"Unreality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was because he was ashamed of what he knew. You never saw him, or you would have known his dread of France, or anything that was French. He was a man living in a dream. His body was here in Farlingford, but his mind was elsewhere—who knows where? And at times I feel that, too—that unreality—as if I were here, and somewhere else at the same time. But all the same, I prefer Farlingford, even if it ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... very reality of things: on such a view there is no impossibility of an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be found in the individual spirits themselves; yet the system, if known to none of them, seems to fall outside the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... of the pale-faced, seedy reporter, seated at a small table and writing with a ghoul-like avidity that made my flesh creep, were each and all as fixed an element in the remarkable scene before me as the splendor of the surroundings which made their presence such a nightmare of discord and unreality. ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... veil lying in their box, swathed in tissue-paper, had a gossamer unreality about them that even the sense of touch could not dispel. No—no! The bride of to-morrow was ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... the result of the combined action of these, as the flame of a candle proceeds from the combustion of its constituent elements. The flame is never the same for two consecutive moments. It seems to have a perpetuated identity, but that is only an illusion, and the same unreality pertains to the soul. It is only a succession of thoughts, emotions, and conscious experiences. We are not the same that we were an hour ago. In fact, there is no such thing as being—there is only a constant becoming. We are ever passing from one point to another throughout our life; and ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... playful and half ferocious. For myself, I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold all I saw. While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as very characteristically American, I assert that the unreality of New York escaped me. It appeared to me that New York was quite a real city, and European geographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail) usually locate it ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... shocks voluntarily received. He was devoted to her with a warmth that his supposed devotion to Lucia had never kindled in him; he even went so far as to dream about her in an agitated though respectful manner. Without being conscious of any unreality about his sentiments, he really wanted to dress up as a lover rather than to be one, for he could form no notion at present of what it felt to be absorbed in anyone else. Life was so full as it was: there really was no room for anything else, especially if that something else must be of ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... had not seen in many years, she had known immediately, and now remembered. And Naida had taken her white-gloved hand shyly, whispering constrained formalities, then had disappeared into the unreality of it all. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... ears through a growing sensation of unreality. It seemed that the speaker was miles away and that his voice and features were those of a radiovision likeness. Wanted by the great power across the Atlantic! It was unthinkable. Why, he had been but an infant in 2085! What possible crime could he have committed? ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... condition of mortals. This idea has found expression, not only in the cynical exclamation of the misanthropist that most men are fools, but also in the cry of despair that sometimes breaks from the weary searcher after absolute truth, and from the poet when impressed with the unreality of his ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... who haunted her thoughts had been arrested, the case might be reported. She scanned the police news anxiously; but there was no report, and she was laying the paper down when her eye caught a familiar name in a paragraph. She read the few lines in a kind of stupor, with a sense of unreality; and when she had finished reading she stood with the paper gripped in her hand, and staring ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... walked up and down before the house, a portly, worthy, unimaginative figure, humming "Silver Threads among the Gold." He casually considered, "Might call up Paul." Then he remembered. He saw Paul in a jailbird's uniform, but while he agonized he didn't believe the tale. It was part of the unreality of this ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... behind—a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in his shadow—superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the reign of priests was ended. And in their place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... motion and matter is an actuality brought to the attention of advanced students on Mars. An understanding of this truth exemplifies the unreality of the world of gross matter and the importance of gaining knowledge concerning Spiritual truths; for the latter are the only real tangible treasures worthy of one's efforts in their acquisition. Already a knowledge of these truths is beginning to be sought for by some of the more ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... particular criticised it at considerable length, calling it 'the least successful of her works.' The subject, while half challenging comparison with Milton, lends itself only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett's genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, 'Lady Geraldine's ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were, like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than their laughter, our restraints ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... weird feeling of unreality; as he hung there helplessly, to see one of the screens on the bulkhead pick up ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... why it was those inflated proportions irritated him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false standards. And more and more the thing which mattered ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... or after, and I can only explain these strange dreams like memories, by ascribing them to overstrain of the nerves. I lived again through the scene in the slaughter-house and the conversation with the governor, and at the same time I was conscious of its unreality. ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... in The Second Coming but upon her fell the larger share of the burden of entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and laughed. Her trained senses knew the unreality of his kisses, of the words with which ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... astonished that it was not her own room. Then she remembered. But it was as a child remembers; for when we have the sense of perfect physical well-being we cannot but see our misfortunes with the child's sense of unreality—and Susan had not only health but youth, was still in the child stage of the period between childhood and womanhood. She lay down again, with the feeling that so long as she could stay in that comfortable bed, with the world shut out, just ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... had become almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... The first unreality of the roots was their rigidity. I stepped from one slender tendon of wood to the next, expecting a bending which never occurred. They might have been turned to stone, and even little twigs resting on the bark often proved to have grown fast. And this was the more unexpected because of the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... Earwig had a wash at home, and one of her children had fallen into the hot copper, for which reason she was running so fast to fetch the doctor. Tom had a profound contempt for this nonsense of Maggie's, smashing the earwig at once as a superfluous yet easy means of proving the entire unreality of such a story; but Lucy, for the life of her, could not help fancying there was something in it, and at all events thought it was very pretty make-believe. So now the desire to know the history of a very portly toad, added to her habitual affectionateness, made her run to Maggie and say, "Oh, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... stage when the typical lost its type without reverting to the specific, to the portrait. The successors of Michael Angelo were among the most skilful craftsmen who ever existed; but their knowledge only bore the fruit of unreality. Donatello did not achieve the typical except in his children: it was only in children that Michael Angelo failed. He missed this supreme opportunity; those on the roof of the Sistine Chapel are solemn and grown old with care: children without childhood. With Donatello all is ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... glamor of the Chambers fancy, the gauzy woof of an artist's imagination which glories in tints, in poesies, in the little whims of the brush and pencil, so that you have just a pleasant reminder of unreality and a glimpse of the author himself here and there to vary the interest."—St. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... not know, Monsieur l'Abbe. I am almost ashamed to talk to you about such troubles," and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... a very permanent or even eternal nature; and Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a dreamy kind, and is ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... of it, Clewe rang to stop. He looked down at the complicated machine he had worked upon so long, with something like a feeling of affection. This he knew, it was his own. Looking upon its familiar form, he felt that he had a companion in this region of unreality. ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... amiably, artificial; histrionic in their manner of discharging the most commonplace of functions; exaggerated in their gestures; stilted and affected in their speech. They seemed, indeed, to belong to a world apart, a world of unreality which became real only on the planks of their stage, in the glare of their footlights. Good-fellowship bound them one to another; and Andre-Louis reflected cynically that this harmony amongst them might be the cause of their apparent unreality. In the real world, greedy ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... evolutionary hypothesis. At some time in the remote past, there must, according to the theory, have been a development of living substance from a mineral base. But if scientific experiment has shown anything it has shown the unreality of what was called "spontaneous generation." This term was very popular with the scientists of a century or two ago. It was believed that certain animal and vegetable forms gave birth, in the process of decay, to insect life. Putrefying ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living. This is ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... stretch of barren mesa cut straight down the middle with a yellow line that was the highway up which Casey had driven the morning before. The inimitable magic of distance and high desert air veiled greasewood, sage and sand with the glamour of unreality. The mountains beyond, unspeakably desolate and forbidding at close range, and the little black buttes standing afar, off—small spewings of age-old volcanos dead before man was born—seemed fascinating, ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... will say, "how are we to know what is real and what is not? I would much rather live my life and get more or less unreality than have this everlasting analyzing." There need be no abnormal analyzing; that is as morbid as the other state. Indulge to your heart's content in whatever seems to you real, in what you believe to be wholesome sentiment. But be ready to ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... and then, but always with the same curious sense of remoteness—or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for disloyalty ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... him; faces he had thought friendly, of good men and women whom he knew, yet at that moment did not know, all gathered round Noel, with fingers pointing at her. He staggered back from that vision, could not bear it, could not recognise this calamity. With a sort of comfort, yet an aching sense of unreality, his mind flew to all those summer holidays spent in Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, by mountain and lake, with his two girls; what sunsets, and turning leaves, birds, beasts, and insects they had watched together! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this unreality real and mighty in the life of the individual and of the Church is the purpose of this book, that is eminently sane and practical, and will appeal with force to every thoughtful ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... and he looked thoughtfully out seaward. It was only one paragraph of many, and the tone of all was the same. Ernestine's words had come true—he was already a man of note. A few months had changed his life in the most amazing way—when he looked back upon it now it was with a sense of unreality—surely all these things which had happened were part of a chimerical dream. It was barely possible for him to believe that it was he, Scarlett Trent, who had developed day by day into what he was at that moment. For the man was changed in a hundred ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier backgrounds. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... is a blistering and awful reality about a well-arranged unreality. It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that night of mine could drive a man to suicide. He would refuse to examine the figures; they would revolt him so, and he could go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... music which forbids unreality, rebukes frivolity into silence, subdues ignoble passions, soothes the heart's sorrow, and summons to the soul high and holy thoughts. It was difficult to begin the conversation; the trivial themes of the earlier part of the evening seemed foreign to the mood that had fallen ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... contradicts the fact that the {250} fullest life under present conditions involves contact with evil. Innocence must be tragic if it is not to be weak. Jesus without the cross would possess something of that quality of unreality which attaches to Aristotle's high-minded man. But this does not prove that life involves evil; it proves only that life will be narrow and complacent when it is out of touch with things as they are. Since evil is now real, he who altogether escapes it ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... people in real life actually wore monocles, something, which I, of course, had known to be true but which had seemed nevertheless an unreality, part of a stage play, a "dress-up" game for children and amateur actors. The "English swell" in the performances of the Bayport Dramatic Society always wore a single eyeglass, but he also wore Dundreary whiskers and clothes which would ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fact made to stand firm on its feet, with the world-rocks under it, and looking free towards all the winds and all the stars. He goes about suppressing platitudes, ripping off futilities, turning deceptions inside out. The realm of Disorder, which is Unveracity, Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy. Honest soul, and he seemed to himself such a stupid fellow often; no tongue-learning at all; little capable to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He cannot argue in articulate logic, only in inarticulate bellowings, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... course immeasurably different in the highest respects from what mine might be had I to speak of the makers of European history of 1866, it is in one respect just the same. It is as completely free from the tone of legend unreality, uncertainty. With the same entire consciousness of matter of fact with which I might write of the statesmen or generals of my early manhood, he writes of One who, in his early manhood, overcame death by death, and "shewed Himself alive after His ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... He thought of Renan, who declares that on the Acropolis at Athens beauty and wisdom do exist, really exist, as external powers. He did not aspire to beauty or wisdom, but he prayed to be delivered from the shadow of unreality that had begun to darken the world. For it was as if some power had pronounced against him—as if, by some heedless action, he had offended an Olympian god. Like many another, he wondered whether the god might be appeased by work—hard uncongenial work. Perhaps he had ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... pendulum of his desire vibrates undeviatingly between two points only. Sense and spirit, spirit and sense, the pulse of his nature seems to reiterate incessantly. There is no poet so absorbed in sensation that physical objects do not occasionally fade into unreality when he compares them with the spirit of life. Even Walt Whitman, most sensuous of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter" is his chef-d'oeuvre. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some of his inferior works; and I think he was right ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... there she became wedged by degrees, as the room grew gradually crowded. Beside her was a mirror, in which she could see all who arrived and all that happened, and involuntarily she became a silent spectator, the medium of the mirror imparting a curious unreality to the scene, which invested it with all the charm of a dream; and, as in a dream, she looked and listened, while clearly, beneath the main current of conversation, and unbroken by the restless change and motion of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... letter through again carefully and slowly; and was astonished at the unreality of Hubert's words about Romish superstition and gospel simplicity. She tried hard to silence her thoughts; but two reasons for Hubert's change of religion rose up and insisted on making themselves felt; it was that he might be more in unity with the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... to his feet, shook himself, and with his elbow resting upon the mantelpiece leaned down towards his friend. He could not rid himself altogether of this sense of unreality. He had the feeling that he had passed through one of the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whole bottom of this enormous basin, stretched a placid lake, the water of which was as clear as crystal. A thin filmy veil of vapour rose everywhere from the surface of the water, softening the hard outlines of the more distant landscape, and imparting an aspect of dreamlike witchery and unreality which it would ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of unreality impressed itself upon Mark Brendon after this stage in his inquiry. A time was coming when the false atmosphere in which he moved would be blown away by a stronger mind and a greater genius than his own; but already he found ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... rare night. Often have I seen such nights in this very spot, but never till to-night did their full joy enter my heart. My life was one long, terrible unreality. To-night the world is new, and full of loveliness and ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... perfect but which will answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the prize turnips on Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, and the offices at his disposal—these are very real indeed. London merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... his criticism and condemnation, he still wanted the great machine. His only happy moments, his only moments of pure freedom were when he was serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he act wholely, without cynicism and unreality. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... with a dazed sense of unreality. Her attire was of the simplest. She wore a hat instead of a veil. It was to be a quiet ceremony in the early morning, for neither she nor Hill desired any unnecessary parade. When she descended the stairs with Adela, Jack was the only person ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Jasper Milvain, the man of letters, who prospers simply because he is also a man of business, which is the main feature of the book and the principal support of its theme, strikes one throughout as strained to the point of unreality. In the first place, it seems almost impossible that a man of Milvain's mind and instincts should have deliberately chosen literature as the occupation of his life; with money and success as his only aim he would surely have become a stockbroker or a moneylender. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... creators under God of their own spheres of utility and happiness, self-degraded into mere slaves of propriety and custom, their true natures undeveloped, their hearts cramped and shut up, each afraid of his neighbor and his neighbor of him, living a life of unreality, deceiving and being deceived, and forever walking in a vain show? Here, now, we have just left a married couple who are happy because they have taken counsel of their honest affections rather than of the opinions of the multitude, and have dared ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and in the intervals between their detonations could be heard the bursting of shrapnel, the bubbling of frying oil, the grinding of a coffee-mill, and the incessant crackling of rifle-fire. Fleecy clouds were floating over the fields, giving to near objects the indefinite lines of unreality. The sun was a faint spot seen between curtains of mist. The trees were weeping fog moisture from all the cracks in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... book have the charm of romance without its unreality. The book illuminates, with life-like portraits, the history of the World ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... he do it? Can he do it? Can anybody do it? How can we help him do it? Now that the task is on him, does he really understand? Do I understand him and he me? There's a certain unreality about it. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... they were backed up by a show of legal claim that satisfied the conscience of king and subject, and to contemporaries Edward seemed a king regardful of his honour and mindful of his plighted word. If his generosity verged on extravagance, and his affectation of popular manners and graciousness on unreality, Englishmen of the fourteenth century were no severe critics of a crowned king. It was only when in his later years Edward laid aside the soldier's life, and abandoned himself to the frivolous distractions and degrading amours[2] which provoked the censure even of his admirers, that the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... at length the moment arrives, there is apt to be disillusion. Either the excitement of the child may pass all bounds and end in tears and so-called naughtiness, or the unfamiliar surroundings may leave him distrait with a strange sense of unreality and unhappiness. It is not always fair to blame the want of wisdom in his hostess's choice of eatables, if the excited and overstimulated child fails in the work of digestion and returns to the nursery to suffer the reaction, with pains ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams. One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The ego which must gauge itself ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... governess. Courtesy and kindliness might lead those whose bread she ate to endeavour occasionally to remove all show of social distinction; neither her temperament nor her sense of comeliness in behaviour would allow her to shrink from such advances, but she could not lose sight of the unreality of the situations to which they led. Self-respect is conditioned by the influence of circumstance on character; in Emily it expressed itself as a subtle sensitiveness to grades of sympathy. She could not shut her eyes ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... first and most important thing was to rid Francis of the delusion that he had disgraced himself in the eyes of his fellow-officers. This would at once wake him as from a bad dream to the reality of his condition: convinced of the unreality of the idea that possessed him, he would at once, they believed, resume his place in the march of his generation through life. To find means, then, for the attainment of this end, they set their wits to work; and it was almost at once clear ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... in the words of the old-fashioned tag, "If our friends in front are pleased, then Manager and Author are satisfied." But, if objection be still taken to the unreality of the Parliamentary setting of the picture, then "please remember," apologises 'ENRY HAUTHOR, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... connection with the door to the Professor's study, which, contrary to custom, was closed. Minchen repeatedly threw furtive glances at it, and Roeschen made her determination not to look at it equally conspicuous; only Gretchen was frankly curious and made no effort to disguise it. A strange sense of the unreality of the whole scene, himself included, crept over the young man; he felt like a man in a play who can murder or make love with equal irresponsibility. He was about to indulge in the latter diversion, when suddenly the mysterious door opened, and the Frau Professorin entered with ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... perfect marriage! How much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence and showy unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where there is no insatiable longing for the unattainable. The worship of wealth, the feeling ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... a little overwrought and designed to conceal a sharpness of wit and observation which she feared to exercise in courtly circles. In this resolve she was doubtless discreet, but it gave her conversation a turn of unreality which impressed as might the use of some perfume of Araby to conceal a less romantic odour. It affected my own candour disagreeably. Possibly the praise received by the author of "Evelina" might cause her ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... in general his sculptural sense, his self-control, his perfect power of expressing what he deemed worth expressing, are really what are noteworthy in his pictures, far more than their monotonous coloration and the coldness and unreality of the pictures themselves, considered as moving, real, or significant compositions. In admiration of these it is impossible for us nowadays to go as far as even the romanticist, though extremely catholic, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... in the argument. Perhaps I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however, I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was sitting reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... there was an oppression upon her breast; her brain whirled with contending tides of thought. She remembered Wade's face. How blind she had been! It exhausted her to walk, though she went so slowly. There seemed to be a chill and a darkening in the atmosphere, an unreality in the familiar slopes and groves, a strangeness and shadow upon ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... Spirit—that He wants to speak through every man. And it helps to clear our minds if we go to our Bibles with the expectation of finding here, not exceptions to all rules which obtain in common life, but types of the divine action. The isolation of Bible history has done much to create a feeling of its unreality. What has happened only in the Bible can, we are apt to feel, safely be disregarded in daily life in the twentieth century. But if what we find there is customary modes of divine action in life, exceptional in detail rather than in principle, the attitude we ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... even deeper than his disillusionment with any Party was his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. He has described ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... broad, low margin, distinct, yet with a coercive conviction of unreality, the figure of a man drawn in lines of vague light paced slowly to and fro; an old man, he would have said, bent and wizened, swaying back and forth, in expressive contortions, a very pantomime of woe, wringing gaunt hands and arms above his head, and ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... he had said "good-bye" rather grimly, and gone out of the door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression. There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she had been rehearsing. She had felt nothing. The breaking of her engagement had failed ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... prosecution of the women's business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear'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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... imposed by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past two centuries many fine-souled men ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his own room he sat himself down to read over the pages of the little black book with painful criticism, asking himself miserably if it were really true that they were feeble amateur efforts, tinged with pretence and unreality. Here and there a flush and a wince proved that the accusation had gone home, when a vigorous pencil mark on the side of the page marked the necessity for correction, but on the whole he could honestly refute the charge; could declare, with the bold yet humble conviction ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... circumstance, mould your action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do not correspond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimed in these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality, oppressive to the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different Christendom would have been and would be to-day, if Christians had learned the lesson of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... it was just chastisement for headstrong folly and conceit. She had heard of bending to the rod and finding it a cross, but here came the dreadful confusion of unreality, and of the broken habit of religious meditation except as matter of debate. She did not know till her time of need how deeply sneers had eaten into her heart. The only text that would come to her mind was, "And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea; and if one look ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seem to confirm that impression. But the opening lines of The Village point to a different origin. It was rather during those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of The Village he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head. The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' His landscapes, to speak of one particular feature, are usually of a rather vague, often of a vast nature, as suits the unreality of his poetic world, and usually, since Spenser was not a minute observer, follow the conventions of Renaissance literature. They are commonly great plains, wide and gloomy forests (where the trees of many climates often grow together in impossible harmony), cool ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... schoolmate would come up to congratulate Rebecca and ask why she had hidden herself in a corner. Then some member of the class would call to her excitedly, reminding her not to be late at the picnic luncheon, or begging her to be early at the class party in the evening. All this had an air of unreality to Rebecca. In the midst of the happy excitement of the last two days, when "blushing honors" had been falling thick upon her, and behind the delicious exaltation of the morning, had been the feeling that the condition was a transient one, and that the burden, the struggle, the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not let you fall." There was a note of irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... themselves—the interpreters forgotten—a normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisable Personality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, with prejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurd unreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian God. Very soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything they have ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression of the unreality of the material universe,—of Buddhist illusion. Even these adamantine records of death, rising on every side to challenge him,—even these might recombine their particles before his very eyes,—might ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew—the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonlight.—Yet ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... of Episcopal appointments, instituted by Henry VIII, as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was required for the completeness of an election which her own choice had already determined, not ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... doubtful of their reality, but persistent observation continued at many successive oppositions compelled acceptance of them as actual features of the planet's disc. So many other observers have now seen them that the objection of unreality seems no ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the authorities whom he has consulted; and this must be taken as his excuse, if any want of keeping is discernible in the composition. He has attempted nothing more than to group old facts in his own way; and he trusts that his defective acquaintance with historical works and travels, and the unreality of book-knowledge altogether in questions of fact, have not exposed ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... at getting something that we feel the want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full, from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities. Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led to unreality, and, if not to untruth, at least to an unwholesome ignoring of a part of truth. There was, therefore, an inevitable reaction to the naturalism described with such verve and gusto by Fra Lippo Lippi. But this is, after all, social history in terms of art, and to Browning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... mustn't go on," said a voice at the door. It sounded like the voice of my knight: but everything was so dream-like and unreal that I thought the voice was part of the unreality. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... there, will yet be struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas ventilated in the Compagnon du Tour de France can reconcile no reader to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure. For her socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dispassionate examination of what she actually inculcated, leaves but little warrant, in the state of progress now reached, for ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a far cry from pounding a typewriter in a city office to jogging through the wilderness, lost beyond peradventure, her only company a stranger of unsavory reputation. Yet she was not frightened, for all the element of unreality. Under other circumstances she could have relished the adventure, taken pleasure in faring gypsy fashion over the wide reaches where man had left ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his delighted eyes dwelt upon was tinged with something of the beatitude that stirred his senses. Every step he took was something of an unreality. And every whispering sound in the scented world through which he was passing found an echo of music ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... place in contrast the wide difference that then separated manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the situation of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... awaken skepticism in the simple-hearted Hindus around her. But this secret confession, which might be repudiated if necessary, raised my whole siege at once.[3] And the confession itself, while it admitted the unreality of the miracles, left a marvel,—namely, her power to cause the hallucinations. I remembered the legend of Glam, from whom came our word "glamour," and had a droll feeling of being defeated, like Grettir, in the moment of his victory over that moonshine-giant. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in it—did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and occupied, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... is not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. That which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... go far to find a slight tinge of unreality marring the Christian life: we have only to scrutinise our own experiences to detect some tendency to affectation, to saying a little more than is quite true, even in our sincerest worship. And we cannot but recognise that in all Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... individual constructed his own subjective entities or illusions; while, on the latter, all men, by reason of the universality of the laws of thought governing their minds, create the same illusion, the same subjective scheme of ideas. Instead of each having his own private unreality, as the product of his perceiving activity, they have all the same, or at least a similar, phantom-world of ideas, as the result of their thinking. But, in both cases alike, the reality of the world without is out of reach, and knowledge is a purely ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... what Ishmael felt it did, though how he could not yet have told. Although he never doubted what he heard, it seemed to him like a dream that he had dreamt long ago and forgotten. It was a curious sense of unreality that impressed him most, that feeling of "This cannot really have happened to me ..." that everyone knows in the first moment of disaster. It was this sensation, not any temporising or actual disbelief, that kept him still motionless, staring. Polkinghorne began to feel the proprieties outraged ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... happily relegated to the position of notes; in the other books they form part and parcel of the novel. The Absentee, for instance, contains admirable dialogue and many life-like figures; but the scheme of the story conveys a sense of unreality. Every fault or vice has its counterbalancing virtue represented. Lady Clonbroney, vulgarly ashamed of her country, is set off by the patriotic Lady Oranmore; the virtuous Mr. Burke forms too obvious a pendant to the rascally agents old Nick and St. Dennis. It is needless to say that the exclusively ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... prefers dreams to facts. Dreams are the motives of crowd action. The dream, the illusion, the unreality have ever been the forces that have shaped human history in its hours of crisis when Fate has placed the future in the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... proceeded in the light of a full moon. It needed only this to give to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. Long since I had lost all sense of direction. It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but it held to no level. At times, concealed by walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, like woodchucks, dived into earthen burrows. For a long distance we crawled, bending double ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... up on deck, moving dazedly, with a strange sense of unreality upon her, as if she had somehow wandered into a cold, ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events centuries away; they conceive ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... not think, Mr. Bond, that we must take things as they are? Granted that there is a great deal of unreality in the church, what are we going to do about it? Can one man who sees the point work a revolution in the whole church? Must we not just take conditions as they are and make the best ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... all a part of the idyl, the daydream, Robert Morton thought,—too flawless a thing to last. Willie, so childlike and simple, his kindly aunt, Delight with her rare beauty, and even the romance of his love seemed a part of its unreality. Was it not to be expected that sooner or later man with his blundering touch would destroy the loveliness, making prose of the poem? The Galbraiths, Snelling, the greed for money, Janoah's jealousy and evil suspicions—ah, it did not take long for such influences ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought romance at the price of esteem and of peace. Then suddenly the whole matter slipped into unreality, and she could not credit it. Was it possible that she, a respectable matron, a known figure, the mother of adult daughters, had fallen in love with a man not her husband, had had a secret interview with her lover, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... in this state, I saw that for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding Appearances. ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy of enthusiasm, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand, and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has not been surpassed ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... was one of almost tremulous elation. He was bringing her home after bridal wanderings that had never lost their element of dream-like unreality. There had always been the feeling that he might wake any day to find Italy and Karen both equally illusory. But to see Karen in his home, taking her place in his accustomed life, would be to feel his joy linking itself ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... he was going abroad to take a long-earned holiday. He lunched at his club, speaking in a more than usually friendly manner to the few men with whom at times he had found it a pleasure to associate, and finally, with that sense of unreality growing stronger and stronger, he found himself once more in the Park, in his usual chair, looking out with the same keen sympathy upon the intensely joyous, beautiful phase of life which floated around him. The afternoon breeze rustled pleasantly among the cool green leaves above his head, ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Slowly they drew away from the dread spot, and soon came to a more populous locality where the lights of honest shops and peaceful homes gave them a sense of greater security and brought a feeling of unreality to the horrors through which they ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... the great trees stand like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has drifted upon the doorstep and lies there untracked. It is, indeed, a dim and untracked world: coldly beautiful but silent—and of a strange unreality! You close the door with half a shiver and take the real world with you up to bed. For it is ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... choose her." Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... he could not see, was flooding the roofs of Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist, like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality, which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day broke, and left the harsh outlines and the blackened chimneys of the town unsoftened by any shadow of illusion. Presently, as the sunlight fell aslant the winding streets, there was a faint stir in the house; but since the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... found on the library table in East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled her marrow ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of his age, was forced to make. But it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that counts in his art? except in so far as it casts the plan of his stories, or sometimes, as in "Tess," or "The Woodlanders," gives too much play to cruel accident, and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser moments of the plots. Our critical emphasis in the past has been wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words, be set not upon the idea, the suggested explanation of misfortune, but upon the living creatures ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... are so ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in upon himself. In his own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre-doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... noticed that in All's Well that Ends Well (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amorous antithesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affectation." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... so easily and lightly by this man and woman, had a nightmare quality for Henrietta. It had the confusion, the exaggerated horror of an evil dream, without the far-away consciousness of its unreality. Here she was, in the presence of the man she loved and it was wicked to love him. She had longed to meet him and now she wished she might have kept his memory only, the figure on the horse, the man ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... mean to give up the chase, he felt depressed as the train sped through the forests of Ontario. It was not long since he had come that way in high spirits, looking forward with pleasure to a holiday. Now he looked back, with a feeling of unreality, on his wanderings among the Scottish bogs. All he had done seemed ridiculous and fantastic. Nobody was the better for it, while he had involved himself in a horrible tangle. The police were probably on his track and Featherstone suspected him; he had acted like a romantic boy and not ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... and helplessness, and in which he seemed to himself to be floating upon a wide and shoreless sea, or wandering in a pathless wilderness or winging his way like a lost bird through the trackless heavens. However large an element of unreality and absurdity there may have been in such experiences, it is certain that changes of the most startling and permanent character were often wrought in the natures of those who passed through them, and when McFarlane at last emerged ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... be beyond my province, even if it were within my power, to discuss these airy speculations, and thereby to descend into the arena where for ages subtle dialecticians have battled with each other over the reality or unreality of an external world. For my purpose it suffices to adopt the popular and convenient distinction of mind and matter and hence to divide experience into two sorts, an inward experience of the acts and states of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... no doubting his own presence here in this strange place. The unreality of it—the strangeness of his own sensations—were borne in upon him. Where was he? he asked. What was this soft cushion upon which he rested so lightly? He tried to sit up and found that he merely twisted his body and set other ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... so accustomed, and as I believe quite rightly, to look at all Christ's life down to its minutest events as intended to be a revelation of God, that we are sometimes apt to think about it as if His motive and purpose in everything was didactic. So an unreality creeps over our conceptions of Christ's life, and we need to be reminded that He was not always acting and speaking in order to convey instruction, but that words and deeds were drawn from Him by the play of simple human feelings. He pitied not only in order ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... any way. Goody-good and professionally "pious" stories, sentimental or unreal stories, ought to be rigorously excluded. A great deal of fiction specially written for children ought to be left severely alone; it is cheap, shallow and stamped with unreality from cover to cover. It is as unwise to feed the minds of children exclusively on books specially prepared for their particular age as to shape the talk at breakfast or dinner specially for their stage ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... at last!" she cried in intense relief as she recognized the well-known landmarks. Long before the train could possibly draw up, she got up and stood by the door with the handle in her hand, a sense of strangeness, of unreality, growing upon her. She felt as though she were some one else, some one older and more experienced, who was accustomed to moving amidst tragedies and the serious events of life. Even the old familiar platform, ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... was glory; but she could not divest herself of a sense of unreality. She could not feel as if it were really and truly Gilbert, and she were mourning for him. All was like a dream—that solemn military spectacle—the serene, grave sunshine on the fortress-harbour ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world, Pamela was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurient unreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of the vulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine were certainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and actuality of the wooden libertine whom Richardson ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... not as the pale Host of the altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the young Raphael, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished. But finished or unfinished, or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, the head of Jesus does but consummate the sentiment of the whole company—ghosts through which you see the wall, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... ghostly phase. All the rugged outlines of half-fallen tepees were silvered and softened. Henry, with that extraordinary sensitiveness of his to nature and the wilderness, felt again the mysticism and unreality of this place, once inhabited by man and now given back to the forest. In another season or two the last remnant of bark would disappear, the footpaths would be grown up with bushes, and the wild animals would ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... everything. You see I was very young. I went to the most charming parties; I was well introduced: I think I may say that I was admired. My first season was almost the happiest—certainly the most joyous—period of my life. But it was still a time of unreality, Lesley: the glitter and glamour of that glimpse of London society was as unreal as my dreams of love and beauty and nobleness in the old library at home. I lacked a mother's guiding hand, my child, and a mother's tender voice ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... so always, Betsy, when friends suddenly come to know each other. All other days sink to unreality like the memory of snow upon a day of August. We wonder how the flowering meadows were once a field of white. Our past selves, Betsy, walk apart from us and, although we know their trick of attitude and the fashion of their clothes, they are not ourselves. ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... atmosphere in which she lived like the cool breath of great moors or of virgin forests. Genius and work and success became the real things of life; money but a mere accident. A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan. She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness. She saw its fundamental insincerity. ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... to swallow something that troubled me, and which I thought must be somehow connected with my breakfast. But it would not go down, and I could do nothing but gaze hard as through a mist at the little delicate woman who was holding so tightly to my hands. There was a dimness and an unreality about everything. Things seemed to be going on in a way I did not understand, and I quite started at last as somebody seemed to say, "Good-bye," and I found myself in the little boat and on the way ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... shadows that have no longer any connection with me. I am very weak and feeble and I wish to sleep.... But the love of God continues, and through Jesus Christ, the love of men. It is the only truth—love of God, love of man—the rest is fantasy and unreality. Look up, my son, bear this with patience. God is standing at your shoulder and will be with you to the end. This is training for you. To show you, perhaps, that all through life you have missed the most important thing. You are learning through ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... call acting. And to this I demur in toto, and assert that as every age has its peculiar stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious fervour, or dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable trifling, so the mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough unreality. Every one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play philanthropy, apathy to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for love of country; and, to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar minds of ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura buried away in the dull brown house, were all creations of some gossamer and dream-like quality of mind. She felt suddenly that the sorrows which had oppressed her in the morning belonged no more to ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... unreality held me thralled and my brain refused me service. Like an hypnotic subject I walked back to my study, followed by my terrible visitor, who ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... turn, curtsey, and sign her thanks to the throng who had followed. Her noble aspect and demeanour, so full of dignity and feeling, obtained a fresh and more genuine acclamation; but throughout there was a strange sense of unreality; she seemed like one performing a part to gratify her son. Clara asked her cousin if it were not like acting a play; and it was plain to him that the spectators beheld it ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is really very serious," said Lord Reckage, with twitching lips. "The whole story has had all along something of unreality about it. Robert seems fated to a renunciant ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... their forces. The groundworks of philosophy were tested, the bases of religious faith examined. The days of skirmishing about the ordeal of water and the test of the Devil's marks were gone by. The combatants were now to fight over the reality or unreality of supernatural phenomena. We shall observe that the battle was less one-sided than ever before and that the assailants of superstition, who up to this time had been outnumbered, now fought on at least even terms with their enemies. We shall see too that the non-participants ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick intolerance of turgidity and inflation—of what he called endeavors to render platitude endurable by making it pompous, and lively horror of affectation and unreality."—Mr. GEORGE RUSSELL. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold |
