"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity-the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction. A distrust in my own abilities as a writer was, nevertheless, one of the principal causes which prevented me from complying with the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I have taught thee, thou shalt before the living sing, the Sun-Song, which will appear in many parts no fiction. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... of these fellows who know more about writing than about running engines would only go out there for a year and keep their eyes and ears and brains open, and mouths shut, they could come home and write us some true stories that would make fiction-grinders exceedingly weary. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Fantastic Universe Science Fiction, December, 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper
... two centuries and a half,-an antiquity not incredible in itself, and which, it may be remarked, does not precede by more than half a century the alleged foundation of the capital of Mexico. The fiction of Manco Capac and his sister-wife was devised, no doubt, at a later period, to gratify the vanity of the Peruvian monarchs, and to give additional sanction to their authority by deriving ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... entirely, and the expression of his face grew almost stern. But the sternness was not all for the culprit thus arraigned before him; much of it was for the prosecutor. He was both shocked and disgusted with the course Mr Benden had taken: which course is not fiction, but fact. ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... deeply, 'that was indeed all. Philosophy, in this part of it, is a mere guess. Even Longinus can but conjecture. And what to his great and piercing intellect stands but in the strength of probability, to ours will, of necessity, address itself in the very weakness of fiction. As it is, I value life only for the brightest and best it can give now, and these to my mind are power and a throne. When these are lost I would fall unregarded ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... traits which may have impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to "My Uncle Toby." The simplicity of nature and the "kindly, sweet disposition" are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's "rapid and hasty temper" in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably. And, on the whole, there seems no reason to ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... character of the Witch. If the name was freely used, the thing itself was then rare, being no less than a marriage and a kind of priesthood. For ease of illustration, I have joined together the details of so delicate a scrutiny by a thread of fiction. The outward body of it matters little. The essential point is to remember that such things were not caused, as they try to persuade us, by human fickleness, by the inconstancy of our fallen nature, by the chance persuasions of desire. There was needed the deadly pressure of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... not, however, a matter for congratulation that so large a portion of the volumes that are most read are works of fiction. In most of our public libraries the novels called for are far in excess of all the other books. Let any one scrutinize the advertising columns of literary journals, and he will see that the only startling ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... continuing to repeat that naughty pet name of his for the Fritzies. Nobody, though, called on anybody else to defend the glory of the flag; nobody invited anybody to remember the Lusitania; nobody spoke a single one of the fine speeches which the bushelmen of fiction at home were even then thinking up to put into the mouths of ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... can improve on the greatest master that ever dared, and with perfect success, to picture, without our condemnation—so wide is the privilege of genius in sportive fancy—what, but for the self-rectifying spirit of fiction, would have been an outrage on nature, and in the number not only of forbidden but unhallowed things. The passages interpolated by Mr Horne's own pen are as bad as possible—clownish and anti-Chaucerian to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... has for its object either a thing considered as existing, or solely the essence of a thing. (2) Now "fiction" is chiefly occupied with things considered as existing. (3) I will, therefore, consider these first - I mean cases where only the existence of an object is feigned, and the thing thus feigned is understood, or ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... but they are all worthy companions of the frontispiece—a lovely portrait of Mrs. Peel, engraved by Heath, from Sir Thomas Lawrence's picture. In the literary department—a very court of fiction—is, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror, a tale of forty-four pages; and, The Tapestried Chamber, by Sir Walter Scott; both much too long for extract, which would indeed be almost unfair. Next ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... given him a distaste for what he called religion; and he was loose, as might be expected. Still, he was not so loose as to have lost his finer instincts altogether, for he had some. He read a good deal, mostly fiction, played the organ, and actually conducted the musical part of a service every Sunday, heathen as he was. His vagrant life of excitement begot in him a love of liquor, which he took merely to quiet him, but unfortunately the dose required ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... above all it has that stimulating hygienic quality, that cheerful, unconscious healthfulness, which makes a story like 'Robinson Crusoe', or 'The Vicar of Wakefield', so unspeakably refreshing after a course of even good contemporary fiction." ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... more fond of fiction, and some of their stories have a strange mingling of humor and pathos. I give the two which follow as specimens. The Indian names contained in them are in the Ottawa or "Courte-Oreilles" language, but the same tales are current in all the different tongues ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... naked, so, to the writer, a book about them without any attempt at foliage and flowers would seem unnatural. The modern chronicler has transformed history into a fascinating story. Even science is now taught through the charms of fiction. Shall this department of knowledge, so generally useful, be left only to technical prose? Why should we not have a class of books as practical as the gardens, fields, and crops, concerning which they are written, and at the same time having much of the light, shade, color, and life of ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... labors are manifest history: we come now to consider that great work, Gulliver's Travels,—the most successful of its kind ever written,—in which, with all the charm of fiction in plot, incident, and description, he pictures the great men and the political parties of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... burglar of whom history or fiction has kept any record, whether before or after this eventful night, when he broke open a safe and, emerging with his booty, found himself confronted by a policeman, took to his heels. Not so this burglar. He walked ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... acquiring votes. One of the expedients, as is well known, for the attainment of such objects, is the creation of nominal and fictitious voters, by conferring on the friends of a political party an apparent, but not a real interest in a landed estate; and this is practised and justified by a legal fiction, and a little casuistry, with which political agents are quite familiar. The ordinary mode in these cases, is to confer such parchment franchises on dependents and personal connections of the great man who needs their support—and the Earl of Bellersdale, who ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... rapidity of drying (especially in a draught), but is more expensive. Nothing, I believe, prevents mites (psocidae) appearing now and then even in poisoned insects. Constant care, stuffed bodies, and soaking in benzoline, are the deterrent agents; camphor is a pleasant fiction, so is wool soaked in creosote, phenic acid, cajeput oil, crystals of napthelin, etc.—in fact, it may be laid down as an indisputable doctrine that no atmospheric poison is of the slightest avail against mites. [Footnote: See remarks on this in chapter IV.] Get them ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... of the characters, and likewise the place where the unfortunate scenes were acted: yet as it was impossible to offer a relation to the public in such an imperfect state, I have thrown over the whole a slight veil of fiction, and substituted names and places according to my own fancy. The principal characters in this little tale are now consigned to the silent tomb: it can therefore hurt the feelings of no one; and may, I flatter myself, be ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... rather, all that was amiable and excellent was drawn out. I was as recluse as ever I had been at the convent, but how different was my seclusion. My time was spent in storing my mind with lofty and poetical ideas; in meditating on all that was striking and noble in history or fiction; in studying and tracing all that was sublime and beautiful in nature. I was always a visionary, imaginative being, but now my reveries and imaginings all elevated me ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... sir as I say. And for thy fiction, Why thy Verse swels with stuffe so fine and smooth, That thou art euen Naturall in thine Art. But for all this (my honest Natur'd friends) I must needs say you haue a little fault, Marry 'tis ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... virtue of which it may itself be made the predicate of a proposition. That the employment of it as a copula does not necessarily include the affirmation of existence, appears from such a proposition as this, A centaur is a fiction of the poets; where it can not possibly be implied that a centaur exists, since the proposition itself expressly asserts that the thing has no ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... snowdrops, and to go snowdropping before February set in was as much an institution as turning their money when they first heard the cuckoo, or wishing at the sight of the earliest white butterfly. As a matter of fact, though the delicate fiction of asking for the holiday was preserved, it was such a sine qua non that the cook was prepared for it. She had baked jam tartlets and made potted meat the day before, and was already cutting sandwiches and packing them in greaseproof paper. Every ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... MATTER.—In the volume will be found the best sentiments of the best writers. The pupil will find fables, nature studies, tales of travel and adventure, brave deeds from history and fiction, stories of loyalty and heroism, examples of sublime Christian self-sacrifice, and selections that teach industry, contentment, respect for authority, reverence for all things sacred, attachment to home, and ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... Wilkins.—Is the author of this delightful work of fiction known? The first edition was published in 1751, but it does not contain the dedication to Elizabeth, Countess of Northumberland, found in later impressions. When was this dedication added? It is observable that in all the editions I have seen, the initials R.P. are signed to the dedication, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... of those wanderings, to the interest and romance of which no fiction can add. After this conference was ended, Prince Charles went to Invergarie; Lord ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... by James Newton Baskett, M. A., as an interesting book to be read in connection with our magazine, "BIRDS." It is well written and finely illustrated. Persons interested in Bird Day should have one of these books. We can furnish nearly any book of the Poets or Fiction or School Books as premiums to "BIRDS." We can furnish almost any article on the market as premiums for subscriptions to "BIRDS," either fancy or sporting goods, musical instruments, including high-grade pianos, or any book published ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... literary, literal, and scientific mind purposeless fiction is abhorrent. Fortunately we all are literally and scientifically inclined; the doom of purposeless fiction is sounded; and it is a great comfort to believe that, in the near future, only literary and scientific works suitable for man, woman, child, and suffragette, are to adorn the lingerie-laden ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... 'Those who do well in school will be equally successful in athletics'; but it's just a pleasant little fiction, like nurses telling you if you eat crusts it will make your hair curl, and it never did, because I used to finish even the hardest and most burnt ones, and my hair's as straight as a yard measure, while my little ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... from whose fathers they have descended to us. From these, and from no other source, we have obtained all that is known of God and divine works, from the beginning of the world. Even among the Turks and the heathen, all their knowledge of God—excepting what is manifestly fable and fiction—came from the Scriptures. And our knowledge is confirmed and proven by great miracles, even to the present day. These Scriptures declare, concerning this article, that there is no God or divine being save this one alone. They not only manifest him to us from without, but they ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the truth—that Alice had ended ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... [1] That the wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the Journey from this World to ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... that makes the treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober; which makes Thebes, Julius Caesar, anything and anybody in fabulous and historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of successive accretions of romantic fiction. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... finding us so easy and good-natured, the enquiry is still unable to discover the truth; but mocks us to a degree, and has gone out of its way to prove the inutility of that which we admitted only by a sort of supposition and fiction to be the true definition of temperance or wisdom: which result, as far as I am concerned, is not so much to be lamented, I said. But for your sake, Charmides, I am very sorry—that you, having such beauty and such wisdom and temperance of soul, ...
— Charmides • Plato
... Daughter of Heth," in 1871, that Black secured the attention of the reading public. "The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" followed, and in 1873 "A Princess of Thule" attained great popularity. Retiring from journalism the next year he devoted himself entirely to fiction. A score of novels followed, the last in 1898, just before his death on December 10 of that year. No novelist has lavished more tender care on the portrayal of his heroines, or worked up more delicately a scenic background ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... disclaiming such empty employments. Indeed, she was presently much interested in the admirable portraiture of "Silas Marner," and still more by the keen, vivid enjoyment, critical, droll, and moralizing, displayed by a man who heard works of fiction so rarely that they were always fresh to him, and who looked on them as studies of life. His hands were busy all the time carving a boss for the roof of one of the side aisles of his church—the last step in ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been in here," said Payne bitterly. "The thing is beginning to get a little clear. Nobody's been in here who wasn't wanted. It's simple to keep them out, with the river the only trail to come in by; so they've built up a fiction about the district, and nobody's been here to check ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... Black have now added a volume on Poland, by Monica M. Gardner. The more we know of Poland and the Polish people the better our understanding of the causes of the war. ... The book is as good reading as any fiction, and the most austere critic must admit its relevance to the task of 'getting on with ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... is itself a fact more important because less disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far larger proportion of the field of literature, the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the biblical doctrine, according to which the world and all that therein is was created at a stroke, he apologetically describes his attempt to explain the origin of the world from chaos under the laws of motion as a scientific fiction, intended merely to make the process more comprehensible. It is more easily conceivable, if we think of the things in the world as though they had been gradually formed from elements, as the plant develops from the seed. We now pass ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... half-sad smile. "Do you still keep up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that YOU knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... my young friend—a fiction that will do no one any harm, but will cause us to be regarded ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... bureaucratic ambitions and policy. It had not one single issue in which the people who were fighting its battles and bearing its burdens were even remotely interested. And then again—a despotism must not show signs of weakness. Its power lies in the fiction of its invincibility. Liberals and Progressives of all shades, wise and not wise, saw their opportunity. Finns and Poles grew bolder. The air was thick with threats and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... through it very well; and seemed to suffer even less than did her aunt. She had done nothing to spread abroad among the public of Hadley that fiction as to Sir Omicron's opinion which her lord had been sedulous to disseminate in London. She had said very little about herself, but she had at any rate said nothing false. Nor had she acted falsely; or so as to give false impressions. All that little world now around ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read something to improve your mind; read about Alexander the Great, about Spurius Ahala, about Caius Gracchus, or, if you please, Tiberius.' But just such nonsense it is, when people ridicule reading romances in which the great event of the fiction is the real great ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... missionary gatherings held in England the statement is often made to-day that the first Englishman to go out as a foreign missionary was William Carey, the leader of the immortal "Serampore Three." It is time to explode that fiction. For some years before William Carey was heard of a number of English Moravian Brethren had gone out from these shores as foreign missionaries. In Antigua laboured Samuel Isles, Joseph Newby, and Samuel Watson; in Jamaica, George Caries and John Bowen; in St. Kitts and St. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... after adolescence, the Jorias consider it a great sin, to avoid which they sometimes marry a girl to an arrow before she attains puberty. An arrow is tied to her hand, and she goes seven times round a mahua branch stuck on an improvised altar, and drinks ghi and oil, thus creating the fiction of a marriage. The arrow is then thrown into a river to imply that her husband is dead, and she is afterwards disposed of by the ceremony of widow-marriage. If this mock ceremony has not been performed before the girl becomes adult, she is taken to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... what you mean," he added after a pause; "you have probably read some fiction of old times when the workers went on strike ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... fiction? No. Go to Simoorie And look at their baby, a twelve-month old Houri, A pert little, Irish-eyed Kathleen Mavournin— She's always about on ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the first moment, and he shuddered at his brother's burlesque of the high romantic vein in which most of his neverended beginnings were conceived. One of his river-faring uncles was visiting with his family at the boy's home when he laid out the scheme of his great fiction of "Hamet el Zegri," and the kindly young aunt took an interest in it which he poorly rewarded a few months later, when she asked how the story was getting on, and he tried to ignore the whole matter, and showed such mortification at the mention of it that the ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... life. The society that he met here was mainly that of the foreign diplomatists, but, agreeable as it was, it did not distract him from his studies or from his observation of the people among whom he was placed. In a letter to this country he said, "What seems mere fiction and romance in other countries is matter of observation here, and in all that relates to manners Cervantes and Le Sage are historians; for when you have crossed the Pyrenees you have not only passed from one country and climate to another, but you have gone back a couple of centuries ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... good thing, he affably accepted Archie's offering, so graciously indeed that the little fellow called for another ear of corn more amply to relieve the porcine distresses, the detail of which had much appealed to his tender heart. It seemed as if the choice of the good Mr. Briscoe lay between the fiction of riding an endless race or playing the Samaritan to the afflicted pig, when in the midst of Archie's noisy beatitudes sleep fell upon him unaware, like a thief in the night. As he waited for the groom to reappear with the second relay of refreshments, Briscoe felt the tense ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... expression. The Spaniards, however, applaud, in the verses of Ausias March, the same musical combinations of sound, and the same tone of moral melancholy, which pervade the productions of Petrarch. [94] In prose too, they have (to borrow the words of Andres) their Boccaccio in Martorell; whose fiction of "Tirante el Blanco" is honored by the commendation of the curate in Don Quixote, as "the best book in the world of the kind, since the knights- errant in it eat, drink, sleep, and die quietly in their beds, like other folk, and very unlike most heroes of romance." The ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... but essential; but they are only the garments in which the Divine spirit of religion must be clad for its exposure to a cold and ungenial world. Many are there who look with profound respect upon the dress, but think not whether it covers a divinity or a fiction. How have men—great statesmen and small politicians as well as others—praised the Established Church of England, and actually stood in awe of its majesty, when the thought of its spiritual relation to themselves or any one else had perhaps never ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... traits were not noticeable except in the working hours and not always then. The boys kept up the fiction of his leadership, conferring with him and consulting him about everything. And with open hearts they took him into their scout life and ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... extraordinary adventure Mr. Pickwick experienced with the middle-aged lady in the double-bedded room, is one of the most amusing in the book, and one which has made the "Great White Horse" as familiar a name as any in fiction or reality. ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... murdered murderer an orthodox funeral. Again, in 522, a high officer was "killed by robbers"; it is explained that there were no robbers at all, in fact, but that the mere killing of an officer by a common person needs the assumption of robbery. It is like the legal fiction of lunacy in modern Chinese law to account for the heinous crime of parricide, and thus save the city from being razed to the ground. Once more, at the Peace Conference of 546, Ts'u undoubtedly ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... you tell? 'Tis incredible. What you say is not very likely. You tell me a Fiction. I don't think 'tis true. You tell me a monstrous Story. Are you not asham'd to be guilty of so wicked a Lye? This is a Fable fit to ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... refer to this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by one of the sentences of Londonian[4] thought which constantly pervert the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also," says the Dean, "the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so many of the legends both of Pagan and Christian times." I might simply reply to this insinuation that times which have no legends differ from the legendary ones merely by ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... God is all, and God is spirit; therefore all is spirit. Matter is not spirit, but is a fiction which only exists for those who persist in believing in it against the evidence of facts. As matter does not exist, and is only a lie and the invention of Satan, the body, which we see in the form of matter, does not exist either. The suffering caused by the body is simply ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... case were suited to the understanding of the pupils. Robinson Crusoe, for example, may appropriately be told to second-grade pupils, or it may be read by fourth- or fifth-grade pupils, or it may be studied as fiction by eighth-grade pupils or university students. All poems of remarkable excellence that are suitable for primary pupils are also suitable for pupils in the higher grades and for adults, and the same is ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... populace followed the vehicle closely, but evinced no active desire to effect a rescue. Rumors of the story soon circulated all over the city. Nor were they exaggerated, as is usually the case. For once, reality surpassed the wildest thought of fiction. ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... innocent little fiction, my young friend—a fiction that will do no one any harm, but will cause us to ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... devoted to travel and ratiocination; here is the result." Mr. Scogan tapped the dummy books. "And now we come to the 'Tales of Knockespotch'. What a masterpiece and what a great man! Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn't be writing a novel about the wearisome development of a young man's character, you wouldn't be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... novelist, but his greatest book. It is the most important translation that has come out of Spain in our time in the field of fiction and it will be remembered as epochal."—JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL, Representative in America of the Society of Spanish ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... will spring into being. Thermopylae will become a new story, while William Tell and Arnold Winkelried will take rank among the demigods. Sidney Carton will become far more than a mere character of fiction, for on his head we shall find a halo, and Horace Mann will become far more than a mere schoolmaster. Historians, poets, novelists, statesmen, and philanthropists will rally about us to reinforce our efforts and to cite to us men and women of all times who shone resplendent by reason ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... smell of ether in the hall outside the door of Monte Covington's room. It made her gasp for a moment. It seemed to make concrete what, after all, had until this moment been more or less vague. It was like fiction suddenly made true. That pungent odor was a grim reality. So was that black-bearded Dr. Marcellin, who, leaving his patient in the hands of his assistant, came to the door wiping his ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... well adapted to the state of Europe in the middle ages. The change in the condition of the world, however, has gradually obliterated almost all its features. The villein has become the independent farmer; the lord of the manor, the simple landlord; and the sovereign leige, in whom, according to the fiction of the system, the fee of the whole country vested, has become a constitutional monarch. It may be that another series of changes may convert the tenant into an owner, the lord into a rich commoner, and the monarch into a president. Though these ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... were not inclined to display in the field the standard of the empire and of Christianity; and though they depended on every superstitious hope of defence, the promise of victory would have appeared too bold a fiction.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... repose, Till late, with wonder, grief, and awe, Great Bourbon's relics, sad she saw. Truce to these thoughts!—for, as they rise, How gladly I avert mine eyes, Bodings, or true or false, to change, For Fiction's fair romantic range, Or for tradition's dubious light, That hovers 'twixt the day and night: Dazzling alternately and dim, Her wavering lamp I'd rather trim, Knights, squires, and lovely dames, to see Creation of my fantasy, Than gaze abroad on reeky fen, And make of ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... parted very good friends. Sarrasin and the two Americans disappeared into Camelot, and Ericson drove home alone. As he drove he was thinking over the Americans. What a perfect type they both were of the regulation American of English fiction and the English stage! If they could only go on to the London stage and speak exactly as they spoke in ordinary life they must make a splendid success as American comic actors. But, no doubt, as soon as either began to act, the naturalness of the ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... fifty or sixty announcements, from annual reference-books, from Sunday School periodicals, fiction-magazines, and journals of discussion. One benefactor implored, "Don't be a Wallflower—Be More Popular and Make More Money—YOU Can Ukulele or Sing Yourself into Society! By the secret principles of a Newly Discovered ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... loud enough for all the company to hear, "Lafite, six florins. 'Arry, shall we have some Lafite? You don't mind? No more do I then. I say, waiter, let's 'ave a pint of ordinaire." Truth is stranger than fiction. You good fellow, wherever you are, why did you ask 'Arry to 'ave that pint of ordinaire in the presence of your obedient servant? How could he do otherwise than ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... only superficially will at once see that it is not all fiction; and he who reads it more than superficially will as easily see that it is not all fact. In what proportions it is composed of either would probably require a very acute critic accurately to determine. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Here! This purse is but an earnest of thy fortune, If thou prov'st faithful. But if thou betrayest me, Hark you!—the wolf that shall drag thee to his den Shall be no fiction. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Amazing Science Fiction Stories May 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... one newspaper contributor in a million has stopped at a first letter to the editor. Like much better people, I had made the discovery that whilst my opinions regarding the Genius of Shakespeare, the Art of Fiction, and the Character of Cromwell were not wanted by anybody, there were some questions cropping up, as it were, at my own door, about which I might, if I liked, give an opinion that some persons at all events would think worth printing. In short, I was enabled to ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... de Charles Neuf," which is very clever, but the history of that period in France is so revolting that works of fiction founded upon it are as disagreeable as the history itself. Hogarth's pictures and Le Sage's novels are masterpieces, and yet admirable only as excellent representations of what in itself is odious. However, they are satirical works, and so have their raison d'etre, which I do not think a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... feature in its enforcement. To do this, we deem it essentially necessary to show the character of such men and the manner in which this law is carried out. We shall make no charges that we cannot sustain by the evidence of the whole city proper, and with the knowledge that truth is stronger than fiction. ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... to pass unnoticed by the ordinary reader and disturb no one except the local archaeologist or those who propose to the novelist that he shall combine the accuracy of the historical scholar with the creative imagination of the writer of what, after all, is fiction. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of 'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'—a short address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it was not specially ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... truth to fiction: if we could select any instances from real life, any trials suited to the capacity of young people, they would be preferable to any which the most ingenious writer could invent for our purpose. A gentleman who has taken his two sons, one of them ten, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is, primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest and importance. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... view, Schulman's achievement is interesting because of the kind of literature it was the first to offer to readers of Hebrew—pastime literature, fiction in place of the serious writings of the humanists. The enormous success obtained by this first work of the translator, the repeated editions which it underwent, testify to the existence of a public that craved light ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... life in the Civil Service, he himself achieved considerable distinction as a dramatic author, "Frou-Frou," written in collaboration with Meilhac, being one of the greatest theatrical successes of his century. He soon, however, forsook the drama for fiction. His first novel, "Monsieur and Madame Cardinal," published in 1873, gave ample promise of the inventive genius and gift of characterisation that were fully realised nine years later in "L'Abbe Constantin." The tale, an exquisite study of French provincial ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... New York, there met Major Smith according to appointment, and together we selected and purchased a good supply of uniforms, clothing, and text books, as well as a fair number of books of history and fiction, to commence ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Champlain entered the mouth of the St. John river. But these early navigators were too intent upon their own immediate gain to think of much beside; they gave to the world no intelligent account of the coasts they visited, they wave not accurate observers, and in their tales of adventure fact and fiction were blended in equal proportion. Nevertheless, by the enterprise and resolution of these hardy mariners the shores of north-eastern America were fairly well known long before Acadia contained a ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... the "Adventures" I have ascribed to Captain Dangerous will be readily recognised as "strange." To some they may appear exaggerated and distorted, to others merely strained and dull. If truth, however, be stranger than fiction, I may plead something in abatement; for although I am responsible for the thread of the story and the conduct of the narrative, there is not one Fact set down as having marked the career of the Captain ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... out; and already Elsie had had a chance to discern that, broad and tolerant as he was, he saw things as they were (except in the case of his wife), never misstated and rarely overstated. For all that, she set out on Saturday afternoon prepared to meet the typical washerwoman of fiction—worn, bedraggled, shapeless, and forlorn. She was prepared to go into a steaming kitchen with puddles on the floor and dirty children all about, and have this red-faced personage take a scarlet hand ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... cutlets are meant, not the French chops, so called), only they are shaped to imitate a real cutlet, with a little bone inserted; or, in the case of lobster cutlets, a small claw is used to simulate the chop bone. Many only stick a sprig of parsley where the bone should be, to keep up the fiction. ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... books. She turns over the leaves dreamily; finds her page; turns the book inside out at it; and then, with a happy sigh, gets into bed and prepares to read herself to sleep. But before abandoning herself to fiction, she raises her eyes once more, thinking of ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... of moral cantharides which serves to inflame the passions and break down the ramparts behind which religion and prudence entrench the human heart. Some there are again, who entertain scruples of a different kind, and turn from a play because it is a fiction; while there are others, and they are most worthy of argument, who think that theatres add more than their share to the aggregate mass of luxury, voluptuousness, and dissipation, which brings nations to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... wraith!" said Graydon, as he read the words. "What a queer, shadowy world her fancy will create, even from the most realistic descriptions I can send her!" But he good-naturedly made up a large bundle of books, in which fiction predominated, for he believed that she would ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... institution; but earnestly do we enjoin all such champions of "things as they are," to read and well digest what is here set before them, believing that they will find the TRUTH even "stranger than fiction." And, as an incentive to the noble exertions of those, either North or South, who would rid our country of its "darkest, foulest blot," we would say, that our attempt has been to give a true picture of Southern society in its various aspects, and that, in our judgment, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... days with the oyster pirates, and, later, equally exciting passages with the Fish Patrol. He only waited to catch up on sleep lost while hammering out "Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan," before applying himself to new fiction. That was what was the matter with it: it was sheer fiction in place of the white-hot realism of the "true story" that had brought him distinction. This second venture he afterward termed "gush." It was promptly rejected by the editor of the Call. Lacking experience in such matters, Jack ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... passage or passages of Philipse Manor-house have not been neglected by writers of fiction, history, and magazine articles. The passage does not now exist, but there are numerous traces of it. The different writers do not agree in locating it. The author of an interesting story for children, "A Loyal Little ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... surety is undoubtedly open to this objection. Suretyship must by its very nature be confined to civil obligations and cannot be extended to criminal liability, and so the "forensic" argument may be set aside as very much a legal fiction. But if we realize the Bible teaching that Christ is the Son of God, that is, the Divine Principle of Humanity out of which we originated and subsisting in us all, however unconsciously to ourselves, then we see that sinners as well as saints are included ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... ever getting drunk. Maybe there is a difference between life and the book. In the book you enjoy your fun, but contrive somehow to escape the licking: in life the licking is the only thing sure. It was the wild young man of fiction I was looking for, who, a fortnight before the exam., ties a wet towel round his head, drinks strong tea, and passes easily with honours. He tried the wet towel, he tells me. It never would keep in its place. Added to which it gave him neuralgia; while the strong ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... the literary world of England, and even spread its writer's name to the continent. The author—"wonder-working Lewis," was a stripling under twenty when he wrote The Monk in the short space of ten weeks! Sir Walter Scott, probably the most rapid composer of fiction upon record, hardly exceeded this, even in his latter days, when his facility of ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... all his prisoners, and was one of the very few pirates, other than those found in works of fiction, who forced his victims to "walk the plank." Not long afterwards the pirates met with and fought an armed Swedish vessel, which was defeated, but the captain and crew escaped in the long-boat, and, getting to shore, spread the tidings of the pirates' ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... agitators for democracy among the civil population were the Nihilists, those long-haired, mysterious individuals whose bomb-throwing propensities and dark plottings have furnished so many Western fiction writers with material for romances. The Nihilists, so well described as a type in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons," were the sons and daughters of the landed aristocracy, the provincial gentry, who went abroad ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... satisfied himself as to the legality of Sandy's guardianship of Molly and the powers that had been granted him to look after all her interests, assuring himself of the speciousness of Plimsoll's claim for grubstake interest. Blake, weaving fact into fiction, compiled the romance of Molly Casey, daughter of the wandering prospector, Patrick Casey; her father's trail-chum by mountain and desert; the death of Casey, the rescue of Molly, the ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn |
