"Fantastically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us thus and thus. These mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky—so much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much vapour and sunshine and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... much as did the assiduous, delicate attention which the chief bestowed on Jane. Had the chief been hunting and procured game, it was laid at her feet; did he secure a bird of rare plumage, its plumes fantastically arranged, were modestly presented to her; and furs of rare softness and beauty in profusion adorned her apartment, at the request of the chief. Unwilling to offend, and as he had never spoken on the subject to her, she could do nothing but accept them with the best grace ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... human head. The more distant groups of rocks are called those of "Rathen," but are considered as belonging to Saxon Switzerland. The "Basteien" (Bastions) of this Switzerland, close by which we now pass, are most wonderful superpositions of lofty and fantastically shaped rocks. Unfortunately, the steamer whirled us so rapidly on our way, that whilst we contemplated one bank, the beauteous scenes on the opposite side had already glided from our view. In much too short ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... within that valley Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... particular in their usefulness, less splendid in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the city, or their appeal to us to-day. You may traverse the city from east to west without forsaking the old streets, and a little fantastically, perhaps, find some hint in the buildings you pass of that old far-away life, so restless and so fragile, so wanting in unity, and yet, as it seems to us, with but one really profound intention in all its work, the resurrection of life ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... rose from amidst the huddled bodies, and then, silently as ghouls from a burial-ground, her sisters emerged also from their resting-places beside the sleepers. The dying light of the fire contended but feebly with the livid rays of the moon, and played fantastically over the gleaming robes of the tymbesteres. They stood erect for a moment, listening, Graul with her finger on her lips; then they glided to the door, opened and reclosed it, darted across the yard, scaring the beasts that slept there; the watch-dog barked, but drew back, bristling, and ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... armed party of cavalry and infantry was sent out on a foraging expedition. They accidently approached a strong fortress where a large number of Indian warriors was assembled, prepared to resist their march. They were very fantastically clothed, and painted in the highest style of barbaric art, so as to render them as hideous as possible. Immediately upon catching sight of the Spaniards they rushed out upon them with ferocious cries. Anasco, who ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... great sea, that little line of lovely islands flung down on it like a chain of amethysts, that vast flame of sky, that heaving water passionately reflecting it, and on the other side, through the other windows, a sharp wall of black mountains,—it was fantastically beautiful, like something in a poem ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... if a false faith is so forcible, what is a true? What force, I say, is there in a faith that is begotten by truth, managed by truth, fed by truth, and preserved by the truth of God? This faith will make invisible things visible; not fantastically so, but substantially so—'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' (Heb 11:1) True faith carrieth along with it an evidence of the certainty of what it believeth, and that evidence is the infallible Word of God. There is a God, a Christ, a heaven, saith ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gently rippling over pebbles, soon mingled with the sand, and was lost in the waters of the mighty ocean. The murmuring of the waves, as the tide ebbed or flowed, on the sand; their dashing against some more distant rocks, which were covered fantastically with sea-weed and shells; sea-birds floating in the air aloft, or occasionally screaming from their holes in the cliffs; the hum of human voices in the ships and boats, borne along the water: all these sounds served to promote, rather than interrupt, meditation. They were soothingly blended ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... presumption outdid even poor Piers Gaveston: he had one hundred and eighty knights in his own train alone, and their dress was so fantastically gay that the Scots jested on them, and made rhymes long ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... she really couldn't be married to Mr. Piper—and yet somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had been—Oliver's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to Mohammedanism together and he looked at Mr. Piper's grey head almost as if he expected to see a large red fez suddenly drop down upon ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... torches, agitated by the night breeze—but more especially in the strange lights that shone through the windows—now red, now blue, and then of a pale violet colour, and in an instant changing from one hue to another—something so fantastically singular, that Don Cornelio suddenly drew up, without daring to ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... do considerable marauding, which worked greatly to the general detestation and lasting discredit of his brigade. For a man, temperamentally constituted as Lane was, warfare had no terrors and its votaries, no scruples. The grim chieftain as he has been somewhat fantastically called, was cruel, indomitable, and disgustingly licentious, a person who would have hesitated at nothing to accomplish his purpose. It was to be expected, then, that he would see nothing terrible in the letting loose of the bad white man, the half-civilized Indian, or the wholly barbarous ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long—then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... long ago ceased to be picturesque. What glimpses into humble interiors, when native secretiveness has not raised a rampart of earthen bricks at the inside of the entrance! In the daytime it is like looking into vast, abandoned pigsties, fantastically encumbered with palm-logs, Roman building-blocks and rubbish-heaps which display the accumulated filth of generations—there is hardly a level yard of ground—rags and dust and decay! Here they live, the poorer ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fancies Clancy cannot, and has not, recognised him. Nor is it likely he would have done so, but for the foreknowledge obtained through Bosley. Even now only by his greater bulk is the robber chief distinguishable among his subordinates, all their faces being alike fantastically disfigured. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... the fact that the south-coast of Java had already been circumnavigated by European navigators, VAN LINSCHOTEN did not venture decidedly to assert the insular nature of this island. It might be connected with the mysterious South-land, the Terra Australis, the Terra Incognita, whose fantastically shaped coast-line was reported to extend south of America, Africa and Asia, in fact to the southward of the whole then known world. This South-land was a mysterious region, no doubt, but this did not prevent its coast-lines from being ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... stars that shone like points of living gold in the warm deeps of the night; the water gave back a glittering reflection. The Arab gazed up at that vast space where the shining constellations swam towards the bosom of the Infinite, then down at their fantastically mirrored image in ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... party, whose arrival had been daily expected. Wyeth, however, reconnoitred them with a spy-glass, and soon perceived they were Indians. They were divided into two parties, forming, in the whole, about one hundred and fifty persons, men, women, and children. Some were on horseback, fantastically painted and arrayed, with scarlet blankets fluttering in the wind. The greater part, however, were on foot. They had perceived the trappers before they were themselves discovered, and came down yelling and whooping into the plain. On nearer approach, they were ascertained ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the corner. What a change! All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the pirate, blacker and more fantastically horrible than ever, for his bare left shoulder was bound with a scarf of silk and his great arm was streaked and bedabbled with his blood, "you are the most cursed coward I have met with in all my days at sea. So frightened out of your wits by a lively brush ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... It occurred to me fantastically that he was looking me over with the eye of an underwriter who has insured at a heavy premium a rotten hulk bound for stormy seas. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... observation by the dense foliage, the reserve Companies of the Brigade, lived in canvas tents fantastically daubed or in log huts. Some of the more elaborate of these latter served the double purpose of mess and bedroom for the Company Officers, the sides being taken up by two tiers of bunks made of wire and filled with straw. Outside the devices of the various regiments ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... greater than is generally thought. Since we propose to make ourselves judges of these distinctions, since, in fact, we shall reject most of them in order to suggest entirely new ones, it must be supposed that we shall do so by means of a criterion. Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes of winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass, and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like plunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through the drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches great masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at night, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with innumerable crystals, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the street of the workers in brass, where from morning till night is heard the sound of hammers at work on the arabesques [Footnote: Arabesques: a kind of low-relief carving of man and animal figures fantastically interlaced.] of vases and plates; the street of the papooch embroiderers, where all the little dens are filled with velvet, pearls and gold; the street of the furniture decorators; that of the naked, grimy blacksmiths; that ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... were going toward the plaza to see the last play at the theatre. Bengal fires burned here and there, grouping the merry-makers fantastically. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in the western corner is crimson, but all the vast south is silver and sombre. The horizon is like that seen from a balloon—pushed out to its furthermost, and there, where clouds and sky mingle, one sees fantastically as it were the sides ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the right and left. This always chased the people away for a few minutes, until, by degrees, they resumed their position. Everybody was dressed up for a grand occasion, mostly in new clothes of bark- cloth, and many were in skins of wild animals, with their heads fantastically ornamented with the horns of goats or antelopes. The sorcerers were an important element. These rascals, who are the curse of the country, were, as usual, in a curious masquerade with fictitious beards manufactured with a number of bushy ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... seen her! She was dressed in a white brocade trimmed with a piece of red silk around the bottom, a red, blousy waist covered with gold heads sewed fantastically over it, perhaps odds and ends of old finery, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Magic Flute was then exposed to view: the gloomy, massive architecture of the interior, the glowing sky above it in the background, and, silhouetted against the latter, the gigantic seated statue of the Pharaoh. A fantastically carved wooden couch lay before the pedestal of the statue. Near the curtain, obliquely placed to the auditorium, was a plain oak armchair, for the use of ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... white waves beat over her. With a feeling of wild despair Susanna now awoke from sleep, and sprang up. Cold perspiration stood upon her brow, and she looked bewildered around. The cave darkly vaulted itself above her; and the blazing fire outside threw red confused beams upon its fantastically decorated walls. Susanna went softly out of the cave; she wished to see the heavens, the stars; she must breathe the free fresh air, to release herself from the terrors of her dream. But no beaming star looked down upon her, for the heavens were covered with a grey roof of cloud, ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... mischievous luxuriance, into the holy and peaceful shades of the Bramins,—such events as these, in which the poetry and the prose of life, its pompous illusions and mean realities, are mingled up so sadly and fantastically together, were of a nature, particularly when recent, to lay hold of the imagination as well as the feelings, and to furnish eloquence with those strong lights and shadows, of which her most ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... ALFHILD from the back of the stage. She is fantastically dressed and adorned with flowers and garlands of leaves; she looks about anxiously until she discovers OLAF and runs joyfully ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... drooping in the heat. Here, however, is Madame Jonquille, taking the air in the bright, grasshoppers' sunshine, sheltering her dainty figure and her charming face under an enormous paper parasol, a huge circle, closely ribbed and fantastically striped. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... at the edge of the path, which winds and turns continually, doubling backward, then, fantastically and strangely, along the side of the mountain as far as the almost invisible little village at its feet. The women jumped into the snow and the two old men joined them. "Well," father Hauser said, "good-by, and keep up your spirits till next year, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... chill faintness stole over her, till she felt all her limbs benumbed, and every thing before her eyes grew misty and dim. The numbness passed away almost immediately, but still the figures around her appeared distorted and fantastically exaggerated; they seemed to be tossing and whirling round one steadfast centre, as the dead leaves in winter eddy round the marble head of a statue; that single centre-object remained, throughout, distinct and unaltered in ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... stormy sunset, as we approached the place, and lo! it looked exactly as it had done when first I saw it more than a score of years before, forbidding as the mouth of hell, vast and lonesome. There stood the columns of boulders fantastically piled one upon another; there grew the sparse trees upon its steep sides, mingled with aloes that looked like the shapes of men; there was the granite bottom swept almost clean by floods in some dim age, and the little stream that flowed along it. There, too, was the spot where once I had ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... Hussars, fantastically dressed in their church-yard array, with skull and cross-bones slashed in silver across his ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... had half stunned the boy. As he slowly struggled to a sitting posture the moon danced fantastically, and some black trees crowning a near hill bowed and rose, and walked sidewise to and fro. A whine, low, cautious, packed with sympathy and solicitude, pleaded at the pickets, but the boy gave it no attention. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... show the quite peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements, the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... stood by her. I remember the look and the feel of the room very well; she lay back in a low chair upholstered in blue; the firelight, forbidden her face, played on the hand that held the screen, flushing its white to red. I could see her hair gleaming in the fantastically varying light that the flames gave as they left and fell. I was in a ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... holiday costume. As the evening approached the scene became still more brilliant, for the fireworks and illuminations then began to have their effect. The evening was soft and Italian, the air pure, and the sky without a cloud. From the water, the scene was fantastically beautiful; the huge altar erected on the shore, was now a blaze of light; the range of buildings, as they ascended from the shore, glittered like diamonds in the distance. Fireworks, in great abundance and variety, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... comes, day by day, Fantastically clad, To read them near the poor; and all Who meet her, look so sad— That even to herself it is Quite ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... fantastically by the lights of the dancing, flickering aurora he could see a vast level plain of snow stretching, so it seemed, to infinity. There was no open sea. No strange land. Nothing but a vast plateau ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... come we remember that the broom was flaunting. It was not quite a lady, for it insisted on being looked at; while these light-hearted things are too innocent to know that there is anyone to look. Grizel was sitting by the side of the stream, adorning her hat fantastically with roses red and white and some that were neither. They were those that cannot decide whether they look best in white or red, and so waver for the whole of their little lives between the two colours; ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... when he was suddenly made aware that a horseman was close to him. He therefore stopped his exciting occupation, and looked round. The horseman was tall, and of a very sinister expression of countenance, with piercing black eyes. He was also rather fantastically ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, full ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... three times around the camp fire; the next time she and three other young ladies advanced and danced four times around the camp fire; this ceremony lasted about one hour. Next the medicine men entered, stripped to the waist, their bodies painted fantastically, and danced the sacred dances. They were followed by clown dancers, ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... and pointed spirelets—soaring into the sky above the gray colony of clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved facade of the Hotel de Ville, which has lured thousands of tourists to Noyon in days of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the emergency manual controls, and were soon standing on the hull of the ship. For several seconds they remained motionless and silent, grimly surveying their awesome surroundings. The billions of stars above were terrifyingly vivid against the dark emptiness of space. The ship's hull was fantastically twisted and pitted, and the enemy ship—it hovered a few miles distant—had been transformed into a brilliantly burning star by ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... into our love, it isn't, as some writer has remarked, "It isn't women's doing." Oh no. They don't care for these things. That sort of aspiration is not much in their way; and it shall be a funny world, the world of their arranging, where the Irrelevant would fantastically step in to take the place of the sober humdrum Imaginative . ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... sunshine of the August morning. It was bordered by a low stone wall along which two peacocks strutted with almost ridiculous self-consciousness of their beauty. In the very centre was a flight of steps which descended to the bowling-green beneath, where the yew hedge which grew round it had been fantastically cut into the shape of an embattlemented parapet, framing the distant view into a series of charming little pictures: here a glimpse of the river, there a delightful ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;—and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... garden occupies a part of it, and you see the trees and plants through the pillars which surround the middle inclosure. Every thing in this residence is colossal; the conceptions of the prince who built it were fantastically gigantic. He had towns built in the Crimea, solely that the empress might see them on her passage; he ordered the assault of a fortress, to please a beautiful woman, the princess Dolgorouki, who had disdained his suit, The favor of his Sovereign mistress created him such as he showed ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... beech-tree. For the most part the bottom of the glen was overgrown with brushwood, and, where its sides were too abrupt to admit the growth of larger trees, they were matted with woodbine and brambles. Out of these would sometimes start a sharp pinnacle, or fantastically-formed crag, adding greatly to the picturesque beauty of the scene. On such points were not unfrequently found perched a hawk, a falcon, or some large bird of prey; for the gully, with its brakes and thickets, was a favourite haunt of the feathered ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... for the siege of Troy, and followed, most of them, by subjects ten times more numerous, this Godfrey may be regarded as the Agamemnon. The princes and counts esteem him, because he is the foremost in the ranks of those whom they fantastically call Knights, and also on account of the good faith and generosity which he practises in all his transactions. The clergy give him credit for the highest zeal for the doctrines of religion, and a corresponding respect for the Church and its dignitaries. Justice, liberality, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 'number of souls that have appeared before the Tribunal of God.' Near a great sundial are these solemn words: 'Sol et luna faciunt quae precepta sunt eis; nos autem pergrimamur a Domino.' The church itself is one of the most fantastically ugly structures imaginable. All possible tricks of style and taste appear to have been played upon it. It is a jumble of heavy Gothic and Italian, and the apse is twisted out of line with the nave, in which respect, however, it is like the cathedral of Quimper. As I ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... made to obtain his past history it was soon discovered that it was so fantastically colored with fabrications as to be entirely worthless, so far as a reliable account of his past life is concerned. As an instance of pathological lying, however, it was a masterpiece. He was requested to write out briefly his past life history, and in ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Tube," said Charles; "but I know many eminently respectable bus people as well. Especially bus-women. They ride about, they tell me, on the most fantastically labelled vehicles and are always seeing new suburbs swim into their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... of July, Caillaux, Carson, strikes, and all the common topics of life had been swept out of the front page of the paper altogether; the stock exchanges were in a state of wild perturbation, and food prices were leaping fantastically. Austria was bombarding Belgrade, contrary to the rules of war hitherto accepted; Russia was mobilising; Mr. Asquith was, he declared, not relaxing his efforts "to do everything possible to circumscribe ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... of all were the little thick twisted trees with the rich shaded umber color of their trunks. They occurred rarely, but still in sufficient regularity to lend the impression of a scattered grove-cohesiveness. Their limbs were sturdy and reaching fantastically. On each trunk the colors ran in streaks, patches, and gradations from a sulphur yellow, through browns and red-orange, to a rich red-umber. They were like the earth-dwarfs of German legend, come out to view ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... (who is her life), would cheerfully go on playing with the odds always slightly against him, if he had a clear idea of the value and significance of zero. But zero is woman inexplicable—something fantastically loyal or shiveringly perfidious, savagely cruel or quixotically self-sacrificing, something that is primitive, non-moral and resolved to win at all costs. In the sex-gamble, zero is more than a thirty-six to one chance; it is Poushkin's DAME DE PIQUE and turns up thirty-six times ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground—designs that took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round black beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince's ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which there was the same eagle ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... smoked and drank just as the young men of her set did, she danced like a madwoman, she sang and rode and skated with the fury of a witch. She was like a child, over-dressed, overjewelled, her black hair fantastically arranged; always talking, always unhappy, a perfect type of the young female egotist. She liked to use reckless expressions, to curl herself up on a couch, in a room dimly lighted, and scented with burning pastilles, and discuss her marriage, her ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... thought of his escapades, and of all the knowledge, unutterable in Bursley, fantastically impossible in Bursley, which he had imparted to her son, he marvelled that the maternal instinct should be so deceived. Still, he felt that her praise ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden foot with her yet scarcely trade—polluted ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... honeycomb wall, or parading a large open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the mothers of the moon world—the queen bees, as it were, of the hive. They are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... dim light until the whole figure was complete, fantastically supplying, in his imagination, the coat, the shirt, the collar and the tie to go with the trousers—all the things which he himself lacked. Was there also a hat? Jimmy couldn't make out, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... train. The present district forms a marked contrast, being largely composed of Carboniferous limestone. And the remarkable thing about these limestones is that they are over many miles totally devoid of any covering of soil or clay; the grey gnarled rock, fantastically carved and crevassed by the action of rain and weather, lies naked and bare. But in the crevices of the rock a wonderful variety of rare and beautiful plants abound. One or two of these have their home in the far south, like the plants we have lately considered, ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... Session had reached the stage that is ended by no power save that of grouse, and the streets were full of vans fantastically decorated with baths, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a kinless boy turned loose in Texas, and went on fantastically through a hundred changes and chops of life, the scenes shifting from State after Western State, from cities that sprang up in a month and—in a season utterly withered away, to wild ventures in wilder camps that are now laborious, paved municipalities. It covered the building ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... horses that seek to return to the burning stable. Pelle might have spared his efforts at consolation; they were races apart, a different species of humanity. In the dark, impenetrable entrails of the "Ark" they had made for themselves a world of poverty and extremest want; and they had been as fantastically gay in their careless existence as though their world had been one of wealth and fortune. And now it was all going up ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... streets of Constantinople, an extraordinary greasy-looking fellow dressed in a leather jacket, covered over with ornaments of tin, bearing in his hand a lash of several leather thongs; he was followed by two men, also fantastically dressed, supporting a pole on their shoulders, from which hung a large copper kettle. They walked through the main streets with an air of great authority, and all the people hastily got out of the way. This he found on inquiry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... is to awaken thoughtful laughter." "Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... later to Akhnaton. It is probable that he first saw the light in the royal palace at Thebes, which was situated on the edge of the desert at the foot of the western hills. It was an extensive and roomy structure, lightly built and gaily decorated. The ceiling and pavements of its halls were fantastically painted with scenes of animal life: wild cattle ran through reedy swamps beneath one's feet, and many-coloured fish swam in the water; while overhead flights of pigeons, white against a blue sky, passed across the hall, and the wild duck hastened towards the open casements. Through ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso. Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... the edge of the path, which goes turning and twisting continually, and which comes back fantastically and strangely, along the side of the mountain, as far as the almost invisible little village at its feet. The women jumped into the snow, and the two old men joined them. "Well," father Hauser said, "good-bye, and keep up your spirits till next year, my friends," and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... curious looking figure!" Glory Goldie remarked to the driver as the old man and the youngsters crowded in through the gate. She had not the faintest suspicion as to who the man was, but she could not help noticing a person who was so fantastically arrayed. On his head was a green leather cap, topped with a bushy feather; round his neck he wore a chain of gilt paper stars and crosses that hung far down on his chest. It looked as though he ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... ordered the dog-cart to take him to Drigg next day in time to meet the morning train, and, after packing such things as he would want, lay awake for some time in a sleeplessness which was not irksome, and then lost himself in dreams of a fantastically brilliant future. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... had not been scared; Ali Baba and his automatic pistol were only part of this unreality; his appearance on the scene had been fantastically classical; he entered when his cue was given by Scheherazade—this oily, hawk-nosed Eurasian with his pale eyes set too closely and his moustache hiding under his nose a la Enver Pasha—a faultless make-up, an entry properly timed and prepared. And then, always well-timed for dramatic ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... they've forgotten to cover Polly's cage." But high fever soon passes from the very old; and early morning brought a deathlike exhaustion, with utter silence, save for the licking of the flames at the olive-wood logs, and the sound as they slipped or settled down, calcined. The firelight crept fantastically about the walls covered with tapestry of French-grey silk, crept round the screen-head of the couch, and betrayed the ivory pallor of that mask-like face, which covered now such tenuous threads of life. Augustine, who had come on guard when the fever died away, sat in the armchair before those ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... who now made his appearance, was a tall good-looking young man about thirty, dressed rather fantastically, as I thought, having a laced cap on his head and a parti-coloured silk sash round his waist, such as they ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... with the mystical colours which he borrowed from the Egyptian and Chaldean priests, which he modified in his own poetical brain, and preserved a remnant of polytheism. The disciples of Plato, such as Proclus, Ammonius, Jamblicus. Plotinus, Longinus, Porphyrus, and others, dressed it up still more fantastically, added a great deal of superstitious mummery, blended it with magic, and other unintelligible doctrines. The first doctors of Christianity were Platonists, who combined the reformed Judaism with the philosophy taught in Academia. Mahomet, in combating the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... then a crew of these half human sons of the forest would make their appearance in the streets of New Amsterdam, fantastically painted and decorated with beads and flaunting feathers, sauntering about with an air of listless indifference—sometimes in the marketplace, instructing the little Dutch boys in the use of the bow and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... York, later Toronto, by Major John Small, Clerk of the Executive Council. His will, drawn by himself after his fatal wound, is still extant in the Court of Probate records at Toronto. One clause reads: "I desire to be rolled up in a sheet and not buried fantastically, and that I may be buried at the back of my own house." Buried in his garden at his direction, his bones were accidentally uncovered in 1871 and reverently buried in Toronto. His manuscript diary is still extant, a copy being in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... smoked his pipe and talked, between the spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate brought him face to face with two enemies at once. Maso was battling his way up the street, white and strained as a grave-cloth; and Carlo Formaggia, the approved bravo—oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared, evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded youths. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... curiosity as though they had not known the story, so captivated were they by the touches of compassionate human feeling which Pierre introduced into his narrative. Their glances never left him, all their heads were stretched towards him, fantastically illumined by the flickering light of the lamps. And it was not only the sick who displayed this interest; the ten women occupying the compartment at the far end of the carriage had also become impassioned, and, happy at not missing a single word, turned their poor ugly faces ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... graver study of mathematical and physical sciences. The abuse of better powers, which has led many of our noble but ill-judging youth into the saturnalia of a purely ideal science of nature, has been signalized by the intoxication of pretended conquests, by a novel and fantastically symbolical phraseology, and by a predilection for the formulae of a scholastic rationalism, more contracted in its views than any known to the Middle Ages. I use the expression "abuse of better powers," because superior ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... upon the califs—men and women and children—clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners—men ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... back. In an instant the whole cavalcade was in confusion. The horses reared and plunged, the men shouted and demanded who was there, and all the while the weird figure, whose tattered garments fluttered fantastically in the wind, waved her skinny arms wildly, and ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... trodden grass, dappled with blood, his head curved fantastically beneath his shoulders. Another had gone down with him and lay half over him, a long arm locked about him in a curious gesture that oddly suggested protection. This one lay face downward, but Varney, as it happened, was on his back, and his upturned ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... piled fantastically in huge mounds over the fields, and the railway cuts would be drifted full, so no train would run for days. But Peter felt that he could walk ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... largely new; old deities have been superseded; other deities have taken their place. There has been both accretion from without and evolution from within. The thirty-three gods of the Vedas have been fantastically raised to three hundred and thirty millions. Siva, Durga, Rama, Krishna, Kali—unknown in ancient days—are now mighty divinities; Indra is almost entirely overlooked, and Varuna has been degraded from his lofty throne and turned into a regent of ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... melancholy peace and burdened bliss, I should note that sun and moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert, opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh 'Enough,' and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep: for that any old Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac, as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... herself. She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot, now on the other, on the animal's naked back, while they flew at full speed. Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down into the city, scattering all she met with right and left, till she rode straight up to the barracks of the Chasseurs d'Afrique. At the entrance, as she reined ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... and his protege were seated at breakfast, the first reading the newspaper, the last glancing over his letters; for Randal had arrived to the dignity of receiving many letters,—ay, and notes, too, three-cornered and fantastically embossed. Egerton uttered an exclamation, and laid down the newspaper. Randal looked up from his correspondence. The minister had sunk into ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
