"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a forgotten dream which we struggle vainly to recall, often flitted through their clay-clogged souls, of a strangely glorious life in some higher sphere; but all attempts to give definite form to such bewildering visions ended but in fantastic reveries of mystic possibilities or dim yearnings of unseen glories. They found the Book of Life, but they remembered not that the Father had told them the Word ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... edge of a gutter. This gutter was one of those stone channels which in former days were constructed below the roofs of houses to receive the rain-water, discharging it at regular intervals through those long gargoyles carved in the shape of fantastic animals with gaping mouths. In spite of the zeal with which our present general pulls down and demolishes venerable buildings, there still existed many of these projecting gutters until, quite recently, an ordinance of the police as to water-conduits compelled them to disappear. But even ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... registers of time, Unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disdains the word, nor holds society With those who own it. 'Tis Fancy's child, and Folly is its father; Wrought of such stuff as dreams are, and as baseless As the fantastic visions of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... marshes. The current gurgled and sucked about her run, as the ebbtide washed her black hull on its way to the sea. The spectacle seemed now even more mysterious than when, mirage-like, it peered forth from a cloud of mist. But it was real, and not fantastic. Another hail, louder than the first, went forth into the night air, and penetrated to the ship's forecastle, for a sailor answered my call, and reported to the captain in the cabin the presence of a boat at the ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... remarkable from its broad, slightly hollowed, and circular summit having been filled up with many successive layers of ashes and fine scoriae. These saucer-shaped layers crop out on the margin, forming perfect rings of many different colours, giving to the summit a most fantastic appearance; one of these rings is white and broad, and resembles a course round which horses have been exercised; hence the hill has been called the Devil's Riding School. I brought away specimens of one of the tufaceous layers of a pinkish colour and it is a most extraordinary ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... traveller. Greenacre, always on the look out for romance in common life, was never surprised when he discovered it, but to Gammon it came with such a sense of novelty that he had much ado to keep a clear head for everyday affairs. He drove about London as usual, but beset with fantastic visions and desires. Not only was Polly quite dismissed from his thoughts (in the tender sense), but he found himself constantly occupied with the image of Mrs. Clover, heretofore seldom in his mind, notwithstanding her brightness and comeliness and the friendship ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... will not wake him; and Sally is asleep too;" and he led her slowly towards the door. The night-lamp was burning low; its pale flame, and the flickering blaze of the big hickory logs on the hearth, made a glimmering twilight, whose fantastic lights and shadows shot out through the door-way into the gloom of the hall. As the first of these lights fell on Hetty's face, Dr. Eben started to see how white it was. Involuntarily he put his arm around her; ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... admission to the kingdom of the Crucified." It is the symbol of Christ's atonement and of the salvation of men, and represents the Christian Faith, its demands and its triumphs. As might be expected, many fantastic stories were woven about this symbol in the middle ages. Yet back of their extravagance was often a true feeling. We see this even in the absurd legend of the tree from which our Saviour's ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... this second gyration. Even as the stairway canted he lost his balance; they were both thrown violently through the open hatchway, and swept off into the boiling surf. Under such conditions thought itself was impossible. A series of impressions, a number of fantastic pictures, were received by the benumbed faculties, and afterwards painfully sorted out by the memory. Fear, anguish, amazement—none of these could exist. All he knew was that the lifeless form of a woman—for Iris had happily fainted—must be held until death itself ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... was often furnished also with a fountain, in which drinking-water was kept, and upon which either stood or hung cups or goblets. These fountains were often of fantastic shapes, and usually enamelled. One is described as representing a dragon on a tree top, and another a castle on a hill, with a convenient tap at some point for drawing off ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... wide. Kowloon, on the mainland, an arid peninsula, on which some of the Hong Kongese have been attempting to create a suburb, was ceded to England in 1861. The whole island of Hong Kong is picturesque. The magnificent harbor, which has an area of ten square miles, is surrounded by fantastic, broken mountains from three thousand to four thousand feet high, and the magnificent city of Victoria extends for four miles along its southern shore, with its six thousand houses of stone and brick and the princely mansions and roomy bungalows of its merchants and officials scrambling ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Where is my BERTHO in this mountain hidden?— Shaping fantastic dreams of heartless OENE, With aching hands into a tangible beauty. How can'st thou keep two yearning souls apart? If thou could'st feel what love is, mighty master Of loveless War, ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... different type—elderly, with a most forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of the others are very much alike—young, dark in complexion, and with long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into fantastic knots and curls on ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words—and he was deep-read in Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a huge pile of learning, unwieldly, enormous) and in Lord Brook's hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson, and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age—and Leibnitz's Pre-established Harmony reared its arch above his head, like the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man—and then he fell plump, ten thousand ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... their necks and arms, and the men their breasts. They also paint each others faces; not, seemingly, with a view of heightening or imitating the natural charms, but merely as matter of fashion; making fantastic spots with the finger on the forehead, temples, and cheeks, of white, red, yellow, and other hues. A brass salver (tallam) covered with little china cups, containing a variety of paints, is served up ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... undergone more dull days than they had, contrived to get through it by torturing Adeline with utter silence of all tidings from the East, and by a swarm of suitors, with the fantastic Viscount foremost. She never was awake from her dream until Mr. Holdsworth came to dinner, and was so straightforward and easy that he ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with its games and amusements, and "assisting," as they would say, at shooting in a barrel, admiring the ability of some, whilst reviling the stupidity of others; when they had a few sous in their pockets they would try their own skill at throwing big balls into the mouths of fantastic monsters, painted upon a square board, while their country friends nibbled at spice-nuts, and thought them delicious. But on this 18th of March morning there are no women, nor spice-nuts, nor sport on the Place Saint-Pierre: all is slush and dirt, and the poor lines-men are obliged to stand at ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... skeptical—the immutable pride of what he considered his own firmly rooted convictions was only very slightly shaken—and he now even viewed the prospect of his journey to the "field of Ardath" as a mere fantastic whim—a caprice of his own fancy which he chose to gratify just ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... weird and fantastic is a self-evident fact. Perhaps the Clark University student who very carefully worked it up a few years ago went a little too far when he said it was a chaotic inferno, but at any rate, it is far removed from celestial harmony. Sidis ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... hardly the kind to fortify one's spiritual part against the contemplation of death, she surveyed the solemn procession as tranquilly as any devoted adherent of either religion or philosophy could have done. Not a shadow passed over her fantastic mockery of youth as she glanced ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when, one Guy Fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" This refrain haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance, "The Flight of the Duchess," was born out of an insistent memory of this woman's snatch of song, heard in childhood. He was ten when, after several passions malheureuses, this precocious Lothario plunged into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... imagine That I had died—died, just ere his return; Then see him listening to my constancy; And hover round, as he at midnight ever 40 Sits on my grave and gazes at the moon; Or haply in some more fantastic mood To be in Paradise, and with choice flowers Build up a bower where he and I might dwell, And there to wait his coming! O my sire! 45 My Albert's sire! if this be wretchedness That eats away the life, what were it, think ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fashions the rule will hold, Alike fantastic if too new or old; Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... island the two arms unite and flow on into the Parana River. From the Brazilian bank the spectator, at a height of two hundred and eighty feet, gazes out over two and a half miles of some of the wildest and most fantastic water scenery he can ever hope to see. Waters stream, seethe, leap, bound, froth and foam, 'throwing the sweat of their agony high in the air, and, writhing, twisting, screaming and moaning, bear off to the Parana.' Under the blue vault of the sky, this ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... traitor Louis Riel. They know he is a liar and a coward. He leads brave men astray and then runs away and leaves them to suffer. This thing he did many years ago." And Cameron proceeded to give a brief sketch of the fantastic and futile rebellion of 1870 and of the ignoble part played by the vain and ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred Scriptures, so 'seeking the dead among the living.'" He speaks of the result as "an unwholesome mixture of things human and divine; not merely fantastic ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... strongest impulse, and which he had learnt from his earlier Perugian master, or later, not improbably, from the great Piero della Francesca. No writer upon Umbrian art can afford to neglect its wonderful landscape backgrounds, often poetic and fantastic, as in the art of Pinturicchio, but always with this sense of roominess, of vastness, and spaciousness, which Mr. Berenson has very happily defined by the phrase of "space-composition"; and, writing of this ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... front bedroom she heaped up all the debris and crawled beneath it. A fantastic pile it seemed to the moon when he looked in after the rain had stopped, the childish head resting on the cover of an old bandbox at one side and a pair of man's boots sticking out at ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... is a name of contempt given by the Indians to the negro troops who had been stationed near the Blackfeet and Crow Indian agencies, on account of their curly, woolly hair, which, in the fantastic minds of the Indians, resembled the short, curly hair on the shoulders of ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... prowling about the streets, and crossing over the bridges and back again. At such a time the streets are alive with story-tellers, magicians and comedians, who delight the nocturnal sight-seers with wonderful fairy-tales, jokes and fantastic plays. ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... supremacy in visibility over even the things that cast them. Now a cast shadow is a much more curious thing than we usually suppose. The strange shapes it gets into—the manner in which it stumbles over everything that comes in its way, and frets itself into all manner of fantastic schism, taking neither the shape of the thing that casts it, nor of that it is cast upon, but an extraordinary, stretched, flattened, fractured, ill-jointed anatomy of its own—cannot be imagined until one is actually engaged ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the cars as they rapidly glided by each other jingled merrily on the ear, and Clodius with smiles or nods claimed familiar acquaintance with whatever equipage was most elegant or fantastic: in fact, no idler was better ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the left are arranged the forks, tines up, also in the order of use, beginning at the left, with the butter plate, on which rests the butter knife, a little above the forks. The napkin—which should be folded four times in ironing and never tortured into fantastic shapes, restaurant fashion—lies either at the left of the forks or on the plate at the center of the cover. If many spoons are to be used, the soup spoon alone rests beside the knife, with the others above the plate. Individual salt cellars go above the plates, shakers at the ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... of men has fortunately made this method at once easy, obvious, and scientific. Even in the rather fantastic realm of ghosts, the stories fall into regular groups, advancing in difficulty, like exercises in music or in a foreign language. We therefore start from the easiest Exercises in Belief, or even from those which ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... sheds a strong light on the genius of the Hawaiian. We are wont to think of the old-time Hawaiians as light-hearted children of nature, given to spontaneous outbursts of song and dance as the mood seized them; quite as the rustics of "merrie England" joined hands and tripped "the light fantastic toe" in the joyous month of May or shouted the harvest home at a later season. The genius of the Hawaiian was different. With him the dance was an affair of premeditation, an organized effort, guarded by the traditions of a somber religion. And this characteristic, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... visibly delighted at the meeting. "Look here, don't suppose you're out of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that's luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the times! Hold on, taxi! Here—I'll drive you home first, and wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time." As he steered her toward the carriage she noticed that ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... paper and warm vinegar; the naughty people went about with cricks in their necks and colds in their heads; while every withered grass blade, every branch of tree and bush, and every pane in the windows, was covered with the beautiful, fantastic, glittering handiwork of CAPTAIN ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... show how Tauler combats the fantastic errors into which some of the German mystics had fallen in his day. The author of the German Theology is equally emphatic in his warnings against the "false light"; and Ruysbroek's denunciation of the Brethren of the Free Spirit has ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... he pointed out to me numberless faults of style, incoherent and fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not know ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... terrible; and for twenty-four hours Bazan had the unknown before him. What could that be from which Crillon himself said that he shrank—a man so brave? It could not be death, for that he had risked on the lightest, the flimsiest, the most fantastic provocation. Then what could it be? Bazan turned the question in his mind, turned it a hundred times that night, turned it a hundred times as he went about his preparations next day. Turned it and turned it, but instinctively, though no injunctions to that effect had been ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... it," replied Louis, as he and his female companion each gazed with one eye into a shop window while they fixed the other upon the native, who was sporting a cane in fantastic twirls, and evidently believing he was ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... or powers, his thought reaches out, and he begins to try to explain it or them. He forms all kinds of crude and fantastic theories about these invisible forces. At first he is apt to think that there are a great many of them; it is long before he clearly understands that there can be but One Supreme. The moral quality of the ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... beyond anything but a Saturday's reckoning—you will see that the pit goes off in darkness—downward. It was but the other evening as we were seated about the fire that there came upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then the woodpile fell over, for so we judged the clatter. Is it fantastic to think that some dark and muffled Persian, after his dingy tunneling from the banks of the Tigris, had climbed the pile of wood for a breath of night at the window and, his foot slipping, the pile fell over? Plainly, we heard him scuttling ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... when the cupola of St. Paul's and the Clock Tower at Westminster pierced upwards through a level of fog, as though hung in the mid-air; or when mists, shredded by a south wind, swirled and writhed about the rooftops until the city itself seemed to take fantastic shapes and melt to a substance no more solid than the ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... convincing. The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of the Puritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birth named Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, was probably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantastic suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also been made,—attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... that Miss Morrison got hold of a humorous book called 'The Brass Bottle,' a fantastic, farcical thing, about a genie who had been sealed up in a bottle for a thousand years getting out and causing the poor devil of a hero no end of worry by heaping riches and honours upon him in the most embarrassing manner. It happened ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... powerful in its way as the Foote Tradition, but separated from it by a whole world—had brought acquaintanceship and intimacy with strange people and strange cults. In the parlor of her home she had listened to frank, fantastic discussions; to lawless theories. These discussions, beginning anywhere, ended always with the reform of the marriage relation. Anarchist, socialist, nihilist, atheist, Utopian, altruist—all tinkered with the family group, as if they recognized ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... before the wild, licking flames. The Court of Honor with its empty lagoon and broken bridges was more beautiful in the savage glow of the ravaging fire than ever on the gala nights of the exposition. The fantastic fury of the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the mass. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle—that noble fantasy plucked ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... drink into London between 1652 and 1675. The advertising student would do well to refer to them because they serve to show how completely the true merits of the beverage were lost sight of by those who urged its more fantastic claims. It is interesting to note, however, that this early copy was of a high order of typographical excellence; indeed, the display letter used for the word coffee is often like that found in copy in the United States two hundred and fifty years after. Also, it should be ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... they might be called. Sometimes the stalactite roofs are lofty, sometimes we have to bend our heads in order to pass from one vaulted chamber to another; here we have a superb column supporting an arch; here a pillar in course of formation, everywhere the strangest, most fantastic architecture, an architecture moreover that is the work of ages; one petrifying drop after another doing its apportioned work, column, arch, and roof being formed by a process so slow that the life-time of a human being hardly counts in the calculation. There is something sublime in the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... him, wondering whether he was speaking seriously or in grim jest. He was given at times to making odd remarks. There was a vein of the fantastic in him that was continually cropping out ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a very beautiful one, for, in addition to the varied character of the scenery and the noble background of the Sierra Nevada, which here presented some of its wildest and most fantastic outlines, the half-ruined hut of the Yankee, with the tools and other articles scattered around it, formed a picturesque foreground. We have elsewhere remarked that our hero was a good draughtsman. In particular, he had a fine eye for colour, and always, when ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... anywhere, and expressed his admiration of his empress, who had shown particular interest in his career. The present gaikwar was placed upon the throne in 1874 by Lord Northbrook, when he was Viceroy of India, to succeed Malhar Rao, one of those fantastic persons we read about in fairy stories but seldom find in real life. For extravagant phantasies and barbaric splendors he beat the world. He surpassed even those old spendthrifts of the Roman Empire, Nero, Caligula and Tiberius. He spent a million ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the effect that great art is always provincial, never cosmopolitan; that only provincial art is universal in its appeal. Like every other theory this one is to a large extent true, but Hergesheimer in his arbitrary summing up, has forgotten the fantastic. The fantastic in literature, in art of any kind, can never be provincial. The work of Poe is not provincial; nor is that of Gustave Moreau, an artist with whom Edgar Saltus can very readily be compared. If you have visited the Musee Moreau ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... majestic are the neighbouring ruins of Spesburg, mere tumbling walls wreathed with greenery, and many another castled crag we see on our way. We are indeed in the land of old romance. Nothing imaginable more weird, fantastic and sombre, than these spectral castles and crumbling towers past counting! The wide landscape is peopled with these. They seem to rise as if by magic from the level landscape, and we fancy that they will disappear magically as they have come. And here again one wild ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... contrasts of color, and the most delicate blendings of rare shades, such as snow white and lilac. Unfortunately, these marvelous blossoms remain but a few weeks at most, and then there is a year's care and waiting. As with the fantastic cacti, all their blossoming energy and beauty seems to be concentrated into one brief but glorious effort. It certainly is to be hoped that the new strain, mentioned on a former page, will successfully be developed. Pelargoniums are propagated by cuttings, and cared for ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odours, which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs, portraying her in strange and different ways. There was Vera looking out through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as a devote, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... hold"—what is it? A thing that is neither enjoyed while had, nor missed when lost. So worthless it is, so unsatisfying, so inadequate to purpose, so false to hope and at its best so brief, that for consolation and compensation we set up fantastic faiths of an aftertime in a better world from which no confirming whisper has ever reached us out of the void. Heaven is a prophecy uttered by the lips of despair, but Hell is an ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dreams! Where is their birthplace—where their home? Lighter than foam upon the crested wave, Fleeter than shadows of the passing cloud, They are of such fantastic substance made That quick as thought they change their fickle forms— Now grander than the waking vision views, Now stranger than the wildest fancy feigns, And now so grim and terrible they start The hardened conscience from its guilty sleep. In troops they come, trooping they fly away, Waved into ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... glaciers and snowfields are limited; the waterfalls are comparatively few and slender, and the rivers small; the loftiest peaks are little more than ten thousand feet high. But, on the other hand, the mountains are always near, and therefore always imposing. Bold, steep, fantastic masses of naked rock, they rise suddenly from the green and flowery valleys in amazing and endless contrast; they mirror themselves in the tiny mountain lakes ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor—provided one can imagine ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... not banish, and he still flushed with shame that he should have declared his knowledge of a scene which ought, at its worst, to have been inviolable by his speech. He scarcely cared now for the woman about whom these miseries grouped themselves; he realized that a fantastic remorse may be stronger ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... benighted way; But now he spurn'd the straw in pure disdain, And now laugh'd loudly at the clinking chain. Then, as its wrath subsided by degrees, The mind sank slowly to infantine ease, To playful folly, and to causeless joy, Speech without aim, and without end, employ; He drew fantastic figures on the wall, And gave some wild relation of them all; With brutal shape he join'd the human face, And idiot smiles approved the motley race. Harmless at length th' unhappy man was found, The spirit settled, but the ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... anything more wonderful, more fantastic? I had dreamed of such things, I had read of them; I even remembered having read, years ago, some of the wonderful stories in Grimm's Fairy Tales. To my childish mind, they seemed very wonderful indeed. There were fairies, goblins, mysterious figures, castles which floated in the air, ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... His life's happiness consisted in the acceptance of every misfortune without a murmur, and its wealth, in the total renunciation of life's joys and material benefits. He was a beggar by choice, a fantastic personage whose life was sacrificed to an idea of which he himself ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir," said the police agent loftily. "He has his own little methods, which are, if he won't mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... World Championship in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age group competitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of balance to my life after ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... conceals him from the view of the person entering. After a pause the door is opened and SOPHY appears. The frills of her night-dress peep out from under the Mandarin's robe, and she is wearing a pair of scarlet cloth slippers; altogether she presents an odd, fantastic figure. She pauses in the doorway hesitatingly, then steadies herself and, with a defiant air, stalks into the bedroom. Directly she has moved away, QUEX softly closes the door, locks it, and pockets the key. Meanwhile SOPHY, looking about the bedroom for the ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... ravens, crickets seem the watch of death; Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons; Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves; Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; While we fantastic dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an imagination's weight; As if, like Atlas, with these mortal shoulders We could sustain the burden of the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... friend to-day," he said, with a cheery smile, as they stood together on the seashore beside their canoe, surveying the magnificent scene of snowy field, fantastic hummock, massive berg, and glittering pinnacle that ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... small beginnings, in the gorgeous but quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But first I should ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Some good at last in this benighted world! Now how like demons on the ascending smoke, Making grimaces, leaps the laughing flame, Filling the room with a mysterious haze, Which rolls and writhes along the shadowy air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Map room, 13, 14). This gives the British Islands, the W. coasts of Europe, N. Africa as far as Cape Boyador, and the Canaries and other islands in the Atlantic. The interior of Africa is filled with fantastic pictures of native tribes; the boat load of men off Cape Boyador in the extreme S.W. of the map probably represents the Catalan explorers of the year 1346, whose voyage in search of the "River of Gold" this ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... expressions of anger or intolerance. In all conventionalism there is a philosophic falsehood; and that would be more than sufficient to repel all general sympathy with Pope from the mind of the laboring man, apart from the effect of direct falsification applied to facts, or of fantastic extravagance applied to opinions. Of this bar to the popularity of Pope, it cannot be supposed that Lord Carlisle was unaware. Doubtless he knew it, but did not allow it the weight which in practice it would be found to deserve. Yet ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... said, "though I am but a poor gitana and humbly born, yet I have a certain fantastic little spirit within me, which moves me to great things. Promises do not tempt me, nor presents sap my resolution, nor obsequiousness allure, nor amorous wiles ensnare me; and although by my grandmother's reckoning I shall be but fifteen ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the garb of admiration for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric Louis Boehner,[A] who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,—now, in his capacity of critic, the paper bugbear of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bay was a vessel making for the unseen harbour below. It stood up black against the moonlight, its sails and yards presenting some fantastic resemblance to ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... immense buttes of yellow clay and sand, with large flakes of mica and seams of gypsum. Nothing could be more forlorn and desolate in appearance. The gypsum had given some consistency to the sand buttes, which were washed into fantastic figures. One ridge formed apparently a complete circle, giving it the appearance of a crater; and although some miles to the left, I should have gone to visit it, supposing it to be a crater, but my mule was sinking with thirst, and water was yet at some distance. Many animals were ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... with its maiden tear; 'Twas on the Morn when laughing FOLLY rules, And calls her Sons around, and dubs them Fools; Bids them be bold, some untry'd path explore, And do such deeds as Fools ne'er did before; 'Twas on that Morn, when Fancy took her stand Beside my couch, and, with fantastic wand, Wav'd, from her airy cells, the Antic Train That play their gay delusions on the brain: And strait, methought, a rude impetuous Throng, With noise and riot, hurried me along, To where a sumptuous Building met my eyes, Whose gilded turrets seem'd to dare the skies. To ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... the pens; the key protruded from the lock of the private drawer. With a tremor of excitement John extended his hand, turned it and opened the drawer; then he caught his breath. There lay a square white envelope addressed to himself in his uncle's fantastic, crooked handwriting. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... irrevocable first impressions, and fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a round cloth cap of a severely plain ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Jellies, in slender glasses, glittered in exquisite amber perfection, or glowed warmly crimson, with points of brighter hue where the sun fell on them. Heaps of old-fashioned "snowballs" hid golden hearts under a pure white frosting, and cakes, baked in fantastic shapes, like Turks' heads and fluted melons, were rich, warm, brown, or white and gleaming as Christmas snow. The pastry showed all shades from palest buff to tender delicate brown, and for depth of tone there were their rich interiors of dark mincemeat and golden custards. ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... Upon the mountain's awful brow, While purple summer blooms below; How icy structures rear their forms Pale products of ten thousand storms; Where the full sun-beam powerless falls On crystal arches, columns, walls, Yet paints the proud fantastic height With all the various hues of light. Why is no poet call'd to birth In such a favour'd spot of earth? How high his vent'rous Muse might rise, And proudly scorn to ask supplies From the Parnassian hill, the fire ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... The scenery is wildly fantastic, for while the rocks which form the western bank are almost entirely covered by the golden sand-drifts which pour over them, smooth as satin, to the water's edge, those on the east are sun-baked and forbidding, a huge agglomeration of boulders piled one upon the other and partially covered ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... passed any time behind the scenes of this great theatre, and are thoroughly acquainted not only with the several disguises which are there put on, but also with the fantastic and capricious behaviour of the Passions, who are the managers and directors of this theatre (for as to Reason, the patentee, he is known to be a very idle fellow and seldom to exert himself), may most probably have learned to understand ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... while in fear of treachery from fickle and bloody savages; or like Fremont, though dripping from the recent flood, and uncertain of the means of existence even for the day, his arms, clothes, provisions, instruments, deep in the whirlpools of the foaming Platte, stop to gaze with admiration on the 'fantastic ruins' Nature has 'piled' among her mountain fastnesses, while from his bare and bleeding feet he draws the sharp spines of the hostile cacti. Truth from travellers is consequently for the most part relative. Abstractedly, with reference to any country, it must be derived from the combined accounts ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... I cannot report any extravagances in his opinions on the old masters. There is so much in his character which is strange that I feel it would complete the picture if his views were outrageous. I feel the need to ascribe to him fantastic theories about his predecessors, and it is with a certain sense of disillusion that I confess he thought about them pretty much as does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... began to be shut in by buildings, and the usual indications appeared of the approach to a great station. Queer-looking signals, of mysterious meaning,—some red, some blue, some round, some square,—glided by, and men in strange and fantastic costumes stood on the right hand and on the left, with little flags in their hands, and one arm extended, as if to ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... leader both in the dance and song, he was occasionally joined in the latter by several of the others, the whole party repeating the last word several times over. In this way they went several times round the table. Madera had a graceful carriage, and his dancing, though fantastic, was really elegant; his singing too was in good taste. The others danced clumsily, though in perfect good time, and joined with some spirit in ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... which prevails throughout the piece, made it hardly possible to bring about a more satisfactory conclusion: after such extravagance, the characters could not return to sobriety, except under the presence of some foreign influence. The grotesque figures of Don Armado, a pompous fantastic Spaniard, a couple of pedants, and a clown, who between whiles contribute to the entertainment, are the creation of a whimsical imagination, and well adapted as foils for the wit of so vivacious ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... "Only my fantastic way of speaking of my roses," he said. "They seem like real people to me, and I am apt to call them by their names. A shame, to be sure, to take such liberties with the General. Permit me to present you in due form! M. le General Jacqueminot, ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... of contrast to the modern realism which makes so unlikely a material for serious opera, the fantastic irresponsibility of The Magic Flute came as a great relief. Its simpler music, serenely sampling the whole gamut of emotions, grave to gay, offered equal chances (all taken) to the pure love-singing of Miss ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... weary hours—not weary neither, for their aim has, I am sure, been a worthy one—but, here have I been persuading, with all the reason and eloquence I could bring to bear, this self-willed girl to renounce these fantastic notions she has imbibed from the Christians, and their books, were it only for the sake of domestic peace. Aurelian is growing daily more and more exasperated against this obscure tribe, and drops, oftener than I love to hear them, dark hints of what awaits them, not ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrill'd me—fill'd me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber-door,— Some late visitor, entreating entrance at my chamber-door; This it is, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Ptolemy. Anatomy had been made the basis of scientific medicine; and it is said by Draper that vivisection had begun. [Footnote: 'History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,' p. 295.] In fact, the science of ancient Greece had already cleared the world of the fantastic images of divinities operating capriciously through natural phenomena. It had shaken itself free from that fruitless scrutiny 'by the internal light of the mind alone,' which had vainly sought to transcend experience, and to reach a knowledge of ultimate causes. Instead ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... letters I at first gave them, both to the arrangement made by Graevius and to the numbers assigned in the edition I am using; but I have found that the numbers would only mislead, as no numbering has been yet adopted as fixed. Arbitrary and even fantastic as is the arrangement of Graevius, it is better to confine myself to that because it has been acknowledged, and will enable my readers to find the letters if they wish to do so. Should Mr. Tyrrell continue and complete his edition of the correspondence, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... but, above all, effectively to strengthen the forces of right. The Golden Rule should be, and as the world grows in morality it will be, the guiding rule of conduct among nations as among individuals; though the Golden Rule must not be construed, in fantastic manner, as forbidding the exercise of the police power. This mighty and free Republic should ever deal with all other States, great or small, on a basis of high honor, respecting their rights as jealously as it ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... which resembled (and actually were proved to be) nuggets of pure gold. Necklaces of beads and animals' teeth hung in many strands upon the breast of his deerskin shirt. Leggings and moccasins were a mass of beads, feathers, and porcupines' quills woven in intricately fantastic designs. And, over all, there hung in graceful folds an ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... realities of human existence; he wants more than life can give. He gets what he wants. He obtains a magic skin which enables him to fulfil his every wish. But in so doing he uses up his vital powers. Such is the idea which makes this fantastic ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... reflections of this nature passed through my mind—for as I grow older I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me—while I stood and stared at those grim yet fantastic lines of warriors, sleeping, as their ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Corbells, the projections from which the arches spring, usually cut in a fantastic face, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various |
