"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees, cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... boy's mind is the worst of my pieces of work. I have made him too refined for one class, and left him too rough for another—discontented with his station, and too desultory and insubordinate to rise, nobleness of nature turning to arrogance, fact and fiction all mixed up together. It would be a study, if one was ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... imagine the airs of broad-blown impudence which are sometimes assumed by ignorant and stupid boors who have been endowed with a license; and assuredly no one would guess the extent of their political power unless he had something to do with election business. The landlord of fiction hardly exists in the quiet towns; there is seldom a smiling, suave, and fawning Boniface to be seen; the influential drink-seller is often an insolent familiar harpy who will speak of his own member of Parliament as "Old Tom," and who airily ventures ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... questions, and was an absolutely fearless writer, audacious and independent, so that he twice suffered imprisonment for his daring. The immortal "Robinson Crusoe" was published on April 25, 1719. Defoe was already fifty-eight years of age. It was the first English work of fiction that represented the men and manners of its own time as they were. It appeared in several parts, and the first part, which is here epitomised, was so successful that no fewer than four editions were printed in as many months. "Robinson Crusoe" was widely pirated, and its authorship gave rise to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... There's my contest! I had urgent business in Ireland, and she 's a good woman, always willing to let me go. I count on her kindness, there 's no mightier compliment to one's wife. She'll know it when it's history. She's fond of history. Ay, she hates fiction, and so I'm proud to tell her I offer her none. She likes a trifling surprise too, and there she has it. Oh! we can whip up the business to a nice little bowl of froth-flummery. But it's when the Parliamentary voting is on comes the connubial pull. She's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... interesting and important work to do.' Here was a nemesis for an innocent illusion I had been accustomed to foster in the minds of my relations and acquaintances, especially in the breasts of the trustful and admiring maidens whom I had taken down to dinner in the last two seasons; a fiction which I had almost reached the point of believing in myself. For the plain truth was that my work was neither interesting nor important, and consisted chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... he was studying history for its facts and principles, and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In "The North American Review" for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who "made twenty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this about with the Word in many parts of the habitable globe, for they trade the world over and read or teach the Word everywhere. This seems like fiction and yet ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... good books after all, for we can't count profuse histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or the volubility of fiction. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... his shoulders. "The ruck would dislike me anyway, because I know more than it does. Still, it need not worry. I am going to quit journalism, and go in for fiction soon, as you will do in due course.... What's the time?" They had come out into Fleet Street again, and he glanced upwards at the Telegraph's clock. "Half-past ten. It's too late to take you down to stay at my place, as I can't telephone to my wife. So I may as well stay in town. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... proclaiming the fact that General Durham of the Statesman office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle, and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the Statesman office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his offering to ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... of criminals might justly be suspected of incivism. This ridiculous lie imposed on the authorities of Paris. Female citizens were solemnly warned against the obnoxious ringlets, and were left to choose between their head-dresses and their heads. Barere's delight at the success of this facetious fiction was quite extravagant: he could not tell the story without going into such convulsions of laughter as made his hearers hope that he was about to choke. There was something peculiarly tickling and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... earthward flight of the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought some happy change in my organization—given a firmer tension to my nerves—carried off some dull obstruction? I had often read of such effects—in works of fiction at least. Nay; in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... description will surpass All fiction, painting, or dumb shew of horror, That ever ears ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... It was all so sad, and she was so ashamed. There was no one to count upon now. Lamartine was a chatterer; Ledru-Rollin was like a woman; the people were ignorant and ungrateful, so that the mission of literary people was over. She therefore took refuge in fiction, and buried herself in her dreams of art. We are not ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... the emperor, and said that it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book. "Your imperial majesty," said he, "cannot believe everything contained in books; sometimes they are only fiction, or what ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... you please to tell me in the stead of truth, and which proves your love to be the greatest fiction ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... not unlikely, but after this comes a series of twenty volumes at least, which produce only half that quantity indeed; but then the whole profits, save commissions, are the author's. That will come to as much as the former, say L50,000 in all. This supposes I carry on the works of fiction for two or three novels more. But besides all this, Cadell entertains a plan of selling a cheaper edition by numbers and numbermen, on which he gives half the selling price. One man, Mr. Ireland, offers to take 10,000 copies ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... establishment of a college beyond the sea, removed from the Founder's supervision and control. No one who knows human nature, or daughters, or Dorothy Wadham, can regard the story as more than an interesting fiction. And yet, is there no foundation for Wood's circumstantial narrative? Does the fact that the Foundress was presented as a Recusant mean nothing? The problem is one worthy of the industry and ingenuity of ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... no longer say that this famous axiom "No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law" is a fiction. Let ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... been, in the heroic ages of human-achievement and endurance, with the glorious cheats and delusions that nerved man to high emprise. The modern scientific discoverer and inventor oftentimes finds himself engaged in quests as strange as that of the Holy Grail of Round-Table fiction. To the Past, with its mythic delusions, simplicity, and dense ignorance of Nature, we can never return, any more than the mature man can shrink into the fresh boy again. Nor is it to be regretted. The distant in time, like the distant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of Fitzgerald's Calderon. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg, as White's book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism. Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were conspicuously absent, Goethe's Faust and Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm, Meister, being about the only notable German works in the library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... I was alone I devoted myself to reading—sometimes Russian history and sometimes works of fiction. The history was that of Karamzin, who may fairly be called the Russian Livy. It interested me much by the facts which it contained, but irritated me not a little by the rhetorical style in which it is written. Afterwards, when I had waded through some twenty volumes of the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... perhaps better known for his contributions to the theatre than for his fiction, a number having been presented by the Irish Players at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. "John Ferguson" is as serious and important a piece of work as he has ever done. In the development of his plot Mr. Ervine not only evidences ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... to leave the matter, where, indeed, the historian of events in Carlingford would willingly leave it also, not having much faith in the rewards of virtue which come convenient in such an emergency. But it is only pure fiction which can keep true to nature, and weave its narrative in analogy with the ordinary course of life—whereas history demands exactness in matters of fact, which are seldom true to nature, or amenable to any general ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... as well as the "Heavenly Twins" of Alsatian fiction, was born in Lorraine, but all three so thoroughly identified themselves with this province that they must be regarded as her sons. Those travellers who, like myself, have visited Edmond About's woodland retreat in Saverne can understand the bitterness with which he penned his volume—Alsace ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and was one of the very few pirates, other than those found in works of fiction, who forced his victims to "walk the plank." Not long afterwards the pirates met with and fought an armed Swedish vessel, which was defeated, but the captain and crew escaped in the long-boat, and, getting to shore, spread the tidings of the pirates' ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... word, Philip read the cable twice over. Then it fluttered from his fingers on to the table. It told its own story beyond any shadow of a mistake. His cousin's great wealth was a fiction. The business to which his own fortune and the whole of his grandfather's money had been devoted, was even now tottering. He remembered the rumours he had heard of Douglas' extravagance, his establishment in London, the burden of his college debts. And then ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... abstractions, secondly, to connect them. In the attempt to realize them, he was carried into a transcendental region in which he isolated them from experience, and we pass out of the range of science into poetry or fiction. The fancies of mythology for a time cast a veil over the gulf which divides phenomena from onta (Meno, Phaedrus, Symposium, Phaedo). In his return to earth Plato meets with a difficulty which has long ceased to be a difficulty to us. He cannot ...
— Laws • Plato
... life Jan-an had never seen anything so wonderful as the girl on the doorstep. She was not at all sure but that she was one of Noreen's fiction creatures. There was a story that Northrup had told Noreen about Eve's Other Children, and for an instant Jan-an estimated the likelihood of the stranger being ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... "Two souls, alas, dwell in my bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions, and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the retrospect of its past folly and credulity. And not only is such a study instructive: he who reads for amusement only will find no chapter in the annals of the human mind more amusing than this. It opens out the whole realm of fiction—the wild, the fantastic, and the wonderful, and all the immense variety of things "that are not, and cannot be; but that ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... computation beyond two centuries and a half, - an antiquity not incredible in itself, and which, it may be remarked, does not precede by more than half a century the alleged foundation of the capital of Mexico. The fiction of Manco Capac and his sister-wife was devised, no doubt, at a later period, to gratify the vanity of the Peruvian monarchs, and to give additional sanction to their authority by deriving it from a ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... the cunning devilry of such as the Barbarous Huns. Hence this little book. It is an inspiration of the Dardanelles, where I met many of our Australasian friends. It is not an official history. I have, in my own way, endeavoured to picture what like these warring Bohemians are. The cloak of fiction has here and there been wound round temperamental things as well as around ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... brought one week with another, more than L50,000 in gold to England. Smith's Wealth of Nations, book iv. ch. 6. Portugal pieces were current in our colonies, and no doubt were commonly sent to them from London. It was natural therefore that they should be selected for this legal fiction. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... not "children in fiction"; they were real children—and beautiful, high-spirited children too. Esther was easily the "fairest of the village maids," and the head of her class in the high-school; Daniel, a leader in games among the boys of ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... reasons for the transformation that goes so far to explain Daudet's peculiar position,—the transformation of a young Provencal poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was a Provencal who became a Parisian,—and in this translation we may find the key to his character as a writer of fiction. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... out of the weakness that was overmastering his limbs, and slid an arm round her waist. The head dropped on his shoulder, and he found himself with parched lips saying things that up till then he believed existed only in printed works of fiction. Mercifully the horses were quiet. She made no attempt to draw herself away when she recovered, but lay still, whispering, "Of course you're the Boy, and I didn't know—I ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in. But history gives us, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... authentic history to warrant it, one paper, in an article entitled "A Funny Old Man," says: "Deacon Shem Drowne, the Carver. Concerning the origin of the carved figure of Admiral Vernon there can be no doubt. History, ancient records, and fiction all record the presence in Boston of one Deacon Shem Drowne, whose business it was to supply the tradesmen and tavern-keepers of the day with similar carved images to indicate their calling, or by which to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... Henry who is making all the trouble. He is attacking one of the oldest and dearest platitudes I know." He paused for the general to speak, but the older man nodded his head for him to go on. "He has just said that fiction is stranger than truth," continued the novelist. "He says that I—that people who write could never interest people who read if they wrote of things as they really are. They select, he says—they take the critical moment ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... will be so kind as to take the assurance which the writer hereby gives him, that the letter was received under the circumstances now stated, and that it is not a fiction. Certain names and the date only are, for ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... feeling about womankind. Think also of the effect with which literature, poetry and the arts have since been cultivating and developing the sentiment. Consider how the great mass of Western poetry is love poetry, and the greater part of Western fiction ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... considerably over L3,000,000 per annum. The management claim that their expenses amount to but forty per cent. of revenue, and this is regarded by them as a matter for general congratulation. The Uitlanders contend that the concern is grossly mismanaged, and that the low cost of working is a fiction. It only appears low by contrast with a revenue swollen by preposterously heavy rates and protected by a monopoly. The tariff could be reduced by one-half, that is to say, a remission of taxation to the tune of one and a half million annually could be effected without depriving ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Faria has gone through various impressions in Portugal, where it is esteemed a curious and accurate performance, though on some occasions it is alleged that he has placed too much reliance on Mendez Pinto, a dealer in bare-faced fiction. The first impression of the Portuguese Asia was printed at Lisbon in 1666, in 3 vols. small folio, and it has been often reprinted, and translated into ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in an excellent state ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... hundred years. As a prose writer he admires him, less, it is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very high, and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of the Stuarts and gentility. What book of fiction of the present century can you read twice, with the exception of "Waverley" and "Rob Roy?" There is "Pelham," it is true, which the writer of these lines has seen a Jewess reading in the steppe of Debreczin, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... took it seriously, like Robert. I looked upon it as a family fiction. I understand that the Turrald barony was a barony by writ—whatever that may be. The point is that if my brother had lived to restore it, the title, on his death, would have descended to his only daughter, if she had been born in wedlock. As she is illegitimate, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... fiction comprise only a selection from a very large number of books suitable for supplementary reading. For extended bibliographies see E. A. Baker, A Guide to Historical Fiction (new ed., N. Y., 1914, Macmillan, $6.00) and Jonathan Nield, A Guide to the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... roused the attention of all the literary world of England, and even spread its writer's name to the continent. The author—"wonder-working Lewis," was a stripling under twenty when he wrote The Monk in the short space of ten weeks! Sir Walter Scott, probably the most rapid composer of fiction upon record, hardly exceeded this, even in his latter days, when his facility of ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... as if it were a part of the same code, though in reality it is often inconsistent with the latter law. The result is the Torah or law, or, as we call it, the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses (Moses being regarded by a convenient fiction as the source of all Jewish laws). This was thenceforward the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... stands for an interesting detective story. The fact that the books in this line are so uniformly good is entirely due to the work of a specialist. The man who wrote these stories produced no other type of fiction. His mind was concentrated upon the creation of new plots and situations in which his hero emerged triumphantly from all sorts of troubles and landed the criminal just where he should ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... dreams. She detested the narrow limits in which her lot was cast, she hated poverty. Much of her reading had been of modern works of fiction, written by her own sex, which had revealed to her something of her own powers and given her indeed, an exaggerated notion of the influence, the wealth, the position a woman may attain who has beauty and talent and ambition and a little culture, and is not too ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her eyebrows. The fiction, that so much having been said, an immediate show of reserve on such topics preserved her in ignorance of them, was one she subscribed to merely to humour the squire. I was half in doubt whether I disliked or admired her want of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... will scarcely credit the sort of things these people will write," he said. "It is all fiction and something called ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... an age of story-telling. Never before has the world turned so attentively to the shorter forms of fiction. Not only is this true of the printed short-story, of which some thousands, more or less new, are issued every year in English, but oral story-telling is taking its deserved place in the school, the home, and among clubs specially organized ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... with mingled hope and dread; reads it with rapture; and this he says was the first token of his succeeding happiness. Whether this is a mere poetic fiction, or whether the Lady Jane did actually send him a token of her favor in this romantic way, remains to be determined according to the fate or fancy of the reader. He concludes his poem by intimating that the promise conveyed in the vision and by the flower, is ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... in question never previously filled a Conspicuous place in fiction or the Chronicles of Fame; And the Blood and Culture critics, or the Rosa and Matilda School of Novelists would shudder at the mention of ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the carriage, pinning the Alpine flower to the corsage of her aunt's dress, when Lynde reached the steps. Mrs. Denham's features expressed no very deep anxiety that he could discover. That was clearly a fiction of Miss Ruth's. Lynde resumed his place on the front seat, and the horses started forward. He was amused and vexed at the inconsequence of his interview with Miss Denham, and did not know whether to be wholly vexed or wholly amused. He had, at least, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hitherto worn was cast aside entirely, and the expression of his face grew almost stern. But the sternness was not all for the culprit thus arraigned before him; much of it was for the prosecutor. He was both shocked and disgusted with the course Mr Benden had taken: which course is not fiction, ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... teaching history has of late years received much attention. One excellent method is to read, in connection with the text-book, good works of fiction, dramas, poetry, and historical novels, bearing upon the different epochs, and also to read the works of the authors themselves of these different periods. We thus make history and literature illustrate and beautify each other. The dry dates become covered with living facts, the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... library in Sam's room, and it was very doubtful whether there were any dime novels in the house. The deacon belonged to the old school of moralists, and looked with suspicion upon all works of fiction, with a very few exceptions, such as Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe, which, however, he ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... the essential thought in this sonnet? Quote corresponding passages. Give illustrations from history and fiction. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... butterflies who flit from pleasure to pleasure and do no work at all. Till late in the morning he sleeps, then breakfasts, then he shoots, lunches, rides, bathes, dines, listens to music, smokes, and reads fiction till late at night, then sleeps again; and this, or the like of this is his day, some three hundred days at least in the year. This is not mere acting for pleasure, it is living for pleasure, or acting for pleasure so continuously as to leave no scope ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... state of a love affair at any moment with a certainty as unerring as that of a great cook who can tell by a mere glance what stage of development the finest sauce has reached. She supported Logotheti's fiction, however, without ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... embodiment of sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded form of him has been sketched in the Syriac scholar of a modern work of fiction, who cherished, side by side with a world-wide reputation for learning, a bestial appetite for profligacy. The message of Tamburlaine holds as true in the pursuit of pleasure as in that of conquest. Faustus denies that there is a limit to pleasure, and the horror of his career ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... supply the deficiency. Passion in high life was the general formula of this work, for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted circles. She adored, in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted for her the romance of the world or, what is more to the point, the prime material of fiction. Their beauty and luxury, their loves and revenges, their temptations and surrenders, their immoralities and diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on her writing-table. She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable novel, she had a cleverness and a ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... That's part of our fun, one of the many pleasures you give us. It only shows how hard up we are for interesting public personages; for a royal family, for romantic fiction, if you will. But I never hear any stories that wound me, and I'm ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... book is to be of use to mothers and to the rising generation, as I humbly hope and trust that it has been, and that it will be still more abundantly, it ought not to be listlessly read, merely as a novel or as any other piece of fiction; but it must be thoughtfully and carefully studied, until its contents, in all its bearings, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Petition, what think you of this poor boy Leonard knowing few of the novels and none of the poems? No wonder the taste of the day is grovelling lower and lower, when people do not begin with the pure high air of his world! To take up one of his works after any of our present school of fiction is like getting up a mountain side after a feverish drawing-room or an offensive street. If it were possible to know the right moment for a book to be really tasted—not thrust aside because crammed down—no, it would not be desirable, as I was going to say, we should only do ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had confessed her love to him. The first letter she did not at once answer, as she was at that moment waiting to hear what Roger Carbury would say about Mrs Hurtle. Roger Carbury had spoken, leaving a conviction on her mind that Mrs Hurtle was by no means a fiction,—but indeed a fact very injurious to her happiness. Then Paul's second love-letter had come, full of joy, and love, and contentment,—with not a word in it which seemed to have been in the slightest degree ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... existed, a Greek painter might rather be suspected of inventing one which did not. We apprehend, however, that he invented nothing. For, besides that subsequent intercourse with Persians would have defeated the effect of his representation had it reposed on a fiction, it is known that the Greeks did not rightly appreciate tallness. 'Procerity,' to use Dr. Johnson's stately word in speaking of the stately Prussian regiment, was underrated in Greece; perhaps for this reason, that in some principal gymnastic contests, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... without religion, because it represents the realization of the human basis of religion in a secular manner. The so-called Christian State, on the other hand, adopts a political attitude towards religion and a religious attitude towards politics. If it degrades the State form to the level of a fiction, it equally degrades religion to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... She was dressed in a dainty, pinkish house gown—or maybe it was light blue. At any rate it was a very pretty gown and she was wonderfully graceful in it. Ordinarily in my fiction I am quite clever at describing gowns that do not exist; but when it comes to telling what a real woman is wearing, I am not only as vague as a savage, but painfully stupid about colors. Still, I think it was pink. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... would lie awake in his bed trying in vain to remember the tales he had told and wondering if the people really believed him. Then he was prone to contrast his fiction with the truth as he knew it, and to blame himself for not having lived the brightly painted life when he had the opportunity. He almost wept when he thought of what he had missed. His imagination carried him so far that he cursed his mistaken rectitude and longed ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... appropriated to strangers;" but Mr. Christie well knew that the House would not adopt those words, because they contain an admission that strangers are present whilst the House is sitting, whereas it is a parliamentary fiction that they are not. If a member in debate should inadvertently allude to the possibility of his observations being heard by a stranger, the Speaker would immediately call him to order; yet at other times the right honourable ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... sense which we have repeatedly noticed. Hindu chroniclers ignore important events and what they record drifts by in a haze in which proportion, connection, and dates are lost. They frequently raise a structure of fiction on a slight basis of fact or on no basis at all. But the fiction is generally so obvious that the danger of historians in the past has been not to be misled by it but to ignore the elements of truth which it may contain. For ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease, that the two come to the same thing. He has no modest affectations, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah. When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the ground that art is the only way in which the people can be taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a Bohemian in his manner ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... piece of fiction connected with one of the claimants to its discovery, by the celebrated Jim Beckwourth, that famous Afro-American, who was chief of the Crow Nation. It says: One day in June, 1822, a beautiful Indian maiden offered him a ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex, as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life is happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be handled with truth to life, some girl, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... told—we cannot say on what authority—which, whether it be a fact or a fiction, is natural, and may serve very well to shew what would be the effect of imagination if reason did not interfere. It is said that the companions of a young man, who was very 'wild,' had foolishly resolved to try to frighten him into better conduct. For this purpose, one of the party was arrayed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... indiscriminately. Yet this mysterious non-existent mother of the house was continually being spoken of, as I found now and afterwards when I listened to the talk around me. After thinking the matter over, I came to the conclusion that "mother of the house" was merely a convenient fiction, and simply stood for the general sense of the women-folk, or something of the sort. It was perhaps stupid of me, but the story of Mistrelde, who died young, leaving only eight children, I had regarded as a mere legend or fable ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... he should retire into fiction, they are too exaggerated for real life."—"Times" on Mr. R.L. Stevenson's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him in his life. And hence, in the progressive ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading analogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a firm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophical analysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms of nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly rested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on a visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting, sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... are weak and unable to revenge themselves, when they are laughed at, may be truly called ridiculous, but those who can defend themselves may be more truly described as strong and formidable; for ignorance in the powerful is hateful and horrible, because hurtful to others both in reality and in fiction, but powerless ignorance may be reckoned, and in truth ...
— Philebus • Plato
... appears to be a combination of fact and fiction. Although Queen Margaret states that she has changed the names of the persons, and also of the places where the incidents happened, several historical events are certainly brought into the narrative, the scene of which is laid in Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... my maiden aunt, come over from the State of Maine to see your British institutions," Mr. Parmalee said, in fluent fiction, to the obsequious landlady. "She's writing a book, and she'll mention the Blue Bell favorably in it. Her name is Miss Hepzekiah Parmalee. Let her have your best bedroom and all the luxuries this hotel affords, and I will foot ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... of those dear, distant days would be complete without a short memoir of "Kitty." She was only a grey Dorking hen, but no heroine in fact or fiction, no Lady Rachel Russell or Fleurange, ever exceeded Kitty in unswerving devotion to a beloved ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... study of this book is in progress, it is well for the pupils to limit their home reading to such books as bear directly upon the subject. Under this head we have suggested several books which belong to the "storybook" order. Wholesome books of fiction and semifiction may certainly do much to stimulate and hold the attention of young students of American history. Thus, Churchill's Richard Carvel and Cooper's Pilot furnish stirring scenes in the career ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... groan and shook her head: to her a young man who was capable of writing novels was lost; she had a wholesome horror of all fiction, having come from a race of Dissenters of the strict old-fashioned class, whose prejudices her hard dull nature had retained in all their strength. Her husband, without any very clear views of his own, thought ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... copiously as orators; the writers of The Spirit of the Nation, that admirable collection of stirring poems, are journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under their influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages, even when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Speeches, or Sentences which we often meet with in Histories, make a deeper Impression on the Mind of the Reader, than the most laboured Strokes in a well-written Tragedy. Truth and Matter of Fact sets the Person actually before us in the one, whom Fiction places at a greater Distance from us in the other. I do not remember to have seen any Ancient or Modern Story more affecting than a Letter of Ann of Bologne, Wife to King Henry the Eighth, and Mother to Queen Elizabeth, which is still extant in the Cotton ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... his accomplished wife have sat for many a picture; but, after all, Fancy, alone, guided the pencil, and the originals have never been truly sketched. The reality of their history possesses sufficient interest, without the aid of fiction, to enlist the sympathies of the most romantic. Born to fortune, and nobly connected, Blennerhasset stood in the front rank of Irish society. Educated for the bar, he distinguished himself on many occasions, ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... favourably reviewed. One critic said that "the author, who was obviously a woman, had treated with singular delicacy and feeling the ever-urgent problem of female employment in our great industrial centres." Another said that the book was "a brilliant burlesque of the fashionable type of detective fiction." Another wrote that "it was a conscientious analysis of a perplexing phase of agricultural life." John thought that must refer to the page where he had described the allotments at Shepherd's Bush. But he was pleased and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... dumb, When we in their description view Monsters which Adam never knew. Yet, on the other hand, the sceptic Supplies his moral antiseptic; Denying unto truths belief, With groans which give his ears relief: But truth is stranger far than fiction, And outlives sceptic contradiction. Read Pliny or old Aldrovandus, If—they would say—you understand us. Let other monsters stand avaunt, And ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... of the Trojan war in a veil is an agreeable fiction; and one might suppose that it was inherited by Homer, and explained in ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... any stimulant to help me in my labours; yet when I have been writing works of fiction, for instance my Indian and Roman Plays, I have nearly always been subject to great nervous agitation. When I suffered most from spasms, I had short intervals of freedom from pain, during which I could write, and those around me asked in astonishment how I could, in the ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... are masterly delineations of Norwegian provincial life and character, and his vivid individualization of his native town of Stavanger finds few parallels in fiction. ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... bore in the eyes of the Landers the character of a complete fiction, but for what purpose it was so got up, they could not divine. The king could gain little or nothing by their protracted stay in his capital; he had received his presents, and therefore it was conjectured, that it might be the etiquette of the court of Katunga, not only for the king to receive ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the cabins, deprived of a satisfactory climax to their little romance, filled her with gravest apprehension. Her strong belief was that Done and Lucy owed it as a sacred duty to the eternal verities, as set forth in popular fiction, to marry. If they failed to conform, they gave people ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... story of the excavations at Mycenae reads more like some well-devised chapter of fiction than a record of sober facts. Here, those sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for every one, are more than fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings, lying in the splendour of their crowns and breastplates of embossed ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the hard-working man before you can well call him old. It was so with Adam Morrison. He broke down fast, we have been told, in his sixtieth year, and after that partook but of one sacrament. Not in tales of fiction alone do those who have long loved and well, lay themselves down and die in each other's arms. Such happy deaths are recorded on humble tombstones; and there is one on which this inscription may be read—"HERE ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... thither its dispositions, its separate interests, its dependence on some neighbouring protector. The city, torn with divisions, formed no longer a whole; and as the vast majority of the citizens were so only by a species of fiction, had neither the same magistrates, the same walls, the same temples, the same gods, nor the same places of sepulture, Rome was no longer seen with the same eyes; the undivided love of country was gone; Rome was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your hearts and mine. And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death. It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and makes them call wrong, right; and right, wrong; love, cruelty; and cruelty, love. Some say that the axe is laid to the root of it just now, and that it is already tottering to its fall: while others ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... customs, rose around me. I walked, I discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my success. Was it a history? I was the chief actor therein. I suffered my own blame; I was glad in my own praise. With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expence of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... went out and left the mother and daughter together again as he had found them. It is needless to say that the Piedmontese friend was a fiction, and that San Miniato had no engagement of that kind. He had hastily resolved to keep one of a different nature because he guessed that in Beatrice's present temper he would make matters more difficult by staying. And ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... is not to be gainsayed; although suspicions of its authenticity have been cast upon it, similar to those which damaged the charms of the "Diary of Lady Willoughby," by eventually proving it to be a fiction. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... in the Imperial Parliament throws a significant sidelight on this prevalent fiction. Whereas England is only represented by one member for every 75,000 of population, and Scotland by one for every 65,000, Ireland has a member for every 42,000 of her people. With a population below that of Scotland, Ireland has 31 more members in the House of Commons, and ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Mr. Le Clear and his fiction looked at each other, and by a rapid interchange of glances signified their inability to extricate themselves from the snarl, except by a dangerous cut, which Nicholas had not the courage at the moment to give. The rest of the company were mystified; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... his two companions. Holger Drachmann (q.v.; 1846-1908) began life as a marine painter; and a first little volume of poems, which he published in 1872, attracted slight attention. In 1877 he came forward again with one volume of verse, another of fiction, a third of travel; in each he displayed great vigour and freshness of touch, and he rose at one leap to the highest position among men of promise. Drachmann retained his place, without rival, as the leading imaginative ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," was probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks, he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... but are generally ashamed to show a literary interest in fiction. Hence the world's most delightful story book has come to us with but scant indications of its origin. Critical scholarship, however, has been able to reach fairly ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... disgusted at all the cold formalities, Hector Servadac resolved to leave all the talking to the count; and he, quite aware that the Englishmen would adhere to the fiction that they could be supposed to know nothing that had transpired previous to the introduction felt himself obliged to recapitulate ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of 'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'—a short address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it was not specially ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... have detracted anything from the commonness and cheapness of the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by his transatlantic canards. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... a man or reasonable creature is supposed to participate of Reason; and, when that governs (as it does in the belief of fiction) reason is not destroyed, but misled or blinded. That can prescribe to the Reason, during the time of the representation, somewhat like a weak belief of what it sees and hears; and Reason suffers itself to be so hoodwinked, that it may ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... until he knew exactly how his story was to end. He must plan to bring about a certain conclusion. The hero and heroine must be united in marriage. The scheming villain must be brought to justice. Or if he scorn the usual ending of the "lived happily ever after" kind of fiction, he can plan to kill his hero and heroine, or both; or he can decide for once that his story shall be more like real life than is usually the case, and have wickedness triumph over virtue. Whatever he elects to do at the conclusion of his story, whether ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... seem as if hitherto it had only been asserted that the tabernacle rests on an historical fiction. In truth it is proved; but yet it may be well to add some things which have indeed been said long before now, but never as yet properly laid to heart. The subject of discussion, be it premised, is the tabernacle of the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... penetrating little book, The English Novel; and the latter in his well-known work on The English Novel in the time of Shakespeare, which gives one, while reading it, the feeling of being present at a fancy-dress ball, so skilfully does he detect the forms and faces of present-day fiction behind euphuistic mask and beneath arcadian costume. To these two books the present writer owes a debt which all must feel who have stood bewildered upon the threshold of Elizabeth's Court with its glittering throng of genius ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... rate, should be put out of the way at the first opportunity, and thus the only witness against himself be removed; for Lady Vernon's own unsupported story would be merely her word against his, and could be treated as the malicious fiction of an ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... cannot be attacked at all without some accurate means of identifying the thing which is the object of study. Without the use of scales for measuring intelligence we can give no better answer as to the essential difference between a genius and a fool than is to be found in legend and fiction. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... "The Lights" is quite just. You say that neither the conversation about pessimism nor Kisotcha's story in any way help to solve the question of pessimism. It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer's business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... work of fiction. It is a record of facts, and therefore the reader will not expect me to dispose of its various characters on artistic principles—that is, lay them away in one of those final receptacles for the creations of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fictitious history, professedly laid in the Middle Ages (and surely even miraculous occurrences cannot be more unreal than these products of sheer imagination); and suppose some critic had engaged to prove it fiction from internal evidence supplied by contradictions and discrepancies, and so on, would you not think it strange if he were to enforce that argument by saying, 'And besides all this, what is more suspicious is, that they occur in a work of imagination!' Would you not say, 'Learned ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... is, I have little doubt that Mrs. MARY ROBERTS RINEHART has hit upon a distinctly profitable title. Indeed I believe that this has already been proved in the Land of Freedom, from which the work comes to us, where (I am given to understand) the vogue of sentimental fiction is even greater than with ourselves. What the name does nothing to indicate is that the stories are almost all of them laid in or about hospital wards. For some, perhaps most, of the author's admirers this may serve only to increase the charm; for others, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... of escaping this misfortune would seem to be in realizing the beautiful fiction of Fenelon in Telemachus, by finding a faithful, sincere, and generous Philocles, who, standing between the prince and all aspirants for the command, would be able, by means of his more direct relations to the public, to enlighten the monarch in reference to ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... and was content to be monarch of both on similar terms. He divided himself, as it were, into two persons, one of whom reigned in Calah, while the other reigned in Karduniash, and his Chaldaean subjects took care to invest this dual role —based on a fiction so soothing to their pride—with every appearance of reality; he received from them, together with all the titles of the Babylonian kings, that name of Pulu, which later on found its way into their chronicles, and which was so ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... with this point the humor of the situation is too plain to require comment, and I need only cite a few facts in order to place the beautiful little fiction where it belongs.* ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however splendid. What is left is more precious than what is added; the one is history, the other is fiction; and I like the former the better of the two—it is so much more romantic. One is positive, so far as it goes; the other fills up the void with things more dead than the void itself, inasmuch as they have never had life. After that I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... Divers stately ones of these, I remember about the banks of Po in Italy; which flourishing near the old Eridanus (so celebrated by the poets) in which the temerarious Phaeton is said to have been precipitated, doubtless gave argument to that fiction of his sad sister's metamorphosis, and the amber of their precious tears. It was whiles I was passing down that river towards Ferrara, that I diverted my self with this story of the ingenious poet. I am told there is a mountain-poplar much propagated ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity. But, alas! we have only to extract from the industrious Henry one of those numerous passages which he has collected from contemporary historians, to prove that fiction itself can hardly reach the dark reality of the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... rogueries, wheel within wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these Autobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had no direct Camera-obscura Picture of the Professor's History; but only some more or less fantastic Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly enough, shadowing forth the same! Our theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally authentic what was but hieroglyphically so, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a certain dignity in her "Castle of Otranto"; and after her came Sir Walter Scott who frankly surrendered to the power and charm of the theme. The line of succession has been continuous. The ghost has held his own with his human fellow in fiction, and his tale has been told with increasing skill as the art of the writer has developed. To-day the case for the ghost as an element in fiction is an exceedingly strong one. There has indeed sprung into being within a couple of decades a new school ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various |
