And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "
real life," as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me, because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form.
Life meanwhile-
real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions- went on as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in
real life, or as worse, or as they are.
Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than
real life itself.
To him it was
real life. It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealed a depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honest were corrupt, the chaste were lewd.
Hence those strange monsters in lace and embroidery, in silks and brocades, with vast wigs and hoops; which, under the name of lords and ladies, strut the stage, to the great delight of attorneys and their clerks in the pit, and of the citizens and their apprentices in the galleries; and which are no more to be found in
real life than the centaur, the chimera, or any other creature of mere fiction.
Very likely half your ideas on the subject are derived from fictions in which happy results are tacked on to conditions very ill-calculated to produce them--which in
real life hardly ever do produce them.
I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick with the invasion of my
real life by that other life of my dreams.
"Professor, is not this ocean gifted with
real life? It has its tempers and its gentle moods.
But there was a more
real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, that in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home.
You gave me my first glimpse of a
real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one.
"STRANGE DOINGS AT GLENINCH--A romance in
real life seems to be in course of progress at Mr.