"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... setting to do with a romance? The old tales had castles environed with savage forests and supplied with caves and underground galleries leading to where it was necessary to go in the novelist's emergency. In our realistic times we like to lay our scenes on a ground of Axminster with environments of lace curtains, pianos, and oil paintings. How, then, shall I make you understand the real human loves and sorrows that often have play ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... to rest from the fatigue of climbing the hills, is lifting Therapia bodily out of its sparkling waters. In the bay moreover there are many calls of mariner to mariner, and much creaking of windlasses, and clashing of oars cast loose in their leather slings. To make the scene perfectly realistic there is a smell of breakfast cooking, not unpleasant to those within its waftage who are yet to have their appetites appeased. These sights, these sounds, these smells, none of them reach the palace in the garden under the promontory opposite the town. There the birds are singing their matin songs, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should raise the same cry as was raised when Tristan was given nearly half a century ago. The introduction opens with a phrase (m) of threefold meaning. It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first love-theme (a, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music of Tristan's stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of mind—chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with which it ends at each occurrence. Then comes the music associated with his suffering ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... continental corn. This device, which he imagined would impoverish us to enrich his own States, was the greatest aid that he could have rendered to our hard-pressed social system; and readers of Charlotte Bronte's realistic sketches of the Luddite rioting in Yorkshire may imagine what would have befallen England if, besides lack of work and low wages, there had been the added horrors of a bread famine. But fortunately the curious commercial notions harboured ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton, combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a modern man and author of the whole, the result would not ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the note of a nightingale; each verse beginning with a prodigious cock-a-doodle-d-o-o! and then rattling along to the gayest of gay airs. The nightingale was not a brilliant success; but the cock-crowing was so realistic that at its first outburst I thought that a genuine barn-yard gallant was up in the organ-loft. I learned later that this was a musical tour-de-force for which the organist was famed. A buzz of delight filled the church ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... said, I am an author. My book is a romance entitled, The Foundling's Farewell. Of course you have heard of it. It is blood-curdling but sympathetic, romantic but realistic, pathetic and sublime. The passage, for instance, in which the Duke of BARTLEMY repels the advances of the orphan charwoman is—but you have read it, and I need not therefore enlarge further upon it. After it had been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... likened life to a dream. Reader, doubtless you are aware, as I am, that life is but too realistic for the masses, the great masses of suffering, sorrow-stricken humanity, with so few, comparatively speaking, so few to uplift, comfort, cheer, and sustain; so few to speak the blessed words of a bright hereafter. Especially ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... those three pictures is of peculiar value for the present purpose inasmuch as it gives a vivid and, in a way, realistic representation of Paul's Cross and its surroundings in the year 1620. There are certain features in the picture which are obviously inaccurate. The view which is taken from the north-west of the cathedral is, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the Psamatiks has been called, is characterized by an extreme neatness of manipulation in the drawings and lines, the fineness of which often reminds us of the performances of a seal-engraver, by grace, softness, tenderness, and elegance. It is not the broad, but somewhat realistic style of the Memphitic period, much less the highly imaginative and vigorous style of the Ramesside kings; but it is a style which has quiet merits of its own, sweet and pure, full ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... frightfully and he was very sick. So sick that the room in which he lay seemed to be rising and falling in a horribly realistic manner. Every time it dropped it brought Billy's ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... feature, and though sometimes choosing themes that are strange and weird in themselves, avoiding sensational treatment of them. "Mateo Falcone", "L'Enlvement de la redoute", "Tamango" (1829), "La partie de trictrac", "Le vase trusque" (1830), and "La double mprise" (1833), are examples of realistic, not of romantic, treatment. ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... of the first night audience, at the Stuyvesant Theatre, New York, January 19, 1909. It was found to be one of the most direct pieces of work the American stage had thus far produced—disagreeably realistic, but purging—and that is the test of an effective play—by the very poignancy of the tragic forces closing in around the heroine. Though it is not as literary a piece of dramatic expression as Pinero's "Iris," ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... other hand, render objects only; the feelings of the observer toward them are carefully excluded. Science is intentionally objective,—from the point of view of the artistic temperament, dry and cold. Even the realistic novel and play, while seeking to present a faithful picture of human life and to eliminate all private comment and emotion, cannot dispense with the elementary dramatic feelings of sympathy, suspense, and wonder. sthetic expression is always integral, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from. But I ask all good and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... and old Runser Argee had instructed Trigger in its use with his customary thoroughness before he formally presented her with the gun. She had never had occasion to turn the stunner on a human being, but she'd used it on game. If this cloak and dagger business became too realistic, she'd already decided she ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... skilful critic of novels. From the first he had allowed his reading to colour his impressions of life, and had obediently lived in a world of blacks and whites, of heroes and heroines, of villains and adventuresses, until the grateful discovery of the realistic school of fiction permitted him to believe that men and women were for the most part neither good nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... fancy of the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her ill-fitting ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... realistic,' said Fagerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... used to call fable. We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is this the case with others. "The Horse and the Fly" states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed. The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running over an only child; and there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his first volume encouraged Melville to proceed in his work, and 'Omoo,' the sequel to 'Typee,' appeared in England and America in 1847. Here we leave, for the most part, the dreamy pictures of island life, and find ourselves sharing the extremely realistic discomforts of a Sydney whaler in the early forties. The rebellious crew's experiences in the Society Islands are quite as realistic as events on board ship and very entertaining, while the whimsical character, Dr. Long Ghost, next to Captain Ahab in 'Moby Dick,' is Melville's most striking delineation. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... comprehended at all,—which is worse." Fired by emulation, he shut himself up to create masterpieces which should surpass Meissonier and paralyze the world; and in a short time he showed his friend Lacroix twelve colossal canvases on which he had painted revolting realistic pictures which he called the "Abominations of Paris." "What do you think of Meissonier now?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... ordinarily speaking more realistic and as regards the composition, less artistic and severe than the Venetian ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... his mobile face into a strange contortion, Spurge emitted from his puckered lips a queer cry—a cry as of some trapped animal—so shrill and realistic ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... poetry of the nineteenth century seemed to me to fall into three groups: Romanticism, the School of Common Sense, the Realistic Art. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely to the weakness and extravagance of the idealistic movement. When sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism, and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the most realistic, grimmest, and at the same time most entertaining books ever given to the public.... The Road to En-dor is a book with a thrill on every page, is full of genuine adventure.... Everybody ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... Jean had, after all, done the dramatic part, the "remorse stuff"? Of course, when Pete sent the film in, the trimmers could cut the scene; they probably would cut the scene just where Gil went down in a decidedly realistic heap. But it hurt the professional soul of Robert Grant Burns to retake a scene so compellingly dramatic, because it had been ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... watch such realistic scenes, Smurov," said Kolya suddenly. "Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be a law ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and Delia Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of the ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique. The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself a ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could not help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however nobly disguised ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work." Lady Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly think of as Smollett's was the ability to work over his own experience into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett's vigorous personality, which in his earlier works was present to give life and interest ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... The only realistic chance for continued existence was to retire, for the five or ten years the radiation would remain deadly, to some well-sealed and radiation-shielded place that must also be copiously supplied with food, water, power, ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... to the house of a clergyman off Madison avenue and presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by a realistic ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even be annihilated, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... with the professor came back to college through the realistic if somewhat irreverent medium of the professor's son, Tom, presently pursuing a somewhat leisurely course toward a medical degree. As Tom appeared in the college hall he was immediately surrounded by an eager ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... hardly wait for the realistic affair to be fastened firmly to his belt, but kept saying, "be quick, ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... this fact to his cousin, after this voyage was concluded. It loomed up as large as the Rock of Gibralter just then, even as a dream may at the moment of awaking, but which later on begins to lose its realistic effect until it ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... of Sir J.H. Thorold of Syston Park, with book-plate. Bound by R. Storr, Grantham, in red morocco, gilt edges, with anchor on sides. The "Dictionary of English Book-collectors," pt. 2, calls attention to the Aldine anchor (made more realistic by an end of rope cable twisted about it) stamped by the Grantham bookbinders Messrs. Storr & Ridge upon many of the Thorold books, "not only those bound by themselves, but also those bound by far better men." Examples of both kinds are found ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... took a prominent part, and at which, in the presence of an innumerable people, I assisted in the performance of strange rites. Such scenes come to me most vividly in my dreams at night; and there are occasions when those dreams are so realistic that when I awake I am puzzled to decide which is the dream and which the reality. And—strangest thing of all—on all these occasions I have spoken the language which I spoke with Vilcamapata to-day! I recognised him, or rather his type of countenance, the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... design like art, however realistic she may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... for any foe that dared to approach. The savage ferocity of his face, the fierce energy in his every movement, culminating in that last vicious leap and stamp, altogether constituted such a dramatic and realistic representation of actual fighting that the whole line burst into a very unsoldierly but very hearty applause, which, however, the sergeant major immediately and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... circus tent and the sawdust arena. The red man is a born actor, a dancer and rider of surpassing agility, but he needs the great out of doors for his stage. In pageantry, and especially equestrian pageantry, he is most effective. His extraordinarily picturesque costume, and the realistic manner in which he illustrates and reproduces the life of the early frontier, has made of him a great, romantic, and popular attraction not only here but in Europe. Several white men have taken advantage ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... sinsere interest in Mr. Beecher. His Works were all realistic and sad. I remember that I saw the first one three years ago, when a mere Child, and became violently ill from crying and had ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his best work in California. It is now nearly forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds, realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried others to the grave ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... etc., are nothing but individual all-relating points in respect of this plane. All that springs from such points does so because of the point's relation to the all-embracing plane. This may suffice to show how realistic are the mathematical concepts which we have here tried to ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the occasion, circulating stories that Sir Charles Warren's patrols were known to be moving that way. These inventions are worth nothing unless the names of corps or their commanding officers can be given, so their originators always take care to give such realistic touches. They give you "the lie circumstantial" or none at all. Possibly there may have been in this firing more method than we imagine, the idea being to mislead us by a pretended engagement with some force on the other side ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... enough, in these days of so much somber, realistic writing, to enjoy a romance pure and simple, full of variety, adventure, and mystery, will be pleased with 'Among the Dunes.'"—New York ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... Lawson is so realistic and emblematic of the times in which he lived, that we reproduce some of his own expressions. Thus, he says, "Now, I having for some time before attended the work of the Ministry in Salem Village, the report of those great afflictions ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... Polygnotos, like that of Giotto, was far in advance of his technical skill. Aristotle called him the most ethical of painters, and recommended the young artist to study his works in preference to those of his contemporary Pauson, who was ignobly realistic, or those of Zeuxis, who had great technical merit, but was deficient in spiritual conception. The course will comprise four more lectures, as follows—November 17, "Greek Painters from B.C. 460 to Accession of Alexander the Great B.C. 336—Apollodoros, Zeuxis, Parrhasios, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... germ of that sweet and winning majesty which Buonarroti was destined to develop in his Pieta of S. Peter, the Madonna at Bruges, and the even more glorious Madonna of S. Lorenzo. It is also interesting for the realistic introduction of a Tuscan cottage staircase into the background. This bas-relief was presented to Cosimo de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Michelangelo's nephew Lionardo. It afterwards came back into the possession of the Buonarroti family, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... her, Mrs. Linde! She had danced her Tarantella, and it had been a tremendous success, as it deserved—although possibly the performance was a trifle too realistic—little more so, I mean, than was strictly compatible with the limitations of art. But never mind about that! The chief thing is, she had made a success—she had made a tremendous success. Do you think I was going to ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... fidelity; that the ideal of art was no longer the Antique, but the Modern. Nor was there wanting creative activity in the spirit of these views. Franzos and Kretzer, to name but a few, originated the modern realistic novel in Germany, and Liliencron brought back vigour and concreteness ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... inspection of the selections in this volume will reveal the rich variety of the material. Specimens are to be found of folk literature and modern literature, of the romantic, of the realistic, of the crude and naive, of the artistic and sophisticated, of the humorous and the pathetic. The editor has tried to find specimens presenting as many themes, as many interests, as many emotions as possible, characteristic specimens ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... repeatedly hearing about it from her old nurse, she felt that she knew it by heart, and used to amuse herself hour after hour in the nursery, drawing diagrams of the rooms and passages, which, to make quite realistic, she named and numbered. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... thin line used in the harpooning of turtles was substituted for the cane, with which, however, some most realistic and serious preliminary work towards perfection in the stratagem of "debil-debil" capture had been accomplished in valorous daylight. But though the boys gave many exhibitions of their skill and of the proper attitude and degree of caution, the correct gestures and facial ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... essentially reactionary and non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as it presents ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. ROBINSON CRUSOE is as realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure with great names, and, in the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... circulation doubled in a day. One-eyed Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her "half a caser" for a Cry, and ran away without the paper or the change. Jack Mitchell bought a Cry for the first time in his life, and read it. He said he found some of the articles intensely realistic, and many of the statements were very interesting. He said he read one or two things in the Cry that he didn't know before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought three Crys from the Pretty Girl, and blushed to ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... that some years before he had any reason to anticipate such a death he was once startled by the ghostly opening of a door in the apartment where he was sitting alone, and by the apparition, horribly distinct and realistic, of a bloody head rolling slowly toward him across the room; till it rested at his feet. The glassy eyes were upturned to his, and the bonny locks were clotted with blood: it was as if it had just rolled from under the axe of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Cardiff firm of Jenkins and Jones announce a novel from the pen of Mr. Caradoc Blodwen, who had to fly from his native village last year owing to the realistic picture he gave of local life in The Home of the Squinting Widows. It is to be called Taffy was a Thief; and those who have had the privilege of seeing early copies of the book, which Mr. Blodwen wrote during his seclusion amongst the Hairy Ainus, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... amount of antagonism, on humanitarian grounds, has been shown by the Italian Government to the importation of a herd of elephants, which were essential to the realistic depiction of the passage of the Alps by the Carthaginian army; but it is hoped that by the use of skis the transit may be effected without undue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... instructive sketches of the better-known wild beasts, describing their appearance, character and habits, and the position they hold in the animal kingdom. The text is printed in a large, clear type, and is admirably illustrated with powerful, realistic pictures of the various creatures in their native state by that eminent animal artist ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... he understood the advantages of the realistic method. On one occasion he stated as his creed, "that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the annual exhibition of Washington artists, Mrs. Burnett stood before a remarkably vivid portrait. Addressing the artist in charge of the exhibition, she said: "That seems to me very strong. It looks as if it must be a realistic likeness. ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... in dismay, "that would be too realistic, Jennings. I don't want it known that I was hanging about the place on that night. My explanation might not be believed. In any case, people would throw mud at me, considering I am engaged to the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... simple, clear, realistic conceptions through pictures, we influence the child to read eagerly the text, to discover the whole story, of which such a fascinating hint is given in the portion illustrated. These first pictures must satisfy the child's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... overview: The Guyanese economy has exhibited moderate economic growth in 2001-02, based on expansion in the agricultural and mining sectors, a more favorable atmosphere for business initiatives, a more realistic exchange rate, fairly low inflation, and the continued support of international organizations. Chronic problems include a shortage of skilled labor and a deficient infrastructure. The government is juggling a sizable external debt against the urgent need for expanded public ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Tennyson's first volume is full of the details of dissolution, the falling jaw, the eye-balls fixing, the sharp-headed worm. Aged poets do not usually write in this manner, because death seems more realistic than romantic. It is a fact rather than an idea. When a young poet is obsessed with the idea of death, it is a sign, not of morbidity, but ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... generally the case after a violent emotion, a great deal of merriment was produced, my men for the rest of the day talking about the incident and reproducing in a realistic way the sounds of the rushing water and the impact of the waves ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... had just been through. In the second scene Marie, driven from her home, wanders around in the streets with her child, until, faint from hunger, she sinks to the ground. The scene is laid before the wall of her father's large estate and she falls at his very gates. Gladys made the scene very realistic, and the audience sat tense and sympathetic. "Food, food," moaned Marie Latour, "only a crust to keep the life in me and my child!" She lay weakly in the road, unable to rise. "Food, food," she moaned again. At this moment there suddenly descended, as from ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... time. I did not enjoy her company. She is so mercilessly realistic, she takes all the color out of life. Everything about her, even her speech, is sharp-lined as the edge of a knife. She could make Bryce's ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... this feeling of nostalgia. In it she has put together the vulgar elements of inferior society in a common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is common in the works of George Sand. Andre is a refreshing contrast, in its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of Lelia and Jacques. It was an initial essay, and a model one, in a style with better ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... rolled and strapped, canteens, haversacks, etc., lay near upon the ground. In the background, a deck of cards and two piles of Confederate money had evidently been thrown down and deserted to "watch the pot." We learned that this most realistic arrangement was the work of a "Yankee boy," whose father had served in the Federal army,—a loving tribute to the people among whom he had come to make ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... his early struggles with bread-winning in Warren's Blacking Factory,—in association with one Fagin, who afterward took on immortalization at the novelist's hands,—for a weekly wage of but six shillings per week, is an old and realistic fact which all biographers and most makers of guide-books have worn ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... at Ellis Island, no matter how realistic the description, will not give a vivid idea of what immigration means nor of what sort the immigrants are. For that, you must obtain a permit from the authorities and actually see for yourself the human stream that pours from the steerage of the mighty steamships into the huge human ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... significant book for a variety of reasons."—Philadelphia Press. "It is a question whether among the dozens of flesh and blood people whom David Graham Phillips has created there be one more genuinely real than this Mildred Gower. Again the marvel of the man is upon us in the full measure of his realistic artistry."—Washington Star. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... soft, gray reveries of the great Kano school of three centuries before, when, to the contemplative mind all forms of nature, whether of the outer universe or in the soul of man, were but reflecting mirrors of a single faith; the heaped-up gold and malachite of Korin's decoration, sweet realistic studies of the Shijo school, even down to the horrors of "abura-ye," oil-painting, as it is practised in the Yeddo of to-day, each had for him its special interest and its inspiration. He leaned above the ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... charge is like. The men are divided into two or more groups and are equipped with fencing outfits. One group is designated as the defense and is placed in trenches. The other groups are the attackers. They may be sent forward in waves or in one line. To make their advance more realistic they have to get over or around obstacles. To take in all phases the attackers are made stronger than the defense and the defense retires—whereupon the attackers endeavor to disable them by thrusting at the kidneys. Likewise the defense ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... than Henry James, with his everlasting stories, full of people who talk a great deal and amount to nothing. I like the older novels best, and enjoy some of Scott's and Miss Edgeworth's better than Howells's, or any of the modern realistic writers, with their elevators, and paint-pots, and every-day people," said Alice, who wasted little time on ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... are monuments almost as interesting as in museums. The tomb of Cavaignac reminded me, I must confess without making any comparison, of the chef d'oeuvre of Jean Goujon: the recumbent statue of Louis de Breze in the subterranean chapel of the Cathedral of Rouen. All modern and realistic art has originated there, messieurs. This dead man, Louis de Breze, is more real, more terrible, more like inanimate flesh still convulsed with the death agony than all the tortured corpses that are ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... realistic whinnies, backed out of its "stall", trotted smartly over to his side, and nuzzled his right pauldron. Mallory mounted—not gracefully, it is true, but at least without the aid of the winch he would have needed if his armor had been manufactured in the sixth century—and inserted ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... any noteworthy poet before Thomson. The Seasons was an innovation, and its novelty lay not so much in the choice of the subject as in the interpretation. Didactic as well as descriptive, it was designed not merely to present realistic pictures but to arouse certain explicitly stated thoughts and feelings. Thomson had absorbed some of Shaftesbury's ideas. Such sketches as that of the hardships which country folk suffer in winter, contrasted with the thoughtless gayety of city revelers, and inculcating ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... a story of character against a New England background. Each character is worked out with the delicacy and minuteness of a cameo. Each is intensely realistic, yet, as in the cameo, palely flushed with romance. "Mother," along with her originality of action and long-concealed ideals, has the saving quality of common-sense, which makes its powerful appeal to the daily realities of life. Thus when ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... is surely not necessary, even for a clever Norwegian man of letters in a realistic social drama, to make quite such a fool of himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... people would naturally be phlegmatic in their art,—they would love a style that pleased but did not arouse them, that spoke to the senses rather than to the imagination—a school of art placid, precise, full of repose, and thoroughly material like their life—an art, in a word, realistic and self-satisfied, in which they could see themselves reflected as they were and as they were content ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... an attitude of violent tension which can endure only for an instant. Yet the face is free from contortion, free from any trace of effort, calm and beautiful. This shows that Myron, intent as he was upon reproducing nature, could yet depart from his realistic formulae when the requirements of beautiful art ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the dark weight of her gaze to him as if she were practising. "You won't upset her, at any rate." Then she stood with her beautiful and fatal mask before her hostess. "I want to do the modern too. I want to do le drame, with intense realistic effects." ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... realistic. We are not going to influence all the experiment stations to do this work. It is not going to be practicable for them. They probably would very much like to do it, but it's not in the picture, as I see it now. Therefore, we are ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... There was a time when the incumbents were forced to leave their cure and give place to an intruding minister appointed by the Cromwellian Parliament. But the clerk remained on to chant his "Amen" to the long-winded prayers of some black-gowned Puritan. That is a very realistic scene sketched by Sir Walter Besant when he describes the old clerk, an ancient man and rheumatic, hobbling slowly through the village, key in hand, to the church door. It was towards the end of the Puritan regime. After ringing the bell and preparing ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a gaunt Baptist in wood, said to be by Donatello, on one of the altars to the left of the choir; and the bronze Baptist in the Baptistery, less realistic, by Sansovino; the pretty figures of Innocence and S. Anthony of Padua on the holy water basins just inside the main door; and the corners of delectable medieval cities in ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... red China threatens the rest of Asia, the FPA-WAC material makes no inference that the reds are an evil, aggressive power—but it does let the reader know that the reds in China are a mighty military power that we must reckon with, in realistic terms. Nothing is said in the FPA-WAC Fact Sheet Kit about the communist rape of Tibet. Rather, one gets the impression that Tibet is a normal, traditional province of China which has now returned ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... at least, I've gotten one idea over to you—that a public release on this thing would be greeted with hoots of derision by the realistic ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... took up The Art World, which his friend had left, and glanced again at the photogravure of "Sanctuary." He knew, as he had declared, nothing about art, and judged pictures as he judged books, emotionally. His bent was to what is called the realistic point of view, and "Sanctuary" made him smile. But very good-naturedly; for he liked Norbert Franks, and believed he would do ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... really trying to write a new kind of book, and the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of David Copperfield. In his last book, Dombey and Son, we see a certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in any of his books, and Toots ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... to be old, and I am inclined to think that it is native; that is, if any stories may be called native. Several facts point to the primitiveness of the tale: (1) the local color and realistic touches, slight though they are; (2) the non-emphasis of the comic possibilities of the situations; (3) the somewhat unsystematic arrangement of incidents, the third demand and exchange (iron rod for dead ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... into the awful whirlpool in which Europe seemed to be perishing. It was not cowardice that held her back: her sons had done enough during the four terrible years of civil conflict in which her whole manhood was involved to repel that charge for ever. Rather was it a realistic memory of what such war means that made the new America eager to keep the peace as long as it might. There was observable, it is true, a certain amount of rather silly Pacifist sentiment, especially in ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton |
