"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... significance of honest inquiry in my companion's face as he probed me with his stare. But I could meet his gaze without confusion. My purpose was single enough, and if I had had a moment's doubt of him when he failed to respond to my mood of fantasy; I was now fully prepared ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... and with costumes and scenery the most splendid. This goes without saying, for the play is intended quite as much to be seen as to be heard. To do it justice, the performance must bring out some of the splendor and the fantasy with which it was conceived. As we read A Midsummer Night's Dream it is easy to imagine the glorious succession of splendid scenes, but on the stage the characters become flesh and blood with fixed limitations, and the illusion is easily lost unless ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... you sought entry to my shed My heart would leap to let you in: Since at your name it trembles still— Muse of oblivious fantasy!— Return and share, if share you will, Joy's consecrated bread ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... design, impression, plan, archetype, fancy, judgment, purpose, belief, fantasy, model, sentiment, conceit, ideal, notion, supposition, concept, image, opinion, theory, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... couple of voyages to the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De Clairville atoned for much ere he died. Francois, his ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... the most remote degree desiring or anticipating an intrigue, he was ready to go as far as she would allow in his devotion. He was constantly tormented by a vague phantom of conquest, which danced with will-o'-the-wisp fantasy before him, and from day to day he endeavored to discover how deeply in love she was willing he should fall. He was really fond of her, a fact that did not prevent his entertaining a half-hearted passion for Ethel Mott, the result of this mixture of emotion being that he was ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... necessary to complete the grotesque fantasy which his brain had evolved. He approached the Spanish Minister first through one of his fellow conspirators and then in his own person. At one time he made his request on the pretence that he wished to desert the other filibusterers, and save Spain by committing a double treachery, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... removed the screen and called another eye to behold. He had drawn them up, with their banners, to fill Geoffrey, at once, with his own confidence and knowledge—for it was knowledge and certitude, not opinion or fantasy, that ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... have been tones of cheer, and voices gay, And careless laughter ringing lightly by, And I have listened to wit's mirthful play, And sought to smile at each light fantasy. But ah, there was a voice more deep and clear, That I alone might hear of all the throng, In softest cadence falling on my ear Like a sweet undertone amid the song. And then I longed for this calm hour of night, That undisturbed by any voice ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... Astounding Stories, which I consider by far the finest number since the inception of the magazine last January. The authors whose work appeared in this issue are among the greatest modern writers of fantasy and scientific fiction. Leinster, Burks, Hamilton, Rousseau—what a brilliant galaxy! And Starzl, Vincent, Rich; all writers of note. If ever a magazine merited the designation "all-star number," your August issue filled ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... I say," he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard "Tweet-tweet," and "Chirp-chirp." ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... window, gazing forth and numbly marvelling at the splendour. As of old, it struck her like a weird fantasy—this Indian enchantment—poignant, passionate, holding more of anguish than of ecstasy, yet deeply magnetic, deeply alluring, as a magic potion which, once tasted, must enchain the ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... danger," said that chamberlain to the silversmith, pulling him on one side. "Dismiss this fantasy. You can meet anywhere, even at Court, with women of wealth, young and pretty, who would willingly marry you. For this, if need be, the king would assist you by giving you some title, which in course of time would enable you to found a ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... evening I haven't slept. I walk around as in a fog...Therefore—I'm thinking right now—therefore, that which, I meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides—even all the world—therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since I have stopped? ... Once again, I don't understand anything ...Sergei Ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life—help me, then, to ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... towards his own crotchets, Borrow could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet. Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as this ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 'Twas but fantasy, for my love lay still In my arms with her tender eyes aglow, And she wondered why my lips were chill, Why I was silent ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... And soon I heard the bell to matins ring, And up I rose, no longer would I lie. But now, how trow ye? such a fantasy Fell me to mind, that aye methought the bell Said to me, 'Tell ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... information, started off in the usual style, magnifying mine office. According as their influence over my rational faculties became more complete, the proportions of their Munchausenisms increased. Unfortunately for the duration of the fantasy, their jumble of Scripture prophecies concerning me—which was then made to appear nearly coherent—was so plainly writ, that as soon as the blockade of my faculties was raised, the illusion, never more than half complete, was dispelled. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... there is no communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... out our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fantasy to work? The Dove, the winged Columbus of man's haven? The tender Love-Bird—or the filial Stork? The punctual Crane—the providential Raven? The Pelican whose bosom feeds her young? Nay, must we cut from Saturday till ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... faculty of imagination and the force of example are important considerations in the development of the spiritual feelings and the formation of fine ideals. The world of make-believe, of purest fantasy, is just as interesting and just as significant as the every day actualities of life. It makes not the slightest difference to a little boy, or girl, whether the stories you read them, or the acts of hero and heroine, are reasonable or not. (And ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... for Arthur, overcome with dismay at the meeting, sat in stony silence. But she talked gaily. She chaffed Oliver as though he were an old friend, and laughed vivaciously. She noticed meanwhile that Haddo, more extravagantly dressed than usual, had managed to get an odd fantasy into his evening clothes: he wore knee-breeches, which in itself was enough to excite attention; but his frilled shirt, his velvet collar, and oddly-cut satin waistcoat gave him the appearance of a comic Frenchman. Now that she was able to examine him more ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... same or similar, different or unlike.[80] Not only is there a primordial animal and a primordial plant, schematic forms to which all separate species are referable, but the parts of each are themselves units, which "der Idee nach," are identical inter se. This fantasy can hardly be taken seriously as a scientific theory; it seems, however, to have been what guided Goethe in his "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. Just as the fore limb can be homologised with the hind limb, so, reasoning ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... mixture still adheres; Striving for earthly good are we victorious? A dream and cheat the better part appears. The feelings that could once such noble life inspire Are quenched and trampled out in passion's mire. Where Fantasy, erewhile, with daring flight Out to the infinite her wings expanded, A little space can now suffice her quite, When hope on hope time's gulf has wrecked and stranded. Care builds her nest far down the heart's recesses, There broods o'er dark, untold distresses, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly together in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... a dream? Was it some fantasy of imagination—some wonderful effect of sunshine shining upon hundreds and hundreds of dewdrops, and turning them into scintillating balls of light, catching reflections from the flowers in yonder beds, and sending dancing rays of red, blue, and green across the ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... carry this spirit over into its music. And yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the lustrous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... he returns not home; though, in truth, he tells those poor old people very little of himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single part only,—coiffure, or robe, or hand,—of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of late to work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. [10] He receives three livres a week for his ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... himself at all with the great "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... cleared away from Ned's mind and it all came back, the terrible and treacherous slaughter of his unarmed comrades, his own flight through the timber his swimming of the river, and then the blank. But these were his best friends. It was no fantasy. How and when they had come he did not know, but here they were in the flesh, the Panther, Obed White, Will Allen, "Deaf" ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... neither can nor knows how to imagine, nor does he even desire to do good painting, his work mostly differs but little from his imagination, which is generally somewhat worse; for if he knew how to imagine well or in a masterly manner in his fantasy, he could not have a hand so corrupt as not to show some part or indication of his good will. But no one has ever known how to aspire well in this science, except the mind which understands what good work is, and what ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... separated unwillingly, each thinking only of the other's safety and comfort. The girl knew she was not wanted because the man wished to spare her some unpleasant experience. She obeyed him with a sigh, and sat down, not to sleep, but to muse, as girls will, round-eyed, wistful, with the angelic fantasy of youth and innocence. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... slender,—such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... verge of absurdity, carried along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... approved of socialism it was because in a socialist state the artist might be absolved from the necessity of carrying a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved to think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy of his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and withdrawn rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to society, and in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be said to have founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. Galsworthy and some lesser ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... grew so pale and emaciated, from want of rest, and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions, that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. "Come," I said, "this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind. Compare her with the beautiful women of your own world, and this false enchantment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... imaginations gone, that we must have real rain upon the stage? Shall we clamor for real snow before long, that must be kept in cold storage against the spring season? A longing for concreteness has befogged our fantasy. Even so excellent an actor as Mr. Forbes-Robertson cannot read the great speech beginning, "Look here, upon this picture and on this," in which Hamlet obviously refers to two imaginary portraits in his mind's eye, without ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... a book of horror, of fantasy. A collection of weird, terrifying, supernatural tales with grotesque illustrations in funereal black and white. And the very line I had turned to, the line which had probably struck terror to that unlucky devil's soul, explained ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... rebirth might be assumed to have adopted these expressions or symbols on account of the concrete way in which the human mind knows birth to take place. The tendency for concrete expression of abstract notions causes the desire for another existence to appear, first as a rebirth fantasy and then as a return to the mother's body. One thinks of Job's cry, "Naked came I from my mother's womb and naked shall I return thither," as an example of the literal comparison of death with birth. We need only refer ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... hollow fantasy to the guiltless? Am I in dreamland? Was it best to wander Through the long waves, or better far to ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... view taken by Mr. E. Clodd in Myths and Dreams, [121] Mr. Clodd shows that dreams were necessarily and invariably considered as real events, and it could not have been otherwise, as primitive man would have been unable to conceive the abstract idea of a vision or fantasy. And since during dreams the body remained immobile and quiescent, it was thought that the spirit inside the body left it and travelled independently. Hence the reluctance often evinced to waking a sleeper suddenly from fear lest the absent spirit might ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... brains in his head, and forbreaketh[172] the mights and the wits of the soul and of the body. And then, for feebleness of the brain, him thinketh that he heareth wonderful sounds and songs; and that is nothing else but a fantasy, caused of troubling of the brain; as a man that is in a frenzy him thinketh that he heareth and seeth that none other man doth; and all is but vanity and fantasies of the head, or else it is by working of the wicked enemy that feigneth ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... that a book like the following, which deals with a subject so great and so mysterious as our hope of immortality, by means of an allegory or fantasy, needs a few words of preface, in order to clear away at the outset any misunderstandings which may possibly arise in a reader's mind. Nothing is further from my wish than to attempt any philosophical or ontological exposition of what is hidden behind the veil of death. But one ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... measure, by their affluence Make me esteem them either swift or slow. From that one which I noted of most beauty Beheld I issue forth a fire so happy That none it left there of a greater splendor; And around Beatrice three several times [22] It whirled itself with so divine a song, My fantasy repeats it not to me; Therefore the pen skips, and I write it not, Since our imagination for such folds, Much more our speech, is of a tint too glaring. [27] "O holy sister mine, who us implorest [28] With such devotion, by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... during this period of Leighton's career, gave him new subject-matter, new tints to his palette, and added something of an oriental fantasy to the classic sentiment of his art. The sketches of Damascus and other time-honoured eastern cities, mosques, gardens, and courtyards, which figured largely among Sir Frederic's studies, were made for the most part in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and the life which they are represented as leading: that he has manufactured his local color to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... in manuscript he proceeded with fine courage to rewrite it, and he published the whole book in 1837. It brought him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor Resartus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results in exaggeration of characters and situations, and much fantasy and grotesqueness of expression; but as a dramatic and pictorial vilification of a great historic movement it was and remains unique, and on the whole no history is more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. Here, as in most of his later works, Carlyle throws the emphasis on ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... or Tamerlane's love of skulls. For just as character is outwardly shown so outward things react upon the character; and who, with that daring barber's ludicrous fancy visible always on his face, could quite go the sober way of beneficent monarchs? The fantasy must be mitigated here, set off there; had you such a figure to dress, say for amateur theatricals, you would realize the difficulty. The heavy silver eagle to balance it; the glittering cuirass lower down, preventing the eye from dwelling too long on the barber's absurdity. And then the ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... fairy tales about the forgotten Knickerbockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puritans of Plymouth Rock; Longfellow to the Acadians and the prehistoric Indians; Emerson took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters—e.g., Whittier and Lowell—who ventured to turn to the life around them, and the banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of the current taste, and the mean position ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... away. But nowadays I have seen the statue actually blink. (39) And yet, may Heaven help me! my good sirs, I think, between ourselves, the culprit must have bestowed a kiss on Cleinias, than which love's flame asks no fiercer fuel. (40) So insatiable a thing it is and so suggestive of mad fantasy. (And for this reason held perhaps in higher honour, because of all external acts the close of lip with lip bears the same name as that of soul with soul in love.) (41) Wherefore, say I, let every one who wishes to be master of himself and sound of soul abstain ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... there was so much of the freedom of nature mingled with the fascinating pleasures of the chase and of the woods, were not to be dispossessed so readily. When Faith artfully led him back to those animal enjoyments of which he had been so fond in boyhood, the fantasy of her brother seemed most to waver; but whenever it became apparent that the dignity of a warrior, and all the more recent and far more alluring delights of his later life, were to be abandoned ere his being could return into its former existence, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... from the moment, Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day, Morning-Star, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... interest that result when art comes in—not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly, and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral, balanced in all its parts, and worthy of ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... had stolen ... that he could not give back: not that ardent, whole-souled, enthusiastic love; not the romantic idealism, the hero-worship, that veil of fantasy behind which first love is wont to hide its ephemerality. But she would not now judge the dead. Her romantic love lay buried in the lonely church at Dover, and she was striving not to think ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... spoken of the work of Mr. O'Lochlainn, who is responsible for the three-act ballet, Brian Boruma; a fantasy on the Brehon laws, entitled The Gardens of Goll; Poulaphuca, and the Roaring of O'Rafferty; but the repertory also includes notable and impassioned compositions by Ossian MacGillycuddy, Aghla Malachy, Carolan MacFirbis and Emer Sidh. The orchestra employed differs in many respects ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... it the conception of? For example, when we speak of a point in the timeless space of physical science, I suppose that we are speaking of something in nature. If we are not so speaking, our scientists are exercising their wits in the realms of pure fantasy, and this is palpably not the case. This demand for a definite Habeas Corpus Act for the production of the relevant entities in nature applies whether space be relative or absolute. On the theory of relative space, it may perhaps be argued that there is no timeless ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... which Callot, the burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself. If it passes from the world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible supply of parodies of mankind. Creations of its fantasy are the Scaramouches, Crispins and Harlequins, grinning silhouettes of man, types altogether unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, which, colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... blood are real, I am so," said he; "a spirit, too, I may claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"—and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... his deepest wit, He thereon feeds his hungrie fantasy, Still full, yet never satisfyde with it; Like Tantale, that in store doth sterved ly, 200 So doth he pine in most satiety; For nought may quench his infinite desyre, Once kindled through that ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... towers are built almost entirely of sandstone, but on the side facing the town they are usually faced with brick. The shapes of the roofs vary from flat to pointed, but the towers themselves are simple and almost austere in form in comparison with those generally found in North Germany, where fantasy runs riot in red brick. The Nuremberg towers were obviously intended in the first place for use rather than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... sensible, gave a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived him ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... recurrence of the subject in another part which, in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the complexity of the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... She had been laughing so much in herself at this long evening of freedom, that the recollection was like ice to her heart. It was all a mockery, a fantasy; and Toby was no more hers. She was separated from him for ever, and the more closely she was embraced by him the less she felt herself free to belong to him. A revulsion of feeling shook her. With an instinctive movement almost savage, she escaped ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... a royal marriage, a triumph, a funeral. So, though Spenser's knights and ladies do what no men ever could do, and speak what no man ever spoke, the procession rolls forward with a pomp which never forgets itself, and with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident. Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that Spenser never ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of compassion for revenges ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... realms of poetic fantasy to record a simple fact of everyday life—one which is appreciated by every man and woman irrespective of nationality or temperament. As in all other matters pertaining to the comfort of the European ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... no end of the diverse fantasy of men's minds." And then he brought forth some Latin, which I conceived not: but whispering unto Aunt Joyce (which is something learned in that tongue) to say what it were, she made answer, "So many men, so many minds." ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... been symbolized and picturegraphed 'til the imagination ran riot, and ingenuity and fancy became lost, like ideas in a fantasy of words. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... at the letter on the table before him, then folded it and put it in his pocket. It was well, he thought. His latest book of fairy tales and fantasy had enjoyed good acceptance. And the check in the letter had been of satisfactory size. He smiled to himself. There were compensations in this job of his. It seemed to be profitable to have a purpose other than ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... admirable art the author has interspersed here and there contrasting episodes of realism or of absurdity; he has woven into his story a succession of vivid dialogues, and by means of an acute sense of observation he has succeeded in keeping his airy fantasy in touch with actual things. The description of Nicolette, escaping from her prison, and stepping out over the grass in her naked feet, with the daisies, as she treads on them, showing black against her whiteness, is a wonderful example of his power of combining ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Poe, whose influence on him is incontestable. These two writers have in common a refined and morbid sensibility, a predilection for the horrible and a passion for the study of the same kind of subjects,—solitude, silence, death. But the powerful fantasy of the American author, which does not come in touch with reality, wanders freely through the whole world and through all the centuries of history. His heroes take refuge in half-crumbled castles, they look at the reader from the top of craggy rocks, whither their love ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... research; free from guile himself, he was too inclined to judge others to be of this nature also. But his common sense and critical attitude towards enthusiasm saved him, no doubt, from many falls into the mire of fantasy. ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... system of traditional, or rather of parabolistic symbols, as Christ himself had sought to render clear his spiritualistic ideas by all kinds of beautiful parables. Hence the mystical, problematic, marvelous, and transcendental in the artwork of the Middle Ages, in which fantasy makes her most desperate efforts to depict the purely spiritual by means of sensible images, and invents colossal follies, piling Pelion on Ossa and Parsifal on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of a picture the mere seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the nobility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... this point in his fantasy, a breath of the practical entered, and Jimmy began to consider the more sensible problem of what sort of information this sheaf of evidence ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... held its tongue. Ultimately the interest on the subject became confined to a few papers which had received the best letters. Those papers that couldn't get interesting letters stopped the correspondence and sneered at the "sensationalism" of those that could. Among the mass of fantasy there were not a few notable solutions, which failed brilliantly, like rockets posing as fixed stars. One was that in the obscurity of the fog the murderer had ascended to the window of the bedroom by means of a ladder from the pavement. He had ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... sweet, gent, and tender, beyond other men, he shall sure as daydawn go and wed with woman that could hold castle or govern army if need were? 'Tis passing strange, but I have oft noted the same. And if he be rough and fierce, then shall he take fantasy to some soft, nesh [Note 10], bashful creature that scarce dare say nay to save her life. Right as men of high stature do commonly wed with small women, and the great women with little men. Such be the ways of Providence, ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... with the history of her cousin, and willing to aid in some fantasy which was to lead to the present happy restoration of the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... from her, his dreams certainly should have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy of music and flowers. ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... find the most obscure and broken indications of the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don Quixote—for those who can understand—but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little village lying near the Portsmouth ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Paulmann gave a grim look at him; but Registrator Heerbrand laid a music-leaf on the frame, and sang with ravishing grace one of Bandmaster Graun's bravura airs. The student Anselmus accompanied this, and much more; and a fantasy duet, which Veronica and he now fingered, and Conrector Paulmann had himself composed, again brought all ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Bach's days. The same is true of many similar passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the free expression, not of musical fantasy, as such (the unconscious play of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... our favorite American poets; LOWELL, indulges in a like fancy in the following lines from that dream, like, exquisite fantasy, "In the Twilight," found in the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the same fantasy that creates a Kerberus, the Iranian dogs[12], or other guardians of the road that leads to heaven. The description is too minute to make it probable that the Vedic poet understood them to be 'sun and moon,' as the later Brahmanical ingenuity ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky, frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... but be our fantasy. Neither Brother Emmanuel nor any other may need the shelter of this room. We will trust ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... "Let him play here if he wants to. He's developing his imagination, and he may be finding more stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy—or whatever you call it—is the essence and mainspring of those scientists, musicians, painters, and poets who amount to something in later life. They are adults who ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... which we applied the power of memory in its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to transform within our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into one another. By doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile fantasy. In this way we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, with ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... legions as the learned author of THE GOLDEN BOUGH, the irreligion of the Arunta and northern tribes (if these be really without religion) is the result of their form of speculation, wholly occupied by the idea of reincarnation, while the Arunta form of totemism is the consequence of an isolated fantasy about their peculiar sacred stones. Meanwhile the Euahlayi, as Mrs. Parker proves, entertain, in a limited way, not elsewhere recorded in Australia, the belief in the reincarnation of the souls of uninitiated young people. They also, like the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole—letters and poems no less than essays—these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of the ridges of a few decrepit walls, from four to six feet high, which extend among the brier bushes. Archaeologists call them the aqueducts of Seranus, the Roman camp of Holderlock, or vestiges of Theodoric, according to their fantasy. The only thing about these ruins which could be considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical humoreske by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears, pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a girl—light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow; many wore women's ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... I saw him dead, breathless and bleeding Upon the ground.— Art thou alive? or is it fantasy That plays upon our eyesight? I pr'ythee, speak; We will not trust our eyes without our ears. Thou ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... fared so ill at the hands of the critics. Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... faith new-stablished would stand, and be No longer vext of this infirmity. And so that night, ere lying down to sleep, There came on him, half making him to weep And half to laugh that such a thing should be, A mad conceit and antic fantasy (And yet more sad than merry was the whim) To crave this boon of Sleep, beseeching him To send the dream of dreams most coveted. And ere he lay him down upon his bed, A soft sweet song was born within his thought; But if he sang the song, or if 'twas nought But the soul's longing whispered to the ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... my spirit is changing within me. I feel as if I had never known life until now. In vain I say unto myself that this must be a mere fantasy of mine; I, who am marked with the 'frost of eild,' who will soon be—let me see—seven-and-thirty years old. What ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... because—he scarcely worded it to himself—he and she and everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... be decisive. Know, once for all, that such a reconciliation as you would desire never can or shall take place. Spare me the pain of recapitulation. It is enough to say that, once thrown from you, I cannot nor will not be resumed at your pleasure and fantasy. Although injured in the tenderest point, I forgive all that has passed, and shall be happy to receive you as a friend, in private as well as in public; but all attempts to obtain more will only meet with mortification ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... what is not so usual, a quite intelligible fantasy in mime—The Magic Pipe: Pierrot, faithless mistress, despair, sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... with different ideas by means of the senses; how hunger, thirst, and the other internal affections can likewise impress upon it divers ideas; what must be understood by the common sense (sensus communis) in which these ideas are received, by the memory which retains them, by the fantasy which can change them in various ways, and out of them compose new ideas, and which, by the same means, distributing the animal spirits through the muscles, can cause the members of such a body to move in as many different ways, and in a manner as suited, whether to the ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... fatal epoch when man experiences an insatiable hunger for love, and for want of a woman will nourish some monstrous fantasy, or even, like the prisoner of Saintine, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... he sought, despite the darkness of the street and the absence of any from whom to elicit information. The venta was on the ground-floor, and above it towered storey after storey, built with the quaint fantasy of the middle ages, and surmounted by a deep, overhanging gabled roof. The house seemed to have two staircases of stone and two doors—one on each side of the venta. There is a Spanish proverb which says that the rat which has only one ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... glimpses through lattice windows of marvelous and fantastic merchandise. Marvelous and fantastic it seemed to Winny at first sight. But when she saw that it was just what they were selling in the shops to-day the delicious confusion in her mind heightened the effect of fantasy and ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... is to be all made of sighs and tears.... It is to be all made of faith and service.... It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty, and observance, All humbleness, all patience, and impatience, All purity, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... taxing with narrow-mindedness, and even unintelligence, persons who consider such an ideal of life as a fantasy impossible to realize, or as the product of exalted dreamers who do not know the world. No doubt this ideal cannot be attained by ill-constructed, unnatural beings, tainted by a morbid heredity, or depraved by idleness, vice and passion for pleasure, who have lost their elasticity and plasticity ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... social service. It may be transformed into the love of God, and find an outlet in the religious life of the individual. Or it may be expressed only in language, in which case it may stop at the stage of erotic fantasy and day-dream, or may result in some really great piece of poetry or prose. This last outlet is so common that our language is full of symbolic words and phrases which have a hidden erotic meaning ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... is confessing, when Noah interrupts with the comment that insobriety is not such a very serious affair. In fact, he himself once ... and by this time the reader begins to get the drift of this joyous humane fantasy, the point being that the hierarchy of Heaven are all on the side of the brave simple soldier who has died that France might live. As how could they not be? Another time, the Poilu continues, he was sent to prison for cutting a piece from his coat in order to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... northern and strenuous half, destined to move with sure steps and steady mind to greater growth and higher place among the nations than any of us can now imagine—would it be as safe to prophesy that such a momentous sailing-day will never be more than the after-dinner fantasy of aristocratic rhetoric? Is it not at least as easy to imagine that even now, while the people of England send their viceroys to the ends of the earth, and vote careless millions for a reconstructed army, and sit in the wrecks of Cabinets disputing whether they will eat our bread or the stranger's, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... extracts must have impressed him. At any rate, on the night after the reading of it, just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy, including the command with which it ends. With a particular clearness did he seem to see the picture of the Great White Road, "straight as the way of the Spirit, and broad as the breast of Death," and of the little Hare travelling towards the ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... occasion Frohman produced a play for the mere pleasure of doing it. He put on a certain little dramatic fantasy. It was foredoomed to failure and held the boards ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... it implies some weight and solidity; Romance means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the later Middle ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... newspaper trusts, how very cautious and averse from idealist upheaval are those that control this capitalist society—when we consider all this, it is frankly incredible that Eugenics should be a front bench fashionable topic and almost an Act of Parliament, if it were in practice only the unfinished fantasy which it is, as I have shown, in pure reason. Even if it were a just revolution, it would be much too revolutionary a revolution for modern statesmen, if there were not something else behind. Even if it were a true ideal, it would be much too idealistic an ideal for our ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton |
