"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Dom-i-stick,"—how the Lord said unto Moses, "Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice." As we would see these "twenty fat bullocks" time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... disturbed: a series of dreadfully realistic dreams danced through his brain. First he seemed to be standing upon a high mountain peak with eternal snows stretched all about him. He looked down, past the snow line, past the fir woods, into the depths ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred" compliment worth the cruel wounds, ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... are," declared Mr. Ringold. "I have my sea drama all ready for the films now. I don't know what to do about a wreck, though. I'm afraid I can't make it realistic enough. I must make other plans about that scene. But get your cameras in good shape, boys, for there is ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... this little can be done beyond indicating on the broadest lines the kind of reading which tends to preserve or to restore mental health. Away with your "problem" novels and "realistic" poems stated in the filthy material of moral gutters! Hans Andersen will take some birds, some flowers, some toys, and will state the same problems, and get the same eternal solutions, without making ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... and college days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips Andover. It was Shore Acres, and I have not yet forgotten, after a quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as if my grandfather's kitchen had ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the Psamatiks has been called, is characterized by an extreme neatness of manipulation in the drawings and lines, the fineness of which often reminds us of the performances of a seal-engraver, by grace, softness, tenderness, and elegance. It is not the broad, but somewhat realistic style of the Memphitic period, much less the highly imaginative and vigorous style of the Ramesside kings; but it is a style which has quiet merits of its own, sweet and pure, full of refinement ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... That is the genial error of the present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method. The 'brown foreground,' 'old mastery,' and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities - significance or charm. And the same - very same - inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,' but then upheaved into snow-clad ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... realistic tendency, already existing in the Flemish masters, to an extraordinary pitch of excellence, whilst in many essential respects he adhered to the more ideal feeling of the previous period, imparting to this, by the means of his far richer ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... to recall the manner in which the opera was put upon the stage in those days. Every effort seems to have been made to render the scenes as realistic as possible, though occasionally this straining after effect was carried to an excess that excited ridicule. Thus, in the scene for Act II of 'Rinaldo,' representing the garden of Armida, the stage was filled with living birds, which were let loose from cages. As the opera ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... use with his customary thoroughness before he formally presented her with the gun. She had never had occasion to turn the stunner on a human being, but she'd used it on game. If this cloak and dagger business became too realistic, she'd already decided she would ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... Ribera, nicknamed Lo Spagnoletto—carried on Caravaggio's tradition. Spagnoletto surpassed his master in the brutally realistic expression of physical anguish. His Prometheus writhing under the beak of the vulture, his disembowelled martyrs and skinless S. Bartholomews, are among the most nauseous products of a masculine nature blessed with robust health. Were they delirious or hysterical, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Topers, which must have been painted while Rubens was at Madrid, or very shortly after he left, we can almost see a determination not to be influenced by him; for the subject was a favourite one of Rubens's, and yet there is nothing in this most realistic ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... leaned back. She closed her eyes. The car had climbed to the entrance of Les Solitudes and the fuchsia hedge was passing on each side. Mrs. Talcott, looking at her companion, saw that she had either actually fainted or was simulating a very realistic fainting-fit. Mercedes often had fainting-fits at moments of crisis; but she was a robust woman, and Mrs. Talcott had no reason to believe that any of them had been genuine. She did not believe that this one was genuine, yet she had to own, looking at the leaden eyelids and ashen face, that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... strange impulse to dwell upon and recall everything relating to this life, since the chances were so great that we might, before the close of another day, enter a different state of existence. You see I am trying, as you requested, to give you a realistic picture." ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... a ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to work to paint. He appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired by any one of them; but he had no conception of the possibility of knowing nothing at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired directly by what is ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... it a few months before he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw, you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to build, but you left ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... continental corn. This device, which he imagined would impoverish us to enrich his own States, was the greatest aid that he could have rendered to our hard-pressed social system; and readers of Charlotte Bronte's realistic sketches of the Luddite rioting in Yorkshire may imagine what would have befallen England if, besides lack of work and low wages, there had been the added horrors of a bread famine. But fortunately the curious commercial notions harboured by our ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... matter of fact the question scarcely conveyed anything to me. One can realize only by reference to familiar standards. The idea of a man who has lived one hundred and fifty years is to me a more realistic curiosity than the idea of a man twenty-five thousand years old. But I caught a glimpse, as it were, of strange figures, moving about in a colourless background, with calm gestures, slow speeches, silences perhaps a year in length. The familiar outline of London ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... said Berry. "I can see it all. It will be hideously realistic. All women and children will have to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... is of peculiar value for the present purpose inasmuch as it gives a vivid and, in a way, realistic representation of Paul's Cross and its surroundings in the year 1620. There are certain features in the picture which are obviously inaccurate. The view which is taken from the north-west of the cathedral is, for example, made to include the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... let that scene stand, or should he order a "re-take" because Jean had, after all, done the dramatic part, the "remorse stuff"? Of course, when Pete sent the film in, the trimmers could cut the scene; they probably would cut the scene just where Gil went down in a decidedly realistic heap. But it hurt the professional soul of Robert Grant Burns to retake a scene so compellingly dramatic, because it had been so ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... of character is so complex a process that the poetic representation of it, with its subtle suggestiveness, is always more complete and realistic than any possible philosophic analysis. Science can deal only with aspects and abstractions, and its method becomes more and more inadequate as its matter grows more concrete, unless it proceeds from the ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... weapon out, and stood quivering, ready for any foe that dared to approach. The savage ferocity of his face, the fierce energy in his every movement, culminating in that last vicious leap and stamp, altogether constituted such a dramatic and realistic representation of actual fighting that the whole line burst into a very unsoldierly but very hearty applause, which, however, the sergeant major ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... not the middle-aged youth with an undeniable stomach and a baldish head, who, by the grotesque necromancy of his hallucinations, assumed a preposterous likeness to his old friend. He waved his hand to the figures and they vanished like figments of a dream; but all the same the vision had been realistic enough for the lady to look exquisitely pretty. No one could help wishing to stay in a world which contained as charming a picture ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... realistic than this bounteous feast? It is just here that we differ most from the etherealists. They claim that it is unnecessary to imagine food; but we have found that for the maintenance of life we must thrice daily sit down to ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... minutes. And as yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing witnessed from the box ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... this kind must, it is clear, lack many of the qualities which are usually associated with the dramatic art; there is no room in it for variety of character-drawing, for delicacy of feeling, or for the realistic presentation of the experiences of life. Corneille hardly attempted to produce such effects as these; and during his early years his great gifts of passion and rhetoric easily made up for the deficiency. As he grew older, however, his inspiration weakened; his command ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the chorus of mermaids, and the first song was a decided hit. Still the Public, as becomes a first night, maintained a dignified and critical reserve. When the President of the Board of Trade, in full court costume, appeared upon the scene, in the midst of the very realistic long-haired sea-ladies, the audience was half shocked for a moment by the utter incongruity of the situation; but after a while they began to discover that the incongruity was part of the joke, and they laughed quietly a sedate and moderate laugh of suspended judgment. As the Progenitor had predicted, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... said the School-master, coldly. "But what was your opinion of Mrs. Ward's handling of the subject? Do you think she was sufficiently realistic? And if so, and Elsmere weakened under the stress of circumstances, do you think—or don't you think—the production of such a book harmful, because—being real—it must of necessity be ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... khan of the Eleuths. His triumph was short-lived; another army was sent from Peking, this time against him, and he fled into Russian territory, dying there soon afterwards of smallpox. This campaign was lavishly illustrated by Chinese artists, who produced a series of realistic pictures of the battles and skirmishes fought by Ch'ien Lung's victorious troops. How far these were prepared under the guidance of the Jesuit Fathers does not seem to be known. About sixty years previously, under the reign of K'ang Hsi, the Jesuits had carried ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... them, God knows why, salad." This is all the description Turgenef devotes to this lieutenant; but this making him despise women under the appellation of half-sour, half-sweet conglomerate of egg-and-vegetable salad, describes the lieutenant in two lines more faithfully than pages of scientific, realistic photography. (3) Before the ruin of poor Liza becomes known, and while the prince, her seducer, is still on the height of lionization, he is challenged to a duel by Liza's faithful lover. The superfluous man wounds the prince's cheek; the prince, who deems his rival unworthy ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... built entirely of white marble with shafts which look, as do those of the south transept door, almost like Cipollino, taken perhaps from some Roman building. It has well-moulded arches and abaci; capitals richly carved with realistic foliage, and on each side six of the apostles, all very like each other, large-headed, long-bearded, and long-haired, with rather good drapery but bodies and legs which look far too short. St. Peter alone, with short curly hair and beard, has any individuality, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... circulation doubled in a day. One-eyed Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her "half a caser" for a Cry, and ran away without the paper or the change. Jack Mitchell bought a Cry for the first time in his life, and read it. He said he found some of the articles intensely realistic, and many of the statements were very interesting. He said he read one or two things in the Cry that he didn't know before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought three Crys from the Pretty Girl, and ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... ferocity; at other times, she was a horse of such high mettle and spirit as could only find vent in chewing up the front gate and pawing her mother's geraniums into the earth. But it was in her great and realistic combat with dogs that I admired Maria most. Every day about noon two setter dogs would come lounging about the yard with the most innocent air in the world. It was Maria's lunch time and the little thing would toddle in and bring ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... in discussing the conflict of "romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works. And it is obviously easy, so far as subject-matter is concerned, to group his books in two divisions: on the one hand, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Salammbo, and two of the Trois Contes; on the other hand, Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... element of absolutism in the man, his uncompromising severity, his command of the situation regardless of cost, sorrow or suffering to other men, is seen in his realistic physiognomy. We study these facts more and more, as we ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... commonplace people in the world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to like French realistic novels, really to be at home in a French modern theatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity. He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... publication. They represent, for instance, culprits hanging on the gallows—sometimes two or three in a row—with a fire kindled underneath; others attached to stakes in the midst of the flames; others, again, racing away under the lash of the executioner, &c., &c., and thus form a most realistic comment on the judicial ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... of villainous performances, often furtively glancing at me as if fearing I might catch the drift of his talk, made me heartsick with growing mistrust and painful forebodings. Uncle's narratives had been so realistic that I began to dread Pierre's departure. My face must have expressed some of these feelings, for when Pierre left, Uncle Thomas looked me straight in the eyes ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... collection should embrace representative stories of all classes—narrative, realistic, imaginative, scientific, and historical, as well as brief and simple tales ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his pen with so much skill that while giving a realistic account of all important operations, passing over no really noteworthy act of heroism, and acutely criticizing everything which demands criticism, he abstains from overlaying his narrative with details which would have increased the bulk of the book ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... which, it may be supposed, later Confucianism, drifting toxards externalism, would hardly have enjoyed.—A man in Sung carved a mulberry-leaf in jade for his prince. It took three years to complete, and was so well done, so realistic in its down and glossiness, that if placed in a heap of real mulberry-leaves, it could not be distinguished from them. The State pensioned him as a reward; but Liehtse, hearing of it, said: "If God Almighty took three years to complete a leaf, there would be very ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... interest altogether different from that which Borrow’s books command; for while Borrow, the man of genius, throws by the very necessities of his temperament the colours of romance around his gipsies, the characters of ‘In Gypsy Tents,’ depicted by a man of remarkable talent merely, are as realistic as though painted by Zola, while the wealth of gipsy lore at his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... by the Deity Himself to the advent of single Divine thoughts. These Philo regards as [Greek: logoi], words or thoughts—for he does not clearly distinguish between the two—and he resolves the realistic angels of the Bible into this spiritual conception.[206] Thus he says, "the place" where Jacob alighted and had the vision (Gen. xxvii. 11) is the symbol of the perfect contemplation of God; the angels which he saw ascending and descending are the inferior light of Divine precepts. ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... prompted in a measure by that of the audience about him. The emotion of a large assembly was always contagious—sweeping the individual along with it. Whereas, in private, her dancing, lacking the glamour and artificiality of the stage, would be a very different thing. It would appear in a more realistic, commonplace light. Any faults which the atmosphere of the stage might have concealed would immediately become apparent in the light of natural surroundings and her performance sink to the level of ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... they were part of the picture!" exclaimed Ruth. And so she had. Often, to make a moving picture seem more realistic, a manager will not tell the actors all he has prepared. Thus he gets the element of surprise. Both Ruth and Alice, in this case, thought the local police had been brought into the scene at the last moment to add a touch of reality to the play. But, as it turned out, it was ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... shows the successive chemical stages in the evolution of coal. The striking qualities of the original are lost in the reproduction through the use of designs in the place of realistic coloring, but the effect is retained sufficiently to indicate the nature of the sequence and the directness with which it leads back to an origin in vegetal accumulations. The evolutionary process is seen to take the form of increasing density through ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he befriended the Russian novelist Tourgueneff and Emilie Zola, as well as many of the protagonists of the realistic school. He wrote considerable verse and short plays. In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, le Gil Blas, le Gaulois and l'Echo ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of any story he ever read—then or later! Another recurrent image in books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert says, "To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street without ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul' whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... voice and the mode of composition forming muted signals of the book's content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-rounded" characters such as we can expect in realistic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness, trying to reach out to companionship ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Yelpatyevsky is a popular writer of realistic, and humanitarian tales and sketches. In his youth he was exiled to Siberia, and in 1910 he was imprisoned. He was ...
— The Shield • Various
... recitation than for song. Out of a far larger number about one hundred and fifty have survived. The earliest—Richeut—is of the year 1159. From the middle of the twelfth century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry of feudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic observation; and even in the chansons de geste, in occasional comic episodes, something may be seen which is in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous stories, having much in common under their various ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... up on stories as Georgina had. He had had few of this kind, and none so breathlessly realistic. It carried him out of himself so completely that as they rowed slowly back to town he did not see a single house in it, although every western window-pane flashed back the out-going sun like a golden mirror. His serious, brown eyes were following the adventures ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and die misunderstood, or never comprehended at all,—which is worse." Fired by emulation, he shut himself up to create masterpieces which should surpass Meissonier and paralyze the world; and in a short time he showed his friend Lacroix twelve colossal canvases on which he had painted revolting realistic pictures which he called the "Abominations of Paris." "What do you think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... writing Madeleine Ferat. The scheme was further attractive in as much as it lent itself readily to the system of treatment to which he had applied the term naturalisme, to distinguish it from the crudities of the realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience, or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the word of ultimate truth, and with ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... line used in the harpooning of turtles was substituted for the cane, with which, however, some most realistic and serious preliminary work towards perfection in the stratagem of "debil-debil" capture had been accomplished in valorous daylight. But though the boys gave many exhibitions of their skill and of the proper attitude and degree of caution, the correct gestures ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... three paper lanterns, shaped like stars and representing the "three wise men," at the climax of the mass were worked on wires so that they floated overhead along the auditorium, and finally came to rest above the altar, which had been transformed into a manger, the more realistic on account of the pigs, ducks, and chickens manufactured out of paper ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... is a striking book—clever, unpleasant, realistic.... No one who wishes to examine the subject of realism in fiction, with regard to English novels, can afford ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... of antiquity have been polished by the hands of time and of civilization, and, as a result of this process, we get the dying whisper of Rachel in the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and the fearfully realistic "kicking" of the modern Croisette in the poisoning scene of The Sphinx. But, whereas the descendants of Themistocles gladly receive, whether captive or free, all the changes and improvements considered as such by modern taste, thinking them to be a corrected ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... distinctions. Everyone was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone else, and the common struggle merged all differences of birth, wealth, and education. In a charming little work called 'Some Social Aspects of South Australian Life,' which was published in Adelaide about two years ago', a most realistic description is given of the sympathetic mode of living of the first settlers; and as it has never been reprinted in England, I extract a few sentences here and there, which may give some idea of the primitive existence ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... the modern demand for fine realistic accuracy in art, the Adapter, previous to making his delineation of Mr. BUMSTEAD public, submitted it to the judgment of a physician having a large practice amongst younger journalists and Members of the ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... interpose the remark that the movies are already too realistic. "They leave nothing to the imagination." If this were so, it were a grievous fault—at any rate in so far as the moving-picture play aims at being an art-form. All good art leaves something to the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... that so fascinated her; but through repeatedly hearing about it from her old nurse, she felt that she knew it by heart, and used to amuse herself hour after hour in the nursery, drawing diagrams of the rooms and passages, which, to make quite realistic, she ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... passion, as he pleaded in court, and moreover preferred to leap into the flames, like a brave man, when the Crotoniates were moved to compassion and gave him the alternative of exile. The difference between your precept and practice is infinitely more ridiculous; you draw a realistic word-picture of that servile life; you pour contempt on the man who runs into the trap of a rich man's house, where a thousand degradations, half of them self-inflicted, await him; and then in extreme old age, when you are on the border ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... was Nelly that Mr. Wrenn was disappointed, though he didn't know why. It always hurts to have one's thunderous tragedies turn out realistic dialogues. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... hardly have created more living portraits than "Rigby," "Tadpole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like "Lord Steyne" and "Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. The love-making is tender, pretty, and not nearly so mawkish as that of "Henrietta Temple" and "Venetia." There is plenty of wit, epigram, squib, and bon mot. There is almost none of that rhodomontade which pervades the other ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the fury of civil war. Something of a bully by nature, for all his blood and kingliness, young Louis seems to have taken a special delight, during these months of wandering, in tormenting his equally high-spirited brother, the little "Monsieur"; and there flashes across the years a very "realistic" picture of a narrow room in the old chateau of Corbeil, in which, upon a narrow bed, two angry boys are rolling and pulling and scratching in a bitter "pillow-fight," brought on by some piece of boyish tyranny on the elder brother's part. And these two boys are not the "frondeurs" ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... habent infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Esau stories contain marvellously exact and realistic portraits of the two races (the Israelites and the Edomites) that they respectively represent. Of the two brothers, Esau is in many ways the more attractive. He suggests the open air and the fields, where he loved to hunt. He is easy-going, ingenuous, and impulsive. ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... of a hero or a heroine, and all for the sake of amusement. Young people and children are not likely to get good impressions from this sort of thing. It has even been said that murders have been committed by youngsters who had been taken by their parents to see a realistic melodrama. It is dangerous to allow young people of tender age to see such plays. The juvenile mind is not ripe enough to form correct judgments. Some time ago I read in one of the American papers that a boy had killed his father with a knife, on seeing him ill-treat his mother ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... complicated as his vision of humanity. His pessimism exceeds in its simplicity and depth that of all other realistic writers. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... interesting circumstance is that this medieval age produced two poets, Langland and Chaucer, who were more realistic even than present-day writers in their portrayal of life, and who together gave us such a picture of English society as no other poets have ever equaled. Langland wrote his Piers Plowman in the familiar ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... away at the church in the cove, and who mistook the instrument for a banjo, addressed himself to picking out this tune, singing the while a quaint and ursine lay. Basil embellished the imitation with a masterly effect of realistic growls. ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... couldn't be duller than Henry James, with his everlasting stories, full of people who talk a great deal and amount to nothing. I like the older novels best, and enjoy some of Scott's and Miss Edgeworth's better than Howells's, or any of the modern realistic writers, with their elevators, and paint-pots, and every-day people," said Alice, who wasted ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... meaning, that they became utterly oblivious to our presence or to Hawkinson's steady grinding of the camera. In the war-dance the participants, who were Moro fighting men, and were armed with spears, shields, and the vicious, broad-bladed knives known as barongs, gave a highly realistic representation of pinning an enemy to the earth with a spear, and with the barong decapitating him. The first part of the dance, before the passions of the savages became aroused, was, however, monotonous ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoievsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of Dostoievsky, yet is evidently a portrait ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... by gold mining and by production of rice, sugar, and forestry products for export. Favorable factors include recovery in the key agricultural and mining sectors, a more favorable atmosphere for business initiative, a more realistic exchange rate, a sharp drop in the inflation rate, and the continued support of international organizations. Serious underlying economic problems will continue. Electric power has been in short supply and constitutes a major barrier ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... this poem its place adjoining Agricola and Lazarus. His artist's hankering to create that beauty to bless the world with which his soul refrains from grossly satisfying, unites the poem with the two following ones. In the first of these the realistic artist, Fra Lippo, is graphically pictured personally ushering in the high noon of the Italian efflorescence. In the second, the gray of that day of art is silvering the self-painted portrait of the prematurely frigid and facile ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... other nations; for the sake of demonstrating to their satisfaction that a contribution of Iceland to world-literature is no more an impossibility now than in the older times, when it enriched us with lore and history, and gave the world what Greece and Rome did not, the realistic novel. ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... sincere pleasure to introduce to mothers and kindergartners a pioneer writer in the unexplored field of simple, realistic ...
— All About Johnnie Jones • Carolyn Verhoeff
... the damned. It is at least suggestive that, in spite of the longing for personal communion with Jesus, her first experience of the ecstasy of divine love was experienced after discovering a 'very realistic' picture of a martyred saint—St. Joseph. The significance of the intense contemplation of a tortured body—possibly made by one whose sexual nature was undergoing a ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... involving improbable incidents and catastrophes. She is always unfortunate in her attempts to extricate her heroes and heroines from entangling difficulties. Invention is not her forte; she is weak when she departs from realistic figures. She is strongest in what she has seen, not in what she imagines; and here she is the opposite of Dickens, who paints from imagination. There was never such a man as Pickwick or Barnaby Rudge. Sir Walter Scott created characters,—like Jeannie Deans,—but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... conditions of campaigning on German soil might at least give our impressionists a chance of originality. I have been inspired to these comments by a perusal of Mud and Khaki (SIMPKIN), in which Mr. VERNON BARTLETT has reprinted from The Daily Mail and elsewhere a number of vigorous and realistic studies of life on the Western Front. Perhaps, as a whole, the collection is a little more grim than most; but there are not wanting touches of light comedy, in, for example, the comments of an admirable philosopher ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... be old, and I am inclined to think that it is native; that is, if any stories may be called native. Several facts point to the primitiveness of the tale: (1) the local color and realistic touches, slight though they are; (2) the non-emphasis of the comic possibilities of the situations; (3) the somewhat unsystematic arrangement of incidents, the third demand and exchange (iron rod for dead ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... much pleased and interested lately in reading Mark Twain's, Mrs. Oliphant's and Andrew Lang's books about Joan of Arc. The last two are far the best, Mrs. Oliphant's as a genuine sympathetic history, Lang's as a fine realistic story ("A Monk of Fife"). Jeanne was really perhaps the most beautiful character in authentic history, and the one that most conclusively demonstrates spirit-guidance, and both Mrs. Oliphant and A. Lang bring this out admirably.... —Yours ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... made amusing, which he would not be in real life. In nine cases out of ten an exact reproduction of real life would prove tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art of the realistic novelist sometimes seems akin to that of the Chinese tailor who perpetuated the old patch on the new trousers. True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Though many of Browne's observations are in every way practical and intelligent, our current knowledge of safe, persistent, effective insecticides would not emerge for some fifty or sixty years after his death. And, please, please! Though Browne was realistic in his assessment of the dangers of the chemicals he describes, bear in mind that even his precautions were insufficient for modern purposes. Above all, be very wary of the mercurial recipes he mentions!!! It is true that mercuric chloride is very effective, but I cannot think of a single ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... responded Fanny coolly, and Gabriella knew in her heart that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity. It was impossible to chaperon her every minute, and Fanny, unchaperoned, was, in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... likened life to a dream. Reader, doubtless you are aware, as I am, that life is but too realistic for the masses, the great masses of suffering, sorrow-stricken humanity, with so few, comparatively speaking, so few to uplift, comfort, cheer, and sustain; so few to speak the blessed words of a bright hereafter. Especially is this so with ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... he was very sick. So sick that the room in which he lay seemed to be rising and falling in a horribly realistic manner. Every time it dropped it brought Billy's stomach ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Crime, "L'enfant avait recu deux balles dans la tete." The child is represented in Henry Gervex's picture as being lifted up by his friends, who are examining the poor little wounded, bleeding head. It is powerful in composition and a very thrilling, realistic picture. The other two representations of this subject are by Paul ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... inferred that he had already swallowed a shovelful of live coals. Nevertheless William went on like an inspired conflagration. There proceeded from his lips a sulphurous smoke of damaging words with Dives's face appearing and reappearing in the haze in a manner that was frightfully realistic. I longed to leap to my feet ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... defunct herself, who wished to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... had at Weimar long fallen off from Christianity, and occupied his mind tranquilly for a time with the views of Spinoza (realistic pantheism). Like Herder and Goethe, he viewed life in its great entirety and sacrificed the individual to the species. Accordingly, through the gods of Greece, he fell out with ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Nature; but I thought it a queer appreciation of Nature that would lead keen fox hunters to complain of the "stinking" violets that throw the hounds off the scent of the fox. I saw Ascot and Epsom, but fortunately not on a race day. A horse race I have never seen. George Moore's realistic novel "Esther Waters" does not overstate the extent to which betting demoralizes not only the wealthier, but all classes. There is a great pauper school in Sutton, where from 1,600 to 1,800 children are reared and educated. On Derby Day ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... remarked that "my friend Smollett . . . has certainly a talent for invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work." Lady Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly think of as Smollett's was the ability to work over his own experience into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett's vigorous personality, which in his earlier works was present to give life and interest to almost every chapter, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... precocity—he was twenty-five when he wrote his Metamorphoses; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... however, farther, that the imitation which Reynolds supposes to be characteristic of the Dutch School is that which gives to objects such relief that they seem real, and that he then speaks of this art of realistic imitation as corresponding to ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... princes and princesses. It was to be expected that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux, the author of Marianne, was of the school of Richardson before Richardson wrote a word. But this was an almost isolated appearance, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... at the annual exhibition of Washington artists, Mrs. Burnett stood before a remarkably vivid portrait. Addressing the artist in charge of the exhibition, she said: "That seems to me very strong. It looks as if it must be a realistic likeness. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... positive and constructive behavior of possessors. Because of the threat of retaliation, WMD capabilities may become politically acceptable targets provided collateral damage to civilians is minimized. Preemption may become a more realistic option along the lines of Israel's strikes against Syria's nuclear reactors in 1982. It is, however, a responsible state's worst nightmare to have successfully struck a chemical, biological, or nuclear production facility with precision only ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... destructive, stupid, and bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents itself from ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... custom, or dictionary allow, rather than leave a gap between word and thought; both must be fused together, and made one. If the merchants were honest, they would not "timber" so high—raise such magnificent houses.[663] In other parts he uses realistic terms, noisy, ill-favoured expressions, which it is ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Revenges, as well as its similarly realistic treatment and striking simplicity of verse and phrase, connect it with the admirable little poem now know as The Italian in England.[27] This is a tale of an Italian patriot, who, after an unsuccessful rising, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... deserves the name; here, for the first time, the world of the peasant was presented as a distinct world by itself.[1] It is at the same time one of the earliest, as well as the most splendid, products of realistic art; and, considered in connection with his later writings, must be regarded as his creed and program. For the motives of the several chapters reappear later, worked out into complete books, and thus both Uli der Knecht ("Uli, the Farmhand," 1841) and Uli der Paechter ("Uli, the Tenant," 1849) ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... clear, realistic conceptions through pictures, we influence the child to read eagerly the text, to discover the whole story, of which such a fascinating hint is given in the portion illustrated. These first pictures must satisfy the child's love of action and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... deal to encourage local writers, but the most powerful influence has been that of 'The Bulletin', started in Sydney in 1880. Its racy, irreverent tone and its humour are characteristically Australian, and through its columns the first realistic Australian verse of any importance — the writings of Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson — became widely known. When published in book form, their verses met with phenomenal success; Paterson's "The Man from Snowy River" (1895) having already attained a circulation of ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Byzantine design is, of course, little more than a pattern with sunk holes for a background, and it is in marble; but those holes are arranged in a distinct and orderly fashion. The other is a highly realistic treatment of foliage, the likeness to nature being so fully developed that some of these groups have veins on the backs of the leaves. The question for the moment is this, which of the two extremes gives ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... in the drama were shown, one in a barnyard full of cows being especially realistic. Then came the scene inside the railroad station at Oak Run, and all of the boys and Dora laughed heartily when they saw the look of astonishment on old Ricks' face as he peered through his ticket window at the actor who had come ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... gazed intently at the glass. Quimbleton produced a white apron from somewhere, and tied it round his burly form. With Bleak playing the role of customer he then went through a pantomime of serving imaginary drinks. His representation of the now vanished type of the bartender was so admirably realistic that it brought tears to the eyes of more than one in the gathering. The editor, with appropriate countenance and gesture, dramatized the motions of ordering, drinking, and paying for his invisible refreshment. His ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... from the personality of the artist, is impressed on all his work? The answer to this question, though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradual analysis. The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is, that he has aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities. His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth. Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid truth of nature. Next we feel ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase—as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound, but it might ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... is directed to the spot, betrays that here is the centre of independent life and motive. The dwarf, unkempt weeds cloak a meek, weak, shrinking crab, whose frail claws and tufted legs are breeched with muddy moss, and whose oddly-shaped body is obscured by parasitic vegetation and realistic counterfeits thereof. Inspection, however critical, makes no satisfactory definition between the real and the artificial algae, so perfectly do the details of the moving marine garden blend with the fringes and fur of the animal's rugged and misshapen figure and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... here is that we are not getting real facts regarding the desperateness of the U-boat situation. We need to be told facts in order to have our minds challenged. We are not cowards, and I hope you will give us realistic pictures of just what is happening if you ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... pieces furnished the music, and in the opinion of the jackies one feature alone was lacking to make the entertainment a complete success—the new drop-curtain had failed to arrive from London. I happened to be present when this curtain was first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a most realistic presentation of "little old New York," seen from the North River, towering against blue American skies. And though I have never been overfond of New York, that curtain in that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... It would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been trying for months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying—perhaps you didn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it—to find a job.—Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, it occurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might be ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... sublime conception of citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... in front of groups of models arranged in realistic surroundings). All the faces screwed up to suffering, you see!... What a nice patient expression that officer on the stretcher has! Yes, they've given him a wax head—some of them are only papier mache.... Pity they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... began to make their way between the battalions, all covered with blood and many displaying most terrible injuries—faces cut to rags, bowels protruding, fishhook spears still stuck in their bodies—realistic pictures from the darker side of war. Thus absorbed, the soldiers hardly noticed the growing musketry fire from the peak. But suddenly the bang of a field-gun set all eyes looking backward. A battery had unlimbered in the plain between the zeriba and the ridge, and was beginning to shell the summit ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... plume of Mlle. des Touches, and perhaps Balzac himself in Claude Vignon, the critic. Less factitious is the interest derived from Balzac's admirable delineation of a doting mother and aunt, and from his realistic handling of one of the cleverest of his ladies of light reputation, Madame Schontz; his studies of such characters of the demi-monde—especially of the wonderful Esther of the 'Splendeurs et miseres'—serving plainly, by the way, as a point of departure for Dumas fils. Yet 'Beatrix' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... seemed to have an innate genius for art and beauty, and who was always eager to perpetuate in marble his ideal conception of the "hero from whose loins he sprung," or to immortalise with some splendid work of art the name of his mother-city—and the stern, practical Roman, realistic in his every pore, eager for conquest, and whose one dominant idea was to bring under his sway all the nations who were brought into contact with him, and to make his city—as had been foretold—the ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... the coldness of Malory's stories. He wrote for a youthful and enthusiastic people; it was a period of new birth throughout Europe, the period of the spring-time of modern literature, the epoch of the Renaissance. There was no need to depict in realistic fashion the passions and stirrings of the heart in order to excite the emotion of the reader; a relation of events sufficed for him; his own imagination did the rest, and enlivened the dull-painted canvas with visions of every colour. The book had as much ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand |
