Literary notes about fancy (AI summary)
The word “fancy” emerges in literature as a versatile term that can convey many shades of imagination and perception. Often, it serves as a synonym for the creative mind’s imagery or an idea born of a dreamy state, as when characters seem to conjure visions beyond immediate reality ([1], [2], [3]). In other contexts, it reflects a sudden notion or personal inclination—something one might “take a fancy to” or regard with particular affection ([4], [5], [6])—while simultaneously signifying an ornamental, sometimes capricious quality that enhances description ([7], [8]). Authors also employ it to blur the boundary between sensory experience and internal thought, enabling characters to perceive mysterious sounds or anticipate future events ([9], [10], [11]). This layering of meaning illustrates how “fancy” can simultaneously evoke the ephemeral flights of imagination and the tangible impulses that shape human behavior ([12], [13], [14]).
- I should call it horizon—the line where odour and fancy meet at the farthest limit of scent.
— from The World I Live In by Helen Keller - This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape.
— from The innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton - I felt the beneficial result of such excitement, in a renewal of those pleasing flights of fancy to which I had long been a stranger.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Marusia struck his fancy more than anyone else; so he stuck close to her.
— from Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore - She'll make up well, and behave herself, I fancy."
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott - Some people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy.
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy - The uniform of the Frenchwoman was of course a fancy one, but very elegant.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova - Don't have the tops wider than absolutely necessary not to bind, and don't have them curved or fancy in shape.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post - I fancy that I hear his step now upon the stairs.”
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - "I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to happen to me to-day."
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells - In this I fancy that in any case he made a miscalculation, and that, if we had not been there, his doom would none the less have been sealed.
— from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle - (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air!
— from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - The walls of this my hermitage have no tongue to tell my follies, though I sometimes fancy that they have ears to hear them and a soul to sympathize.
— from Twice-told tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne - But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
