"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth—and the queerest part of it all ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... beasts. Watching for him she could see through the uncurtained French windows the starry brilliance of the night, and the moon now in its middle quarter. And down below, the houses and shanties along the opposite side of the street, the fantastic tufts of the pawpaws, the long white road stretching away into the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... "Look here, don't suppose you're out of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that's luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the times! Hold on, taxi! Here—I'll drive you home first, and wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time." As he steered her toward the carriage she noticed ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... remains. 'If moral approbation involve no perception of beneficial tendency, how do we make out the coincidence of the two?' It might seem that the foundation of morals is thus made to rest on a coincidence that is mysterious and fantastic. According to the author, the conclusive answer is this. Although Conscience rarely contemplates anything so distant as the welfare of all sentient beings, yet in detail it obviously points to the production of happiness. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... crept back into the minds of each one present that the prince had just made her an offer of marriage. The situation had, therefore, become three times as fantastic ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... stopping with a grin and pointing. Following the finger with his eye David caught a fantastic sign swinging above him: a thin iron crescent, and sitting up between its two tips a lean black rat, its sharp nose in the air, its tail curled round its iron perch, while two other creatures of the same kind crept about him, the one clinging to the lower tip of the crescent, the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... quality is necessarily and always the outcome of temperament. There are some authors of whom it may be said that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their “literary mood,” a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born of temperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect. Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim (not excluding Rabelais), passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which, as “Yorick,” he tried to live up to in his private life—tried in vain. With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... convince himself. Yes, again! As ugly and withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard as the big brass eagle holding the sacred books upon his wings (and, according to the sculptor's representation of his ferocious attributes, not at all converted by them), ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... scarcely out of the forest which crowns the slope of the valley. It was divided into two lobes, so to speak: one, called the "interior," contained six passengers on two seats; the other, a sort of cabriolet constructed in front, was called the "coupe." This coupe was closed in with very inconvenient and fantastic glass sashes, a description of which would take too much space to allow of its being given here. The four-wheeled coach was surmounted by a hooded "imperial," into which Pierrotin managed to poke six passengers; this space was inclosed by leather curtains. Pierrotin ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... but feeling; a proneness to romantic friendship, and a pining after good not consistent with our nature. I imagined that I had kept at a distance all such books and companions as tend to produce this fantastic character; and whence you imbibed this perverse spirit, at so early an age, is, to me, inconceivable. It cost ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... state of semi-consciousness, my thoughts wandering away from my present condition and fixing themselves, with strange pertinacity, upon subjects of the most trifling import; now plunging into vague speculations, and anon indulging in all sorts of fantastic fancies, as lever began to assume its burning sway ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... might have been an agreeable coolness of his sand-baked feet. The incident seemed so disagreeable and so likely of recurrence that Colonel Perez ever afterward slept with his feet rolled up in a variety of fantastic draperies, while Mr. Marcoy for several ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... the beautiful neighbourhood. Its height is one hundred feet. In the midst of the interesting scenery of Cape Cornwall, the visitor, gazing out to sea, will observe the Longships Lighthouse. It is needed, for the rocks are most dangerous—the Armed Knight and Irish Lady being fantastic names for huge masses that would send many a ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... visions of the soul! Ye wild and freakish gambolings of the spirit, freed from the incubus of matter, and unfettered by the control of reason, of what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking life do ye not exhibit to us, ludicrous and distorted indeed, but still preserving through their most extravagant exaggerations a wayward and grotesque likeness ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... so used to stories of "Bug-eyed Monsters" coming to Earth, that the idea of beings from other worlds looking and acting human seems fantastic. It should not. There is good sound scientific reason to believe that there is little chance of it being any other way. Life is a delicate and fragile thing when compared to cosmic extremes of temperature and environment ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton
... creatures! Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man—such as he is—out of it. I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... around the steamer as birds of prey gather to a feast: captains in gilt braid; coolies in blue and white, with their calling-cards stamped in large letters on their backs, and the story of their trade written around the tail of their coats in fantastic Japanese characters. Gentlemen in divided skirts and ladies in kimono and clogs swarmed up the gangway. In the smiling, pushing crowd I looked for the low-browed relative I expected to see. Imagine the shock, Mate, when a man with manners as beautiful as his silk kimono presented his card and ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... among the branches; sometimes a dull splash in the water reminded us that the alligator was still our neighbor; and ever there was the piping of wild birds whose notes we had never heard before, and whose outlines were as fantastic as those of the bright objects that glorify ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... see, if homespun lasses milder be Than my curs'd dame and Lacy's wanton wife. Thus therefore will I live betwixt two shapes; When as I list, in this transform'd disguise, I'll fright the country-people as they pass; And sometimes turn me to some other form, And so delude them with fantastic shows. But woe betide the silly dairymaids, For I shall fleet their cream-bowls night by night. And slice the bacon-flitches as they hang. Well, here in Croydon will I first begin To frolic it among the country lobs. This day, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... was in their ragged sides; through it a little track branched off, which, upwards threading that short defile, came breezily out above, to where the mountain-top, part sheltered northward, by a taller brother, sloped gently off a space, ere darkly plunging; and here, among fantastic rocks, reposing in a herd, the foot-track wound, half beaten, up to a little, low-storied, grayish cottage, capped, nun-like, with a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... appeal to the law? Where were my proofs? I knew that the facts were true, but could I help to make a jury of countrymen believe so fantastic a story? I might or I might not. But I could not afford to fail. My soul cried out for revenge. I have said to you once before, Mr. Holmes, that I have spent much of my life outside the law, and that I have ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... happy hours over these scraps, building up the fantastic fairy tale of Paragot's antecedents, and should have gone on reading them for an indefinite time had not Paragot one day discovered me. It was then that I learned the sacrosanctity ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a fantastic, unaccountable whim; the whim of a woman seeking forgetfulness, not counting the cost nor caring; simply a whim. She had brought him here to crush him for his impertinence; and that purpose was no ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... then existing conditions, where so many irreconcilable interests were in presence, it is not to be wondered at if little harmony prevailed amid the various conflicting elements gathered together by fate for the enactment of this fantastic scene. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... keenly entering into the fun, and not unconscious of the dignity of his position. Meanwhile the rest were getting up a scenic representation of Bombastes Furioso, arranging a stage, piling a lot of beds together for a theatre, and dressing up the actors in the most fantastic apparel. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... into the fantastic story which he and Nick had prepared. The language of the Cree helped him, for the natural colouring of the Indian tongues is as flowery as ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... had kept the best of all—that is, the Egyptian fire- eater, called "Phosphorus"—for the last part. The curtain went up for the third time, and on the stage, in fantastic scarlet dress, with a burning torch in his left hand, there stood a tall—ah! a form only too well known to me. It was Lipp, who had been looked ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... Hence fantastic vapours! What are ye to this! Where are the dreams of the hero when he learns he has a child? Nature is taking him to her bosom. She will speak presently. Every domesticated boor in these hills can boast the same, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Sally is asleep too;" and he led her slowly towards the door. The night-lamp was burning low; its pale flame, and the flickering blaze of the big hickory logs on the hearth, made a glimmering twilight, whose fantastic lights and shadows shot out through the doorway into the gloom of the hall. As the first of these lights fell on Hetty's face, Dr. Eben started to see how white it was. Involuntarily he put his arm ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could see the operators writing at their desks, and the sight ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... of a learned but fantastic Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. Biesenthal had an enthusiastic reverence for what in the hands of others were the dry details of Hebrew Grammar. "Herr Doctor," a dense pupil once asked him, "ought there not to be a Daghesh ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... reached the street he shook his head. It all seemed so fantastic. But the money in his hand was real money—and there was a lot of it! Suddenly he realized that people were staring at the handful of bills, and he hurriedly stuffed them in a pocket. When he was alone for a moment he stepped into a ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... and the Union. After Lincoln's reelection he went to Canada, and associated with the Confederate agents there; and whether or not with their advice, made a plan to capture the President and take him to Richmond. He passed a great part of the autumn and winter pursuing this fantastic scheme, but the winter wore away, and nothing was done. On March 4 he was at the Capitol, and created a disturbance by trying to force his way through the line of policemen who guarded the passage through which the ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... of the "Bride of Lammermuir," "Ivanhoe," the "Monastery," the "Abbot," "Kenilworth," and the "Pirate."[54] The marks of broken health on all these are essentially twofold—prevailing melancholy, and fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the "Abbot" scarcely less so in its main event, and "Ivanhoe" deeply wounded through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the series the impossible ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... transparent, fleecy, white clouds that were slowly pressing forward in the path of the moonlight, as if in duteous attendance upon some maiden queen, our mutual minds were busied in framing pictures from the fine yet fantastic forms that glowed, gathering on our gaze. I felt the hand of Julia trembling in my own. Her head sank upon my shoulder; I felt a warm drop fall from her eyes ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... the rest, his triumph increased. He turned his head, and waved his hands to his friends. Then he waved his cap in the air, and shouted, "Hurrah!" Then he rode side-saddle fashion for a little while, then he drew both legs up in front, and then he indulged in a series of absurd and fantastic tricks. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... the shape of the idol with his peaked cap of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by, a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... admired the face full of violent tones. The mother and daughter hovered about the easel, marvelling at all his preparations; they evidently thought him a demigod. This visible admiration pleased Fougeres. The golden calf threw upon the family its fantastic reflections. ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... formulating that fantastic thought, upon the point of retiring. He took up, as was his habit, one of the books on his table, in order to read a few pages, when once in bed. He had thus within his reach the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive intellectuality; they ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... had a fantastic manliness in his composition, which enabled him to realize that there was no credit in beating an unresisting opponent. Dandy must do some thing; he must bestow some blows upon his capricious companion, but he had learned ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... how like demons on the ascending smoke, Making grimaces, leaps the laughing flame, Filling the room with a mysterious haze, Which rolls and writhes along the shadowy air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let me clutch that limb— Oh, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... they would clearly to-day both know. For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other—what was it monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by going to lock yourself up in the sanctum sanctorum of that person's house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What was going to happen, at any rate, was that Murray ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... and had now come in answer to his prayers. He sat up on the bed, feeling mechanically at the place where the handle of his sword would have been but two hours since, feeling his hair stand on end, and a cold sweat began to stream down his face as the strange fantastic being step by step approached him. At length the apparition paused, the prisoner and he stood face to face for a moment, their eyes riveted; then the mysterious stranger spoke ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the time to the First Consul; while Russia, although her youthful sovereign had abandoned the anti-British policy of his predecessor, remained undecided as to the general course she should pursue amid the ever-shifting perplexities of the day. Less fantastic in imagination than his insane father, Alexander I. inherited a visionary tendency, which hindered practical action, and showed itself in plans too vast and complicated for realization, even when two rulers of the overwhelming ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... talus and the base of the rampart,—a true covered way,—we see but the rampart alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,—the fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,—the masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen from above, and lie scattered at its base,—the extreme loneliness of the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... when I began this tale, (See the first canto if ye will), A ball in Peter's capital, To sketch ye in Albano's style.(60) But by fantastic dreams distraught, My memory wandered wide and sought The feet of my dear lady friends. O feet, where'er your path extends I long enough deceived have erred. The perfidies I recollect Should make me much more circumspect, Reform me both in deed and word, And this fifth canto ought to ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... had been leveled beneath the trees, surrounded by a painted rail, with a row of benches inside. The music was placed in a slight balcony, built around the trunk of a large tree in the center; and the lamps, hanging from the branches above, gave a gay, fantastic, and fairy look to the scene. How often in such moments did I recall the lines of Goldsmith, describing those "kinder skies" beneath which "France displays her bright domain," and feel how true and masterly ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... came Mary McDogherty dancing and jumping as only Irish ever jumped. She had a lump of dim metal in one hand and a glittering mass in the other. She came up to the table with a fantastic spring and spanked down the sparkling mass on it, bounding back one step like india-rubber even as she ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... close together where the current ran swiftest, had at some time caught an immense fallen tree squarely on their shoulders, and the pressure of the current held it there. Another tree had caught on the obstruction, and another, and now the fantastic pile reared itself high out of ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear of these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practise—it's magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound on extraordinary errands. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... halted right under the editor's window. In the midst thereof was seen the tall, lank figure of a man, whose extraordinary appearance enchained the attention of the multitude, and excited afresh their shouts and derisive laughter. And, in fact, nothing could be more striking or fantastic than this man. Notwithstanding the cool October weather, his gigantic figure was clothed from head to foot in gray linen, harmonizing strangely with the gray color of his skin and hair, which latter fell in long locks from his uncovered head down on his shoulders, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition was repeated on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she would be writing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... fantastic tricks with her on that occasion; or did she see, as that little black box met the view, a momentary repetition of the suffering spasm which had crossed the face of Richard Crawford half an hour before, when ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... perpetual barrier; only Mark might prefer to wait until he had settled down to the more serious practice of the profession, about which no man could be keener. The truth was that Carrissima was prone to search for a variety of explanations for his backwardness, all more or less fantastic. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... simple method of crossing oceans is adopted, it will of course mean the end of that fantastic medieval anachronism, the Navy. No need for billion-dollar aircraft carriers, battleships, drydocks and all the other cumbersome junk that keeps those boats and things afloat. Give the ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison
... This fantastic, savage vengeance was a thing dreadful to hear; what it must have been to see I can only guess. I know that I wished I might have fled from it and that I pleaded with Jodd for mercy on these men. But neither he nor his ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... seven cigars, at first was as fantastic as a kid let loose, but finally it settled down upon the strategy of the constant war waged in Paris between ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... of lightning, clearing the sky; lighted up for a second all the landscape she knew so well, with a startling and sinister gleam, and she saw the great river, with the color of melted lead, as a river appears in dreams in fantastic scenes. ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... summary of the evidence up-to-date may be found in A. E. Waite's Devil-Worship in France (1896). Assuming that Luciferianism really exists, I do not for a moment believe that it has the antiquity which Miss Vaughan claims for it. The various Rites of modern Freemasonry, with their fantastic and high-sounding degrees, are comparatively recent excrescences upon the original Craft Masonry. The New and Reformed Palladian Rite is said to have been founded at Charlestown by the well-known Mason, Albert Pike, in 1870. It is based on the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, which dates ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... College, Kentucky, is a society called the Annarugians, "composed," says a correspondent "of the wildest of the College boys, who, in the most fantastic disguises, are always on hand when a wedding is to take place, and join in a most tremendous Charivari, nor can they be forced to retreat until they have received a due proportion of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the sun was finally showing its bright and limpid light, lengthening the shadows of men and trees to fantastic dimensions. Hills and woods came forth from the haze, fresh and dripping after their morning bath. The entire valley was now completely exposed, and Desnoyers was surprised to see the river from the spot ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is spoken over the round world which thou oughtest to hear will vibrate on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the great and tender heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... witch clapped her skinny hands together, and smiled encouragingly upon her handiwork. She saw that the charm had worked well. The shriveled yellow face, which heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin fantastic haze, as it were, of human likeness shifting to and fro across it, sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more perceptible than ever with the next whiff from the pipe. The whole figure, in like manner, assumed a show of life such as we impart to ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises them to look hard at spotty walls for inspiration, I cannot say. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... two steep hills, overgrown with furze and fern, except on their tops, which were clothed with purple heath; they were also covered with patches of broom, and studded with gray rocks, which sometimes rose singly or in larger masses, pointed or rounded into curious and fantastic shapes. Exactly between these hills the sun went down during the month of June, and nothing could be in finer relief than the rocky and picturesque outlines of their sides, as crowned with thorns and clumps of wild ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... up an empty fantastic Citizen, in order to qualifie him for an Alderman. He was succeeded by a young Rake of the Middle-Temple, who was brought to me by his Grandmother; but to her great Sorrow and Surprize, he came out a Quaker. Seeing my ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... orthopedic, orthodox *Osteon bone osteopathy, periosteum *Pais, paidos child paideutics, pedagogue, encyclopedia Pas, pan all diapason, panacea, pantheism Pathos suffering allopathy, pathology Petros rock petroleum, saltpeter *Phaino show, be visible diaphanous, phenomenon, epiphany, fantastic Philos loving bibliophile, Philadelphia *Phobos fear hydrophobia, Anglophobe Phone sound telephone, symphony *Phos light phosphorous, photograph *Physis nature physiognomy, physiology *Plasma form cataplasm, protoplasm ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... of ordinary musical appreciation. Nothing is farther from the truth, as a slight examination of musical literature will show. For we see that the fugal form has been used to express well-nigh every form of human emotion, the sublime, the tragic, the romantic; very often the humorous and the fantastic. When we recall the irresistible sparkle and dash of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, of the Overture to the Bartered Bride by Smetana, of the Finale of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, and of many of the fugues in the Well-tempered Clavichord, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... individuals here and there in the general mass who interbreed—preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species but ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... portfolio except a blank cheque signed with those grand yet simple words—John Bull. The German General is the product of an organising nation. The British General is the product of an improvising nation. Each army would be better commanded by the other army's General. Sounds fantastic but ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... quotation from the Midrash Rabbah. The Targum of Jonathan and also the Yerushalmi record the same fantastic tradition. In the latter it is given thus, "And Esau ran to meet him, and hugged him, and fell upon his neck and kissed him. Esau wept for the crushing of his teeth, and Jacob wept for the tenderness of ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... looking for a cab, glad of the empty Embankment and the cold river, and the thick-strewn shadows of the plane-tree leaves—confused, flurried, sore at heart, and vaguely disturbed, as though he had made some deep mistake whose consequences he could not foresee. And the fantastic thought suddenly assailed him if instead of, 'I think you had better go,' she had said, 'I think you had better stay!' What should he have felt, what would he have done? That cursed attraction of her was there for him even now, after all these years of estrangement ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not help going now and then to the tower door to look on and listen; but he feared at last that the steeple might fall upon him and kill him. We call such scruples in these days exaggerated and fantastic. We are no longer in danger ourselves of suffering from similar emotions. Whether we are the better for having got rid of them, will be seen in the future history of ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... mountains by which we were surrounded. The colors of the rocks are variegated, so that the gorgeous cliffs appear to be banded, rising from 800 to 1,000 feet sheer on all sides. These rocks had weathered into fantastic shapes suggestive of cathedrals, Greek temples, and sharp steeples of churches extending like giant needles into the sky. The scenery compares very favorably with that of the Garden of the Gods, and is much more extended. This place, I have no doubt, will sooner ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... killed by it. But a young man little dreams what he must inevitably encounter in the course of a life ambitious of public notice. My indignation at Mr. Keats's depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... lived in a sea of trifles, and she was desperately angry if her lover was not always sailing a pleasure-boat in the same ocean. Now this was expecting too much from me, and, after twisting our silken strings of attachment into all manner of fantastic forms, we fell fairly out one evening and broke the little ligatures in two. No sooner had I quarrelled with Tarleton than Lady Hasselton received him in my place, and a week afterwards I was favoured with an anonymous letter, informing me of the violent passion which ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the chamber in which Windybank awaited the stroke of midnight faced towards the river, and the sheen of its broad waters was plainly visible. He sat without a light, and the silvery beams from without cast fantastic shadows on the oaken floor and the dark panelling of the low walls. The carved furniture stood distorted and grotesque. The woodwork creaked as it cooled from the heat of the day, and a mouse that scuttled sharply across the floor brought the watcher to ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... position, the young man took to be the speakers of the evening. The room was half full of the motleyest crew that it had ever been his ill fortune to set eyes on. The flaring light of two lard-oil torches brought out the peculiarities of the queer crowd in fantastic prominence. There was everywhere an odour of work, but it did not hang chiefly about the men. The women were mostly little weazen-faced creatures, whom labour and ill treatment had rendered inexpressibly hideous. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... indignation of all the gods and goddesses. Accusations poured in upon Yue Huang, and he ordered the Four Gods of the Heavens and their chief generals to bring Sun to him. The armies laid siege to Hua-kuo Shan, a net was spread in the heavens, fantastic battles took place, but the resistance of the enemy was as ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture, tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains at this season, opening upon a court—a wide stone-eaved court, planted with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown old fountain, indefatigable, played its ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... fantastic toe, the nymphs Thither assembled, thither every swain; And o'er the dimpled stream a thousand flowers, Pale lilies, roses, violets and pinks, Mix'd with the greens of bouret, mint, and thyme, And trefoil, sprinkled with their sportive arms, Such custom holds along th' irriguous vales, From ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... from its transformation scenes a less extravagant episode, in which the heath dimly appeared behind the general brilliancy of the action. She was dancing to wondrous music, and her partner was the man in silver armour who had accompanied her through the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet being closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic. Soft whispering came into her ear from under the radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in Paradise. Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass of dancers, dived into one of the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the Picts; and their warriors, who stripped themselves for a day of battle, were distinguished, in the eyes of the Romans, by the strange fashion of painting their naked bodies with gaudy colors and fantastic figures. The western part of Caledonia irregularly rises into wild and barren hills, which scarcely repay the toil of the husbandman, and are most profitably used for the pasture of cattle. The highlanders were condemned to the occupations of shepherds ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... just it—what things? What have I to say, after all? I am going to-morrow because I am a fantastic, capricious ass. Also because ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... in the lane, and told him the thing was done. Fitzpiers went back to his house musing. Why had he carried out this impulse—taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to his own and his young wife's prospects? His motive was fantastic, glowing, shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs. Charmond could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and to his wife, at the outside, a patron. In the unattached bachelor days of his first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for lingering ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... silver-spined branches into a tree-like bush, or, in the great pitahaya, rises in fierce dignity like a monitor against the deep blue sky. And the yuccas are quite as beautiful, with their tall central rods so richly crowned with bell-like blossoms, the fantastic Clistoyucca arborescens, or Joshua tree, being more in harmony with the archaic landscape than any other plant there. As the traveller crosses one of the open forests of this tree, which is often twenty-five feet high, the more distant ones ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... do to say that by adopting vulgar methods and appealing to vulgar people, General Booth established his universal kingdom of emotional religion. Let the person inclined to think in this way dress himself in fantastic garments, take a drum, and march through the streets shouting 'Hallelujah.' There is no shorter cut to humility. Many have tried to do what William Booth did. Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken drugged humanity and render the Kingdom of Heaven a reality. Many ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of his age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite other than L'Allegro and Lycidas. In the closing years of the preceding century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet Marino was developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... salaamed and bowed. When20 I spoke it sounded like a gun, with an echo long afterward rumbling in my brain. Thoughts came to me like fury, bewildering, sometimes as points of light in the most exquisite fireworks. Objects were clothed in most fantastic garbs. I looked at my two animal companions. I seemed to read their thoughts. I felt strange affinities with them, even with the Swami. Yet it was all by the psychological law of the association of ideas, though I was no longer master but the ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... each wrote a Vengeance d'Alexandre. Jean le Nevelon relates how Alior, the son of Alexander and Candace, avenged his father's death on Antipater and others. Between 1310 and 1315 Jacques de Longuyon (or Langhion) introduced into the account of the Indian war Les Voeux du paon, a romanesque and fantastic episode very loosely connected with Alexander. It is interesting for its connexion with the 15th-century romance of Perceforest, since in it Alexander visits Britain, where he bestows Scotland on Gadifer and England on Betis (otherwise Perceforest). Les Voeux du paon enjoyed great popularity, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... are made of pewter, terra-cotta, or wood, in every shape of bird, or beast, or fish. Rafael had a bird-whistle, Edith's was a yellow butterfly, and the tops which they spun were dressed like dolls, in many fantastic costumes. ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... alleged designs on Norway and Sweden are as fantastic as the sweeping statements by which they are heralded. One of them was the order issued by the Russian Government to build a railway bridge over the Neva in Petrograd in order to link the Finnish railway with all the other stations which ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and hop on one leg as a specific for the cramp. Then, as he realized his position, he strove madly to rise and straighten the afflicted limb. He was so far successful that he managed to stand, and in the fantastic appearance of a human snail, to shuffle slowly round the kitchen. At first he thought only of the cramp, but after that had yielded to treatment a wild idea of escape occurred to him. Still bowed with ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... had already woven a fantastic background, for the mystery and hints had been broadly made that Annette Oakleigh had been indiscreetly intimate with a young physician in the town, a Dr. Gunther, a friend, by the way, of Minturn. "There ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Karnevalgroteske, was given at the Dresden Pressfestival, February 7, 1913, with the title of Matrimony in the Year 2000, the author and his wife appearing in the leading roles with brilliant success. It contains in solution the leading motives from all his plays and his philosophy of life. It is fantastic, as fantastic as Strindberg's Dream Play, but amusing. In 1914 his biblical drama, Simson (Samson), was ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... thanked her mother, and danced away merrily, storing up her flatulence like an organ-blower waiting for the first note of mass. Entering the nuptial chamber, she determined to expel it when getting into bed, but the fantastic element was beyond control. The husband came; I leave you to imagine how love's conflict sped. In the middle of the night, the bride arose under a false pretext, and quickly returned again; but when climbing into her place, the pent up force went off ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... to take a seat in it for the short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street opening into ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... portal to the mountains through which we passed was formed by immense buttes of yellow clay and sand, with large flakes of mica and seams of gypsum. Nothing could be more forlorn and desolate in appearance. The gypsum had given some consistency to the sand buttes, which were washed into fantastic figures. One ridge formed apparently a complete circle, giving it the appearance of a crater; and although some miles to the left, I should have gone to visit it, supposing it to be a crater, but my mule was sinking with thirst, and water was yet at some distance. ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... rather tackle Goggle-eyes and minus X than write compositions for Miss Halliday on Spring Flowers—Sper-ing Flow-ers," Carol simpered gently, and, letting his hands fall limp from the wrists, fluttered imaginary skirts in a fantastic promenade across ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... work was the work of an artist. The body was done in graceful, sweeping lines, while the legs were circled red, white and blue alternately down to each hoof. Even the animal's head was emblazoned in the most fantastic manner. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... the door opened, one slipped into the world, one found one's place. There were instantaneously real things to be done, real money to earn, men and women to live with and work with, to conciliate or to resist. A mist rolled away from my eyes. What a fantastic life it had been hitherto, how sheltered, how remote from actuality! I seemed to have been building up a rococo stucco habitation out of whims and fancies, adding a room here and a row of pinnacles there, all utterly bizarre and grotesque. Vague dreams of poetry and art, nothing ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... supplied to Theophile Gautier's French edition of 1862 by Gustave Dore, who fully maintained by them the reputation he had gained for work of a similar genre in his drawings for Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. When, however, the public has had an opportunity of appreciating the admirably fantastic drawings made by Mr. William Strang and Mr. J. B. Clark for the present edition, they will probably admit that Baron Munchausen's indebtedness to his illustrations, already very great, has been ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... parading up and down, like arrant braggarts and coxcombs. Sometimes they met with rival coxcombs in the young Indians from the opposite shore, who would appear on the beach painted and decorated in fantastic style, and would saunter up and down, to be gazed at and admired, perfectly satisfied that they eclipsed ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... of this old quarter presented a curious conglomeration of the architectural monstrosities of seven centuries. It was a fantastic tumult of irregular shapes that only took the semblance of human design upon being considered in detail. As a whole they seemed the result of a great upheaval of nature—the work of some powerful demon—rather than that of human architectural conception. These confused and frightful ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... and parapet. In the corners of the court polygonal bays, whose surfaces were entirely occupied by buttresses and windows, broke into the squareness of the enclosure; and a far-projecting oriel, springing from a fantastic series of mouldings, overhung the archway of the chief entrance to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Hessian garrison was presenting arms, and their salutes joined with those of the inhabitants of Saint Goar, Further on, they shouted through a speaking- trumpet to hear the famous echo of the Lorelei, with its wonderfully distinct and frequent repetitions. Then they passed the fantastic castle of the Palatinate, built in the middle of the stream, and in old times the refuge of the Countesses Palatine, where their children were born and kept in security during their babyhood. The Empress landed at ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in its dim recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals of a vanished race—the rhinoceros, the elephant, the bison, and the hamadryad, that great and terrible snake which ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... clematis, full however of wild aspirations towards other gardens, less staid, less humdrum, where the rose trees would fling out their branches untrained, and the wild growth of weed and briar be taller than the trees, and blossom with unknown and fantastic flowers, luxuriantly coloured by a warmer sun. Such gardens are rarely found save in the books of poets, and so she read many verses, all unknown to the nurseryman, who knew no other poetry than a few almanac distichs ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. It is written "from a hamlet among the mountains of Savoy. . . Here ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... was a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... pricked his lamp down very low so as to save his oil, and was lying at full length on the cold floor, a prey to the most gloomy thoughts. All sorts of fantastic forms seemed to mock at him out of the darkness. He could almost hear their jeering laughter, and was rapidly giving way to terror and despair, when a ray of light flickered for a moment on the rocky roof ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... discussed in the most bald, prosaic manner, with abundance of Latin phrase, scriptural allusion, and commonplace precept, unenlivened by a single spark of true poetic fire, and presenting altogether a farrago of the most fantastic pedantry. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... the ordinary playwright and so highly esteemed by critics and spectators, he always borrows, as if he had recognized the weakness of this first attempt, and when he sets himself to construct a play, it has no action, no plot—is, indeed, merely a succession of fantastic occurrences that give occasion for light love-making and brilliant talk. Even in regard to the grouping of characters the construction of his early plays is puerile, mechanical; in "Love's Labour's ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... merry reign, many fantastic changes took place in the costumes of courtiers and their followers. At the restoration, the dress most common to women of all ranks consisted of a gown with a laced stomacher and starched neckerchief, a sad-coloured ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Race Cargill had been the best Terran Intelligence agent on the complex and mysterious planet of Wolf. He had repeatedly imperiled his life amongst the half-human and non-human creatures of the sullen world. And he had repeatedly accomplished the fantastic missions until his name was emblazoned ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... see at each flash of lightning the forest lining both banks up the river, bending before the furious blast of the coming tempest, the upper reach of the river whipped into white foam by the wind, and the black clouds torn into fantastic shapes trailing low over the swaying trees. Round her all was as yet stillness and peace, but she could hear afar off the roar of the wind, the hiss of heavy rain, the wash of the waves on the tormented river. It ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... and abandoned a great many which he would willingly have put in better order, he sat down to dinner upon the Wednesday preceding the appointed day, with his worthy aide-de-camp, Mr. Meiklewham; and after bestowing a few muttered curses upon the whole concern, and the fantastic old maid who had brought him into the scrape, by begging an invitation, declared that all things might now go to the devil their own way, for so sure as his name was John Mowbray, he would trouble himself ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... several seconds no one moved or spoke. In the flickering light of the candle they looked at one another, and then at the fantastic pillars of salt all about them. Then Mr. ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... new scheme shows that the proposal is at once disingenuous and fantastic. The Prime Minister shrinks from admitting the nature of the work he is engaged in. He breaks up the unity of the Kingdom, but he will not allow that his Bill involves the repeal of the Union. But whatever quibbles may be indulged in, the main principle of the Act of Union, that Ireland ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... and I wondered what strange emotion he got from those subtle cadences and obscure phrases; and again I found him absorbed in the detective novels of Gaboriau. I amused myself by thinking that in his choice of books he showed pleasantly the irreconcilable sides of his fantastic nature. It was singular to notice that even in the weak state of his body he had no thought for its comfort. Stroeve liked his ease, and in his studio were a couple of heavily upholstered arm-chairs and a large divan. Strickland would not go near them, not from any affectation of stoicism, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... their general aspect, the well-known Giant's Causeway on the northern coast of Ireland, and the Isle of Staffa off the western coast of Scotland. The latter, which, around its whole sea-girt outline, presents ranges of basaltic columns, some of them disposed in curious fantastic groups, most nearly resembles the Sicilian pair. These differ from it chiefly in their having the columns piled in terraces, one above another. Staffa, however, can boast of a far more striking feature —the celebrated Cave of Fingal—its ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... be more unlike the usual known habits and tastes of the Conte Leandro, than such a freak. But supposing such a whim to have occurred to him, would he have set out on his walk evidently intending to be disguised—with a cloak wrapped round the fantastic costume in which he had been at the ball? Was such a supposition in any wise ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... poor creatures of chance have fantastic desires and inconceivable loves. We give ourselves now for one thing, now for another. There are men who ruin themselves without obtaining the least thing from us; there are others who obtain us for a bouquet ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... That sounded quite fantastic, but Pelle had no desire to climb up to the heights only to fall flat on the earth again. He had obtained certain tangible experience, and he wanted to know how far it would take him. While he sat there working he pursued the question ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and expounded this by a Gnostic doctrine of aeons, which was intended to harmonize the goodness of God and the existence of evil, and it added the figure of the highest aeon, Christ, the savior of men. On the other hand, its involved and fantastic machinery led ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy |
