"Real thing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may sound and his technique record. He has Nature for pattern, and he may do what he will so long as, Nature-like, there is life expressing itself. Everything in the world stands for something, as even the hills stand for pulsing life. As within, so without: the outer semblance is never the real thing, but ever stands as a mirror to the inner. The bird sings, but he is ever expressing his soul in song: it is only the human singer who can utter sounds without significance. Music is never mere notes, never ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said, becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal as you could find, but the Twinklers were the real thing, they said,—real, unadulterated, arrogant Junkers, which is why they wouldn't talk to anybody; for no Junker, said the German ladies, thinks anybody good enough to be talked to except another Junker. The German ladies themselves had by sheer luck not been born Junkers. They had ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... feel?" Lefty asked, apparently not expecting an answer. "I clamped your coronary artery shut for a few seconds. A post-mortem would never be able to tell it from the real thing if ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... dominating race on the continent, with their square faces painted in various colors, wrapped in their blankets, and bare-footed, their feet being very much like those of a mud turtle, they were the real thing. ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... a good thing if they don't!" Eleanor flashed back at him. "They do, though, only you men don't know the real thing when you see it. You have an idea that a woman ought to be helpless and clinging. Maybe that was all right in the old days, when there were always plenty of men to look after a woman. But how about ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... the clock. I was astride the bulwarks again when the Windhover was free of her moorings. There was a lack of deliberation and dignity in this departure which gave it the appearance of improvisation, of not being the real thing. I could not believe it mattered whether I went or not. My first voyage had, that is, those common circumstances which always make our crises incredible when they face us, as if they had met us by accident, in mistake ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... as so much less effectual. And not only may the miscellaneous races of the world be justly described as being upon various edges of industrial civilisation, approaching it by various sides, and falling short of it in various particulars, but the moment they see the real thing they know how to use it as well, or better, than civilised man. The South American uses the horse which the European brought better than the European. Many races use the rifle—the especial and very complicated weapon of civilised ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... alleys, the cry for aid from the starved souls of the world. You and I have other work to do than to listen,—pleasanter. But this man, coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a despised race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him: it was the most real thing on earth to him,—more real than his own share in the unseen heaven or hell. By the reality, the peril of the world's instant need, he tried the offered help from Calvary. It was the work of years, not of this night. Perhaps, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... think of taking a comb to it as didn't know? And for the knots, I've worked 'em—now with a finger and now a thumb—over a shutter-front till it looked that beautiful the man it was done for telled me himself,—'I'd rather,' says he, 'have 'em as you've done 'em than the real thing.' But young hands is nowhere with the knots. They puts ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish - hardly worth the twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris took ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... influenced in many ways by the Indian philosophy; but the special doctrine of Plato made ideas the most permanent of all things. Visible things are only fleeting shadows, which soon pass away; only ideas remain. The universal concept, or notion, is the only real thing. Thus the perfect globe is the concept held in the mind; the marble, ball, or sphere of material is only an imperfect representation of the same. The horse is a type to which all individual horses tend ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the knee when the number went up. 'If you see anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing—alive an' movin'." ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... at once. At least, it would have come, if Sir George Chesney, who described the battle of Dorking in Blackwood's Magazine, had prophesied truly. He lived till 1895, to see more than twenty years after his battle pass without an invasion; but the battle, for some of his readers, became a very real thing. The late Louis Jennings, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, tells us that he had a friend who, believing most people to have very hazy notions of history, was in the habit of saying, "Of course you remember the battle of Dorking? Well, this was the very place where it was ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... corner of the bunk house Injun approached. It will be remembered by those who have read of Injun that he was very fond of pink pajamas. As garments, pink pajamas seemed to Injun to be the real thing. It had been hard to convince him that they were not proper for everyday wear, but when he was half convinced of this fact, he had done the next best thing, and taken to a very pink shirt. This, tucked in a large pair of men's trousers, below ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... but this time the devil got fooled. The young man had been going to the University of Minnesota where they had been tapping some blood from them for medical science purposes to use to heal others stricken in the same manner; so medical science acknowledge they had the real thing. ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... ruling militaristic party in Germany, abetted by Austria, bears the moral guilt of thrusting this war upon the world as the method of settling international difficulties which could have been better settled by arbitration or conference, is a very real thing at the present moment. It is shared by the Entente Allies and the United States. It is one of those "imponderables" which, as Bismarck said long ago, must never be left out of account in estimating national forces. It will hold the Allies and the United States together. It ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... fallen deeply in love with me in her school days and had never been able to care for any one else. She is a woman of considerable literary talent and of good general ability and high ideals. She is usually much liked by men. Her love for me is the most real thing in the world for me, and seems the most permanent. At first my feeling for her was almost purely physical, although there were no sexual relations. I hated this feeling and have succeeded in overcoming it pretty ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... care to hear all this, don't you?" he asked, happily, and went on before she could do more than nod. "Well, the short of it is that through Doctor Forester I got to know a friend of his who is a railroad magnate—the real thing—and to please the doctor he seemed to take an interest in me. He's offered me a position in one of his offices, provided I take a year to study practical railroading first. Of course I'm only too glad to do that. And now I'm coming to the point of the whole ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... that doesn't matter. The real thing is to be systematic and exact in our charities. Slovenliness or carelessness in such things is worse than a bad habit—it's a sin. Now, how are you? A trifle queer in the legs, eh? Things in the room look a bit hazy? That's all right. ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... Iago is an attack on the army, Sir John Falstaff an attack on knighthood, and King Claudius an attack on royalty. Here again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised by so many critics when they are confronted by the real thing on the stage, is really a clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort of logic. The dramatic reason for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren calls "an old stick-in-the-mud," whose son, in spite of much capacity and charm, is a cynically worthless member of society, is to set up ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... something reverent in that love which the years had ripened and mellowed with tenderness; something that was profound, that made of this night's work a sacrilege in touching them—and that poor jewel, clung to all too obviously through adversity for its past associations, was probably the last real thing ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... scornfully. "My God, Buddy! Would you let him tell you—? Is he pickin' out women for you like he picks out a dress for me and a hotel for Ma? How does he know what's the real thing?" ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... feeling that the suspicions of his family about the crystal were allayed, began to take it to and fro with him in order that, as occasion arose in the daytime or night, he might comfort himself with what was fast becoming the most real thing in his existence. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... you folks are swells, ain't you? The real thing, I mean, you and Madame? Even the yellow nigger's a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Mont Blanc? It is not possible. This landscape has the beauty of an antique medal and of a precious painting. It is a perfect and measured work of art. And here is another thing that I do not know how to say, that I can not even understand, but which is a real thing. In this country I feel—and you will feel as I do, darling—half alive and half dead; in a condition which is sad, noble, and very sweet. Look, look again; you will realize the melancholy of those hills ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... bigger destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... ridiculously garbed and painted to represent wild indians. The real, live indians, who followed these clowns in delighted crowds, enjoyed thrills of terror at their whoops, fierce glances, and wild antics, and assured us that these actors were, if not the real thing, at least wonderfully accurate impersonations of the natives of the Estados unidos (United States)—the land of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... came to care, the question vaguely nagged him. He should try to remember. There was more than dreams and the whispering voice. There was—what? If he had one real thing to cling to, to put his feet on and climb back from— One ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... You'll hear that Bland killed men who ran after me. But that's a lie. Bland, like all the other outlaws along this river, is always looking for somebody to kill. He SWEARS not, but I don't believe him. He explains that gunplay gravitates to men who are the real thing—that it is provoked by the four-flushes, the bad men. I don't know. All I know is that somebody is being killed every other day. He hated Spence before Spence ever ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... quite serious about it. It had always seemed rather more or less of a joke to me that I should be addressed as majesty and all the rest of it. Yet my imperial power and dignity had been a very real thing ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I feel that this time the real thing has come, and with it the real man. I can't tell you, Will, how much different it is, but everything I felt before seems so sort of earthly—and somehow this love that I have for this man is so different. It's made me want to be truthful and sincere and humble ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... seen the real thing a fortnight before, so that we were greeted with shouts of laughter as the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... Kentucky, and in Austria and Germany there are poor Barons in the streets. There was a time in my life when I could have had a foreign title, but I found it ridiculous, and so refused it. But in England, in spite of your amusing radicalism the real thing still counts. It is a valid asset—a tangible security for one's money—from a business point of view. And Americans or foreigners like myself and my niece, for instance, are securing substantial property and equal return, ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... comic opera cheese factory," said I, when we had left the church. "Now, I'll show you the real thing, and then you shall have lunch. It won't be conventional, but ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... well do that," Dick answered him. "Fellows, the real thing for us to do, on this trip, is to learn how to move fast and light. We must learn how to do without many things and yet have just as good ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... was energetically pulling off his short, thick jacket. "Get busy at that 'mix' of yours. Put plenty of the real thing in and don't be sparing with the tasties. Off with your coat and hat, Mister Gaston. Make yourself comfortable. To folks as is already up, what's an hour ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... answer. "I haven't slept all night, though, and I can't think it out clearly," he said to himself. "I'll work it out later. One thing's certain, this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing," he told himself. "It's all ever so ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the real thing,' said Jim, his eyes brightening as he gazed at them. 'I'd like to have that dark bay colt with the star. My word, what a forehand he's got; and what quarters, too. If he can't gallop I'll never say I know a ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... try to tell me my own business. People don't behave that way in real life; they don't explode under passion—not even jealousy or revenge; they are reserved. Reserve! That's the real thing; the other ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Georgiana, you bring me a dowry bigger than any I could ask for—the inheritance from such a father as he is—and from the mother who gave you all he left her to give. What are towels and tablecloths—I don't know what it is brides bring!—beside such things as these? Won't you give me the real thing, and let me furnish the ones that don't count? Dear, if you could know the pleasure there is for me in the very thought ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... "is the greatest thing in the world. There is no door it will not unlock, no problem it will not solve. It is, after all, the only real thing in ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... in this overcrowded country. As you know, certain property will revert to me eventually, but, remembering what is in our blood, I dare not trust myself to drag out a life of idleness or monotonous drudgery, waiting for the future here. The curse is a very real thing—and it would not be fair to you. Now I can save enough from the wreck to start us without positive hardship over seas, and George has written offering me a small share in his Australian cattle-run. You shall want for nothing, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... strong on all the games that go to make up the real thing," one of the baseball squad remarked, grinning amiably at the chaff of his friends. "You see, potatoes go to make up life for a big part of the human race; and we're after 'em, good and hard. And our girls are helping us out handsomely. ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... hope," answered his chum. "He'll be out of the swing of this in a few days and when he learns what the real thing is, if he likes it and takes to it, he'll forget ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... termed the "New Navy," which took the sea to combat the submarine and the mine; also of the novel weapons devised amid the whirl of war for their use, protection and offensive power. Into this brief recital of the events leading to the real thing an endeavour will be made to infuse the life and local colour, which, however, would be more appropriate in a personal narrative than in a general description of anti-submarine warfare of to-day, but without ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... rolling and the solid rain sweeping against the sober old sides of our supply-ship—on this night, the finest kind to be sitting in a warm cabin, we sat and, while the smoke rolled high, aired our views of the real things in the world; and the most real thing in the world just then being a submarine, ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... me, anyway?" he questioned himself impatiently. "I'm acting like I hadn't a right to go in and take a drink when I feel like it! If just a slight touch of matrimony acts like that with a man, what can the real thing be like? I always heard it made a fool of a fellow." To prove to himself that he was still untrammeled and at liberty to follow his own desire, he stamped across the porch, threw open the door, and entered with a certain ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... not sorry she's going away. Maybe the Lord's sending her hence, either to open her eyes and send her back weary and cloyed with the world she's going into so gaily now, or else to open thine, and show thee plain, stripped of outside glitter, the real thing she is, that thou mayest see what a sorry wife she would make to a Christian man. No, I'm not sorry. And unless I mistake greatly, Tom, the time's coming when thou shalt not be sorry neither. In the meantime, 'tarry thou the Lord's leisure.' If He be the chief object of thy desire, thy desire ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the most real thing about Belloc, the religion, because it is above this purpose, and nothing of the later attacks on him by the chief Newspaper Trust, because they are much below it. There are, of course, many other reasons for passing such matters over here, including the argument of space; but there is also ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... faileth. A heart—the real thing of a heart, that is, God's heart—never lets go. It breaks; but let go? not once: never yet. The breaking only loosens the red that glues fast with a tighter hold than ever. The fibre of the heart—God's heart—is made of too strong stuff to loosen or wear out or snap. Love never faileth. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... us simultaneously with the affinity-wave and the soul-mate quest; and it is both pertinent and timely, although by no means always wisely applied. It is the expression "I have found my seek-no-farther; he (or she) is the Real Thing." ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... too happy this morning," he went on. "That young man won't do. I never quoted him within twenty points of par, but Mabel seemed to like him and her mother thought he was the real thing. Mrs. C. couldn't forget that his family is one of the oldest on the list. Personally I don't gamble much on families; know a little about my own and that little is enough. But women are different. However, family ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Jews and in the lines of real culture there would be little of the real thing left in Germany. Gutmann, Bleichroeder, von Swabach, Friedlander-Fuld, Rathenau, Simon, Warburg in finance; Borchardt and others in surgery, and almost the whole medical profession; the Meyers, the Ehrlichs, Bamberger, Hugo Schiff, Newburger, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... of a more-than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will not be for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist on reverence and restraint. If church and preacher offer only a pietized and decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked and unashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form of humanistic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as boresome as it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is essentially superfluous and a rather humorous imposition upon the world. The only thing that ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a man returning home after years of exile, and trying to bring himself into personal relations with everything; the act of oblivion was in force only up to the threshold; the real thing he had to see to himself. The land he had tilled was in other hands, he no longer had any right to it; but it was he who had planted, and he must know how it had been tended and how it ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... very nature of his mental organs man can never grasp reality. It is always the sensation, never the real thing, he feels. The metaphysicians are right. We can never know the actual world outside of ourselves. We are imprisoned in a dream cage; the globe itself is a cage of echoes. Science, instead of contradicting religion, has but affirmed its truths. Matter is radiant ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Something of the plan of it all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the making of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... selection born from the struggle of her soul in prayer to God that there might be no mistakes, no unwise choices, no messengers sent forth who went for their own ends and not for the glory of God. Here lies the secret which makes the world wonder to-day why the Salvation Army workers are called "the real thing" by the soldiers. They were hand-picked by their leader on the mount, face to ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... escaped her; she lifted her head suddenly; the tears were running down her face. "But—but—you could teach me, Rufus. You could teach me what love—true love—is. I want the real thing—the real thing. Will you give it to me? I want it—more than anything else in the world." She drew nearer to him with the words, like a frozen creature seeking warmth, and in a moment her arms were slipping round his neck. "You are so ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... against a former member of the circle who was now relegated to the limbo of 'bores'—and to the utter despair of M. Verdurin, who had always made out that he was just as easily amused as his wife, but who, since his laughter was the 'real thing,' was out of breath in a moment, and so was overtaken and vanquished by her device of a feigned but continuous hilarity—she would utter a shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were beginning to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she had only just time to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... political society," she answered. "It isn't the real thing. Now you are out of Parliament, though, even that ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... initiator of the Kingdom of God. It is a real thing, now in operation. It is within us, and among us, gaining ground in our intellectual life and in our social institutions. It overlaps and interpenetrates all existing organizations, raising them to a higher level when they are good, resisting them when they are evil, ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... him at the Riverbank Hotel at eight-forty-five," said Mr. Gubb. "Like it was the real thing. I'm goin' over to my room now, and give him ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... of that passionate life that lay now so far behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... information upon which he acted happened to have a grudge against the owners of that factory they would naturally be more than glad if, while groping about in search of the imaginary slavers and barracoon, we should stumble upon the real thing and destroy it. All this, however, is mere idle conjecture, which may be either well founded or the opposite; but there is one indisputable fact about this business, which is—unless Mr Purchase is altogether ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... stockings and deer-stalker; its Chaplain in khaki, and its Surgeon a mark for bullets in his Belgian officer's cap. I suggest that this absence of uniform only proves our passionate eagerness to be off and get to work. But it is right. Our ambulance is the real thing, and Mr. L. is going to be an angel and help it all he can. He will write about it in the Illustrated London News and the Westminster. When he hears that I came out here to write about the War and make a little money for the Field Ambulance, and that I haven't seen anything of the ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... wasn't, Joany. It was mine. I wasn't merely your pal, ever. I loved and adored you from the very second that I found you out on the hill. You thought it was a game, but it wasn't. It was the real thing, and I ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... The real thing is more nearly visible in Swift's macaronic lines about Molly—'Mollis abuti, Hasan acuti,' etc.—another vein of fun which has been exceedingly well worked out by successive writers. But such inspirations as these have too much method in them to be quite admissible. Much better ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... as if it were a real thing!" she exclaimed. "George, you don't really believe that you saw somebody in the summer-house? The place was empty. I tell you positively, when you pointed into the summer-house, the place was empty. You have been thinking and thinking ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... with the question of subjects, local colour—that kind of thing. I gravely advise people, if they possibly can, to write of the wealthy middle class; that's the popular subject, you know. Lords and ladies are all very well, but the real thing to take is a story about people who have no titles, but live in good Philistine style. I urge study of horsey matters especially; that's very important. You must be well up, too, in military grades, know about ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... almost impatient for the morning. I haven't the remotest idea what I will get, but I am sure it will be something good." A few days before his translation he was visited by one of his old-time railway associates, who said to him: "H——, you are now up against the real thing, according to your belief; and it looks to us the same, just as if you would have to go some one of these days. How does it seem? What is ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... real thing that started the exodus lies at the door of the farmer and is easily within his power to remedy. The Negro must be given better homes and better surroundings. Fifty years after the Civil War he should not be expected to be content with the same ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... they both starve; the man who can give a woman half the world is loathed for his pains. Not that he 's to be pitied like the pauper, for if you can't buy love you can buy women, and the wise ones know how to manufacture a very lasting substitute for the real thing." ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... rather curiously. "Well," he said, with an air of reflection, "you'll probably have to face a good deal that you don't like out yonder, and in one way you won't suffer from a little preparatory training. This, however, is not a case where sentimental pity is likely to relieve anybody. It's the real thing." ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... branching off in all directions. Dingy Clerkenwell and Aldersgate Street were gilded with a plentiful and radiant deposit of that precious metal of which healthy youth has such an infinite store—actual metal, not the "delusive ray" by any means, for it is the most real thing in existence, more real than the bullion forks and spoons which we buy later on, when we feel we can afford them, and far more real than the silver tea-service with which, still later, we are presented amidst cheers ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... let her. If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John—Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... isn't exactly what I mean.... It's hard to explain, but even if we were to see our soldiers trying to cross the river and the Austrians trying to prevent them that wouldn't be—well, wouldn't be exactly the real thing, would it? It would only be a kind of side-show, rather unimportant like that dead ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... his seventeen volumes—vastly important to his contemporaries—read like a romance to us to-day, and a glance at the map laid down according to his descriptions is like a vague and distorted caricature of the real thing. And yet, according to the men of his times, he "surpasses all the geographical writings of antiquity, both in grandeur of plan and in abundance and variety of ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... very ordinary life, you see, and the great blast of love has never come my way, or to any one whom I knew. I did not realize, quite, it was a real thing out of books—but now I know it is; and oh, I can believe, if circumstances were different, it could be heaven. But this cannot alter the fact that for me to think of you much would be very wrong now. I do love you—I do not deny it—though I am going to try my utmost ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... had decided to land and practice an attack. He knew that at any moment his Regiment might be thrown into action, and as the long journey was found to have a stiffening effect on one's limbs he decided on some small practice manoeuvres before the actual and real thing took place. ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... wild, wicked fellow, became interested also. He bought his first New Testament and dedicated himself to the task of reading it through. "I must find out," said he, "what this young man Davis is talking about. His religion seems to be the real thing." ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... Ta-kap-si-ka-pi has ever forgotten it. Major Eastman of the old army, who was quite an artist, attempted to depict the scene on canvas, and while he made an excellent picture which would please the eye of anyone who had not seen the real thing, he found it impossible to convey an adequate idea of its best points. The picture, I think, is now either in the rooms of the Wisconsin Historical Society, or in ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... imitations of stirrups, and there was a long fight between Sally and stirrups, but the stirrups, being inanimate, won, and Sally submitted to the bouncing wooden things at her sides. And still, day after day, Andrew built his imitation saddle closer and closer to the real thing, until he had taken a real pair of cinches off one of Pop's saddles and had taught her to stand ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this pleasure. Harry, you have it—the real thing, you know, whatever it is—and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go now, just when lessons would mean everything—well, you must not think of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or at least—well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... first stage of the journey. You are now simply assimilating what you learned at school, and making the facts, which you took on trust then, part and parcel of your actual experience now. It seems to me one of the best ways to study geography at home is to travel on paper. That comes nearest the real thing. Map out a route, buy your tickets (in imagination), take your conveyance, and on the way see everything possible to be gleaned from those eyes which have gone before, and left a record of their impressions. Try ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... they'd cuss, too," observed Jadwin, "if they were long forty million wheat, and had to know just where every hatful of it was every second of the time. It was all very well for us to whoop about swinging a corner that afternoon in your office. But the real thing—well, you don't have any trouble keeping awake. Do you suppose we can keep the fact of our corner dark ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... dare, but a vertical strip of braid down the middle of her skirt suggests the effect. From a distance you couldn't distinguish between her and a man to save your life, for her hat, shirt-bosom, collar and tie are the real thing. She has pockets in her skirt, one on each side, and, sometimes at the club, she puts her hands in them and, with arms akimbo, admires herself in the glass. At the club also she does other things to show how independent she is. She slaps her friend on the back with a 'Hello, Gertie. How's ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... with his easy imperiousness. "I can't spare you yet. I must have one more dance just to soothe my nerves. I've been dancing with a faultless automaton who didn't understand me in the least. Now I want the real thing again." ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... and stooped over anxiously. He didn't want a death at the start. He wouldn't care to be responsible for a concussion of the brain or anything like that. Besides, he couldn't waste time fooling with a fool kid when the real thing might be along any minute. He glanced anxiously up the broad white ribbon of a road that gleamed now in the moonlight, and then pulling out his pocket flash, flooded it swiftly over Billy's upturned freckled face that lay there still ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... 371st Infantry, had been drilled with dummy grenades. When given the real thing he released the pin and immediately heard the fulminating fuse working its way down into the charge. It was too much for his nerves. He threw the grenade as far as he could send it. The lieutenant reprimanded ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... and a real thing, Which hath itself an actual working might, Which neither from the senses' power doth spring, Nor from the body's humours ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it maintains the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays, general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" is a real thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in the sensible, but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know. Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... conceit of learning was most hateful to him.' Hence the cry of the class affected by his action that he discouraged learning and learned men. He did nothing of the sort. There never has flourished in India a more generous encourager of the real thing. In this respect the present rulers of India might profit by his example. One of the men whose knowledge of history was the most extensive in that age, and who possessed great talents and a searching mind, was Khan-i-Azam Mirza, son ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... That's a thing hardly to be trusted at any time. A show of love is sadly like the real thing, and I have met with very ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... same effect on the observer that those sham oak beams and uprights that are so popular on the front of suburban houses have. They are not real beams or uprights. They do not support anything, or fill any useful function. They are only a thin veneer of oak stuck on to pretend that they are the real thing. They are a detestable pretence, and I would rather live in a hovel than in a house tricked out with such vulgar ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the dignity and ease Most becoming to Rear-Admirals (retired); He was bred on "Spit and Polish"—he was reared to "Stick and String"— All the things the ultra-moderns never name; But a storm blew up to seaward, and it meant the Real Thing, And he had to slip his cable when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... jammy banjo voice the Younger Son, Who waits for his remittance to arrive; I represent the grimy, gritty one, Who sweats his bones to keep himself alive; Who's up against the real thing from his birth; Whose heritage is hard and bitter toil; I voice the weary, smeary ones of earth, The helots of the sea ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is the ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... disregarding the irony of her tone. "Well, if yuh ever do, I tell yuh right now you'll see the real thing. If he makes love like he does other things, there won't any female girl dodge his loop, that's straight. ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... get your letter, but frightened when I found it open (the gum wholly fresh) and no photograph in it. [Footnote: I believe the photo given in this volume, of Dr. Nicholson, to be the one referred to here.] I feared it was taken out. But next day came the real thing. It is excellent. The slight excess of black in the left eye is perhaps quite natural. In a three-quarter face the light does not fall alike on both eyes, and we do not in real life compare a friend's two eyes (they ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Anne. When a man fancies himself in love with a pretty girl, he seldom seeks for lasting qualities or a strong character. He accepts the transitory beauty as the real thing and wakes up, too late, to find ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... been at school with mamma. She never would go half a mile out of her way for scenery. 'Why should I?' she would say. 'What are the painters for? If there is anything good, let them bring it to me and I will look at it. She said she preferred the picture to the real thing, it was so much more artistic. In the landscape itself, she complained, there was sure to be a chimney in the distance, or a restaurant in the foreground, that spoilt the whole effect. The artist left it out. If necessary, he could put in a cow or a pretty ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... me. 'Never run and hide again. Only cowards do that. Walk straight up and face the thing. Ten to one you'll find it's nothing but a dead skin masquerading as the real thing. Even if it isn't if it's alive—face it. Find a weapon and fight it. Know that you are going to conquer it and you'll conquer. Never run. Be a man. Men don't ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... interests in life mattering more, and there being other kinds of really better happiness, but it is pure rot; if one is honest one owns that there is no real happiness but in the satisfaction of love. Every other kind is second best. It is jolly good often, but only a pis aller in comparison to the real thing. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... common thing for oxen to sham sick, but this was the real thing, and it seemed they were going to lose the ox, which meant also lose a large part of ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... you she's an uncommon handsome young lady, Sarah. An' she has the real way with her; the real thing, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... wrap it up in cotton till next fall, Vic," Trench whispered in the closing minutes. "We've got to face the real thing now. We're civilians in citizens' clothes, amenable to law henceforth; not a lot of athletic brigands, privileged outlaws, whose glory dazzles all common sense. Quit bumping your head against the Kansas motto up in the dome, get your hob-nailers down on the sod, and trot off and tackle ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in the jeweller's safe and the real thing carried away by the commercial traveller. The fact of the substitution was not discovered for some days and by that time the traveller, following his ordinary route, should have been in Manchester or ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... live? It is all arrangements with us—the frame for the picture, the sheath for the sword—and we leave the picture and the sword to look after themselves. What a wretched dilettante business it all is, keeping these boys practising postures in the anteroom of life! Cannot we get at the real thing, teach people to do things, fill their minds with ideas, break down the silly tradition of needless wealth and absurd success? And I must keep up all this farce, simply because I am fit for nothing ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the century we thus see that the question of a small-pox prophylactic was wavering between the monstrous assumption that everybody must necessarily have small-pox, and had better set about it, and the milder notion of vaccine as an antidote, if the real thing should come. The old custom of variolation had not been discarded, and the experience of the Gloucestershire milkmaids had not crystalized into the form of vaccination to be handed down by Jenner. At the beginning of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... blandly. "As God is my judge, I do. There ain't no such thing as two loves—a first and a second. When the real thing comes to a body he knows it. A feller could be blinded for a time, I reckon, in hot-blooded youth, while he was in close pursuit of a thing that kept slipping away from him, as was my case when Dick and me was going nip and tuck to see which ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... Personally I thought it was to be mounted, and I was not alone in this idea either. More than a few of us got busy at once in settling how, if possible, we could provide our own mounts. That was in the days when we were new to war, long before we began to know what something approaching the real thing was. ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... contrary for legislating well; but it means dishonesty, and even impudent dishonesty;—brazen insensibility to lying and to making others lie; total oblivion, and flinging overboard, for the nonce, of any real thing you can call veracity, morality; with dextrous putting-on the cast-clothes of that real thing, and strutting about in them! What Legislating can you get out of a man in that fatal situation? None that will profit much, one would think! A Legislator ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... help smiling at the grimace with which Dick accompanied this remark. "Which same goes to prove," he went on, "that he is the real thing." ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... 11th, 1906.]—I have not lost my nerve. I dance, drive and skate well; I don't skate very well, but I dance really well. I have a talent for drawing and am intensely musical, playing the piano with a touch of the real thing, but have neglected both these accomplishments. I may say here in self- defence that marriage and five babies, five step-children and a husband in high politics have all contributed to this neglect, but the root of the matter ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the point of making arrangements for regular lessons. She knew from him familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price, five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real thing. She was already on her ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... that, for all the nonsense I had talked about returning invitations, the real thing at my heart even then was an impulse towards hospitable entertainment, and the desire to see my husband merry with his friends, under—shall I say it?—the protecting wing of his wife. For, as mother of the family, the wife ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... shocking a few fanatics, far more than they really cared to knit. But nobody had time to pry into the quality of such patriotism. There were too many other people doing the same thing, and so it passed everywhere for the real thing, and the world whirled on and tried to be gay to cover its deep heartache and stricken horror over ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... not hanged himself, made sure of soon seeing him amongst us. Accordingly he soon arrived, knocked over the porter on his road to the reading-room; he seized every man's hand as he passed him—wrung it almost frantically, and kept ejaculating, "Why, now here's something like a murder!—this is the real thing—this is genuine—this is what you can approve, can recommend to a friend: this—says every man, on reflection—this is the thing that ought to be!" Then, looking at particular friends, he said—"Why, Jack, how are you? Why, Tom, how are you? Bless ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... excellent news, earlier than I had dared to expect it—the news that sounds to a recruit half as good as active service. We were going to march and go off right away westward over half a dozen horizons, till we could see the real thing at Chalons, and with this news ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... tower by studying advertisements. You may think that the pictures you see of world events on your cans of baked beans and maple syrup and soap, give you the benefit of foreign travel, but it does not. You have got to see the real thing or you are not fit to even talk about what you think you have seen. You remember that Ferris wheel at the Chicago world's fair, and how we thought it was the greatest thing ever made of steel, so high that it made us dizzy to look to the top of it, and when we went up on the wheel we thought we ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... was a real thing, when he was the rich one. So I told Essie; and besides, Allen would never make any hand of poverty, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the window-seat of his friend's room in Holworthy Hall, that day, and said he was going to try to help the cause of better government in New York, Mr. Thayer looked at him and wondered if he were "the real thing." Thirty-nine years later Mr. Thayer looked back over the career of his college mate, and knew that he had talked that day with one of the great men of our Republic, with one who, as another of his college friends says, was never a "politician" in the bad sense, but was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... miracles to obtain it, and expects the fairies to bring it her.(5) She is quite above thinking of a settlement, jointure, or pin-money. She takes the will for the deed all through the piece, and is so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion of rank and title as a real thing that cannot be counterfeited that she is the dupe of her own fine stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken adventurer for an accomplished and brave gentleman. Her meanness is equal to her folly and her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she holds out on the strength ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... an unreal thing cannot be larger than a real thing; nor can an unreal thing be a whole of which a real thing is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Philibert captured a glance of hers which might not have been intended for him, but which Amelie suffered him to intercept and hide away among the secret treasures of his heart. A glance of true affection—brief, it may be, as a flash of lightning—becomes, when caught by the eyes of love, a real thing, fixed and imperishable forever. A tender smile, a fond word of love's creation, contains a universe of light and life and immortality,—small things, and of little value to others, but to him or her whom they concern more precious and more ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Alexei has done that. Oh yes! He has made a fool of Nicholas for months, and although I have hated him for doing that, I have seen, also, what a fool Nicholas is! But he is a hero, too. Make him as noble as you like, Ivan Andreievitch. You cannot colour it too high. He is the real thing and I am the sham.... But oh! I do not want to live with him any more, I am tired of him, his experiments, his lamentations, his weakness, his lack of humour—tired of him, sick of him. And yet I cannot leave him, because I am soft, soft without ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... some real thing An image draws, and in yourselves displays it So that it makes the ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante |
