"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in, the beauty of the desert seemed to increase daily. The heat, whilst it added to one's sense of the desert's cruelty, added at the same time to the unreality and to the mystery of silence and of distances that are so large a ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... of the golden heart!—God in heaven grant that to you and such as you this vision may be no dim unreality! God grant you true hearts against which your own may beat, and faithful arms upon which you may lean when the day of your probation is accomplished I And failing this fruition, the same God of love and peace grant you a truer and more enduring union ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... couch Miss Lady lay, and watched the flickering of the fire and the heavy masses of the shadows. She could not sleep. There came upon her the feeling of unreality in her surroundings which is experienced by nearly all civilized human beings when thrown into the uncivilized surroundings of nature. It all seemed to her like some rapid and fevered dream. She wondered what had become of Henry ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... his leave gracefully and went away through the enthralling, glittering unreality of it all leaving a young girl thrilled, excited, and deeply impressed with his ease and bearing amid awe-inspiring scenes in which she, too, desired most ardently to find herself ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... grey windows, its iron-hung gas-lamps, its ugly desk and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange shapes and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest, as ready ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Compassion urged the one, the love of harmony led the other. How near they were akin! how far apart they have wandered! Yet there has always been this essential difference between them, that while the Buddhist regards the senses as windows looking out upon unreality and mirage, to the Taoist they are doors through which the freed soul rushes to mingle with the colours and tones and contours of the universe. Both Buddha and Lao Tzu are poets, one listening to the rhythm of ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... not take kindly to the 'Drama of Exile,' and 'Blackwood' in particular criticised it at considerable length, calling it 'the least successful of her works.' The subject, while half challenging comparison with Milton, lends itself only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett's genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship.' It must have been a little mortifying ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... chase, he felt depressed as the train sped through the forests of Ontario. It was not long since he had come that way in high spirits, looking forward with pleasure to a holiday. Now he looked back, with a feeling of unreality, on his wanderings among the Scottish bogs. All he had done seemed ridiculous and fantastic. Nobody was the better for it, while he had involved himself in a horrible tangle. The police were probably on his ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... displays of rhetorical patriotism for which the Irish language has found the expressive term raimeis, and which (thanks largely to the Gaelic movement) most people now listen to with a painful and half-ashamed sense of their unreality. ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... upward through the brambles, even though it was hard work. Men were fighting all around and below him, meanwhile, and he wondered vaguely what made them kill one another when he and his negroes were all dead or dying. It seemed very strange—of a piece with the general unreality of things—and it troubled ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... Science,—namely, that there are no sickness, sin, and death in the divine Mind. What seem to be disease, vice, and mortality are illusions of the physical senses. These illusions are not real, but unreal. Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else. In a moment you may awake from a night-dream; just so you can awake from the dream of sickness; but the demonstration of the Science of Mind-healing by no means rests ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... Silent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him back to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... halted in his tracks and stared incredulously, then he smiled. "A shell-game, running wide open on the main street of the town!" This WAS the frontier, the very edge of things. With an odd sense of unreality he felt the world turn back ten years. He had seen shell-games at circuses and fairgrounds when he was much younger, but he supposed they had long since been abandoned in favor of more ingenious and less discreditable methods of robbery. Evidently, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let the talk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern ocean liner pulled into the harbor of New York—to find an untouched Manhattan Island in its ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... of unreality, a feeling that the natural order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had predicted I should be. When I expressed to Mr Brindley my stupefaction ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... fourteen speeches delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality—of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere—is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the Philippics. In the epoch of the Verrines and the Catilinarians ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... last!" she cried in intense relief as she recognized the well-known landmarks. Long before the train could possibly draw up, she got up and stood by the door with the handle in her hand, a sense of strangeness, of unreality, growing upon her. She felt as though she were some one else, some one older and more experienced, who was accustomed to moving amidst tragedies and the serious events of life. Even the old familiar platform, the white palings, the 'bus and the drowsy horses that she knew so well, seemed ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... learn from this perfect marriage! How much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence and showy unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where there is no insatiable longing for the unattainable. The worship of wealth, the ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. That which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... mean to say—?' he cried. The rapidity of her confidence alone made him feel it all of a dreamlike unreality. ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... upon us, we find it impossible to feel that all things about us are not changed. We cannot imagine ourselves falling into the old daily routine again. The death of one dear to us gives us a shock which seems to unsettle the very foundation of things. A sense of insecurity and unreality pervades all that concerns us. We shrink from the thought that the old pleasures will charm us again, that daily cares will occupy our minds to the exclusion of to-day's sadness, that time will heal the wounds that ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... United States are unfamiliar with the lines, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." It is vaguely remembered that a certain Bishop Berkeley was the author of a treatise on tar-water. There is moreover a general impression that this Bishop Berkeley contended for the unreality of all things outside of his own mind, and now and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... natural science, not in the spirit of detraction, but for the sake of a more sound belief concerning reality. The philosopher falls into error no less radical than that of the dogmatic scientist, when he charges the scientist with untruth, and attaches to his concepts the predicate of unreality. The fact that the concepts of science are selected, and only inadequately true of reality, should not be taken to mean that they are sportive or arbitrary. They are not "devices" or abbreviations, in any sense that does not attach to such symbolism as all thought ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... rebellious reaction which had come upon him with regard to his personal religion. Certainly he had had Mass said for Amy this morning; but it had been by almost a superstitious rather than a religious instinct. He was, in fact, in that state of religious unreality which occasionally comes upon converts within a year or two of the change of their faith. The impetus of old association is absent, and the force of novelty ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills—the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions. Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon of dance-hall music floated on the air. Outside it all was the desert silence—the silence of a world ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... vain to hear what was going on inside the choir. As a wise author— a Protestant, too—has lately said, 'the scanty service rattled in the vast building, like a dried kernel too small for its shell.' The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy life-in- death, while the whole nineteenth century went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought, though only as a dilettante, of old St. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through centuries and dynasties, from old Augustine and Mellitus, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... going on around me, the raindrops will occasionally be heard to patter against my window-panes, which look forth upon one of the quietest streets in a New England town. After a time, too, the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike bedtime to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gala nights of opera fastened on him with a peculiar significance—suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth. Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth. The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language, the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic expression of the resplendent vagaries of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of Chou Nu served merely to stress the sense of unreality: for, obviously, only the heroine of a true fairy tale could have broken from a chrysalis stage of sordid Soho to the brilliant butterfly existence of a Russian princess domiciled in the most aristocratic quarter of London and attended ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... a nap. He was seventy years old, and could drop asleep easily. When he slept, however lightly and briefly, he was pretty sure to dream; and if awakened suddenly, his dream would often prolong itself, and mingle with passing events, which would themselves put on the semblance of unreality. On the present occasion the sound of Helwyse's voice had probably crept through the door, and insinuated itself into his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... so accustomed, and as I believe quite rightly, to look at all Christ's life down to its minutest events as intended to be a revelation of God, that we are sometimes apt to think about it as if His motive and purpose in everything was didactic. So an unreality creeps over our conceptions of Christ's life, and we need to be reminded that He was not always acting and speaking in order to convey instruction, but that words and deeds were drawn from Him by the play of simple human feelings. He pitied not only in order ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of unreality, partially dispelled, began to return. Benson dropped to the floor and stood beside the table, getting a cigarette out of his ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... my travels and visits I saw little of the theatre or concert room, and some of the candid confessions of Mrs. Oliphant might stand for my own. I had read so many plays before I saw one that the unreality of much of the acted drama impressed me unfavourably. The asides in particular seemed impossible, and I think the more carefully the pieces are put on the stage the more critical I become concerning their probability; and when I hear ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... connected with my breakfast. But it would not go down, and I could do nothing but gaze hard as through a mist at the little delicate woman who was holding so tightly to my hands. There was a dimness and an unreality about everything. Things seemed to be going on in a way I did not understand, and I quite started at last as somebody seemed to say, "Good-bye," and I found myself in the little boat and on the way ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... obvious questions be put to our positive moralists—these questions they have themselves suggested, and the grotesque unreality of this vague optimism will be at once apparent. Never was vagary of mediaeval faith so groundless as this. The Earthly Paradise that the mediaeval world believed in was not more mythical than the Earthly Paradise believed in by our exact thinkers now; ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... appeared to me a little overwrought and designed to conceal a sharpness of wit and observation which she feared to exercise in courtly circles. In this resolve she was doubtless discreet, but it gave her conversation a turn of unreality which impressed as might the use of some perfume of Araby to conceal a less romantic odour. It affected my own candour disagreeably. Possibly the praise received by the author of "Evelina" might cause her to abandon ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the pit vanished. A clear light sprang up in the big room. Simultaneously, Halder felt the nightmare immobility draining from him and the sensation of dreamlike unreality fade from his mind. He turned to the right, found Kilby's eyes already on him, saw the Rellis couple sitting beyond her ... Rane, no longer disguised, looking like a ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... horrible connected with existence, and with vivid descriptions, consciously faltering with inadequacy, of every thing supremely fascinating in connection with Nirwana. "The three reflections on the impermanency, suffering, and unreality of the body are three gates leading to the city of Nirwana." The constant claim is, that whosoever by adequate moral discipline and philosophical contemplation attains to a certain degree of wisdom, a certain degree of intellectual insight, instead of any longer cleaving to existence, will ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... with the interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community. In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constant tendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrill it. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two political parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... my province, even if it were within my power, to discuss these airy speculations, and thereby to descend into the arena where for ages subtle dialecticians have battled with each other over the reality or unreality of an external world. For my purpose it suffices to adopt the popular and convenient distinction of mind and matter and hence to divide experience into two sorts, an inward experience of the acts and states of our own minds, and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... they walked and talked together the course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried reading aloud to Telfer ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... with geranium lips slightly parted on flawless teeth, and nodded slowly. The westering sun striking through the window overlooking the Common illuminated her with a flat gold unreality. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Park Gardens, instead of turning east towards Piccadilly he turned west in the direction of the Workhouse tower. And thus he exposed the unreality of the grandiose pleas with which professional men impose on their wives and on themselves. A few minutes earlier his appointment at the club (not Pickering's, to which, however, he still belonged, but a much greater institution, the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... really very serious," said Lord Reckage, with twitching lips. "The whole story has had all along something of unreality about it. Robert seems fated to a ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... elderly man kneeling beside my bed, and my brain whirled with the unreality of it all. The "man of mystery," the "Quester" of Broadway, the elderly soldier of fortune, about whose reputed wealth and constant searching of faces wherever he was the idle gossip of the city's Bohemia had whirled—to think that this man was the father I had never known, the father, alas! whom ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... separate works of God leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less importance is economically or sacramentally connected with the more momentous system[2], and of this conclusion the theory, to which I was inclined as a boy, viz. the unreality of material phenomena, is an ultimate resolution. At this time I did not make the distinction between matter itself and its phenomena, which is so necessary and so obvious in discussing the subject. ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... range. Youth and propinquity have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia's situation was an unspoken appeal to her lover's forbearance. The sense that her safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made the happiness of the moment seem, in its exquisite unreality, a mere dreamlike interlude between the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... was brought into connection with the powerful enemy who controlled more and more even the normal and reasonable doings of the patient. My first impression was decidedly that of a paranoiac. Yet in some ways the case suggested another view. There had remained an insight into the unreality of the obsession. The patient did not really believe the theory of the telepathic hypnotic influence. He felt it more as an idea which he could not get rid of and he did not know clearly himself whether he requested hypnotic treatment on my part for the purpose of counteracting ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... been about ten or eleven when I went through this experience, and I never got rid of the feeling of a certain unreality in the whole transaction, but on the other hand I had the same feeling of unreality in the system of theology which led to it. I tried to do my best to carry out the line of spiritual duties imposed upon ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... other hand, he should by some incantation be projected forward only fifty years in time, still in the place of his birth, the effect of unreality would be even more startling, especially if those things should have happened which prophets predict and toward which all progress tends. Conditions would be unendurable, manners offensive. No man would seem quite a man. No woman ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... not take Amy's word: she searched her face and eyes with one swift scrutiny that was like a merciless white flame of truth, scorching away all sham, all play, all unreality. Then she dropped her head quickly, so that her own face remained hidden, and silently plied her work. But how the very earth about the rake, how the little roots and clods, seemed to come to life and leap joyously into the air! All at once she dropped everything ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... all that had been promised and they sat through its mystic-scenes with rapt attention, comparing notes enthusiastically in the intervals when the curtain was down, and when it was over they came out into the daylight with that peculiar sensation of unreality in the daylight world that follows an ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn't you a little for her sick husband? But a husband is nothing—when you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... true of animals as of men. If automata existed similar to animals in all respects, both external and internal, it would be absolutely impossible to distinguish them from real animals. If, however, they were made to resemble human bodies, two signs would indicate their unreality—we would find no communication of ideas by means of language, and also an absence of those bodily movements which take their origin in the reason (and not merely in the constitution of the body). ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of unreality was creeping back. It was almost better to remember the Napoleon past. There were books about that. He pictured again the dead Ram-tah in trappings of royalty. If he could only see himself, and be sure. But that ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... from devil-terrors. Even Jesus was pursued by Satan, and the Holy Catholic Church has its ceremonies for the exorcising of demons, and a most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they are perfect in God—yet tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... of this book have the charm of romance without its unreality. The book illuminates, with lifelike portraits, the history of ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... house it was, large and cold. I found that I was expected; but an air of unreality hung over everything. I met three or four most kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knew nothing of me. I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am sure the others knew less. I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... weird feeling of unreality; as he hung there helplessly, to see one of the screens on the bulkhead pick up something ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... astonished to find a real elephant dropping in to tea, or a real miniature railway across the lawn, than in finding a toy elephant or a toy engine awaiting him. Children are so accustomed to novelty that they do not realise the abnormal; nor do they always crave for unreality. As coaches and horses were the delight of youngsters a century ago, so are trains and steamboats to-day. Given a pile of books and an empty floor space, their imagination needs no mechanical models of real locomotives; or, to be ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Preux, Rene, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins,—so much easier is it to caricature life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint it in its noble simplicity; so much cheaper is unreality than truth. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... very subtle and sweet warmth emanated from her like a breath. It took him back to the day when he had huddled close to her, hiccoughing with grief and anger, and yet deeply, deliriously happy because she was sorry for him. It made him giddy with a sense of unreality, as though the present and the intervening years were only part of one of his night stories, which, after their tiresome, undeviating custom, had got tangled up in a monstrous, impossible dream. And then a new fancy took possession of him. He wanted to bend closer to her and say, very ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... that my recollections of things seen when the sense of reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however, I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... a delicate sensitiveness to beauty and to suffering which gives distinction to this charming book. Less happy perhaps and much less in the picture are the episodes learnt only at second hand and suggesting the technique and unreality of the ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... superficial religious philosophy taught, were all as far removed from the divine Son of Mary as the tinsel scenery of a stage differs from a natural landscape. Mildred's deep and sorrowful experience made its unreality painfully apparent and unsatisfactory. She resolved, however, to try to give the sacred words that would be uttered their true meaning; and, in fact, her sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Canterbury. Here at Dartford the pilgrims slept, here to-day we say farewell to all that suburban district which now stretches for so many miles in every direction round the capital, spoiling the country as such and making of it a kind of unreality very hard to tolerate. The traveller must then realise that it is only at Dartford his ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... curiosity. She should have let him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had—tried to regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of these last ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... force of tradition, and by our own gift of pretending, we do still very much enjoy ourselves on Christmas Day. What I mean to insinuate, and to assert, is that beneath this enjoyment is the disconcerting and distressing conviction of unreality, of non-significance, of exaggerated and even false sentiment. What I mean is that we have to brace and force ourselves up to the enjoyment of Christmas. We have to induce deliberately the "Christmas feeling." We have to remind ourselves that ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... looked through it. She was not orderly or systematic enough to keep a diary regularly, and it only contained a few entries, at long intervals, relating mostly to her married life—and to the death of her child. She glanced through them with that strange sense of unreality—of standing already outside her life, of which she had spoken to Janet. There were some blank pages at the end of the book; and, in her restlessness, just to pass the time and to find some outlet for the storm of feeling within, she began ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... illustrated by Gustave Dore, which she found on the library table in East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled her ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the sutra insists on the unreality of all things. The book was first used by the Fifth Patriarch, as we have seen in the first chapter. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 10, 11, 12, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Lieven visited Belgrade, the Bulgarians were induced by the promises of Prince Michael Obrenovitch to rise en masse. These promises were never fulfilled, and the insurrection was put down with great barbarities by the neighbouring Albanian levies. This single fact is tolerably conclusive as to the unreality of a south Slavonic insurrection, of which so much has been said, and to promote which so much trouble has been taken. Even were the discontent tenfold as deep-rooted as it now is, the Turkish Government might rely on the Mussulman population and the Arnauts to suppress any rising ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... we meet with knights whom we only know apart by their armor, and queens ambling through pathless forests on white palfreys; we attend brilliant tournaments and witness superhuman deeds of arms. Our minds, untroubled by scepticism and thoughtless of unreality, yield themselves to the poetical illusion. Who stops to think of the incredible when Sir Bedivere hurls into the lake the dying Arthur's ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... embarked on a strange river, in a strange boat, and bound for a strange city. To us Westerners a halo of romance, of unreality, hung over New Orleans. To us it had an Old World, almost Oriental flavor of mystery and luxury and pleasure, and we imagined it swathed in the moisture of the Delta, built of quaint houses, with courts of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is divided into four chapters: (i) Agama (scripture), (2) Vaitathya (unreality), (3) Advaita (unity), (4) Alatas'anti (the extinction of the burning coal). The first chapter is more in the way of explaining the Ma@n@dukya Upani@sad by virtue of which the entire work is known ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Grave," and expend four pages of useful paper in detailing your emotions there. But, my dear sir, watering does not improve the quality of ink, even though you should do it with tears. To publish a sorrow to Tom, Dick, and Harry is in some sort to advertise its unreality, for I have observed in my intercourse with the afflicted that the deepest grief instinctively hides its face with its hands and is silent. If your piece were printed, I have no doubt it would be popular, for people like to fancy that they feel much better than the trouble of feeling. I would ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value in that idea. The fact that material objects were represented or conceived would not of itself prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have augured ill ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... strange how vague and shadowy my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality about our life at B——. Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant from Paris,—less than an hour by train,—the country round about our camp seemed to be quite ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... would curve upward in that way. There was no point of reference by which to determine how far away it was, and the air was blue with haze, giving everything an appearance of remoteness and of unreality. He had never seen the city from that angle before, but if what he saw was what he thought it was, how could it have been so close without his knowing about it before this time? It was a thing which belonged to vast distances—spatial ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... quite resisting and firm. From the roof chains of roses hung, concealing small lights—while from above the screen of lilac-bushes in full bloom the moon in all her glory mingled with the rose-shaded lamps and cast a glamour and unreality over ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... except through the grottos about you—grottos haunted by weird forms of the deep, from graceful to grotesque, from almost colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ocean he could hardly feel more detached from the ordinary aerial world ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... predetermined and willful gayety about Asheville however, that is apt to be present in a watering-place, and gave to it the melancholy tone that is always present in gay places. We fancied that the lively movement in the streets had an air of unreality. A band of musicians on the balcony of the Swannanoa were scraping and tooting and twanging with a hired air, and on the opposite balcony of the Eagle a rival band echoed and redoubled the perfunctory joyousness. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with weariness as he strode along the highway, for in the crisp air a tonic was borne, but loss of sleep had made his senses dreamy, and all things about him were touched with the spirit of unreality—the dead leaves fluttering on the underbrush, the purple mist rising from the fields, the water-mirrors flashing in the road; and so surrendered was he to a listless brooding, forgetful even that he moved along, that he did not notice, up the road, ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... of hereditary degeneration." But it turns out that Janet's cases are all what he calls psychasthenics, or victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fatigue, insufficiency, impossibility, unreality and powerlessness of will; and that in each and all of them the particular activity pursued, deleterious though it be, has the temporary result of raising the sense of vitality and making the patient feel alive again. These things reanimate: they would reanimate us, but it happens that in ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... empty. A few palpably deserted huts, nothing else. Beneath us, snugly anchored there on the ledge, was our power house. No unreality here. Its aerials were mounted; its external dynamos were visibly revolving; from its windows blue shafts of light slanted out; and from it rose the low hum ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... him in this state, I saw that for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was, to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty, must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... Spanish Armada. What a tremor would pass through the antique group, if a damp newspaper should suddenly be spread to dry before the fire! They would feel as if either that printed sheet or they themselves must be an unreality. What a mysterious awe, if the shriek of the railway-train, as it reaches the Warwick station, should ever so faintly invade their ears! Movement of any kind seems inconsistent with the stability of such an institution. Nevertheless, I trust that the ages will carry it along ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... splendid sound and colour. And this for a reason. The large and lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. We meet on almost every page with lines ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant."[457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered familiar ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... on, every new turn revealing untold wonders and giving an added stimulus to the leader's lively imagination. And indeed the forest was a place in which anyone might expect to meet a fairy or a goblin behind every tree. The happy sense of unreality lent by the uncertainty of distances, the airy unsubstantial appearance of the leaf-grown earth; the dazzling splashes of golden light on the green, the sudden appearance of open glades choked with blossoms; and through all the ringing ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... pray for the Holy Ghost, and do not so much as believe there is a Holy Ghost. They ask God to do something, when they never knew Him to do anything, and don't expect He ever will. The world is dying because of this unreality, and being damned ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... ghastly, unnerving and altogether terrible. Not that Stern feared height. No, it was the unreality of the experience, the inexplicable character of this yawning edge of the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... and thus giving substance to that which as principle has no existence. So long as this negative action of thought continues so long will it produce its natural effect; whether in the individual or in the mass. The experience is perfectly real while it lasts. Its unreality consists in the fact that there was never any real need for it; and the more we grasp the truth of the all-embracingness of the ONE Good, both as Cause and as Effect, on all planes, the more the experience of its opposite ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... stretch of barren mesa cut straight down the middle with a yellow line that was the highway up which Casey had driven the morning before. The inimitable magic of distance and high desert air veiled greasewood, sage and sand with the glamour of unreality. The mountains beyond, unspeakably desolate and forbidding at close range, and the little black buttes standing afar, off—small spewings of age-old volcanos dead before man was born—seemed fascinating, unknown islets anchored ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... e.g., the rejection of Christian Science is no more erroneous than its affirmation. Will Christian Scientists acquiesce in that inference? And if they will not, by what means do they propose to show that it is not a legitimate deduction from their own axiom, the unreality of evil? If error is a real fact, evil must be so to that extent; on the other hand, how can it be an error to believe that evil is real, if error, being an evil, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... shapes of the sycamores—all these things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old sense of unreality. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... was an air of unreality about the landing, as if this planet wasn't really Earth at all, despite its orbit around the sun, despite its familiar moon. It looked too much like too ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... of this picture. After all those torments of doubt and perplexity which he had undergone during the last three months, the simple fact of Marian's safety seemed too good a thing to be true. He was tortured by a vague sense of the unreality of this relief that had come so suddenly to put an end ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... about. I not let you fall." There was a note of irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... perspective, while his normal surroundings, seen in broad daylight, tended to steady him further. The hotel clerk, busy about his uninspired duties; the impassive waiters in black and white; the solid-looking Englishmen and their wives who began to make their appearance, lent a sense of unreality to the ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... and Vergil. 'He cannot perceive that the divine interventions which are admissible in the quarrel of Aeneas and Turnus are ludicrous when imported into the struggle between Scipio and Hannibal. Who can help resenting the unreality when at Saguntum Jupiter guides an arrow into Hannibal's body, which Juno immediately withdraws, or when, at Cannae, Aeolus yields to the prayer of Juno and blinds the Romans by a ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... enough so far as words went, but she was too stunned and confused to take in their full meaning; and in truth her presence there at all had only been another unfamiliar element in this bewildering whirl of events, imparting an additional sense of unreality. But when she mentioned Madame Lavaux, the name linked itself at once with recent memories and emotions, and its accustomed association with her every-day life made it a rallying point, as it were, for her scattered ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... see the Eucharist, not as the pale Host of the altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the young Raphael, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished. But finished or unfinished, or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, the head of Jesus does but consummate the sentiment of the whole company—ghosts through which you see the wall, faint ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... proper names, or of verbs, or of numbers, or merely of dates, in consequence of an accident. The localization of all the avenues of thought has been accomplished nowadays; what, then, would there be surprising in the fact that my faculty of controlling the unreality of certain hallucinations should be destroyed for ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... and there was glory; but she could not divest herself of a sense of unreality. She could not feel as if it were really and truly Gilbert, and she were mourning for him. All was like a dream—that solemn military spectacle—the serene, grave sunshine on the fortress-harbour stretching its mailed arms into the sea—the roofs of the knightly old monastic ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she got out with a strange feeling of unreality, closed the door behind her, careful to see that it caught, spoke to the driver quietly and told him to wait, and then walked up the steps and rang the bell. During the moment she stood there a boy came along and threw a small printed paper at her feet. It was an advertisement ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... or marvel! He was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression of the unreality of the material universe,—of Buddhist illusion. Even these adamantine records of death, rising on every side to challenge him,—even these might recombine their particles before his very eyes,—might shiver into mist and float down to the plain ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... From unreality lead me to the real, from darkness to the light, from death to immortality. [Footnote: Asatoma sadgamaya, tamasoma jyotirgamaya, mrityorma mritangamaya.] But how can one hope to have this prayer granted? For infinite is the distance that lies between truth and untruth, between death and deathlessness. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... blessed privacy of his own room he sat himself down to read over the pages of the little black book with painful criticism, asking himself miserably if it were really true that they were feeble amateur efforts, tinged with pretence and unreality. Here and there a flush and a wince proved that the accusation had gone home, when a vigorous pencil mark on the side of the page marked the necessity for correction, but on the whole he could honestly refute the charge; could declare, with the bold yet humble conviction of the true craftsman, that ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that theirs are the unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan Women at this moment of the history of ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... shadowy occurrences away back in lives lived long ago? Who has not felt the influence of the mountain, the sea, the desert, coming to them when they are far from such scenes—coming so vividly as to cause the actual scene of the present to fade into comparative unreality? Who has not had ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... are covered by art papers and plastered over with china dishes. This erection, wherein human beings have to live and work and fight their sins and prepare for eternity, is a fraud and a lie. No man compelled to exist in such an environment of unreality can respect himself or other people; and if it come to pass that he holds cheap views of life, and reads smart papers, and does sharp things in business, and that his talk be only a clever jingle, then a plea in extenuation will be ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Ruth Dale. The expression of face, voice and language swept away the sense of unreality and detachment. Here was a vital trouble. A tangible human call. It might be that she, instead of Ralph Drew or Constance, or any other person, might touch and rescue this girl who was finding herself among the ruins ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... years of its loneliness, was coming forth at the sound of Abel's voice. We were alone in the kitchen, and when the coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk within them one would almost certainly wear one's self ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... whenever he wishes to bring about a sudden and otherwise inexplicable transition from one mental attitude to another, and entirely opposite. But for the earnestness of the actors, this reductio ad Fairydum would have imparted an air of unreality to the characters and incidents which does not belong to them. The plot is a model of neat construction; and, to everyone at all in doubt as to where to pass an agreeable evening, I say, "Go to the Garrick Theatre." By the way, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... our platform and parliamentary palaverers, our popular entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. In particular ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... glare in the immediate foreground caused by the burning buildings, the gesticulating figure of her half-breed partner, the excited, picturesque onlookers, the vagaries of the fiddler and the never-ceasing sound of the Indian drum, all tinged with an air of unreality and a sense of the danger that menaced, made up a situation that could not easily be eclipsed. And she was dancing and trying to make herself believe she was enjoying it, opposite a crazy half-breed rebel! She recognised him now as the dandy Pierre, the admiration of the fair sex in his own particular ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a dreamy kind, and is given ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... across the table into Barry Elder's eyes and poured his coffee and ate his bread and jam. The amazing youth in her forgot for those moments all that it had suffered and all that it must meet. She was floating, floating in the web of this beautiful unreality. ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... drama and the stage. To children, and to some grown people, too, the stage is a little dream world of absolute realities. Their imaginations turn the picture that is placed before them into real, throbbing life. They do not see the unreality of the art, the suggestive effects, the flimsy delusions; to them the play is real life, the stage is a real drawing room or a real wood, and they cannot conceive of the actors existing outside their parts. But the critic must look deeper; ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... specious and cherche art, demanding, for its appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise the full value, the real charm, of A Rebours, some such initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of En Menage and A Vau-l'Eau, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror of human mediocrity, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons |
