"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... standing alone in the high-walled garden when the convent bells are tolling, and the convent itself, with its iron-barred, Gothic windows, and its gray-green olive-trees that look so unreal and lifeless, is tinged by the last rays of the sun, the whole seems like a vision, or a half-remembered sketch, or a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... by an unsuccessful preacher the secret of his power over audiences: "You speak of eternal verities and what you know to be true as if you hardly believed what you were saying yourself, whereas I utter what I know to be unreal and untrue as if I did believe ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of doors was unreal, like a show, like a peepshow. Helena was an actress somewhere in the brightness of this view. He alone was out of the piece. He sighed petulantly, pressing back his shoulders as if they ached. His arms, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... idea and turning the attention away from another idea. That which characterizes and constitutes suggestion is a belief in the idea, an acceptance of the idea as real and the dismissal of the opposite idea as unreal. Yes, we may say directly that it is meaningless to speak of suggesting an idea; we suggest either an action or, if no action is concerned, we suggest belief in an idea. If I suggest to the fearful man at twilight that the willow-tree trunk by the wayside is a man with a gun, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... morning we were all keenly intent on the approach of some ship; many times already as we stood on the bridge we had been deceived by some unreal vision or some delusive sound; our overstrained nerves transformed our too lively fancy into seeming reality; and in a thick fog objects are strangely magnified and distorted: a floating board may assume the shape of a boat, or a motor launch be ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less unreal than vulgarity. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... easily and rapidly bend to such treatment. It is his inability to discover the true mode of investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, assumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... when she pushed open the door, Rapt in the stillness there, Her mother sat, with stooping head, Asleep upon a chair; Fast—fast asleep; her two hands laid Loose-folded on her knee, So that her small unconscious face Looked half unreal to be: So calmly lit with sleep's pale light Each feature was; so fair Her forehead—every trouble was Smooth'd out beneath ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... as my dog," Edward Henry indiscreetly murmured—and his fancy flew back to the home he had quitted; and Wilkins's and everybody in it grew transiently unreal ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... round His captive train, from Thule's northern bound To far Taprobane, a countless crowd, Who, to the archer boy, adoring, bow'd. Sad fantoms shook above their Gorgon wings— Fantastic longings for unreal things, And fugitive delights, and lasting woes; The summer's biting frost, and winter's rose; And penitence and grief, that dragg'd along The royal lawless pair, that poets sung. One, by his Spartan plunder, seal'd ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... man opened his great eyes in astonishment. It was so unlike his old friend's brusque rollicking character to propose prayer, that he fancied he must be dreaming, and the possibility of the visit turning out unreal, induced an expression of distress on his haggard countenance. On being ordered, however, in the peremptory and familiar tones of former days, to shut his eyes, he felt reassured and became calm, while his ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Concepcion had said. He had admitted that it was. But the boredom had been excruciating. In the street they had bought an evening paper of which he had never before heard the name, to learn news of the war. The war, however, seemed very far off; it had grown unreal. "We'll talk to-morrow," Concepcion had said, and gone abruptly to bed! Still, he had slept well in the soft climate, to the everlasting murmur ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... action which can alone wring enterprise from life. Meditation was my natural element. I loved to spend the noon reclined by some shady stream, and in a half sleep to shape images from the glancing sunbeams. A dim and unreal order of philosophy, that belongs to our nation, was my favourite intellectual pursuit; and I sought amongst the Obscure and the Recondite the variety and emotion I could not find in the Familiar. Thus constantly watching the operations of the inner mind, it occurred to me at last that sleep having ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paper carries little sport and usually less material of vital interest. A hike must be "hiked" to be real, the "grub" must be munched by the side of a stream, and the wild things venturing out for crumbs must be "seen to be appreciated," as the "ad" says; so that it would seem unreal to attempt to put into words the glories of a day in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... his mind balances the poetical, and by giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has strange success, conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible doubt which is the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal. ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... what wondrous curiosities there are in the Civil Service, and would, I feel sure, be amused and instructed at a well-organised and representative Exhibition. At 10.15 A.M. they would see real live Clerks sign real Attendance-Books, and insert (real or unreal) times of arrival. In the course of the morning there might be an Exhibition of Civil Servants over sixty-five years of age, who didn't want to retire, with a similar number of Civil Servants, of fifty-five ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... still playing with the dog, caressing its beautiful head with his uninjured hand, and talking to it in a half whisper. As Constance departed, a bright and feverish red had rushed into his cheeks; but it had only made his aspect more ghostly, more unreal. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... resemblance, it has always been hurtful to me, because, to avoid that resemblance, I was tempted by cowardice or compelled by conscience to throw in differences, which often ended in making my character inconsistent, unreal. ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... cases are chosen at random and are typical of scores of others. In no single case was the trouble feigned or imaginary or unreal. But in every case it was a mistake. The sense of loss of muscular power was really a sense of loss of power on the part of the soul. Some inner force was reaching out, reaching out after something which it could never quite attain. As it happened, in every case that ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... investigation of claims advanced by individual Englishmen, whether they were suffering from money losses or from summary procedure at the hands of the Portuguese police. Of the diplomatic questions which arose many proved to be shadowy and unreal. Something could be done, even in remote Portugal, to improve Anglo-Russian relations by a minister who had friends in so many European capitals. The politics of Pio Nono and the Papal Curia often find an echo in his correspondence. Here, too, as elsewhere, the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... How unreal seems the existence of the inner life! How vain our intent to catch its meaning, and portray its deepest lessons, and yet, it is the reality. It forms the center around which all external life revolves, from which all outward being receives its vitality ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... desert with his fervent beams until the uplifts cringed low and in the horizons the mountain peaks floated languidly upon the waves of heat. And in all this dispassionate land, from horizon to horizon, there were only My Lady and I, and the beleaguering Sioux. It seemed unreal, a fantasy; but the rocks began to smell scorched, a sudden thirst nagged and my wounded arm pained with weariness as if to remind that I was here, in the body. Yes, and here she was, also, in the flesh, as much as I, for she stirred, glanced at me, and smiled. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... argument drawn from the supposed damnation of the heathen is unreal. We may stir up a quasi enthusiasm; we may be moved for the time; but we are not by any means moved to the level of the fate which we deplore. If we really believed it, as so many profess, we would spend our last dollar, and make all but superhuman efforts, to take the Gospel to the heathen. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human sense,—an awful likeness ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... and unreal. "Do you know," continued he, striking on a new idea, "the padre don't like the guero family. That's evident from the hints he let drop to-night. We may get this fellow out of the way without much scandal, ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... Osa, the goose girl, dreamed that little Mats had said this, there was a knock at the door. It was a real knock—not something she heard in the dream, but she was so held by the dream that she could not tell the real from the unreal. As she went on to ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... her not a dream—not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring, very real, very practical embodiment of the poet's ideal, with new powers and relations illustrating its harmony ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... has—But when he sprang to my side, and took me with his bare, bleeding arms to his heart, that panted so, I thought his heart would burst, and mine, too, could I feel another woman between us. All that might be true, but it was unreal. That he loved me, and had saved me, that was real. And when we sat together in the carriage, your poor bleeding head upon my bosom, and his hand grasping mine, and his sweet eyes beaming with love and joy, what could I realize except my father's danger and my husband's mighty love? I was all present ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... to have no more than a nightmare vision of the city—an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that haunted him for long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks and ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church—the Church of the Disruption—should be also coming forward with a caveat which at least seems scarce less equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall—huge, monstrous, unreal—both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure. It is a cause worth struggling and suffering ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... choose a life of concealed misery, rather than a partial, disgraceful release. Secondly, those who, in their impetuosity and despair, do, in spite of public sentiment, separate, find themselves in their new position beset with many temptations to lead a false, unreal life. This isolation bears especially hard on woman. Marriage is not all of life to man. His resources for amusement and occupation are boundless. He has the whole world for his home. His business, his politics, his club, his friendships with either sex, can help to fill ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... but he had more than one moment of weakness before he could meet his friends. The world seemed unreal and himself the most unreal thing in it. But the night air acted as a stimulant and helped him to call back his courage. When he entered the studio at one o'clock, he was prepared to redeem his promise to be "the jolliest fellow of ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... except because I know that it is so. We come to strange conclusions out yonder, where only death seems to be true and all the rest a dream. What we call the real and the unreal get mixed." ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... felt overcome with an absurd sensation of freedom. Completely surrounded by billions of motionless, pin-point stars and securely hidden by the vast blackness of space, the aliens and the problem of survival seemed dream-like and unreal. ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... but to say 'Dors!' and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds—just the sounds he wanted and nothing else—and think his thoughts and wish his wishes—and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love ... just his own love for himself turned inside out—a l'envers—and reflected back on him as from a mirror ... un echo, un simulacre, quoi? pas autre chose!... It was not worth having! I was not ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she was conscious that she was offering something unreal to extenuate the fault of her brother—her hopes rather than ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... up at him wildly, but he could not speak. The strange sensation of everything being unreal came over him again, and, in a dreamy way, he saw the coming of his aunt and uncle to ask him the same question; while Mark was lying, pale and cold, lifeless in his room. There was the rushing, murmuring sound of the river from close at hand, and the deep tones of the great Cathedral ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... whisper of the water along the bank; the echo of the half heard talk strikes your ear like the mysterious voices wafted to the banks from the boats as they go by; and the lights of the shops and the street presently become spectral and unreal like lights seen upon the ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... ever the Union with Ireland were lost, it would be lost through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts, the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds of ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Alexander's reign, which began with so large a promise of amelioration, ended by riveting still tighter the chains of the Russian people was, however, due less to the corruption and backwardness of Russian life than to the defects of the tsar himself. His love of liberty, though sincere, was in fact unreal. It flattered his vanity to pose before the world as the dispenser of benefits; but his theoretical liberalism was mated with an autocratic will which brooked no contradiction. "You always want to instruct ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pleasant June weather they worked together over the picture; and if he really knew what he was about, it is uncertain, for his thoughts were of Valerie; and he painted as in a dream, and with a shadowy splendour that seemed even to him unreal. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Syntax of the English Language, p. 1. See the same doctrine also in Hiley's Gram., p. 141. The language which "is common to all animals," can be no other than that in which AEsop's wolves and weasels, goats and grasshoppers, talked—a language quite too unreal for grammar. On the other hand, that which is composed of sounds only, and not of letters, includes but a mere fraction of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... light as spray—a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... naturally, full. Such a beard was out of fashion, save among country doctors. It signified carelessness, indifference, or a full life wherein the niceties of the razor had of necessity been ignored. Keenly she searched the familiar likeness. What an amazing freak of nature! It was unreal. She tossed the photograph back into the kit-bag, ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... not have seen him then and there, I did realise, nevertheless, the overwhelming interest of him. I knew him to be a stranger sight, a more memorable and instructive, than any of the fair sights I had been seeing. He made them all seem nebulous and unreal to me. Beside me lay my despatch-box. I unlocked it, drew from it all the notes and all the photographs I had brought back with me. These, one by one, methodically, I tore up, throwing their fragments out of the window, not grudging them ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another. All alike live in an unreal world, in its essentials a world of their own creation. With all of them the bark is worse than the bite, and their "Keep" is more ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... watch by night over the faithful believer. But his poetry gave way to material evidence, and the sight of the terrace, of whose existence he had had no suspicion, proved that the djinn was really a human being, who for some unknown motive had wandered across it, and was by no means so unreal as he had supposed. The idea of crime and theft occurred to him. He was about to follow the person who fled, when he saw on the terrace, before his window, an object which he immediately picked up, and examined by the light of his lamp. It was a veil ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of these days had almost driven from Zen's mind the tragedy of George Drazk. When she thought of it at all it presented such a grotesque unreality—it was such an unreasonable thing—that it assumed the vague qualities of a dream. It was something unreal and very much better forgotten, and it was only by an unwilling effort at such times that she could bring herself to know that it was not unreal. It was a matter that concerned her tremendously. Sooner or later Drazk's disappearance ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... some of the shops were taking down their shutters, the surface cars were beginning to run with increasing frequency, and the sidewalks were becoming sparsely populated. Familiar as the sights were, they were yet somehow strangely unreal to the young man. In a night the face of the world had changed for him; its features loomed weirdly blurred and contorted through the mystical grey-gold atmosphere of the land of Romance, wherein he really lived and moved and had ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... hiding place, extract the plunder, restore the locks to their original condition, and re-issue into the passageway without disturbing the latches or the crossbar. My losses are supernatural. Now follow me carefully and confess that you have not heard anything so ghastly, so unreal as what I ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... flaying the air, while he loomed tall and unreal in such an attitude, the broncho hung for a moment in mid-poise, then dropped over sheer—as if ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... and five shillings—a large sum for him—found its way from his kind hand to hers. Now the common ending might have come; now starvation, the slow, unwilling, recourse to more shame and deeper vice; then the forced hilarity, the unreal smile, which in so many of these poor creatures hides a canker at the heart; the gradual degradation—lower still and lower—oblivion for a moment sought in the bottle—a life of sin and death ended in a hospital. The will of Providence turned the frolic of three voluptuaries to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... late November. And as Honora sat at the window of the drawing-room of the sleeping car, life seemed as fantastic and unreal as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared. She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into the unknown. The monotony of existence was at last broken, and riven the circumscribing walls. Limitless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pedantic or unreal uniformity; and yet, whilst leaving the widest scope for divergencies of individual character and experience, and not asking that a man all diseased and blotched with the leprosy of sin for half a lifetime, and a little child that has grown up at its mother's knee, 'in the nurture and admonition ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... had spread over the jagged western outlines of the Moor an orange-tawny sunset, whereon the solid masses of the hills burnt into hazy gold, all fairy-bright, unreal, unsubstantial as a cloud-island above them, whose solitary and striated shore shone ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... almost piteously around. Life seemed suddenly to have become an unreal thing—the crowds of well-dressed diners, the gentle splashing of the water from the fountains in the winter garden, the distant murmuring of music from behind the canopy of palms. So this was the end of it! All that week ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is of such a circuitous character that we can hardly tell whether the twelfth or the thirteenth century deserves the credit. In almost all the adoption of any intermediate date of severance would leave an awkward, raw, unreal division. We should leave off while the best of the chansons de geste were still being produced, in the very middle of the development of the Arthurian legend, with half the fabliaux yet to come and half the sagas unwritten, with the Minnesingers in full voice, with ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the flaming torches he saw her—just for an instant! The whole surroundings were strangely unreal, but well calculated to impress the youthful imagination, and out of it all the boy carried with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... it became more unreal and Maggie's unerring knowledge of the difference between sense and nonsense refused to credit the tall handsome villainness who confronted the Charity girl at the ball. The Charity girl had no right to be at the ball ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... edge of the pathway, his pride wounded, but now in possession of the citadel of his heart; and on he strode, still driven by the terrible passion raging within him; resolving already, as many have done under like circumstances, that his life was finished. Hope had gone, dreams were unreal and vanishing as the mist that crawled along ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... non-existence of "the many." His grand position was that all phenomena, all that appears to sense, is but a modification of the absolute One. And he displays a vast amount of dialectic subtilty in the effort to prove that all "appearances" are unreal, and that all movement and change is a mere "seeming"—not a reality. What men call motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... last they were seated side by side in the car and the train began slowly to pull out, her presence there seemed even more unreal than ever. But soon he gave himself up comfortably to the illusion. She was within arm's length of him and they were steaming through the green country. That was enough for him to know at present. She looked ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Then for a moment what he had just been through this last hour came back to him in an almost amusing light: as something grotesquely impossible—much like those helter-skelter, utterly unreal chases which, with slight variations of personalities and costumes, were the chief plots for the motion-picture drama in its crude childhood. But though there seemed a likeness, there was a tremendous difference. For this was real! Every one ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... don't you use a *real* operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial Unix sector are known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", and people from IBM object "Unix? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" Only {MS-DOS} is universally considered unreal. See {holy wars}, {religious issues}, {proprietary}, {Get a ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... finally came forth, at great cost, victorious. These religious experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to those who will but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... influences hang about the spot which he has hallowed by his presence. His relics—his household possessions, his books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At worst, it is but an ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of the bell from outside that probably announced Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Railton's admirable drawings of old English houses. (I recommend the study of Mr. Railton's work with a good deal of reservation, however. While it is admirable in respect of textures and fascinating in its color, the values are likely to be most unreal, and the mannerisms are so pronounced and so tiresome that I regard it as much inferior to that of Mr. Pennell, whose architecture always appears, at least, to have been honestly drawn on ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... civilization, the sea at our feet, its murmurs or its roaring for ever in our ears,—all these things led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from everyday life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. A sort of spell surrounded us; and each day, as the voyagers did not return, we grew restless and disquieted, and yet, strange to say, we were not fearful of ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... it was not without some superstitious embarrassment that Israel felt himself encased in a dead man's broadcloth; nay, in the very coat in which the deceased had no doubt fallen down in his fit. By degrees he began to feel almost as unreal and shadowy as the shade whose part ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the ordinary world went on, but far away and dimly heard and seen; as when one looks down from a castle-garden on to humming streets five hundred feet below; and the old life at Overfield, and Ralph's doings in London seemed unreal and fantastic activities, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... athwart the great columnar trunks which ran up into the dimness above her, and the cold glimmer of the snows with a pale star beyond them when the red flame sank, while the hoarse roar of an unseen river emphasized the silence. At first she felt there was something unreal and theatrical about it all. The light that blazed up and died, awful serenity of the snow, and the vast impenetrable shadows filled with profound silence, seemed all part of a fervidly-imagined spectacle; but as the silence deepened ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... separated farms and then two last miles of bayberry, salt meadow, coarse grass, rocky sand and blue, inrolling seas. I know how the salty, strengthening air blew Roger's lungs clean of the frightful murk of the car, how the strange, stunted windrocked trees gave an odd, unreal air of Japan to that bleak shore; I can half close my eyes now and lo, Atami and her thundering, surf-swept beach broadens out before me, and the breakers as they come pounding in, chase—not the withered, monkeylike old priest who searches endlessly for something in ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... marble columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock over which the Dome ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more than intellectual puzzles: ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... tenderly; "but I believe very many young people are unfitted for the higher duties of life where they give themselves up to society to such an extent as they do here in New York; it is such a shallow, unreal kind of life. We will be social—you and I, Mona, when we make a home for ourselves; we will be truly hospitable and entertain our friends for the good that we can get and give, but not merely for the sake of show and of being ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... exaltation, a fever of enthusiasm lent glamour to the scenes which were daily enacted on the Place de la Revolution, turning the final acts of the tragedies into glaring, lurid melodrama, almost unreal in its poignant ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... they are not real; they have no life and no sweetness in them, and they can never make the sick and the suffering happy as real flowers do. My life, with all its advantages, and what people call accomplishments, has been as unreal, as lifeless, as scentless as those wax flowers. It has not pleased God; it has not made others happy; there has been nothing to envy in it, but oh, quite the other way: it should rather be a warning. Tell my girls so, for they have their temptations ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... sufficiently clear and distinct for all practical purposes. And to my mind, all discussion about Good is for this reason rather factitious and unreal. I don't mean to say, of course, that it isn't amusing, among ourselves, to pass an hour or two in this kind of talk; but I should think it very unfortunate if the habit of it were to spread among the mass of men. For inquiry does tend in the long run to influence opinion, and generally to ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... disposition to shrink from ordinary dangers. His motives were certainly pure, and his subsequent exertions to rally his men and bring them to face the foe, were as great as could have been made by any one; but disheartened by the fear of unreal danger, and in the trepidation of a flight, deemed to be absolutely necessary for their safety, they could not be readily brought to bear the brunt of battle. The efforts of a few cool and collected individuals, drove back the pursuers, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... were little living beings taking life as seriously as other children do. The great, wide desert stretching far! The bare, solid rocks beneath their feet! The curious houses behind them! It all seemed unreal to Margaret, like a great picture-book spread out for her to see. She turned from gazing and found Gardley's eyes upon her adoringly, a tender understanding of her mood in his glance. She thrilled with pleasure to be here with him; a soft flush spread over her cheeks and a light ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... surroundings of the vaunted enlightenment and civilisation of the nineteenth century, and as we gradually accustomed ourselves to the new and strange conditions of primitive barbarism, our recollections of a civilised life faded into the unreal imagery of ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... home, and the new life opening before her, seemed for a long time strange and unreal to Lilias. She used to wake in the morning with the burden of her cottage-cares upon her, till the sight of her pleasant room, and the sunshine coming in through the clustering roses, chased her anxious thoughts away. The sense of repose that gradually grew upon her in ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... strange supper amid strange environments, but she enjoyed it as she had never before enjoyed a meal. The air was full of romance and danger, and her imagination was enthralled. Everything was so new and unreal that she scarcely could believe herself awake. The world seemed to have gone back to the days of Robin ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... reading public and some of the statesmen of the world begin to recognize that, whatever may be the case on other portions of the new map, there is nothing unreal or impossible or artificial about Yugoslavia. This State is the result of a national movement, having its origins within and not without the peoples whose destiny it affects. The various Yugoslavs, after being kept apart ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fine ladies in the memoirs of Grammont or the diaries of Pepys. The moral atmosphere is precisely that of the dissolute court of Charles II., and the 'privation of moral light' required is a delicate way of expressing its characteristic feeling. In the worst performances we have not got to any unreal region, but are breathing for the time the atmosphere of the lowest resorts, where reference to pure or generous sentiment would undoubtedly have been received with a guffaw, and coarse cynicism be regarded ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... line of kings. Nevertheless to me (a matter-of-fact man), Paoli appeared scarcely less imposing in person, and withal bore himself with a businesslike calm which, in a subtle way I cannot describe, seemed to tolerate the others, yet suggest that, beside his own purpose, theirs were something unreal. As an Englishman I should say that he felt the weight of public opinion behind him all the while, without which in these days the kingliest nature must miss something of gravity. Yet he has proved more than once that no public man can be more ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... with an unreal sang-froid. He ambushed behind a display of infants' socks. Driven to buy by a saleswoman he appeared to be demanding improbable varieties ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... trip without trouble or molestation of any sort, and reached St. Louis in safety. How strange it all seemed, to walk about the streets of the great city of the West, and as the residents fondly term it "the future great city of the world;" everything seemed so unreal, after the long years of my captivity and wild life among the mountains, that I used sometimes to fancy that it was all but a dream and I would presently awake to find myself again in the temple with Wakometkla, in that strange and far off land hidden among ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... expresses his conviction that 'men, to protect themselves . . . have set up a feeble, romantic conviction that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man . . . but the pretence is so shallow, so unreal that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare's plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. . . . The pretence ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... that were not quickened by his presence. Indeed, no Arctic winter could be colder and more devoid of light and life than this time of absence was to her, and, had it not been for the warm splendour of her hopes, shooting its beautiful promise in unreal gleams across the blackness of her horizon, she felt as though she must have frozen and died. For hope, elusive as she is, often bears a fairer outward mien than the realization to which she points, and, like ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... on its sacred aspect. It is a crude mind that would insist that these appearances are not real, that the eye does not see them when all eyes behold them. To say dogmatically that any new thing seen by half-light is an illusion, is like arguing that a discovery by the telescope or microscope is unreal. If the appearances are beautiful besides, they are not only facts, but assets in ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... broadened, and shed its ghastly chilly beams over the sea, making all look unreal and depressing, and showed the faces of our crew, sitting crouched in the bottom of the boat, ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... of merely abstract lines. Workmanship when separated by too wide a gulf from fresh thought—that is, from design—inevitably decays, and, on the other hand, ornamentation, divorced from workmanship, is necessarily unreal, and quickly falls into affectation. Proper ornamentation may be defined as a language addressed to the eye; it is pleasant thought expressed in the speech of ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... imagination, tumours which are visible to a physician's eye while the patient is conscious and his mind obsessed with the conviction that it is there; he knew that such swellings disappear when the patient is asleep. He felt dazed, and as if he himself were unreal; his feet refused to tread firmly on the earth; they never managed to reach it. When he looked for Abdul and the camels, they were floating in the heavens above the horizon, miles and miles away; there ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... evangelistic missionary, technically so called, is doing a most important educational work, and often truly medical, healing work. The division is a technical one and missionary-hearted men begin to resent it; they are all evangelic in their work, if not technically evangelistic, and the division seems unreal, unnatural, untrue. It would be a sad day for our missions if medical and educational missionaries ceased to be at heart evangelists, and were content to leave evangelistic work to others. Nevertheless, the technical ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... when we are obedient to law, and it is a wonderful day for any human being when he intelligently recognizes and finds himself getting into the current of the law of the New Testament. The action of that law he sees is real, and everything outside he recognizes as unreal. In the light of the new truth, we see that many things which we have hitherto regarded as essential, are of minor importance in ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... should take place. All the possibilities of deliverance are sought after in such a disposition of mind, and are, by imagination, easily changed into probabilities and realities, because just that is wanting which proves them to be improbable and unreal, viz., the consciousness of a living, omnipotent God. Thus men free themselves from fear, and with it, from the troublesome obligation of escaping from it in another and a legitimate way, viz., by true conversion. Now, it is this levity which the prophet opposes. He shows that whatever possibility ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... proposition in Christian 9 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 12 illusions are not real, but unreal. Health is the conscious- ness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else. 15 In a moment you may awake from a night-dream; just so you can awake from the dream of sickness; but the demonstration ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy
... all the great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality—for he knows nothing of men—and the last projection of himself into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused. Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers, all of whom are but ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... this by heart; had always known it. It all belonged to the make-up of the life of elegance: there was nothing new about it. What had been new to her was just that short interval with Nick—a life unreal indeed in its setting, but so real in its essentials: the one reality she had ever known. As she looked back on it she saw how much it had given her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden flowering of sensuous joy in heart ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... be derived is cumulative—each acquisition of knowledge adding to the satisfaction of that which comes after—it is of a sort, however, to be experienced in the presence of the thing itself; any description at a distance must necessarily be shadowy and unreal, only the dry bones of something which one sees there, a thing of beauty and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... who have lived," writes George Sand, "and not an unreal being created by my pride and my ennui." We all know the use to which Musset put this phrase. He wrote the famous couplet of Perdican with it: "All men are untruthful, inconstant, false, chatterers, hypocritical, proud, cowardly, ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... that the fish in the water is thirsty: You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly! Here is the truth! Go where you will, to Benares or to Mathura; if you do not find your soul, the world is unreal to you. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... upon the green earth in bright patches. The robins were singing, and many strange birds, whose calls she did not know, but who piped gently, musically, so in harmony with the soft landscape that their notes seemed a part of it. It was all unreal, this quiet, sunlit world, where the birds were free as the air which bore their songs, while the brave Captain—she ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... in a strange dream ever looked out more wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his uncle's house without the woman who had reigned in ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... told you only the truth. The imagination is very strong, and may easily give the semblance of reality to unreal things." ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the soul—those ultimate places where things common ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... was something vitally spurious about this whole Winkelberg business. And I said to myself: "The man's a downright fake. If anybody were as pathetic and impossible and useless as this Winkelberg is he would shoot himself. Winkelberg doesn't shoot himself. So he becomes illogical. Unreal." ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... not so light as it was, or her laugh so gay. How little we know of each other, although living the same lives, seeing the same people and things; we have all got an inner existence which no one but ourselves knows anything about, it is so shadowy and unreal, that contact with the outer world would crush all the beauty and poetry ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... I am discouraged, to make people understand that a book does not have to be a verity in order to be true—that a story must be possible, instead of actual, and that actual circumstances may be too unreal for literature. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... pity me yet—only listen to me. I am so tired of living on husks, I seem to be nothing but a husk myself, brainless, soulless, and empty. I am so tired of sham and pretence, of keeping up appearances. I hate appearances. They are all false, unreal, loathsome. Yes, I am a well-trained puppet; I smile and chatter, dance and sing, am haughtily self-satisfied; but at night—at night my sick heart cries like a starving child, and I pace the floor with it until I fear that its wailings ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... patient into one of the few furnished bedrooms, and having put him to bed left him in care of the beautiful nurse. When we four men met again downstairs, amazement had rendered the whole scene unreal to me. Soar stood just within the open door, not knowing whether to go or to remain; but Hilton motioned to him to stay. Earl Dexter bit off the end of a cigar and stood with his left elbow resting ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... had heard with rapture at a concert on the evening before. She was talking with this lady when a new announcement fell upon her ear, a name which caused her to start and gaze towards the door. Impossible for her to guard against this display of emotion; the name she heard so distinctly seemed an unreal utterance, a fancy of her brain, or else it belonged to another than the one she knew. But there was no such illusion; he whom she saw ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... expect the paper roses to smell. This mystifies you a little, for you are a plain, downright siren. Your lovers' songs have been in simple measures. Well, the moral is this: take my love-letters as real (in their way) as the play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for the moment, unreal for the hour, eternal as the dead passions of the ages. Further, it is better to feel the aromatic attributes of love than the dangerous or unlovely reality. You can flirt with number nine or marry number ten, but I shall ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... unreal light died away. The pageant of the hills, the panorama of the battle, faded and were gone. The table and the books came back. Wondering at these words, I scarce could tell when the Singing Mouse went away, leaving ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... wonderful Indian stars, which are not all pricked in on one plane, but, preserving an orderly perspective, draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... life sometimes appear to you, Miss Barton, more distorted and unreal than a dream? I know it does to me. The spectacle we have just witnessed was a part of the ages that believed in the godhead of Christ and the divine right of Kings; but it seems to me strange that such barbarities should be permitted ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... of the previous night had by this time completely passed away, and it was almost with a sense of shame that he looked back upon his mad wanderings from street to street, his fierce emotional agony. The very sincerity of his sufferings made them seem unreal to him now. He wondered how he could have been so foolish as to rant and rave about the inevitable. The only question that seemed to trouble him was, whom to make away with; for he was not blind to the fact that murder, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... homeward straggle, interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt contemplations—that for instance of the painted portrait, large as life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... this will pass by, and there will be nothing left of international bitterness but its memory. It is sincerely to be hoped that this may be so—that even the memory of the existing feeling may fade away and become unreal. I for one cannot think that two nations situated as are the States and England should permanently quarrel and avoid each other. But words have been spoken which will, I fear, long sound in men's ears, and thoughts have sprung up which will not easily ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... their departure and the store was closed for the night he passed into the kitchen for his supper. He looked to find Keeko. He looked to find Marcel. He looked to revel in those moments of happiness which still seemed utterly unreal, even impossible. There were so many things he still had ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... graves which, in countless thousands, are spread along the foot of the mountains like a vast gray blanket. In the late afternoon sunlight the walls of the city seemed to recede before us and the picturesque gate loomed shadowy and unreal even when we passed through its gloomy arch and clattered up the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... Garish, it might have been, and tawdry, in the full light of the sun. But on these weirdly unreal structures the sun's rays never shone; they were illumined only by the soft golden glow that diffused across this world from the cloud masses ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... and he had to look about to find a seat. The bare possibility that she might be there was overpowering. There was a total suspension of every sort of emotion. He felt, as he took his chair and essayed to glance casually around, as light and unreal as any one who ever walked the tight-rope in a dream. The blood leaped in torrents through his veins, and yet his movements, as he fumbled aimlessly with his knife, fork, and ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... avenging glare; the brooding skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the straths into intermingling vapors and visions. A spectral world, unreal, and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigor of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and unreal. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... hill and forest, half wished he were well away from this uncanny house and its eccentric inmates. And yet, despite the mystery which enshrouded it, there was a charm, a fascination, he could not deny. It was the dream-like unreality of his surroundings—unreal, because different from all that he had ever known. Should he suddenly find himself a dozen miles removed, he felt certain that ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... careful speech, always weighed upon by his promise, by the deception he must practice, by the dread of what must come. Nevertheless, minute by minute, his pulse quickened. This, God be thanked, would mean the end. The insufferable knot of circumstance, so fantastic, so extravagantly unlivable and unreal, would break, Hugh would tear the tangle of his making to tatters with angry hands when they got back. His difficult trust in Pete's promise would go down under the strain of these long and unexplained hours of Sylvie's absence in his company. It was the last act in the extravaganza, queer ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others. This letter ran so smoothly, so plausibly, that it produced on the writer of it the effect of a work of fiction, which we know to be unreal, but feel to be true. Long habits of this kind of self-delusion in time produce a paralysis in the vital nerves of truth, so that one becomes habitually unable to see things in their verity, and realizes the awful words of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and my first numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh had prayed me 'Be first'—for her. Wondrous little now cared I for the Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth—precious little for the fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes lay unregarded around me. But that thought, Be first! was deeply suggested in my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as the Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the United Kingdom as a whole. And this is the time which is chosen for seriously suggesting that she should once again be excluded from all the benefits of partnership in the United Kingdom and driven out into the wilderness of poverty and decay. The plea for this folly is an unreal sentiment which is itself merely the survival of the mistaken political or economic separatism of the past, and which is nothing to the real and justifiable sentiment of bitterness which would be roused in Ireland if ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the outside world of nature. Dreams are unreal things—the fantastic images of a brain ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... still bashfully) across the fire to me, of our old wanderings upon the beach, to pick up shells and pebbles; and when I asked her if she recollected how I used to be devoted to her; and when we both laughed and reddened, casting these looks back on the pleasant old times, so unreal to look at now; he was silent and attentive, and observed us thoughtfully. She sat, at this time, and all the evening, on the old locker in her old little corner by the fire—Ham beside her, where I used to sit. I could not satisfy myself whether it was in ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... through the motley crowd, powerless to express ourselves except in the universal language of pantomime, with mountains all around us and the Kanchanjanga still in view, we felt as though we were a part of a play, it seemed so unreal. Later we visited the street bazars, all of them furnished with articles claimed to be antique. In the evening the proprietor of the hotel gave us an interesting description of scenes in Tibet, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... was too tired to do it; and besides, words seemed so far away, and feelings seemed far away, too. Francis and the work at the cabin and Pennington, with his kind, plump, rueful face, and even the O'Maras and Logan, seemed suddenly unreal and of little account. The only thing that really mattered was a chance to go somewhere and lie down and sleep. Perhaps she could lean back a little in the side-car as he ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... containing some chicken-broth which I swallowed slowly, not feeling the cravings of hunger, in fact not knowing whether I was dead or alive. The old woman had a peculiar piece of wood through her lip and looked very unreal to me, and ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... the proof!" Phillips stared at the editor, trying to penetrate through the haze of hope that had somehow grown chilled and unreal. His thoughts were abruptly disorganized and out of his control. Only the urgency remained. "It's the key evidence. And we've got to move fast! I don't know how long it takes, but even one more day may be ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... familiar as it already was to Carroll, struck him that afternoon as looking more than usually unreal, ephemeral, and unsubstantial. The Moorish arches, of the thinnest white pine; the arabesque screens and lattices that looked as if made of pierced cardboard; the golden minarets that seemed to be glued to the shell-like towers, and the hollow battlements that visibly warped ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... She was so disturbed, so confused in her mind that Van Shaw's words seemed unreal, as unreal as the kiva on which she was sitting or the changing groups of vivid colour moving about on the tops of ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... around Winter Quarters began to come into view, part of the basin of the boat harbour appeared, and lo! there were human figures! They almost seemed unreal—I was in a dream—but after a brief moment one of them saw me and waved an arm, I replied, there was a commotion and they all ran towards the Hut. Then they were lost, for the crest of the first steep slope hid them. It almost seemed to me that they had ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of Grandma Wentworth's upstairs windows he remembered those last talks and understood that yearning for home. When he had been in Green Valley only a few weeks the old life began to grow vague and unreal. The mother was real and near. But the splendid figure of his father was fading into a strange memory. He was a father to be proud of, that strong, cool, selfless man who had asked nothing of life but to take ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... full price for her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It should have been food for sermons in every pulpit in Christendom, that a modern woman preferred solitary confinement with ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... "Not unreal, dearest," he said, as they walked under the trees, her head against his shoulder, his arm round her waist and supporting her. "It is real enough, this love of mine—which will last me till my death, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... can not be held up to gratify the whims, or out of respect to the governmental impotence, or to the even more sinister and evil political peculiarities, of people who, though they dwell afar off, yet, against the wish of the actual dwellers on the Isthmus, assert an unreal supremacy over the territory. The possession of a territory fraught with such peculiar capacities as the Isthmus in question carries with it obligations to mankind. The course of events has shown that this canal can not be built by private enterprise, or by any other nation than our own; therefore ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and yet there was a curious relief at the formality of it. It was like something from a play, too unreal to affect ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... was too extreme; but as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, he worked step by step; and because of this the extremists hated and denounced him with a fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its deification of the unreal and the impossible. At the very time when one side was holding him up as the apostle of social revolution because he was against slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced him as the "slave hound of Illinois." When he was the second time candidate for ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... to Emotion also and one of the most necessary elements in the higher forms of literature is Imagination, the faculty of making what is absent or unreal seem present and real, and revealing the hidden or more subtile forces of life. Its main operations may be classified under three heads: (1) Pictorial and Presentative. It presents to the author's mind, and through him to the minds ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... round the corner.' She shut the door, and for the first time we looked at one another. I could not say that I was nervous, but there was certainly, to me, a something strange in the atmosphere. Last night seemed a long way off and somehow a little unreal. I suppose I must have shown this in my manner, for she suddenly broke what had amounted to a distinct pause by giving a little laugh. 'Peter,' she said, 'you're embarrassed.' I denied the charge warmly, but without real conviction. I was embarrassed. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... occupied my thoughts day and night. Other things seemed unreal. I discovered by accident that Herr von Brincken often visited the parents of one of my schoolmates. I took great pains to cultivate her acquaintance, and ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-street especially selects for reprobation it is the life of the Enclosed Religious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal; it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life of Jesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured out upon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is said that "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... to this hodgepodge of technicalities, was dismayed and distrustful. These men spoke a language evidently familiar to them, which he, although a professional scientist, found a meaningless jargon. The whole thing seemed unreal, had a purely theoretic or literary quality about it that made him question even their premises. In the tainted air of the council room, listening to these little pot-bellied Professoren from Amsterdam and Muenich, doubt assailed ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... separates two ages of truth." Yet no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that an age of fable and an age of truth cannot be distinguished with absolute precision. It is not that what is presented to us through the haze of tradition must necessarily be unreal, any more than that what comes to us in an age of literature must be absolutely true. An historical fact, a real personage, may be handed down from a remote age in the songs of bards; but it is not therefore to be inferred that these national lyrics are founded upon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... waking hours as to retain the impressions during sleep, is the experience of every day. And yet we know so little of the means by which truths may be communicated to the human spirit while the senses are closed, that it would be unphilosophical to pronounce even upon those fugitive thoughts as unreal. That Napoleon must have often reflected on his selfish and cruel desertion of Josephine, it is perfectly natural to conceive. That he may have bitterly regretted it, is equally natural, for, from that day, his good fortune deserted him. And he might also have discovered that he had committed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and in no unreal sense, even a family relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to every sort of happiness among ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin |
