"Realistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... apron from somewhere, and tied it round his burly form. With Bleak playing the role of customer he then went through a pantomime of serving imaginary drinks. His representation of the now vanished type of the bartender was so admirably realistic that it brought tears to the eyes of more than one in the gathering. The editor, with appropriate countenance and gesture, dramatized the motions of ordering, drinking, and paying for his invisible refreshment. ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... military service This entry gives the number of males and females age 15-49 fit for military service. This is a more refined measure of potential military manpower availability which tries to account for the health situation in the country and reduces the maximum potential number to a more realistic estimate of the actual ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Reality, a legend within that amorphousness called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual's ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately naive, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical manner—this taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... successes rather than perpetual reproductions of the marriage failures. The novel should more often show how many people save, so as by fire, the dreams of youth in rescue of their married life from threatening ills. Such portrayal would not be against a realistic ideal of art, but a more perfect and balanced use of realism. The rise of people on "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things" is quite as dramatic as the succession of falls that land them in the pit of despair. The struggles that succeed are quite as capable of exciting emotional ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Californias, to corroborate his statement. Colonel Pendleton started, and grasped Paul's hand warmly. Paul turned to the already half-mollified Director with the diplomatic suggestion that the vivid and realistic acting of the admirable company which he himself had witnessed had perhaps unduly excited his old friend, even as it had undoubtedly thrown into greater relief the usual exaggerations of dramatic representation, and the incident terminated with a ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... instinctively felt to be remote. Tennyson's first volume is full of the details of dissolution, the falling jaw, the eye-balls fixing, the sharp-headed worm. Aged poets do not usually write in this manner, because death seems more realistic than romantic. It is a fact rather than an idea. When a young poet is obsessed with the idea of death, it is a sign, not of morbidity, but ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature—its motives tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have—always ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... well-dressed an audience; never heard a full and well-trained orchestra. In spite of himself, he began to be distracted, excited, stirred. When the curtain rose on the beautiful tropical scene, the lush island, the turquoise sea, the realistic strip of golden sand, Pierre gave an audible oath of admiration and surprise. The people about him began to be amused by the excitement of this handsome, haggard young man, so graceful and intense, so different with his hardness and leanness, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... wonderfully brilliant.... The interest never lags; the style is realistic and intense; and there is a constantly underlying current of subtle humor.... It is, in short, a book which no student of modern literature should ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... alluded to in her memorable essay read before the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture," and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas. Equally quaint was the dish of highly realistic stone fruit that stood beside the pot-pourri and the furry Japanese spider that sprawled in a silk ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... cleared the air, giving, as Archie reflected, a fresh illustration of the power of romance to soften the harshness of even so realistic a situation as confronted the tug's passengers. Eliphalet's imagination had been stirred, and he asked many questions about the treasure. Briggs lost his hostile air and showed himself the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... later, at the annual exhibition of Washington artists, Mrs. Burnett stood before a remarkably vivid portrait. Addressing the artist in charge of the exhibition, she said: "That seems to me very strong. It looks as if it must be a realistic ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... very studious, and his skill in Greek and Latin made the professors in dead languages feel to see that their laurels were in place. Everybody prophesied that the Parker boy would be a great man— possibly a college professor! Theodore was passing through the realistic age when every detail must be carefully put in the picture. He was painstaking as to tenses, conscientious as to the ablative, and had scruples concerning the King James version of Deuteronomy. About the same time he fell in love—very much ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... years there has been a great craze after the nude in art, and the realistic in literature. Many art galleries abound in pictures and statuary which cannot fail to fan the fires of sensualism, unless the thoughts of the visitor are trained to the strictest purity. Why should artists and sculptors persist in shocking the finer sensibilities ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... of nostalgia. In it she has put together the vulgar elements of inferior society in a common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is common in the works of George Sand. Andre is a refreshing contrast, in its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of Lelia and Jacques. It was an initial essay, and a model one, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... is played the world over. His six Symphonic Poems, comprised under the title Mein Vaterland, are works of considerable power and brilliant orchestral treatment. Perhaps the finest sections are Vltava (Moldau), celebrating the beauties of Bohemia's sacred river, and Vy[vs]ehrad, a realistic description of the national fortress at Prague.[327] The Quartet in E minor, noted for its freedom and intimacy of style, has become a classic. Whenever it was performed Smetana wished the sub-title "Aus Meinem Leben" to be printed on the program; ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... square flat piece is then tacked to the upper deck, which acts as a cover. Four posts are then put in place in the same way as those on the tug. One is placed in each corner. A boat or a scow like this is generally painted red, and the model described can be made to look much more realistic by painting ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... step into the Dark Tarn of Auber and float for you? I'll make a realistic picture, my Master Painter—who paints without imagination." And then she darted into the shrubbery and was lost to view. Without further speech the two regained the path and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... upper lip, it would have been impossible to establish a parallel. The only things these two might have claimed in common were a slackness of trade and a liking for the aromatic Virginia leaf, though Dame Trippew had taken hers in a dainty idealistic powder, and the sergeant took his in realistic plug through the medium of an ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Voice of the Heart." How the hero, by virtue of a self-evolved, infallible system, speedily climbs to the top of his profession in New York; how he saves the woman he loves from a fate worse than death, and then, to save his honor, discards the system that made his success, forms a vividly realistic and powerful story. 12mo. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... material, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Energy, as appropriate, and establish performance metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of individual detectors and detection systems in detecting such devices or material— (A) under realistic operational and environmental conditions; and (B) against realistic adversary tactics and countermeasures; (8) support and enhance the effective sharing and use of appropriate information generated by the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies, counterterrorism community, ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
... inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is a more impersonal writer and more detached from his subject, is perhaps the most artistic among the authors of short stories. His volume entitled Peasants, from which the two sketches in this collection are taken, gives very powerful and realistic pictures of ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... himself).—"Before we plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or strong walking shoes; and I don't ask the shoemaker to give me ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had known members of the local Press Gang intimately. It was from her that Jeremy heard, in detail, the famous story of the Scarlet Admiral. It was, of course, in any case, a well-known story, and Jeremy had often heard it before, but Miss Henhouse made it a new, a most vivid and realistic thing. She sat forward in her chair, leaning on her silver-headed cane, her eyes staring in front of her, her two chins bobbing, gazing, gazing as though it all had happened ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... compliance with the modern demand for fine realistic accuracy in art, the Adapter, previous to making his delineation of Mr. BUMSTEAD public, submitted it to the judgment of a physician having a large practice amongst younger journalists and Members of the Legislature. This authority, after due critical inspection, pronounced it psychologically ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... mountains and snow-covered icebergs. Here and there signs, apparently left by explorers, told the latitude and longitude, and a flag marked the explorations Farthest North. Over these snow peaks scrambled white polar bears in most realistic fashion, and in one corner an Esquimau ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... criticism of the costume of all the strangers, managing so skillfully that by the time the sermon began she was able to yield the text a statuesquely close attention, and might have been carved in marble where she sat as a realistic ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... the love affairs of Chip and Della Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... This realistic plate follows closely, in essentials, that in de Saint-Amant's Voyages. (See note to plate 2, ante.) The bare declivity has evidently been worked, and the auriferous gravel must now be packed from the heights. A barrow with shafts at only one end may be ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... gorgeous oil paintings—from the brush of the local sign painter—respectively representing the coasting packet Hannah M., Eri Hedge, Master, and the fishing schooners, Georgie Baker, Jeremiah Burgess, Master, and the Flying Duck, Perez Ryder, Master, were shrouded in a very realistic fog of the same dust. Even the imposing gilt-lettered set of "Lives of Great Naval Commanders," purchased by Captain Perez some months before, and being slowly paid for on an apparently never-ending installment plan, was cloaked with it. The heap of newspapers, shoved ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... many of the operations of the game-board that turn out well in games are tried out afterward by the fleet in peace maneuvers. War games and problems may be compared to the drawings that an architect makes of a house which some one wants to build; the plans and drawings are not so realistic as a real house, but they are better than anything else; and, like the war games, they can be altered and realtered until the best result seems to have been attained, considering the amount of money allowed and ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... narrow truth—but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composition forming muted signals of the book's content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-rounded" characters such as we can expect in realistic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness, trying to reach out to companionship and love, driven almost mad by the search for human connection. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... mind, so positive, so realistic, so ultra-practical, had its singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt. At times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell into long, strange, agonised meditations, and then, seizing a pencil, she would commit to paper ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... as if they had heard nothing;" there seemed to be a total lack of sympathetic comprehension on the part of the public. In the end, however, the book found its way to the hearts of its readers, and, to quote Mr. Gosse's words on the subject, "achieved a very great success; it was realistic and modern in a certain sense and to a discreet degree, and it appealed, as scarcely any Norwegian novel had done before, to all classes ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... mirror of the past, into which mankind shall love to look, and thereby ascertain whether civilization has advanced or retrograded with the lapse of time. This is a reaction against the eighteenth century, and it appears under two forms—the idealistic-sentimental and the strongly realistic-social. The earliest instance in Germany of the romantic school, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is the apotheosis of the art and literature of the Middle Ages. The writings of Walter Scott put an end to this sentimentalism, and this ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... made weak by standing in your way? An ideal dog, a china dog, a dog behind a picture-frame, the dog of literature, are not without their aesthetic side,—are certainly things to be let alone. But the realistic, vigorously vital, intrusively affectionate, or faithfully suspicious dog can no more be "let alone" than could Mr. Jefferson Davis and his rebellious States once upon a time, for the simple reason that he will not let us alone. It is as curious an exhibition ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... or two! And now she was to wind it all up by marrying Joseph Tank, who had made a great deal of money out of the manufacture of paper bags. This from her—who had always believed she would end her days in New York, or perhaps write a realistic ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... this realistic novel has not been afraid to endow his people richly with the ordinary faults and foibles of human nature.... Both his men and women are very real, human people." ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... later joined the pessimistic camp. His works, at least, indicate other qualities than those which gained for him the favor of the reading public. He becomes a more ingenious romancer, a more delicate psychologist. If some of his sketches are realistic, we must consider that realism is not intended 'pour les jeunes filles ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... controlled, workmanlike effect, the whole scene had distinctly a dramatic touch about it. Possibly the firemen would have shouted louder had they been upon the boards, and fainting women, it is generally assumed, give a realistic touch to well-staged melodrama. No doubt the crowd on the terrace at Bowshott would have disappointed an Adelphi audience. But the old white horse stood to attention like a soldier on a field day; and Tom Ellis, wiping his brow as though he himself had run in ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a swinging ballad measure that took instant hold of the popular mind. No book ever printed in America has met with a proportionate ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... slubberings, with realistic shudders and kicks and a great jingling of spurs, lay down on ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... she wouldn't be able to pay my fees, and so on, I could restrain myself no longer. On the spot I asked her to marry me. I didn't practise any deception, mind. I told her I was a poor devil who had failed as a realistic novelist and was earning bread in haphazard ways; and I explained frankly that I thought we might carry on various kinds of business together: she might go on with her novel-writing, and—so on. But she was ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... flitted over her face at any compliment, however obviously perfunctory; her way of talking about every trivial thing she did—and what did she do that was not trivial?—as if some diarist ought to take it down for the delight of ages to come. As Ross looked at the new-created realistic image of her, he was amazed. "Why, I've always disliked her!" he cried. "I've been lying to myself. I am too low for words," he groaned. "Was there ever such a sneaking cur?" Yes, many a one, full as unconscious ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... realistic," said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it was over, and he was helping ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Thucydides; see also Grote's History of Greece, Chap. XLIX. Of the great plague of London (1665) the most realistic description is Defoe's ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... third and modern type of tragedy has grown to be almost exclusively the property of realistic writers, it is interesting to recall that it was first introduced into the theatre of the world by the king of the romantics. It was Victor Hugo's Hernani, produced in 1830, which first exhibited a dramatic ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... accepted her invitation to stay with her, and devoted himself to Gladys, who took up her flirtation with him precisely where she had dropped it when they bade each the other a mock-mournful good-by five months before. They were so realistic that Pauline came to the satisfying conclusion that her sister-in-law was either in earnest with Langdon or not in earnest with anybody. If she had not been avoiding Scarborough, she would probably have seen Gladys' real game—to use Langdon as a ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Thompson entertained the company with that difficult and intricate dance known as the 'Mountain Lion Mazourka,' accompanying their efforts with spirited vocalisms meant to imitate the defiant screams of a panther on its native hills. These cries, as well as the dance itself, were highly realistic, and Messrs. B. and T. were made the recipients of many compliments. Mr. and Mrs. Tutt are to be congratulated on the success of the function; to fully describe its many excellent features would ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... I have brought a charge against it and, permit me to say, against the kind of art that M. Flaubert cultivates, the kind that is realistic but not discreet. You shall see to what limits he has gone. A copy of the Artiste lately came to my hand; it is not for us to make accusations against the Artiste, but to learn to what school M. Flaubert belongs, and I ask your permission to read you ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... Paintings under the Arches of the Nations, the two by Edward Simmons in the arch on the east are an allegory of the movement of the peoples across the Atlantic, while those by Frank Vincent Du Mond in the western arch picture in realistic figures the westward march of civilization to the Pacific. Historically, the picture on the southern wall of the Arch of the Nations of the East comes first. Here Simmons has represented the westward movement from the Old World through natural emigration war, conquest, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... piecemeal into the torrent below. At the Rocher du Cire he is frightfully stung by myriads of bees, during his attempt to obtain as a trophy for his lady a quantity of honey from this well-nigh inaccessible place. The kind of criticism that is appropriate for realistic literature is here quite out of place. It must be said, however, that the episode is far from convincing. Calendau compares his sufferings to those of a soul in hell, condemned to the cauldron of oil. Yet he makes a safe ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... frightfully and he was very sick. So sick that the room in which he lay seemed to be rising and falling in a horribly realistic manner. Every time it dropped it brought Billy's stomach nearly to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his first volume encouraged Melville to proceed in his work, and 'Omoo,' the sequel to 'Typee,' appeared in England and America in 1847. Here we leave, for the most part, the dreamy pictures of island life, and find ourselves sharing the extremely realistic discomforts of a Sydney whaler in the early forties. The rebellious crew's experiences in the Society Islands are quite as realistic as events on board ship and very entertaining, while the whimsical character, Dr. Long Ghost, next to Captain Ahab in 'Moby Dick,' is Melville's ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... our time, the historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know, in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Fontenelle (indeed, his statement is a paraphrase of Fontenelle's), and in opposition to the school of Rapin, Pope, and Gay, who argued for a portrait of the Golden Age. Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity of an ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... multitudinous speech, the chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton, combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a modern man ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of those realistic Zolaesque stories I would describe the crick in the back that—but let ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... a ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to work to paint. He appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired by any one of them; but he had no conception of the possibility of knowing nothing at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired directly by what ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... about him. The emotion of a large assembly was always contagious—sweeping the individual along with it. Whereas, in private, her dancing, lacking the glamour and artificiality of the stage, would be a very different thing. It would appear in a more realistic, commonplace light. Any faults which the atmosphere of the stage might have concealed would immediately become apparent in the light of natural surroundings and her performance sink to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... South Brooklyn kike," I goes on, maybe more realistic than I meant, "I got you right, ain't I? And all I got to do is push in a half-arm jolt ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of it. Centerpieces of rose design. Mounds of cushions stamped in bulldog's head and pipe and appropriately etched in colored floss. A poker hand, upheld by realistic five fingers embroidered to the life, and the cuff button denoted by a blue-glass jewel. Across their bed, making it a dais of incongruous splendor, was flung a great counterpane of embroidered linen, in design as narrative as a battle-surging tapestry and every thread in it woven ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... followed in 1871 by a volume of short stories "Fortoellinger," and during the next year by a larger and more ambitious book, "The Three-master Future,"—"Tremasteren Fremtiden"—a realistic sketch of life in the northern harbours of Norway. Two years later "The Pilot and his Wife"—"Lodsen og hans Hustru"—appeared, a book in every respect greatly in advance of its predecessors. Though written almost entirely in an Italian village it has been justly described by ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... "It is a realistic age," he answered, smiling. "People no longer believe what they do not see. We are forced to adopt modern methods and modern costume ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... . . . has certainly a talent for invention, though I think it flags a little in his last work." Lady Mary was both right and wrong. The inventive power which we commonly think of as Smollett's was the ability to work over his own experience into realistic fiction. Of this, Ferdinand Count Fathom shows comparatively little. It shows relatively little, too, of Smollett's vigorous personality, which in his earlier works was present to give life and interest to almost every ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... of a ship about to founder with all hands. And she saw glimpses, beautiful and compensatory, of the romantic quality of common life. She was in a little office of a perfectly ordinary boarding-house—(she could even detect the stale odours of cooking)—with a realistic man of business, and they were about to discuss a perfectly ordinary piece of scandal; and surely they might be called two common-sense people! And withal, the ordinariness and the midland gumption of the scene were shot through with the bright exotic rays of romance! She thought: "It is painful ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... suggested by Coleridge's grandson that Wordsworth was describing S. T. C. in all the stanzas of this poem; that he drew two separate pictures of him; in the first four stanzas a realistic "character portrait," and in the last four a "companion picture, figuring the outward semblance of Coleridge, but embodying characteristics drawn from a third person"; so that we have a "fancy sketch" mixed ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is, however, one memorable exception. Tam o' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to Ellisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a transcript of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tam o' Shanter he had let loose his powers upon the materials of past ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips Andover. It was Shore Acres, and I have not yet forgotten, after a quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as if my grandfather's kitchen had been put upon the stage, and with Herne himself to play the leading ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic "realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating him. And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the dialogue between ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... names in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written a noble ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... to Wordsworth. Between the latter poet and Winther there was much resemblance. He was, without compeer, the greatest pastoral lyrist of Denmark. His exquisite strains, in which pure imagination is blended with most accurate and realistic descriptions of scenery and rural life, have an extraordinary charm ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... thoroughness before he formally presented her with the gun. She had never had occasion to turn the stunner on a human being, but she'd used it on game. If this cloak and dagger business became too realistic, she'd already decided she ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... barbaric-looking pile of dazzling white walls and cupolas set against a background of cobalt waters, which stands outside the town on a rocky platform jutting into the Mediterranean and is approached by a broad flight of marble steps adorned with most realistic figures of souls burning in brightly painted flames of Purgatory. This point too commands a good view of the extreme north-eastern promontory of the island, a tall cliff known as the Punta del Imperatore ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... reporter. This is saying a good deal, for the news crew and editorial force of the paper were a carefully selected body of men indeed. Bland never hired a man unless experience had endowed him with some unusual qualification. Most of them could write up a story with realistic exactitude, being able in most cases to supply details gleaned from actual experience in one walk of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... intimate matters with a complete lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes he embarrassed his wife, and the only time I saw her put out of countenance was when he insisted on telling me that he had taken a purge, and went into somewhat realistic details on the subject. The perfect seriousness with which he narrated his misfortunes convulsed me with laughter, and this added to ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic:[22] both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... So realistic had been the acting of Hemingway that for an instant Harris himself had been deceived. But only for an instant. With his knowledge of the circumstances he saw that Hemingway was not confessing to a crime of his own, but drawing across the trail ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... flourished at Rome. The causes are not far to seek. Tragic drama was dead in Greece by the time Greek influence made itself felt, while the New Comedy which then held the stage was of too quietly realistic a type and of too refined a wit and humour to be attractive to the coarser and less intelligent audiences of Rome. Terence, the dimidiatus Menander, as Caesar called him, though he won himself a great name with the cultured classes by the purity and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux, the author of Marianne, was of the school of Richardson before Richardson ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... is of peculiar value for the present purpose inasmuch as it gives a vivid and, in a way, realistic representation of Paul's Cross and its surroundings in the year 1620. There are certain features in the picture which are obviously inaccurate. The view which is taken from the north-west of the cathedral is, for example, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the "Deirdre" of "A.E.," a play out of old legend, national legend, and "Cathleen ni Houlihan," a symbolic national play of '98. Then followed Mr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of the Foundations," by Mr. Frederick Ryan,—a realistic satire of Dublin life; and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth." The appeal of the repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by Lady Gregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... illustrated with reproductions from old maps—old primitive maps, with a real Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Eden, with Pillars of Hercules guarding the Straits of Gibraltar, with Paradise in the east, a realistic Jerusalem in the centre, the island of Thule in the north, and St. Brandon's Isles of ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... welcome addition to the gaiety of the nations. The title-piece is an inimitably clever skit. It is both genial and realistic, and there is a genuine laugh in every line of it. Humour and artistry are finely ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... with one of his clavier sonatas in manuscript, and expressed a desire to see him. When Haydn presented himself, the countess was so struck by his shabby appearance and uncouth manners that it occurred to her he must be an impostor! But Haydn soon removed her doubts by the pathetic and realistic account which he gave of his lowly origin and his struggles with poverty, and the countess ended by becoming his pupil and one of ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... English human nature, and showed "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," with manly boldness indeed, but with due artistic reticence also; each knew how to be vivid without being vicious, to be realistic without being revolting; and despite the sometimes offensive caricature in which the one indulged, despite the seeming cynicism of the other their influence must be pronounced healthy. Thackeray did not, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... fury of civil war. Something of a bully by nature, for all his blood and kingliness, young Louis seems to have taken a special delight, during these months of wandering, in tormenting his equally high-spirited brother, the little "Monsieur"; and there flashes across the years a very "realistic" picture of a narrow room in the old chateau of Corbeil, in which, upon a narrow bed, two angry boys are rolling and pulling and scratching in a bitter "pillow-fight," brought on by some piece of boyish tyranny on the elder brother's part. And these two boys are not the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... boots, nor the whining farmer who sits with his feet on the kitchen-stove, but the glory that we find in nature and the grandeur that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his virtue. Realism does not mean the unattractive. A rose is as real as a toad. And a realistic novel of the days of Caesar would be worth more than ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Warburton took up The Art World, which his friend had left, and glanced again at the photogravure of "Sanctuary." He knew, as he had declared, nothing about art, and judged pictures as he judged books, emotionally. His bent was to what is called the realistic point of view, and "Sanctuary" made him smile. But very good-naturedly; for he liked Norbert Franks, and believed he would do better ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... heaven now, seated there as the same Jesus who met His disciples that first Sunday night, the same Jesus who ascended out of their midst from Olivet. This same Jesus! The same not only in realistic, human body, but the same in character, full of the same measureless compassion and grace as when He sat on the well curb in Samaria and though thirsting as a real man for real water offered to give to the sinful woman who by divine and eternal ordination met him there, the water that ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... the reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique. The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself a peasant, he used to say, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... same way, people may now know what customs it is orthodox to find among ghosts, and may pretend to find them, or may simulate them by imposture. The white sheet and clanking chains are forsaken for a more realistic rendering of the ghostly part. The desire of social notoriety may beget wanton fabrications. In short, all studies have their perils, and these are among the dangers which beset the path of the inquirer into things ghostly. He must ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... with him or for him. Mr. Gilmour's journal of this work is not only a record of the willingness with which he added gladly to his own heavy labours in order to assist a colleague; but it also gives some most realistic pictures of what ordinary life in China is like, and under what conditions evangelistic itineration there is carried on. Some of the districts visited had just been ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... to the house of a clergyman off Madison avenue and presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by a realistic romance of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... those standards. So, indeed, is the tragedy of The Trojan Women; but on very different lines. The Electra has none of the imaginative splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its psychology reminds one of Browning, or ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without any preoccupation, whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire, without the need of any studied end, or of morality; this story without intrigue or action, portraying ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... careful distinction is made between them, the contrast between the (realistic) physiological or historical, and the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... at least, I've gotten one idea over to you—that a public release on this thing would be greeted with hoots of derision by the realistic American public." ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... very effort of Balzac to attain realistic characterization has resulted in producing what the ordinary reader will look upon as a defect in his stories. When we compared above the stories of this writer to a painting, we had been as near the truth, if we had likened them to a reflection or photograph of a scene. ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... and the powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr. Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is nothing but the happening of things, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... but received all my experiences into my soul as amazingly real inward perceptions. That these perceptions are of unprecedented intensity, and more realistic than those which are merely visual, can be understood by bodily comparisons; for to feel or to be one with fire is ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... said Berry. "I can see it all. It will be hideously realistic. All women and children will have to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... man of letters, born at Portsmouth; eminent chiefly as a novelist of a healthily realistic type; wrote a number of novels jointly with James Rice, and is the author of "French Humourists," as well as short stories; champion of the cause of Authors versus Publishers, and is chairman ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... gone that we begin to appreciate his real value and comprehend how large a part he really played in our existence. As sudden silence gives the consciousness a keener realization of the sound that has just ceased, so death, by its contrast, gives a vivid, realistic touch to life. We all know how enormously the heart qualities are quickened by the death of a close friend. The whole nature is in some degree purified and spiritualized. Selfishness is decreased and compassion expands. Sympathy for others in distress is born, and thus a decided evolutionary advance ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our 'Alerts' and 'Challengers,' but then upheaved ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... startling. The story is not so startling as the title would indicate. It is a strongly moral one, showing in a vivid, realistic manner the result of evil thinking. The Devil in this story ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... of Tom and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made the prison in Amelia as horribly and disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in Roderick, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on utilising ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... charge is like. The men are divided into two or more groups and are equipped with fencing outfits. One group is designated as the defense and is placed in trenches. The other groups are the attackers. They may be sent forward in waves or in one line. To make their advance more realistic they have to get over or around obstacles. To take in all phases the attackers are made stronger than the defense and the defense retires—whereupon the attackers endeavor to disable them by thrusting ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... A realistic story of the days of the French Revolution, abounding in dramatic incident, with a young English soldier of fortune, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... something will be said on the other side, of Shakespeare's broad and indulgent humanity, and of his toleration even of vice itself when it is convivial and amusing. It should be remembered, however, that his comedies while more realistic are not so real as his tragedies. They are, as he himself insists, entertainments; to which jovial sensuality, witty falsehood, and even hypocrisy when it is not morose are admitted, as diverting in their very aberration from the mean rule of life. So that a touch ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... and by production of rice, sugar, and forestry products for export. Favorable factors include recovery in the key agricultural and mining sectors, a more favorable atmosphere for business initiative, a more realistic exchange rate, a sharp drop in the inflation rate, and the continued support of international organizations. Serious underlying economic problems will continue. Electric power has been in short supply and constitutes a major barrier to future gains in national output. ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of The Fair Haven, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John Pickard Owen. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in forming the MS. of The Fair Haven. To have published this book as by the author of Erewhon would have been ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... "It's realistic. Do you still insist upon getting up there, for the doubtful pleasure of looking down?" ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... a realistic way, the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion. Stories like these are impressed upon the memory and their reading is productive only ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... taste, or of whom it would be more just to say, have set present taste, so that to-day not only the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... are taken in hand by the amiable sergeant major and taught to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, to simulate the most murderous passion, and the simulation of a husky youth in his twenties of a murderous passion is realistic enough to make your flesh creep; for the very simulation produces the passion, as every wise man's son doth know. Then the youths are lined up in the trench, and numbered "one-two; one-two; one-two"; clear down the trench. Then the order ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Passion Week "Strashnaya Nedelli," i. e., "Terrible Week," is enacted in a very realistic fashion one of the last acts of our Saviour—"the washing of the Disciples' feet." After the close of the second diet of worship at St. Isaac's Cathedral this ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... It is when the realistic writer turns philosopher and begins to generalize that we must be on our guard against him. He is likely to use his characters as symbols, and the symbolism becomes oppressive. There are some businesses which ought not to be united. They hinder healthful competition and produce ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... which (i.e. two in the first half, and one in the second) usually began with the same sound or letter. The musical effect was heightened by the harp with which the gleeman accompanied his singing.. The poetical form will be seen clearly in the following selection from the wonderfully realistic description of the fens haunted by Grendel. It will need only one or two readings aloud to show that many of these strange-looking words are practically the same as those we still use, though many of the vowel sounds were pronounced differently ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... eventually gets on to the canvas is a reflection of a reflection of something purely imaginary. The three Magi never had crowns like that, supposing them to have had crowns at all, but the effect is realistic because the crown from which the studies were ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... vocation this tendency caused my family to be accused of formalism and artificial pedantry; and the so-called "classical" school of acting, to which they belonged, has frequently since their time been unfavorably compared with what, by way of contrast, has been termed the realistic or natural style of art. I do not care to discuss the question, but am thankful that my education preserved me from accepting mere imitation of nature as art, on the stage or in the picture gallery; and that, without destroying my delight in any kind of beauty, it taught me a decided ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... broader one." Its characters are portrayed with great skill and power, but they lack the freshness which comes from actual contact with the people described, and with whom Scott was familiar as a youth in the course of his wanderings. It is more historical than realistic. In short, "Old Mortality" is another creation of its author's brain rather than a painting of real life. But it is justly famous, for it was the precursor of those brilliant historical romances from which so much ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... other garb in vogue for the serious drama was prose: this was not only used for realistic pictures of conditions of a decidedly cheerful type (since Lessing had introduced the bourgeois dramas of Diderot into Germany), but also for pathetic tragedies, the vital power of which the lack of stylistic disguising of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the same basic problems, is fired by the same ambitions, beset by the same doubts. And if the modern reader, after turning a page or two finds his attention held and wants to go on reading, it will mean that this book has become at last what in fact it was always meant to be—a realistic but romantic story of healthy adolescence set against the background of an average English ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... for the battle takes place actually before his eyes. And after the return from the scene of action, when it is desired to show how the victor employed his prisoners for the greater honour of his gods and his own glory, the picture is no less detailed and realistic. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... highest flights of imagination in the human being fail to grasp the Reality of the splendors everywhere surrounding him,—and, viewed rightly, Realism would become Romance and Romance Realism. We see a ragged woman in the streets picking up scraps for her daily food, . . that is what we may call realistic,—but we are not looking at the ACTUAL woman, after all! We cannot see her Inner Self, or form any certain comprehension of the possible romance or tragedy which that Inner Self HAS experienced, or IS experiencing. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is a realistic comedy of life in London suburbs. The scenes are laid principally in Kentish Town, with excursions to Hampstead, Highgate, and Gospel Oak; while unusual pictures of the publishing trade form a setting ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... service: This entry gives the number of males and females falling in the military age range for the country and who are not otherwise disqualified for health reasons; accounts for the health situation in the country and provides a more realistic estimate of the ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... broken off and the vessel inverted, b, there is a decided change; we are struck by the resemblance to a frog or toad. The original legs, having dark concentric lines painted around them, look like large protruding eyes, and the mouth gapes in the most realistic manner, while the two short broken ends of the handle resemble legs and serve to support the vessel in an upright position, completing the illusion. The fetich-hunting Pueblo Indian, picking up this little vessel in its mutilated condition, would ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... is fading into the ultimate dark. Aileen, within the hour of her greatest triumph, had seen love die. It was useless to tell herself, as she did sometimes, that it might come back, revive. Her ultimately realistic temperament told her this could never be. Though she had routed Rita Sohlberg, she was fully aware that Cowperwood's original constancy was gone. She was no longer happy. Love was dead. That sweet illusion, with its pearly ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the two characteristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... shellabi kabir. Extremely beautiful. Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people. Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naively confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... more complicated questions and when the actors are as numerous as the actions are various. Fictitious narratives comprise short stories and novels. One prominent writer notes the following types: (1) The realistic novel that is true to actual life and often enters into the discussion of important questions of record. (2) The novel of life and manners which is largely descriptive and in which the exigencies of the plot give way to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to begin with, a bit like the description I sometimes read of them in newspapers. In one of Kipling's books there is a description of a painting of a soldier in action; realistic and true to life; dirty and grimed and foul, with an assegai wound across the ankle, and the terror of death in his face. The dealer who took the picture made the artist alter it; had the uniform cleaned and the straps pipe-clayed, and the face smoothed and composed, and the ferocity and despair ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... century are condemned for having treated serious things too lightly; and it is said that "in confining the French mind to the observation of society and its attractions, she has restricted and retarded a more realistic and larger activity." In answer to this it may be asserted that the French mind was not prepared for a broader field until it had passed through the process of expurgating, refining, drilling, and disciplining. If preciosite influenced politics, it was by developing diplomacy, for, from ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the profoundest sympathy for the unfortunate passengers of the Vulcan. Cheeks paled at the very thought of the catastrophe that might take place at any moment within sight of the sister ship. It was a realistic object lesson on the ever-present dangers of the sea. While those on deck looked with new interest at the steamship plunging along within a mile of them, the captain slipped away to his room. As he sat there there was a ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... remember, in the end of the Victorian era had attempted to become realistic—had attempted, that is, the absurdly impossible; and photography exposed the absurdity, For no man can be truly a realist, since it is literally impossible to paint or to describe all that the eye sees. When photography became general, this began ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the season. It is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to nature and life in its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, in its incidents; indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must become classic. It is difficult to give an outline of the story; it is ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Buddhist Temple are to be seen, in the long side pavilions, the chambers of horrors with their realistic representations of the torments of a soul in its passage through the eight Buddhist hells. I looked on these scenes with the calmness of an unbeliever; not so a poor woman to whom the horrors were very vivid truths. She was on her knees before the grating, sobbing piteously at a ghastly ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison |
