"Real life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been only a momentary mood, and will it pass and leave no trace?" he thought. But the same instant, going back to his mood, he felt with delight that something new and important had happened to him. Real life had only for a time overcast the spiritual peace he had found, but it was still untouched ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... though seldom, met in real life. But many pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcee who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... mental powers, and unfits them for close study and serious contemplation. It dissipates the mind, and creates a diseased imagination. It promotes a sickly sensibility, and renders its votaries unfit for the pursuits of real life. It is a great waste of time, and on this account alone may be regarded as sinful. But I would not advise you to read any books, merely because you can get nothing else; nor because there is nothing bad in them. There are many books which contain ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... submitting; "but the difficulty about a thing of this sort is that you don't know whether you haven't been an ass. It has been pawed over so much by the romancers that you don't feel like a hero in real life, but a hero of fiction. I've a notion that Hicks and I looked rather ridiculous going over the ship's side; I know we did, coming back. No man can reveal his greatness of soul in wet clothes. Did ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Lord again!" cried Kate. "I see where you will be happier than you ever have been. Real life is just beginning ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... not; but I imagine it ought to be something pretty pronounced, you know, even in such a pale reflection of the novels as real life. I gather that it ought to be; seriously, Loo, I think it ought to be. I suppose you do love Woodthrop, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... seen that the real life of the community depends on common interests and the ability of its people to act together. This having things in common is the basis of all community and is achieved only through the exchange of ideas by various means of ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... that there was something piquant in the company of the clerk who takes the money at the door of a second-rate entertainment. Mrs. Ascher has often told me that she is more interested in life than in anything else, even art. She distinguishes between life and real life. Mine, I gather, is not nearly so real as that of a performer in a travelling circus. I do not know why this should be so, but I have no doubt that it is. Mrs. Ascher is not by any means the only person who thinks so. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... also. It does not matter so much if one is wet or sweating as long as he keeps moving or working. On wash day do not dry your clothes in the kitchen or sitting room, or put them on your bed, unless they have been thoroughly dried, aired and warmed before using. These little things mean much in real life. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Harrod's to get relief, or one takes a 'bus, or one tries Trafalgar Square, or one sees if one can really get across the Strand or one does something—almost anything to recall one's self to real life. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... saccharine melodies of Rossini and Bellini, show thereby that they have never studied the history of the opera. This history teaches a curious lesson, viz., that operas which had a great vogue at one time and subsequently lost their popularity can never be galvanized into real life again. What has become of the threescore and more operas of Donizetti, and the forty of Rossini—some of which for years monopolized the stage so completely the world over that Weber and Beethoven were ignored even in Vienna and the German capitals? ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... the promenade deck make a mile," said my room-mate consulting his pedometer. Then we strolled to the library for books, but the books lay unread in our laps when we were seated in our steamer chairs; for how could our minds be fixed on the story when the real life before us was more interesting? The Professor who was to lecture during the trip stepped by with rapid tread, nodding as he passed. The minister from Iowa who was to preach on the Sabbath stopped to exchange greetings, a friend ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... the library, which owes its completeness to the morbid taste of his successor, who defends the collection as best illustrating the popular morals and manners of every period, and contends that fiction yields in interest to the gloomy dramas of real life." ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... unreasoning world. If he followed the beaten track, whither would it lead? To a position of comfort and respectability, in which the first duty was to throw a veil over one's own heart and those of others: to suppress all doubt and inquiry, and to deaden all real life in the individual, so that the whole machine might continue its regular movements without noise or friction. But truth was a two-edged sword, sharp and shining as crystal. When the light of truth broke into the heart of man, it caused an agony as piercing ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... like hypocrisy: "I am enemy to all romances, novels, and whatever carries the air of them. . . . It is a real, not a fictitious character I am about to present"—which is merely another instance of fiction disguising itself, this time, I regret to say, as immorality in real life. And so they all go, forever implying that fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it is not surprising that, as Mr. Bradsher has reminded us, the elder Timothy Dwight of Yale College was able ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... worthless piece of imitation. Sardou's heroine in his Maison Neuve, who sells her small real diamonds in order to appear at a ball ablaze with paste, is a true character of the epoch, and was evidently sketched from real life. But the disappearance of the masses of clinquante which used to be worn some years ago is a positive boon to the lovers of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... had stepped across the threshold of her career, she unconsciously realized that the home stage is the real background of the supreme world drama, and she shows this by the intimate, tender domestic scenes which made all of her stories bits of real life, with a strong appeal to those whose homes are joyous parts of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and let his honest gray eyes wander from Luck to the darkly handsome face of the Native Son. "Sounds most as exciting as holding down a homestead, anyway. Don't you think so, Mig? And say! It's sure a pity we can't put off some things in real life till we get all set and ready to ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... too sawest undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the promised land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our prophetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for others, working for the world by thinking beauty. While her pain-racked body lay asleep in the bed it had not left for thirty years, nor would ever leave again this side of death, she found her real life in loving sympathy for the pain of others everywhere. For thought is prayer, and prayer is the only true effective action that leaves no detail incomplete. She thought light and glory into others. Was it any wonder that she drew a special, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... that our fate has been scarcely different from the crowd, and that our life stands out about as unique as one house is in a row of houses all built on the same pattern. But I sometimes think that our dreams are our real life, and that what we do is a matter of indifference to what we think and suffer and feel. Some days, when you sit in a railway carriage on the underground railways and gaze at the rows of stodgy, expressionless, flat kind ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... very little money and depend for his income upon winning about three good criminal prosecutions a year; the rest of his time to be spent reading up criminal psychology and taking his aunt to see pictures. The commonplace scene-shifter who places behind people the scenery of real life has bungled Sir Henry, thereby robbing him of much interest. What a net a man with his classic patience and enormous ferret instinct for minutiae could have woven about some cunning but once too often embezzler! Instead ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... but Bertha had seen a play or two in the great town hard by, and Lane looked and talked rather too much like a stage lover to her mind. In the unreal life behind the footlights lovers talked with just such a fluency, just such a tender fiery emphasis. In real life John Thistlewood came doggedly a-wooing with a shoulder propped against a doorpost, and had hard work to find a word for himself. If only that one absent element of faith could be imported into the business, ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... which they were unconscious. For, if many of them were not lacking in a rude sort of talent, they had little intelligence and less taste. They could not rise above the fastidious atmosphere which they had created, and like all cliques, they had ended by losing all sense of real life. They legislated for themselves and hundreds of fools who read their reviews and gulped down everything they were pleased to promulgate. Their adulation had been fatal to Hassler, for it had made him too pleased with himself. He accepted without ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... list, the compilation of which would occupy more time and space than its scientific value would warrant. But there are certain other incidents of a more individual type, and it is these which make the Lives of Ciaran especially remarkable. They may well be genuine reminiscences of the real life, or at least of the real character of the man himself. Thus, there are a number of coincidences, clearly undesigned (noted below, p. 104) consistently pointing to a pre-Celtic parentage for the saint. Again, the saint's mother is represented as a strong personality, ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... unknown to himself, he had been inoculated with selfishness. The germs of Parisian political economy, latent in his heart, would assuredly burst forth, sooner or later, whenever the careless spectator became an actor in the drama of real life. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it sufficed her. It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... is, no longer, romance in real life. But the truth is that we live the romance that former ages told and sang. The magic carpet of the Arabian tales, the mirror that brought to view most distant objects, have come out of poetry, and present themselves in the prosaic form of steam locomotive ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Carlyle, when he said, "The name is the earliest garment you wrap around the earth-visiting me. Names? Not only all common speech, but Science, Poetry itself, if thou consider it, is no other than a right naming," sounded a wonderful note in Moral Philosophy, which rings false many a time in real life, when to ring true would change the whole ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... but in each case the justification is manifest, for he constantly refers to the tortuous and treacherous machinations of his virulent enemies. The "Autobiography" is from beginning to end a thrilling and wonderful romance of real life, for the hairbreadth escapes of this extraordinary man are among the most singular recitals in the whole world of adventure. The whole story is unique, as was the noble individuality of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... rode forth arm'd beneath the burning sun, My gleams of happiness were faint and few, But then I saw my real life had begun, And that I should be ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... to which I invite your attention is the contrast between the early age at which Washington began to profit by the discipline of real life and the late age at which our educated young men exchange study under masters, and seclusion in institutions of learning, for personal adventure and responsibility out in the world. Washington was a public surveyor at sixteen years of age. He could not spell ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... everybody he possibly can, it only remaining to be observed that, the more extensive the swindling is, and the more barefaced the impudence of the swindler, the greater the rapture and ecstasy of the audience. Now it is a most remarkable fact that precisely this sort of thing occurs in real life day after day, and nobody sees the humour of it. Let us illustrate our position by detailing the plot of this portion of the pantomime—not of the theatre, but ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... And as we speak to them, when they answer purely and simply, the Word of God speaks through them. This is not degrading the sacraments—nay, but raising all human life—nay, raising the sacraments as well, for it brings them into relation with real life, and transforms the poor magical ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... Phillips! Don't try to tell me my own business. People don't behave that way in real life; they don't explode under passion—not even jealousy or revenge; they are reserved. Reserve! That's the real thing; the other ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... interested in etymology?' I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the derivation of words—it's full of the romance and wonder of real life and history. Think of Magic, for instance; it comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ancient priests ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... characters as he should retire into fiction, they are too exaggerated for real life."—"Times" on Mr. R.L. Stevenson's Sad ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... genius, like Keats, it won't kill me," she said stoutly, "and I've got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced 'charmingly natural, tender, and true'. So I'll comfort myself with that, and when I'm ready, I'll up ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... correspondent sends the following incident from real life, which illustrates the well-known negro fondness for so-called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... nature as it is in real life, alas, too often a melancholy retrospect! Romance displays only the amiable side of the picture; it shews the pleasing features, and throws a veil over the blemishes: Mankind are naturally pleased with what gratifies their vanity; ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... tricks. Clapp and him had made out a story from my papers and what they know'd before, and got it all ready in a letter; they agreed that from the time of the wreck, they had better keep pretty straight to Hopgood's real life; ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... this way and that, while deep-throated curses came up from their midst with a breathless, muttered force. But through the tangle of sprawling bodies and waving limbs Kate's quick eyes discovered all she required to satisfy herself. She saw no real life and death struggle here. Maybe, had the circumstances been changed, it would have been so, but one of the combatants was far too experienced a rough and tumble fighter for those ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... it may likewise be objected that it is drawn from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to real life. Idalia's 'velvet-green' has something of cant. An epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded. 'Many-twinkling' was formerly censured ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... perhaps, when the public was tired of contemplating rascality, the editor would find something sweet, full of country charm and suburban peace, to feed them.... On the title-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,—a "homely" story of "real life" among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc.... Fosdick had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. 'So Dickie, having ceased to roll about the world,' ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... his spacious marble we rely, Pity a worth like his should ever die! If credit to his real life we give, Pity a wretch like him ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... without education or culture, yet with an innate sense of refinement and a touching undercurrent of desire "not to be too hard on Zekle." As she tells her story, which she informs us is a true one from real life, she engages the attention and wins the sympathy of all her hearers, and frequent bursts of applause evidence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... this manoeuvre, Sir John, five times in real life; and my claim to be a patriotic patriot is founded on its invariable success. A single false step might have ruined me; but as you say, practice makes perfect, and perfection is ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... from the routine duties of his military rank, Zeppelin thereafter devoted himself wholly to his airships. He was fifty-three years old, adding one more to the long list of men who found their real life's work after middle age. With him was associated his brother Eberhard, the two forming a partnership in aeronautical work as inseparable as that of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Like Wilbur Wright, Eberhard von Zeppelin did not live to witness the fullest fruition of the work, though ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... her director-husband, of her dramatic talent, and of her children, of which she had four. In real life she was fond of playing the role of a matron occupied only with her home and the upbringing of her children, while in truth she was nothing but a comedienne, both in life and behind the scenes. ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... and needle upon another piece of clothing; one boy had his feet in a bucket of water washing them carefully; other girls and boys were standing round attentively looking upon the strange pictures of real life before them, and waiting for something to turn up to interest them personally. Our meeting was of the most cordial kind, but Middendorf did not interrupt the business in which he was engaged. 'Come, children,' he cried, 'let us go into the garden!' and with loud cries of joy the ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... the other hand, told the children stories of real life, describing how she had travelled all over Russia as a little girl, how the Allies had bombarded Taganrog during the Crimean War, and how hard life had been for the peasants in the days of serfdom. She instilled ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... good of real life is true also of its counterfeit in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious, but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... all religion. "Of the philosophers, those that are most estimable he terms Brahmans ([Greek: brachmanas]). These discuss with many words concerning death. For they regard death as being, for the wise, a birth into real life—into the happy life. And in many things they hold the same opinions with the Greeks: saying that the universe was begotten and will be destroyed, and that the world is a sphere, which the god who made and owns it pervades throughout; that there are different beginnings of all things, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... popular vote. Among all kinds of dispositions, temperaments, and temptations, Bob has no easy road to the coveted distinction. Athletics are plentifully featured, and every boy, good, bad, and indifferent, is a natural fellow, who talks and acts like a bright, up-to-date lad in real life. ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... monks at whose monastery I once broke bread, and how their eyes sparkled when they asked me of the France that lay around their walls. I thought, pardie, of the lurid verses written by young men who, in real life, know no haunt more lurid than a literary public-house. It was, for me, merely a problem how I could best avoid 'sensations,' 'pulsations,' and 'exquisite moments' that were not purely intellectual. I would not attempt to combine both kinds, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... may I not die a natural death here as well as anywhere? All mankind die, and then there is an end of all——An end of all! did I say? No, there is something within that gives me the lie when I say so. Let me see; Death, my master used to say, is not an end, but a beginning of real life: and may it not be so? May I not as well undergo a change from this to a different state of life when I leave this world, as be born into it I know not from whence? Who sent me into this world? Who framed me of two natures so unlike, that death cannot destroy ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... History:—Perhaps you can take this from real life; or perhaps you know some interesting old man whose early adventures you can imagine. Tell briefly how you happened to know the old man. Describe him. Speak of his manners, his way of speaking; his character as it appeared when you knew him. How did you learn his ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... for two hours the man who was no longer manikin and the girl who in real life was only a frail little bookkeeper played to David: a brilliant polonaise, a nocturne that was moonlight and shadow set to music, a concerto that only the masters attempt, a few noble old classics. Between them she sang thrice, songs chosen by Jonathan, each a little more taxing than the one ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... real life, the gaiters wear the man, as the nose wears Cyrano. It may be Sir Auckland Geddes and Mr. J. H. Thomas are only clippings from the illustrated press. It may be that a miner is a complicated machine for cutting coal and voting on a ballot-paper. It may be that coal-owners ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest poet to possess, there can not be a doubt but that the language which it will suggest to him must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... on the other side of the table is an insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to love—and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum, there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the world worth the hearing—we have ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... college training. Although he could write and speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and endeavor to make their souls expedite and light from things mortal, using philosophy as a study for death. Thus I account death a truly great and accomplished good thing; the soul being to live there a real life, which here lives not a waking life, but suffers things most resembling dreams. If then (as Epicurus saith) the remembrance of a dead friend be a thing every way complacent; we may easily from thence imagine how great a joy they deprive themselves of who think they do but embrace and pursue the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... The Supper Superstition The Duel A Singular Exhibition at Somerset House Lines to Mary The Compass with Variations The Ghost The Fall Our Village A Public Dinner Sally Simpkin's Lament Ode to Sir Andrew Agnew, Bart The Lost Heir The Fox and the Hen The Poacher A Waterloo Ballad A Lay of Real Life The Sweep's Complaint The Desert-Born Agricultural Distress Domestic Poems The Green Man Hit or Miss The Forlorn Shepherd's Complaint Lieutenant Luff Morning Meditations A Plain Direction The Assistant Drapers' ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts, than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old, heroic music, heard thirty years before;—such ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stuff that makes our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... real life, the personages of a novel or romance live and move in the midst of an environment. They are placed in the midst of circumstances, upon which they act and by which they are acted upon. They may live on land ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... woman who schemes to entangle a young man of wealth or high rank into a secret engagement with her daughter, who she knows is no suitable wife for him, is neither honest to him nor kind to her child. Such unequal marriages seldom answer in real life. There must be sympathy, and a certain community of interests to make marriage ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... Irene to the theatre, instinctively choosing the modern Society Plays with the modern Society conjugal problem, so fortunately different from any conjugal problem in real life. He found that they too always ended in the same way, even when there was a lover in the case. While he was watching the play Soames often sympathized with the lover; but before he reached home again, driving with Irene in a hansom, he saw that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is the advice of Margaret Sangster. "It is a forest-scented, fresh-aired, bracing and wholly American story of country and town life. * * * If in the far future our successors wish to know what were the real life and atmosphere in which the country folk that saved this nation grew, loved, wrought and had their being, they must go back to such true and zestful and poetic tales of 'fiction' as 'Eben ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... of persons like these, partly on the still more tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawn from his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in Thackeray's admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as a creature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasy sinks and shrivels when we begin to apply the horrid tests of criticism to his component parts. The ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... is not so utterly vapid as I had thought. That effeminate, fat face of his is almost beautiful, with an odd smile, brazen and cruel. I have seen faces like this, if not in real life, at least in my boyish romantic dreams, when I read Swinburne and Baudelaire, the faces of wicked, vindictive women. Oh yes! he is decidedly a beautiful creature, this Zaffirino, and his voice must have had the same sort of beauty ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... a brief moment he came back to real life again and lay quite still, seeing everything about him with clear eyes and for the first time, as though he had but just that instant been lifted over the ship's side. His keeper, glancing up, found the prisoner's eyes considering ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... boys, I need one more picture.... You know, next Wednesday night Mrs. Mansfield is going to give a book review of The Hoosier Schoolmaster at the Literary Society and I've promised to illustrate the story on the screen with some modern pictures from real life. I ought to have one of a teacher putting a board on the chimney of a schoolhouse.... Leslie, you get that ladder I saw you boys carry behind the schoolhouse awhile ago, and set it up again—here, Bill, hold my Bible a minute." He thrust the ...
— Shenanigans at Sugar Creek • Paul Hutchens
... and Montmartre by night are two very different places. This Parisian playground, perched high on the eminence that overlooks the Ville Lumiere, does not wake to its real life until its repose is disturbed by the lamplighter. Then the Moulin Rouge, festooned with lamps of gorgeous red, flares forth upon an expectant world. The Cafe de l'Enfers opens its demoniac mouth to swallow ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... who lived a century or more after the age that gave birth to the Homeric poems, was the poet of nature and of real life, especially of peasant life, in the dim transition age of Hellas. The Homeric bards sing of the deeds of heroes, and of a far-away time when gods mingled with men. Hesiod sings of common men, and of every-day, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play, they'd have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork," she thought humorously, "but this is real life, and I've just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday. He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Socialism. From which of them the impulse came I have no means of knowing, but surely it must have been from her. In her case I can understand it; she lives in an asthetic reverie; she idealises everything. Naturally she knows nothing whatever of real life. She is one of the most interesting women I ever met, but I should say that her influence ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... heart, cannot indeed compensate for imperfect comprehension of the masculine way of thinking. Strictly speaking, Helene Boehlau knows of only two sorts of feeling for men: hatred of the brutal beast and admiration for an ideal, which is born of longing to embrace a lofty, victorious personality. In real life she has found the fulfilment of her longing in her husband, the strange prophet who as half a Turk gathered about himself in Munich a queer circle of auditors for his mystical Oriental philosophy. To his memory she erected a dutiful monument in her last work Isebies (1911), an apology ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... John Gilbert not very long before the death of that delightful actor. It was in the morning, and Mr. Gilbert was dressed with gentlemanly simplicity and propriety. But as he bowed courteously the good player seemed to have stepped aside for a moment from his real life, and to be not quite at ease when saluted by his own name rather than by that of Sir Peter, or Squire Hardcastle, or Sir Anthony Absolute. Methought, as the sages of the theatre say, that the stage was a more natural life to him. He knew the part of his own personality ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... insists that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was destined to lead to results all too important; otherwise it would not have been related here. You very likely may have discovered, ere this, that this story of the Helstonleigh College boys is not merely a work of imagination, but taken from facts of real life. Had you been in the cloisters that night with the boys—and you might have been—and heard Master William Simms, who was the son of a wealthy farmer, tell the tale of a boy's being frightened to death, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... irresistible fun. He understands the value of repose in art. One tires of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is constantly attitudinizing for our amusement. We like to be betrayed into laughter as much in books as in real life. It is the unconscious, easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm. He seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of the public. He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... keeping a boy young as long as possible, and I have never hurried you by putting you in an important place, though at one time I thought of having a third officer, and assigning you to the position, for the practice it would give you in real life; but I concluded that you had better ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... mentioned were all in one end of the attic. We were by no means through when we turned to the other end, the space beyond the great chimney. Here under the eaves were piles of yellow periodicals—religious papers, the New York Tribune, and those weekly story-papers whose thrilling "romances of real life," like "Parted at the Altar" and "The Lost Heir of Earlecliffe," were so popular with those young ladies of slender waists and sloping shoulders who became our grandmothers. I think none of the numbers ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... referred to our personal friendship and said that he was sure that we should be able to manage everything together. Helfferich in his speech said that I, by learning German and studying the life of the German people, was one of the few diplomats that had come to Germany who had learned something of the real life and psychology of the Germans. Von Gwinner made a speech in English that would have done credit to any American after-dinner speaker; and I, in my short address, said that the relations between ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... met with even worse contumely." Ernest Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody "dropped into each of the Simeonites' boxes." Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life. Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark's collection, three printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject. He speaks of them in an ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... the friend we mourn, but as only the cast-off and mouldering garment. It has kindled within us a lively appreciation of the continued existence of those who have gone from us; taught us to feel that the thoughts, the love, the real life of the departed, all, in fact, that communed with us here below, still lives and acts. And our relations to them are relations which we bear, not to abstractions of memory, to phantoms of by-gone joy, but to spiritual intelligences, whose current of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... advise the young people who read these lines, and older folks also, if this is your style of reading, to stop right where you are. Get some good books—there are plenty of them—and don't fill your mind with stuff that only unfits you for the real life of ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... biographer, curious in the dissection of human vanity, written the real life of Doddington? There could be no richer subject for a pen contemptuous of the follies of high life and capable of dissecting that compound of worldly passion and infirm principle which, in nine instances out of ten, figures in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... passed onward across the market-place, where buying and selling went on languidly, and where a drowsy hum of talk made a rhythmic setting to a scene that seemed to my unaccustomed eyes less a bit of real life than a bit lifted bodily from an opera. Facing the market-place was the ancient church; and the change was a pleasant one, from the vivid sunlight and warmth of the streets to its cool, shadowy interior: where the only sign of life was a single old woman, her head muffled ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... returned Friedrich's visits as promised, he found him sharing the room of his friend Karl Messer. Messer was a successful architect who had already secured a Government commission while the equally youthful Kirtley—may it be repeated—had not begun real life and, according to the American plan, could do nothing very well. Those two room-mates and cronies were leading the typical Teuton existence of youths who combined proficient work with a frank sensuality ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... of course," said Patricia, in a businesslike tone; "but this is real life! Cheer up, Paul," she went on (they had reached Christian names some weeks before). "I am going to have two darling girls here for two weeks at Thanksgiving, just from Japan. And think of the concert ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... novels, and (when abroad) was a perfect Baedeker, or Murray, or Mr. Augustus Hare: instructing through correspondence. So the matron complained, but this was not the worst of it. There was an unhappy family history, of a kind infinitely more common in fiction than in real life. To be explicit, even according to the ideas of the most abject barbarians, the young people, unwittingly, were too near ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... secret underground passages. The Chinese lived there their own life in their own way. The Chinatown of New York is dull beside it. And the tourist, who always included Chinatown in his itinerary, saw little of the real life. The guides gave him a show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the place had considerable importance in a financial way. There were clothing and cigar factories of importance, and much of the tea and silk importing was in the hands of the merchants, who numbered ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... all comparison, is that of Farmer Ashfield. It is a picture of real life, originals of which are found in multitudes in England—plain, honest, benevolent, and under a rustic garb, possessing a heart alive to the noblest feelings. No man that we know in this country possesses such happy requisites for exhibiting the farmer in the true ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... be imagined how much Shakespeare excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authours. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... They cannot deceive; they will not lie. I in sincerity admire them, and have as many beauties about me as fill up all my hours of dangling, and no disgrace attending me, from sixty-seven years of age. Within doors we come a little nearer to real life, and admire, upon the almost speaking canvas, all the airs and graces ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the heir to a property, which has always been a favourite subject with novelists and romance writers, has occasionally happened in real life, and a Shropshire legend relates how, long ago, the heir of the house of Corbet went away to the wars, and remained absent so many years that his family—as in the case of Enoch Arden—gave up all hope of ever seeing him again, and eventually mourned for him as dead. His younger brother ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... really engaged in building a Tower of Babel. Power, Affirmation, Yea-Saying he considered the attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are bizarre, and have only ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... certain little persons, we will gently ramble along in this chapter and tell some of the pastimes of Mrs. Jo's boys. I beg leave to assure my honored readers that most of the incidents are taken from real life, and that the oddest are the truest; for no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the noblest work of God." Havard, from sorrow rest beneath this stone; An honest man—beloved as soon as known; Howe'er defective in the mimic art, In real life he justly played his part! The noblest character he acted well, And heaven ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... painting, and his Oxford manner never seem to desert him. We feel, not for the first time, how dangerous it must be to allow our simple perky unspoiled Colonials to associate with such deleterious exotic beings, who, though in fiction horsewhipped or (if heroes) shot in the last chapter, in real life are so apt to become prosperous city men or ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... apply with equal truth to King Mancho, or any one of his sable subjects, will be necessary that you write him down the hero of adventures he never dreamed of, and leave out the score of delinquincies his real life is blemished with. If you do this, wise men will set you down a scribbler ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... of his letter, Mr. S. says, "Intending, as I do, that my statements shall be relied on, and knowing that, should you think fit to publish this communication, they will come to this country, where their correctness may be tested by comparison with real life, I make them with the utmost care ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... it in books, no emotion in this world ever did, or ever will, last for long together. The strong feeling may return over and over again; but it must have its constant intervals of change or repose. In real life the bitterest grief doggedly takes its rest and dries its eyes; the heaviest despair sinks to a certain level, and stops there to give hope a chance of rising, in spite of us. Even the joy of an unexpected meeting is always an imperfect sensation, for it never lasts long enough to justify ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... life work of the most charming description. Winifred envied them. It was indeed their business to make all men, women, and children who passed envy them enough to stop, enter the store, and purchase things to make real life as much as possible like life in ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... reflect that if he were once condemned, nothing but financial ruin and social obloquy would attend his wife and children; and this it was which inspired the passionate and pathetic letter which he addressed to Lady Raleigh just before he stabbed himself. This letter seems to close the real life of Raleigh. He was to breathe, indeed, for fifteen years more, but only in a sort of living death. He ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... book and looking up, sleepily, "I wanted to see what is coming to this pair of sweethearts, but they can wait. I am anxious to know what is going on in real life. I am tired of the poky way you and Dick Mostyn are courting. I want to be a swell ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... but it doesn't matter much. We mustn't exaggerate the fellow's importance; he's a very poor sample of the theatrical villain. Besides, I imagine you seldom meet the latter in real life; ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... there are a couple of things I do not like about it. One is the habit of giving people surnames that are also parts of the ship. I know that Marryat did it once or twice, and Kingston did it, but it jars each time. I suppose the virtue of doing this is that you are unlikely to find anyone in real life with that surname, so confusion with ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... his Inclinations good or bad, and give him imaginary Opportunities of pursuing them to the utmost; so that his Temper will lye fairly open to his View, while he considers how it is moved when free from those Constraints which the Accidents of real Life put it under. Dreams are certainly the Result of our waking Thoughts, and our daily Hopes and Fears are what give the Mind such nimble Relishes of Pleasure, and such severe Touches of Pain, in its Midnight Rambles. A ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physiological and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you, or for anyone, at any time. But my real life, as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes, has nothing before or after because it is beyond time. It is independent of birth and death because it cannot be related to biological events; it is not born, and will not die; it is immortal; all possible thinkable time is enclosed ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... studied. Perhaps it is a disease that cannot be observed. Suicide is one effect of a sentiment which we will call self-esteem, if you will, to prevent confusion by using the word "honor." When a man despises himself, and sees that others despise him, when real life fails to fulfil his hopes, then comes the moment when he takes his life, and thereby does homage to society—shorn of his virtues or his splendor, he does not care to face his fellows. Among atheists—Christians being without the question of suicide—among ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... queer scene, such as we only act in real life. The vast room, with its gorgeous hangings, the flickering candles, the table spread with delicacies, and the strange party seated at it—Concha eating steadily, the General looking round with his domesticated little smile, Estella with a new light in her eyes ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together. I used to smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me like a mysterious and appalling force. I crave the human presence in my home. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... advantageous location and her richly indented coast to develop a maritime trade which extended from Kamchatka to India; but in 1624 an imperial order withdrew every Japanese vessel from the high seas, and for over two hundred years robbed her busy littoral of all its historical significance. The real life of the Pacific coast of the United States began only with its incorporation into the territory of the Republic, but it failed to attain its full importance until our acquisition of Alaska, Hawaii, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... story books are like real life. And if Nancy had had fairy glasses that she might look ahead the "years and years" Jennie had spoken of, how amazed she would have been to see two figures—identical with her own and ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... unpleasant smile. "Ask the widowed Queen Anne, whether Richelieu knew how to love. And ask her whether Mazarin was not as fond as he was sagacious. But enough of day-dreams: we must return to the affairs of real life. There has been a demonstration of serious import against me to-day. I must oppose it by another. Louvois and his minions must learn that I am not to be intimidated by their menaces, nor to be browbeaten by ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Are all these solemn sayings of Mencius to be regarded as nothing more than mere literary rodomontade, wherewith to beguile an enslaved people? Do the mandarins keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope? Or do the Chinese people enjoy in real life the recognition which should be accorded to them by the terms ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... Sir Brian!" cried the Frenchman, now completely restored, "my real life is lived in the land of the poppies; my other life is but a shadow! Morbleu! to be an outcast from that garden of bliss is to me torture excruciating. For the past three months I have ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... about to tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end of that passage of real life. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... holding it up to nature without the intervention of the conventionalities of the stage. The company to which we are introduced is, no doubt, pursuing a somewhat artificial vocation; but it is pursuing it in the way of real life, as many live men and women have pursued it. The mask itself may be of their trade and class; but it is taken off them, and they are not merely ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Starr. But he was gone, no one knew where, and the whole country rang with the gossip and scandal of the affair. Eliza knew nothing of this, for she was ill and unconscious for many a day. In a novel or story she would have died, I suppose, and that would have been the end of it. But this was in real life, and Eliza did not die, although many times we thought ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... seemed to her that no girl had ever been placed in so painful a position before. We, who have more experience of life than Lesley had, know better than that. Lesley's position was painful indeed, but it might in many ways have been worse. But she, ignorant of real life, more ignorant even than most girls, because she knew so few of the pictures of real life that are to be found in the best kind of novels, had nothing but her native instincts of truth and courage to fall ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... bring also an entering upon real life-work. Faith knew it; she had realized long before with a thought of pain, that this summons to Europe had perhaps cut short her last time of absolute holiday pleasure. Mr. Linden could hardly now be more than ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... at the age of thirteen, and you've lived a whole year? No; I won't say 'lived,' but you've kept pretty nearly alive. There isn't much real life in you, Drew, I'll be bound. ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... what about her great interest in Rod, and that closing piece which she had sung in such a pathetic manner? Stranger things had happened before, he mused. But they generally occurred in stories, and not in real life. Anyway, it was interesting, though he decided to keep the idea to himself for awhile, to see if anything else ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... fair to add that the photograph scarcely did Mr. Wylie justice. In real life he did not wear the collar, he was free and easy in his manners, sure of his powers of conquest. As Lise observed, he had made a home-run with her at Slattery's Riverside Park. "Sadie Hartmann was sure sore when I tangoed off with him," ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which included Aileen Lawton, a girl as restless and avid of excitement as herself. Rex Roberts and several other young men had been in attendance, and Polly had begged Ruyler to stay on and let his wife see something of "real life." ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... descriptions, for example, of the company at the Rainbow or of the party at the Red House, seem like caricatures or like pictures from real life? Give reasons. ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... tragedy in Chapter VI might have been used in the days of Thespis in a much cruder and less metaphorical sense. According to primitive ideas, the mimic representation on the stage of 'incidents arousing pity and fear' did act as a katharsis of such 'passions' or 'sufferings' in real life. (For the word pathemata means 'sufferings' as well as 'passions'.) It is worth remembering that in the year 361 B.C., during Aristotle's lifetime, Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome, not on artistic but on superstitious grounds, ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... cried aloud at the memory of his furtive cigarette, the bishop was staying with a rich man named Garstein Fellows. These Garstein Fellows people were steel people with a financial side to them; young Garstein Fellows had his fingers in various chemical businesses, and the real life of the firm was in various minor partners called Hartstein and Blumenhart and so forth, who had acquired a considerable amount of ungentlemanly science and energy in Germany and German Switzerland. But the Fellows element was good old Princhester stuff. There had ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... things, it ceases to be a wise guardian of present things: that it ought never, as long as the world lasts, to be wholly content with any existing state of institution or possession, but to be hopeful still of more wisdom and power; not clutching at it restlessly or hastily, but feeling that its real life consists in steady ascent from high to higher: conservative, indeed, and jealously conservative of old things, but conservative of them as pillars, not as pinnacles—as aids, but not as idols; and hopeful chiefly, and active, in times ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... long pause. Then Mr. Warlock began again. "When I ask about your life, my boy, I don't mean where you've lived, how you've earned your living—I do know all that—you've been very good about writing. But your real life, what you've been thinking about things, how you ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... express them with complete composure; and as Donne in poetry tried to attain to an intellectual mastery over his passions by means of conceits, so Poussin in painting tried to attain to the same mastery through the representation of an ideal world. Each was enthralled with his experience of real life; but each was dissatisfied with the haphazard, tyrannous nature of that experience, and especially with the divorce between passion and intellect, which in actual experience is so painful to the man who is both passionate and intelligent. So each, in his art, tried to make a new kind of experience, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... that your husband belongs to a type that our dramatists have thought worthy of preservation and of exercising their finest art upon. I often give writers credit for more creative ability than they possess, for I always am seeing some one in real life whose entire type I had supposed had come straight out of their genius. Take yourself, for instance. If I had not met you outside of a book, I should have thought ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... in all the novels and motion picture plays the vampires and adventuresses have dark hair and black eyes, while the innocent, persecuted angels are all blondes—whereas in real life it is always ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... interest only on account of the legal points involved. When I was there, filing papers in their dusty packages, I used to feel as though I was fumbling among the dust of clients long since dead and gone. The place stifled and depressed me. I longed for red blood and real life. There I was, acting as a clerk on nothing a year, when uptown I was in the centre of the whirlpool of existence. It was with ill-concealed gratification that I used daily at one o'clock to enter the library, bow to whatever member of the firm happened ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women. These men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. But their thinking tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is no doubt of what you say." "We may then conclude," said Socrates, "that it is the part of an excellent statuary to express the various affections and passions of the soul, by representing such-and-such motions and postures of the body as are commonly exerted in real life whenever the mind ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... similar incident occurred in real life near Alipur Duar in Eastern Bengal to a lady and an officer on a female elephant named Dundora during a beat. But in this case it was the man that killed the tiger with his second rifle when it was standing on the elephant's head with ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... various ways: it is a pure, true book without effort, which, in these days of gesture and rolling of the eyes, is an uncommon thing. Also you make your 'private judgment' work itself out quietly as a simple part of the love of truth, instead of being the loud heroic virtue it is so apt in real life to profess itself, seldom moving without drums and trumpets and the flying of party colours. All these you have put down rightly, wisely, and boldly, and it was, in my mind, no less wise than bold of you to let in that odour of Tyrrwhitism into the folds of the purple, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... at all. He cannot make his hero talk like a great man; he must make him look like one. For which reason he ought to be well studied in the analysis of those circumstances which constitute dignity of appearance in real life. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds |
