"Fantasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible that just three-score years ago, on a May day (see Who's Who), some Maestro of Fantasy slipped into a little house in Kirriemuir, N.B., with a black bag? Wouldn't that explain the otherwise inexplicable, the unwearying resourcefulness, the unabashed playfulness ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... that he never joined the pessimists, or the party which professed pseudo-peasant tendencies, and followed Count L. N. Tolstoy's ideas, but has always preserved his independence. His first work, a delightful fantasy, entitled "Makar's Dream," appeared in 1885. Korolenko has been sent to Siberia several times, but now lives in Russia proper,[48] and publishes a high-class ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... shun the acquaintance of the family? Both Mr. Beaufort and Arthur saw you in childhood, and their suspicion once aroused, they may recognise you at once; your features are developed, but not altogether changed. Come, come!—my adopted, my dear son, shake off this fantasy betimes: let us change the scene: I will travel with ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist's imagining? We shall never know. Borrow called his Lavengro 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... fifty pounds; it will come as a very boon of heaven, and assuredly blesseth him that gives as much as him that takes. A poor fifty pounds, which the wealthy fool throws away upon some idle or base fantasy, and never thinks of it; yet to S—- it will mean life and light. And I, to whom this power of benefaction is such a new thing, sign the cheque with a hand trembling, so glad and proud I am. In the days gone by, I have ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the character of his new friends; of Irina, her treachery and her remorse; and finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... what is not so usual, a quite intelligible fantasy in mime—The Magic Pipe: Pierrot, faithless mistress, despair, sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... a crystalline glittering substance, like molten glass sprayed on and allowed to harden. Behind this glasseous protective surface, paintings and carvings spread a fantasy of strange form and color, but the light was too dim to make much of it, except that it was alien to my experience, and exceedingly well done, speaking of a culture second ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.' ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... despite certain obvious faults of imagination and style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of conventional thought, and is prepared ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... reached that fatal epoch when man experiences an insatiable hunger for love, and for want of a woman will nourish some monstrous fantasy, or even, like the prisoner of Saintine, become enamoured of ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... closely. It was a letter full of delightful things but the delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writer had been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did you own the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature of fantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of my being. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate with robins— English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in a letter what I am now ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and the life which they are represented as leading: that he has manufactured his local color to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... has its 'credibilizing' effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—''tis but our fantasy!' upon which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... of these assumptions is nothing less than the complex vision itself, with that "something," which is the soul, as its inscrutable base. Thus I am permitted to retain, in spite of its arbitrary fantasy, my pictorial image of a pyramidal arrow of fire, moving from darkness to darkness. My picture were false to my conception if it did not depict the whole pyramid, with the soul itself as its base, moving, in its complete ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold." A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions, especially if chiming in with favorite preconceived ideas; and then ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... its credibilising effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution—"'tis but our fantasy!" ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no "specimens," no varnished pine cones, no "Rock of Ages," ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... turned again to resume his meditations upon the steps, his incredulous eyes fell upon a performance amazingly beyond fantasy, and without parallel as a means to make scorn of him. Not ten feet from the porch—and in the white moonlight that made brilliant the path to the gate—Miss Mary Randolph Kirsted was walking. She was walking with insulting pomposity in her most ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... between the old Persian and the conquering Mohammedan. By using veiled language, by taking all the every-day things of life as mere symbols of the highest transcendentalism, it was possible to be an observing Mohammedan in the flesh, whilst the mind wandered in the realms of pure fantasy and speculation. While enjoying Hafiz, then, and bathing in his wealth of picture, one is at a loss to tell whether the bodies he describes are of flesh and blood, or incorporeal ones with a mystic background; whether the wine of which he sings really runs red, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... allegorical fantasy. All the most interesting Days, grandchildren of Mother Year, came to Mrs. November's dinner party, to honour the birthday of ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... away These trees, this south-wind and this dreary day Would all be mad with joyous ecstasy; But you are gone, so mourning they with me Find bitter-sweet in idle fantasy. How glad, how mad, how gay, If you were ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... principal personage who figures in it, Golias, the type of the gluttonous and debauched prelate. Some of those poems were merry songs full of humour and entrain, perfectly consistent with what we know of Map's fantasy: "My supreme wish is to die in the tavern! May my dying lips be wet with wine! So that on their coming the choirs of angels will exclaim: 'God be merciful to this drinker!'"[289] Doubts exist also as to what his French poems were; most of ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... west. Lightning played in fitful dashes. Then followed swirling wind gusts, which stirred up fantastic columns of whirling dust, roared down the ravines, and raised a surf which grated furiously on the shingle below. Thunder crashed and bellowed, and the whole weird fantasy of crag, cliff and cyclonic dust columns was terribly and wonderfully lit by the vivid and almost continual flashing ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... in its way, a little masterpiece, and its grace and fancy, and beauty of line and colour, cannot be over-estimated. The Greeks gave human form to wood and stream, and saw Nature best in Naiad or in Dryad. Mr. Crane, with something of Gothic fantasy, has caught the Greek feeling, the love of personification, the passion for representing things under the conditions of the human form. The flowers are to him so many knights and ladies, page-boys or shepherd- boys, divine nymphs or simple ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... permanent. And it was much more striking in situation, with the bay offering an immense, flat blue extension at one side and the city hills, pricked with lights, slanting up and away from the other. By day, the joyous, whimsical fantasy of the colossal Tower of Jewels, which caught the light in millions of rainbow sparkles, must, for children at least, have made of its entrance the door to fairyland. At night, there was the tragedy ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... beards making them look like brothers. Side by side against the faded paper on the sunny wall they stood, surveying us contentedly. The violinist, who turned out to be a Norman, played a solo—some music-hall fantasy, I imagine. The next number was the ever popular "Tipperaree," which every single poilu in the French army has learned to sing in a kind of English. Our piano-violin duet hit off this piece even better than ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy; Which is as thin of substance as the air, And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his face ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... His dream was melted in his blood, and his blood ran bright for her. His dreams were the flowers of his blood. Hers were more detached and inhuman. For centuries a certain type of woman has been rejecting the 'animal' in humanity, till now her dreams are abstract, and full of fantasy, and her blood runs in bondage, and her kindness is ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Then a fantasy seized him. "That man stands at our antipodes on the other side of the earth. If the earth were of glass he could look down upon us. But he can see me just as well as I see him. What is he doing? He is catching rattlesnakes, and when he comes back he will ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you never ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... up a fantasy of spires, needle-sharp and bare and golden. The long straight range—saw-toothed limestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of the Organ—stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky, till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, to misty haze; till the sharp, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... though, i' faith, 'tis smart, A jeu d'esprit, not art concealing art, Fruition of a moment's fantasy, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill- omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of fear ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... him still, But his hot blood now warms him in his dream Which is much more to him than it doth seem; And clasping her within convulsing arms, Receives a thrill that all his nerves alarms, And wakes him from the dreams she had instilled. "What means this fantasy that hath me filled, And spirit form that o'er my pillow leans; I wonder what this fragrant incense means? Oh, tush! 'tis but an idle, wildering dream, But how delightful, joyous it did seem! Her beauteous form it had, its breath perfume; Do ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... exactly coeval with the commencement of its decline. The feverish and ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning into the Old Market, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... masterpiece of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace. There was other music here, different music, a wilder, more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the overpowering ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... In it, in fact, Beethoven may be said to have broken away from form, for after the word sonata he adds the qualifying phrase "quasi una fantasia," signifying that, although he calls the work a sonata, it has the characteristics of a free fantasy. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Aeolian Harp To Erinna To Cleis Paris in Spring Madeira from the Sea City Vignettes By the Sea On the Death of Swinburne Triolets Vox Corporis A Ballad of Two Knights Christmas Carol The Faery Forest A Fantasy A Minuet of Mozart's Twilight The Prayer Two Songs ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... crept down to the distance of a gun-shot. The mounting tiers of stone and brawling water caught the moonlight in waves, and now he was in a cold pit of shadow and now in a patch of radiant moonshine. It was a world of fantasy, a rousing world of wintry hill winds and sudden gleams of summer. His spirits rose high, and he forgot all else in plain enjoyment. Now at last he had found life, rich, wild, girt with marvels. He was beginning to whistle ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... rose from the window, and seated herself, in her impulsive way, at the organ. Her fingers touched the keys timidly at first as she began a trembling prelude of her own fantasy. In music her pent-up feelings found congenial expression. The fire kindled, and she presently burst out with the voice of a seraph in that glorious psalm, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... interest that result when art comes in—not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly, and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral, balanced in all its parts, and worthy ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... distortion of the story heard only from the lips of the circuit rider, some fantasy of tradition invested with the urgency of fact, but Roger Purdee could not remember the time when he did not believe that these were the stone tables of the Law that Moses flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath. In the dense ignorance of the mountaineer, and his secluded life, ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths and fables histories; Enter these arms, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... reputation with Character, and believe themselves to be striving for the reality of the one, when the fantasy of the other alone stimulates their desires. Reputation is the opinion entertained of us by our fellow- beings, while Character is that which we really are. When we labor to gain reputation, we are not even taking a first step toward the acquisition of Character, but only putting on ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... conceive of a critic who in general and offhand looks upon the presentations of this book as the out-pourings of a fantasy run wild or as dreamy thought-pictures. Yet all that can be said in this respect is contained in the book itself, and it is explicitly shown that sane and earnest thought not only can but must be ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... these, altogether, made his homely cottage by the wayside seem an unsubstantial edifice, such as castles in the air are built of, and the ground he trod on unreal; and that grave, which he knew to contain the decay of a beautiful young man, but a fictitious swell, formed by the fantasy of his eyes. All unreal; all illusion! Was Rose Garfield a deception too, with her daily beauty, and daily cheerfulness, and daily worth? In short, it was such a moment as I suppose all men feel (at least, I can answer for one), when the real scene and picture of life swims, jars, shakes, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ought otherwise to be concealed: I believe that you already understand to whom I allude, and since you have discovered her weakness, it is right that you should know also her virtue; it is right that you should learn that it was not in her the fantasy or passion of a moment, but a long and secreted love; that you should learn that it was her pity, and no unfeminine disregard to opinion, which betrayed her into imprudence; and that she is, at this moment, innocent of everything but the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... surface of the volcanic cone besides consists of small loose pieces of lava, without any trace of vegetation. Only at one place the brim of the old crater is covered with an open pine wood. The volcano has also small side craters, from which gases escape. The same coarse fantasy, which still prevails in the form of the hell-dogma among several of the world's most cultured peoples, has placed the home of those of the followers of Buddha who are doomed to eternal punishment in the glowing hearths in the interior of the mountain, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... ago. As if a portion of that Thought By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper-even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams— Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, Of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... anxiety of fame, and the last we shall ever hear of them will be the funeral bell, that tolls them to their early graves! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful! because their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, but to clutch the 'trick and fantasy of fame'; and they go to their graveswith purposes unaccomplished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, and for the world in their example, had they known how to wait! Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... nursery, where Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain it from below—the Hyades, those first leaping maenads, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile criticism the one thing lost sight of is the fact that a poet must ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... possible. The impalpable yet terribly real menace of authority overshadowing them both now made it imperative that all the facts should be faced. All the facts—but what were they? It was the question he asked himself again and again as he strove to twist out of the black fantasy of that horrible night some tangible shred of truth which might help them both. His own incredible share in it was forever being re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... at the letter on the table before him, then folded it and put it in his pocket. It was well, he thought. His latest book of fairy tales and fantasy had enjoyed good acceptance. And the check in the letter had been of satisfactory size. He smiled to himself. There were compensations in this job of his. It seemed to be profitable to have a purpose other than ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... last, this life in manacles? Do you remember Job? Job? Aye, doubtless Jehovah was sitting at some jovial feast when he conceived that fantasy of a drunken brain, to let Satan loose upon a happy man. Job? His seven sons and daughters, and his cattle, and his calves were restored unto him, but we read nothing of any compensation made him for the jest itself. He was made to play court fool, with ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... many a wild and undetermined fantasy, was narrowly inspecting these two doves that had flown into our ark. The young man, tall, agile, and athletic, wore a mass of black shining curls clustering round a dark and vivacious countenance, which, if it had not greater expression, ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under. Which of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much vanity to trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not gigantic. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... made use, first of all, of exact sense-perceptions to which we applied the power of memory in its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to transform within our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into one another. By doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile fantasy. In this way we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialess drive, and shooting the whole neighborhood ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... of their last meeting, just as she had then ignored the circumstances of their last parting. Lady Cayley owed her success to her immense capacity for ignoring. In her way, she lived the glorious life of fantasy, lapped in the freshest and most beautiful illusions. Not but what she saw through every one of them, her own and other people's; for Lady Cayley's intelligence was marvellously subtle and astute. But the fierce will by ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... indications of the things which really are. There is the true enchantment of true romance in the Don Quixote—for those who can understand—but it is delivered in the mode of parody and burlesque; and so it is with the extraordinary fantasy, "The Ghost-Ship," which gives its name to this collection of tales. Take this story to bits, as it were; analyse it; you will be astonished at its frantic absurdity: the ghostly galleon blown in by a great tempest to a turnip-patch in Fairfield, a little village lying near the Portsmouth ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... conclusion, he remained on the porch and finished his breakfast. You and I, and even Mr. Burroughs, perform acts of reasoning precisely similar to this every day in our lives. How Mr. Burroughs will explain Glen's action by the instinctive theory is beyond me. In wildest fantasy, even, my brain refuses to follow Mr. Burroughs into the primeval forest where Glen's dim ancestors, to the tooting of automobile horns, were fixing into the heredity of the breed the particular instinct that would enable Glen, a ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor. Meeting me, he said, "Have you read 'Eureka?'" I answered, "Not yet: I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to see—sorry if it be true—suggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the 'Vestiges of Creation;' and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... but a scurvy faintness. Raise me! There, 'tis sufficient. Come hither, child; there, rest thy poor troubled head upon thy father's heart, and be at peace. Thou'lt soon be well: 'tis but a passing fantasy. Fear thou not; thou'lt soon be well." Then he turned toward the company: his gentle manner changed, and baleful lightnings began to play from his eyes. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nature mingled with the fascinating pleasures of the chase and of the woods, were not to be dispossessed so readily. When Faith artfully led him back to those animal enjoyments of which he had been so fond in boyhood, the fantasy of her brother seemed most to waver; but whenever it became apparent that the dignity of a warrior, and all the more recent and far more alluring delights of his later life, were to be abandoned ere his being could return into its former ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... window, gazing forth and numbly marvelling at the splendour. As of old, it struck her like a weird fantasy—this Indian enchantment—poignant, passionate, holding more of anguish than of ecstasy, yet deeply magnetic, deeply alluring, as a magic potion which, once tasted, must enchain the senses ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... reaching Constable's Camp, where we were to stop for the night. I worked hard all day, but in a kind of dream, as if the dead weight I carried with weariness were only the phantom of something, and I were a fantasy carrying it;—the actual had become visionary, and my imaginings nudged me and jostled me almost off the path of reason. But I had no time for a seance with my daemon. The next day I devoted with the guides to bushing out the carry across to Forked Lake, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... it no vain fantasy That raised me from the earth with pride? Should I to-morrow verily Be Bridegroom, and Honoria Bride? Should I, in simple fact, henceforth Live unconditionally lord Of her whose smile for brightest worth Seem'd all too bountiful reward? Incredible life's promise seem'd, Or, credible, for life too ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... more harassed and perplexed than ever. He was singularly confounded by all that he had seen and dreamt, and began to doubt whether his mind was not affected, and whether all that was passing in his thoughts might not be mere feverish fantasy. In his present state of mind, he did not feel disposed to return immediately to the doctor's, and undergo the cross-questioning of the household. He made a scanty breakfast, therefore, on the remains of the last night's provisions, and then wandered out into the fields to meditate ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... a light glanced suddenly in his face, and flashed on the wet roof above him. Looking fearfully down, Aristides beheld between the interstices of the rafters, which formed a temporary flooring, that there was another opening below, and in that opening a man was working. In the queer fantasy of Aristides's dream, it took the aspect of a second pocket and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... narrator, whilst all ears, drank in his singular story, had managed to take down and carry off the portrait. The company remained plunged in perplexity, almost doubting whether they had really seen those extraordinary eyes, or whether the whole thing were not a fantasy, a vision, the phantom of a brain heated and fatigued by the long examination of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... horizons of San Francisco, where the skyscrapers take on fantasy as they pile up on hills and recede into vales. Most visitors cross the Bay and arrive at the city by way of the Ferry Building, the gala tower of which has a clock at each point of the compass. Travelers also arrive at the Third and ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... loveliness of form and tint. Now, before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected in a pearly sea—a silvery city of fantasy like an exquisite shadowy drawing of some foreign land. . . . They sat silent, entranced. How long the vision lingered neither of them knew. . . . Then a breeze fanned their faces and in a twinkling ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... pictures? Painted by an artist of wondrous power, and terrible acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the never perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr. Smith. And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him, at the day of judgment? Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly penitential tear would have washed away each hateful ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... everything Polish were at that time the rage in Paris. The young Polish master found ready entrance into the highest musical and literary circles of this most delightful city of the world. All was romance, fantasy, passion, which fitted with Chopin's sensitive and romantic temperament. Little wonder that he became inspired by contact with some of the greatest in the ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... still thy wife, by chaste intentions led, Gives thee each night a maidenhead. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well-weav'd bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes; while fantasy discloses Millions of lilies mix'd with roses. Then dream ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat: While Faunus in the vision comes to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep. With thousand such enchanting dreams, that meet To make sleep not so sound as sweet: ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... so that the idea was rekindled and the writing was soon begun. And I found a certain rest and ease of mind in having turned from a long struggle (in which, alas, I had been too often worsted) for exactitude in dates and names and in the setting down of facts, to the escape into a world of fantasy where I could create my own. And so before the winter was over the play was put in rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, and its first performance was on St. ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Then the traveler began to feel ashamed of his bird. "All that I say," he thought, "appears to them foolish, even the Princess's gift is, in their eyes, a common chirping chaffinch. What if indeed I have been dreaming; what if this, after all, should be the real world, and the other a mere fantasy?" The bird sang, "Away! away! or you will never see the Princess more! The real world lies beyond the gates of the sunset!" But when the traveler asked the youths what the bird sang, they answered that they had only heard "Tweet-tweet," and "Chirp-chirp." Then he was really angry, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... strange fraternity for their convent—their rigid separation from human intercourse—the infringible taciturnity imposed upon themselves—and the terrible severity of their penances, are certainly circumstances more resembling the visionary indulgence of fantasy and fiction, than actual realities to be met with among living men, and in the ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... but these are living beings who have crossed the boundary] There it continues eternally in its pure intellectual nature. Its condition is that of perfect rest which nothing disturbs. These fundamental ideas are carried out in the particulars with a subtilness and fantasy unexampled, even in subtile and fantastic India, in a scholarly style, and defended by the syadvada—the doctrine of "It may be so",—a mode of reasoning which makes it possible to assert and deny ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... he said, "that my spirit is changing within me. I feel as if I had never known life until now. In vain I say unto myself that this must be a mere fantasy of mine; I, who am marked with the 'frost of eild,' who will soon be—let me see—seven-and-thirty years old. What think you of ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... gave a movement of delight at the sight of the brocaded bed where the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the Committee for their poetry. "The Funeral of John Bixby," by Stephen Vincent Benet, and "The Duke's Opera," by "Jacques Belden" (the first an allegorical fantasy and the second a poetic-romance) are at the head of this division. With these should be included Don Marquis's "Death and Old Man Murtrie," for its sardonic allegory, and "The Designs of Miramon," by James Branch Cabell, for its social ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... fed my childish fantasy, Whose mountains were my boyhood's wild delight, Whose rocks, and woods, and torrents were to me The food of my soul's youthful appetite; Were music to my ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... scholarship, he loves to depend for his richest, most human effects, upon his own peasant-people of Touraine! The proverbs of the country-side, the wisdom of tavern-wit, the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives tales, the sly earthly humors of farmers and vine-tenders and goat-herds and goose-girls—these are things out of which he distils his ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... with the talking over of plans for John Strang's long-cherished idea of a forest garden at Heartholm, there had been no allusion between mistress and gardener to that far-off fantasy, the life of little Gargoyle. During the autumn the two drew plans together for those spots which next spring were to blossom in the beech glade. They sent to far-off countries for bulbs, experimented in the Heartholm greenhouses ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is it that one should occasionally place oneself in the midst of those more striking forms of nature in which God has indulged His fantasy! It is very true that the flat land, the bare hillside, the muddy stream comes also directly from the creative hand: but these do not bring one into the sweetness of the heartier moods of God; in the midst of them it is as if one were transacting the business ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... extracts must have impressed him. At any rate, on the night after the reading of it, just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy, including the command with which it ends. With a particular clearness did he seem to see the picture of the Great White Road, "straight as the way of the Spirit, and broad as the breast of Death," and of the little Hare travelling towards ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... But it is doubtful yet Whether Caesar will come forth to-day or no; For he is superstitious grown of late, 195 Quite from the main opinion he held once Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies: It may be these apparent prodigies, The unaccustom'd terror of this night, And the persuasion of his augurers, 200 May hold him from the ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... to usher in Fear to those sheets that know no sin. The damask'd meadows and the pebbly streams Sweeten and make soft your dreams: The purling springs, groves, birds, and well weaved bowers, With fields enamelled with flowers, Present their shapes, while fantasy discloses Millions of Lilies mix'd with Roses. Then dream, ye hear the lamb by many a bleat Woo'd to come suck the milky teat; While Faunus in the vision comes, to keep From rav'ning wolves the fleecy sheep: With thousand such enchanting dreams, that meet To make sleep ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... Register's Office. For though the searching of title-deeds be a mortal process, the loafing margin of the working hour could be extended imperceptibly, and without hazarding his or his employer's interest. The following piece of speculative fantasy and insight must have been thought out when he should ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... contemplative life they seek rest in body and soul. For a great Doctor says: "They are GOD'S throne who dwell still in one place, and are not running about, but in sweetness of Christ's love are fixed." And I have loved for to sit: for no penance, nor fantasy, nor that I wished men to talk of me, nor for no such thing: but only because I knew that I loved GOD more, and longer lasted within the comfort of love: than going, or standing, or kneeling. For sitting ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane vagantes clerici, for ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... many books of fiction. It is really an essay in philosophy dealing with the question of the immortality of the soul; and it has an especial interest for English readers owing to the fact that much in it that seems to be pure fantasy is based on researches undertaken by the British Society for Psychical Research. The plot and the characters are of secondary importance; they are only used for the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... been too long since airplane flight was considered an idiot's dream. This scene here at La Guardia would have seemed pure fantasy in 1900—thc huge Constellations and DC-6's; the double-decked Stratocruisers, sweeping in from all over the country; the big ships at Pan-American, taking off for points all over the globe. We'd come a long way in the forty-six years since ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... attire on the opposite side of the run, which was torn up, with the marks of a terrible struggle and many feet. Probably he tore off his own clothes in the fancied fight, drew his knife, struck at "an air-born fantasy," and was finally partially restored by falling into the water, after which he completed his exhaustion by running back to ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... which never touched a question without enlightening it thoroughly. Aramis smiled, as he had long known that in diplomacy D'Artagnan acknowledged no master. Colbert, who, like all proud men, dwelt upon his fantasy with a certainty of success, resumed the subject, "Who told you, M. d'Artagnan, that the king ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Henri, looking at the girl of the golden eyes, "who will help you to remove the traces of this fantasy which the law ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... only very few steps to make, but before she had stopped, confronting Immada, d'Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another universe, as if presented by the fantasy of a fevered memory. He saw her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under lofty ceilings that like a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the only clue to the secret that is given. These childlike diaries are full of the "Gondal Chronicles",[A] an interminable fantasy in which for years Emily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the "Gondal Chronicles" in each other's faces, with positive bravado, trying to see which could keep it up the longer. Under it all there was a mystery; for, as Charlotte said of their ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair |
