument in behalf of their truth, that traditions and legends have been long-lived; in this respect, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... agree with you about the reprinting of old stories, because you would only force older Science Fiction readers to read the same stuff that they have read before. Any Science Fiction fiend like myself will surely have the reprinted story in his collection ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... containing some or all of the {regexp} wildcards such as '*' or ''. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the Algol-60 report; it uses '[]', which was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognized. 3. In {{science-fiction fandom}}, BNF means 'Big-Name Fan' (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... excuse in the state of facts. A man would like at this moment to assume that Europe and Asia were listening to him; and as some few copies of his book do really go to Paris and Naples, some to Calcutta, there is a sort of legal fiction that such an assumption is steadily taking root. Yet, unhappily, that ugly barrier of languages interferes. Schamyl, the Circassian chief, though much of a savage, is not so wanting in taste and discernment as to be backward in reading any book of yours or mine. Doubtless ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... rainbow, or a star at noon. Their quickly muster'd force will quickly yield, And quit in momentary flight the field. Or if some deep-mouth'd demagogue should blow The flame of war, and bid its fury glow, Yet well-told fiction and inventive art With milder force can turn the vulgar heart. Rais'd by a breath their swelling clamours rise, And with a breath their vain opinion dies." He spoke; attention sat on every eye, And all in ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... amongst us the foundation of monarchy itself, much more clearly and much more peculiarly is it the ground of all parliamentary power. Parliament is a security provided for the protection of freedom, and not a subtile fiction, contrived to amuse the people in its place. The authority of both houses can, still less than that of the crown, be supported upon different principles in different places, so as to be, for one part ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... read the history of pirates and of their bold exploits, till I almost fancied that I should like to become one, or, at all events, that I should like to encounter them. But I can assure my friends that the reality was very different to the fiction; and as the hideous black was standing over me, ready every moment to knock out my brains, and my companions were suffering all sorts of ill-treatment, I most heartily wished that such gentry as pirates had not ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... seemingly impossible of the fiction of today becomes outdone by the facts of tomorrow," as the author aptly ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... cling to him, possibly to involve him in disagreeable and even dangerous complications, but she had no strength to do what she would have denounced another as base for not doing. Instead of the lofty words that flow so freely from the lips of stage and fiction heroines, instead of the words that any and every reader of this history would doubtless have pronounced in the same ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... and embraced of the wisest, honoured with the worthiest and graced with the best. She makes imprisonment liberty when the mind goeth through the world, and in sickness finds health where death is the way to life. She is an enemy to passion, and knows no purgatory; thinks fortune a fiction, and builds only upon providence. She is the sick man's salve and the whole man's preserver, the wise man's staff and the good man's guide. In sum, not to wade too far in her worthiness, lest I be drowned ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... that, when all is said and done, a dweller in hammocks may bring upon himself any number of diverse dangers of a character never described in books or imagined in fiction. A fellow naturalist of mine never lost an opportunity to set innumerable traps for the lesser jungle-folk, such as mice and opossums, all of which he religiously measured and skinned, so that each, in ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... plenty of time, and because Holman Sommers was in no hurry for the manuscript, which he did not expect to see completed for a year or so, since a work so erudite required much time and thought, being altogether different from current fiction, which ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks's last address in the Temple at Leatherwood and as given in the Taneyhill narrative. Otherwise the story is effectively fiction. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God's sake, that they might ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... just here that Matthew Broffin fell under the limitations of his trade. Though the detective in real life is as little as may be like the Inspector Buckets and the Javerts of fiction, certain characteristics persist. Broffin thought he knew the worth of boldness; where it was a mere matter of snapping the handcuffs upon some desperate criminal, the boldness was not wanting. But now, when he found himself face to face with the straightforward expedient, the craft limitations bound ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... it stated by correspondents in leading London papers that "Russian" Customs officials were stationed in Sistan, and interfered greatly with British caravans. That is mere fiction from beginning to end. As I have already stated, there is not a single Russian in the Customs anywhere in Persia. In Sistan the only official—a Belgian—far from interfering with the caravans, is of great help to them and ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... no intention in this remark to intimate that there is any higher rule of life than the Ten Commandments; only it is illuminating as showing the relationship between manners and morals, which is too often overlooked. The polished gentleman of sentimental fiction has so long served as the type of smooth and conscienceless depravity that urbanity of demeanor inspires distrust in ruder minds. On the other hand, the blunt, unpolished hero of melodrama and romantic fiction has lifted brusqueness and pushfulness to a pedestal not wholly merited. Consequently, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... work of fiction, but interesting as being the first book in which the word Australiens is used. The next quotation is from ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of sentiment and humorous characterization. Nothing more individual, and in its own way more powerful, has been done in American fiction.... The story is ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... the main I am a strong believer in Mr. MAIS, and (with his connivance) have every intention of retaining that attitude. With all its faults Rebellion remains gloriously distinct from the rubbish-heap of fiction by virtue of its intense sincerity and its frequent flashes of fine descriptive writing. The question of sex dominates it, and those of us who still think that such problems are merely sustenance for the prurient-minded may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... not, however, a matter for congratulation that so large a portion of the volumes that are most read are works of fiction. In most of our public libraries the novels called for are far in excess of all the other books. Let any one scrutinize the advertising columns of literary journals, and he will see that the only startling figures are those which announce the enormous sale of popular ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Austen's fame; and it is only within a few years that we have learned that the friendly and discerning critic was Walter Scott. He continued to be her admirer until her early death; but these two, the greatest writers of fiction in their age, were never brought together. Both were home-loving people, and Miss Austen especially was averse to publicity and popularity. She died, quietly as she had lived, at Winchester, in ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... not all romance, dear. It sometimes seems unbearably prosaic, and then it is a relief to lose oneself in fiction. You can't deny that! I seem to have a remembrance of seeing someone I know seated in a big chair before this very fire devouring a novel and a Newton pippin together on more Saturday afternoons than ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... she saw him come along, having on the previous day made herself acquainted with his personality. He was a dapper pert little man, neat in his dress, and suave in his manners. Not at all like the detective of fiction as known to Mrs. Parry. There was no solemnity or hint of mystery about Mr. Steel. He would pass unnoticed in a crowd, and no one would take him for a bloodhound of the law. He did not even possess the indispensable ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... on,—we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an ave of friendship that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even still more widely circulated than they are; that the young should read them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity—should esteem the tender heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... over and done with—functus officio. This difficulty he meets by asserting that every grant is attended by an implied contract on the part of the grantor not to reassert his right to the thing granted. This, of course, is a palpable fiction on Marshall's part, though certainly not an unreasonable one. For undoubtedly when a grant is made without stipulation to the contrary, both parties assume that it will ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... light literature of Spain be spoken of as a gay contagion? Did this Christian attitude toward fiction and poetry ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... clearly fall in the category of private revelation. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are infallible; private revelation is fallible. However, her visions are neither mere human meditations nor pious fiction. Her account of events in the lives of Jesus and Mary were revealed to her by God. Although God cannot err in anything He does, errors can be introduced into private revelation by a misunderstanding on the part of the person ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... for an interesting detective story. The fact that the books in this line are so uniformly good is entirely due to the work of a specialist. The man who wrote these stories produced no other type of fiction. His mind was concentrated upon the creation of new plots and situations in which his hero emerged triumphantly from all sorts of troubles and landed the criminal just where he should be—behind ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... continued: 'I saw him again sixteen years ago, always in hiding, always proscribed. To-day he reappears under a name which is not his own: he wishes to link my fate with his; he has insisted on seeing Edouard. But I shall escape him. I have invented this fiction of placing my son among the, royal pages to account for my stay here. Do not contradict me, but help me; for a little time ago I met one of Monsieur de Lamotte's friends, I am afraid he suspected something. Say you have seen me several times; as you have come, let it be ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... but also persecution; and Madame Lenormant attributes this rare good-fortune to the agency of the infamous Barrere. Barrere's cruelty was equalled only by his profligacy, his cunning by his selfishness. Macaulay said of him, that "he approached nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and total depravity"; and everybody must remember the famous comparison by which he illustrated Barrere's faculty of lying. But even taking a much milder view of Barrere's character, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... person he bore some resemblance, and who, for some offence or other having been imprisoned at Milan, during the leisure which his captivity afforded, had contrived greatly to improve himself in his art; and when once it was embodied into shape, the fiction naturally enough might have obtained the more credence, from the fact that two of his most distinguished predecessors, Tartini and Lolly, had attained to the great mastery which they possessed over their instrument during a period of solitude—the one within the walls of a cloister, the other ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various |
