"Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on any man, whether he be the Governor in his chair of State, or the hunted outlaw wandering through the night, hungry and cold and with murder in his heart. We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects; of the symbolism which exalts our sex but is only a meaningless mockery. We demand that these shadows shall take substance. The coat of arms of the State of New York represents Liberty and Justice supporting a shield on which is seen the sun ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and love and the three of them discussed the little improvement with the intimacy of old friends. Several books, one of them still open at the page where Penelope had been reading, were on a table beside the window. Gordon took them up one by one and ran over their titles. "Ah, poetry—and fiction—and biography—how catholic your interests are, Penelope! But I knew that already. Sociology, too. Yes, I knew that is your favorite study. It is mine, too, but I haven't had as much time yet to ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... has sometimes happened that the sovereign for whom a regent was required to be appointed was incapable of performing any governmental act. In such a case, there has been resort usually to some legal fiction by which the appearance, at least, of regularity has been preserved. A regency act regularly defines the limits of the regent's powers and establishes specific safeguards in respect to the interests of both ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... popular notion of Eastern customs. We hear a great deal about Harems, and we fancy that every Persian must have dozens of wives, while there are people who seriously believe that the Shah has no less than one wife for each day of the year, or 365 in all! That is all very pretty fiction, but differs ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulae, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have reason to think I drew in the time more money from Punch, proportionately, than any other contributor in its history in a like period. I read from time to time accounts of the remuneration men like myself receive. Of course these statements are invariably fiction, as in fact is nearly everything I have read outside Mr. Spielmann's careful analysis of Punch concerning myself and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction might lead you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer decides ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read something to improve your mind; read about Alexander the Great, about Spurius Ahala, about Caius Gracchus, or, if you please, Tiberius.' But just such nonsense it is, when people ridicule reading romances in which the great event of the fiction is the real great event of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... fountain of her richest blessings, the source of her true consolation, and the ground of her brightest hope. It is, therefore, the book of home. She may have large and splendid libraries; history, poetry, philosophy, fiction, yea, all the works of classic Greece and Rome, may crowd upon her shelves; but of these she will soon grow wearied, and the dust of neglect will gather thick upon their gilded leaves; but of the bible the Christian ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... getting admission to Almack's, the seventh heaven of the fashionable world." The large ballroom was about 100 feet in length by 40 in width, and the largest number of persons present at one time was 1,700. It is often mentioned in the contemporary fiction dealing with fashionable society; indeed, the whole of this neighbourhood was the theatre for much of the gay life ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... myself in Capetown. Everybody goes out to South Africa from England on those Union Castle boats so familiar to all readers of English novels. Like the P. & O. vessels that Kipling wrote about in his Indian stories, they are among the favorite first aids to the makers of fiction. Hosts of heroes in books—and some in real life—sail each year to ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... remembered rather for the remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction car, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopaedic romance Polexandre, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Tenebreux of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that a woman's only place is at home. Then a married woman in most of our States could not control her own person, property or earnings; now in most of them these laws have been largely amended or repealed and it is only in regard to the ballot that the fiction of woman's perpetual minority is ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... am a plagiarist. To this I reply that I borrow facts from every accessible source, and am not a plagiarist. The plagiarist is one who borrows from a homogeneous work: for such a man borrows not ideas only, but their treatment. He who borrows only from heterogeneous works is not a plagiarist. All fiction, worth a button, is founded on facts; and it does not matter one straw whether the facts are taken from personal experience, hearsay, or printed books; only those books must not be ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... developed my powers of observation, but at that time I was a novice. The small card-room seemed undisturbed. I looked for footprints, which is, I believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has been that as clues both footprints and thumb-marks are more useful in fiction than in fact. But the stairs in ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which a thing is told Some truth abuse, while others fiction hold; In stories we invention may admit; But diff'rent 'tis with what historick writ; Posterity demands that truth should then Inspire relation, and direct ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... fact with fiction, and given us art for truth, then his character of Samuel Johnson is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has omitted the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and softly turning the case about and about as if he were petting something. "Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... commercial cut Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was paying for time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about the poor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of the firm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promoted to vice-president without any question of whether or not he could fill the job. Because, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... days, she had carried on the fiction that she was getting better. This was to break the news to him, and he on his part, to break the news to her, had pretended to believe the story. They made Elena help the little artifice, and even engaged the doctors in their ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... No fiction, it should again be recorded, is lent out save to members of Parliament, and those on the full-privilege list—a ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian for the Year 1924-25 • General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... chronicled acquired a tinge of romance and not a little of fiction, but the revelations concerning him were deemed sufficiently serious by Germany to produce a repudiation of him by the German embassy on direct instructions ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... fiction of the Duke of Wellington having been surprised on this great occasion has maintained its place in almost all narratives of the war for fifteen years. The Duke's magnanimous silence under such treatment for so long a period will be appreciated by posterity. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... hotel at Rochester. The amiable Morpheus soon claimed me as his own, nor was I well pleased when ruthlessly dragged from his soft embrace at 6-1/2 A.M. the following morning; but railways will not wait for Morpheus or any other deity of fancy or fiction; so, making the best use I could of a tub of water and a beefsteak, and calming my temper with a fragrant weed, I was soon ensconced in one of their cars, a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... our great historical novelist. When I first came to Reisenburg, now eight years ago, the popular writer of fiction was a man, the most probable of whose numerous romances was one in which the hero sold his shadow to a demon over the dice-box; then married an unknown woman in a churchyard; afterwards wedded a river nymph; and, having committed ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... of excruciating torments, prayed for His merciless tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition, in fact, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... lecture to heart, resigned, entered the field of literature, and, in a comparatively short time, became a noted writer of short stories. He blessed William at the time and ever afterwards for opening his eyes to the possibilities of the boy in fiction—and fact. ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in this new century.[1] Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer;[2] the narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculative inductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether in favour of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... best adapted to the use of their scholars, and keeping them in constant circulation among them. During the year two lists of books for the use of the children in the public schools were printed under the direction of the trustees. One of these lists contained works in juvenile fiction; the other, biographies, histories, and books of a more instructive character. All the works included were selected by the trustees as being such as they would put in the hands of their own children. The lists thus prepared were then given to the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Tale of Old Turley. Humorous fiction in this well-known author's happiest style. ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... a better book of its kind has been written in America....Its scenes of passion are intensely wrought, its incidents are striking and original, its sentiments audacious and suggestive at least, if not at all times tenable. In a word, it is that rare thing, a fiction of power ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... will no longer say that this famous axiom "No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law" is a fiction. Let ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... and modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from fiction. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... quarrels over it, began to bore me. It appeared that the huge tomes of the Talmud were not the only books he read these days. He spent much time, clandestinely, on little books written in the holy tongue on any but holy topics. They were taken up with such things as modern science, poetry, fiction, and, above all, criticism of our faith. He made some attempts to lure me into an interest in these books, but without avail. The only thing connected with them that appealed to me were the anecdotes that Naphtali would tell me, in his laconic way, concerning their authors. I scarcely ever listened ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the rights of man,—an abstract question, first mooted by Rousseau, and re-echoed by Jefferson. Mirabeau was appointed with a committee of five to draft the declaration,—in one sense, a puerile fiction, since men are not "born free," but in a state of dependence and weakness; nor "equal," either in regard to fortune, or talents, or virtue, or rank: but in another sense a great truth, so far as men are entitled by nature to equal privileges, and freedom of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... manner of Hawthorne's, and was astonished at the ease with which she filled its pages. Now that her interest was aroused she saw "material" everywhere. The high school had given her German and French, and having heard her father say that the French were the great masters of fiction, she addressed herself to Balzac and Hugo. The personalities of favorite contemporaneous writers interested her tremendously, and she sought old files of literary periodicals that she might inform herself as ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of the news, and every one alike had taken it at random, it was abandoned for the present and thought no more of, until, a few days after, certain intelligence came, and then the first was looked upon as no less than a miracle, having, under an appearance of fiction, contained what was real and true. It is reported, also, that the news of the battle fought in Italy, near the river Sagra, was conveyed into Peloponnesus the same day, and of that at Mycale against the Medes, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... write no fiction to prove this. What we are sure of, what has already been experimented upon, and recognized as practical, would suffice to carry it into effect, if the attempt were fertilized, vivified by the daring inspiration of the Revolution and the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... sheets of the story to a third American house, and an expos of the situation showed that English publishers had been in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most popular works of fiction to the American houses, and recouping the half of the price ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd.... ... ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... difficulties, Hogg wrote rapidly, with the view of relieving himself. In 1822, he published a new edition of his best poems, in four volumes, for which he received the sum of L200; and in this and the following year, he produced two works of fiction, entitled, "The Three Perils of Man," and "The Three Perils of Women," which together yielded him L300. In 1824, he published "The Confessions of a Fanatic;" and, in 1826, he gave to the world his long narrative ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... treats the September business so freely, that the editor will doubtless soon be silenced. Admitting these accusations to be unfounded, what ideas must the people have of their magistrates, when they are credited? It is the prepossession of the hearer that gives authenticity to fiction; and such atrocities would neither be imputed to, nor believed of, men not ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Georgie forced himself out of the weakness that was overmastering his limbs, and slid an arm round her waist. The head dropped on his shoulder, and he found himself with parched lips saying things that up till then he believed existed only in printed works of fiction. Mercifully the horses were quiet. She made no attempt to draw herself away when she recovered, but lay still, whispering, "Of course you're the Boy, and I didn't ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... has never had, and probably never will have, such a champion as you are in right of this book." "As a picture of the time I really think it is impossible to give it too much praise. It seems to me to be the very essence of all about the time that I have ever seen in biography or fiction, presented in most wise and humane lights. I have never liked him so well. And as to Goldsmith himself and his life, and the manful and dignified assertion of him, without any sobs, whines, or convulsions of any sort, it is throughout a noble achievement of which, apart ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... politics. Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." Collier's Weekly undertook to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines. Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they portrayed. Coniston, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... action there is joy which is no fiction, The hope of something as in faith begun, God's sweet and everlasting benediction, The flush of victory ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... present may be without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read. It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have faithfully painted the manners of ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... fantastic idea, that the birth of the Virgin was not only immaculate, but altogether miraculous, and that she owed her being to the joyful kiss which Joachim gave his wife when they met at the gate. Of course the Church gave no countenance to this strange poetical fiction, but it certainly modified some of the representations; for example, there is a picture by Vittore Carpaccio, wherein St. Joachim and Anna tenderly embrace. On one side stands St. Louis of Toulouse as bishop; on the other St. Ursula with her standard, whose presence turns the incident into a religious ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Haven, Connecticut, on the 17th of June 1877. He was a voluminous writer of books on Christian ethics, and of histories, which now seem unscholarly and untrustworthy, but were valuable in their time in cultivating a popular interest in history. In general, except that he did not write juvenile fiction, his work in subject and style closely resembles that of his brother, Jacob ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... experiences with his imaginations and become unable to distinguish one from the other? Anything is possible, but it is strange that on this occasion and for the rest of the journey, whenever he happened to tell a story, he gave unmistakable preference to fiction, and never told of what he really had experienced. At the time Yegorushka took it all for the genuine thing, and believed every word; later on it seemed to him strange that a man who in his day had travelled all over Russia and seen and known so much, ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates the highest perfection, such as has never been seen in flesh and blood, - has now, as an invented historical occurrence, driven the whole world to the rudest falsifications of truth and impossible efforts ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... former abortive disturbance. The doctrine of asylum as applied to this case is not sanctioned by the best precedents, and when allowed tends to encourage sedition and strife. Under no circumstances can the representatives of this Government be permitted, under the ill-defined fiction of extraterritoriality, to interrupt the administration of criminal justice in the countries to which they are accredited. A temperate demand having been made by the Chilean Government for the correction of this conduct in the instance mentioned, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... it was not possible for so conspicuous a public character to pass away without exciting popular notice, the following explanation of the affair was circulated at the time; which, whether a fact or a fiction, deserves to be mentioned as the sort of ending which was considered in his case probable and appropriate. It was believed that, the family of Rahmat Khan having fallen into his hands, Shujaa-ud-daulah sent for one of the fallen ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of 'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'—a short address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of symptoms is still plainer. He knew his own defect; and purposed going through a course of hellebore. Sleeplessness, one of the commonest indications of lunacy, haunted him in an excess rarely recorded. [Footnote: No fiction of romance presents so awful a picture of the ideal tyrant as that of Caligula by Suetonius. His palace—radiant with purple and gold, but murder every where lurking beneath flowers; his smiles and echoing ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... to give credit to what I heard in the course of our Tour was too great. Dr. Johnson's peculiar accuracy of investigation detected much traditional fiction, and many gross mistakes. It is not to be wondered at, that he was provoked by people carelessly telling him, with the utmost readiness and confidence, what he found, on questioning them a little more, was erroneous[901]. Of this ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... a misinterpretation which would injure her vanity, though it was not likely to aim at her honour, Alma had recourse to fiction. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... In reading, too, she began to take new and strong delight. Especially two or three new English periodicals, which John sent for on purpose for her, were mines of pleasure to Ellen. There was no fiction in them, either; they were as full of instruction as of interest. At all times of the day and night, in her intervals of business, Ellen might be seen with one of these in her hand, nestled among the cushions of the sofa, or on a little bench by the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... cannot be imagined that the Greeks ever regarded this tradition otherwise than as a fable, so far as the double nature of the animal was concerned, yet it is curious, to observe, with what care and devotion they recorded the particulars of this fiction in their poems, sculpture, paintings, and other monuments of art. The Centaurs were invited to the nuptials of Pirithous, king of the Lapithae. During the marriage feast, one of the Centaurs, named Eurytion, or Eurytus, with the characteristic brutality ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. English fiction became pure, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a small attic at No. 9, Rue Lesdiguieres, which was chosen by him for its nearness to the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, the only public library of which the contents were unknown to him. At the same time, appearances, always all-important in the Balzac family, were observed, by the fiction that Honore was at Alby, on a visit to a cousin; and in this way his literary venture was kept secret, in case ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... little tale is neither pure fiction nor absolute historic truth; being, indeed, little more than an attempt to show a picture of Channel Island life as it was some two centuries ago. For the background we have been beholden to Dr. S.E. Hoskins, whose "Charles the Second in the Channel ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... cunning, seldom far removed from the brink of insanity, the incident I have recorded will appear incredible. I have narrated it, simply because I have undertaken to narrate everything bearing on the business in which I was engaged. I am well aware that truth is stranger than fiction, and I should have little difficulty, if I were so disposed, in framing a story, full of plausible, commonplace incidents, which no one could doubt ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... fluttering about me like a faint summer wind, and filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, which looked as vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I attempted to grasp and define them. Of course, the explanation of the mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... into the fire. In a hundred different ways he saw her face, a will-o-the-wisp thing amid the flames; an illusive, very girlish, almost childish face—yet always with the light of a woman's soul shining in it. That was the miracle which startled him at last. It seemed as if the fiction he built up in his despair transformed itself subtly into fact and that her soul had come to him from out of the southland and was speaking to him with eyes which never changed or faltered in their adoration, their faith and their courage. She seemed to come ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the outset of their acquaintance. To strengthen an impression so desirable and useful, he followed up the blow by acquainting him, in some detail, with the magnitude and extent of his operations; blending truth and fiction together, as best served his purpose; and bringing both to bear, with so much art, that Mr. Bolter's respect visibly increased, and became tempered, at the same time, with a degree of wholesome fear, which it was highly desirable ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... been written up in fiction; it has been discussed otherwise as an impossibility. Then we discover that the ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... also a curious phenomenon in the natural world on this farm, which perhaps will be regarded as a fiction of fancy by many a reader. It was a large field of barley grown from oats! We have recently dwelt upon some of the co-workings of Nature and Art in the development of flowers and of several useful plants. But here is something stranger still, that seems to diverge from ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... exertion go to augment its power. Profit is every hour becoming capital. The vast crop of our neutrality is all seed-wheat, and is sown again to swell, almost beyond calculation, the future harvest of prosperity. And in this progress, what seems to be fiction is found to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... know, Evan," Paula broke in on her recital, "Dick can nose more human tragedy out of columns of ranch statistics than can the average fiction writer out of the whirl of a great city. Take the milk reports—the individual reports of the milkers—so many pounds of milk, morning and night, from cow so-and-so, so many pounds from cow so-and-so. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... little does the amateur, dwelling at home at ease, comprehend the labours and perils of the author, and, when he smilingly skims the surface of a work of fiction, how little does he consider the hours of toil, consultation of authorities, researches in the Bodleian, correspondence with learned and illegible Germans—in one word, the vast scaffolding that was first built ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... finally she informed him that Jacqueline had gone to Italy with an old Yankee and his daughter—he being a man, it was said, who had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by keeping a bar-room in a mining camp in California. This last was no fiction, the cut of Mr. Sparks's beard and his unpolished manners left no doubt on the subject; and she wound up by saying that Madame d'Avrigny, whom no one could accuse of ill-nature, had been grieved at meeting this unhappy girl in very improper company, among which she seemed ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... of fiction, written by a fanatical old {117} woman, although untrue even as a picture of southern society, has obtained for her the cordial ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... pre-historic treasures there. The cavern was interesting as showing the honeycombing effects of water on limestone rock, but it did not lead very far into the hill. The belief that the murderer escaped by another opening than the one by which he entered was founded on fiction. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... practically all animal stories. I have said in my foregoing discussion that the Negro communed with Nature and she gave him Rhymes for amusement. This is true, but when we say "communed" we simply express a vague intangible something the existence of which lives somewhere in a kind of mental fiction. ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... we have in our library belong entirely to what may be called the classical school, and may from many points of view be regarded as genuine works of art. Besides these, there is in the market a huge quantity of fiction which appeals to the less highly educated classes, and even to those who are absolutely unable to read. For the latter, there are professional readers and story-tellers, who may often be seen at some convenient point in a Chinese town, delighting large audiences ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... in love with you anyway, but I'd like to know where I stand. I have a constitutional hatred of mystery outside of fiction ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... difficult to converse with him without giving him offence. He was introduced to Sir Walter Scott by Sir James Mackintosh, who said, in presenting him, "Mr. Cooper, allow me to introduce you to your great forefather in the art of fiction"; "Sir," said Cooper, with great asperity, "I have no forefather." Now, though his manners were rough, they were quite changed. We saw a great deal of him, and I was frequently in his house, and found ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... near it; and, not being at all sleepy, he sat down reflecting on the amusements of the day, and endeavoured to remember the tales he had heard. In some he thought he perceived strong traits of truth; and in others he discovered palpable fiction and absurdity. Whilst he was deliberating on the various incidents, the heavy watch-bell tolled two; but Barbarosse did not attend to it, being deeply engaged in his contemplations. He was suddenly awakened from his reveries by an uncommon rustling sound issuing ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... 'Holy War' allegorically represents Bunyan's personal feelings, is clearly declared by him in the poetical Introduction or Address to the Reader, prefixed to the book. He adverts to books of fiction, and solemnly declares— ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... life to fight. Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life. Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming. The idealist would fain have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the fiction which we should like to believe, making it impossible to paint the young man of the nineteenth century other than he is. Lucien imagined that his scheming was entirely prompted by good feeling, and persuaded himself that it was done solely for ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... guidance, half in the briskly moving intrigue supposed to be going on there. I say "supposed," because, to be frank, Miss FOX SMITH'S story, good fun as it is, hardly convinces like her setting. You may, for example, feel that you have met before in fiction the lonely hero who rescues the solitary maiden, his shipmate, from undesirable society, and falls in love with her, only to learn that she is voyaging to meet her betrothed. At this point I suppose most novel-readers would have given fairly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... whether the revengeful temper attributed, by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... whereby to judge of the fortunes of individuals; because, in the first, there is great uniformity, every one, more or less, enjoying, exteriorly, the same easy circumstances, notwithstanding the disparity of real property; and in the second, considerable fiction prevails, many persons shipping under the same mark, and even when the shipper stands alone, he might have been provided with the necessary funds from the pious and charitable establishments, possibly without ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... been written by critics, especially by those in Germany (the native land of criticism), upon the important question, whether to please or to instruct should be the end of Fiction—whether a moral purpose is or is not in harmony with the undidactic spirit perceptible in the higher works of the imagination. And the general result of the discussion has been in favour of those who have contended that Moral Design, rigidly ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... be willing to acknowledge the fact, it may here afford some little amusement to show why no one should have been deceived-to point out those particulars of the story which should have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however rich the imagination displayed in this ingenious fiction, it wanted much of the force which might have been given it by a more scrupulous attention to facts and to general analogy. That the public were misled, even for an instant, merely proves the gross ignorance which is so generally prevalent upon subjects ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pages and pages to get to the end of a story, the habit of reading without caring what I read, that I know to have been bad for my mind. To use a nautical expression, my brain was in danger of getting "water-logged." There are so many more books of fiction written nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have any ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... This is not easy to accomplish, however, and its telling, which shows a fine literary style and unquestioned powers of characterization and description, is what makes the author one of the most popular among fiction writers of ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... The proces of Gisquet, which has appeared lately in the papers, shows how deep the demoralization must be, and how a Government, based itself on dishonesty (a tyranny, that is, under the title and fiction of a democracy,) must practise and admit corruption in its own and in its agents' dealings with the nation. Accordingly, of cheating contracts, of ministers dabbling with the funds, or extracting underhand profits for the granting of unjust privileges and monopolies,—of grasping, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... also of the effect with which literature, poetry and the arts have since been cultivating and developing the sentiment. Consider how the great mass of Western poetry is love poetry, and the greater part of Western fiction love stories. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... the latest and one of the strongest works of the successful delineator of modern society life and manners. It will be read eagerly and enjoyably by thousands of lovers of the best fiction. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... period take root in England. At the same period the works of many of the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio and Boccaccio, were translated into English; Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction. Thomas Hoby translated Castiglione's 'Courtier' in 1561. As a proof of the extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:—'Even Guicciardine's silver ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... York Tribune: "One of the cleverest musical novels we know, and it is particularly creditable in that it holds nothing of the hysterical gush with which the feminine writer usually fills fiction of this kind.... The study of the group of singers at the Royal Opera in a minor German city is astonishingly well done, and so is the portrait of the great tenor's peasant wife ... so unmistakably true that she ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... after all, I had been mistaken; if, after all, Mrs. Stapleton had not invented that story, but had told Dulcie the truth. I confess that the more I thought it all over and the harder I tried to sift possible facts from probable fiction the more hopelessly entangled I became. Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of my theory that we were being cleverly and systematically hoaxed lay in Dick's discovery of the cypher messages in the Morning Post. There could, at any rate, be no getting ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... this more than a quarter of a century, every waking hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer's difficulty—and successfully, too—you have a ground-work of first-hand information that tends toward facts instead of fiction and ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... its nature, pleasing and instructive; it leaves after it the most lasting impressions; and when youth, as at present, is almost universally taught to read, and works of fiction or lying histories placed constantly in their way, is it not obvious that every parent and every pastor should be careful not only to exclude from their flocks and families such impious productions, but also to provide the youth committed to their care with works of an opposite description? ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Spain's greatest novelist, but his greatest book. It is the most important translation that has come out of Spain in our time in the field of fiction and it will be remembered as epochal."—JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL, Representative in America of the Society ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... eternal hills are vibrant to the eye of science, and the very stones are pulsing with the joy of life. The countryside sings, and there is the beat of rhythm not merely in our hearts but in every particle of our body. Stillness is a delusion, and immobility a fiction of the senses. Life is movement and activity, and rigidity and stiffness come more near to what we understand as death. Yet even in death there is no stillness, there is but a change in the form of activity. The body is no longer alive as an organised community, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... visited China, he spoke to several merchants and traders there, and tried to induce them to send him back to the lagoon with a crew of divers, but as he was usually drunk when he called on them, no one would listen to him. His story was merely regarded as the fiction of a drunken sailor. ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... Thomas Browne and Addison, have been induced to suppose that the soul in this state is partially disengaged from the encumbrance of the body, and therefore more intelligent, which is a mere fancy—a poetical fiction. Surely it is absurd to suppose that the soul, which we invest with such high and perfect attributes, should commit such frivolous and irrational acts as these which take place so constantly in our dreams. "Methinks," observed Locke, "every drowsy nod shakes this doctrine." All we remark, is, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation. Even though the result disappoint us, must we not base our actions on better expectations, and believe that the prosperity and happiness of one country promotes that of others, that the solidarity of man is not a fiction, and that nations can still afford to treat other nations ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Barlowe's expedition, of Ralph Lane's bold adventures in exploration of Albemarle Sound, Chowan River and Chesapeake Bay, of the return of his disappointed colony to England in Drake's vessels, and the tragic fate of little Virginia Dare and of John White's colony, have all been told in fiction, song and verse. ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such literature the fact from the fiction—where there is certainly fact and certainly fiction—is one of the most difficult to which the intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the last century, intellects of the highest ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... most successful among the writers of that class of fiction which, for want of a better term, maybe ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... books of the interesting prisoner now in custody are, the Pilgrim's Progress, an Australian Summary of the Newgate Calendar, and the poetry of the late Dr. Watts. He has also expressed himself as pleased with Mrs. Humphrey Ward's latest work of fiction, though he does not quite approve of the theological ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention—poetry annoys her; fiction—the book of the moment, which happened to be "The Damnation of Theron Ware," makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the divine processions. But in the Gorgias he adopts the Homeric dogma, respecting the triadic hypostases of the demiurgi. And, in short, he every where discourses concerning the gods agreeably to the principles of theologists; rejecting indeed the tragical part of mythological fiction, but establishing first hypotheses in common with the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... to science, the high principles which have regulated his conduct in every relation of life, and, above all, his engaging modesty, which is the crown of all his other virtues, presenting such a model of an accomplished philosopher as can rarely be found beyond the regions of fiction, demand abler pens than mine to describe them in adequate terms, however much inclined I might feel ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... in a frenzy. 'Because Jem Frost was in love with her himself, he fancied every one else must be the same, and now he will be married to her before Christmas, so that's disposed of. As to my feeling for her a particle, a shred of what I do for Mary, it was a mere fiction—a romance, an impossibility.' ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and were camping in the forest by the wayside. Parasurama came up and asked them who they were, and they said they were Daharias or wayfarers, from dahar the Chhattisgarhi term for a road or path; and thus they successfully escaped the vengeance of Parasurama. This futile fiction only demonstrates the real ignorance of their Brahman priests, who, if they had known a little history, need not have had recourse to their invention to furnish the Daharias with a distinguished pedigree. A third derivation is from a word dahri or gate, and they say that the name of Dahria ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... themselves. They have the usual British characteristic of reticence intensified. But though I have been brigaded with them on active service, I have not been a member of the corps, and hence do not feel bound by their policy of silence. Let the plain truth, which is always stranger than fiction, be told about these gallant riders as an inspiration to young Canadians and to men of the blood everywhere. With this purpose in view I am now keeping the resolution made that night in the North, as I am in this book extending and telling to a larger ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... necessary to say that not all moving-picture productions are photoplays than that not all prose is fiction, yet the distinction must be emphasized. A photoplay is to the program of a moving-picture theatre just what a short-story is to the contents of a popular magazine—it supplies the story-telling or drama element. A few years ago the managers of certain ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... think there is a spice of malicious humour in this valuation, and am confirmed in this opinion by noting that though woman in the Iliad is on one occasion depicted as a wife so faithful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the sex that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master. Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... rationis is distinguished from the nihil negativum or pure nothing by the consideration that the former must not be reckoned among possibilities, because it is a mere fiction- though not self-contradictory, while the latter is completely opposed to all possibility, inasmuch as the conception annihilates itself. Both, however, are empty conceptions. On the other hand, the nihil privativum ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... hard to find, even in sensational fiction, a more daring leader than Lord Cochrane, or a career which supplies so many thrilling exploits. The manner in which, almost single-handed, he scattered the French fleet in the Basque Roads is one of the greatest feats in English ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... his dealings, abhorring crookedness: for the essence of lying is not inexactitude in speech, but deceitfulness of intention. Christian veracity means honesty, straightforwardness, and sincerity in deed as well as in word. A writer of fiction is not a liar: to improve in the telling an anecdote or a story is not necessarily to deceive others in any culpable sense; and moralists have from time to time discussed the question whether there may not be circumstances in which ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... justified, since it is a regrettable fact that the taxi-cab driver's wife made "Hermione" rhyme with "bone," and laid no stress on the second syllable. Strong in her superior knowledge, for she was an omnivorous reader of fiction—and Greek names were fashionable last November—she passed ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... living pictures is to remain perfectly still during the performance. You should select several well-known scenes either from history or fiction, and then arrange the actors to represent the scenes as ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... chances of human life which go to make up fiction as well as fact, there is one change which has never chanced to any man; and yet the idea has been found so fascinating by all men that it appears in the literature of every country. Most other fancied transformations are recorded as ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and well that his early desertion of fiction is surprising. His mocking spirit has often suggested comparison with Voltaire, whom he studied and admired. He too is a skeptic and an idol-breaker; but his is a kindlier irony, a less incisive philosophy. Perhaps, however, this influence led to lack of faith in his own ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... observed your work in the literary department of The Gazette. I admitted demurely that I had. He praised several reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you were the only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modern fiction. Then he incensed me with this ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... same as you will find in all rumors—some truth; some fiction. I had contemplated making a publication of some remarkable episodes that have occurred in my life, but have not completed ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Passing from one to another she commandeered room after room, even managing to wrest a bed from the father of six; and I verily believe that the inhabitants would have burned their dwellings to warm us had the little lady ordered it. All the while she maintained the fiction that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... contained history, travels, adventures, fiction, natural history, and biography. So great was the favor in which they were held in the eighteenth century that the compiler, Nathaniel Crouch, almost lost his identity in his pseudonym, and like the late Mr. Clemens, was better known by his nom-de-plume than by his ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... it difficult to repeat this patchwork of truth and fiction in proper order, but the ex-schoolmaster impressed it so firmly on his sweetheart's mind that at last it flowed from her lips as fluently as his pupils in Stanstadt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Commons was not, however, a popular body in the eighteenth century. In theory, of course, as a part of Parliament it represented the whole English people. But this was a mere political fiction, since by reason of the narrowly limited suffrage, a large part of the English people had no voice in parliamentary elections. Probably not one-fifth of the adult male population was entitled to vote for members of Parliament. As the right to vote was an incident ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... What makes it all the more strange is that he seems to have hardly thought of this formidable rival. But he had looked upon him as a remote danger, and Karamazov always lives in the present. Possibly he regarded him as a fiction. But his wounded heart grasped instantly that the woman had been concealing this new rival and deceiving him, because he was anything but a fiction to her, because he was the one hope of her life. Grasping this instantly, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the brochure of Sieyes, the third estate was every thing; the king, the nobility, the clergy, were no more. In 1793, the nation, without stopping at the constitutional fiction of the inviolability of the sovereign, conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold; in 1830, it accompanied Charles X. to Cherbourg. In each case, it may have erred, in fact, in its judgment of the offence; but, in right, the logic which led ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... fixed his imagination and inspired him to martyrdom might have made a plot for some old-fashioned melodrama, but Max began to realize that there was nothing in fiction so incredible as the things which happen in life: things one reads about any day in newspapers, yet which in a novel would be laughed at by critics. He would say to Edwin Reeves that, shortly before her death, Rose had learned through the dying confession of a Frenchwoman who had nursed her in childbirth ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson |
