"Novelist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old Italian novelist—a horse fell, as in a fit, with his rider. The people, running from all sides, gathered about the steed, and many and opposite were the opinions of the sudden malady of the animal; as many the prescriptions tendered for his recovery. At length, a great hubbub arose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... and novelist, many years resident in Vienna, whose fantastic stories and fairy tales are well known in Europe, has written the following ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to hit upon a novelist who shows wider divergences in his work than Booth Tarkington, not because he gives in it any special evidence of versatility—a word which implies something like genius, or at least talent. This peculiarity is due rather to an arbitrary method in ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... blood-red figure on the black-robed scaffold? Shall we ever think of Monmouth pleading for his life with James II, without remembering the picture which hung last year upon these walls? Is there no affinity between novelist and our many painters of ordinary scenes, with their kindred endeavor to shed light and beauty on the hopes and fears, the duties and sorrows of human life? Nay, even if the preacher and the divine may claim any part in the domain of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... others died wrecks of their former selves, and many, without a vicious instinct, became criminals and outcasts. Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... daughter of a widow; he, the only son of a wealthy London merchant. They run away and after a month's search are found by the father of the young man in southern France. The girl is sent home to her mother; the young man sent to India in order to get him far away from his wife. The novelist makes the young man a noble character, who is determined to prove himself worthy of his wife, and he toils to send her means for support. The young wife becomes a mother, and the young husband toils the harder to care for his wife and babe. When time hangs heavy on ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... legion, but when one thinks of the opportunities for character-study, without that exaggeration into which previous illustrators have been too prone to indulge, which the works of the great novelist afford, one is inclined to think that until we see that wonderful gallery of fanciful personalities which began with Mr. Pickwick and his companions portrayed by the pencil of Frank Reynolds, we shall have to wait still for the perfect edition of Dickens. One niche in that gallery has already been ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... for ever so many journals. I think"—and she became complacently reflective—"I think I may say with perfect truth that I have interviewed everybody who has ever done anything worth noting, from our biggest provision dealer to our latest sensational novelist! And all my articles are signed 'Tiger-Lily.' NOW do you remember? Oh, you MUST remember? ... I am so ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... passionate to waste even the moments of his astonishment." This good father, however, does ample justice to the gallantry of the Patriarch Jacob. He offers to serve Laban, seven years for Rachel. "Nothing is too much," cries the venerable novelist, "when one really loves;" and this admirable observation he confirms by the facility with which the obliging Rachel allows Leah for one night to her husband! In this manner the patriarchs are made to speak in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... His sister, Madame de Surville, visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he gave of intelligence." We must defer for another occasion what we have to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in private—the historian of society—French society—as it is. The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... warfare as between two First-class Powers, fighting in the midst of civilisation, and to reduce it to terms of exact realism, showing the latest devices of destruction at work, but carefully excluding those improbable and impossible agencies which the more exuberant but less informed novelist loves to imagine and put in play. Mr. PALMER'S conception, though based upon some experience, is for the most part speculative, of course, but I am confident that he gives us an excellent idea of how the military machine would work in practice, how its human constituent parts would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... him in college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way." The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady, designated in his brother's biography of him as Mrs. L. John Foster, whose social career was as trying to him as his massive soul was ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... our physical nature. The men and women, youths and maidens, of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, to say nothing of minor writers, are true enough to nature in other respects, but in all sexual relations they are mere simulacri. George Meredith is our only novelist who triumphs in this region. As Mr. Lowell has noticed, there is a fine natural atmosphere of sex in his books. Without the obtrusion of physiology, which is out of place in art, his human beings are clearly divided into males and females, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... the dazed fellow held out the letter for him to read. Schonberg glanced over it, and smiled. "This Kalimann," he murmured, "is a deuce of a fellow. The world has lost a novelist in him. But let me see how I can arrange matters. Mendel," he continued, turning to the open-mouthed lover, "you shall stay here, and you shall marry your Gutel. I will give you two or three rooms in the factory for your housekeeping, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous, woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk around to the law ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... vicar of Looe Trenchard, Devonshire, England. Born at Exeter, England, 1834. An antiquarian, archaeological and historical writer, no mean poet, and a novelist. From his "Curious Myths of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... inquiringly, for a moment wondered if the novelist understood him as he seemed to ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... patience seems unable to explore, is yet enlivened here and there with a cheerful spot, when he tells us of some scalade or camisado, or speculates on troopers rendered bullet-proof by art-magic. His chaotic records have, in fact, afforded to our Novelist the raw materials of Dugald Dalgetty, a cavalier of the most singular equipment, of character and manners which, for many reasons, merit study and description. To much of this, though, as he afterwards proved, it was well known ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... for cats was a fad which he shared with Paul de Koch, the novelist, who, at one time, kept as many as thirty cats in his house. Many descriptions of them are to be found scattered through his novels. His chief favorite, Fromentin, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... or less educated. Mr. Meldon had proclaimed himself a bachelor of arts. It was natural to suppose that he would have known the name, even the real name, of a famous living novelist. Apparently he did not. Miss ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... indignant glance at the novelist and rushed after his friends; but when he arrived at the stage-door he saw the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... destroyed all letters that might have been used for such a purpose, publicity of any kind being most distasteful to her, evidence of which is very clearly shown in the first part of this narrative. The chief secret of her success as a novelist (setting aside her great genius) was the great care and time she bestowed on the formation of each novel—an interval of six years occurring between each, the result being delineations ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... is the novelist that naked talk in print conveys no meaning that he loads, and often overloads, almost every utterance of his characters with explanations and interpretations. It is a loud confession that print is a poor vehicle for "talk"; it is a recognition that uninterpreted ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to represent them, especially represent them under strong compression and in brief and subordinate terms; and this even though the novelist who doesn't represent, and represent "all the time," is lost, exactly as much lost as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, doesn't paint ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... a silly little idiot or a fisher of men, a social sham who prattled of duchesses or a strenuous feminine politician who babbled of votes; a Christian Scientist bent on converting, an adventuress without adventures (the worst kind), a mind-healer or a body-snatcher, a hockey-player or even a lady novelist, it would have been exactly the same; whatever she had been, mentally or morally, he would undoubtedly have fallen in love with her physically, at first sight. But it was very much worse than that. He found her delightful, and clever; he was certain ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... assertion at once and forever; an assertion which Rebecca regarded (quite truly) as untenable, though why she certainly never could have explained. Unfortunately Lancelot was a poor missionary, quite unfitted for the high achievements to which he was destined by the youthful novelist, and Uncle Jerry, though a stage-driver and no reading man, at once perceived the flabbiness and transparency of the Parted Lovers the moment they were ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... clothe. An old story. As the great ship glided gently away from the quay—in those days the Mahanaddy loaded at Southampton—he went and stood beside Norah Hood. Not that he had anything to say to her; but his calling of novelist, his experience of doctor, taught him that a silent support is what women sometimes want. They deal so largely in words that a few ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... and compared with other quadrupeds, but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the glass from the learned judge's method in Biography, the learned historian's method in History, and the daily chronicler's method in dressing res gestoe for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate, not based on ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... 1741, d. 1794, was a French novelist and dramatist of the Revolution, who contrary to his real wishes became entangled in its meshes. He exercised a considerable influence over certain of its leaders, notably Mirabeau and Sieyes. He is said to have ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... of Wilde's trial the nearly completed MS. of La Sainte Courtisane was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, the well-known novelist, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the author. Wilde immediately left the only copy in a cab. A few days later he laughingly informed me of the loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it. I have explained elsewhere that he looked on his works with disdain ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... There was a man, then, as well as a boy! She was not going to be entirely stifled in ruins, after all! She went on with her cogitations, staring hard, her head a little to one side. A real man, too, with a lean, brown face, and a square, determined chin, and a nose quite Roman enough to suit any novelist, and dark hair a little thin on the top and a little grey at the temples. She could not be sure if he were a soldier or not, but evidently he had been riding, for he still carried a hunting-crop; and also, judging by his ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... themselves, but they cannot always see the meaning of it, the why and wherefore, whence things come and whither they are tending, so that the lessons of life are lost—or would be but for the efforts of the modern novelist." ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... rising priests in the Church of England. A lawyer does not sin in seeking to be a judge, or in compassing his wishes by all honest means. A young diplomat entertains a fair ambition when he looks forward to be the lord of a first-rate embassy; and a poor novelist, when he attempts to rival Dickens or rise above Fitzjeames, commits no fault, though he may be foolish. Sydney Smith truly said that in these recreant days we cannot expect to find the majesty of St. Paul beneath the cassock of a curate. If ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... "very pretty, indeed, and very original; beats Scott hollow, and Percy too: but, sir, the day for these things is gone by; nobody at present cares for Percy, nor for Scott, either, save as a novelist; sorry to discourage merit, sir, but what can I do? What else ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and published 'Lettres de mon Moulin' (1868), which also made his name favorably known. He now turned from fiction to the drama, and it was not until after 1870 that he became fully conscious of his vocation as a novelist, perhaps through the trials of the siege of Paris and the humiliation of his country, which deepened his nature without souring it. Daudet's genial satire, 'Tartarin de Tarascon', appeared in 1872; but with the Parisian romance 'Fromont jeune et Risler aine', crowned ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... at the family seat, and died in London, in the seventy-third year, of his age.—21st. At Edgeworthstown, county of Longford, Ireland, in her eighty-fifth year, Miss Edgeworth, so celebrated as a novelist, and deserving equal celebrity as a metaphysician, for her novels abound with the most accurate and acute speculations in mental philosophy, incidentally occurring in the course of her narratives. She was small in stature, lively in disposition, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is already a novelist. They record the strokes of finesse and the subterfuges necessary to the attainment of the vain ambitions which are the preoccupation of human genius in superficial levels of Society in all ages. We realise the waste of energy and diplomacy expended to score ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... familiar and conventional polish of town life. This theme had already caught the fancy of the song-writers of the fourteenth century, who produced some of the most delightful examples of native and unconventional pastoral anywhere to be found[40]. Franco Sacchetti the novelist, for example, gives us a series of charming vignettes of country life and scenery, but always from the point of view of the town observer. One poem of his in particular gained wide popularity, and a modernized and somewhat altered version ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... had lunch with her. They told each other all the innermost secrets of their hearts, and in the evening Corydon would retail these to Thyrsis, who was thus put in the way to acquire that knowledge of human nature so essential to a novelist. Delia had never been in love, it seemed—her only passion was for savage tribes along the Congo; but Mr. Harding had been involved in a heart-tragedy some time ago, and was supposed to be still inconsolable. Incredible as it might seem, he was ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... he read plays in the bath and that the best results were obtained by those selected either in the bath or on a long railway journey. "A man," he added, "is always at his best in his bath." Again, Mr. CHARLES GARVICE, the famous novelist, said that he always felt intensely musical while having his bath, though the ideas for his stories came chiefly while ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... work stands on a very much higher plane than the facile fiction of the circulating libraries.... The characters are drawn with patient care, and with a power of individualisation which marks the born novelist. It is a serious, powerful, and in many ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... believes what he says, but it is impossible for any student of Irish history or of Irish politics to believe Mr. M'Carthy. Facts are too strong for him. Mr. Lalor showed a prevision denied to our amiable novelist. Gustave de Beaumont understood political philosophy better than the lively recorder of the superficial aspects of recent English history. Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt, and the whole line of witnesses before the Special Commission, tell a different ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... novelist's business to make one half of the world know how the other half lives; and in this province Smollett anticipated Dickens. He left the service as soon as he could, when the beaten fleet was refitting at Jamaica. In that isle he seems ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... am to deal with life it must be in my own way, for there's no escape from one's character. I may be a good poet or a bad one—that's not for me to say; but I am a poet of sorts. Now a poet does not observe like a novelist. He does not indeed necessarily observe at all until he feels the need of observation. Then he observes, and intensely. He does not analyse, he does not amass his facts; he concentrates. He wrings out quintessences; and when he has distilled his drops of pure spirit ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Belfast, he was in the habit of receiving whips from both sides of the House, a remarkable testimony to the impression of his absolute impartiality thus early conveyed to observers. The House of Commons, by the way, is ignorant that in this sturdy Protestant it entertains a novelist unawares. Mr. Johnston has written at least two works of fiction, one entitled "Nightshade," which presumably deals with the epoch of the fellest domination of Rome; and the other "Under Which King?" a, perhaps unconscious, reflection of the unsettled state of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the merits of the book. I have sometimes thought to transcribe these marked passages, or at least so much of them as to point where they are, and send them to you. Original strokes that strongly depict the human heart, is your and Fielding's province beyond any other novelist I have ever perused. Richardson indeed might perhaps be excepted; but unhappily, dramatis personae are beings of another world; and however they may captivate the unexperienced, romantic fancy of a boy or a girl, they will ever, in proportion as we ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... by our veteran novelist, William Dean Howells, we have clung to the wisdom of Solomon, in this respect, through centuries of changing conditions. Solomon said: "Spare the rod and spoil the child"; Mr. Howells suggests that we might with profit ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... grandsons of that Canon Dallison, well known as friend, and sometime adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist. The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of two volumes of "Socratic Dialogues." He had bequeathed to his son—a permanent official in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bring back Edgar Allan Poe." He has been director-general of public instruction in Rio de Janeiro, professor at the Normal School and the National School of Fine Arts, and also a deputy from Pernambuco. With the surprising versatility of so many South Americans he has achieved a reputation as poet, novelist, dramatist, publicist, journalist ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... hardly be our Western way of treating a proposal of the kind; nor would the European novelist neglect so grand an opportunity ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... an accepted truth, I believe, that every novelist embodies in the personalities of his heroes some of his own traits of character. Those who were intimately acquainted with William Otis Lillibridge could not fail to recognize this in a marked degree. To a casual reader, the heroes of his five novels might perhaps suggest five totally ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... other author who wrote in Sanskrit. There have also been many attempts to express in words the secret of his abiding power: such attempts can never be wholly successful, yet they are not without considerable interest. Thus Bana, a celebrated novelist of the seventh century, has the following lines in some stanzas of poetical criticism which he ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... has broken new ground as an historical novelist. His tale is full of stirring action, and will commend ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... the dialect spoken on the West Coast differs more from the dialect spoken in the Thirlmere Valley than the latter differs from the dialect spoken in North Lancashire. The patois problem is not the least serious of the many difficulties the novelist encounters. I have chosen to give a broad outline of Cumbrian dialect, such as bears no more exact relation to the actual speech than a sketch bears to a finished picture. It is right as far ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the Muses should love, make a serious claim on our compassion. The art of the novelist is simple. At the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... time, too, a band of writers, of whom the novelist Turgenieff is the best known, were extolling the triumphs of scientific research and the benefits of Western democracy. He it was who adapted to scientific or ethical use the word "Nihilism" (already in use in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Montpensier, about whom we have been quarrelling for the last year, and a half, should be here as a fugitive and dressed in the clothes I sent her, and should come to thank me for my kindness, is a reverse of fortune which no novelist would devise, and upon which one could moralise ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... authors of philosophical dialogues are, in fact, better evidences of the growing love of nature than the poets. The novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously the rules of his department of literature; he gives us in his novels themselves not a word more than is necessary on the natural scenery amid which the action ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate cum laude from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... happy one? Granted that the writer is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at intervals respire, and in their happiest ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... comes into the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is at times, as in The Return of the Native, the chief person, or the chorus, of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... book was that the style was too good—for a novel. It was not well, he said, to write too well. On the contrary, a certain roughness and carelessness had their advantage, especially with critical readers, and served to show the hand of the professed novelist who, sick or well, in the spirit or not, fills his twenty-four or thirty-six quarto pages per diem. A polished style, on the other hand, exhibited care and looked amateurish. He had no very great opinion of this kind of writing, and advised her to get rid of the delusion that when she wrote a novel ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... than I merited, and I would willingly have contented myself with this phrase. Unfortunately, I could not forget the austere counsel of Monsieur Louis Veuillot, and at this very epoch, Monsieur Louis Ulbach, who as a novelist could merit a great deal of praise, took it into his head to publish a thick volume of transcendental criticism, in which he attacked everything I admired and lauded everything I detested. I confess that I felt extremely embarrassed: those nice little words "fascinating" and "ingenious" stuck ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... not allow that the letters are forgeries, and rather suspects the novelist, his lady(728) for the authoress; and if she is, probably Miss Charlemagne is not quite innocent of the plot: though she still maintains that her mother-in-law elect did give her much encouragement; which, considering her grace's conduct about her children, is not the most incredible part of this ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Adopted Son of California, a novelist and muckraker, returned a few years ago to the beloved land of his adoption. His arrival was made the occasion of a dinner by his Club. He had come back specifically on a muckraking tour. But it happened that during his absence he had written ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... contained; and even that Mr. Hare's engraver has disfigured into the nearly or the utterly irrecognizable. Two Pencil-sketches, which no artist could approve of, hasty sketches done in some social hour, one by his friend Spedding, one by Banim the Novelist, whom he slightly knew and had been kind to, tell a much truer story so far as they go: of these his Brother has engravings; but these also I must ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... say, because a book with the Walpole name on the title-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton's obscure name was at that time sure of not selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his incognito. But this he might have preserved without telling a circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and carrying into comfort the dear ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... those precautions it is no wonder that the novelist felt surprise when days passed and no reply was sent to him. But never at any time was he discouraged. Had they intended to reject the novel, he reasoned, they could as easily have done so in three days ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... bringing her fist down upon the table, "you're a disgusting woman. Yes, you are, and I won't take it back, however much you ask me to. All the worst scandal in this place comes from you. If it weren't for you we shouldn't be so exactly like every novelist's Cathedral town. But I warn you, I won't have you talking about Brandon. His son's only a boy, and the handsomest male in the place by the way—present company, of course, excepted. He's only been home a few months, and you're ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... went out and returned in a few moments with a small lady much wrapped in veils and extremely wet. She stood blinking in the doorway in the accustomed light. She was recognised at once as a well-known English novelist who is conducting a soup kitchen at a railroad station three miles behind the ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... salad which the olive cannot give, and mushrooms pickled in it become the most delicious and indigestible of all imaginable morsels. I have had dreams from those pickled mushrooms which, if I could write them out, would make my fortune as a romantic novelist. ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... an ode in his own study was a memory of life-long value. Among the most venturesome of this class was John Falk, once the humble son of a poor wig-maker of Dantzic, but afterwards the Halle student, the novelist, satirist, and poet.[85] He received high compliments from Wieland, and was admitted into an intimacy with Goethe which resulted in his publication of the latter's Conversations. He gradually gained public favor, and his elevation to the society and attention of the literary ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... listen to the way in which they speak of self-abuse as though it implied monstrous moral perversion, one would think that the condition of morals when they were young was wholly different. The great novelist Thackeray gives little countenance to this opinion when he writes in Pendennis: "And, by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... wreathe her lips. When she heard of the handsome sister in New York, and of her former relations with David Spafford, her eyes narrowed speculatively, and her fair brow drew into puzzled frowns. Harry Temple had drawn a word picture of Mrs. Leavenworth. Harry should have been a novelist. If he had not been too lazy he would have been a success. Gold hair! Ah! Hannah had heard of gold hair before, and in connection with David's promised wife. Here was a mystery and Hannah resolved to look into it. It ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... then, are simply these: The tales of Boccaccio's Decameron were read with great delight by Margaret, by Francis the First, and by his children. They resolved, therefore, to imitate the great Italian novelist by committing to writing the most remarkable incidents supplied by the gossip of the court (see the Prologue to the Heptameron). Francis and his children, finding that Margaret greatly excelled in this species of composition, soon renounced the unequal strife, but encouraged her to pursue ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... destroy the whole reality and probability of the story. To fill a novel with typical characters only, or with merely strange and uncommon people, would render the book unreal and improbable, and would very likely destroy the interest. In my opinion, the duty of the novelist is to seek out points of interest and instruction even in the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... pushed it, thereby distinguishing itself from anything we have seen since the twelfth century. Since the twelfth century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth, in painting and drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art. Now the essence of realism is detail. Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... us nearer than books usually bring us to a living knowledge of some features of a bygone time; and yet again, because it helps us a little to come near to Milton in his daily life. He would be a good novelist who could invent as pleasant a book as this unaffected record of a quiet life touched by great ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... were a novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors and high wainscots, and its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster of pines that turn themselves into aeolian harps every time the wind blows, would be the place in which to write a summer romance. It should be a story ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to give out that he was ill, to allow no one to come into the house, to send everybody away, and to postpone business of every kind for three days. He wheedled the manager of the coach-office, made up a tale for his benefit—he had the makings of an ingenious novelist in him—and obtained a promise that if there should be a place, he should have it, passport or no passport, as well as a further promise to keep the hurried departure a secret. Luckily, the coach ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... man who is happily married is a successful man even if he has failed in everything else. And every man whose marriage is a failure is not a successful man even if he has succeeded in everything else. The great Russian novelist Turgenev said he would give all his fame and all his genius if there were only one woman who cared whether he came home late to dinner. It would have been well if he had known this when ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... I admire all women—they are so clever, so innocent, so pure-minded. Do not your English novels prove it, your English stage, your newspapers, so high-toned? Who supports the novelist, the play-wright, the actor, ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... amount of divine beauty. But for her inner character, let him take that from me as I go on, if so be that I can succeed in making clear to others that which is clear enough to my own mind's eye. I have called her a heroine; it is the novelist's customary name for his prima donna, and so I use it. But many opera companies have more than one prima donna. There is the donna prima, and if one may so say, the donna primissima. Now Adela Guantlet is no more than my donna prima. My donna primissima ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... (1661-1731): an English novelist and political writer. On account of his political writings Defoe was sentenced to stand in the pillory, and to be "imprisoned during the Queen's pleasure." During this imprisonment he wrote many articles. Later in life he wrote ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 1771-1832, the great Scotch poet and novelist, was born in Edinburgh. Being a feeble child, he was sent to reside on his grandfather's estate in the south of Scotland. Here he spent several years, and gained much knowledge of the traditions of border warfare, as well as of the tales and ballads pertaining to it. He was also a great reader ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase, a poetic ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Review if some writers in it have been instrumental in the process of showing how such principles and aims meet the requirements of the new time. Reformers must always be open to the taunt that they find nothing in the world good enough for them. "You write," said a popular novelist to one of this unthanked tribe, "as if you believed that everything is bad." "Nay," said the other, "but I do believe that everything might be better." Such a belief naturally breeds a spirit which the easy-goers of the world resent ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... strawberries and cream which make a coolness and delight in the midst of the raging day—has been erected by woman into one of London's daily social events; and though the novelist has not discovered the fact up to this moment—Mr. McCarthy has made a very pretty love scene on the Terrace, but it is at the witching hour of night—though this discovery has yet to come, the respite is brief, and in a short time we shall have the hero and the heroine passing through ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... asked Remand. "I observed that your novelist had a beautiful house, many rare books, and some priceless paintings and pieces of sculptured marble. Are these among the 'needs' that you have ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the novelist—who was being baited by the moralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock, desire ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, GUNNAR GUNNARSSON. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a melange of family biographies; yet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... the Cavalli, and then a comfortable-looking house with a roof garden and green and yellow posts, opposite which the fondamenta comes to an end. Fenimore Cooper, the novelist of the Red Man, made this palace his home for a while. The pretty little Palazzo Valmarana comes next, and then the gigantic, sombre Grimani with its stone as dark as a Bath or Bloomsbury mansion, which now ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... The drama may be called the art of crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace considerable segments of many lives; ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... main room which gives on Fifth Avenue, he found Ten Eyck Jones talking war. Jones was a novelist, but he did not look like one. There was nothing commercial in his appearance, which was that of a man half-asleep, except when he talked and then he seemed very much awake. He was not fat and though an inkbeast, he dressed after the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Elliston's country house that Amabel first met Paul Quentin. He was a daring young novelist who was being made much of during those years; for at that still somewhat guileless time to be daring had been to be original. His books had power and beauty, and he had power and beauty, fierce, dreaming eyes and an intuitive, sudden ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... plum-pudding, its ways, manners, and customs,—knows more of these things and a thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies, and essays in the language. Where is there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living population, as ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 2 vols. The psychologist who wrote like a novelist. Chapters of special interest: Habit, Instinct, Will, Emotions and The Stream of Consciousness. Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals. Memories and Studies, especially ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... sent to my rooms. I will not hear of your going elsewhere for lodging while in town. I have a floor, and you shall share it. It's a bachelor's ranch from basement to garret, inhabited by artists, journalists, one or two magazine men, a clever novelist, and three of our New York men. There is no small fry save myself. We have little banquets every Friday night, and they sometimes last till Saturday noon. I've taught the Frenchman who represents the Paris Temps how to play poker, and he threatens ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... William Johnson in the Mohawk and Upper Susquehanna Valleys. He acquired title to a large tract of land at the foot of Otsego Lake, but, while settling it, mortgaged the land heavily, and eventually lost it through foreclosure. William Cooper, father of the novelist, subsequently obtained title to these lands and went into the country to settle them. In the course of his labors, he founded the village of Cooperstown, and made it his home. It was this circumstance which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... straight into the action. Treat your subject from different points of view, sometimes in a side-light, sometimes retrospectively; vary your methods, in fact, to diversify your work. You may be original while adapting the Scots novelist's form of dramatic dialogue to French history. There is no passion in Scott's novels; he ignores passion, or perhaps it was interdicted by the hypocritical manners of his country. Woman for him is duty incarnate. His heroines, with possibly one ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... words, not as they are used in talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark; it is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be recognised; that he should, in a literary sense, hang the right man. But it is by no ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... little biographical study of George Eliot is written with sympathy and good taste, and is very welcome. It gives us a graphic if not elaborate sketch of the personality and development of the great novelist, is particularly full and authentic concerning her earlier years, tells enough of the leading motives in her work to give the general reader a lucid idea of the true drift and purpose of her art, and analyzes carefully ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... very anxious to get the novelist's autograph. The fact was that Mr. Day, his house-master, a man whose private life was in other ways unstained by vicious habits, collected autographs. Also Mr. Day had behaved in a square manner towards ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... When Fielding, the novelist, rather boastingly avowed that he never knew, and believed he never should know, the difference between a shilling and sixpence, he was told: "Yes, the time will come when you will know it—when you have only eighteen ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi |
