"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religions differ fundamentally in their different ways of looking at the world. To the Indian religions, the existence of the world is an evil; the world is itself a kingdom of illusions. "All in it is transient [p.176] and unreal; nothing in it has duration; happiness and love are merely momentary, and men are as two pieces of wood floating on the face of an infinite ocean which pass by one another, never to meet again. Fruitless agitation and ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... my Guide and looked at me unveiled, And I beheld no face of matron stern, But that enchantment I had followed erst, Only more fair, more clear to eye and brain, Heightened and chastened by a household charm; She smiled, and 'Which is fairer,' said her eyes, 'The hag's unreal Florimel ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was not Joanne's voice. It was unreal, terrible, and her eyes were terrible as they looked steadily into his. Aldous could not answer; something had thickened in his throat, and his blood ran cold as he stared into Joanne's dead-white face and saw the understanding in her eyes. For a space he ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... his ambitions seemed as far as ever from realization. Yet the ambitious mind lacks not fuel for its fires; the youth's imagination peopled the woody solitudes with braver company than courts could boast—vivid, unreal dream-people, whose shadowy presence increased his longing for the actuality. The very winds whispered mysteriously of coming triumphs, and as he listened his unrest grew greater. At length there came a time when dreams no longer ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples seemed to come very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first read in the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well have seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were once living men like his father and neighbours, and not mere nominatives governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument. Now it became ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... from inability to attain the knowledge of Brahman and from their connection with earthly enjoyments, are obliged to sojourn in a cycle of re-births, up and down and around. The natural inclination of man towards pursuits that are unreal is alone the cause of the senses being led to error. The soul that is constantly affected by the pursuit of objects that are unreal, remembering only that with which it is always engaged, adoreth only earthly ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he had drilled along the German roads, he had made some feeble protest. But then war seemed so unreal and so far away; now the horror of it was in ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... past adventures, the unreal wonder of their present situation, the bewildering possibilities and impossibilities of their future plans—all these conspired to banish sleep until long past midnight. It was not until, speeding due north with the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... at this wild and reckless pace I do not know, but little by little I became aware that the rain had ceased, the clouds were rent asunder and the moon looked down, pale and remote, upon a desolate countryside very ghostly and unreal and wholly unfamiliar. Before me was a winding road fringed with dripping, sombre trees and reining Wildfire to a standstill, I found that the wind had greatly abated its fury. But though the storm was over, the storm within me raged fierce as ever; therefore, heedless of where the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of all with Janet. He felt as if he were in a strange, unreal dream. It was all at once so like and so unlike what he had expected to find it. All these quiet, demure-looking young strangers, instead of the jolly, familiar children he had left nine years ago—and, as he realised ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... of delirium . . . she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... A strange, unreal hope, an illusion of her tortured mind, even now sometimes visited her. It was certain that Egremont knew where she lived; it might be that even yet he would come. Perhaps Miss Newthorpe would not ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... had always a memory as confused and unreal as that of a dream in which logical events go mad. Through many faces, which at the moment seemed to be floating against black and leering at her, she had the sense of moving without the action of her muscles.... She saw the lion-like mane of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... frightened rabbit, perfectly regardless of what Lady Turnour might think, caring only to dart away without being caught by the man I'd done such wild deeds to escape. But I was as helpless as a person in a nightmare; and, indeed, it was as unreal and dreadful to me as a nightmare to see that fat, fur-coated figure walking toward me, with the bearded face of Monsieur Charretier showing between turned-up collar and motor-cap ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... interpreted by a woman, a poet and a genius. It differs from Comte's as the work of a poet differs from that of a philosopher, as that of a woman differs from that of a man. His positive religion gives the impression of being invented; it is artificial, unreal. Hers is, at least, living and beautiful and impressive; it is warm, tender and full of compassion, He invents a new symbolism, a new hierarchy, and a new worship; that is, he remodels Catholicism to fit the Religion of Humanity. She is too sensible, too wise, or rather too poetic and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... overtaking Mr. Grimm. Once he caught himself nodding and raised his head with a jerk. Then he noticed that the arc lights in the street were wobbling curiously, and he fell to wondering why that single flame sparkled at the apex of the capitol dome. Things around him grew hazy, vague, unreal, and then, as if realizing that something was the matter with him, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... in order to make him laugh; and laugh he did, he must laugh; it would never do to let those fellows know what was passing in his mind; so he laughed loud as any of them, but what a laugh!—how empty and hollow, how joyless and unreal, how unlike his former bursts of feeling!—a got-up laugh, which shewed plainer than ever something was wrong. Abe knew it, and he felt it was of no use trying any longer to keep up a sham happiness, and all the time be in torments ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... carefully tended, pretty, all a-blowing and a-growing; but unreal. The palm trees are unhomely, the tropical plants seem to stand behind footlights. Restore them to their homes, or give me back Lake Leman, ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... ministry waited ready for her. Later, she lay again in the balcony chair, not so soothed by her little pile of books as she had looked to be. Beautiful, pellucid thought, deep-flowing philosophies, knife-edged epigrams and measured verse lay to her hand, but they seemed unreal, somehow, and their music echoed like meaningless words shouted, for the echo merely, in empty halls. She drowsed discontentedly and woke from a dream of the grey lady to see her stretched in the companion chair, herself asleep, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... in every war." He saw in 1911 as clearly as Lloyd George did in 1921 (as witness the latter's statement to the House of Commons in that year on the Irish treaty) that the policy of consultation gave the Dominions a shadowy and unreal power; but imposed upon them a responsibility, serious and inescapable. He thus felt himself obliged to discourage the procedure suggested by Premier Fisher of Australia, even though, to the superficial observer, this involved him in the contradiction of, at the same time, exalting ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... humility. If the intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environment, how should it not reveal to us something of the very essence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create it—as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination cuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... curiously stunned sort of way she reached the street, and for a few blocks walked along scarcely conscious of the direction she was taking. Her mind was in turmoil. The night seemed to have been one of harrowing hallucination; it seemed as though it were utterly unreal, like one dreaming that one is dreaming. And then, suddenly, she looked at her watch, and the straight little shoulders squared resolutely back. The hallucination, if she chose to call it that, was not yet over! It was twenty minutes ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... vivid colours, and with the unconscious heightening of effect that comes natural to one who looks back upon a happy past, from which the countless pricks and stings that make up reality have faded, leaving in their place a sense of dreamy, unreal brightness, like that of sunset upon distant hills. He told him of Germany, and the gay, careless years he had spent there, working at his art, years of inspiriting, untrammelled progress; told him of famous musicians he had seen and known, of great theatre performances at which he had assisted, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... identity is lost. Here I live, in my real appearance, under a false name. But I have a house elsewhere, in which I dwell disguised, but under my real name, and with an unreal character. Here I am a serious, plotting conspirator; there I am a dissipated, reckless, foolish spendthrift, of whom no man need be afraid. It chanced that after certain events had occurred, of which ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden-woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... pond: they would drink in the warm air and the music of the goat-bells, borne on the gusty wind, and the smell of the new-mown hay and the warm resin. And they would dream together of the past and the future, and the present which seemed to them to be the most unreal and intoxicating of dreams. Sometimes Antoinette would be infected with her brother's jolly childlike humor: they would chase each other and roll about on the grass. And one day he saw her laughing as she used to do when they were children, madly, carelessly, laughter clear and bubbling as ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... unreal city, doesn't help me any! Forgive this, I'm afraid morbid, letter, and believe me affectionately always—write me ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... as though I were walking in a dream, so unreal did the whole business seem to me by this time. I was in a moonlight glamour; the influence of the silver orb was upon me. Of self-volition I seemed to have little or none left. I was given over to unseen powers, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... Play is the introduction of a new type of character, unhuman, unreal, a mere embodied quality. In Scene 9, where Mary is handed over by her parents to the care of the High Priest at the Temple, she finds provided for her as companions the five maidens, Meditation, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... angels are called appearances; those things are called appearances, because, corresponding to the interiors of spirits and of angels, they vary according to the states of those interiors. There are real appearances and appearances unreal; the unreal appearances are those which do not correspond to the ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... not easily and rapidly bend to such treatment. It is his inability to discover the true mode of investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, assumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... years unseason'd, I attun'd the lay To idle Passion and unreal Woe? Yet serious Truth her empire o'er my song Hath now asserted; Falsehood's evil brood, Vice and deceitful Pleasure, she at once Excluded, and my Fancy's careless toil Drew to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Cleopatra's auburn waves had turned to a vivid magenta: Biddy's black tresses had a blue, grapey bloom on them: and Anthony's dark eyes were a sinister green, with red lights. Ghostly, mother o' pearl faces with opal shadows, peered through the violet glass at an unreal landscape, which would instantly cease to exist if the windows were opened. But the windows could not be opened, or a rain of sand would pour in; so we gazed out on an impossible fairy land consisting of golden sea, with mountainous ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... calamity should take place. All the possibilities of deliverance are sought after in such a disposition of mind, and are, by imagination, easily changed into probabilities and realities, because just that is wanting which proves them to be improbable and unreal, viz., the consciousness of a living, omnipotent God. Thus men free themselves from fear, and with it, from the troublesome obligation of escaping from it in another and a legitimate way, viz., by true conversion. Now, it is this levity which the prophet opposes. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... consulted on this theme since our last interview, and now declare it to be the work or nature of the imagination. It is a scientific truth, as you will readily admit, that imagination can and does get up some singular and unreal forms. We now assume that the idea of a God is but the thought of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... and going toward her on a beautiful morning, the anger and bitterness of Monday fled away, became unreal, and the sweet dream of the Sunday parting grew the reality. She was waiting for him now. She had on her pretty blue dress and the wide hat that always made her look so arch. He ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of the discussions and decisions of the Roman senate. Before the first consulship of Julius Caesar (59 B.C.), minutes of the proceedings of the senate were written and occasionally published, but unofficially; Caesar, desiring to tear away the veil of mystery which gave an unreal importance to the senate's deliberations, first ordered them to be recorded and issued authoritatively. The keeping of them was continued by Augustus, but their publication was forbidden (Suetonius, Augustus, 36). A young senator (ab actis senatus) was chosen ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... always unseen; spiritual things are often apparently unreal. God cannot be reduced to figures nor to material elements. This hand that works with ours may mean one thing to one and another to another. What we all need is to simply grasp the great fact of the spiritual forces that strengthen every good resolve, that give ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... my St. Julian, that I am busy to torment myself, that I invent a thousand imaginary misfortunes. And is this to torment myself to address my friend in these poor lines? Is this to deceive myself with unreal evils? Even while Matilda cherishes the fond idea of pouring out her complaints before him, my St. Julian may be a lifeless corse. Perhaps he now lies neglected and unburied in the beds of the ocean. Perhaps ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... present state for the worst of her days then! How she wished that she had died with mamma, or, living, had not taken it as her duty to avenge those wrongs which the saints allowed! Oh, what a tangled dream it all was! she so hideously guilty in fact, and yet that thought of hers, if unreal and insane, that had not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... with the blind, bewildered vagabond who seemed to answer to the same name. Yes, he would find Torpenhow, and come as near to the old life as might be. Afterwards he would forget everything: Bessie, who had wrecked the Melancolia and so nearly wrecked his life; Beeton, who lived in a strange unreal city full of tin-tacks and gas-plugs and matters that no men needed; that irrational being who had offered him love and loyalty for nothing, but had not signed her name; and most of all Maisie, who, from her own point of view, was undeniably right in all she did, but oh, at this distance, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... last, she only smiled again, doubtfully. "You are wonderful in your enthusiasm, John dear," she said, "and I love you for it. I think I understand you now, and for yourself it is right, of course, but for me—it is all so visionary—so unreal." ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... ghosts they seemed to be. Now I could understand why the lady took so little notice of me. I, and all these people, were like wreaths of mist to her. I turned towards her. She was looking out with the same calm eyes. It was all unreal to her, but she was very real to me, very beautiful. I wished she were not. I wished she were not in the carriage; that it would stop; that I could get out, and run, dancing and shouting, through the fields. I broke the silence. ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... none too easy, and it was only the thought that it was a labour of love, or something very like it, that enabled him to persevere. Even then for the first few minutes he thought it might prove love's labour's lost, so bright and unreal was Lucia. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... basin, the wicket in the door, and all that is fragile in my cell flies to pieces, and, with the broken glass from the window, covers the floor. In spite of the feverish haste with which I accomplish this sad task, my heart is not in the work. All this is so unexpected, so unreal, so violent, that it bewilders me. But through the bewilderment the questions, "Is it possible? And why?" continue to force their way. Then I say to myself, "If this man, this soldier, has really killed Ivanoff, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... not a thing to be run at too hastily. It may be easily possible to delay this national general reconciliation of mankind by an unreal effusion. There will be no advantage in forcing the feelings of the late combatants. It is ridiculous to suppose that for the next decade or so, whatever happens, any Frenchmen are going to feel genial about the occupation of their north-east ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... once, when the house consisted of only two or three rooms? and was that a picture of her mother, left there she knew not how or why? These were the thoughts crowding each other so fast in her brain when the faintness and pallor crept over her and the objects about her began to seem unreal. But the cold water revived her, and she was soon herself again, listening while Marian talked of heat and sun-strokes, with an evident forgetfulness of the peasant girl knitting in the sunshine; but Jerrie ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... concealed identity are there in the poem? Does this turning of the plot on mistaken identity make it seem unreal? Show in each case where the identity is exposed and where hints have been given ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... (1772-1801), by his unsullied character, his early death, and the mystic tone of his productions, was long regarded with an enthusiasm which has now greatly declined. His romance, "Henry von Ofterdingen," contains elements of beauty, but it deals too exclusively with the shadowy, the distant, and the unreal. His "Aphorisms" are sometimes deep and original, but often ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... cherished secrets, With a calm and godlike air, Luring all their radiance from them Leaving a dim twilight there, Something vague, and half unreal, Like ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that, more than anything, tend to wean the man of genius from actual life, and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at length, the heart becoming ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... whistle, tolled no bell. Even the passenger coaches in the rear of the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. It was as unreal as the black swamp, as the moss on the dead trees, as the ghostly tug-boat tied to ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... left the house, the return to the world was quick. It was like coming out from the matinee and seeing the crowds on the street. They, not the matinee, were unreal for the moment. But, strange to say, I found one felt no depression as a result ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... she passed. He half rose, half spoke. She went down the steps leading from the veranda to the court-yard, down this walk to the pier, down the pier to the very end, where the little roofed shelter lay out in the ocean, bathed in moonlight, fairylike, unreal. The ocean was a thing of molten silver. The sound of the wailing voices in song came to her on the breeze, agonizing in its beauty. There, beyond, lay Pearl Harbour. From the other side, faintly, you heard the music and laughter from ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... It is inadequate for decency; it lacks that truthfulness which is, and should be, the base of all that is attractive and beautiful; and in its symbolism it is in the highest degree objectionable, for it not only aims at what is unreal and false, but it simulates that which is positively hateful and meretricious, so that it is difficult now for even a practised eye to distinguish the high-born maiden or matron of Belgravia from the Anonymas who haunt the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... volubility. He revenges himself, however, in her absence: he abuses her with such a variety of comic invective, and pours forth his pent-up wrath with such a ludicrous extravagance and exaggeration, that he betrays at once how deep is his mortification, and how unreal his enmity. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Mildred's life; her dreaming lay in some far-distant region, All the fairer, all the brighter, that its glories were but guessed; And the daily round of duties seemed an unreal, airy legion— Nothing true save Philip's letters and the ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... fell upon a loose sheet of note-paper covered with Alves's unfamiliar writing. He took it up and read it, and then looked around him to see her, to find her there in the next room. The letter was so unreal! ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the Reformation Acts, they had disposed of the question for ever. It was, indeed, time for a statesman to step in, and protest, if only in the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow and unreal an abuse of law-texts—documents of the highest importance in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... I confess that my drawing was blurred for a moment—the picture swam. They had accepted their failure, but they couldn't accept their fate. They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn't want to starve. If my servants were my models, then my models might be my servants. They would reverse the parts—the others would sit for the ladies and gentlemen and THEY would do the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... sighed Maria, and, tossing her hat upon the sofa, pressed her fingers on her temples. With the firelight thrown full on the ivory pallor of her face, the effect she produced was almost unreal in its intensity of black and white—an absence of colour which had in it all the warmth and the animation we are used to associate with brilliant hues. A peculiar mellowness of temperament, the expression of a passionate nature confirmed in sympathy, shone in the softened fervour of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... very grateful to her innate sense of refinement, all dressed after one fashion, and talked mostly about the same things. To her, ungifted with the blessed faculty of small talk, the conversation appeared somewhat frivolous, unreal, and uninteresting. She hardly knew what to say or how to say it, yet was painfully conscious that her every word and every look were being sharply criticised, either in the character of Edward Oakley's daughter or ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... remembered her; in very truth he knew he had loved her; in very truth he knew he had murdered her! But another still stranger truth was forcing itself upon him now; and this was, that the old love of the old old days was arising within him in all its strength once more, and that he loved her still! Unreal and terrible as it seemed, it was nevertheless a fact, that as he gazed upon her tortured face, her beautiful anguished eyes, her phantom form, he felt that he would give his own soul to rescue hers and lift her from the coils of vengeance into love again! ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may be still another state of it. But all these theories of physical science are justified by their fruits. The atomic theory of matter, and the kinetic theory of gases, are mathematically demonstrated. However unreal and fantastic they may appear to our practical faculties, conversant only with ponderable bodies, they bear the test of the most rigid and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Now we understand why the patient in an acute alcoholic hallucinosis almost invariably hears voices making homosexual accusations. The unreality complex is translated into sexual terms and he is accused of unreal love. I have been struck in dream analysis by the almost constant coincidence in dreams of Mutterleib symbols in the same dream that on analysis proved to be homosexual in principle. I can quote one ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Robert? Is it really you, or am I—" she murmured, scarcely above a whisper. Once more she closed her eyes, tightly; as if to shut out the vision of a ghost,—an unreal thing that would not be there when ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Wordsworth saying that, at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its existence by clasping a tree, or something that happened to be near him. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... who came in and out of the house in Eaton Square the figure sitting at the desk writing letters or taking orders from the Duchess was that of the unconsidered and unreal girl. Among the changing groups of women with intensely absorbed and often strained faces the kind-hearted observing ones were given to noticing Robin and speaking to her almost affectionately because she was so attractive an object as well as so industriously faithful ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... very beginning, have been something unreal and uncanny in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, crammed with properties of dead Stuarts and Sobieskis, with its royal throne and dais in the ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of England, must have been full of rather lugubrious memories. Here James III. of England ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the time I've been here. Do you think I didn't see it was unreal, when you talked with such cynical indifference? I know you well enough to tell when you're hiding your real ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... so very still that every rock in the cliffs around it was faithfully portrayed. High overhead rose one of the more elevated peaks of the Andes, which, being clothed in pure snow, looked airy—almost unreal—against the blue sky. The highest peak of the Andes (Chimborazo) is more than 21,000 feet above the sea. The one before them was probably a few hundred feet lower. Of living creatures, besides themselves, only one species was to be seen—the gigantic "condor"—the royal ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... not only that novel-reading engenders false and unreal ideas of life, but the descriptions of love-scenes, of thrilling, romantic episodes, find an echo in the girl's physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex, which she recognizes only as a pleasurable mental emotion, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... disciples to abide with them for ever. But now, what do we mean when we speak of the gift of the Holy Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is it that He does for us? Many of us, I think, must have felt how extremely unreal, and therefore unsatisfying, the discussions of this great subject often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find a place among the proved realities of our Christian experience. It remains, so to speak, outside of us, a foreign substance which life has ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... I must at length have become light-headed, for gradually a feeling stole over me that everything—my surroundings, my situation, and my suffering—was unreal; that I was the victim of a peculiarly ghastly and horrible nightmare; and that I should by and by be wakened fortunately to find that I was in my own bunk, and that the events of the past twenty-four ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... age was a profoundly religious country. There was ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but there was faith—a faith that itself worked true miracles, even while it believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those devotional movements began among the clergy in France, which from time to time occur in national churches, without it being possible for the historian to assign any adequate human cause for their immediate date or extension. Numberless friars and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they were unreal became the object and the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... demanded. Various apprehensions were competing for attention in her brain. The episode of Mr. Cowl had agitated her considerably. And now she was standing right against the column bearing Musa's name in those large letters, and other columns up and down the gay, busy street echoed clear the name. And how unreal it was!... Tickets being given away in half-dozens!... She ought to have been profoundly disturbed by such a revelation, and she was. But here was the drive with Mr. Gilman insisting on a monopoly of all her faculties. And on the top of everything—Tommy ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate remark the Colonel's tongue leaped as ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... windows are composed of oiled paper, fastened to neat frames with a glue which water cannot melt. The panels which divide the chambers are ornamented with paintings of various animals—tortoises, cranes, butterflies, and wonderfully unreal monsters. Mats, about half an inch thick, cover the floors. In the centre is a square place for a wood fire, when a brazero is not used. No chairs or tables are employed in ordinary houses, as the inhabitants sit on the mats round ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... rattled noisily over the cobbles, some of the shops were taking down their shutters, the surface cars were beginning to run with increasing frequency, and the sidewalks were becoming sparsely populated. Familiar as the sights were, they were yet somehow strangely unreal to the young man. In a night the face of the world had changed for him; its features loomed weirdly blurred and contorted through the mystical grey-gold atmosphere of the land of Romance, wherein he really lived and moved and had his being. The blatant day was altogether ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... vital interest. A hike must be "hiked" to be real, the "grub" must be munched by the side of a stream, and the wild things venturing out for crumbs must be "seen to be appreciated," as the "ad" says; so that it would seem unreal to attempt to put into words the glories of a day in the ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... different," he thought. "Refreshingly different." But he sighed as he handed the papers to the clerk. The whole case seemed a hopeless tangle. And now that she was gone Felicia herself seemed absolutely unreal. He rubbed his eyes and plunged into the ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... should have taken place in the mystery of Christ, which would make His body to seem unreal. Now it seems to pertain not to a true but to an unreal body, to be able to go through a closed passage; since two bodies cannot be in one place at the same time. It was therefore unfitting that Christ's body should come forth from His Mother's closed womb: and consequently that she should ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... told you only the truth. The imagination is very strong, and may easily give the semblance of reality to unreal things." ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Beanstalk world, this Santa Claus world, this world in which anything may happen, and must begin to doubt, begin to question, begin to test things, to prove things, find out what is real and what is unreal, what is true and what is untrue, must measure itself against the realities of things, learn to recognize the real forces and the laws according to which they operate, so as to deal with them, obey them, make them serve him, enable ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... aged. Something uncertain and vaguely sweet. Just think of it—half a century, more than one generation, had passed since these two had met. Their old love story must have seemed to them something all unreal, something they had but read long ago ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... many-levelled experiences—I believe we have the way of approach to which religion to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which—agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense—makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is already a marked character ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Sylvia Bailey's social circle had become much larger, and there were a number of people who enjoyed inviting and meeting the pretty, wealthy young widow. But just now all these friends of hers in far-away England seemed quite unreal ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... scythe of Time, to reap the harvest of the world; while incarnated man, as represented in the wrestling youths, is struggling for that which he did not produce, and which only death can reap. The poppy reveals the secret of the illusions of Nature's master-showman. All earthly things are unreal to the spirit, which is the only real thing. Man's effort to hoard and save the things of this world IS INJUSTICE TO OTHERS. The struggle is eternal, and no matter how careful or cunning man is to monopolize ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... architecture looming up, the regiment of liveried men-servants, with respectfully lowered but excitedly curious eyes, the dark and solemn richness inclosing and claiming him—all this created an atmosphere wholly unreal. As he had not known books, its parallel had not been suggested to him by literature. He had literally not heard that such things existed. Selling newspapers and giving every moment to the struggle for life or living, one did not come within the range of splendors. He had ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... building the interoceanic canal can not be held up to gratify the whims, or out of respect to the governmental impotence, or to the even more sinister and evil political peculiarities, of people who, though they dwell afar off, yet, against the wish of the actual dwellers on the Isthmus, assert an unreal supremacy over the territory. The possession of a territory fraught with such peculiar capacities as the Isthmus in question carries with it obligations to mankind. The course of events has shown that this canal can not be built by private enterprise, or by any other nation than our own; therefore ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Toby at this time that a veil hung about him which, dim and unreal in itself, served to make all things dim and unreal. He did not know whether he was asleep or awake, so strange was life, so vivid were his dreams. Mummie, Uncle John, the baby, Toby himself came with a flicker of the veil and disappeared vaguely without ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... the point of falling asleep again. She got up and opened the window, and once more the air acted as a restorative. She watched the activities of the street with a distant interest. They, too, seemed dreamlike and unreal. People were hurrying up and down on mysterious errands. An inscrutable cat picked its way daintily across the road. At the door of the apartment house ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... I should apologize for criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But le vin est verse, il faut le boire, and I must cite a couple more instances before ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... which no one but himself could solve. He was only half conscious of his surroundings; he was moving in a kind of detached world of his own, where the warders and the Sheriff and those who followed were almost abstract and unreal figures. He was living with a past which had been everlasting distant, and had now become a vivid and buffeting present. He returned no answers to the questions addressed to him, and would not talk, save when for a little while they dismounted from their horses, and sat ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she was conscious that she was offering something unreal to extenuate the fault of her brother—her hopes ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... The National Volunteers were to become the objects of derision and contempt, which would extend to himself. By keeping the Volunteers out of active participation in war service, it could be proved that Redmond did not speak for Ireland or represent Ireland; that the Irish were raising unreal objections so as to keep an excuse for avoiding danger. It was urged on him that he should press for the extension of the Territorial Act to Ireland and endeavour to bring his ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... fantastic shapes exhibited Nature in her most sublime and striking attitudes. Here her vast magnificence elevated the mind of the beholder to enthusiasm. Fancy caught the thrilling sensation, and at her touch the towering steeps became shaded with unreal glooms; the caves more darkly frowned—the projecting cliffs assumed a more terrific aspect, and the wild overhanging shrubs waved to the gale in deeper murmurs. The scene inspired madame with reverential awe, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... threw themselves into the first shade. Fred closed his eyes. He had a sense that he was dreaming—that all the scenes that he had witnessed these many days were unreal. Presently he would wake up to the old familiar ring of his alarm clock, and gradually all the outlines of his bedroom would shape themselves to his recovered senses... There would stand Helen by her dressing table, stooping down to the mirror's level as she popped ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... one of the most unhealthy parts of the country killed my old horse "Jack," one coolie, and very nearly extinguished me rendering it imperative that I should seek a change of climate in England. And what a dream-like change it is!—past events appear unreal, and the last few years seem to have escaped from the connecting chain of former life. Scarcely can I believe in the bygone days of glorious freedom, when I wandered through that beautiful country, unfettered by the laws or customs of ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Birkin, who looked muted, unreal, his presence left out, introduced her as Miss Darrington. She gave her hand with a sudden, unwilling movement, looking all the while at Gerald with a dark, exposed stare. A glow came over him as he ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble: or be alive again, And dare me to the desert with thy sword; If trembling I inhabit then, protest me The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence! ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... achievement. And here again we must reassert the significance of Lyly's appeal to women. "That noble faculty," as Macaulay expresses it, "whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future in the distant and in the unreal," is rarely found in the opposite sex. They delight in novelty, their minds are of a practical cast, and their interests almost invariably lie in the present. The names of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Mrs Humphry Ward are sufficient to show how entirely successful ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... limitations, which are continually breaking in upon the perfection and completeness of the idea, destroy the illusion in the story and throw an air of suspicion even on what is good in the idea, which hence appears fictitious and unreal. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... to the other, and this had been a mystery to us all our young lives, as far as we had ever reflected on the contrast between the practical failure and success of each. Our mother, on the other hand, viewed Clarence's tendencies as part of an unreal, self-deceptive nature, and regretted his intimacy with Miss Newton, who, she said, had fostered 'that kind of thing' in his childhood—made him fancy talk, feeling, and preaching were more than truth and honour—and might lead him to run after Irving, Rowland Hill, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... real anxiety gnawed at his vitals. He had been in many tight places; but somehow heretofore success or failure had seemed to him about immaterial, like points gained or conceded in the game; a fresh start was always so easy, and what had been already won as yet unreal. Now the game itself was at issue. Property, reputation, and the family's future were at stake. When the three had lived in the tiny house by the church, it had seemed that no adversity could touch them. But now that long use had accustomed ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... trilogy The Road to Damascus presents many mysteries to the uninitiated. Its peculiar changes of mood, its gallery of half unreal characters, its bizarre episodes combine to make it a bewilderingly rich but rather 'difficult' work. It cannot be recommended to the lover of light drama or the seeker of momentary distraction. The Road to Damascus does not deal with the superficial strata of human life, but ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... also the German transcendentalists, so strangely devised and became enamored of,—the grotesque views of men and things, the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the learned thought of the Middle Ages,—the Buddhistic Orient, with its subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion,—such are instances of great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to each other on the supposition of mutual sanity. They suggest a difference of ideas, moods, habits, and capacities, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... dream was not all a dream. And then she mused on as she was wont to do, and, after relating to us the incident, she said, "May it not be that much of our life that we have thought passed in dreamland, and therefore among unreal things, has been spent with actual existences? For what is an 'unreal thing'? It would not be a 'thing' had it no existence; and what is the 'it' that we speak of? Can we not then conclude that there is nothing but ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... and put her little home in order. Presently, the local expressman arrived with her baggage and was followed by sundry youths bearing sundry provisions; at twelve-thirty, when she and young Don sat down to the luncheon she had prepared, her flight to New York and return appeared singularly unreal, like the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. And presently the empty trains would depart, reversing the process of their arrival, and vanishing gradually along a line which appeared at last to turn up into the air and run at a tangent into an unreal world. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... it was still dark. But there was a light in his room—some one had come in with a candle. It was Elsa. He rubbed his eyes and looked at her with a strange unreal feeling, as if he were still dreaming. And when he saw her face, the unreal feeling did not go away. She seemed so unlike herself, in her long white dressing-gown, the light of the candle she was holding making her look so pale, and her eyes so strained and anxious—was it the candle, or was ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... prompted to that course by a disposition to shrink from ordinary dangers. His motives were certainly pure, and his subsequent exertions to rally his men and bring them to face the foe, were as great as could have been made by any one; but disheartened by the fear of unreal danger, and in the trepidation of a flight, deemed to be absolutely necessary for their safety, they could not be readily brought to bear the brunt of battle. The efforts of a few cool and collected individuals, drove back the pursuers, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Pamela, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether—a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In Pamela itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is wholly unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way. In Joseph Andrews, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious artifice. These are all real people who do real ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... to the hotel seemed unreal; the lights in the cafe, the noise and movement, the pretty face of his aunt with the pink reflection from the candle shades on her cheeks—all seemed as unconvincing as himself and this thing that he could not grasp—could not understand—could not ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... is coming forward to arrest the progress of national education with her strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church—the Church of the Disruption—should be also coming forward with a caveat which at least seems scarce less equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall—huge, monstrous, unreal—both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... escape seemed at first fantastic and unreal, but it has come to seem to me the only practical way out of my difficulty. In no other way can I leave the parish without giving pain to the poor people, who have been very good to me. And you, who appreciated my scruples on this point, will, I am sure, understand ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here he was still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to him; but when he reached out to them they were gone—the real and the unreal, the dead and the living—and even She disappeared whenever he tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... circlet from her brow and cast it from her, and, thereafter, laid by her rings and jewels, and coming to the open casement fell there upon her knees and reached forth her pale hands to where, across the valley, the dark forest stretched away, ghostly and unreal, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... A moment later she stood on the front porch, looking at them all. This scene seemed unreal to her—the cowboys at a distance, Masten and Chavis in the rear, looking on, Pickett near the edge of the porch, his face bloated with impotent rage, his eyes glaring; the grim figure that Randerson made as he stood near Pickett, ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... capable of fixity and finality. Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... been so strong and the reaction was so great that he dropped to a sitting posture on the heap of bedding and laughed long and weakly, and still with a feeling in his heart that this apparition was something strangely unreal and menacing. ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like flight of the pure child-mind to whom the unreal is yet the real. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... apartment suddenly flew aside. The astonished lover beheld his mistress:—not the unreal phantom he had imagined, but a being substantial in quality, and of a nature like his own, though gentler than ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... I will," replied Marescotti, speaking rapidly, his glowing eyes raising themselves from her face to look out over the distance; "but, in mercy, grant me a few moments to collect myself. Remember I am a poet; imagination is my world; the unreal my home; the Muses my sisters. I live there above, in the golden clouds"—and he turned and pointed to a crest of glittering vapor sailing across the intense blue of the sky. Then, with his hand pressed on his brow, he began to pace rapidly up ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him. Again it was a quiet evening, and still the valley stretched below; nothing changed here made all the changes of her life seem half unreal. Here she told him he must live, he must be docile ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... dull roar that beat against their ears and filled the air with a continuous tremor. Sometimes the roar rose in volume when a new battery came into action. For a few minutes Paul and Arthur were absorbed. They listened, spellbound, to the roar of the guns. There was something unreal about it. It did not seem possible that those guns were being fired to kill and destroy, for, as they looked out, everything was peaceful still. Save when their eyes fell upon the Uhlan, mounted on his horse. He sat in his saddle, ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... ear &c. (mismanage) 699; put the saddle on the wrong horse; reckon without one's host; take the shadow for the substance &c (credulity) 486; dream &c (imagine) 515. Adj. erroneous, untrue, false, devoid of truth, fallacious, apocryphal, unreal, ungrounded, groundless; unsubstantial &c. 4; heretical &c. (heterodox) 984; unsound; illogical &c. 477. inexact, unexact inaccurate[obs3], incorrect; indefinite &c. (uncertain) 475. illusive, illusory; delusive; mock, ideal &c (imaginary) 515; spurious ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... nearer madness in those days than now, for when he threw himself here—" She rose and pointed to the floor near the table—"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his love, to be his wife—I, his wife!—it was as strange, as unreal as a vision.—I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... finished. The great actor Garrick well illustrated it when asked by an unsuccessful preacher the secret of his power over audiences: "You speak of eternal verities and what you know to be true as if you hardly believed what you were saying yourself, whereas I utter what I know to be unreal and untrue as if I did believe it ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... again avoid alluding to Mr. Wehnert's illustrations to 'Grimm.' They are instinct with the most vital spirit of German legendary romance—remote, unreal, grotesque, and suggestive; with strange bits of landscape and beautiful human faces (those of the children remarkably so), and with a singular absence of strong contrast of light and shade, as though the sun which shone upon ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... fury of the wind that had seized upon them and was dragging them at headlong speed athwart the arch of heaven. The air, too, was full of spindrift, to perhaps double the height of the felucca's mast, and that too was luminous with a faint, green, misty light that imparted a weird, unreal aspect to everything it shone upon; an effect which was further heightened by the unearthly screaming and howling ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... I am in a hurry," was Cousin Jasper's unexpected permission, so that Oliver, nothing loath, let out the car to its full speed. It was very dark, for the moon had gone under a cloud. The road, showing vaguely white through the blackness, was nearly empty and the tree trunks flashed by, looking unreal in the glare of the lamps, like the cardboard trees of a scene on the stage. The big car hummed and the wind sang in Oliver's ears, but for only the briefest moment, for they seemed to come immediately ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... because I know that it is so. We come to strange conclusions out yonder, where only death seems to be true and all the rest a dream. What we call the real and the unreal get mixed." ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... through the darkness, and the dark forms, outlined in their glimmering beams, seemed like beings of an unreal world; the bearers of the body, with their unconscious burden, appeared like a mournful procession of medieval times, when in the solemn hours of the night the bodies of the dead were borne ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... dawn-sprite as she waded ashore—a slender, unreal shape in the rosy glow, while behind her, from the dim ravine, ghosts of the mountain mist floated, rising like a company of slim, white angels drifting to ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... completed, was a revolt against the unscrupulous inventions of romance-writers, and was crammed full of archaeological lore. The story of Gaston de Blondeville is tedious, the characters are shadowy and unreal, and we become, as the Ettric Shepherd remarked, in Noctes Ambrosianae, "somewhat too hand and glove with his ghostship"; yet, regarded simply as a spectacular effect, it is not without indications of skill and power. Miss Mitford based ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of the mountains,—their dreamy, veiled appearance, with the morning sun full upon them; their deep violet blueness in the evening, with the sun behind them, and the mystery of the moonlight, which "sets them far off in a world of their own," as tender and unreal ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out, before the clock shall strike bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials, as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nay more, unreal. I recalled the sweet refined face turned up to me from the bare boards of this same floor, the accounts I had read of the vivacity of her spirits and the wild charm of her manner till the shadow of this old house fell upon her. I marveled, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... become warm, active and daring under an inspiring appeal. Remember, and have done with despair. Think how you and I found our path step by step of the way: political life was full of conventions that suited our fathers' time, but have faded in the light of our day. We found these conventions unreal and put them by. This was no reflection on our fathers; what they fought for truly is our heritage, and we pay them a tribute in offering it in turn our loyalty inspired by their devotion. But their errors we must rectify; ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... very good horses, we reached home easily the same evening. So near and yet so far! As I have said already in the third chapter, my grandfather's wife and children never even saw his brother's house, and during my own youth the place had seemed as distant and unreal as one of the old towers that I had read about in northern ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... contains a little less than two thousand words. It will be seen at once that unless handled in such fashion as to appeal vividly to the imagination, a story with this for its theme will seem weak and unreal. It must be made as suggestive as possible or it will fail. It preaches, but it must avoid the air of preaching. Consider carefully how you would present the stranger—whether first at the window or before—so as to affect the reader with a sense ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... merely idle or interested persons gathered for the sale. The sheriff stood facing them under the towering pillars of the portico; his voice rang clearly through the air. To Gordon the occasion, the loud sing-song of the sheriff, appeared unreal, dreamlike; he listened incredulously to the meager cataloguing of his dwelling, the scant acreage, with an innate sense of outrage, of a shameful violation of his privacy. He was still unable to realize that his home and his father's, the clearing that his grandfather had cut from the wild, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... again?—Heavens, do I wake? Why heave my sighs, why gush my tears anew? Unreal forms my trembling doubts mistake, And frantic sorrow ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... to avoid here any metaphysical obscurity. My assertion is, that the chief impulses of nations and peoples are abstract ideas and ideals, unreal and unrealizable; and that it is in pursuit of these that the great as well as the small movements on the arena of national life and on the stage of history ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of the lower garden, where a little bridge spanned a narrow piece of swamp. The view there was very restricted, yet very intimate and pleasing. We are so accustomed to confound art with nature that, often enough, phenomena of nature which are never to be met with in pictures seem to us unreal, and give us the impression that nature is unnatural, or vice versa; whereas phenomena of nature which occur with too much frequency in pictures seem to us hackneyed, and views which are to be met with in real life, but which appear to us too penetrated with a single idea or a single ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... allegorical story. Reality of substance is a thing on which epic poetry must always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell his stories very well, but even more because their substance (not, of course, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, The Faery Queene is outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegory requires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is more important, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is a long way from the solid ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... different states: first, as a pure, simple, abstract, and inert essence; secondly, as an active individuality. Nature in this system is only a special quality or quantity of Brahm, having no actual reality, and he who turns away from ail that is unreal and changeable and contemplates Brahm unceasingly, becomes one with it, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... In this unreal frame of mind, then, and as one but partly belonging to the world of things actual, Cairn found himself an invalid, who but yesterday had been a hale man; found himself shipped for Port Said; found himself ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... empty mug on the flat of the table in mock applause which was not all unreal, "what do you think of that for the first draft? It does justice to me and to you, chronicles little Charles' escape, kicks your Monsieur d'Argenton in passing, and takes off its hat to the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... wealthy, powerful body, trading upon a solecism, but not the less, therefore, devoted to its maintenance, and in their artificial horror of being identified with heresy, the most relentless persecutors of the Protestants. This party, unreal as they were, and influential perhaps in virtue of their unreality, became for the moment the arbiters of the Church of England; and the bishops belonging to it, and each rising ecclesiastic who hoped to be a bishop, welcomed the resistance of the annates as an opportunity for ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... foes, had watched, with bated breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... and moonlight, and were happy. The atmosphere seemed more human, less unreal. Going up stairs at last, I looked in at the nursery, and found my pet rather flushed, and I fancied that she stirred uneasily. It passed, whatever it was; for next morning she came in to wake me, looking, as usual, as if a new heaven and earth had been coined purposely for her since she went ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a romancer to inquire closely about the man who mended the boats, for she liked to think of him as an unreal being who only touched the earth off the tip of the Island, and only touched humanity through Worth. That wove something alluringly mysterious—and mysteriously alluring—about the man who made sick boats well, whereas had she given rein to the ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... upon Mrs. Cox in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs. If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. Cox to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no such landlady, no such woman could exist out of England But why not? My story, remember, deals with people and things as they were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago there were such Inns, though few at number, to be found in Western Canada—ay— and as English as any that a certain ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... eventually carried off by a mighty wind, and so translated to the skies. These divine honors were earned by his piety, wisdom, and justice as a ruler of men, and his name long shed a shimmering glory over those Hesperidean regions of the earth, where the real and unreal touched hands in the mystical twilight ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... sanity, and so obsessed with a sense of the unreal that his senses were benumbed, began to take off his collar; he could not feel the contact of his fingers with his neck in the act. Collarless, he entered the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... a sincerity was in her voice, that again chill touched me. The clammy dampness of my garments hung on my limbs as a reminder of the Thing, real or unreal, that twice had made Its presence felt beyond denial. Wild as her words might be, their incredible suggestion was matched by my experience. I sought with my eyes for her, before answering. The room was dark, yet the darker bulk of furniture loomed out enough to ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram |
