"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his very body from the intolerable reality ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... came across him a sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position; whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man's brain, only slightly or not at all ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Rickman's regret, Flossie did not take kindly to Miss Roots, very soon after her engagement she discovered her bosom friend in Miss Ada Bishop. The friendship was not founded, as are so many feminine attachments, upon fantasy or caprice, but rested securely on the enduring commonplace. If Flossie respected Ada because of her knowledge of dress, and her remarkable insight into the ways of gentlemen, Ada admired Flossie because of the engagement, which, after ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... interest at this time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers on being so small and adding ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... disposition to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions, especially if chiming in with favorite preconceived ideas; and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... noisy declamation we hear about human equality. The Negro is a barbarian, and barbarism is not humanity but inhumanity; hence the unfitness to the case, of such illogical reasoning as is adopted by the advocates of Negro equality. Human equality, as applied to the Negro, is an idle fantasy, without even the shadow or semblance of plausibility. White men are equals in few things; certainly not in physical nor mental capacity, nor power. The equality declared by our Revolutionary Sires was the political ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... Allees. I do not want to be an idolator, still less an idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all for coming back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetised, either by mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew what it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful boots) to fall down the chimney and walk about my room. But when he procures ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the sentence do transpose And that whiche is wryten, both playne and holely By theyr corruptynge and vnlawfull glose Oft tyme they brynge to damnable heresy Falsly expoundynge after theyr fantasy They labour to transpose and turne the right sence Thoughe the wordes stryue ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... that this fantasy of language is not very serious. So be it. But then what remains of the dualism of mind and matter? It is at least singularly compromised. We may continue to suppose that matter exists, and even that it is matter which provokes in our ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... who erred and of a man who prayed and wrestled with God in prayer for her, and ultimately wrung her salvation by self-sacrifice from Divine Justice. Here and there are passages that we could have wished modified, but surely such a terrific fantasy was never before penned! It is as harrowing as The Ancient Mariner, and appeals to one more forcibly than Coleridge's "Rime," because it seems actual truth. Other volumes, containing impassioned ballads, lyrics, narrative poems and sonnets, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... an artist of wondrous power and terrible acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the never-perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr. Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment? Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture and left the canvas white ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... than a half-truth is in Charles Lamb's theory, that the old comedy 'has no reference whatever to the world that is': that it is 'the Utopia of Gallantry' merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy. What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired directly by the court of Charles the Second, and nobody conversant with the memoirs of that court can have any difficulty in matching the fiction with ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Then a fantasy seized him. "That man stands at our antipodes on the other side of the earth. If the earth were of glass he could look down upon us. But he can see me just as well as I see him. What is he doing? He is catching rattlesnakes, and when he comes back he will let them loose on the island. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... And soon I heard the bell to matins ring, And up I rose, no longer would I lie. But now, how trow ye? such a fantasy Fell me to mind, that aye methought the bell Said to me, 'Tell ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... dreame was to him brought, Unto that Elfin knight he bad him fly, Where he slept soundly void of evill thought, And with false shewes abuse his fantasy, In sort as he him schooled privily: 410 And that new creature, borne without her dew,[*] Full of the makers guile, with usage sly He taught to imitate that Lady trew, Whose semblance she did carrie under ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... slow. From that one which I noted of most beauty Beheld I issue forth a fire so happy That none it left there of a greater splendor; And around Beatrice three several times [22] It whirled itself with so divine a song, My fantasy repeats it not to me; Therefore the pen skips, and I write it not, Since our imagination for such folds, Much more our speech, is of a tint too glaring. [27] "O holy sister mine, who us implorest [28] With such devotion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy; Which is as thin of substance as the air, And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his face ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... straighter and his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... but, as a matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted. They, for the most part, found the exercise of fantasy more pleasant than careful observation, and subsequent brooding over facts. Hence it is, that when those whose education has been derived from the ancients speak of 'the reason of man,' they are apt to omit from their conception of reason one ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... care of Huatama, he returned to his apartments in the palace and flung himself into a chair to endeavour to convince himself that what he had seen in those rock-hewn chambers below was all prosaically real and not the fantasy of a ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... child's nature the faculty of imagination and the force of example are important considerations in the development of the spiritual feelings and the formation of fine ideals. The world of make-believe, of purest fantasy, is just as interesting and just as significant as the every day actualities of life. It makes not the slightest difference to a little boy, or girl, whether the stories you read them, or the acts of hero and heroine, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... for the improvisatrice Corilla, was nothing more than a strong wine with which she refreshed and strengthened her fatigued poetic powers for renewed exertions; it was in a manner the tow which she threw upon the expiring fire of her fantasy, to make it flash up in ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... do so, and I do not for a moment believe that there is another dramatic author in America who can, they will be the first to grant the difficulty of the achievement. With an apparently inexhaustible fund of fantasy and wit Mr. Hopwood passes his wand over certain phases of so-called smart life, almost always with the happiest results. With a complete realization of the independence of his medium he often ignores the realistic conventions and the traditional ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... dazzled, believing that he was dreaming, and all that he saw, heard, and experienced was mere passing fantasy. Becoming convinced of the reality of his condition, he said to some men about him for whom he ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... strange fraternity for their convent—their rigid separation from human intercourse—the infringible taciturnity imposed upon themselves—and the terrible severity of their penances, are certainly circumstances more resembling the visionary indulgence of fantasy and fiction, than actual realities to be met with among living men, and ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... a fog...Therefore—I'm thinking right now—therefore, that which, I meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides—even all the world—therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since I have stopped? ... Once again, I don't understand anything ...Sergei Ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life—help me, then, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... impress of the impiety of her[1] who changed her form into the bird that most delights in singing. And here was my mind so shut up within itself that from without came nothing which then might he received by it. Then rained down within my high fantasy, one crucified,[2] scornful and fierce in his look, and thus was dying. Around him were the great Ahasuerus, Esther his wife, and the just Mordecai, who was in speech and action so blameless. And when this imagination burst of itself, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... with vigor. "Usedn't you to keep me awake praying for her—hollerin' at God to forgive her? Didn't you, or did you?" No answer. "And you think this is her!" The ridiculousness of the fantasy smote him. "Say, you must 'a' went plumb nutty! Bendin' over that tub must 'a' gave you a rush of brains ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... walk from the village, seem to be insignificant enough; they consist of the ridges of a few decrepit walls, from four to six feet high, which extend among the brier bushes. Archaeologists call them the aqueducts of Seranus, the Roman camp of Holderlock, or vestiges of Theodoric, according to their fantasy. The only thing about these ruins which could be considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... suggested by a series of ideas which lead the recipient of them to expect that the series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was overwhelmingly suggested by all the faiths ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained M. S.'s "decayed human form, standing in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... in a system of traditional, or rather of parabolistic symbols, as Christ himself had sought to render clear his spiritualistic ideas by all kinds of beautiful parables. Hence the mystical, problematic, marvelous, and transcendental in the artwork of the Middle Ages, in which fantasy makes her most desperate efforts to depict the purely spiritual by means of sensible images, and invents colossal follies, piling Pelion on Ossa and Parsifal on Titurel to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... may Heaven help me! my good sirs, I think, between ourselves, the culprit must have bestowed a kiss on Cleinias, than which love's flame asks no fiercer fuel. (40) So insatiable a thing it is and so suggestive of mad fantasy. (And for this reason held perhaps in higher honour, because of all external acts the close of lip with lip bears the same name as that of soul with soul in love.) (41) Wherefore, say I, let every one who wishes to be master of himself and sound of soul abstain ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... of small hot fried things that tasted crisp and delicious. Bart relaxed, answering questions. How old? Only seventeen? And you came all alone on a Lhari ship, working your way as Astrogator? I must say you've got guts, kid! It was dangerously like the fantasy he had invented. But Montano interrupted ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... bard: for the sober page of history should be carefully chastened from all scenes that might inflame a wanton imagination; leaving them to poems and romances, and such-like highly seasoned works of fantasy and recreation. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Ogier, Girard de Roussillon, Raoul de Cambrai, were not mere creatures of the fancy. Even when the narrative records no historical series of events, it may express their general significance, and condense into itself something of the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy made a conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasy had been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative, with all its wild exaggerations, its reckless departures from truth, its ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... it remarked. A work of art may stand very far from Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is true to his fantasy. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mist the two were like the flitting figures of a fantasy. The road was still well filled with wains and pedestrians, following after those who had gone on ahead. The wains stopped; the pedestrians halted and gaped and gasped. Women cried out shrilly. Vaniman ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... terribly real menace of authority overshadowing them both now made it imperative that all the facts should be faced. All the facts—but what were they? It was the question he asked himself again and again as he strove to twist out of the black fantasy of that horrible night some tangible shred of truth which might help them both. His own incredible share in it was forever being re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments of his eternal quest, the curtain ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... He began seriously to doubt the evidence of his senses. Had she, his fairy princess, ever really been in the house at all or had he dreamed her—her and her butterflies? Was she, after all, some fantasy born of the music and his dreaming imagination? And would it ever be possible to dream her again; or, if she were real, where, where could he find her? To discover a fairy princess and to lose her, lose her, as he ruefully confessed, like a needle ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... have been some distortion of the story heard only from the lips of the circuit rider, some fantasy of tradition invested with the urgency of fact, but Roger Purdee could not remember the time when he did not believe that these were the stone tables of the Law that Moses flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath. In the dense ignorance of the mountaineer, and his secluded ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here—a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness—refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain—which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It was ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... man be rare sweet, gent, and tender, beyond other men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways of Providence, I ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... in my life; for having hitherto, in all my plans for the improvement of the town, not only succeeded, but given satisfaction, I was vexed to see the council run away with such a speculative vagary. No doubt, the popular fantasy anent education and academies, had quite as muckle to do in the matter as Mr Plan's fozey rhetoric, but what availed that to me, at seeing a reasonable undertaking reviled and set aside, and grievous debts about to be laid on the community for a bubble as unsubstantial as that of the Ayr ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... happened in this case to be nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms, foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was on the point of damning ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... esteem! In that precious incense of praise burned by M. de Balzac, "in honor of that daughter of a foreign soil," he has thus sketched the Polish woman in hues composed entirely of antitheses: "Angel through love, demon through fantasy; child through faith, sage through experience; man through the brain, woman through the heart; giant through hope, mother through sorrow; and poet through dreams." [Footnote: Dedication of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... away from Ned's mind and it all came back, the terrible and treacherous slaughter of his unarmed comrades, his own flight through the timber his swimming of the river, and then the blank. But these were his best friends. It was no fantasy. How and when they had come he did not know, but here they were in the flesh, the Panther, Obed White, Will Allen, "Deaf" Smith ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... drifted into a new sea, Where all was calm and warm, and where no tower Of ragged ice upreared itself. On, on I floated, while some lovely fantasy Seemed stealing my true sense—so fair the scene. Huge lillies, which no tropic land might boast, Slept on the water—like embodied moonlight; A mellow lustre bathed all things; sweet birds With rainbow plumage fluttered through the air, And this fair island dawned upon my sight. Soon on the shore ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... The Witchery of Archery by Maurice Thompson. To Will and Maurice Thompson we owe a debt of gratitude hard to pay. The tale of their sylvan exploits in the everglades of Florida has a charm that borders on the fay. We who shoot the bow today are children of their fantasy, offspring of their magic. As the parents of American archery, we ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... stronger by degrees till it could no longer be resisted. True, he knew that when he beheld it, the offspring of his brain would have been mangled almost out of recognition, but that did not deter him. The mother loves her crippled child, and the author of a musical fantasy loves his musical fantasy, even if rough hands have changed it into a musical comedy and all that remains of his work is the opening chorus and a scene which the assassins have overlooked at the beginning of act two. Otis Pilkington, having instructed his Japanese valet to pack a few simple ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... on which, more than on any others, the grace and delight of a fine Gothic building depends; one is the springing of its vaultings, the other the proportion and fantasy of its traceries. This church of Santa Croce has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn. And its windows are all of the same pattern,—the exceedingly prosaic one of two pointed arches, with a round ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... rest. Only, he [50] would do his part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness, the sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to vary with the intellectual fortune of the hour, from the plainest account of experience, to a sheer fantasy, only "believed because it was impossible," that one hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men's common pleasures and their common ambition, above all their commonest vices, seem very petty indeed, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... direction, he fails to mate and thus fails in his reproductive function. The reproductive function cannot go on without this biological thrust towards the proper object. By Narcissism is meant the formulation that a new development is taking place in the infantile Oedipus fantasy. The child cannot hold on to the mother image. He passes it to others nearer his own age. He does it first through his own identification with the female. His bisexuality permits this. Similarly the infantile father protest must be supplanted by an evolved ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... glide.... More prodigal in beauty than the dreams Of fantasy,... beneath the chain Of mingled wood and precipice, that seems To buttress up the wave, whose silvery gleams Stretch far beyond, where ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... Nerval and all their fellows), may be, without violence or exaggeration, said to be a new form of the French fairy-tale, divested of common form, and readjusted with the help of the German Maerchen and fantasy-pieces. Le Diable Amoureux had, no doubt, set the fashion of this kind earlier; but that story, charming as it is, is still scarcely "Romantic." Nodier is so wholly; and it is fair to remember that Hoffmann himself was rather a contemporary of his, and subject to the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend. He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm, transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... but an Anglo-Saxon fantasy, and they speak for themselves. But many tell-tale documents exist to mark the concurrent Norman and English development that went on in the English mediaeval literature, and was seen and felt in the church and ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... an all but religious zeal, mankind conceived its fantasy dream of populating the galaxy. Never in the history of the race had fervor reached such a peak and held so long. The question of why was seemingly ignored. Millions of Earth-type planets beckoned and with a lemming-like desperation ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... realms of poetic fantasy to record a simple fact of everyday life—one which is appreciated by every man and woman irrespective of nationality or temperament. As in all other matters pertaining to the comfort of the European in the tropics, the Dutch, in the matter of food, seem to ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... remained fastened on the stage; between him and it—or them, art's gaily attired illusions!—a tress of golden hair sometimes intervened, but he did not move. Through threads like woven flashes of light he regarded the scene of the poet's fantasy. Did they make her a part of it,—did they seem to the man the fantasy's intangible medium, its imagery? Threads of gold, threads of melody! He saw the former, heard the latter. They rose and fell wilfully, capriciously, ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... I say," he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard "Tweet-tweet," ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... exorcise THYSELF from my power! Thy life has left thee, to live in the heart of a daughter of the charnel and the worm. In that life I come to thee with my inexorable tread. Thou art returned to the Threshold,—thou, whose steps have trodden the verges of the Infinite! And as the goblin of its fantasy seizes on a child in the dark,—mighty one, who wouldst ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... never quite in harmony with the genius of Disraeli, but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect of reading Zadig and Candide was the completion of the style of Disraeli; that "strange mixture of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... noise I hear all the time?" asked Lady Desborough presently, in a feeble voice. "I feel as though there was something burning in the room. The air seems thick and heavy. Is it my fantasy, or do I smell burning? Where is my husband? Is there something the ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... again; now the voices of the house were deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... admire it, not only for the things that are not creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He will admire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in the world. He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedly respectable and commonplace people in the world. This mistake the Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that he makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... one thing, he has not always been sober, he is confessing, when Noah interrupts with the comment that insobriety is not such a very serious affair. In fact, he himself once ... and by this time the reader begins to get the drift of this joyous humane fantasy, the point being that the hierarchy of Heaven are all on the side of the brave simple soldier who has died that France might live. As how could they not be? Another time, the Poilu continues, he was sent to prison for cutting a piece from his coat in order to mend the seat of his trousers—in ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... fields first fed my childish fantasy, Whose mountains were my boyhood's wild delight, Whose rocks, and woods, and torrents were to me The food of my soul's youthful appetite; Were music to my ear—a blessing ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... To my high fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will, like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the Sun ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to shun the acquaintance of the family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of fantasy George Mac Donald has very few equals, and his rare touch of many aspects of life invariably gives to his stories a deeper meaning of the highest value. His Princess and Goblin exemplifies both gifts. A fine thread of allegory ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... detested as the absolute master of Spain, whose guides were perfidy, ambition, personal interest, views always oblique, often caprice, sometimes madness; and whose selfish desires, varied and diversified according to the fantasy of the moment, were hidden under schemes always uncertain and oftentimes impossible of execution. Accustomed to keep the King and Queen of Spain in chains, and in the narrowest and obscurest prison, where he allowed them to communicate with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... tongue. Ultimately the interest on the subject became confined to a few papers which had received the best letters. Those papers that couldn't get interesting letters stopped the correspondence and sneered at the "sensationalism" of those that could. Among the mass of fantasy there were not a few notable solutions, which failed brilliantly, like rockets posing as fixed stars. One was that in the obscurity of the fog the murderer had ascended to the window of the bedroom by means of a ladder ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... tells those poor old people very little of himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single part only,—coiffure, or robe, or hand,—of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of late to work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. [10] He receives three livres a ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... taken their begynning, from Pagans and Heathen men, which haue then first used them, when they did sacrifyce to their Gods. For beeing plunged into very thick, & as it were palpable dark nesses, after that they had forged and advised Gods according to their owne fantasy, they thought and supposed that they should bee delighted and pleased, with the selfe same delightes and pleasures, wherein, or ...
— A Treatise Of Daunses • Anonymous
... Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet." Reference may also be made to the Anat. of Mel.: "Fear makes our imagination conceive what it list, ... and tyrannizeth over our fantasy more than all other affections, especially in the dark"; also to the song prefixed to the same work, "My phantasie presents a thousand ugly shapes," etc. On the power of imagination or ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... he gives, we at once detect the proper tools and cunning of the poet: fancy gives us liquentes campos, titania astra, lucentem globum lunae, and fantasy or imagination, in virtue of its royal and transmuting power, gives us intus alit—infusa per artus—and that magnificent idea, magno se corpore miscet—this is the divinum nescio quid—the proper work of the imagination—the master ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... doubtful yet Whether Caesar will come forth today or no; For he is superstitious grown of late, Quite from the main opinion he held once Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies. It may be these apparent prodigies, The unaccustom'd terror of this night, And the persuasion of his augurers May hold him from ...
— Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... always took off his hat before the windows of the manor house, even if he saw no one there. The crown of it all is The Wedding. The bridal pair's visit to the graves of by-gone loves is a gem of fantasy. But behind all the humor and satire must not be forgotten, in view of what was to follow, the undercurrent of courageous democratic protest which finds its keenest expression in the "Free Note" to Chapter Six. Fixlein ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the hands of the critics. Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile criticism the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... borrowed much from the heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically true only in its minor characters, which were conceived and rendered with wonderful realism by the gifted actors. And this naturalism was shot through with streaks of pure fantasy, so that kangaroos suddenly bounded on in a masque for the edification of a Russian tyrant. But comedy and fantasy alike were subordinated to horror and tragedy: these refugees from the brutality of Russia and Rumania, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... he was gray at the curling hair which turned up at his broad temples—smiled as if he held it to be a pleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, when any asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off his questioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was such a tenderness in his eyes as he looked ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... always came to; they paid, in this particular, a larger tribute to pure fancy than the people who were supposed habitually to cultivate that muse. Blanche Evers was what the French call an article of fantasy, and Gordon had taken a pleasure in finding her deliciously useless. He cultivated utility in other ways, and it pleased and flattered him to feel that he could afford, morally speaking, to have a kittenish wife. He had ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... waters about it a silhouetted metropolis of spires, domes, and minarets. It was 1921, and that generation thus received its first glimpse of the alien landscape of The Blind Spot and the baroque beauty of an immortal woman of fantasy fiction. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed—a dream, a fantasy, a delirium—something that had left no external things behind it and had only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. He ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... sense of the mysterious, of the feeling of the wind-swept mountain and its roaring fires, the thing is undeniably impressive. But in other less expert hands it would become ludicrous. There is one tale of finer texture than the others. It is called Wayfarers, and is a quite beautiful little fantasy on the old theme that love is longer than life. This is what Mr. BLACKWOOD can do to perfection. It redeems a volume that, for all its originality, does not otherwise display his art quite ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... to make his parties different from others by some childish fantasy or other. He especially delighted in a surprise. He often took the trouble (for instance) to have a telegram sent to every one of his guests during the course of the evening. Each of these wires contained ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... journalism, education, philanthropy, and religion—which had been testified to by so many notable people on that occasion, I hoped to prove that I was not a mere faddist, who could be led away by a chimerical fantasy. I wanted the world to understand that I was a clear-brained, commonsense woman of the world, whose views on effective voting and other political questions were as worthy of credence as her work in other directions had been worthy of acceptance. The greetings of my many friends from all ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Dante meant theology By Beatrice, and not a mistress—I, Although my opinion may require apology, Deem this a commentator's fantasy, Unless indeed it was from his own knowledge he Decided thus, and show'd good reason why; I think that Dante's more abstruse ecstatics ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... fantasy. He has a kindly word for all who please his eye. It may be one today and another tomorrow. He ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... fact, Beethoven may be said to have broken away from form, for after the word sonata he adds the qualifying phrase "quasi una fantasia," signifying that, although he calls the work a sonata, it has the characteristics of a free fantasy. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... diary, of which the first French translation has just been issued by Paul Biriukov,[15] Tolstoy gives utterance to the fantasy that in an earlier life his personality had been a complex of loved beings. Each successive existence, he suggested, enlarged the circle of friends and the range and power ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a 'surprise.'" The child of today chooses his Christmas present in advance and decides between Peter Pan and the Pantomime (when he does not get both). The Chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the framework of a toy-theatre of which their father was carpenter, scene-painter and scene-shifter, author and creator of actors and actresses a few inches high. Gilbert's earliest recollection is of one of these ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, Of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Rose and the Ring." The burlesque drawings of that delightful child's book are not its least attraction. Not arriving at the prettiness of Mr. Tenniel, and the elegance of Mr. Du Maurier, and falling far short of their ingenious fantasy, they are yet manly delineations of great adventures. The count kicking the two black men into space is a powerful design, full of action; and it would be hard to beat the picture of the fate of Gruffanuf's husband. These and the rest are old friends, and there are hosts of quaint ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... whom she devised the name Corambe, was to combine all the spiritual qualities of the Christian ideal with the earthly grace and beauty of the mythological deities of Greece. For very many years she cherished this fantasy, finding there the scope she sought for her aspirations after superhuman excellence. It is hardly too much to say that the Christianity which had been expressly left out in her teaching she invented for herself. She erected a woodland altar in the recesses ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... to have taken a leaf out of Paradise and bound it among the dingy pages of her dull and monotonous life. Every thing about her was so quaint and rare, the clothes she wore so rich and fantastic, that she could not control her fancy. Every musical fantasy that had ever crept into her brain seemed to be trooping along its galleries in a mad gallop as her fair fingers flew over the time-stained keys. The little boy stood clinging to her skirt in silent ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the opposite side of the run, which was torn up, with the marks of a terrible struggle and many feet. Probably he tore off his own clothes in the fancied fight, drew his knife, struck at "an air-born fantasy," and was finally partially restored by falling into the water, after which he completed his exhaustion by running back ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... truth of this story should lead you to read the whole book, I shall have had the privilege of introducing you to what is surely one of the finest and most delicately wrought fantasies in the English language, a fantasy so permeated with beauty and truth that you will neither wish nor need ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... another voice or part, recurrence of the subject in another part which, in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the complexity of the material ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... That containing the body of the Marchesa, his wife (Vittoria Colonna), has an aperture at the top where the wood is worn away and the embalmed form, partly crumbled, may be seen. This seems strange to the verge of fantasy, but it is, apparently, true. The writer of this volume visited the Church of Santa Domenica Maggiore in Naples in December of 1906, and was assured by the sacristan that this sarcophagus contains the body of the Marchesa. Inquiries ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... warm desire would kiss him still, But his hot blood now warms him in his dream Which is much more to him than it doth seem; And clasping her within convulsing arms, Receives a thrill that all his nerves alarms, And wakes him from the dreams she had instilled. "What means this fantasy that hath me filled, And spirit form that o'er my pillow leans; I wonder what this fragrant incense means? Oh, tush! 'tis but an idle, wildering dream, But how delightful, joyous it did seem! Her beauteous form it had, its ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... land, and in the stillness of this secluded valley, sheltered from every bleak wind by surrounding hills and woods, the gardens of the Manor Moat had grown into a settled beauty that made the chief attraction of a country seat which boasted so little of architectural dignity, or of expensive fantasy in moulded brick and carved stone. Plain, sombre, with brick walls and heavy stone mullions to low-browed windows, the Manor House stood in the midst of gardens such as the modern millionaire may long for, but which only the grey ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... is nothing but a scurvy faintness. Raise me! There, 'tis sufficient. Come hither, child; there, rest thy poor troubled head upon thy father's heart, and be at peace. Thou'lt soon be well: 'tis but a passing fantasy. Fear thou not; thou'lt soon be well." Then he turned toward the company: his gentle manner changed, and baleful lightnings began to play from his eyes. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who was made to believe by this vehemence in what at first had seemed a mere fantasy. "Only remember, that, if you could assure me that any papers had been destroyed, the assurance would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. These fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syadvada—the doctrine of "It may be so",—a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny the existence of one and the same thing. If this be compared with the ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... A. Merritt, he attempted to imitate in style, mood and subject the magic of that late lamented master of fantasy. The imitation found great favor from the readership and almost instantly Jack Williamson became an important name on the contents page of AMAZING STORIES. He followed his initial success with two short novels, The Green Girl in AMAZING STORIES and The Alien Intelligence in SCIENCE WONDER ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... rebirth might be assumed to have adopted these expressions or symbols on account of the concrete way in which the human mind knows birth to take place. The tendency for concrete expression of abstract notions causes the desire for another existence to appear, first as a rebirth fantasy and then as a return to the mother's body. One thinks of Job's cry, "Naked came I from my mother's womb and naked shall I return thither," as an example of the literal comparison of death with ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... by legend and fantasy! She had evoked no phantom, but a fact actual as nature always is even if nature is not humanly ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... art, Whose magic fired your brain and stirred your heart, Whose touch, more potent than King Midas' gold, Wrought Tales of Tanglewood and Tales Twice Told, Whose Marble Faun and Mosses from the Manse Still hold the lasting colors of Romance; Who built 'for you the Hall of Fantasy Through whose bright portals you might pass and see Hester and Miriam and Goodman Brown And Pyncheron, who dwelt in Salem Town— Malvin and Endicott and Ethan Brand, John Inglefield and that old crone whose hand Was lent to fashioning Scarecrows built of straw— All ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... him, in mellow mirth, by England's greatest spirit. "What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?" Whereto replies the much-offended Malvolio: "That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird." He of the crossed garters disdains such fantasy. "I think nobly of the soul, and no ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... Mifflin Co. for Anna Hempstead Branch's "Such Are the Souls in Purgatory" from Heart of the Road, the poems of Henry W. Longfellow, Nathan Haskell Dole's "Russian Fantasy," Amy Lowell's "Haunted" from Pictures of the Floating ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... there may be others. Moreover, it must be added that the psychoanalytic method by no means excludes unconscious deception by the subject, as Freud found, and so was compelled to admit the patient's tendency to "fantasy," as Adler has to "fictions," as a fundamental psychic tendency ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... off Rajah browsed in a clump of weeds, the howdah at a rakish angle, like the cocked hat of a bully. Kathlyn stared at her hands. There were no burns there; she passed a hand over her face; there was no smart or sting. A dream; she had dreamed it; a fantasy due to her light-headed state of mind. A dream! She cried and laughed, and the ape ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... is to be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All purity, all trial, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... soul. For a great Doctor says: "They are GOD'S throne who dwell still in one place, and are not running about, but in sweetness of Christ's love are fixed." And I have loved for to sit: for no penance, nor fantasy, nor that I wished men to talk of me, nor for no such thing: but only because I knew that I loved GOD more, and longer lasted within the comfort of love: than going, or standing, or kneeling. For sitting am ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... Milton will evoke, and again peoples it with those laughter-moving figures amid which Callot, the burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself. If it passes from the world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible supply of parodies of mankind. Creations of its fantasy are the Scaramouches, Crispins and Harlequins, grinning silhouettes of man, types altogether unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... admixture with the duller things of earth—the Shelleys, the Coleridges, the Keats—are the very poets whose lives are among the saddest records in literature? Is it that (by some subtile mystery of analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like water, fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so from fire and tears ascend the "visions of aerial joy"; that the harvest waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the earth, smells ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... Cottage when the Sun was in Libra, and then, as on spirit's wings, glided out again, might be? An inexpressible desire, full of love and of sadness, has often since struggled within me to shape an answer. Ever, in my distresses and my loneliness, has Fantasy turned, full of longing (sehnsuchtsvoll), to that unknown Father, who perhaps far from me, perhaps near, either way invisible, might have taken me to his paternal bosom, there to lie screened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... tribes (if these be really without religion) is the result of their form of speculation, wholly occupied by the idea of reincarnation, while the Arunta form of totemism is the consequence of an isolated fantasy about their peculiar sacred stones. Meanwhile the Euahlayi, as Mrs. Parker proves, entertain, in a limited way, not elsewhere recorded in Australia, the belief in the reincarnation of the souls of uninitiated young people. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... I do not share the general enthusiasm for the narrative of the comically grotesque quarrel between the two Ivans: but the three stories, "Old-fashioned Farmers," "The Portrait," and "The Cloak," show to a high degree that mingling of Fantasy with Reality that is so characteristic of this author. The obsolete old pair of lovers in "Old-fashioned Farmers" is one of the most charming and winsome things that Gogol wrote at this period: it came straight from the depths of his immeasurable tenderness. It appealed to that ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink ... a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth ... passionately kind and angry ... oppressed with fantasy which hath ever mastered his reason." There must, however, have been far other qualities in a man who could command, as J. undoubtedly did, the goodwill and admiration of so many of the finest minds of his time. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... unspeakable Fear and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might! And is not man a microcosm, or epitomized mirror of that same Universe; or, rather, is not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the waste fantasy of his own dream?" No wonder that man, that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... portrait dimly shone, the flowers on the table seemed to give out their beauty and their scent with conscious desire to please, to add their offerings, and for Henrietta the grotesqueness of the elder aunts, their gay attire, their rouge and wrinkles, gave a touch of fantasy to what would otherwise have been too orderly ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... skulls. For just as character is outwardly shown so outward things react upon the character; and who, with that daring barber's ludicrous fancy visible always on his face, could quite go the sober way of beneficent monarchs? The fantasy must be mitigated here, set off there; had you such a figure to dress, say for amateur theatricals, you would realize the difficulty. The heavy silver eagle to balance it; the glittering cuirass lower down, preventing the eye from dwelling too long on the barber's absurdity. And ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... but a slight stretch of the imagination to have beheld in her a priestess of the sun, awaiting in reverent adoration the appearance of her fire-god. Her complexion and features, too, would have helped to strengthen the fantasy, for the one was singularly fair, pale, and transparent, and the other characterized by delicacy, refinement, and a sort of earnest yet still enthusiasm. Her hair, of the softest and palest brown, was arranged in simple yet massive plaits ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... showed the world to be one of fantasy, one to which the sun did not exist. It was not an utter, pitchy blackness that pervaded the water, but rather a peculiar, dark blueness. No fish schools, Keith noted, scurried from them. They had already left these waters; aware, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... name but one—say the example from "Robinson Crusoe" (Blackie), reproduced on page 32—to realise Mr. Gordon Browne's vivid and picturesque interpretation of fact, or "Down the Snow Stairs" (Blackie), also illustrated, with a grotesque owl-like creature, to find that in pure fantasy his exuberant imagination is no less equal to the task. In "Chirp and Chatter" (Blackie), fifty-four illustrations of animals masquerading as human show delicious humour. At times his technique appears somewhat hasty, but, as a rule, the ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... link between the Earth and Man; wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and discipline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beautiful means of life. First, a carpet to make it soft for him; then, a coloured fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen rain; that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... fatal epoch when man experiences an insatiable hunger for love, and for want of a woman will nourish some monstrous fantasy, or even, like the prisoner of Saintine, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France |
