"Literalness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ninety days he had been going without opium he had known nothing like proper sleep. I desire to be understood with mathematical literalness. There had been periods when he had been semi-conscious; when the outline of things in his room grew vaguer and for five minutes he had a dull sensation of not knowing where he was. This temporary numbness was the only state which in ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... altogether adorable, like a wee wren after a stormy day. The stilted phrases were slipping away. She spoke more alertly. Bits of Dulcie's lingo were creeping into her speech. But she still answered with a literalness that ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of Cervantes ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sticking manfully to his own opinion. "Where will you find a more decided mannerist than Holbein? And because he was the first portrait-painter of his day, was he not reproduced with all his faults of literalness and dryness by a legion of imitators? So with Sir Peter Lely, with Petitot, with Vandyck, with every great artist who painted kings and queens and court beauties. Then, again, a certain style of beauty becomes the rage, and-a skilful painter flatters each fair sitter in turn by bringing ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... taken, is so inexpressibly comprehensive, pregnant, and deep—when taken really, so perfectly improbable. It will be likewise difficult to believe that even the old readers of the account—at least those of them who looked deeper and were more enlightened—took with extreme {318} literalness the expression, that God breathed into the nostrils of man who is dust of the ground, the breath of life. The third chapter has still other features from which we have at least to assume that the author did not at all intend to give importance to an extremely literal conception ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
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