"Real life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with enthusiasm, might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover some of his property, confiscated years ago by the Austrians. It does one's heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred to real life. Apropos of public events, all London is talking of the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming, who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in 1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... probability, or, at any rate, possibility; for the careers of many of our most eminent and successful men attest that truth is often-times stranger than fiction. But to cure a boy of radical faults is almost as difficult in fiction as in real life. Whether the influences which led to Sam's reformation were adequate to that result, must be decided by the critical reader. The author may, at any rate, venture to congratulate Sam's friends that he is now more worthy of their interest and regard than in ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... are young and hot-headed. I nearly said empty-headed. Then we read fat books about the divine right of Motherhood, Free Love and State Maternity. All very well in the abstract and fine theories to argue about, but they do not work in real life. Believe me, the older you get the more and more you realize how far away they all are from the ideal. Marriage may be sometimes a mistaken solution, but at present it is the only ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... notes on cases which are not compositely imagined—like Mary and John—but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... he fancied. And each weapon was also a book to him; he sensed their stories as he handled them; he felt the personalities of their former owners stirring in him when he picked them up. It was in that room that he dreamed; which is to say, it was in that room that he lived his real life. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... town hard by, and Lane looked and talked rather too much like a stage lover to her mind. In the unreal life behind the footlights lovers talked with just such a fluency, just such a tender fiery emphasis. In real life John Thistlewood came doggedly a-wooing with a shoulder propped against a doorpost, and had hard work to find a word for himself. If only that one absent element of faith could be imported into the business, Lane Protheroe's fashion of courting was certain to be ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... upon life as a drama, bearing the same sort, though not the same degree, of relation to eternity, as an hour spent at the theatre, and the fictions there exhibited ... do to the whole of real life. Nor is there any thing in this passing pageant worth the sorrow that we lavish on it. Now, when my children or friends leave me, or when I shall be called to leave them, I consider it as merely parting for the present visit, to meet under happier circumstances, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... languishing Nymphs, or any of the Representations of Gods, Goddesses, Demy-gods, Satyrs, Polyphemes, Sphinxes, or Fauns? But if the Virtues and Vices, which are sometimes pretended to be represented under such Draughts, were given us by the Painter in the Characters of real Life, and the Persons of Men and Women whose Actions have rendered them laudable or infamous; we should not see a good History-Piece without receiving an instructive Lecture. There needs no other Proof of this Truth, than the Testimony of every reasonable Creature ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... been to my credit. It reminded me of the mauvais ton in Gogol's "Revisor", do you remember? Perhaps because I tried to pour my vodka under the table. Oh dear! It is difficult for an aesthetic creature like me to come in contact with real life." ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... not developing a romance, but trying, as just said, to give from real life some warning pictures. Our task is nearly done. A few more scenes, and then our work will be laid ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... them might have been written by Martial, at the court of Domitian. They contain references to court doings, compliments, and sentiments couched in pointed language. The drama of Japan is represented by two types, one of which may be called lyrical, and the other the comedy of real life. Specimens of both are found in the present collection, which will furnish English readers with a very fair idea of what the most interesting and enterprising of Oriental nations has done in ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... awarded by the hand-clapping of a few admirers, most of whom had no appreciation of the work, and no sympathy with its higher motives. Would it not be cold? Would it not slowly freeze my heart to the warm love of human beings, with every one of whom I had now something in common? A real life, taking part in active work, in plain, daily toil; touching the great, full, seething heart of humanity on its warm side; working for them; working with them; being one with many—one with her. Which was best? Which was the supremest ideal? ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... real life, the gaiters wear the man, as the nose wears Cyrano. It may be Sir Auckland Geddes and Mr. J. H. Thomas are only clippings from the illustrated press. It may be that a miner is a complicated machine for cutting coal and voting on a ballot-paper. It may be that coal-owners are like the ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... heroine of honeyed romance. In particular she played one episode, the trying over of a new song, in a winningly natural manner. I found the way in which she flapped her eyelids a subject of puzzled study. I have not observed that maidens in real life indulge in these calisthenics. This is perhaps as well; they are evidently very deadly. Within a fortnight of their being brought into action poet Quintard is in the Kamerad stage. Not Anne Whitfield herself exhibits more explicitly the urgency of the life ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... trouble, or what would there be to write about? When, further, her detestable lover, seeking change and fearing the financial lash of his properly indignant parent, terminates the arrangement, even an observer of real life can guess that her return to her rightful lord and master must entail disagreeables; but only a reader well brazened in modern fiction could expect Don Juan promptly to make love to and marry the husband's sister without a word of apology to anyone. This kind of rather unsavoury dabbling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... the formal and pedantic congratulations with which the lawyer had concluded his business statement. She was not aware that she was an object of congratulation. It all seemed very stupid and uninteresting. Of real life she knew nothing and of the ordinary ties and attachments of family life less than nothing. Aubrey's cold, loveless training had debarred her from all affection; she had grown up oblivious of it. Love did not exist ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... start for the gravel-pit was delayed by Martha's insisting on everybody's washing its hands—which was nonsense, because nobody had been doing anything at all, except Jane, and how can you get dirty doing nothing? That is a difficult question, and I cannot answer it on paper. In real life I could very soon show you—or you me, which is much ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... strange that he should ever have thought of writing the lives of imaginary heroes, and should not have remained content with "forging stories and imposing them on the world for truth" about famous and notorious persons in real life. The purveyors of news in those days could use without fear of detection a licence which would not be tolerated now. They could not, indeed, satisfy the public appetite for news without taking liberties with the truth. They had not special correspondents in all parts of the ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... I don't know," said Honor, tapping her foot nervously on the shining fender, "but we both agreed that if such a thing happened in real life as was represented on the stage to-day, the man who thus slighted and neglected any woman he had promised to cherish and love, should be punished just as far as justice and humanity ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... shook Staniford's clammy hand. "Yes," said the latter, submitting; "but the difficulty about a thing of this sort is that you don't know whether you haven't been an ass. It has been pawed over so much by the romancers that you don't feel like a hero in real life, but a hero of fiction. I've a notion that Hicks and I looked rather ridiculous going over the ship's side; I know we did, coming back. No man can reveal his greatness of soul in wet clothes. Did Miss ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... English school and college training. Although he could write and speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... judicial. "But in real life about the hardest thing to do is for a man to make a woman care for ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... tragedy in Chapter VI might have been used in the days of Thespis in a much cruder and less metaphorical sense. According to primitive ideas, the mimic representation on the stage of 'incidents arousing pity and fear' did act as a katharsis of such 'passions' or 'sufferings' in real life. (For the word pathemata means 'sufferings' as well as 'passions'.) It is worth remembering that in the year 361 B.C., during Aristotle's lifetime, Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome, not on artistic but ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... his arms and looking into my eyes, that perhaps we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin, and because we were so delighted with the opera that season at Bucharest. Real life is so seldom like that—indeed never, as far as I knew it then. (Remorsefully.) Only think, mother, I doubted him: I wondered whether all his heroic qualities and his soldiership might not prove mere imagination when he went into a real battle. I had an uneasy fear that he might cut ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... effect upon the fine dreams in which his fancy had indulged. He was not a grub, and could not burrow through the earth to the rebel lines; he had no wings, and could not fly over them. The obstacles which are so easily overcome in one's dreams appear mountain-high in real life. He looked troubled and anxious; but, having put his hand to the plow, he was determined not to ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... when I began this book, to put on record a description of how utterly different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and "The Adventure of Dying," a theme which has never ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... THE most notorious dive in Chinatown, and it is only through special arrangement with the authorities and at great expense that the company is able exclusively to gain an entree here for its patrons. You will see here the real life of the Chinese, and in half an hour you will get what few would get in a lifetime spent in China itself. You will see the Chinese children dance and perform; the Chinese women at their household tasks; the joss, the shrine of his hallowed ancestors, at ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened, and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its eyesight. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... the most delicate,—and does this by an art in which he must make his characters appear real and we looking on, though he cannot use, to develop his dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in real life,—that is, in Nature. He also always approaches us upon the level of our common sense and experience, and never requires us to yield it,—never breaks in or jars upon our judgment, or shocks or alarms any natural sensibility. After enlarging our souls with the stir of whatever can move us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... of Lord Mount Severn and his interment, occurred quickly; and to one of them the reader may feel inclined to demur, as believing that it could have no foundation in fact, in the actions of real life, but must be a wild creation of the author's brain. He would be wrong. The author is no more fond of wild creations than the reader. The ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... poem of Beowulf. But it is certain that stories like those of Grendel are commonly believed in many places where dragons are extinct. The story of Beowulf and Grendel is not wildly fantastic or improbable; it agrees with the conditions of real life, as they have been commonly understood at all times except those of peculiar enlightenment and rationalism. It is not to be compared with the Phaeacian stories of the adventures of Odysseus. Those stories in the Odyssey are plainly and intentionally in a different ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... is prolix and languid in form, and undoubtedly bears a curious resemblance to Richardson's novel. The English printer, however, could not read French,[29] and there is sufficient evidence to show that he was independent of any influences save those which he took from real life. None the less, of course, Marivaux, who has a name for affectation which his writings scarcely deserve, has an interest for us as a harbinger of the modern novel. Pamela was published in two volumes in 1740. The author was sufficiently ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of the tenderest human feeling. It rather seems to be a kind of distinct faculty working harmoniously with all the others; but he who possesses it needs never to be at a loss for interest or amusement; he is always a spectator at a tragedy or comedy, and sees in real life a humor and a pathos beyond anything he can find ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lovely, of course," said Patricia, in a businesslike tone; "but this is real life! Cheer up, Paul," she went on (they had reached Christian names some weeks before). "I am going to have two darling girls here for two weeks at Thanksgiving, just from Japan. And think of the concert next month, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... counterbalance the influence of these books and outshine the glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the fair reader sees neither hole nor stain?—Poor fool! too late, alas! for her happiness and for yours, your wife will find out that the heroes of poetry are as rare in real life ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... for this purpose to pronounce the name of GOD; it will suffice that the words shall lift the soul beyond this material world and its sensual enjoyments, and raise them upwards to that supernatural atmosphere necessary to the real life. ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... go,—that is, as far as real life is concerned. There's that dear good Bishop of Abingdon is the best friend I have in the world,—and as for the Bishop of Dorchester, I'd walk from here to there to hear him preach. And I'd sooner hem aprons for them all myself than that they should ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom. His moral precepts are practical; for they are drawn from an intimate acquaintance with human nature. His maxims carry conviction; for they are founded on the basis of common sense, and a very attentive and minute survey of real life. His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet; yet it is remarkable, that, however rich his prose is in this respect, his poetical pieces, in general, have not much of that splendour, but are rather distinguished by strong sentiment and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... know," said Luke, wagging his ears, "I sometimes doubt whether I am sufficiently in touch with real life. I must consult somebody ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... historical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space. In any case, he generally contents himself with a very slight embroidery of outward manners,—the faintest possible counterfeit of real life,—and endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject. Occasionally a breath of Nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... upon his features, and his thin gray locks, that were discomposed in the paroxysm by his own hands, stood out in disorder upon his head. We question, indeed, whether mere imagination could, without having actually witnessed it in real life, conceive any object so frightfully illustrative of the terrible dominion which the passion of avarice is capable of exercising over the ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... all comparison, is that of Farmer Ashfield. It is a picture of real life, originals of which are found in multitudes in England—plain, honest, benevolent, and under a rustic garb, possessing a heart alive to the noblest feelings. No man that we know in this country possesses such happy requisites for exhibiting the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... in praise of the monks of old for preserving works of solid wisdom; but why can not a good word be said for those publishers of the present day who confer a service by not merely embalming, but by reviving and sending forth by thousands into real life the best books of the past? There are many authors who are quoted by everybody, and read by very few, simply because good modern editions of their works, at ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... accompanied![623] and will stay with me continuously till the 15th of May. As to your exhorting me in the same letter, as in many previous ones, to ambition and labour, I shall, of course, do as you say: but when am I to enjoy any real life? ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and dazzled by the advantages that a marriage with Miss Trevanion would confer on his patron, and might reflect on himself, and delighted at an occasion to exercise his dramatic accomplishments on the stage of real life, he soon practised the lesson that the theatres had taught him; namely, to make a sub-intrigue between maid and valet serve the schemes and insure the success of the lover. If Vivian had some opportunities to imply his admiration, Miss Trevanion ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... interest in his career. The present gaikwar was placed upon the throne in 1874 by Lord Northbrook, when he was Viceroy of India, to succeed Malhar Rao, one of those fantastic persons we read about in fairy stories but seldom find in real life. For extravagant phantasies and barbaric splendors he beat the world. He surpassed even those old spendthrifts of the Roman Empire, Nero, Caligula and Tiberius. He spent a million of rupees to celebrate the marriage ceremonies of a favorite pigeon of his aviary, which was mated with ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene, even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... a dramatic poet, a favourite with Henry VIII. and his court; wrote farces, the characters of which were drawn from real life, presumably not hard to identify ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... horse-dealer had finished this pleasant tale, he laughed loudly, and the three other men laughed also because they had keen wits and appreciated a good story of real life. But their laughter was changed to astonishment—almost fright—when a big black negro bounded out of a dark corner and stood by the table, one outstretched ebony finger pointing to the piece of gold. Instantly the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... all, may I not die a natural death here as well as anywhere? All mankind die, and then there is an end of all——An end of all! did I say? No, there is something within that gives me the lie when I say so. Let me see; Death, my master used to say, is not an end, but a beginning of real life: and may it not be so? May I not as well undergo a change from this to a different state of life when I leave this world, as be born into it I know not from whence? Who sent me into this world? Who framed me of two natures ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... her comparison. "Real life, as well as romance, sometimes contains startling surprises, Miss Carleton. The next chapter ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... like Keats, it won't kill me," she said stoutly, "and I've got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced 'charmingly natural, tender, and true'. So I'll comfort myself with that, and when I'm ready, I'll up again and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some sweet and companionable meaning had revisited that thoughtful countenance, if the fixed eyes had lost their rigid strain and shone with feeling, if he had ever looked humanly about him and returned to the real life of common things, it would indeed have been difficult not to do involuntary homage to the winning beauty of his face and the gracious soul that would then have shone from it. As it was, all who looked at him regretted that the man belonged no more to the world at large, and said to one another: ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... belfries touch the clouds. It is but a sad and cramped development, however; statutes restrain his young ardor and chill his blood. It is not until the boy is behind the plough in the fields and sunlight that his real life begins—a poor, brutish existence, if you will, but still life. The “Jacques,” half man and half beast, of the Middle Ages is the result of a thousand years ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... old-fashioned fiction—for he most certainly had not read either of them, and very likely had not even heard of either. But if he had studied them he would probably have considered them as quite as much an appurtenance of real life as any story of a plot for political assassination carried on in an English country-house. Now, however, it was plain that a warning had been given which did not come from the fossilised officials of the Foreign Office, and which impressed so cool an old soldier as Captain Sarrasin with ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... would reply that nothing could be more thrilling than to meet a famous actor in plain clothes and identify him. I am not a young woman myself, but I should be inclined to share their opinion. There is something about an actor in real life, moving along like a human being—one of us—that always stirs my pulse. It is exciting enough to see Mr. LLOYD GEORGE or Mr. ASQUITH or Sir OLIVER LODGE; but no one stirs the imagination ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... of my long life, I, with all the things that I meant to do and have failed to do heavy upon me, can give you only this one word. I have hurried, I have scrambled, I have fought and cursed and striven, but as an Artist only those hours that I have spent listening, waiting, have been my real life. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... independently of its immediate application to subjects of real life, has never found more than a few votaries among the Poles. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Aristotle was translated into Polish by Petryci. For nearly two hundred years, the teachers of philosophy in the Polish universities stopped at Aristotle; and a few commentaries on ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... "He was bred a lawyer, and them 'ere lawyers are good at all sorts of tricks. Clapp and him had made out a story from my papers and what they know'd before, and got it all ready in a letter; they agreed that from the time of the wreck, they had better keep pretty straight to Hopgood's real life; ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... foil these intents, and received the scant amount of encouragement which falls to well-meaning interference in real life; the Certified Poisonmonger presided over three tin pails of liquids, labelled respectively, "Lingering," "Sudden," and "A highly superior article in writhes and coils. As patronised by the Empress of China" and the demand for these wares was naturally brisk in so quarrelsome ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... prose these are the colours of poetry; but it is of poetry chastened and directed by the observation of reality, and possessing the inimitable charm of being drawn from real life, and sharing the freshness and variety which characterize the works of nature, and distinguish them from the brightest conceptions of human fancy. As we have set out in this article with placing Humboldt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... S. Our little romance in real life is happily and satisfactorily completed. Charley has come, listened, acted—and now John T. Lewis has ceased to consider himself as belonging to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Cooper "was an aristocrat in feeling, and a democrat by conviction." His recognition of the worth of true manhood, entirely apart from rank and social refinement, is shown in the noble character of Leather-Stocking. Yet the manners and customs of uncultivated people in real life were most offensive to his squeamish taste, and much of his concern for the welfare of his countrymen had to do with their neglect of the decencies ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... primitive wit—of drolls and tricksters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts. These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... embellish her account with the fruits of her imagination, a young lady possessed the power of seizing upon the points best worth describing, and could give an exact account of them, she would be far more entertaining than any exaggeration could make her; for there is no romance like that of real life, and no imaginings of an inexperienced girl can equal in piquancy the scenes and characters that are every day presented to our view. Extravagant expressions are sometimes resorted to in order to atone for deficiencies of memory and observation; but they will never hide such ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... the season has come and gone and now we settle down to the real life of the winter. Plans innumerable are under way for winter activities, and the children are on tiptoe over the prospect of approaching Christmastide. Their jubilations fill the house, and writing is even more ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... and for God's sake do not thrust upon me your hackneyed remarks, repeated to nausea, that "I was only a dreamer," while they even then had an understanding of life. They understood nothing, they had no idea of real life, and I swear that that was what made me most indignant with them. On the contrary, the most obvious, striking reality they accepted with fantastic stupidity and even at that time were accustomed to respect success. ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do not mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakspeare's or equal to it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood;—when the meaning is once seen, then the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... is to its successful conduct. What I wish to point out is that law and order in themselves are quite temporary and unsatisfactory. a man's soul passes away from its brief dwelling-place, thoughts of law and order do not accompany it. If it is strong, it is the ecstasy of true being and real life which it becomes possessed of, as all know who have watched by the dying. If the soul is weak, it faints and fades away, overcome by the first flush ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... of real life; All else is empty show— To those who read a source Of much unreal woe: Pollution, too, Through novel-veins, Oft fills the ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... from books. Charlotte, the wife of Howard, though in comparative solitude, drew her enjoyment from society. There was not a family in the village near, that did not, in some way or other, promote her happiness. Her information was gathered from intercourse with living beings—her knowledge from real life. If the two sisters had changed situations, the one might have become a mere bookworm; the other, from the liveliness of her disposition, and the warm interest she took in characters, a little of a gossip. As it was, they both admirably filled their sphere in life, ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... gain much, but should I not lose more? And yet there is life, life in the city, and here it is sameness, and life, real life, is scarce felt. I ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... class of books was generally moral in tone, but trashy in its representations of real life; the other, religious in tone, but equally trashy in its presentations of pictures of what purported to be the life of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... offered a new complication. Fellingham rapidly sketched it in fancy—Van Diemen, as a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain, led away from the House of Commons to be branded on the bank! What a magnificent fall! We have so few intensely dramatic positions in English real life that the meditative author grew enamoured of this one, and laughed out a royal "Ha!" like a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... jest, discontinue it. Perhaps this little romance is to end here—is it? It has not been without fruit. My sense of duty is aroused, and you, on your side, will have learned something of Society. Turn your thoughts to real life; throw the enthusiasms you have culled from literature into ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... the cloud, but light . . . and there was sound, musical sound. I went up with the child's hand clasped close in my own, but at the top he disengaged himself, and went in without a word to me or a sign, not as if he were leaving me, but as if his real life, and mine too, were within—just as a child would run into its home, if you came back with it from a walk, and as if it knew you were following, and there was no need of good-byes. I did not feel any sorrow ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... liveth to himself." "For unto every one which hath shall be given, and from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him." "Service" is the magic word around which real life swings. By giving, one gets. The investment of service, as individuals, and as a class, will bring big dividends in the development ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... present things: that it ought never, as long as the world lasts, to be wholly content with any existing state of institution or possession, but to be hopeful still of more wisdom and power; not clutching at it restlessly or hastily, but feeling that its real life consists in steady ascent from high to higher: conservative, indeed, and jealously conservative of old things, but conservative of them as pillars, not as pinnacles—as aids, but not as idols; and ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... attend on a patient. I retired to my bedroom, and opened my Diary. Again and again, I read that remarkable story of the intended poisoning, and of the manner in which it had ended. I sat thinking over this romance in real life till I was interrupted by ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... some places there are also pictures designed in the grand style, with figures of the gods or detailed mythological episodes, or the battles at Troy, or the wanderings of Ulysses, with landscape backgrounds, and other subjects reproduced on similar principles from real life. ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... practical wisdom without them, won by observation." The use of books must be found outside their own lids. It was said of a great French scholar: "He was drowned in his talents." Over-culture, without practical experience, weakens a man, and unfits him for real life. Book education alone tends to make a man too critical, too self-conscious, timid, distrustful of his abilities, too fine for the mechanical drudgery of practical life, too highly polished, and too finely cultured for every ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... because she was so plainly dressed, which comforted Jude in the thought that only himself knew the charms those habiliments subdued. A matter of ten pounds spent in a drapery-shop, which had no connection with her real life or her real self, would have set all Melchester staring. The guard of the train thought they were lovers, and put them into a compartment all ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the beautiful narrator, as she enacted before her this poetry and tragedy of real life, so much beyond what dramatic art can ever furnish. Her eyes grew splendid in their depth and brilliancy; sometimes they were full of tears, and sometimes they flashed out like lightnings; her whole form seemed to be a plastic vehicle which translated every emotion of her soul; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... begin with the entrance. The front part of it had been let to a cobbler who was sitting at his bench mending a shoe, and if it had been real life he would have been singing. Behind him was a garden of artificial flowers with a fountain of real water that was not playing that evening. A door led through the side wall into the second compartment, which was a salone. The porter, in evening dress, was introducing ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the derivation of words—it's full of the romance and wonder of real life and history. Think of Magic, for instance; it comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... not present them in their natural size, for it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the picture which his fancy painted. He might have seen the marshaled hosts of Liliput marching to the beat of drum, in the proud array ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... shook her head, and her smile was like a clear bright streak in the clouds, through which after the tempest has passed one almost fancies Paradise is opening. "But," she added, "there are other passions in a high-born heart. Love is poetry; but the real life of the heart is pride. Comte, I was born on a throne, I am proud and jealous of my rank. Why does the king gather ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and smiled. "What I said to Phillips was," he explained, "that if things were related just as they happen, they would not be interesting. People do not say the dramatic things they say on the stage or in novels; in real life they are commonplace or sordid—or disappointing. I have seen men die on the battle-field, for instance, and they never cried, 'I die that my country may live,' or 'I have got my promotion at last;' they just stared up at the surgeon and said, 'Have I got to lose ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... a Chicken substitute at St. James', but one had to believe it to be Hawk; and, anyhow, I have always heard that it is very difficult to eat, and talk, on the Stage—though people seem to manage it easily enough in real Life. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... frequently be of real use in regulating conduct, not so much because they are more just or more profound than those which might be culled from other authors, as because they can be more readily applied to the problems of real life. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... same applies to the realization of all the other modes of livingness; so that it is only in proportion, as the individual life is an independent centre of action, with the option of acting either positively or negatively, that any real life has been produced at all. The further the created thing is from being a merely mechanical arrangement, the higher is the grade of creation. The solar system is a perfect work of mechanical creation, but to constitute centres which can reciprocate ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... these gifts I have no doubt whatever. As a tale Helen of Four Gates is crude, unnatural, melodramatic; but the power (brutality, if you prefer) of its telling takes away the critical breath. Whether in real life anyone could have nursed a lifelong hatred as old Mason did (personally I cherish the belief that hatred is too evanescent an emotion for a life-tenancy of the human mind; but I may be wrong); whether he would have bribed a casual tramp to marry and torment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... same in literature. The author's feelings, his language, the rhythm of his words, and his delicate fancy afford the reader greater delight than he has ever known when he has met similar persons, scenes, or actions in real life. This is genuine aesthetic pleasure, similar to the pleasure that people derive from ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... least afraid. Even if she were being kidnapped, she wasn't afraid. She was so young, so absurdly confident in her ability to take care of herself. On the other hand, intuition kept admonishing her that in real life things simply didn't happen like this, so smoothly, so fortunately; somehow, somewhere, in this curious affair, something must ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... yearns for love. He loves. And more, He is love. Man is like God in his yearning for love, in his capacity for love, and in his lovableness. Man must love. He lives only as he loves. True love, and only that, is the real life. He will give up everything for love. He is satisfied only as he loves and finds love. To love is greater than to be loved. One cannot always have both. God does not. But every one may love. Every one does love. And only as there is love, pure and true—however ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... author does all the work, instead of letting the ideas do the work for him. One should write what one sees, but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, look up and into the sky of real life itself. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... dear sir!" Good-nature oozed out of every pore of the fat body of the master player. "It is nothing at all. But, by all means. Rhodomont will provide what you require. He is the dandy of the company in real life, though a fire-eater on ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... there positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... for labor and capital shall continue up to the profit-annihilating point. Here, as elsewhere in the purely static part of the discussion, we have to make assumptions that are rigorously theoretical and put out of view in a remorseless way disturbing elements which appear in real life. The static state requires that all entrepreneurs who survive the sharp tests of competition should have equally productive establishments, which means that they should all be able to get the same amount of product from a given ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... suspicion that ... No, I cannot identify his character. (Not that I want to; I am not a victim of that fatal obsession which fastens itself upon so many readers of fiction—the desire to identify the characters in a story with someone in real life. The idea is ridiculous.) Mr. Footner knows Greenwich Village. He knows outlying stretches in the greater city of New York; he knows excursion boats such as the Ernestina, whose cruises play so curious a part ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... of the leading literary topics of the year. Goldsmith's emulation was roused by its success. The comedy was in what he considered the legitimate line, totally different from the sentimental school; it presented pictures of real life, delineations of character and touches of humor, in which he felt himself calculated to excel. The consequence was that in the course of this year (1766), he commenced a comedy of the same class, to be entitled the Good Natured Man, at which he diligently wrought whenever ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... a fairy-tale, Virginia, and it is an extremely good one for a little girl like you to make up out of her own head. But you know in real life it is different." Margaret Elizabeth gazed ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... tears. You will observe, as you shall come to know more of our literature, that one respect in which it differs from yours is the total lack of the tragic note. This has very naturally followed, from a conception of our real life, as having an inaccessible security, 'hid in God,' as Paul said, whereby the accidents and vicissitudes of the personality are ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... teacher to give this knowledge the requisite form; an honourable and often a difficult task. But it is a task which receives its final sanctification, when the teacher himself honestly tries to add a rill to the great stream of scientific discovery. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with Nature. We may, it is true, have good and instructive lectures from men of ability, the whole of whose knowledge is second-hand, just as we may have good and instructive ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... real life began. In after years she used to say, "I was born first in my native town; second, in the Atlantic Ocean!" The effect of the strong sea air upon her was something indescribable; joy seemed to radiate from her whole being. She smiled whenever she ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... long as he keeps moving or working. On wash day do not dry your clothes in the kitchen or sitting room, or put them on your bed, unless they have been thoroughly dried, aired and warmed before using. These little things mean much in real life. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... three. Liszt's group, however, brings vividly before us one section of Chopin's social surroundings: it shows us what a poetic atmosphere he was breathing, amidst what a galaxy of celebrities he was moving. A glimpse of the real life our artist lived in the early Paris years this extravagant effort of a luxuriant imagination does not afford. Such glimpses we got in his letters to Hiller and Franchomme, where we also met with many ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... temperaments as that of Lottie Marsden. And when it is remembered that her ideas of true religion were of the vaguest kind, the conservative will think, "Whatever may take place in a book, the morning dew would be the type of all this feeling in real life." ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of them smoking. They had the cutest little cigarettes (Mother said they were) in gold holders, and I knew then that I was seeing life—real life; not the stupid kind you get back in a country town like Andersonville. And I said so to Mother; and I was going to ask her if Boston was like that. But I didn't get the chance. She jumped up so quick I thought something had hurt her, and cried, "Good Heavens, Baby!" ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... principles that he had cabled,—"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger brother humorously, he remarked,—"I thought you'd better get a taste of real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on the way. You'd better see him, ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... representing the same Image. The Drama presents to the Eyes of a Spectator an Actor, who speaks and acts as the Person, whom he represents, is suppos'd to speak and act in real Life. The Characteristic Writer introduces, in a descriptive manner, before a Reader, the same Person, as speaking and acting ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... story. Women—I heard you say the other day—are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud. Lilia is dead and her husband gone to the bad—all through me. You see, Mr. Herriton, it makes me specially unhappy; it's the only time I've ever gone into what my father calls 'real life'—and look what I've made of it! All that winter I seemed to be waking up to beauty and splendour and I don't know what; and when the spring came, I wanted to fight against the things I hated—mediocrity and dulness and spitefulness and society. I actually hated society for a day ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... phenomena which make a strong impression on my mind; but my dreaming mind makes, it seems, a whimsical selection among these incidents, and discards some, while it makes a liberal use of others. For instance, in real life, the sight of a beautiful sunset is a common experience, and stirs in me the most profound emotion; yet I have never seen a sunset in dreams. All my dreams are enacted in a pale and clear light of which the source is never visible. I have never seen sun, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... century since the painter's life work ended, and in these years some few changes have been made in the customs and costumes which Millet's pictures represented. Such changes, however, are only outward; the real life of peasant labor is always the same. Seedtime and harvest, toil, weariness and rest, the ties of home and of religion, are subjects which ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... to bear on the situation. It consoled Georgie at once, and must have been some kind of spell, for it raised the bottom of the deep, and he waded out with a twelve-inch flower-pot on each foot. As he was strictly forbidden to meddle with flower-pots in real life, he ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... was to find myself in such society." But with all this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. "The whole Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred," he said; "and it required the art of Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic tale." But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated it more ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Examiner—"The characters are sketched with real life and picturesqueness. Mr. Boldrewood accomplishes the very difficult feat of enabling his readers not only to understand the bewildering complexities of mining law, but to be interested in the situations which arise out of their operation, while his fund of ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... where Beulah got her nonsense," he retorted. "All this talk about real life is very fine, but you don't get much life, real or any other kind, unless you have the cash to pay down for it. You can't buy beefsteaks with long walks over the prairie, nor clothe yourself and family with sunsets. For my part I want some real success. We've done pretty ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... with the Moors, and the fourth part opens with an elaborate setting forth of the history of the great hero of mediaeval Spain, the Cid Campeador. The Cid is the King Arthur, or the Roland, of the Spaniards, less mythical, but not less interesting, with incidents of a real life seen through the warm haze of Southern imagination. King Alfonso, in his Chronicle, transformed ballads and fables of the Cid into a prose digest that was looked upon as history. Robert Southey translated this very distinct section of the Chronicle, not from the Crnica General ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... have called it a romance, Katy; for as a story, it is just nothing. It has no interest except as marking the beginning of my education,—the education, I mean, of real life." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... is drawn from life, and to the smallest detail is truthfully depicted. The Morris family has its counterparts in real life, and nearly all of the incidents of the story are founded ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... book is a delightful and beautiful work of art. The man of whom Claretie writes becomes a living character to us, and we love him as we would such a man in real life.—Cincinnati Tribune. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... pass out information more to the point than anything I can hand you. I'll simply say this. When you saw what you beheld in the fog this night, you were seeing a revised version of the Book of Exodus acted out in real life. The Children of Israel, of this day and date, are departing from the land of Pharaoh, current edition. With their flocks and their possessions, their wives and their children, they are on their way to The Promised Land. And now, if you'll step into ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... seeing the real life of a navvy while we lived in the shanty. Our men came from nearly all parts of the world—Russia, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the Dominion. There were also many Scotch and French half-breeds, as well as full-blooded ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... dramatists, Henry DeMille was getting ready for collaboration with Belasco, Daniel Frohman was house-manager and Charles Frohman was out on the road, trying his abilities as advance-man for Wallack and Madison Square successes. Winter's life is orderly and matter-of-fact; Belasco's real life has ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... "from which I derive subsistence. Amidst the endless varieties of Real Life in London, I am an Epitaph-Collector, favoured by my friends with the appellation of Old Mortality, furnished them by the voluminous writer and meteor of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... minority. I have often amused myself with comparing the Merope of Voltaire with that of Maffei and am puzzled to which to give the preference. Maffei has made Polyphonte a more odious and perhaps on that account a more theatrical character, while Voltaire's Polyphonte is more in real life. In the play of Voltaire he is a rough brutal soldier, void of delicacy of feeling and not very scrupulous, but not that praeternatural deep designing villain that he is represented in the piece of Maffei. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than anything in real life. Cinderella and her glass slipper are common-place to it. She is not, like Millamant (a century afterwards), the accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of the character. It is the honeymoon ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... me from the brilliant eyes! "Smart trick, eh?" they telegraphed. I had to turn away, or I should have laughed. Surely never before, on stage or in story—to say nothing of real life—was the villain and blackmailer a mischievous, schoolboy imp, who made his victims giggle at the very antics which caught them in his toils! But, come to think of it, I am a villain, and next door to a blackmailer! Yet I always see myself ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... novels are almost exclusively devoted to pictures of Parisian manners. Balzac, it is true, has given us delineations of provincial life; but the delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the problems of real life, and even if we could always accept the portraitures they give us as undistorted, they generally presuppose a knowledge on the part of the reader on those points on which the foreigner is most apt to be ignorant. In any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer who both understands ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... happy Warrior? Who is he That every man in arms should wish to he? —It is the generous spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: Whose high endeavours are an inward light That makes the path before him always bright: Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; Abides by this resolve, and ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... are most remote, strange, beautiful and delightful. They are doubtless composites of actual localities but in their construction and use fine powers of imagination are at work and real life seems left far behind. In my dreams of this type the ocean stands as a symbol of Life itself, of the mighty and profound procreative force the entrance into whose domination is the crisis of existence. For this experience is demanded the mightiest symbol. It ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... ever dreamed," said Wilmot unsteadily, "that you were going to say things like this to me, I'd have dreamed that I went wild with happiness, and drove you to the nearest clergyman. But now that you have actually said what you have said, in real life, I find that I love you more than ever, and that it is not compatible with so much love to take you on a basis of friendship. You feel that you have hurt me more than is possible for your conscience to bear, and you wish to make up for it. Is ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... plain man gets home again, does his wife's face say to him: "I know that your real life is now over for the day, and I regret for your sake that you have to return here. I know that the powerful interest of your life is gone. But I am glad that you have had five, six, seven, or eight hours of passionate pleasure"? Not a bit! His wife's face says to him: "I commiserate with you on all ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children "dressing up," disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and throat, he ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... splendid—the horsemanship." She stammered. "I've seen it in the movies, but I didn't know it was actually done in real life." ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... I have said, leaned on the worship of Vesta, the Preserver, and in later times was devoted to that of Isis. In Sparta, thought, in this respect as in all others, was expressed in the characters of real life, and the women of Sparta were as much Spartans as the men. The "citoyen, citoyenne" of France was here actualized. Was not the calm equality they enjoyed as honorable as the devotion of chivalry? They intelligently shared the ideal ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... directly to attack Rome? Examine the question as if you were Hannibal." Much of this appears theoretically sound enough. Unfortunately the subjects were generally either hopelessly threadbare or possessed no bearing upon real life. "We are learning," says Seneca, "not for life, but for the school." The only novelty which could be given to the treatment of old abstract themes or puerile questions was novelty of phrase, and the one great mark of the literature of this time is therefore the pursuit of the striking expression, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... dozen or so, and by the light of the torches we carried I could plainly see their red tongues lolling out of their hungry jaws. So did Pierre, and out came his beads. But reely, boys, there are more wonderful escapes in real life than ever folks read of in books. Now, what do you suppose saved us that night? Under Providence, of course, I means. We might have turned at bay and shot one or two, and there was a knife apiece. But we should have been doomed men had we done so. However, help was close, just ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... mainly forced to ignore. People call the art of Forain immoral, they call Yvette Guilbert's songs immoral. That is merely the conventional misuse of a conventional word. The art of Yvette Guilbert is certainly the art of realism. She brings before you the real life-drama of the streets, of the pot-house; she shows you the seamy side of life behind the scenes; she calls things by their right names. But there is not a touch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated nor contaminating by what she sings; she is simply ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... urging forward the day when profession will give place to endeavor, and, in the real life of a genuine brotherhood of man, and true recognition of the All-Fatherhood of God, all men, in spite of their diversities, shall unite in their worship and thus form ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... "that's very good on the stage, in a play, with low music in the orchestra. I can just see it. In real life, unfortunately, the life which we both live, you and I, it is not with words, were they a yard long, that the baker, the grocer, and those rascally landlords, can be paid, or that dresses and shoes ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... our dreams to what we are in real life. She felt full of love for him, full of calm and deep love, and was happy in stroking his forehead and in holding him against her. Gradually he put his arms round her, kissed her eyes and her cheeks without her attempting to get away from him; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... your husband belongs to a type that our dramatists have thought worthy of preservation and of exercising their finest art upon. I often give writers credit for more creative ability than they possess, for I always am seeing some one in real life whose entire type I had supposed had come straight out of their genius. Take yourself, for instance. If I had not met you outside of a book, I should have thought you a triumph ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... something is happening. Its form is controversial—and the playwright, by force of this controversy, is in turn each one of his characters, and not merely a witness of their doings. When they begin to take hold of him, their possession is more and more insistent—all interests in real life become more and more secondary and remote until the questions in dispute are not only decided, but there is also a written record of the debates ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... the girl, "I felt almost as if I had known you for a long time. You and Horace were such good friends at college, and he had often told me of you. I was very glad to meet you in real life, especially here, where I had no one but Mrs. Bascom to talk to; Mr. Atkins, by reason of his aversion to ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... very atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there was ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... you put yourself in the paths of adventure and experience, the less you will have to say, and the more impossible will it be to read your work. Never notice people's manner, conduct, nor even dress, in real life. Walk through the world with your eyes and ears closed, and embody the negative results in a story or a poem. As to Poetry, with a fine instinct we generally begin by writing verse, because verse is the ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... fallacies by which some of these authors have been misled. The Ratiocinative half, dealing with matters which had already been well handled by Dutrieu and other scholastic logicians, invests their dead though precise formalism with a real life and application to the actual process of finding and proving truth. But besides thus working each half up to perfection, Mr Mill has performed the still more difficult task of overcoming the repugnance, apparently an inveterate repugnance, between them, ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... burnt or met with even worse contumely." Ernest Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody "dropped into each of the Simeonites' boxes." Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life. Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark's collection, three printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject. He speaks of them in an ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... I might go on almost indefinitely with the story of Anna; but in real life stories have a curious way of coming to quick fruition, and withering away after having cast the seeds of ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... it? The house full of children, there's soon a dozen of them! Poor Mrs. This and This—it makes one quite weak both in body and mind only to think of it! Yes, yes, my friends, people don't put these things down in romances, but it goes on in this way in real life! Yes!" ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... be added after all that has been said about light and atmosphere in connection with Titian and Tintoretto, and their handling of real life, that Bassano's treatment of both was even more masterly. If this were not so, neither picture-fanciers of his own time, nor we nowadays, should care for his works as we do. They represent life in far more humble phases than even the pictures of Tintoretto, and, without ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... this sudden and extraordinary change in the hiterto even tenor of his life. Little more than twenty-four hours previously, all he had been concerned about was the production of his play by Bassett Oliver—here he was now, mixed up in a drama of real life, with Bassett Oliver as its main figure, and the plot as yet unrevealed. And he himself was already committed to ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... I want no explanation to see and understand how M. Josselin has written most of his chefs-d'oeuvre from the depths of a happy consciousness habituated to all that is most graceful and charming and seductive in real life—and a deeply sympathetic, poignant, and compassionate sense of the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... be imagined how much Shakespeare excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... inventions of romances and play-writers are quite as often transferred from their books and pieces into real life, as the events of real life are made use of on the stage or adapted to a tale. I have seen the comedy of Tartufe played out—with the exception of the close; Orgon's eyes could not be opened to ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... to meet in real life a character so strong and vivid, so full of subtle characteristics, that his appearance in a novel would make the author's name. Such a ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... of medieval investigators. It was, however, much mixed up with alchemy, a false science which the Middle Ages had received from the Greeks, and they, in turn, from the Egyptians. The alchemists believed that minerals possessed a real life of their own and that they were continually developing in the ground toward the state of gold, the perfect metal. It was necessary, therefore, to discover the "philosopher's stone," which would turn all metals into gold. The alchemists ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Reinfred' to me is considerable, from the sketches which it contains of particular men and women, most of whom I knew and could, if necessary, identify. The story, too, is taken generally from real life, and perhaps Carlyle did not finish it, from the sense that it could not be published while the persons and things could be recognized. That objection to the publication no longer exists. Everybody is dead whose likenesses have ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland |
