"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and seemed still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point—he never pretended not to understand when he ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... from the same quarter; news of poor Wolfe's Repulse, on the other or eastern side of Quebec, July 31st, known to us already, not known in England till October 14th. Heightened by such contrast, the news filled all men with a strange mixture of emotions. "The incidents of Dramatic Fiction," says one who was sharer in it, "could not have been conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exultation, than Accident had here prepared to excite the passions of a whole People. They despaired; they triumphed; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... simply as a poetical fiction, the account which Statius has given of the fate of Amphiaraus is particularly striking and beautiful—(Thebald. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... astonish her neighbours in the pit by a lavish style of costume, by loud remarks implying a free command of cash, by purchase between the acts of something expensive to eat or drink. Needless to say that she never read anything but police news; in the fiction of her world she found no charm, so sluggishly unimaginative was her nature. Till of late she had either abandoned herself all day long to a brutal indolence, eating rather too much, and finding quite sufficient ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... thrilling romance, is established at once by the very remarkable character of the Reverend Thomas Grey. The duty upon you to read them depends, as the prologue hints, upon whether you are greatly interested in life and not exclusively intent on fiction. When I realised that I must expect no more than an account, without climax, of years spent as a tale that is told, I accepted the conditions subject to certain terms of my own. The family must be an interesting one and not too ordinary; the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... latest aspirant to literary fame had two magnetic qualities which seldom fail to arouse the jaded spirit of the reading public,—novelty and mystery, united to that scarce and seldom recognised power called genius. He or she had produced a Book. Not an ephemeral piece of fiction,—not a "Wells" effort of imagination under hydraulic pressure—not an hysterical outburst of sensual desire and disappointment such as moves the souls of demimondaines and dressmakers,—not even a "detective" sensation—but ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... lands, fresh experiences, novel customs, rose around me. I walked, I discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my success. Was it a history? I was the chief actor therein. I suffered my own blame; I was glad in my own praise. With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... that I should not care to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" hi our camp; it would have seemed tame. Any group of men in a tent would have had more exciting tales to tell. I needed no fiction when I had Fanny Wright, for instance, daily passing to and fro before my tent, with her shy little girl clinging to her skirts. Fanny was a modest little mulatto woman, a soldier's wife, and a company laundress. She had escaped from the main-land in a boat, with that ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... for them; And so, I suppose, to make the simile good, we must compare the Marquis of Farintosh to a lamb for the nonce, and Miss Ethel Newcome to a young eaglet. Is it not a rare provision of nature (or fiction of poets, who have their own natural history) that the strong-winged bird can soar to the sun and gaze at it, and then come down from heaven and pounce on a piece ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... imperious causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind, but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity."[30] Such a character, almost as difficult to delineate in fiction as to find in real life, has Shakspeare given us in Helena; touched with the most soul-subduing pathos, and developed with the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... interesting variety of the human race, the sense of the marvelous and the sense of the beautiful, or the developments of wonder and ideality. The character of a people cannot be fully understood without a reference to its tales of fiction and its poetry. Poetry is the offspring of the beautiful and the wonderful, and much of it the reader will find embodied in the Indian tales to which the author of the Algic Researches has given an ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... acquaintance, and, in the humour of her ideas, I wrote some lines, which I enclose to you, as I think they have a good deal of poetic merit; and Miss Nimmo tells me that you are not only a critic but a poetess. Fiction, you know, is the native region of poetry; and I hope you will pardon my vanity in sending you the bagatelle as a tolerable offhand jeu d'esprit. I have several poetic trifles, which I shall gladly leave with Miss Nimmo or you, if they were worth house-room; as there ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... that what a man produces and creates is his, but the land to which he may be legal heir and which probably he has never seen, and which certainly he does not use or improve, is his only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The law ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... canvas before him, somewhat slowly and painfully. "If I were to lose" (29th of March) "a page of the five numbers I have proposed to myself to be ready by the publication day, I should feel that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy, and write very slowly. And I have so much—not fiction—that will be thought of, when I don't want to think of it, that I am forced to take more care than I ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... on Reeve, but it did not bear fruit till nearly six years later. In January 1887 the 'Edinburgh Review' contained a strong article on 'The Literature of the Streets,' in which the proposal was definitely made for the issue of wholesome fiction and good works of good writers, sensational and otherwise, in penny booklets. Eight or nine years later the idea was taken up by at least two publishers; such penny books are now issued by thousands, and, together with the countless number of halfpenny and penny periodicals, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... with you anyway, but I'd like to know where I stand. I have a constitutional hatred of mystery outside of fiction and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... American correspondent who had cabled the news on two occasions had presumably simply "lifted" the announcement from the German papers. Frau Lang could understand that very well when I explained, but how about the stories that Anton had been serving a machine-gun, and other details which were pure fiction? ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... because, in the first, there is great uniformity, every one, more or less, enjoying, exteriorly, the same easy circumstances, notwithstanding the disparity of real property; and in the second, considerable fiction prevails, many persons shipping under the same mark, and even when the shipper stands alone, he might have been provided with the necessary funds from the pious and charitable establishments, possibly without risking a dollar of his own in the whole operation. Under circumstances ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... NOVELS it is difficult to say what advice ought to be given. At first view they seem unnecessary, wholly so; and from this single consideration. They interest and improve just in proportion as the fiction they contain is made to resemble reality; and hence it might be inferred, and naturally enough, too, that reality would in all cases be preferable to that which imitates it. But to this it may be replied, that we have few books of narrative and biography, ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... of coffee, and its influence on the discourse, poetry, history, drama, philosophic writing, and fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on the writers ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... The plausibility with which the idea was presented, the bare directness of the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too real to be invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination. People could not decide where truth and fiction blended, and the name of Caxton leaped into ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... than fiction. "Jerusalem" is founded upon the historic event of a religious pilgrimage from Dalecarlia in the last century. The writer of this introduction had opportunity to confirm this fact some years ago when he visited the parish in question, and saw the abandoned farmsteads as well ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... proceed; I am sorry that I began at all—that I have got thus far. I love Margaret, the beautiful and gentle—Margaret, the heart-broken penitent. I love her as a brother; and what brother but yearns to conceal his erring sister's frailty? The faithful historian, however, is denied the privileges of fiction. He may not, if he would, divert the natural course of things; he cannot, though he pines to do it, expunge the written acts of Providence Let us go or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... rushed through her mind. What if Andora had rushed to him with the tale of the discovery of the letters—with the "Fly, you are discovered!" of romantic fiction? What if he had left her for good? It would not be unlikehim, after all. Under his wonderful gentleness he was always evasive and inscrutable. He might have said to himself that he would forestall her action, and place himself at once ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... strong, active, intelligent man that was your father, do not your very senses assure you that your father has gone away, and, as I told Bertha, you will surely see him again? It may seem to you that what I said about the good-by kiss was but a fiction to soothe the child, but in my belief it was not. Though we know with certainty so little of the detail of the life beyond, we have two good grounds on which to base reasonable conjecture. We know of God's love; we know your father's love; now what ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... excitants, then? So did mine until I began to suspect that the history might be authentic, and not a figment of the raconteur's imagination. The hero's name at first disposed me to set down the entire relation as a fiction. It is romantic enough to perfume ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... her photograph. All the expectations of the Argonaut were more than realised, and some people said that Florence was the coming woman, and that her writings would be quite as popular as those of the best-known American fiction writers. Hers was the first short story of any promise which had appeared in the English magazines for some time. The next from her pen was eagerly awaited, and it was decided that it was to be published in ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... to remind his readers again that he has not felt called upon to invest his story with the dignity of history, or in all cases to mingle fiction with actual historic occurrences. He believes that all the scenes of the story are not only possible, but probable, and that just such events as he has narrated really and frequently occurred in ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... he said, repeating his superior's question. "There is a story of villainous treachery surrounding that man that will sound to you like fiction; if it will not weary you, as we have yet some miles to travel, I ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... history and thrilling adventures of a brave lad whose earliest recollections of life find him an orphaned waif in the streets of New York. He has the right sort of blood and grit in him. * * * * It is a strong, wholesome and dramatic bit of fiction. There are no wearisome homilies in it, yet everywhere it incites to truthfulness and manliness. It ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... French translation. O Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the East produce ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... to that land of true liberty, and sorry are we to say, that thou has left so many who are so much worse than thyself behind thee! One of the most virtuous acts of thy life was the defrauding the Spiritual Railway Assurance office of two thousand pounds upon the fiction of thy death; which, truth to say, was a ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... which raises you above humanity, and makes you most like to God. Your wars will be spoken of to the end of time in all lands and tongues; but in tales of battles we are deafened by the shoutings and the blare of trumpets. Justice, mercy, moderation, wisdom, we admire even in fiction, or in persons whom we have never seen; how much more must we admire them in you, who are present here before us, and in whose face we read a purpose to restore us to such remnants of our liberty ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... or fiction, whichever you like. Here's a fact, plain and unvarnished. Born and bred in New York. Swell stable. Swell coachman. Swell master. Jewelled fingers of ladies poking at me, first thing I remember. First painful experience being sent to vet. to have ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... tables," Cleo said cheerily, "and she shooed off the—desperate thieves!" and Cleo again reverted to type as a fiction fixer. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which the poet calls up grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Garland at the eighty-second dinner of the Sunset Club, Chicago, Ill., January 31, 1895. The chairman of the evening, Arthur W. Underwood, introduced Mr. Garland to speak in relation to the general subject of the evening's discussion, "The Tendency and Influence of Modern Fiction." Mr. Underwood said: "To some of us the field of modern fiction may have seemed before this evening a wilderness without a chart. We are fortunate in having with us a man who has left the 'main travelled roads' of fiction ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... existed only in name. The men in the store were saying one night that some Indians had got through from Thunder Bay by way of the Albany River with mails; but as this meant about four hundred miles on snowshoes, Katherine regarded it only as a piece of winter fiction, and thought no more about it. There were fifty miles of hill and valley between Roaring Water Portage and the Albany River at its nearest point; but this was undoubtedly the nearest trail to civilization and the railway, and when ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... the invention of fable. That which Aristotle calls "the soul of poetry," was first breathed into it by Homer, I shall begin with considering him in his part, as it is naturally the first; and I speak of it both as it means the design of a poem, and as it is taken for fiction. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... announcement that Miss Anthony was fifty years old was one more of the courageous things for which her life has been distinguished. Battling with the wrong and striving for the right has not left so rigid a mark of the progress of time upon her features as to prevent her keeping up a little fiction about being fair and forty. Miss Anthony prefers the truth, and she says that the register in the family Bible supports the assertion that a half-century of rolling years have ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... times with insistence during the illness which terminated mortally some four months later. The manner in which the narrative is presented may be open to criticism: but of this, as one who has for some years eschewed the reading of fiction, I am not a fair judge. It adds, at any rate, nothing in the way of 'sensation' to the story as Mr. Molesworth told it: and of its improbability I should be the last to complain, who am to add, of my own positive observation, some ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... past three days have seen a marked improvement in both our invalids. Clissold's inside has been got into working order after a good deal of difficulty; he improves rapidly in spirits as well as towards immunity from pain. The fiction of his preparation to join the motor sledge party is still kept up, but Atkinson says there is not the smallest chance of his being ready. I shall have to be satisfied if he practically recovers by the time ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... consisted of a female set designer—who'd turn any male head—from the Studio, a garage mechanic with 30 years' experience, an electronics engineer, a science fiction writer, and the prettiest competent secretary available. I found Hazel, discovering with delight she'd had three years of anthropology ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... first, but the second character in the piece), we see the very demon of curiosity personified. Perhaps the art with which these two characters are contrived to relieve and set off each other has never been surpassed by any work of fiction, with the exception of the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... afterwards affected by the Ptolemies and implying simply that the royal race of the Pharaohs being emphatically divine was therefore essentially exalted above the world in general. According to this flattering fiction there could be no equal union for a king of Egypt except with his own sister. No such marriage seems to have been made by Nimmuria, but, as if in amends for that, he worshipped, as above stated, his ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... make rhymes, nor learned enough to undertake history, philosophy, or science, as well as those who despaired of success in essays, travels, or sermons, have all thought themselves capable of representing human life in the form of fiction. Very few of the twenty-seven thousand, probably, are wholly destitute of merit. Each author has drawn what he saw, or knew, or did, or imagined; and so has preserved something worthy, for those who live upon his plane and see the world with his eyes. The difficulty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Transcripts of them were sent by me to Mr. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, for use in a novel, which he did not live to finish. The character of Pickle, indeed, like that of the Master of Ballantrae, is alluring to writers of historical romance. Resisting the temptation to use Pickle as the villain of fiction, I have tried to tell his story with fidelity. The secret, so long kept, of Prince Charles's incognito, is divulged no less by his own correspondence in the Stuart MSS. than by the ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... company," Martinson retorted grimly. "That clause in the contract where we agree to produce his stories in a manner befitting the quality and fame of these several stories in fiction; he's got grounds for action there, and he's going to make the most of it. He's sore, anyway. Some one's been telling him he practically made us ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... proceeds to an examination of the more subtle and plausible case for psychological determinism. A very large number of our actions are due to some motive. There you have it, says the psychological determinist. Your so-called Freedom of the Will is a fiction; in reality it is merely the strongest motive which prevails and you imagine that you "freely willed it." But then we must ask him to define "strongest," and here is the fallacy of his argument, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... laugh," as Edna looked amused; "but I think father is right. He says it makes him quite unhappy to see books of this description in the hands of mere children. He is a doctor, you know, and he declares that a great deal of harm is done by overstimulating the imagination by highly wrought fiction. 'A meal of horrors can nourish no one,' he ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... My hope is that our statesmen may learn from John's dignified conduct a lesson which does not appear hitherto to have occurred to them—that even the fate of a Ministry will not justify a lie. We all admire in fiction the stern uprightness of Jeanie Deans: "One word would have saved me, and she would not speak it." ... Whether that word would have saved them is a question—it was their only chance—and he would not speak it; that word revolted his conscience, it would ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... touching the inflictions upon slaves, are not hap-hazard assertions, nor the exaggerations of fiction conjured up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty and imperfect investigation, nor the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; but they are proclamations of deliberate, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... diligently employed in displaying the cruelty, than in imitating the conduct, of their Pagan adversaries. To separate (if it be possible) a few authentic as well as interesting facts from an undigested mass of fiction and error, and to relate, in a clear and rational manner, the causes, the extent, the duration, and the most important circumstances of the persecutions to which the first Christians were exposed, is the design of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... effort to be beautiful and failed!" jauntily replied Rebecca, but she was too miserable to keep up the fiction. "Oh, Aunt Miranda, don't scold. I'm so unhappy! Alice and I rolled up my hair to curl it for the raising. She said it was so straight I looked like ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... immaculate, but altogether miraculous, and that she owed her being to the joyful kiss which Joachim gave his wife when they met at the gate. Of course the Church gave no countenance to this strange poetical fiction, but it certainly modified some of the representations; for example, there is a picture by Vittore Carpaccio, wherein St. Joachim and Anna tenderly embrace. On one side stands St. Louis of Toulouse as bishop; on the other St. Ursula with her standard, whose presence turns the incident into a ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... Le Queux is well known to novel-readers as that of one who can weave the most wonderful mysteries and elaborate the most thrilling plots that are to be met with in the fiction of to-day. His books are read with the avidity of intense curiosity, for the string of events described are of the kind that demand attention until the end is reached and everything made ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... Bound," he took an old Olynthian captive and put him to the torture, that he might catch, and transfer to canvas, the natural expression of the most terrible of mortal sufferings. This story, we may hope, is a fiction; but the incident is often alluded to by the poets, and the American poet WILLIS has painted the alleged scene in lines scarcely less terrible in their coloring than those pallid hues of death-like agony which we may suppose the painter-artist ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... before it was as a free man, who was accountable to no one for his actions, and could lend himself with an amused detachment to the game of precautions and prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required. This procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders, had long since initiated him into every ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... there was an extraordinary display of human virtue in both these battles. But there is no romance in the battles of the last Italian campaign, in which mere feebleness and distrust were on one side, mere physical force on the other. And even in fiction, the opponents of virtue, in order to be romantic, must have sublimity mingled with their vice. It is not the knave, not the ruffian, that are romantic, but the giant and the dragon; and these, not because they are false, but because ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... tragedies ardently. I read Shakespeare, more or less, and admired him rather, although I could see his weak points, and thought him considerably overrated. I had also read the nursery rhymes carefully, and most of the harrowing stories of history and fiction, particularly the latter. I had, moreover, recently made a tragic acquaintance with the Greek Drama in the person of a scoundrel called Aeschylus, whose sickening lucubrations I was forced to learn by heart, and now and then to copy out, a hundred lines at a time, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... a place by itself among the novels I have written. Many critics said that it was a welcome return to Canada, where I had made my first success in the field of fiction. This statement was only meagrely accurate, because since 'The Right of Way' was published in 1901 I had written, and given to the public, 'Northern Lights', a book of short stories, 'You Never Know ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had worn whiskers, and his face had been thin in those days. And Johnnie had said his father's name was Josiah Childs. He, Josiah, was this model husband who neither smoked, swore, nor drank. He was this seafaring man whose memory had been so carefully shielded by Agatha's forgiving fiction. He warmed toward her. She must have changed mightily since he left. He glowed with penitence. Then his heart sank as he thought of trying to live up to this reputation Agatha had made for him. This boy with the ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... in nature, and how that she had found a lover, the critical sense was not strong enough in her to lead her to compare reality with imagination. She accepted Ralph as unsuspectingly as she hitherto accepted the tawdry poetry of her favourite fiction. And her nature not being a passionate one, she was able to do this without any apparent transition of sentiment. She pitied him, hoped she could be of use in nursing him, and felt flattered at the idea of being ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... The Birmingham Daily Mail, of August 23, 1876, headed "Shakspeare's Carte de Visite." This is strongly adverse to Mr. Norris's proposals. The writer inclines to believe that the "friend residing near Stratford" was "a fiction of the Mrs. Harris type," or "possibly a modest way of evading the praise which would be the meed of the brilliant genius who originated the project": both very random guesses, and, as it turns out, wide of the mark. The article ends thus: "If Moses had been raised ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... fiction, believed by so many, of an armistice secretly determined upon by an American dictator; submitted to by the European governments: imposed by their weakness upon the victorious armies, despite the opposition of the generals? The Armistice was discussed in the open light of day. President Wilson only ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... picture of me when I was a small child; and I wondered if Captain Boomsby had invented that fable on the spot. I was not willing to believe it. It would have required too great an exercise of imaginative power for him; and it was not unlikely that he had spent weeks in evolving the brilliant fiction. ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... measure, numbers, and harmony, according to Aristotle; from the word [Greek text], which signifies to make or feign. Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. For the fable and fiction is, as it were, the form and soul of any poetical ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... possessions. So, sixty-two years after Lord Mansfield's decision, England emancipated her slaves! It took only two generations for the people to get rid of slavery under the British flag. How true, then, that "facts are stranger than fiction"! ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... be true, it was a continuation of the same powers; if they be false, it was an imitation, I will not say of what had been wrought, but of what had been reported to have been wrought, by those who preceded them. That imitation should follow reality, fiction should be grafted upon truth; that, if miracles were performed at first, miracles should be pretended afterwards; agrees so well with the ordinary course of human affairs, that we can have no great difficulty in believing it. The contrary supposition is very improbable, namely, ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... been a secret one throughout, and though the numerous correspondents have done their best to obtain information, very few facts have been ascertained; and fact and fiction have been so mixed in the newspaper accounts that it is not safe to accept as final any ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 10, March 10, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... things should be used, not abused. Thirdly, That he is not the author of any error. Fourthly, Neither is he to be corrected on the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, that birds, the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "First, That this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and secondly, if so, by what force would birds be able to ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... power lay. The story, too, of the poem possessed that stimulating charm for him, almost indispensable to his fancy, of being in some degree connected with himself,—an event in which he had been personally concerned, while on his travels, having supplied the groundwork on which the fiction was founded. After the appearance of The Giaour, some incorrect statement of this romantic incident having got into circulation, the noble author requested of his friend, the Marquis of Sligo, who had visited Athens soon ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the Casino. But within a few hundred yards, in half a dozen streets and lanes, the physiognomy, the mentality, the language of the people make you realize that regarding Monaco as a separate country is not wholly a polite fiction to relieve the French Government of the responsibility for the Casino. These people are different, children as well as grown-ups. They are neither French nor Italian, Provencal nor Catalan, but as distinct as mountain Basques are from French and Spanish. It is not a racial group distinction, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... writer of fiction could scarcely devise a more romantic meeting than this between the autocrat of Russia and the red-armed, bustling cleaner of the window-panes, and he would certainly never have ventured to build on it the romance of which it was the prelude. What ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... elements in fiction which make for culture is, primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest and importance. The aspirations, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland and Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those days between the two northern ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the modern small girl will take to her heart these well known books by a famous author have won an important place in the field of juvenile fiction. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... oratory, great poetry, great fiction; you try it by the pathos. All our critics agree in stipulating for the pathos. My tears were no feminine weakness, I could not be a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lads and the two skippers are admirably drawn. Mr. Hyne has now secured a position in the first rank of writers of fiction for boys."—Spectator. ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... again is a body with a ghastly rip in the chest, made perhaps by bayonet or shell fragment. Frantic hands now stiffened in death are seen trying to hold together great wounds from which life must have flowed in a few great spurts of blood. And here it is no fiction about the ground being soaked with gore. One can see it,—coagulated like bits of raw liver, while great chunks of sand and earth are in lumps, held together by this human glue. Other bodies lie in absolute peace and serenity. Struck dead with a rifle ball through ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... I know nothing in fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow. "Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away; for ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... however, in some degree, be ranked as historical; for although surrounded with rich fiction, as is always the case in Calderon, they nevertheless in general express the character of Biblical or legendary story with great fidelity. They are distinguished, however, from the other historical pieces by the frequent prominency of a significant allegory, and by the religious enthusiasm ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... upon the paper, lost in wandering thoughts and wild, fantastic dreams. He threw his pen aside, and tried to lose himself in the beautiful creations of his favorite poet, all things in nature and fiction seemed ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... sacrilegious hands were breaking open his grave, and called out with a voice like subterranean thunder, I perceive the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger! videlicet, the pickaxe. This, to be sure, is a fiction; but it shows the prevalent opinion, the feeling, the conviction, of absolute, universal, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... with what slow dignity she could command. Betty had called her Molly since she was fourteen months old, and, sweet and gracious in small matters, invariably pursued her own way when sufficiently roused by the strength of a desire. Mrs. Madison, however, kept up the fiction of an authority which she thought was due to herself and ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... coveted him, as well I might to this day; and if he was oftener without anything to write about, his ideas would pay twenty shillings in the pound, in strength and originality, where mine made some contemptible composition in pence. That is why I have been a failure at fiction—oh, yes, I have! That is why Pharazyn would have succeeded, if only he had stuck to plain ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... their acquaintance. To strengthen an impression so desirable and useful, he followed up the blow by acquainting him, in some detail, with the magnitude and extent of his operations; blending truth and fiction together, as best served his purpose; and bringing both to bear, with so much art, that Mr. Bolter's respect visibly increased, and became tempered, at the same time, with a degree of wholesome fear, which it ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the determination of this question. The monthly figures for each of the ten Birmingham libraries are given separately, and it is clear at a glance that without exception the maximum number of readers of prose-fiction at all the libraries during 1897-98 is found in the month of March. (I have chiefly taken into consideration the figures for 1897-98; the figures for 1896 are somewhat abnormal and irregular, probably owing to a decrease in readers, attributed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... narrative intelligible and accurate. With these explanations, which are made in order to prevent the person who may happen first to commence the perusal of this manuscript from throwing it into the fire, as a silly attempt to write a more silly fiction, I shall proceed at once to the commencement of ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... rocky basin; the hill behind clothed with a dense jungle of bread-fruit trees and wild plantains, whose sea of greenery was starred with the golden balls of innumerable orange trees; the whole place must really have been lifted bodily out of some boy's book, and put here to prove that writers of fiction occasionally tell the truth, for it seemed perfectly familiar to both of us. Certainly, the oranges were of the bitter Seville variety and were uneatable, and wild plantains are but an indifferent article of diet; ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... "The History of Polexander" was "done into English by W. Browne," and published in folio, London, 1647. It was the earliest of the French heroic romances, and it appears to have been the model for the works of Calprenede and Mdlle. de Scuderi; see Dunlop's "History of Fiction" for the plot ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... lamp in hand As Glencoe's horror, thou hast England true. Why let Froude fiction haze thy vivid view? Put not thy light out for sound sleep, but stand And answer, when the mother, whom thou drew Thy soul from, cries "Glencoe"! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... a star at noon. Their quickly muster'd force will quickly yield, And quit in momentary flight the field. Or if some deep-mouth'd demagogue should blow The flame of war, and bid its fury glow, Yet well-told fiction and inventive art With milder force can turn the vulgar heart. Rais'd by a breath their swelling clamours rise, And with a breath their vain opinion dies." He spoke; attention sat on every eye, And all in silence ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... series, to 1869, when The Ring and the Book appeared, for these years include all of his dramas and most of the poetry on which his fame rests. A survey of this period at once reveals the predominance of fiction. Within these years come nearly all the novels of Charles Dickens, of William Makepeace Thackeray, of Charlotte Bronte, of Wilkie Collins, of Charles Kingsley, of Mrs. Gaskell, of Anthony Trollope, of George Macdonald, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... and well that his early desertion of fiction is surprising. His mocking spirit has often suggested comparison with Voltaire, whom he studied and admired. He too is a skeptic and an idol-breaker; but his is a kindlier irony, a less incisive philosophy. Perhaps, however, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... two young people, not engaged nor going to be engaged to one another; and for three days or more circumstances had abandoned them to an inevitable and unchaperoned tete-a-tete! Mary made light of it; she relied on the fraternal relationship, but that was, after all, a fiction, quite incapable, in Miss Bussey's opinion, of supporting the strain to which It had been subjected. Besides Mary's sincerity appeared doubtful; the kind girl, anxious to spare her aunt worry, made light of the difficulties of her position, but Miss Bussey detected a restlessness ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... of which traces are still to be found in the metrical traditions and phraseology of his country. According to the old legend, the existence of Starkather was prolonged for three lifetimes, in each of which he was doomed to commit some act of infamy; but this fiction has not here been followed out. Oehlenschlaeger's drama, bearing the name of this hero, has many beauties; but deviates widely from Saxo's story of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... on Circuits (METHUEN) with Mr. PHILIP CAMBORNE you will find him an interesting and informing companion. His hero and heroine are a Wesleyan minister and his wife, so completely out of tune with the usual heroes of contemporary fiction that they are actually shameless enough to be in love with one another from the first page to the last. Though he shows a remarkable insight into the lives of Wesleyan ministers, Mr. CAMBORNE declines the popular methods of sectarian fiction and refrains from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... set all the heart strings to vibrating by its pathos, flood one's being in the great surge of patriotism ... a story that vastly enriches American fiction."—Albany Times-Union. ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace as it was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she was sorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a different reason for avoiding her. She made no further objections to accompanying her parents, taking them into the inner room to give Winterborne a last look, and gathering up the two or three things that belonged to her. While she was doing this the two ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... greatly resembles a train of incidents in a projected tale. The latter, in order to produce a sense of reality in the reader's mind, must be conceived with such proportionate strength by the author as to seem in the glow of fancy more like truth, past, present or to come, than purely fiction. The prospective sinner, on the other hand, weaves his plot of crime, but seldom or never feels a perfect certainty that it will be executed. There is a dreaminess diffused about his thoughts; in a dream, as it were, he strikes the death-blow ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... defense of his Indians in the preface of the Leather-Stocking Tales. "It is the privilege of all writers of fiction," he declares, "more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... really well EXECUTED scenes are the riverside ones; the escape in particular is excellent; and I may add, the capture of the two convicts at the beginning. Miss Havisham is, probably, the worst thing in human fiction. But Wemmick I like; and I like Trabb's boy; and Mr. Wopsle ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... underwent shall be My topic, with of course the due restriction Which is required by proper courtesy; And recollect the work is only fiction, And that I sing of neither mine nor me, Though every scribe, in some slight turn of diction, Will hint allusions never meant. Ne'er doubt This—when I speak, I don't ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... person ever came to Naples at all. Thirdly, no ship arrived here at the date mentioned by your sister. Fourthly, no ship of that name ever came here at all. Fifthly, no ship arrived here at any time this year that had picked up any one at sea. The whole thing is untrue. It is a base fiction made ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the eerie stories which pass from mouth to mouth among the peasantry of Central Europe. The general characteristics of such tales are too well known to need more than a passing reference; a fairly typical specimen of the vampire story, though it does not profess to be more than the merest fiction, is Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla, while a very remarkable account of an unusual form of this creature is to be found in Isis Unveiled, vol. i., p. 454. All readers of Theosophical literature are familiar with the idea that it is possible for a man to live a ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... parts of it, but as a most skilful conveyancer, and great real property lawyer, with a deep knowledge of all its intricacies and moot points, he, at once, obtained considerable practice, and a fine income, which, I believe, by present provincial counsel would be regarded rather as a fiction than reality. He was, moreover, a fluent speaker, with diction pure, and most grammatical. I ought, here, perhaps, to mention what will seem strange to the present generation, that I have often heard my father say, that the first book he began ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... tolerant as he was, he saw things as they were (except in the case of his wife), never misstated and rarely overstated. For all that, she set out on Saturday afternoon prepared to meet the typical washerwoman of fiction—worn, bedraggled, shapeless, and forlorn. She was prepared to go into a steaming kitchen with puddles on the floor and dirty children all about, and have this red-faced personage take a scarlet hand out of the tub, dry it on a dirty apron, and hold ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... and list slippers. The bonnes who thus serve as chaperons are often as young as or even younger than the demoiselles whose virginal modesty they are supposed to protect. That they are anything more than a mere form of guardian, a figment of the social fiction that a young French girl never leaves her mother's side till she goes to her husband's, it is unnecessary to observe. Human nature, especially French human nature, is human nature all the world over, and Romeo will woo and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... developed a body of literature strongly polemic in purpose, quite hostile to the ideals of detachment and disinterested worship of beauty that Goethe and Schiller in their classical period had preached and practised. This literature took the form of fiction, drama, and journalism, as well as of poetry. Indeed, the only important lyric poet of the Young German group was HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856), who had begun his career with the most intimate poetry of personal ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the wrapper which covers every Grosset & Dunlap book. When you feel in the mood for a good romance, refer to the carefully selected list of modern fiction comprising most of the successes by prominent writers of the day which is printed on the back of every Grosset ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... No other type of fiction is more familiar to the teacher, and probably no other kind is the source of so much uncertainty of feeling. The nature story is much used, as I have noticed above, to illustrate or to teach the habits of animals and ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... We have no way of verifying the propositions by the trial of our senses. There they lie, to be received by us in the construction that first suggests itself to us, or not. They are something like an agreeable imagination or fiction: and a sober observer, in cold blood, will be disposed deliberately to weigh both sides of the question, and to judge whether the probability lies in favour of the actual affirmation of the millions of millions of miles, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... publisher, asking me to write a novel of fifty thousand or sixty thousand words for what was called his Annual. In this Annual had appeared Hugh Conway's 'Called Back' and Anthony Hope's 'Prisoner of Zenda', among other celebrated works of fiction. I cabled my acceptance of the excellent offer made me, and the summer of 1893 found me at Audierne, in Brittany, with some artist friends—more than one of whom has since come to eminence—living what was really an out-door literary ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... naturally to be men, and are keenly interested in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books—which I detested—and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction February 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on ...
— The Plague • Teddy Keller
... suppose not; good titles went out with good fiction—when he ceased to write novels a number of years ago. May I look ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... across bridgeless chasms, took part in dozens of sets illustrating scenes of frontier life as Billy Threewit conceived these. Sometimes Steve smiled. The director's ideas had largely been absorbed in New York from reading Western fiction. But so long as he drew down his two-fifty a day and had plenty of fun doing it, Steve was no stickler for naked realism. The "bad men" of Yeager's acquaintance had usually been quiet, soft-spoken citizens, notable chiefly for a certain chilliness of the eye and an efficient ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... to catholicity of taste, the chosen stories reveal predilection for no one type. They like detective stories, and particularly those of Melville Davisson Post. A follower of the founder of this school of fiction, he has none the less advanced beyond his master and has discovered other ways than those of the Rue Morgue. "Five Thousand Dollars Reward" in its brisk action, strong suspense, and humorous denouement carries on the technique so neatly achieved in "The Doomdorf Mystery" and other tales ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was never questioned until 1904, when Professor Barrett Wendell, in his "Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature," discovered and revealed to the world that Shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... into Parliament. He prefers to pursue culture in the capitals of Europe, or to urge an automobile at a furious pace across the sands. And the inaction of the real American is America's heaviest misfortune. So long as politics are left to the amateurs of graft, so long will Freedom be a fiction and Patriotism a piece of mere lip-service. Wealth is not wanting; brains are not wanting; energy is not wanting. Nothing is wanting save the inclination to snatch the control of the country from the hands of professional ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... bureaucratic ambitions and policy. It had not one single issue in which the people who were fighting its battles and bearing its burdens were even remotely interested. And then again—a despotism must not show signs of weakness. Its power lies in the fiction of its invincibility. Liberals and Progressives of all shades, wise and not wise, saw their opportunity. Finns and Poles grew bolder. The air was thick with threats and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... Sylvia Manning at a peculiar moment. She had been shocked and distressed beyond measure by the morning's tragedy. Mortimer Fenley was one of those men whom riches render morose, but his manner had always been kind to his ward. A pleasant fiction enabled the girl to regard Mr. and Mrs. Fenley as her "uncle" and "aunt," and the tacit relationship thus established served to place the financier and his "niece" on a footing of affectionate intimacy. Of late, however, Sylvia had been aware of a splitting up of the family into armed ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... here translated, are a treasure of myth and folk-lore. Of the songs and stories which Denmark possessed from the common Scandinavian stock, often her only native record is in Saxo's Latin. Thus, as a chronicler both of truth and fiction, he had in his own land no predecessor, nor had he any literary tradition behind him. Single-handed, therefore, he may be said to have lifted the dead-weight against him, and given Denmark a writer. The nature of his ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... as I before said, is corruption or rot; thus, Glek-Nas may be construed, "the universal strife-rot." Their compounds are very expressive; thuat which the Ana have attained forbids the progressive cultivation of literature, especially in the two main divisions of fiction and history,—I shall have occasion ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... or girl the book will be a perfect bonanza. * * * Every statement it contains may be accepted as accurately true. * * * This book shows once more that truth is stranger than fiction.—Philadelphia North American. ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... persuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction that I could do what he desired. There existed at the time only the little sketch, "The Jilting of Jane," included in this volume—at least, that is the only tolerable fragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind period. But I set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing moving and interesting things that could be given vividly in the little space of eight or ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Louis Stevenson Rab's Friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Mr. Morris's Poems Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels A Scottish Romanticist of 1830 The Confessions of Saint Augustine Smollett Nathaniel Hawthorne The Paradise of Poets Paris and Helen Enchanted Cigarettes Stories and Story-telling The Supernatural in Fiction An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... women.[22] The one, Brilliant with recent renown, Young, unpractised, had told With a master's accent her feign'd Story of passionate life; The other, maturer in fame, Earning, she too, her praise First in fiction, had since Widen'd her sweep, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... for libertinism, though only in so simple and innocent a form as kissing. I do not long for the repetition (or more properly commencement) of Polydore Virgil's days of "promiscuous" kisses. Let these remain, as heretofore, in fiction, and in fiction alone. "A glutted market makes provisions cheap," ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... you will keep up the fiction, do. Andrew knows—he isn't an idiot—and to him we can make light of it now. What does anybody's birth matter, who's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is as essential to the young people as good food—its effect is seen in after years. Especially do they need good, pure fiction, which engages their attention and excludes mischievous ideas, leaving a lasting impression. In its great variety of short and continued stories, GOLDEN DAYS is among the foremost, and its illustrations are artistic. Puzzledom delights the solvers, while the Letter Box contains much information ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... off effluvia or moisture. Out of all damp towels, &c., which become dry in the room, the damp, of course, goes into the patient's air. Yet this "of course" seems as little thought of, as if it were an obsolete fiction. How very seldom you see a nurse who acknowledges by her practice that nothing at all ought to be aired in the patient's room, that nothing at all ought to be cooked at the patient's fire! Indeed the arrangements often make this rule ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... Miss Merrifield's mother; so that it was almost a family party, and by no means a formidable gathering. Lady Probyn played the part of hostess and chaperoned her pretty niece; but she was not in the least like the aunt of fiction—on the contrary, she was comparatively young in years and almost comically young in mind; her niece was devoted to her, and the moment I saw her I knew that our cruise ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... Sunday serial, and feeling not unlike one in a difficult situation at the end of an instalment. At home, in her father's house, she had occasionally been driven to read Sunday serials on Sunday. They were the only fiction permitted ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction December 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... Facts are stubborn things; they won't serialize. But now and then there's a case. There was one a little time ago. Oh, there was a great case not long since, if we had but the man to handle it, without spoiling it, in English fiction!" ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Colonel Hewson, from his pious zeal, marched with his regiment into London, and destroyed all the bears which were kept there for the diversion of the citizens. This adventure seems to have given birth to the fiction of Hudibras. Though the English nation be naturally candid and sincere, hypocrisy prevailed among them beyond any example in ancient or modern times. The religious hypocrisy, it may be remarked, is of a peculiar ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... It was clear that they regarded a two-hour speech from him under the circumstances as an imposition. But Babson wished to preserve the fiction of impartiality. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... fiction, can hardly be better employed than when it makes such sweet, simple earnestness real ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... recommended me rather to try Mr. Fiction, who lives close to Amusement's bazaar. It is a great matter, you know, not to have to cross over brook Bother, or carry a carpet up-hill. And Mr. Fiction has such a magnificent shop, and his ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... his immortal Dupin tales, the name "Detective" stories had not been invented; the detective of fiction not having been as yet discovered. And the title is still something of a misnomer, for many narratives involving a puzzle of some sort, though belonging to the category which I wish to discuss, are ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Troy, for a time regarded as a poetic fiction, is now believed by many scholars to be an actual historical event which took place about the time of the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... love with her. It is now four weeks since hearing this conventional fiction, and every day I have been perfectly able to repeat: "I am not in love with Georgiana!" There was one question which I put severely to Mrs. Walters: Had she told Georgiana of my foolish talk? She shook her head violently, and ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... handed down from father to son respecting the ancient lords and inhabitants of the district. It is indeed the region of romance, and I have often felt surprise, that the interesting materials with which it abounds have so seldom been incorporated into the works of fiction which are now issuing with such thoughtless haste from the press of the metropolis. In Dr. Whitaker's History of Craven—which in spite of his extravagant prejudices in favour of gentle blood, and in derogation of commercial opulence, is still an excellent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... among the pupils of the schools by compiling lists of the best books upon the shelves, and distributing these lists to the pupils. Such lists may be classified as suitable to different grades or ages, or by subjects, as, History of different countries or epochs, Biography, Travels, Nature work, Fiction, etc. ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... towards the door. He forgot that each word he spoke was false. He personated his assumption of innocence even to self-deception. Have not actors wept, as they pourtrayed imagined passion? A more intense feeling of the reality of fiction possessed Raymond. He spoke with pride; he felt injured. Perdita looked up; she saw his angry glance; his hand was on the lock of the door. She started up, she threw herself on his neck, she gasped and sobbed; he took her hand, and leading her to the sofa, sat down near her. Her head fell on ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... true that the American administration did try something resembling a policy of non-intercourse in dealing with Mexico. But, the thing was a fiction. While the Department of State talked of non-intercourse the Department of the Treasury was busy clearing ships for Mexico, facilitating the dispatch of mails, &c. And, of course, Mexico's communication with Europe remained unimpaired; at the exact moment when the President of the United ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and favourites of Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents fairly well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths were beautiful, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the same character. The wood logs burning in the grate gave out a pleasant sense of warmth. He took more particular note of the volumes in the well-filled bookcases,—volumes of poetry, French novels, with a fair sprinkling of modern English fiction. There was a plaster cast of the Paris Magdalene over the door and one or two fine point etchings, after the style of Heillieu, upon the walls. There was no writing table in the room, nor any signs of industry, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as he said it would; for, on the seventh day after his wife's death, he died also. This is not a fiction, but perfectly true. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... predominant, at times little more than a title, had received its death-blow from the hands of Napoleon and vanished from the historic stage. It was Bismarck's design to restore the German Empire - not the old, moth-eaten fiction of the past, but an entirely new one - and give Prussia the position it had earned, that of the great center of German racial unity. In this project Austria, long at the head of the old empire, was to have no part, the imperial dignity being conferred upon the venerable King William of Prussia, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... | | By the time you finish reading the | | final instalment of "The Skylark of | | Space," we are certain that you will | | agree with us that it is one of the | | outstanding scienti-fiction stories | | of the decade; an interplanetarian | | story that will not be eclipsed | | soon. It will be referred to by all | | scienti-fiction fans for years to | | come. It will be read and reread. | | This is not a mere prophecy of ours, ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... works of fiction exhibit the deplorable corruption of the vernacular English. You cannot open a novel or book of travels printed within the present year without stumbling on French or Italian words, and so frequent is their occurrence, that they are often printed in the same type as the rest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... Philip Sidney, who, being mortally wounded in the action, was carried off by the soldiers, and soon after died. This person is described by the writers of that age, as the most perfect model of an accomplished gentleman that could be formed even by the wanton imagination of poetry or fiction. Virtuous conduct, polite conversation, heroic valor, and elegant erudition, all concurred to render him the ornament and delight of the English court; and as the credit which he possessed with the queen and the earl of Leicester was wholly employed in the encouragement of genius and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... it and the text from which the title was drawn as his subject for an entire sermon, in the course of which he said: "In its ethical and social significance it is the most important piece of fiction that has lately appeared in America. I do not think that a more trenchant word has been spoken to this nation since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' And it is profoundly to be hoped that this book may do for the prevailing Mammonism what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of the gods:—"Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales." Thus the "Decamerone" was appearing much earlier than we suppose. DESCARTES, while yet a boy, indulged such habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by his companions "The Philosopher," always questioning, and ever settling ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Shakespeare's male characters can be measured beside George Washington? There is not one of them, unless Kent in "King Lear." Strong, resolute natures, like Washington, Hamilton, Sumner, are not adapted to dramatic fiction, either in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... highest and embraced of the wisest, honoured with the worthiest and graced with the best. She makes imprisonment liberty when the mind goeth through the world, and in sickness finds health where death is the way to life. She is an enemy to passion, and knows no purgatory; thinks fortune a fiction, and builds only upon providence. She is the sick man's salve and the whole man's preserver, the wise man's staff and the good man's guide. In sum, not to wade too far in her worthiness, lest I be drowned in the depth of wonder, I will thus end in her endless honour:—She is the grace ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various |
