"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The sum total of these expenses amounted to only eighteen cents, which left me two cents over for emergencies." Balzac somewhat exaggerates his poverty and reduces his expenses to suit the pleasure of his poetic fantasy, but undoubtedly it was a brusque transition from the bourgeois comfort of family life to the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... painting, using not without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that Michelangelo praised, it seems to be complete in ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... untrodden snow round to the side of the house underneath Rosamund's window. A little exclamation broke from his lips as he stood there. From the terraced walks, down the steps, and straight across the park to the corner of the Black Wood, were fresh tracks. The cry had been no fantasy. Somebody or something had passed from the Black Wood and back again to this ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Gaga. She had been laughing so much in herself at this long evening of freedom, that the recollection was like ice to her heart. It was all a mockery, a fantasy; and Toby was no more hers. She was separated from him for ever, and the more closely she was embraced by him the less she felt herself free to belong to him. A revulsion of feeling shook her. With an instinctive movement almost savage, she escaped ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... contact it seemed to her that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"—and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"—and in her sleep it seemed to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... second part of the concert came the wonderful new march and the fantasy, "A Hunt in a Storm," and both came in for prolonged applause. Then came a medley of national airs, ending with the "Star Spangled Banner," at which the audience arose; and the performance came to ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney, the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins, Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... that next morning they followed his track, finding his shoes and fragments of his attire on the opposite side of the run, which was torn up, with the marks of a terrible struggle and many feet. Probably he tore off his own clothes in the fancied fight, drew his knife, struck at "an air-born fantasy," and was finally partially restored by falling into the water, after which he completed his exhaustion by running ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Spectra, Diaboli, What scared St. Anthony, Hobgoblins, Lemures, Dreams of Antipodes, Night-riding Incubi Troubling the fantasy, All dire illusions Causing confusions; Figments heretical, Scruples fantastical, Doubts diabolical, Abaddon vexeth me, Mahu ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... drenched trees, and peevish houses. There is always a sense of wonder about a mist. The outlines of what we consider our hardest tangibilities are melted away by it into the airiest dream-sketches, our most positive and glaring facts are blankly blotted out, and a fresh, clean sheet left for some new fantasy to be written upon it, as groundless as the rest; our solid land dissolves in cloud, and cloud assumes the stability of land. For, after all, the only really tangible thing we possess is man's Will; and let the presence and action of that be withdrawn but for a few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... up, but I can't. I wander around and wander around until I am weary and feeble, and when I rouse myself I find I am here, in the very same place. There is the monastery and the belfry, and the clock strikes the hour. And it's all like a dream, a fantasy. You close your eyes, and it does not exist. You open them, and it's there again. Sometimes I go out into the fields at night and close my eyes, and then it seems to me there is nothing at all existing. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... fantasy passed. In the distance two glowing orbs of a hansom came slowly towards her, and her purpose grew ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Production of W. H. Humiston's "Southern Fantasy" for orchestra, at the Mendelssohn Union, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... mingled with the fascinating pleasures of the chase and of the woods, were not to be dispossessed so readily. When Faith artfully led him back to those animal enjoyments of which he had been so fond in boyhood, the fantasy of her brother seemed most to waver; but whenever it became apparent that the dignity of a warrior, and all the more recent and far more alluring delights of his later life, were to be abandoned ere his being could return into its former existence, his dull faculties obstinately refused to lend ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... anything of that kind in a state of material hardship. To-day I have sent S—- a cheque for fifty pounds; it will come as a very boon of heaven, and assuredly blesseth him that gives as much as him that takes. A poor fifty pounds, which the wealthy fool throws away upon some idle or base fantasy, and never thinks of it; yet to S—- it will mean life and light. And I, to whom this power of benefaction is such a new thing, sign the cheque with a hand trembling, so glad and proud I am. In the days gone by, I have sometimes given ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... enterprise to which Uncle Ramsey had opened the door; she saw Washington with its domes and Capitol looming ahead of her ambition; Senators and great men bowing before her; even the White House came like a fantasy of possibility. All this and more were hers if she played her cards aright. Never fear! She would play them! Courtland must be made to accept ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Med Ship rested peacefully on the ground. Around and above it the grid rose like geometric fantasy to veil most of the starry sky. Here in the starlight the ground-car communicators gave out the same voice. The same message. The President of Tallien Three made a speech. Earlier, he'd made another. Earlier still he'd taken orders ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... style of thinking. The constructive capacities of the intellect are inferred from the variety of mathematical creations which it originates, as well as from the more diverse and interesting structures which the never wearied and ever aspiring fantasy is always building. Should any one question the right of these creations to be, or seek to detract from their importance, our author is ready to defend them to the utmost in contrast with matter and its claims. Indeed, the author's exposition of his doctrine of the Will is by itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... very small use in the case. He may be directed by an impulse, which occurs in the morning, and vanishes in the evening. His preferences change as rapidly as the shapes we sometimes observe in the evening clouds, and are governed by whim or fantasy, and not by any of those indications which are parcel of his individual constitution. He desires in many instances to be devoted to a particular occupation, because his playfellow has been ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of Arabian Nights country, where all the passions, all the desires of real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... this kind of tribulation is marvellous and strange. And the temptation is of such a sort that some men have the opinion that those who once fall into that fantasy can never ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... begynning, from Pagans and Heathen men, which haue then first used them, when they did sacrifyce to their Gods. For beeing plunged into very thick, & as it were palpable dark nesses, after that they had forged and advised Gods according to their owne fantasy, they thought and supposed that they should bee delighted and pleased, with the selfe same delightes and pleasures, wherein, or wherewith they ...
— A Treatise Of Daunses • Anonymous
... matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Rickman's regret, Flossie did not take kindly to Miss Roots, very soon after her engagement she discovered her bosom friend in Miss Ada Bishop. The friendship was not founded, as are so many feminine attachments, upon fantasy or caprice, but rested securely on the enduring commonplace. If Flossie respected Ada because of her knowledge of dress, and her remarkable insight into the ways of gentlemen, Ada admired Flossie because of the engagement, which, after all, was not (like some girls' engagements) an ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... boundary] There it continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. These fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syadvada—the doctrine of "It may be so",—a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny the existence of one and the same thing. If this be compared with the ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... stolen ... that he could not give back: not that ardent, whole-souled, enthusiastic love; not the romantic idealism, the hero-worship, that veil of fantasy behind which first love is wont to hide its ephemerality. But she would not now judge the dead. Her romantic love lay buried in the lonely church at Dover, and she was striving not to think even of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy of the mind and one must be always ready to obey the behests of the other. Youth and will can resist excess; but nature silently avenges herself, and the day when she decides to repair her forces, the will struggles to retard her work ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... for experiment, some scene whose beginning you once saw enacted on a street corner but passed by before the denouement was ready to be disclosed. Recall it all—that far the image is reproductive. But what followed? Let your fantasy roam at pleasure—the succeeding scenes are productive, for you have more or less consciously invented the unreal on ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... is a work of genius and, as always with works of genius, it is difficult to analyze the elements that have gone to make it. There is poetry here and fantasy and humor, a little pathos but, above all, a number of creations in whose existence everybody must believe whether they be children of four or old men of ninety or prosperous bankers of forty-five. I don't know how Mr. Lofting has done it; I don't suppose that he knows himself. There it is—the ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... evidently contains much that is autobiographical, and helps us to understand Carlyle's childhood and youth; but it is so mixed up with fantasy and humour that it is difficult to separate fiction from fact. Its chief aim seems to be the overthrow of cant, the ridiculing of empty conventions, and the preaching of sincerity and independence. But not yet was Carlyle's generation prepared to listen to such sermons. Jeffrey ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... individuals, born or to be born? Are we then to treat our descendants in advance as cattle, who shall have neither will nor rights of their own? To inherit government is to inherit peoples, as if they were herds. It is the basest, the most shameful fantasy that ever degraded mankind. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... looking at herself in the mirror, trying to remember, and having thought all through the day of the same thing—thinking of nothing. She undressed slowly; she stopped every moment, sitting on the bed, trying to remember what Jean-Christophe was like. It was a Jean-Christophe of fantasy who appeared, and now he did not seem nearly so uncouth to her. She went to bed and put out the light. Ten minutes later the scene of the morning rushed back into her mind, and she burst out laughing. Her mother got up softly and opened the door, thinking that, against orders, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... mind persuades him he is Prince of Wales; 'twill be odd to have a Prince of Wales still with us, now that he that WAS the prince is prince no more, but king—for this poor mind is set upon the one fantasy, and will not reason out that now it should cast by the prince and call itself the king. . . If my father liveth still, after these seven years that I have heard nought from home in my foreign dungeon, he will welcome the poor lad and give him generous shelter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at him. Caillette!—Spain!—these were the words he had often uttered in his delirium. Although he seemed much better and the hot flush had left his cheeks, his fantasy ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend. He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... problem, by one so new to our councils and deliberations. I never was more fashed in my life; for having hitherto, in all my plans for the improvement of the town, not only succeeded, but given satisfaction, I was vexed to see the council run away with such a speculative vagary. No doubt, the popular fantasy anent education and academies, had quite as muckle to do in the matter as Mr Plan's fozey rhetoric, but what availed that to me, at seeing a reasonable undertaking reviled and set aside, and grievous debts about to be laid on the community for a bubble as unsubstantial ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... interest at this time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers on being so small and adding that, with so manifest a subordination ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Bronte's life the shaping influences were so few, and the sins of this beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of 'Wuthering Heights.' It would have been to leave untold the patience, the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic character; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having chosen to invent ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... much each day. And she could not submit. Yet gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun was being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in prison, abolished, she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will. How then could the sky be shining? There was no sky, there was no luminous atmosphere of out-of-doors. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Not only is there a primordial animal and a primordial plant, schematic forms to which all separate species are referable, but the parts of each are themselves units, which "der Idee nach," are identical inter se. This fantasy can hardly be taken seriously as a scientific theory; it seems, however, to have been what guided Goethe in his "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. Just as the fore limb can be homologised ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... things (it is better to speak of the whole collection, including the Snow Image, and the Mosses from an Old Manse at once) there are three sorts of tales, each one of which has an original stamp. There are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy and allegory—those among which the three I have just mentioned would be numbered, and which on the whole, are the most original. This is the group to which such little masterpieces as Malvin's Burial, Rappacini's Daughter, and Young Goodman Brown also belong—these ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... is set so hye In his ierarchye Of frantike frenesy, And folish fantasy, That in chambre of stars{1} Al maters ther he mars, Clapping his rod on the borde, No man dare speake a worde: For he hath al the saying Without any renaying. He rolleth in his Recordes; He saith, "How say ye, my lordes? Is not my reason good?" Good!—even good—Robin ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... and in the stillness of this secluded valley, sheltered from every bleak wind by surrounding hills and woods, the gardens of the Manor Moat had grown into a settled beauty that made the chief attraction of a country seat which boasted so little of architectural dignity, or of expensive fantasy in moulded brick and carved stone. Plain, sombre, with brick walls and heavy stone mullions to low-browed windows, the Manor House stood in the midst of gardens such as the modern millionaire may long for, but which only the grey old ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of all fantasy. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... said Mr. Raleigh, who was made to believe by this vehemence in what at first had seemed a mere fantasy. "Only remember, that, if you could assure me that any papers had been destroyed, the assurance would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... old sea wall, And watch the shimmering sea, Where soft and white the moonbeams fall, Till, in a fantasy, Some pure white maiden's funeral pall The strange ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... in exceeding the speed-limit, sings "Oh ra-ha-ha-hap-ture !" several times, varied by "What can e-he-he-he-qual a brother's love?" Then, using the same words, they sing as much as possible in unison to the end of the scene, which closes with a fantasy of capricious arabesques and a series of trills on notes seldom heard from any but the ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... animals, and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her. But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and Antoinette—Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both—stout little boots and suede gloves and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... their bodies are out of tune, they suspect some part or other to be amiss, now their head aches, heart, stomach, spleen, &c. is misaffected, they shall surely have this or that disease; still troubled in body, mind, or both, and through wind, corrupt fantasy, some accidental distemper, continually molested. Yet for all this, as [2496]Jacchinus notes, "in all other things they are wise, staid, discreet, and do nothing unbeseeming their dignity, person, or place, this foolish, ridiculous, and childish fear excepted;" which ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... this excursion under the waters, I'm well aware that it sounds incredible! I'm the chronicler of deeds seemingly impossible and yet incontestably real. This was no fantasy. This was what I ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... entry to my shed My heart would leap to let you in: Since at your name it trembles still— Muse of oblivious fantasy!— Return and share, if share you will, Joy's ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... the tree accept the little boy's fantasy as fact, Naomi wondered why she'd never thought of ...
— Tree, Spare that Woodman • Dave Dryfoos
... is in the calm sphere of truth, in which the passions have no deceiving power. I have already published in the "Manual of Psychometry" the prediction of universal peace at the end of five years from the prophecy, and I now repeat the statement that great Franco-German war is but the fantasy of passion and fear. The last psychometric expression, March 11, confirms the uniform statements heretofore. Upon the question "What of the war in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... still sensible, gave a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived him ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... stop all work," Mary said to Mr. Ovens, who felt as if he were moving in some grotesque fantasy of sleep; "this is going to be a serious business. We can't leave these prisoners for a moment. I'll watch beside them all night and you'll take ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... perturbed spirit had been soothed by the serene influence of her friend; and she too was silent for awhile. But the giddy images that had of late been reeling their wild dance through her brain, soon came back in glittering fantasy. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... talk of dreams; Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air; And more inconstant than the wind, who woos Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his face to ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... three-dimensional, thousand-mile spread of fantasy infernal. Out of it, after an hour or two, a steady sift of every manner of wreckage was drifting down upon the Moon. The scene began to blur. A haze like glowing star-dust, or the radiance from a comet's tail, was spreading ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after the villages. ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... of Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill- omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... some intolerable agony. So terribly did the teeth crunch and grind together that it seemed they must crash into fragments. A little later he suddenly stiffened out. The hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream. The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to open, but did not. Instead, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... illumined, and into which they wrought, every object around them that was in any wise subjected to their power, they obeyed the laws of their inner nature, and found its proper food. The splendor and fantasy even of dress, which in these days we pretend to despise, or in which, if we even indulge, it is only for the sake of vanity, and therefore to our infinite harm, were in those early days studied for love of their true beauty and honorableness, and became one of the main helps to dignity of character, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... wooden gate and waited while the darkness settled closer. I can swear, moreover, that it was neither dream, nor hope, nor any hungry fantasy in me that then recognized a further marvel—I ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... had any easy pity it was for men, who live always in fantasy, lured on by their own imaginings in the vain effort to solve the mystery of which only a true and loyal woman has ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... by means of the senses; how hunger, thirst, and the other internal affections can likewise impress upon it divers ideas; what must be understood by the common sense (sensus communis) in which these ideas are received, by the memory which retains them, by the fantasy which can change them in various ways, and out of them compose new ideas, and which, by the same means, distributing the animal spirits through the muscles, can cause the members of such a body to move in as many different ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy of music and flowers. ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... of science, could not expect absolute fairness, and he had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor. Meeting me, he said, "Have you read 'Eureka?'" I answered, "Not yet: I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to see—sorry if it be true—suggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the 'Vestiges of Creation;' and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... parts of the ships, at first in little knots of two and three, which gradually increased and became formidable, joining in murmurs and menaces against the admiral. They exclaimed against him as an ambitious desperado who, in a mad fantasy, had determined to do something extravagant to render himself notorious. What obligation bound them to persist, or when were the terms of their agreement to be considered as fulfilled? They had already ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... true," answered Wolfe thoughtfully; "and yet a voice in my heart seems to tell me that I shall see those loved faces no more. It may be but the fantasy of a troubled and fevered brain; but in dreams I have seen them, tears in their eyes, weeping for one unworthy of such grief, who lies in a far-off grave beneath the frowning battlements of yon great city. I wonder ofttimes whether we are given to know something of that which is about ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Oh the long fantasy of the kiss; the ceaseless hunger, ceaselessly, divinely appeased! The aching presence of the beloved's beauty! The wisdom, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... idle, they shall never be pleased, never well in body or mind, but weary still, sickly still, vexed still, loathing still, weeping, sighing, grieving, suspecting, offended with the world, with every object, wishing themselves gone or dead, or else carried away with some foolish fantasy or other.". ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... life of fantasy and frivolity, on which so much cleverness was thrown away, the unfortunate Beau finished his career miserably. On his application to the Foreign Office, representing his wish to be removed to any other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... face to face the truth beyond the seeming. This is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to come as a revelation to the searcher. He may first find it in some pure lyric such as Shelley's "Skylark," or in some mystical fantasy such as Moore's "Lallah Rookh" or Coleridge's "Christabel," or in some story of human abnegation such as Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," or some wail of a soul in pain, as in Shelley's "Adonais," or in some ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Brett, suddenly switching the conversation away from the Italian's fantasy, "you are well acquainted with all the circumstances connected with Sir Alan's murder. Have you formed any theory about the crime, its motive, or its ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... The buried forms of long ago. As if a portion of that Thought By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and a lady may go to Prague on a gentleman's behalf without intending to marry him. All the women in London were at present more or less in love with the man who had been accused of murder, and the fantasy of Madame Goesler might be only as the fantasy of others. And then, rumour also said that Phineas Finn intended to marry Lady Laura Kennedy. At any rate a man cannot have his head broken for asking a lady to marry him,—unless ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Vernon's winding up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under. Which of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much vanity to trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not gigantic. Especially be it remarked, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sinful fantasy to work? The Dove, the winged Columbus of man's haven? The tender Love-Bird—or the filial Stork? The punctual Crane—the providential Raven? The Pelican whose bosom feeds her young? Nay, must we cut from Saturday till Monday That feathered marvel with a human tongue, Because she does not preach ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the realms of poetic fantasy to record a simple fact of everyday life—one which is appreciated by every man and woman irrespective of nationality or temperament. As in all other matters pertaining to the comfort of the European in the tropics, ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... restlessness and inconsistency. But it is impossible to hear, without a deep sense of original power, the oracular voices that issue from the cell; enigmatical, like the ancient responses, and like them illuminating doubtful vaticination with flashes of wild and half poetic fantasy. His language and thoughts alike set aside hereditary rules, and are compounded of elements, English and German, and elements predominant over all, which no name would fit except that of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... on the importance of motive power for successful flight. In 1809 he published, in Nicholson's Journal, a paper on Aerial Navigation, which has since become a classic, for although it stops short of a complete exposition, it is true so far as it goes, and contains no nonsense and no fantasy. He endeavoured, in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign, to establish an aeronautical society, but the ill repute of the balloon and the bad company it kept deprived him of influential support. He did his duty by his county, as a Whig magnate, and amused his leisure with science, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive plaits around her finely-shaped head, and crowned with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... things that aroused our childish fantasy, when Balint Orzo and I were boys, but none so much as the old tower that stands a few feet from the castle, shadowy and mysterious. It is an old, curious, square tower, and at the brink of its notched edge there is a ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... even for us to be a girl was bliss, these maidens of a later day must surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our poet, "much that we resigned"—much, too, that we prized. No girl, in our day, but dreamed of the lordly lover, and I hazard a guess that the fantasy persists. It is slower to be realised than even in our own dream-period, for now it must come through the horn-gate of the maiden's own judgment. Man has fallen from the self-erected pedestal of "superiority." ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... At least one-hundred and fifty stories and articles appeared in magazines; most of these, perhaps nearly all, are listed in this bibliography. None of the theosophical articles are included here, though, as the intent of this listing is to stress his mastery of the fantasy-high ...
— Materials Toward A Bibliography Of The Works Of Talbot Mundy • Bradford M. Day, Editor
... would have sheltered us from their sight, even if they had been a little more vigilant—as I should have expected Sure-shot to have been. They were trusting all to the thicket in which they had pitched their camp; and, being hungry and wearied no doubt, were for the moment off their guard. Some fantasy decided me not to disturb them for a moment—a sort of curiosity to hear what they would say, and, if possible, discover their whence and whither. We were perfectly within earshot; and could have heard even a whisper ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Den, which was a sort of combination room, partly a library and partly study and smoking-room with a quaint suggestion of Oriental fantasy about it, Sir Arthur, according to his wont at that time of night, unlocked the spirit case, and mixed himself a whiskey and soda. As he did so, Vane found his eyes fixed on one of the bright cut-glass bottles which contained brandy. He would have given anything to be able to mix a brandy ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... (one of them, perhaps, the "bad" one referred to above) may find place in a note. Revenants is a fantasy, in which the three most famous pairs of lovers of the later eighteenth century, Des Grieux and Manon, Paul and Virginie, Werther and Charlotte, are revived and brought together (v. sup. p. 378). This sort of thing, not seldom tried, has very seldom been a success; and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... interesting passage in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Poise and footing of my thought! I brake through thy doors of sunset, Ran before the hooves of sunrise, Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies Wild and wilful As a poet's hand could twine them; Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice The Bow, as its cataract of colours Plashed to thee downward; Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning, Celestial dawning Over the ultimate marges of the soul; ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... playing. Conrector Paulmann gave a grim look at him; but Registrator Heerbrand laid a music-leaf on the frame, and sang with ravishing grace one of Bandmaster Graun's bravura airs. The student Anselmus accompanied this, and much more; and a fantasy duet, which Veronica and he now fingered, and Conrector Paulmann had himself composed, again brought all ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... moment that I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... were inside it I laboriously hide it, And a rather pretty sermon you might preach Upon Fantasy, selecting For your "instance" the affecting Tale of me and ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... of them to expect that the series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was overwhelmingly suggested by all the faiths and prejudices of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... trouble to you to come to Weymar, it would be most kind of you to give us the pleasure of your company for a day or two during our theatrical season, which concludes on the 15th of June. We could then chat and make music at our ease (with or without damages, ad libitum), and if the fantasy took us, why should we not go to some new Fantasie of leisure on the "Traum- lied (dream song) of Tony, [No doubt meaning Baron Augusz, Liszt's intimate friend at Szegzard, who died in 1878.] for instance, at the hour when our peaceable inhabitants are sleeping, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... memory is a fairly common thing, in cases like this. Even the little psychology I know, I've heard about that. There's been talk about rockets to the Moon for years. You included something about that in your future-history fantasy, and then, after the event, you convinced yourself that you'd known all about it, including the impromptu christening of the ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... which whatever in this worldly state Is sweet and pleasing unto living sense, Or that may dayntiest fantasy aggrate Was poured forth ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... head (though not his heart) to be in love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not conceive any man being in love with ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Treasury, and from mere high fantasy spread the interesting news that he had broken a back tooth at lunch and had had to visit his dentist at Putney. His colleague, Hunter, remarked to him that he seemed strangely gay for a man with a broken tooth, and Mr. Prohack answered that a philosopher always had ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... if they were the two points of an electric chain, which being joined, an instantaneous effect must follow. Earnestly, as he would have looked forward to this moment (had he in sober reason ever put any real weight on the fantasy in pursuit of which he had wandered so far) he now, that it actually appeared to be realizing itself, paused with a vague sensation of alarm. The mystery was evidently one of sorrow, if not of crime, and he felt as if that ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated divinity"? But his amusement thereat had been genial. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... incomprehensible, enterprise—the conquest of a country which hardly anybody had ever seen and in which nobody had any practical interest. Before such an enterprise could be carried out all hearts must be filled by that uncontrollable and yet vague longing, so characteristic of the great period of fantasy. The suggestion that the wealth of the East, exciting the greed of the western nations, led to the Crusades, is an absolutely indefensible idea. Doubtless, rumours of the fabulous treasure of the Orient had stirred the imagination of Europe, appealing far less, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... author can also conceive of a critic who in general and offhand looks upon the presentations of this book as the out-pourings of a fantasy run wild or as dreamy thought-pictures. Yet all that can be said in this respect is contained in the book itself, and it is explicitly shown that sane and earnest thought not only can but must be the touch-stone of all the facts presented. Only one who submits what is here ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... is to be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... obvious faults of imagination and style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of conventional thought, and is prepared ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will, like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the Sun and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... so the French and Spanish translators have not done";[270] Hoby says of his translation of The Courtier, "I have endeavored myself to follow the very meaning and words of the author, without being misled by fantasy or leaving out any parcel one or other, whereof I know not how some interpreters of this book into other languages can excuse themselves, and the more they be conferred, the more it will perchance ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly together ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... gives, we at once detect the proper tools and cunning of the poet: fancy gives us liquentes campos, titania astra, lucentem globum lunae, and fantasy or imagination, in virtue of its royal and transmuting power, gives us intus alit—infusa per artus—and that magnificent idea, magno se corpore miscet—this is the divinum nescio quid—the proper work of the imagination—the master and specific faculty of the poet—that ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... those sheets that know no sin. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well weaved bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes, while fantasy discloses Millions of Lilies mix'd with Roses. Then dream, ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat; While Faunus in the vision comes, to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep: With thousand such enchanting dreams, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... fantasy? Why, reading the facts of what happened in 1929, it is already prognosticated. The fishing banks off the Coast of Newfoundland have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable, snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that for distances ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... poetry richest in skiey grain, most free from admixture with the duller things of earth—the Shelleys, the Coleridges, the Keats—are the very poets whose lives are among the saddest records in literature? Is it that (by some subtile mystery of analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like water, fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so from fire and tears ascend the "visions of aerial joy"; that the harvest waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the earth, smells sweetest after ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy |
