"Real life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... usual poltroon contrasted with the manly and masterful girl, a conjunction of the lioness and the lamb sometimes seen in real life. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... life are conveyed by our senses to the consciousness within us, and stimulate the world of thought and feeling that constitutes our real life. Thought and feeling are very intimately connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling. But there is this general division ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... own child,' she told him slow; 'you've had a real life. I'm just gettin' to mine—since ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... they say? I think few of you will be at a loss to guess. Life—real life as well as life in story-books—is full of such shocks and surprises. They are half happy, half unhappy; but they have to be borne. Younger sisters, till their own turns come, are apt to take a ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... tell you no woman could: though you'll say I've told enough. I shall burn with shame when I think of it. I could go on my knees to have your arms round me once. I could kill myself for saying it!—I should feel that I had one moment of real life.—I know I ought to admire you. They say a woman hates if she's refused. I can't: I wish I were able to. I could have helped the Radnors better by staying here and threatening never to go to him unless he swore not to do them injury. He's revengeful. Just as you like. You say ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as an old woman "with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue; having a rugged coat on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a dog or cat by her side." Such was the witch of real life when this superstition was so prevalent in our own neighbourhood, and even throughout England. From the beginning of the reign of James the First to the concluding part of the reign of James the Second, it may be considered as having attained the zenith of its popularity. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Government has installed a great variety of displays. Most striking, perhaps, is the section from the National Museum, where the most modern methods of exhibition are exemplified in cases containing human groups that are almost real life. The great pipe organ in Festival Hall is classed as one of the exhibits of this palace. Germany, Japan, China, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Cuba, and New Zealand are heavy exhibitors here. Of special interest is the German exhibit of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... to novels that we chiefly go for pictures of character and manners, and French novels are almost exclusively devoted to pictures of Parisian manners. Balzac, it is true, has given us delineations of provincial life; but the delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the problems of real life, and even if we could always accept the portraitures they give us as undistorted, they generally presuppose a knowledge on the part of the reader on those points on which the foreigner is most apt to be ignorant. In any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... because his power to conquer worlds is the product of his own 'past life and his own past needs. To weave knowledge into action is the antidote for ennui. To plan, to hope, to do, to accomplish the full measure of our powers, whatever they may be, is to turn away from Nirvana to real life. A useful man, a helpful man, an active man in any sense, even though his, activity be misdirected or harmful, is always ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... possibly be true. It was not that they doubted their friend's veracity, but the country, the men, and therefore the happenings were so strange to the lads that they seemed to have an existence only in books and not to be possible in real life. But now Mick showed the stuff he was made of. When he had found out all there was to learn, about what the blacks had done, and exactly what position the party was left in, he stopped thinking about that part of the question ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... hospitality, the farmer invited every one in the room to come and stay with him as soon as he was settled down. He would show them, he said, what real life was ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Senator's return with the approaching arrival of Fabian, was one of those events in which chance, oftener than might be supposed, sports with the events of real life. ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... great reason to be thankful: the approbation of such men as your husband is no slight encouragement and no slight happiness. I assure you we have felt this deeply. After great anxiety one feels more as if in a happy dream than in real life and you will not laugh at the relief to me of seeing him well after such an effort and after such labour as it ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... poignant conviction). He cares for only one person in the world; and that is himself. There is not in his whole nature one unselfish spot. He would not spend one hour of his real life with— (a sob chokes her: she rises passionately, crying) You are all alike, every one of you. Even my father only makes a pet of me. (She goes away to the fireplace and stands with her back ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... pence—pantomimes compact of fun and fantasy, far surpassing, even to the man's eye, the gilded dullnesses of Drury Lane. The pantomimes of the Pavilion, too, were frolicsome and wondrous, marred only by the fact that I knew one of the fairies in real life, a good-natured girl who sewed carpet-slippers for a living. The Pavilion, by the way, is in the Whitechapel Road, not a mile from the People's Palace, in the region where, according to the late Mr. Walter Besant, nobody ever laughs. The Pavilion, like the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... real life was very pale, and had exquisitely chiselled features, and the ones I now looked upon were of the same cast. The height was also similar, and an indescribable atmosphere of refinement, purity, and quiet dignity, for which she had been remarkable; all this was present with this ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... rascality, the editor would find something sweet, full of country charm and suburban peace, to feed them.... On the title-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,—a "homely" story of "real life" among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc.... Fosdick had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. 'So ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... is a sketch from real life. He was a petty officer in the service at the same time with me, and notwithstanding his rambling life, was a man of good education and strong mind. His life was a striking illustration of the truth of the proposition that "there is no ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... is, at the age of sixteen, Buonaparte was nominated for a commission as junior lieutenant in La Fere regiment of artillery quartered at Valence on the Rhone. This was his first close contact with real life. The rules of the service required him to spend three months of rigorous drill before he was admitted to his commission. The work was exacting: the pay was small, viz., 1,120 francs, or less than L45, a year; but all reports agree as to his keen zest for his profession ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... where Beulah got her nonsense," he retorted. "All this talk about real life is very fine, but you don't get much life, real or any other kind, unless you have the cash to pay down for it. You can't buy beefsteaks with long walks over the prairie, nor clothe yourself and family ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... might be some stranger's wife, and that we might never more hear anything of her! Yet you discover her identity at once. This is the kind of thing which occasionally occurs in novels, but which critics say never happens in real life. Well, now ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... a life work of the most charming description. Winifred envied them. It was indeed their business to make all men, women, and children who passed envy them enough to stop, enter the store, and purchase things to make real life as much as possible like life in ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life,—the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... cries Critic, hold; Pritchard's for comedy too fat and old: 820 Who can, with patience, bear the gray coquette, Or force a laugh with over-grown Julett?[67] Her speech, look, action, humour, all are just, But then, her age and figure give disgust. Are foibles, then, and graces of the mind, In real life, to size or age confined? Do spirits flow, and is good-breeding placed In any set circumference of waist? As we grow old, doth affectation cease, Or gives not age new vigour to caprice? 830 If in originals these things appear, Why should we bar ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... on his spacious marble we rely, Pity a worth like his should ever die! If credit to his real life we give, Pity a wretch like him should ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... women so bad at playing this part in real life, this Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for our sakes? They do it ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... inconsistent with free hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel Carter of Cartersville" had many a prototype in real life. A higher type was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Washington was not broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to some degree into the real life of the Roman people, to catch the true spirit of their actions, and to indicate the current of the national life, while avoiding the presentation of particular episodes or periods with undue prominence. It is intended to set down the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... incident in the history of benevolence, which we must regret is only practised in such limited communities. Malte-Brun, in his "Annales des Voyages," has painted a scene of this nature, which may read like some romance of real life. The girls, after a service of ten years, on one great holiday, an epoch in their lives, receive the ample reward of their good conduct. On that happy day the mistress and all the friends of the family prepare for the maiden a sort of dowry or marriage-portion. Every ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... know," said Luke, wagging his ears, "I sometimes doubt whether I am sufficiently in touch with real life. I ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... had assigned them: he expressly condemns the extemporizing with which they loved to enlarge their parts.[26] Johnson founds the justification of the species of drama in which seriousness and mirth are mixed, on this, that in real life the vulgar is found close to the sublime, that the merry and the sad usually accompany and succeed each other. But it does not follow that, because both are found together, therefore they must not be separable in the compositions of art. The observation is in other respects ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... reproduce the past, by painting its events with the most vivid colors of description. They do not give the polished, stately bas-reliefs of the old historians, but glowing pictures, perhaps less distinct in their outlines, but conveying a stronger impression of real life. The works of Prescott, (who has maintained, however, a happy medium between these styles,) Michelet, Lamartine, and Carlyle, furnish striking ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... on the New Orleans Crescent. A year later the restlessness which had rebelled against the grave professions led him to the gold fields of California, and San Francisco. There, in 1852, at the age of only twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco Herald, Walker began his real life which so soon was to end ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... his intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... cigarette and let his honest gray eyes wander from Luck to the darkly handsome face of the Native Son. "Sounds most as exciting as holding down a homestead, anyway. Don't you think so, Mig? And say! It's sure a pity we can't put off some things in real life till we get all set and ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... pictures which fill the churches of Italy and Spain, works of the old masters, are now chiefly prized for their grace of form and richness of coloring,—exhibitions of ideal beauty, charming as creations, but not such as we see in real life; George Eliot's novels, on the contrary, are not works of imagination, like the frescos in the Sistine Chapel, but copies of real life, like those of Wilkie and Teniers, which we value for their fidelity to Nature. And in regard to the passion of love, she does not portray it, as in the old-fashioned ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found. There are no women portrayed in the Bible who equal thousands and thousands of known to-day. The women of the Bible fall almost infinitely below, not simply those in real life, but the creations of the imagination found in the world of fiction. They will not compare with the women born of Shakespeare's brain. You will find none like Isabella, in whose spotless life, love and reason blended into perfect truth; nor Juliet, within whose heart, passion and purity met like ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... no conflict with Life or common sense, if this sense were consistently sensible. Man's real life or existence is in harmony with Life and its glorious phenomena. It upholds being, and destroys the too [15] common sense of its opposites—death, disease, and sin. Christian Science is an everlasting victor, and vanquish- ment is unknown to the omnipresent Truth. ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... The time is that of Charles II. The book is historical, it is very long, it is minute in detail, and it is melodramatic: but it is alive. The strange adventures may or may not have happened, but we believe in them, for it is real life that is set before us; and whatever the author may tell us of robber caves and black-hearted villains, there is nothing incredible in any of his confidences. Nothing in recent novel writing is more vivid than the contrast between these outcast nobles the Doones, robbers and brigands, living ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... is a pure, true book without effort, which, in these days of gesture and rolling of the eyes, is an uncommon thing. Also you make your 'private judgment' work itself out quietly as a simple part of the love of truth, instead of being the loud heroic virtue it is so apt in real life to profess itself, seldom moving without drums and trumpets and the flying of party colours. All these you have put down rightly, wisely, and boldly, and it was, in my mind, no less wise than bold of you to let in that odour of Tyrrwhitism ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... honeyed romance. In particular she played one episode, the trying over of a new song, in a winningly natural manner. I found the way in which she flapped her eyelids a subject of puzzled study. I have not observed that maidens in real life indulge in these calisthenics. This is perhaps as well; they are evidently very deadly. Within a fortnight of their being brought into action poet Quintard is in the Kamerad stage. Not Anne Whitfield herself exhibits ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... world had come to her—real life. She saw her power; the gates of that mysterious kingdom, in which the reborn soul is a new creation, had been opened to her. Her spirit seemed to rise as on new-created wings, and the world to sink beneath her. She had spiritual sight, ears, and senses—a new consciousness of Divine ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... lowly peones drowsing away life's little hour within! There was scarcely a book in the town. Few of its inhabitants could even read or write. Culture, education, refinement—all wanting. Nothing but primal existence—the barest necessities of real life. He could not stand it! He had been a fool all his years! He would throw everything to the winds and go out into the world to live his life as it had been intended he should live it. He would send his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Who is he That every man in arms should wish to be? —It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: Whose high endeavors are an inward light That makes the path before him always bright: Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... answered. "I miss it all! Of course I do, and yet one is so much nearer to life here, the real life of men and women. Oh, one cannot compare it. Why should ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all the better reason why I should promptly incline the greedy ear, for over and above his eccentricities in the matter of launching a subject, Mr. Doolan is the only member of his calling I ever saw who talks in real life as all the members of his calling are fondly presumed to talk, in story-books ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... none is more beautiful than Lake Lugano, although Como is larger and Maggiore has a charm of its own. The town of Lugano stands at one end of the lake. It is pretty and bright, with many things to interest and amuse; but it is in the villages dotted along the south side of the lake that the real life of the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... translating Othello in consequence of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate 'Le bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example of the difference between la tragedie philosophique and the drama of real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word mouchoir at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic- realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola the enfant terrible, just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was emphasised ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... to Baltimore and be awakened by the enemy's cannon thundering against the other sides of the figure!—leave Baltimore out of the calculation and lose, perhaps, the whole of Maryland! McClellan was disturbed enough. And then, in the great drama of real life there occurred an incident. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... solitude, drew her enjoyment from society. There was not a family in the village near, that did not, in some way or other, promote her happiness. Her information was gathered from intercourse with living beings—her knowledge from real life. If the two sisters had changed situations, the one might have become a mere bookworm; the other, from the liveliness of her disposition, and the warm interest she took in characters, a little of a gossip. As it was, they both admirably filled their sphere in life, and influenced and were ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... dramatic situations in real life quite as well as in make-believe, planned to conceal her radiance until her first appearance on the stage, when she would startle them all, and especially Lysander, with her dazzling loveliness. She stood in a shadow of the wings with her coat wrapped about ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... My early ambition had been for a hard place in the world, where the world's work would force me to give hard knocks before I reached success. But now I shrank from the jostle and bustle and harsh competitions of real life; and as both my mother and Mr. Floyd wished nothing so much as that I should be guarded from all effort and fatigue at this epoch, everything conspired to unfit me for an active career, and to make me a mere looker-on—not a worker, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... ground of this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the first-born of the spirit of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... or pathetic; to select a verse that melts the heart or enlarges the imagination. We should vainly seek, in the poems of Claudian, the happy invention, and artificial conduct, of an interesting fable; or the just and lively representation of the characters and situations of real life. For the service of his patron, he published occasional panegyrics and invectives: and the design of these slavish compositions encouraged his propensity to exceed the limits of truth and nature. These imperfections, however, are compensated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the danger of morbidity through emphasis on sin is undeniable. Yet it seems to me that the worst errors of Calvinism and Evangelicalism in this regard have lain in a tendency to theological formalism and a failure to keep in touch with real life. In consequence, those who most deplore our waning sense of sin try us by a perverted or antiquated standard, and fasten often on changes of sentiment and habit which are by no means necessarily or largely sinful. They are least conscious of the want of a sense of sin, in modern society, where ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... history,' continued she. 'It is a tragedy of real life, which you will do well, young painter, to compare with your own!' With a kindly pressure of the hand, and a gentle smile—oh! so sweet, so pure, and heavenly!—Julia Reay left me; while I sat perfectly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... books and did the same work at the same hours as formerly. It seemed to me that I was stifling in this atmosphere. I gasped for breath, and thought that anything would be preferable to this semblance of existence, which was not real life. I was thinking of applying for the 'good situation,' which had so often been mentioned to me, when one morning I was summoned into the steward's office—a mysterious and frightful place to us children. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... soliloquy came into being. We moderns, however, see the absurdity of it. In real life no one thinks aloud or in an empty room. The up-to-date dramatist must at all costs avoid this hall-mark of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... appreciation of the intelligence of the great artists who had interpreted a story which thrilled the imagination of generation after generation, and he felt that Parliament was a paltry thing. Parliament—what was Parliament? The wrangle of political parties over a paltry issue. It had no real life in it; it had nothing of the fullness and breadth of the matters that interested ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... conjectures as to the romantic side of his dealings with the rightful king are vague and need not be recorded. "You can be in a new conspiracy every day," said an Irishman with zest, but conspiracies are better things in fiction than in real life; and Stevenson had no personal ambitions, and, withal, as much common sense as Shelley displayed in certain late events of his life. He turned to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... according to the title. Remembering that "Harry Collingwood" was in real life a naval architect, you can take good note of the way he handles nautical terminology. Other contemporary authors were good, but in this respect Collingwood is a ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... photoplay compare with the drama?—we seem to have sufficient material on hand to form an esthetic judgment. The verdict, it appears, can hardly be doubtful. Must we not say art is imitation of nature? The drama can show us on the stage a true imitation of real life. The scenes proceed just as they would happen anywhere in the outer world. Men of flesh and blood with really plastic bodies stand before us. They move like any moving body in our surroundings. Moreover those happenings on the stage, just like the events ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... ideals of success which demand that the worker become a boss of somebody else is that the world of industry needs only a relatively small number of bosses. Theoretically it is possible for any individual to reach the eminence of boss-ship. In real life less than one-tenth of the boys who enter industrial employment can rise above the level of the journeyman artisan, at least before later middle age, because only about that proportion of bosses ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... imagination. Perhaps the most striking feature of this volume, is its truthfulness and freshness of feeling. The author has ventured to appropriate the most sacred emotions as the materials for his composition. Scenes, over which the vail is reverently drawn in real life, and which are touched lightly by the great masters of passion, are here depicted with the most faithful minuteness of coloring, and fondly dwelt on, as if the artist could not leave the tearful creations of his fancy. Nothing but an almost Shakspearian fidelity to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... praise of the monks of old for preserving works of solid wisdom; but why can not a good word be said for those publishers of the present day who confer a service by not merely embalming, but by reviving and sending forth by thousands into real life the best books of the past? There are many authors who are quoted by everybody, and read by very few, simply because good modern editions of their works, at ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... violently stirred by the new surroundings. She was painfully affected. She began to feel almost desperate. That terrible sensation, known perhaps in its frightening nightmare fulness only to youth, "My life is done, all real life is at an end for me, because I cannot be linked with my other half, because I have found it, but it has not found me!" besieged, assailed her. It shook her, as neurasthenia shakes its victim, squeezing as if with fierce and powerful hands till the blood seems to be driven out of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... I might go on almost indefinitely with the story of Anna; but in real life stories have a curious way of coming to quick fruition, and withering away after having cast the seeds of ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... not mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakspeare's or equal to it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood;—when the meaning is once seen, then the harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... heard. Were all her dreams mere empty imaginings? she asked. If so, why should they ever have come to her? she inquired piteously; why should she have found solace in them—why should they have become her real life? Did no one walk the earth of all that company which went with her in ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... divorce and readjustment. Neither is the writer's inner thesis—the immoralness of ordinary morality, so far as I can make out—particularly agreeable; but Anita, though far from being the sort of person one would look to meet in real life, is intriguing after a fashion, and just possibly repays the hard work needed for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... &or instance why does the thingonthetop the klnd of overhead Wailway arrrangement move along one pace afterr every word; I haVe exam@aaa ined the mechanism from all points of view but there seeems to be noreason atall whyit shouould do tLis . damn that L, it keeps butting in: it is Just lik real life. then there are all kinds oF attractive devisesand levers andbuttons of which is amanvel in itself, and does somethI5g useful without lettin on how it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... known that Emmeline was at the bottom of it; but he didn't, and he began going to see Althea Gillis, and they were married the next year. Althea was a rather nice girl, though giddy, and I think she and Stephen were happy enough together. In real life things are often ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reached the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... to Harrod's to get relief, or one takes a 'bus, or one tries Trafalgar Square, or one sees if one can really get across the Strand or one does something—almost anything to recall one's self to real life. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... plan of the writers of the different volumes to enter into the real life of the peoples, and to bring them before the reader as they actually lived, labored, and struggled—as they studied and wrote, and as they amused themselves. In carrying out this plan, the myths, ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... four writers together, it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the poet of romance; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton as they ought ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... lay awake thinking. Of what? Unacquainted with real life, having no store of accumulated impressions, his mental processes could only be instinctive, and he could but picture life in accordance with the conceptions that he had inherited, together with his flesh and blood, from his ancestors, the tigers (vide Darwin). His thoughts ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... will be kept in view throughout my somewhat discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun my hour, you must pardon me, for I can say with Pascal that I have not had the time ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... easily obtainable. The poems can be bought in more forms than one; Messrs. Smith and Elder have reprinted cheaply the "Autobiography," "Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "The Town," "Wit and Humour," "Table Talk," and "A Jar of Honey." Other reprints of "One Hundred Romances of Real Life" (one of his merest pieces of book-making) and of his "Stories from the Italian Poets," one of his worst pieces of criticism, but agreeably reproduced in every respect save the hideous American spelling, have recently appeared. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... hear an Italian opera half as badly sung in England as we may hear the Foscari performed, to-night, in the splendid theatre of San Carlo. But, for astonishing truth and spirit in seizing and embodying the real life about it, the shabby little San Carlino Theatre—the rickety house one story high, with a staring picture outside: down among the drums and trumpets, and the tumblers, and the lady ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... accepted the invitation, and enjoyed the trip greatly. I think it was all the more interesting and instructive because we went for most of the way on one of the slow, old-fashioned canal-boats. This gave us an opportunity of seeing and studying the real life of the people in the country districts. We went in this way as far as Rotterdam, and later went to The Hague, where the Peace Conference was then in session, and where we were kindly received by the ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... real life is true also of its counterfeit in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious, but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium and Hellas quite the same; the decorous armed dance, the "leap" (-triumpus-, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... where the author has no description to rely on to explain who and what his characters are, there is especial need of names that will help to indicate the social status of his different characters. In real life, a bank president is as likely to be a Casey or a Smith as he is to be a Rutherford or a Pendleton, but the chances are that, when given to a great banker, either of the last two names would make a greater impression on "popular" spectators. Again, certain names ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... but—" The difference between the two men no doubt lay in the fact that Prof. Marheincke, the speculative theologian, was principally interested in the first part of the assumed contrast—thinking, whereas Grundtvig's main concern was with the last—being, existence, life. In real life there could be no more fundamental, no farther reaching contrast than the continuous and irreconcilable difference between life and death. The thought of this contrast lies at the root of all his thinking and colors all his views. From the day of his conversion ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... individual.[2273] Adultery also appealed to the love of intrigue and the appreciation of the imaginative element. Lewd stories and dramas were produced in great numbers in which the cunning and deception of adultery were developed in all imaginable combinations of circumstances. In real life a woman's relatives showed great ferocity in enforcing against her all the current conventions about her conduct. That was because she might bring disgrace and ridicule on them by marrying beneath her, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... will never happen. I know, that whatever one foresees, and FEELS has happened, never happens in real life. It sort of works itself off through the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... less artistic in spirit. They impress one as if the soft, luxurious court atmosphere had passed over them, and taking away their strong points, had left them only a general air of being well-bred and well-kept persons, of little importance to the real life of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... however, cease to offer some degree of interest to the Shakespearean student, for this process makes us aware not merely of what materials Shakespeare happened to use, but from what stores he chose them. On this account such works as Greene's tales of real life have been studied at some length, and a chapter has been devoted to Nash, who, high as he stands among the older novelists, has been allowed to pass unnoticed as a tale writer by all historians of fiction. If, therefore, ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the publication of Daily Bread Mr. Gibson was hailed as a new poet of the people. Fires, his later volume, confirmed the impression that here was a man whose writing was close to real life, a man in whom were combined a sympathy and appreciation of humankind with a rare lyrical genius. This present book continues the work which Mr. Gibson can do so well. In it are brought together three plays and a number of short lyrics which reveal again ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... him like a tigress. "It feeds upon electricity and it can discharge a lightning bolt. Don't you see? There are few weapons that can resist it. But that is not all. In your own brain, Gunnar, there is a charge of electricity. It may be the only real life that you have within you. This can take it all away. That was why I asked for a live ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... was this edition of the The Story of the Glittering Plain, it yet raised a doubt—the doubt as to whether there was any real life in this effort to start afresh from old models, or whether it was a mere antiquarian revival and nothing more. The history of printing—or rather of the handwriting which the first printers took as their models—recorded, at least, one instance in which an antiquarian revival had been of permanent ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... comprehension of the masculine way of thinking. Strictly speaking, Helene Boehlau knows of only two sorts of feeling for men: hatred of the brutal beast and admiration for an ideal, which is born of longing to embrace a lofty, victorious personality. In real life she has found the fulfilment of her longing in her husband, the strange prophet who as half a Turk gathered about himself in Munich a queer circle of auditors for his mystical Oriental philosophy. To his memory she erected a dutiful monument in her last work Isebies (1911), an apology ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... from the brilliant eyes! "Smart trick, eh?" they telegraphed. I had to turn away, or I should have laughed. Surely never before, on stage or in story—to say nothing of real life—was the villain and blackmailer a mischievous, schoolboy imp, who made his victims giggle at the very antics which caught them in his toils! But, come to think of it, I am a villain, and next door to a blackmailer! Yet I always see myself (unless I stop to reflect ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... pen. He took a comedy in five acts to the Odeon; the comedy was accepted, the management arranged to bring it out, the actors learned their parts, the stage manager urged on the rehearsals. Five several bits of luck, five dramas to be performed in real life, and far harder tasks than the writing of a five-act play. The poor author lodged in a garret; you can see the place from here. He drained his last resources to live until the first representation; his wife pawned her clothes, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... writing for children (as was Marryat), and even if morality can best be implanted in the young mind with a watering of fiction, yet a desert-island story is the last story which should be used for this purpose. For a desert-island is a child's escape from real life and its many lessons. Ask yourself why you longed for a desert-island when you were young, and you will find the answer to be that you did what you liked there, ate what you liked, and carried through your own adventures. It is the "Family" which spoils The Swiss Family ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... in New York City and there wrote his best stories. Instead of writing of the Four Hundred, or the social set of the great city, as so many other writers were fond of doing, with his clever pen he revealed to us through little sketches the real life of the four million others in New York. Laundresses, messenger boys, policemen, clerks, even the tramps ever present in the parks were pictured for us as real everyday people whom one could find anywhere. Read his stories in The ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... La Salle, beginning his real life-work, sold his domain and its improvements, equipped a party, and started out into the wilderness. We trace his route as far as the Seneca country, in western New York. Then for two years we lose sight of him altogether. This time he passed among the Indians; and there is the best reason ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... children, there's soon a dozen of them! Poor Mrs. This and This—it makes one quite weak both in body and mind only to think of it! Yes, yes, my friends, people don't put these things down in romances, but it goes on in this way in real life! Yes!" ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... cause is just and holy. Let them protest against wrong measures, let them refuse to participate in them—nothing can be better; but to withdraw into a sort of political Thebais because the noblest parties have stains on their banner, is, in truth, to turn their back on the civil obligations of real life. ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... seemed to her that no girl had ever been placed in so painful a position before. We, who have more experience of life than Lesley had, know better than that. Lesley's position was painful indeed, but it might in many ways have been worse. But she, ignorant of real life, more ignorant even than most girls, because she knew so few of the pictures of real life that are to be found in the best kind of novels, had nothing but her native instincts of truth and courage to fall back upon, together with the strong will and power of judgment that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... its own complacency. The keynote of these little plays is dread of the unknown that surrounds us. I, or rather some obscure poetical feeling within me (for with the sincerest of poets a division must often be made between the instinctive feeling of their art and the thoughts of their real life), seemed to believe in a species of monstrous, invisible, fatal power that gave heed to our every action, and was hostile to our smile, to our life, to our peace and our love. Its intentions could not be divined, but the spirit of the drama assumed ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... suffered enough. I have lowered the social key of the original considerably, not only to bring it within the compass of the executant, but also to make a distinction. I have increased the remoteness from real life—which was sometimes appreciable in the original—to such an extent that it should be impossible to suppose that any of the grotesques of the parody is intended for anybody in real life. Nobody in the parody is ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... thing, then, is to see that the talk of the class room takes place under as natural conditions as serious conversation and discussion elsewhere, thus duplicating real life. We know that children may spell words correctly in lists that they will miss in writing letters, and that they can solve problems in arithmetic correctly in school that seem quite beyond them when accidentally met as actual problems outside. Such facts emphasize ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... history; but first we must introduce our readers to a new character—a great and holy man, destined by Providence to save Alvira, and give the most interesting and most remarkable chapter in this romance of real life. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... dreamed a wonderful dream since first he had beheld the charming fur-clad figure enter his office at Sachigo. He had realised, even in those first moments, the impish act of Fate. Nancy McDonald was the one woman in the world who could mean life—real life to him, and they were definitely arrayed against each other in the battle for commercial supremacy in ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... true love. She had loved Lucien for six years as actresses love and courtesans—women who, having rolled in mire and impurity, thirst for something noble, for the self-devotion of true love, and who practice exclusiveness—the only word for an idea so little known in real life. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... whether the change be occasioned by enlarging or diminishing it? But it never should be lost sight of, that such a one is only an abstraction after all, for which, not only in the transition to practice, but even in finished theory, we must turn to the infinite variety of real life.(167) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... highest circles, between the parties of Rumyantsev, the French, Marya Fedorovna, the Tsarevich, and others, drowned as usual by the buzzing of the court drones. But the calm, luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about phantoms and reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made it hard, except by a great effort, to realize the danger and the difficult position of the Russian people. There were the same receptions and balls, the same French theater, the same court ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... natural scenery are most remote, strange, beautiful and delightful. They are doubtless composites of actual localities but in their construction and use fine powers of imagination are at work and real life seems left far behind. In my dreams of this type the ocean stands as a symbol of Life itself, of the mighty and profound procreative force the entrance into whose domination is the crisis of existence. For this experience is demanded the mightiest symbol. It is evening. I am on ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... "Not in real life I grant you. But on the stage it's different. I'm sorry you don't care for my tragedy," he ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... smile at the optimism of our grand-fathers. We know now that railway dividends are not as readily earned in real life as they sometimes are in dreams which follow gorgeous banquets; but, in one respect, at any rate, the future of the Oswestry and Newtown undertaking appeared to justify jubilation. Axes had been, at any rate, temporarily buried; the advocates of rival routes ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... act of what we call death, the angel, strong enough then to cast off its wrappings, survives and begins its real life. The infinite variety which differentiates individual men can only be explained by this twofold existence, which, again, is proved and ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... and the nature of truth and of the chief good to consist; but in this division I miserably imagined there to be some unknown substance of irrational life, and the nature of the chief evil, which should not only be a substance, but real life also, and yet not derived from Thee, O my God, of whom are all things. And yet that first I called a Monad, as it had been a soul without sex; but the latter a Duad; -anger, in deeds of violence, and in flagitiousness, lust; not knowing whereof I spake. For I had not known or learned ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... discovering truth unawares; but nothing can be more futile and fastidious than the meagre notes of the original actor, fresh woven and discoloured by the hands of an obsequious servant, who conceals all the facts he cannot explain, and all the motives he cannot justify. Such memoirs resemble the real life as the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... sausage at such a moment; and he could not feel that a job as waiter at a New York hotel was an adequate job for an exceptional man. Of course, the root of the trouble lay in the fact that the fellow could not remember what his real life-work had been before the war. It was exasperating to reflect, as the other moved away to take his order to the kitchen, that there, for all one knew, went the dickens of a lawyer or doctor or architect or ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... a little thought.—"You remember the story which Trevanion (I beg his pardon, Lord Ulswater) told us the other night. That gives you something of the romance of real life for your plot—puts you chiefly among scenes with which you are familiar, and furnishes you with characters which have been sparingly dealt with since the time of Fielding. You can give us the country squire, as you remember him in your youth: it is a specimen of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of thirty near died of Their hunger for lore, as they slaved by the side of Rejected aspirants with faces hairless, Like sparrows in spring, scatter-brained and careless. —Vigorous seamen whose adventurous mind First drove them from school that real life they might find— But now to cruise wide on the sea they were craving, Where the flag of free thought o'er all life wide is waving. —Bankrupted merchants who their books had wooed In their silent stores, till their creditors sued And took from them their goods. Now they studied "on ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... his outstanding characteristics was his love of women, a really amusing and at times ridiculous quality. He was always sighing over the beauty, innocence, sweetness, this and that, of young maidenhood in his songs, but in real life he seemed to desire and attract quite a different type—the young and beautiful, it is true, but also the old, the homely and the somewhat savage—a catholicity of taste I could never quite stomach. It was "Paul dearest" here and "Paul dearest" there, especially in his work in connection ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... must be saved in his own time and by his own methods. For my own part, I don't see what conceivable chance of success in life there is left for him. You can't imagine a man like him making money and living comfortably. It's a tragedy—all the dramas of real life always ARE tragedies; but I'm terribly afraid there's no ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry down to the present time, of the spirituality which constitutes the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible, be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students. What I mean by spirituality is explained in my treatment of the subject. The degree to which poetry is quickened with it should always enter into an ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of the deceased who are spoken of as lying in the surrounding churchyard. But first for the one picture given by the 'Wanderer' of the living. In this nothing is introduced but what was taken from Nature, and real life. The cottage was called Hackett, and stands, as described, on the southern extremity of the ridge which separates the two Langdales. The pair who inhabited it were called Jonathan and Betty Yewdale. Once when our children were ill, of whooping-cough ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... out the man or woman. But I would have everybody feel that the man makes the Dress. Almost any thing looks well on a noble woman. The plainest Dress becomes agreeable when worn by a person of grand purpose and good-doing life. Real life when unadorned is most adorned. Noble womanhood is always beautiful. The world always has and always will admire it. The richest Dress is always worn on the soul. The adornments that will not perish, and that all men most admire, shine from the heart through this life. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... may have impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to "My Uncle Toby." The simplicity of nature and the "kindly, sweet disposition" are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's "rapid and hasty temper" in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably. And, on the whole, there seems no ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... sublime! What a roar of applause must follow! Then she should enter herself, and fling her arms about her husband's neck, and call him her lion-hearted husband. When the curtain dropped, it would be buzzed about the house that the scene just witnessed had been drawn from real life, and had actually occurred in the household of the Rev. Theobald Pontifex, who had married a ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... went across with father and Debby once, and stayed a year. It was such a pleasant time! Father's people live in an old town they call Lynn—such a pretty, shady place, with a drowsy air that wakes into real life two or three times a day, when the factory people stream through the streets—for you ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... imagination. I—I—" and the Emperor stroked his beard and gazed out into the distance. "I learn by experience that the older I grow, the more often I find it possible so to imagine men, places, and things that I have not seen as that when I meet them in real life for the first time, I feel justified in fancying that I have known them long since, visited them, and beheld them with my bodily eyes. Here, for instance, I feel as if I saw nothing new, but only gazed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who spoke to him. At night at home, as he lay in his comfortable bed, he used to think of his aunt and the other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church, from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... he was one of those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a man. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little Jew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of those accidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the one of the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff or sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, with knots and bunches of their little ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... said Uncle John. "They'll combine the phonograph with the pictures, for one thing, so that the players, instead of being silent, will speak as clearly as in real life. Then we'll have the grand operas, by all the most famous singers, elaborately staged; and we'll be able to see and hear them for ten cents, instead of ten dollars. It will be the same with the plays of the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... till the earth falls into the sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physiological and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you, or for anyone, at any time. But my real life, as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes, has nothing before or after because it is beyond time. It is independent of birth and death because it cannot be related to biological events; it is not born, and will not die; it is immortal; all ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... and the castles of their vassals, offered a new and more genial home to the poets of Germany than the monasteries of Fulda and St. Gall. Poetry changed hands. The poets took their inspirations from real life, though they borrowed their models from the romantic cycles of Brittany and Provence. Middle High-German, the language of the Swabian court, became the language of poetry. The earliest compositions in that language continue ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the work for him. One should write what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, look up and into the sky of real life itself. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... was bred a lawyer, and them 'ere lawyers are good at all sorts of tricks. Clapp and him had made out a story from my papers and what they know'd before, and got it all ready in a letter; they agreed that from the time of the wreck, they had better keep pretty straight to Hopgood's real life; and ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... not die a natural death here as well as anywhere? All mankind die, and then there is an end of all——An end of all! did I say? No, there is something within that gives me the lie when I say so. Let me see; Death, my master used to say, is not an end, but a beginning of real life: and may it not be so? May I not as well undergo a change from this to a different state of life when I leave this world, as be born into it I know not from whence? Who sent me into this world? Who framed me of two natures so unlike, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... thought that her best days, which she would have employed in loving him, were being vainly wasted, with no advantage to anyone, tormented her incessantly. His letters for the most part irritated her. It hurt her to think that while she lived only in the thought of him, he was living a real life, seeing new places and new people that interested him. The more interesting his letters were the more vexed she felt. Her letters to him, far from giving her any comfort, seemed to her a wearisome and artificial obligation. She could not write, because she could not ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... with rage and disappointment when he recapitulated his blighted hopes, his fruitless efforts, and the insults he had endured. The past had been sad, the present was intolerable, the future threatened to be terrible. Condemned to constant privations, he tried to escape from the horrors of his real life by taking refuge ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... in the complete certainty of returning to office, for which they are already making all their arrangements. The parts are all so quietly performed, the catastrophe is so clearly before everybody's eyes and understanding, that it more resembles a dramatic representation than a mighty event in real life, big ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... at first, utterly unlike real life, they said—nothing. The boy moved round and stood close to his side so that he found himself placed between them, all three leaning forward over the rails watching the phosphorescence ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... is quite a romance. He is just returned from Turin, where he was received with enthusiasm, might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover some of his property, confiscated years ago by the Austrians. It does one's heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred to real life. Apropos of public events, all London is talking of the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming, who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in 1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... example of the defects of the English school and college training. Although he could write and speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... does make a real life for oneself until one does settle. I've found that out for myself,' said ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... proud of her director-husband, of her dramatic talent, and of her children, of which she had four. In real life she was fond of playing the role of a matron occupied only with her home and the upbringing of her children, while in truth she was nothing but a comedienne, both in life and behind the scenes. On the ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude. "Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life than is Lelia. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a child. There is no action. The interest is not ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... reel life as against real life! We are not shown how she yearns for the activities of her old career; we are not shown the feeling she constantly has that she is too good for housekeeping. If she has been fortunate enough to marry ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... expresses when he says that he follows after if that he may 'lay hold of that for which also he is laid hold of by Jesus Christ.' This is the underlying thought, that according to a Christian man's acts here is his capacity of receiving the real life yonder. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... persecuted by an unreasoning world. If he followed the beaten track, whither would it lead? To a position of comfort and respectability, in which the first duty was to throw a veil over one's own heart and those of others: to suppress all doubt and inquiry, and to deaden all real life in the individual, so that the whole machine might continue its regular movements without noise or friction. But truth was a two-edged sword, sharp and shining as crystal. When the light of truth broke into the heart of ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... better all the time," in the American manner. It was merely on general principles that he had cabled,—"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger brother humorously, he remarked,—"I thought you'd better get a taste of real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on the way. You'd better see ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... forgetfulness of the present, Balthazar Claes had abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some sweet and companionable meaning had revisited that thoughtful countenance, if the fixed eyes had lost their rigid strain and shone with feeling, if he had ever looked humanly about him and returned to the real life of common things, it would indeed have been difficult not to do involuntary homage to the winning beauty of his face and the gracious soul that would then have shone from it. As it was, all who looked at him regretted that ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... brother, registering disgust. "The motion pictures have spoiled that sort of thing. They have to propose bang outright in the films because the fans can't be bothered by the nuances of courtship. But for a chap to get down on his knees these days in real life would make the girl laugh as loud as the fans would whoop if the hero in reel life stood on his head and popped the question. Nothing of that kind of formal stuff in my ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... people say of my manner of life!" [It will be perceived by those readers who are kind or patient enough to reach the conclusion of this work, that Russelton is specified as one of my few dramatis personae of which only the first outline is taken from real life: all the rest—all, indeed, which forms and marks the character thus briefly delineated, is drawn ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Pacific." In this lively production of dramatic genius Hayes was portrayed as something worse than Blackboard or Llonois, and committed more murders and abductions of beautiful women in two hours than ever fell to the luck in real life of the most gorgeous pirate on record. No one of the audience was more interested or applauded more vigorously the villain's downfall than "Bully" Hayes himself, who was seated in a private box with a lady. He had come to ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... when I worked there." It is now a quarter of a century since the painter's life work ended, and in these years some few changes have been made in the customs and costumes which Millet's pictures represented. Such changes, however, are only outward; the real life of peasant labor is always the same. Seedtime and harvest, toil, weariness and rest, the ties of home and of religion, are subjects which never grow ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... him imaginary Opportunities of pursuing them to the utmost; so that his Temper will lye fairly open to his View, while he considers how it is moved when free from those Constraints which the Accidents of real Life put it under. Dreams are certainly the Result of our waking Thoughts, and our daily Hopes and Fears are what give the Mind such nimble Relishes of Pleasure, and such severe Touches of Pain, in its Midnight Rambles. A Man that murders his Enemy, or deserts ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Memories of scenes and activities in former days, and the inherited memories of scenes witnessed and actions performed by ancestors, are blended in strange confusion by broken and inverted sequences. Now and then the dream-scenes are enacted in real life, and the infrequent coincidence or apparent verification makes deep impression on the mind, while unfulfilled dreams are forgotten. Thus the dreams of sleepers are attributed to their immaterial duplicates their spirits. In many ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... of these books will be found the kind of people all girls like to meet in real life. There is Joyce Payton, known as Joy, who has a remarkable knowledge of gypsy customs. She is a universal favorite among girls. Then, too, there is Pam, Joy's partner in adventure, and Gypsy Joe, the little Romany genius who has a magical fiddle—and ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... life as a drama, bearing the same sort, though not the same degree, of relation to eternity, as an hour spent at the theatre, and the fictions there exhibited ... do to the whole of real life. Nor is there any thing in this passing pageant worth the sorrow that we lavish on it. Now, when my children or friends leave me, or when I shall be called to leave them, I consider it as merely parting for the present visit, to meet under happier ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... so to do that the same phenomenon always unfolds itself in the same order. But this process is not always comprehended in real life, for it is hidden from our eyes by the manifold combinations of chance; in the reality that we perceive there is a crowd of phenomena which resemble each other but are not really the same. There are a number of phenomena which co-exist or follow each other without this order of co-existence or ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet |
