"Protagonist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his own restricted field a reformer. He was not only the protagonist of a new cause, but a pioneer who had to cut through the underbrush of opinion a pathway for speculation to follow. So far as England was concerned, Scot found no philosophy of the subject, no systematic defences or assaults upon the loosely constructed theory of demonic agency. It was for him ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... dramatic interest is intensified by the warning of Artemidorus and the suggestion of a way of escape for the protagonist. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... with the marriage, in 1572, of Henry of Navarre and Margaret, sister of King Charles IX, which was intended to assuage the religious strife. But the Duke of Guise, the protagonist of the play, is determined to counterwork this policy, and with the aid of Catherine de Medicis, the Queen-Mother, and the Duke of Anjou (afterwards Henry III), he arranges the massacre of the Huguenots. Of the events of the fatal night we get a number of glimpses, including the murder of a ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... the Tomb, and Mary Magdalen bringing the News to the Apostles. Then follows Bishop Bale's oracular play of God's Promises, which is in effect a series of seven interludes strung on one thread, united by one leading idea, and one protagonist, the Pater Coelestis. ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... extreme crisis in the fortunes of the treaty its chief protagonist was removed from the scene of action and the Democratic forces fighting for ratification were deprived of effective leadership. Had there been a real leader in the Senate who could carry on the fight with vigor and finesse, the treaty might even then have been saved; ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... radicals and clericals, one can consult contemporary periodicals, and Olmet y Carraffa, cap. XIV. Its estreno happened to coincide with a popular protest against the forced retirement to a convent of a Seorita de Ubao, and the Spanish public saw in the protagonist a symbol of Spain, torn between reaction and progress. Consequently, no play of Galds has been so unduly praised or so bitterly attacked. Two facts appear to stand out from the confusion: (1) Galds did not deliberately trade upon ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... would represent this condition would be vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... only be appropriately concluded by one great name, "the protagonist on the great arena of modern poetry, and the glory of the human ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... Partners of Providence suffers from the inevitable comparison with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which it cannot stand, though it continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but The Fugitive Blacksmith has a flavor which few comparisons and no neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... hypotheses regarding Arthurian origins have been dubbed the 'Continental' and the 'Insular' theories. The first has as its leading protagonist Professor Wendelin Foerster of Bonn, who believes that the immigrant Britons brought the Arthur legend with them to Brittany and that the Normans of Normandy received it from their descendants and gave it wider territorial scope. The second school, headed by the brilliant M. Gaston ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... chapter while the Captain paced the floor, frowning heavily, smoking cigars, listening to every word. Condy told the story in the first person, as if Billy Isham's partner were narrating scenes and events in which he himself had moved. Condy called this protagonist "Burke Cassowan," and was rather proud of the name. But the captain would none of it. Cassowan, the protagonist, was simply ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... of our stay, when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds we talked of these things. There are two Henrys—one, the owner of a ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To me this was his greatest charm—this infinite variety of Henrys that was forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beacon building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my theories about the ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... ignored, and civil rights demands had to be considered in developing laws relating to selective service and universal training. Nor could the administration overlook the fact that the United States had become a leading protagonist in a cold war in which the sympathies of the undeveloped and mostly colored world would soon assume a special importance. Inasmuch as integration of the services had become an almost universal demand of the ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... appreciation, and Mr Cruickshank, following, spoke in complimentary terms of the eloquent appeal made by the "young and vigorous protagonist" of the imperial cause, but proceeded to a number of quite other and apparently more important grounds why he should be elected. The Hon. Mr Tellier's speech—the Minister was always kept to the last—was a defence of ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... employ them. So much is told of the commanding influence of Colonel Goethals, the chief in command; of the administrative talents of Colonel Gorgas, the head of the sanitary department; of the engineering skill of Colonel Sibert, the protagonist of the Gatun dam, that an Englishman must wish to claim kinship with these American officers who are making so large a mark upon the surface of the earth. Devotion to the great work in hand has exorcised meaner feelings, and you ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... the day of the second hearing in Sheffield, an enormous crowd had assembled outside the Town Hall. Inside the court an anxious and expectant audiience{sic}, among them Mrs. Dyson, in the words of a contemporary reporter, "stylish and cheerful," awaited the appearance of the protagonist. Great was the disappointment and eager the excitement when the stipendiary came into the court about a quarter past ten and stated that Peace had attempted to escape that morning on the journey from London to Sheffield, and that in consequence of his injuries ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... effective in molding the Novel than those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the social situation. The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant fact: woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more dominant in her social relations, that ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... (sewn pamphlet). Lockhart's Life of Napoleon (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories, aggrandising defeats of the protagonist). ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... elaborate and contain even sub-plots, counter-plots, and added complications of all sorts. But the basis is the same, and always in some form struggle pervades the drama; always this struggle ranges the subordinate characters for or against protagonist and antagonist, and the outcome is vitally part and substance of all that goes before—the end was sown when the seeds of the beginning were planted. This touches ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds |
