"Make-believe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chanced to reach me in the black fit which preceded one of my make-believe new honeymoons, I should doubtless have been a good deal more elated than I was by the letter I received from Mr. Sylvanus Creed, the well-known connoisseur and arbiter of literary taste, who presided over the fortunes of the publishing house ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... merely, but "noble patriotism" as well; "a true English heart breathes, calm and strong through the whole business ... this man (Shakespeare) too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that." I find no valour in it, deathless or otherwise; but the make-believe of valour, the completest proof that valour was absent. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... are but a boy and I am no less a girl. Yet, let us make-believe, you a bold knight and I your lady. Mayhap it ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... to admire, feeling a power within him to merit the like; finds his way back at last, still light of heart, to his own poor fare, able to do without what he would enjoy so much. As, grateful for his scanty part in things—for the make-believe of a feast in the little white loaves she too has managed to come by, sipping the thin white wine, he touches her dearly, the mother is shocked with a sense of something unearthly in his contentment, while he comes and goes, singing now ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... mother and Granny the inevitable kiss of greeting. And he might even have refused to be bothered by such a thing but for his fear of being put under some discipline that might prevent him from plunging straightway into the unexplored country of make-believe. ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... your return home and see. Then the print. Observe that the type is identical on both sides of this make-believe clipping, while in fact there is always a perceptible difference between that used in the obituary column and that to be found in the columns devoted to other matter. Notice also," I continued, holding up the scrap of paper ...
— A Difficult Problem - 1900 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... these make-believe dudes," he shouted. "That's the kid old Skin Flint Crawford took out of an orphan asylum. He's a kid that old Crawford took up with because he was too mean t' have t' Lord bless him with one o' his own. That's straight, fellers. ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... taking the honors of stardom away from him and generously submerged his own talent in order to enhance her triumph, or it is but another proof of the statement that husband and wife do not make convincing lovers in the realm of the make-believe. It was surely due to no lack of opportunity ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... of two main kinds; fights between men and beasts—occasionally between two kinds of wild beast—and fights between men and men. There was no make-believe about these combats; they meant at least serious wounds, even when they did not mean death. Those who fought with beasts might in some cases be volunteers; in general they were captives or condemned criminals, and it perhaps hardly needs pointing out that, when St. Paul says he had "fought ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... close to Robert. She even gave him a quick, friendly touch. He could almost hear her say, "Tag, Robert!" but he would not look at her. And yet the moment after he knew that it was all make-believe. His anger was a sham, protecting something that was fragile and afraid of pain. Now that she had gone out of the barren little room she had taken with her the sense of a secret, gracious intimacy which had been its warmth and colour. He saw that the sunlight had shrunk to a pale gold finger ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Toby, quickly; "but you see that was a real one, an' this of ours is only a little make-believe for three cents. We want to get you to let us have the lot between the barn an' the road to put our tent on, an' then lend us old Whitey. We're goin' to have Jack Douglass's hoss that's blind, an' we've got a three-legged cat, an' one without any ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... before noon, when the sun was shining broadly and the silken tassels of the corn were shrivelling up into make-believe tobacco for bad little boys to smoke, there was a heavy step on the garden walk, and Tom felt the signal "Snuggle!" Then he hugged as close as he could to his mother's side, and the gardener with his sharp knife cut off all ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Ben Jonson," spoke up Master Burbage, "this is all very well for Will and thee; but, pray, where do Hemynge, Condell, and I come in upon the bill? Come, man, 'tis a pity if we cannot all stand together in this real play as well as in all the make-believe." ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... herself, "did the Pani really think she was so stupid? Rats had to be [Pg 5] here. The Pani wished rats to be here; the Pani tried to make-believe that rats were here. Well, let people who were more stupid than she was believe it, for she, Marianna ['S]roka, was much too clever, nobody could humbug her. The mistress must have some reason for saying it, for there ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... pretended that he was the pirate, and that the others were his prisoners. He made them dig little holes in the sand, and bring in shells and stones as well as seaweed. This last he made believe was hay for a make-believe elephant. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did not mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... with none of the hard, consistent strength and intelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening an example to our faltering impulses for good. She has been infinitely human and pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and complained and done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still fought ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... second place, you can't want to marry your little niecelet, the funny little 'kiddo,' that used to burn her fingers and the beefsteak over that old studio gas stove. We had such lovely kinds of make-believe together. That's what our association always ought to mean to us,—just chumship, and wonderful and preposterous pretends. I couldn't think of myself being married to you any more than I could Jack the giant killer, or Robinson Crusoe. ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... ministered to fantasy. Rogers had felt it steal over him from the beginning. It was like watching a children's play in which the scenes were laid alternately in the Den, the Pension, and the Forest. Side by side with the grim stern facts of existence ran the coloured spell of fairy make-believe. It was the way they mingled, perhaps, that ministered ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... chaos; of implanting gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction that there was no limit to Rebecca's power of make-believe. In this, and in yet greater things, little as she realized it, the law of compensation was working in her behalf, for in those anxious days mother and daughter found and knew each other as never before. A new sense was born in Rebecca as she hung over her mother's ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... we rich people lead is a hollow make-believe, Jasmine," he said, with sudden earnestness. "I don't know what's the matter, but we're not getting out of life all we ought to get; and we're not putting into it all we ought to put in. There's a sense ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... read them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage, dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an "adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some translators and by many critics; in his own country, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... wrath against the enslavers of his country, as he called the French. So he found an especial pleasure in bombarding all France with his toy gun from his grotto; and as he then felt very bitter indeed because of his treatment at home, you may be sure the French army was horribly butchered in the boy's make-believe ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... thought he had broken his ankle. Now of course that would have been a catastrophe indeed, but so was that slip into the German tongue. A kindly Providence saw to it that an alert Tommy had heard, and in a trice those six make-believe English soldiers had been rounded up and were on their way to headquarters. Next morning there was a sunrise party, for those Germans must be taught it isn't ever healthy for ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel's narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have to be set aside. As against the vigor of Levy Bruehl's living men, the make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you in the face. After the rout at Sedan, after the startling transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... he would go out in his sleigh, even when the snow was deep. It was jolly fun to be in the sleigh all wrapped up cozy and warm in furry robes. He would crack his long whip and make it sound almost as loud as a fire-cracker. He used to carry a make-believe pistol when he dressed up in his "Rough-Rider" suit and went horseback-riding. But all the neighbors thought it was funny that Philip would always leave the saddle on his horse when he went out in his sleigh. But you won't think it is funny when I tell you a secret—maybe you have ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... first I thought it was just the usual game of make-believe in which children love to indulge. But it was much more than this, and the simple words were an expression of her sure faith that what she willed must come to pass. "It mun be so." Why not? "If ye have faith, and shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... of a man? Was he a real man, or only a make-believe, such as was sometimes seen at shows and fairs? Darby knew about dwarfs, certainly, although he had never seen one, and at last he concluded that this must be a dwarf—this small creature not much taller than Joan, yet with a huge, broad-shouldered body, square and solid as Moll's ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... years, hearing his music-teacher (and father) who had just returned from a performance of Siegfried say with a look of anxious surprise that "somehow or other he felt ashamed of enjoying the music as he did," for beneath it all he was conscious of an undercurrent of "make-believe"—the bravery was make-believe, the love was make-believe, the passion, the virtue, all make-believe, as was the dragon—P. T. Barnum would have been brave enough to have gone out and captured a live one! But, that same boy at twenty-five was ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... at the temporary camp were aroused to a high pitch of excitement. Some turned their buffalo robes and put them on in such a way as to convert themselves into make-believe bison, and began to tread the snow, while others were singing the buffalo song, that their spirits might be charmed and allured within the circle of the camp-fires. The scout, too, was singing his buffalo bull song in a guttural, lowing chant as he neared the hunting camp. Within arrow-shot ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... enchantments, transformations,[26] magic rings and charms, "gramarye"[27] of many sorts; and all these things are more effective here than in poets like Spenser and Collins, because they are matters of belief and not of make-believe. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... cottage was a summer palace of the present fashion, but there was one good thing about it: it had no tower, nor any make-believe balconies hung on the outside like bird-cages. The rooms were spacious, and had big fireplaces, and ample piazzas all round, so that the sun could be courted or the wind be avoided at all hours of the day. It was, in short, not a house for retirement and privacy, but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to all this, feeling very confidential and courageous, but I dare say the good Father gave the same counsel to my mother also, for she and I had many games of make-believe, I remember, in which we laughed and chattered and sang, though I do not think I ever suspected that the part we played was easier to me ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... sense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do not even care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceive of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... game of make-believe. All sorts of liberties are taken, the clock is put forward or back at the command of the general, a great enemy army is created in the twinkling of an eye, day is turned into night and a regular game of topsy-turvydom indulged in. On the occasion ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... this was not a make-believe home of the Alp-climber, created by our heated imaginations; no, for here was Mr. Girdlestone himself, the famous Englishman who hunts his way to the most formidable Alpine summits without a guide. I was not equal to imagining a Girdlestone; it was all I could do to even ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Unless the presence of her ex-pupil could be made to redound to her own glory, Theresa much preferred reserving representation of The Hard and its distinguished proprietor wholly and solely to herself. So in the spirit of pretence and of make-believe did she go forth; to find, on her return, that spirit prove but a lying and treacherous ally—and for ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... would play at make-believe. It is almost a pity that he could not persuade the lady that he meant even a tithe of what he wrote to her. Listen to him again: "For my part, I hate a great many women for your sake, and undervalue all the rest. 'Tis you who are ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... reality. It had been all right as a provision merchant, but when it fancied itself capable of higher things it had deceived itself. Foolish little image with its brave dreams and its swelling words from Browning! All make-believe of the feeblest. He was a coward, running away at the first threat of danger. It was as if he were watching a tall stranger with a wand pointing to the embarrassed phantom that was himself, and ruthlessly ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... about her, and the thing that has set me writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows it as willingly or unwillingly ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... a-watering after the Dew beasts in the pinfold, and after the brown horse in partickelar! And so I loaned him a horse, and sent him off to Logan's. Well, sir, and what does the brute do but ride off, for a make-believe, to set us easy; for he knew, the brute, if he war in sight of us, we should have had guards over the cattle all night long; well, sir, down he sot in ambush, till all were quiet; and then he stole back, and turning my own horse among the others, as if to say, 'Thar's the beast that ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... light is morning light, yet it is the mystic light of Rembrandt, never seen on sea or land. In The Syndics, that group of six linen-drapers, Rembrandt shows with what supreme ease he can beat Hals at the game of make-believe actuality. Now, according to the accustomed order of development, The Night Watch should have followed The Syndics. But it preceded it by two decades, and the later work contains far better painting and a sharper presentment ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... taken by men of cheerful, natural, and entirely sane disposition in body and mind, much resembling, even at its strongest, the temper of well-brought-up children:—too happy to think deeply, yet with powers of imagination by which they can live other lives than their actual ones: make-believe lives, while yet they remain conscious all the while that they are making believe—therefore entirely sane. They are also absolutely contented; they ask for no more light than is immediately around them, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Freddie," agreed the older boy. "But maybe, if Flossie wants it, we could put a make-believe chimney ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... seen in the lumber-room, hanging upon some pegs high upon the wall, a row of old bonnets, and a black one among them. Other black things could be had for the hunting. I was a fanciful child, too used to conjuring up weird situations and make-believe happenings to be easily scared by what other children might dread. Nor was I then, or ever, a physical coward. As soon as the idea of visiting that upper room came to me I acted upon it. Tripping up the narrow stairs, I pushed hard against the door. It stuck in the frame, and I was fearing it ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... only a single generation removed from arrant savagery. She calls a spade a spade. You shouldn't blame her. It is civilization—which is after all a sort of make-believe—that causes us white folk to refer to a spade as ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... she exclaimed. "There is no make-believe in the sun's brightness and its warmth. We see it and we feel it, and we are none the less glad of it because the time of year should be November; rather do we take the greater joy in it. And it is not yet November in your life, not ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... sort of contrast, for a soldier hat on Janet was a striking foil for her utter femininity. And its romantic pretense (so different from the dark gypsy-like romantic) was such an arrant little piece of make-believe that it had the effect of playful candor, acknowledging how impossible a man she would make; and while it was, strikingly, a pure case of art for art's sake, you could not but remark how much better she looked in it than any soldier could ever have done. ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... Merry Chuckle from Make-Believe Land!" replied the elf. "And aren't you very cross this ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... cork stoppers for heads, with faces marked on the sides, the rest, only wads of paper or cloth fastened on the ends of sticks that reached down into the bodies. A strip of cloth tied around each neck, below the bulge, served as make-believe arms, suitable for all ordinary purposes, and, with a little assistance, capable of saluting an officer or ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... accepted and responded to by his class. He leads the way in interest and enthusiasm. Nor will any sham or pretense serve. The interest must be real and deep. Even young children quickly sense any make-believe enthusiasm or vivacity on the part of the teacher, and their ardor ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... and finally when they throned her upon the shoulder of the oldest veteran, and pronounced her "well and truly adopted," and the bands struck up and all saluted and she saluted in return, it was better and more moving than any kindred thing I have seen on the stage, because stage things are make-believe, but this was real and the players' hearts ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... imperious, perhaps a little narrow; impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for make-believe. I should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception and carrying out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... line of argument in The Prophetical Office of the Church was taken by Mr. Newman. It was certainly no make-believe, or unreal argument. It was a forcible and original way of putting part of the case against Rome. It was part of the case, a very important part; but it was not the whole case, and it ought to have been evident from the first that in this controversy we could not afford to do without the ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... was given for the Queen in which we are told eight ladies of the Court performed. One of these ladies "wooed her to dawnce, her Majesty asked what she was, affection she said, affection, said the Queen, affection is false, yet her Majesty rose and dawnced." During the stay at Cowdray similar make-believe and allegory were evidently used in the entertainments given for the Queen. Roydon's poem may, like Love's Labours Lost, be a reflection of ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... hermits, with only a poor hut, a little patch of corn, and a garden in which to grow a few vegetables. Our life was to be spent in continual contemplation, one praying while the other engaged in active duties. All was done with religious gravity and decorum. If we went out, the make-believe continued even in the street; the two hermits would say the Rosary, using their fingers to count on, so as not to display their devotion before those who might scoff. One day, however, the hermit Therese ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... pretending that the reptile was crushing him, fighting his way free of the folds, picking up his club and attacking it in turn, beating the make-believe head with his club, and finally indulging in a war-dance as he jumped round, dragging the imaginary serpent after him, pretending all the while that it was very heavy, before stooping down to smell it, making a grimace, and then ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... I have always attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement, too, is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me too much to make-believe. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... amid the intrigues that surrounded that other Stuart prince who styled himself James III., and still kept up the appearance of a king in exile. As he watched the artifice and the plotting of these make-believe courtiers he may well have thought of his innocent companion of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureat on the other side of the Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be "finished," educationally, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... so! What was he down here for at Christmas? Do you pretend to think that that make-believe will was concocted without ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... same light as to his audience. With Shaw this sense of community of feeling is wholly lacking. He describes things as he sees them, and the house is in a roar. Who is right? If we were really using our own senses and not gazing through the glasses of convention and romance and make-believe, should we see things as ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... is dead theology. It is sentimentalism and make-believe. Perfectly scriptural doctrines are cast aside while others are arbitrary retained. Vague talk about "Christ and him crucified" takes the place of time-honored dogmas, logically deduced from the "Word of God," and stamped ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... deeply. It was a knock-down blow, surely. He was a just man, so far as he knew, and as he studied the situation over he could not blame the girl. In the light of her convincing wrath he comprehended that the sharp things she had said to him in the past were not make-believe-not love taps, but real blows. She had not been coquetting. with him; she had tried to keep him away. She considered herself too good for a hired man. Well, maybe she' was. Anyhow, she had gone out of his ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... put an unaccustomed edge to my appetite, and I took a cab to Murray's, deciding to spend the remainder of the evening there, over a good dinner. Except in a certain mood, Murray's does not appeal to me; the pseudo-Grecian temple in the corner, with water cascading down its steps, the make-believe clouds which float across the ceiling, the tables of glass lighted from beneath—all this, ordinarily, seems trivial and banal; but occasionally, in an esoteric mood, I like Murray's, and can even find something picturesque and romantic in bright gowns, and gleaming shoulders, and handsome ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the horses, who are picketed in the open. And thunder. It's often extremely difficult to tell whether, when the thunder is far away, it is thunder or guns. Quite a novel experience, and quite pleasant after the long period of make-believe in England. Discipline. So salutary and so irksome. Now for the battle. I own I long to get into the thick of it soon. We see infantry returning and going up, and we feel sick, ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... so selfish," she faltered ahead, "that she preferred a make-believe husband to a real husband, because—because so she thought she would ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... tell you, all those heads in the reek of the light, the foolery of those people enjoying life and profiting by peace! It was like a ballet at the theater or the make-believe of a magic lantern. There were—there were—there are a hundred thousand more of them," Volpatte at last concluded ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Do you think I don't know that our republican friend there spoke what is every thoughtful man's verdict upon me? (They are silent.) But how could I possibly undertake my task, as long as I believed everything to be make-believe and falsehood, without exception? Now I know the root of the falsehood! It is in our institutions; he was quite right. And one kind of falsehood begets another. You cannot imagine how ludicrous it appeared to ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... when the country of make-believe was swept down by a whirlwind, a whirlwind of realization which crashed through Katie's consciousness and knocked over the fancyings. Those whirlwinds would come all unannounced; when Ann seemed most Ann, playing with Worth, perhaps wearing ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... pushed her into the living room with make-believe savageness. "I've heard her and Luck sing that last winter. And there's a kind of a teetery dance that goes with it. It's supposed to be a mourning song, as Luck explains it. But don't pay any attention to her at all. She just does it to get ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we were both very young that ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... her forehead in a pretty make-believe of woe—the question of the sale had ceased to be acute: 'I just came out here to ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... only a make-believe trip," laughed the manager. "It's for moving pictures. See, there's the chap who was taking the films, and they'd been spoiled if that horse got on the gang-plank. So you see what you did ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... temperament laid upon him. Yet he never made an effort to combat it, partly I think from pride, for he hated everything that savoured of earwigging; he was not going to put constraint upon himself that his following might be more enthusiastic. There was no make-believe about him, and he was never one who liked discussion for ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Jerry lost himself in the play. Still playing, he grew so excited that all that had been feigned became actual. This was battle a struggle against the hand that seized and shook him and thrust him away. The make-believe of ferocity passed out of his growls; the ferocity in them became real. Also, in the moments when he was shoved away and was springing back to the attack, he yelped in high-pitched puppy hysteria. And Captain Van Horn, realizing, suddenly, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... world did not measure up to her expectations, she had been in the habit of making a world of her own; a beautiful make-believe place that held all her heart's desires. It had given her gilded coaches and Cinderella ball-attire in her nursery days, and enchanted orchards whose trees bore all manner of confections. It had bestowed beauty ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... all events was there; his fear was sweet to her, beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when, the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... you absolutely concerning my own name. Will you forgive me utterly if I hereby promise never to deceive you again? Why what could I possibly, possibly do with a great solemn name like 'Meredith'? My truly name, Sir, my really, truly, honest-injun name is 'Molly Make-Believe'. Don't you know the funny little old song about 'Molly Make-Believe'? Oh, ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... plaster, charcoal, and things even worse, disgusting to look at, much more to eat; so that it will be necessary to have recourse to some artifice to cure me; and this can be easily effected if only thou wilt make a beginning, even though it be in a lukewarm and make-believe fashion, to pay court to Camilla, who will not be so yielding that her virtue will give way at the first attack: with this mere attempt I shall rest satisfied, and thou wilt have done what our friendship binds thee to do, not only in giving me life, but in persuading me not to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... once in the ballad of the "Mistletoe Bough." She had been one of the "guests," who had sung "Oh, the Mistletoe Bough!" and had looked up at it, and she had seen at the side-scenes how the bride had laughingly stepped into the trunk. But the trunk then was only a make-believe of some boards in front of a sofa, and this was ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... mean less expensive. There's one of the great big differences between you and the make-believe ladies one bumps into in this part of town. You don't like to be troublesome or expensive. But we'll go to the Knickerbocker. I feel 'way down today, and I intended to treat myself. You don't look ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... some object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may in large measure be overborne by the more immediately constraining incentive to a reputable leisure and an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it may therefore work itself out in make-believe only; as for instance in "social duties," and in quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly accomplishments, in the care and decoration of the house, in sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in proficiency at dress, cards, yachting, golf, and various sports. But ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... promise you, Roger, that should I hear of any situation which you can fill with advantage, I will not fail to let you know, and I hope that your father and the Colonel will approve of your accepting it; you know that I mean what I say, and therefore do not look upon it as a mere make-believe promise." ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... show children that if one keeps things where they belong, they are true with regard to each other, but that if one drags these things out of the shadowy atmosphere of the "make-believe," and forces them into the land of actual facts, the whole thing ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Jennings facetiously called a "rural mail delivery" through regions near the Pole. Jennings himself and his men had patrolled through snow and ice very extensively that year, and the sense of humour that could speak of this white wilderness as a "rural route" would be a saving make-believe in the midst of Arctic blizzards. And the thought of bearing a loving missive to solitary men from friends thousands of miles distant, might well thrill the imagination of these knights of the ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... know you're only talking just because it is nice to make-believe. I like to hear you, too; but what is the use when it's ONLY make-believe? You know what father's health really is; you know how nervous he is. Doctor Powers told me he must not be overexcited or—or dreadful things might happen. You saw him at that ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... it might be as well to let them take their time about it," remarked Captain Link. "These Moros always get very much worked up in their war-dances, and occasionally they forget that it is all make-believe and send a spear into a spectator. It's safer to leave ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... traveling. He had arranged his affairs for a two weeks' trip to New York and Boston. They took an afternoon train for New York, which required five hours to reach. When they were finally alone in the Astor House, New York, after hours of make-believe and public pretense of indifference, he gathered her in ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... supposed to be in the distance, though both are on the same flat surface; they have the same parallax and are therefore the same distance from the observer, and as this produces a similar image on our retina, we accept it though we know it is only a make-believe; it serves its purpose by giving us an impression on our retina which we have learnt to interpret as representing that landscape, but such a picture would indeed be a marvel of absurdity to a being who ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... hands in the fuzzy hair of the cub and pull with all his might, and the cub would growl with make-believe fury, but it seemed to know that the baby did not intend to hurt it, and did not offer to bite. When the baby pulled its ears too hard, it would simply ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... would have suited him. He had new ones enough—was surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn't have so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imagination—as against time—for something that would do, and saying to himself ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... it; and self-sacrifice being her hobby, she has evidently worked herself up into a morbid state of mind and resolved to "redeem" the unfortunate man should the opportunity occur. This is honest work, not Scribe make-believe. Cases in which men and women have wrought themselves into an exalted mood and planned and achieved deeds, great or small, noble or ignoble, but always more or less mad, are common enough in history to justify a dramatist in taking a specimen as one of the persons of his drama. Besides, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... a sort of make-believe wedding," replied Mrs. Clifford; "that is all. And since you are to be bridesmaid, Dotty, I wonder if I cannot find a pair of white slippers for you. I remember Grace had a pair some years ago, which she ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... world, are as eager as children for a story, and like children they will embrace the man who will tell them a story, with abundance of details and plenty of colour, and a realistic assurance that it is no mere make-believe. Macaulay never stops to brood over an incident or a character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to the lowest depth of motive and cause, to the furthest complexity of impulse, calculation, and subtle incentive. The spirit of analysis ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... Wiggily hopped down, and waved both ears backward and forward, and made a low bow to a make-believe crowd of people, only, of course, there were ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... letter he had written to her was positive proof of that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... another year," murmured Ethel Blue to Ethel Brown. "We can have a make-believe county fair and ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... must do your bidding. I'm not a free man; I'm—don't be offended—I'm your creature. I don't say I was a free man before this came up. I haven't been a free man ever since I've been Herbert Strange. I've been the slave of a sort of make-believe. I've made believe, and I've felt I was justified. Perhaps I was. I'm not quite sure. But I haven't liked it; and now I begin to feel that I can't stand it any longer. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could conceivably be ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... do. He comes to see her about twice a week, and I've heard her say, "Goodness me, there's that tiresome old bachelor again." But she treats him just as polite as she does anybody; and when he brings her candy, she says, "Oh, Mr. Martin, you are too good." There's a great deal of make-believe about girls, I think. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 8, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... were deceiving him, and picked up another handful. It behaved exactly in the same way. It glinted and flashed yellow in a way that no sand could ever do. All at once it dawned upon him. This was no trick of sunlight on wet sand. This was no make-believe of ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... odours of violet Drive men to madness and saints to sin,— I see you over the footlights' glare Down in the pit 'mid the common mob,— Your throat is burning, and brown, and bare, You lean, and listen, and pulse, and throb; The viols are dreaming between us two, And my gilded crown is no make-believe, I am more than an actor, dear, to you, For you called me your king but yester eve, And your heart is my ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... self-possessed Mrs. Dolly Page that they would have had with a different style of woman. The grosser sort got a sudden conge; and with the more refined sportsmen she coquetted just enough to show them that two could play at a game of "make-believe," and then sent them off with a lofty scorn edifying to behold—to the mingled admiration and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is Make-Believe. He argues that all social intercourse is founded on make-believe. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... education is bad which leads to the formation of habits of idleness, carelessness, failure, instead of habits of industry, thoroughness and success. Any religious or social institution is bad which leads to habits of pious make-believe, insincerity, slavish regard for authority and disregard for evidence, instead of habits of ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... twin brother, did not stop to answer the question. Indeed it would take a great deal of time to reply to the questions Vi asked, and no one ever stopped to answer them all, any more than they tried to answer all the riddles—real and make-believe—that ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... make-believe. I am in love with him myself, and have been any time since Nelson and the Nile. As for you, Dolly, since he went away six months ago, you have been positively in the megrims. I shall date your loss of appetite from George Austin's vanishing. No, my dear, our family ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... starched and painted rhetoric, or mere got-up figures of modes and manners: they are no shadows or images of fancy, no heroes of romance, no theatrical personages at all; they have nothing surreptitious or make-believe or ungenuine about them: they do not in any sort belong to the family of poetical beings; they are not designs from works of art; nay, they are not even designs from nature; they are nature itself. Nor are they compilations from any one-sided or sectional view of mankind, but are cut out round ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... often rushed forward to the footlights, pouring into the helpless mass before them repeated volleys of explosive crotchets. But this was a very different chorus that now saluted his eyes. It was the real thing, instead of the make-believe, and, in the opinion of Signor G——, at least, very much inferior to it. Instead of the steeple-crowned hat, jauntily feathered and looped, these irregulars wore huge sombreros, much the worse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... us through an open French window into the drawing-room, and we follow her, with a pleased and yet bashful sense of expectancy. Into the drawing-room, mark you! and a real drawing-room, too; not a visible make-believe, like the library in our shanty. This is a large room, furnished as people do furnish their best reception-chamber in civilized lands. Pictures hang on the varnished walls; books and book-cases stand here and there; tables loaded with knick-knacks, vases of flowers, workboxes, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... building was little fortified, and had been erected with greater eye to internal convenience than those crannied places of defence to which the name strictly appertains. It was a castellated mansion as regular as a chessboard on its ground-plan, ornamented with make-believe bastions and machicolations, behind which were stacks of battlemented chimneys. On still mornings, at the fire-lighting hour, when ghostly house-maids stalk the corridors, and thin streaks of light through the shutter-chinks lend startling ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... which was loose and heavy, slip from her finger into the pool. It had lodged endwise between two pebbles, and she had taken some minutes to find it. "As for these," she said, "the flowers are all done, but I like the leaves better. In summer our housekeeping might have been make-believe; now, with the frosts upon us, we shall have hard work, and a fire ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that you thought them so, and I always said to myself, 'If he knew, he would be sorry for me.' At last I said, 'He is sorry for me; there is the sea, and he cannot come, but he knows, and is sorry.' It was make-believe,—for you thought that I was happy, did you not?—but it helped me very much. I was only a child, you know, and I was so very lonely. I could not think of mother and Molly, for when I did I saw them ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... were so real in their make-believe play that they did things a grown person would ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... You're one can make-believe everything lovely, too! I see it. What fun we'll have! Let's begin at once. We're in the enchanted forest. We've been enchanted ourselves. But the fairy king has come and shown us where to find the magic ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... be worth, ag'in Halifax, or Bermuda? I'll put my life on the channel, and would care more for your ship, Miles, than my own. If you love me, stand on, and let us see if that lubberly make-believe ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... a strong guard, were sent off to Pratolino, hers and Francesco's best-loved retreat—they had together planned its beauties. There, during her make-believe convalescence, she came to consider the very serious nature of her love's stratagem, and she determined to make a full confession to her lover. The Grand Duke was thunderstruck, but at once he recognised ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... over it. It is witty, but does not bite. If you bite you are serious, if you bite you are in love; but that is elegant make-believe. He will take himself off next minute, and encountering ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... a make-believe," she told herself; "and he's got them all fooled proper. Maybe he wants the farm, seeing old Skinflint didn't get it. I am going to ask Mrs. Grinnell. She had sense enough to ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... incredibly tawdry, from the festoons of paper roses on the walls to the flash of paste jewels in make-believe crowns. The big hall, with its stage flanked by gilded boxes, was crowded with a shifting throng of maskers in costumes of flaunting discord. Above the noisy laughter and popping of corks, rose the blaring strains of a brass band. Through the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice |
