"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been struck by the palsy, and dragged one side along with extreme difficulty. His bloated cheeks and body had fallen into deep pits; and the swelling massy parts were of a black-red hue, so that the skin appeared a bag of morbid contents. His mouth was drawn awry, his speech entirely inarticulate, his eye obscured by thick rheum, and his clothes were stained by the saliva that occasionally driveled from his lips. His legs were wasted, his breast was sunk, and his protuberant paunch ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... enterprise for any one to live with him, most of all for such a woman, delicately bred, nervous, and highly strung. She was aware of this, and was prepared for a large measure of self-denial; but she could not have foreseen how severe she would find the trial. The morbid sensitiveness of Carlyle to his own pains and troubles, so often imaginary, joined with his inconsiderate blindness to his wife's real sufferings, led to many heart-burnings. If she contributed to them, in some degree, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... various predisposing causes, such as feebleness of constitution of the variety planted, rendering them an easy prey to the disease; by planting on low, moist land, or on land highly enriched by nitrogenous manures, causing a morbid growth which invites the disease; also by insects or their larvae puncturing or eating off the leaves or vines. But by far the most wide-spread and most common cause of the disease is sudden changes of atmospheric temperature, particularly when accompanied ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... she hinted this, Miss Ludington replied, "You must not think of it that way. What has a spirit like her to do with earthly passions? Your love has saved Paul from a dream as vain as it was beautiful, and which, had it gone on, might have gained a morbid strength and blighted his life. I like to fancy, and I know it is Paul's belief, that the spirit of my Ida influenced you to come to us just as you came, that under her form Paul might fall in love with you. In no other way but ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which [v.04 p.0804] his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... he had passed from among the living. I obtained permission to go in once more and look upon him as he lay shrouded for the grave. I was then a child of ten years, but even at that early age I had not that morbid terror of looking upon death, so common among children. With my own hands, I folded back the napkin which covered his face, and gazed upon his aged, but now serene countenance. There was nothing in his appearance to inspire terror, and for ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... fond of poetry from boyhood, and had gradually made himself familiar with large parts of Shakespeare's plays and the works of other great writers. He now discovered, in a strange collection of verses, the one poem which seemed best to express the morbid, troubled, sore condition of his mind, . . . the lines by ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... occasion to speak hereafter. But there is another kind of growth, which may well be called unnatural; we mean, of those diseased appetites, whose effects are seen in the distorted forms of the conventional, having no ground but in weariness of the true; and it cannot be denied that this morbid growth has its full share, inwardly and outwardly, both of space and importance. These, however, must sooner or later end as they began; they perish in the lie they make; and it were well did not other falsehoods take their places, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... gods. She is a reactionary person who thinks only of the old and hates everything new in the most ferocious meaning of the word; she would exterminate the world and nature to give new life to her decayed gods. But this is not merely an obstinate, morbid mood in Ortrud; her passion holds her with the full weight of a misguided, undeveloped, objectless feminine desire for love: for that reason she is terribly grand. No littleness of any kind must occur in this representation; she must ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... once imagined the royal touch could cure, and by a slovenly mode of dress. He had the use only of one eye; yet so much does mind govern and even supply the deficiency of organs, that his visual perceptions, as far as they extended, were uncommonly quick and accurate. So morbid was his temperament that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon. That with his constitution and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the opinion that his absolute pardon would not be compatible with the welfare of this state—the scene of his crime—for the reason that his presence therein, if freed from the conditions of his parole, would create a morbid and demoralizing interest in him and ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... point where inner conflict ends and peace begins. Her recognition of Helena and her reception into the family calmed me for a while, and gave me hope that all would yet be well. But I had never sounded the full bitterness of madam's morbid heart, well as I thought I knew it. The hatred she had felt from the first for her husband's child ripened into frenzied dislike when she found her a living image of the mother whose picture she had come across among Frank's personal effects. To win a tear from those meek eyes ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Margaret, did his share in the production of another long period of quiet. Penrod allowed this one to pass without any vocal disturbance on his part. It may be, however, that his gaze was disturbing to Mr. Blakely, upon whose person it was glassily fixed with a self-forgetfulness that was almost morbid. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the one hand there is a deficiency of food material which can be used for the upbuilding of brains, muscles, and nerves; while on the other hand it contains an abundance of material calculated to induce dyspepsia, headache, dullness of intellect, and other morbid conditions. Left in an ante-room, during the school session, until, in cold weather, it becomes nearly frozen, and then partaken of hurriedly, that there may be more time for play, is it to be wondered at that the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... of candles was exhausted, and this dismal hole plunged in cave-like darkness; only two persons knew of my predicament, or were capable of releasing me. What if something should occur making it impossible for either to act? What if this was a trick, and I had been actually buried alive? I grew morbid, suspicious, almost convinced that I was the victim of conspiracy. Then, somehow, a flash of courage returned, and I caught at these fears, as memory of those honest blue eyes came again. I would not permit such a thought to dominate me; it was not possible—the ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... There was a great sympathy always expressed for the black man who escaped from the slave life; but he had lived with them twenty-five years, and had come to the conclusion that the black man was born for servitude, and was not fit for any thing else. He might listen to the morbid philanthropy of honorable gentlemen in favor of the negro; but they might as well try to change the spots of the leopard as to change the character of the blacks. They would still retain their idle and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... from the numerous facts herein cited, that the so-called monstrous formations (excluding morbid growths the result of disease or injury) present no peculiarities absolutely foreign to the normal organisation of plants. The difference between the natural and monstrous development is one of degree and frequency ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... were examples of the type of poverty as it is set forth by anthropology. Although the development among them of certain muscles, due to the particular nature of their work, might give a false idea of their strength, they presented sure signs of morbid debility. Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests, they were further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a multitude of physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common want of symmetry between the head and the limbs. And they were ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of necessity," she answered. "Perhaps I take rather a morbid view of things, but one of them was the brother of a great friend of mine, and they fear that he has lost his reason. There are peculiar and painful difficulties in connection with this post, Mr. Ducaine, and I think it only fair to ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ideal in his passion for ill as he had before been in his belief of good. Apemantus was satisfied with the mischief existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. One of the most decisive intimations of Timon's morbid jealousy of appearances is in his answer to ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... and only an artist. In his tranquil, unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse, eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not a morbid process, no medicine should be given, where there is no appearance of disease. The absurd custom of giving a powerful opiate without indication to all women, as soon as they are delivered, is, I make no doubt, frequently attended with injurious, and sometimes with fatal ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... "Morbid again," said Moya. "You belong to your own day and generation. You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... saying, as it were: "This is yours. Do as you please with it. We will watch the results." A marked contrast this with the centralizing of authority which seems to be ever proceeding in Europe, and which breeds in all classes at all ages—especially in France—a morbid fear and horror ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... minus multiplied by plus, which gives minus. So, some ethical writers begin by assuming, that certain general sentiments are the natural sentiments of mankind, and thence argue that any which differ are morbid and unnatural. Thus, lastly, Hobbes and Rousseau rested the existence of government and law on a supposed social compact, and not on men's perception of the interests of society, which, however, could be the only ground for their abiding by ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... the amendment relating to representation, and though assenting to that which was now reported by the committee, thought it inferior to, and less effective than, the one which had failed. The third section he thought too lenient. "There is," said he, "a morbid sensibility sometimes called mercy, which affects a few of all classes from the priest to the clown, which has more sympathy for the murderer on the gallows than for his victim. I hope I have a heart as capable of feeling for human woe as ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... money, and the law. Some conservative sheets still endeavour to live up to this ideal, but the circulation and the influence go to those which find no aspect of human existence beneath their notice. Formerly newspapers had a morbid dread of being readable. They have lost that dread now, and those which have lost it most completely, most completely succeed. As with the dailies, so with every other sort of paper. The aim is to be inclusive, satisfying the public curiosity ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... the Cunard pier in New York. There seems to be no adequate reason why a report of such a scene should depict mainly the sorrow and grief, should seek for every detail to satisfy the horrible and the morbid in the human mind. The first questions the excited crowds of reporters asked as they crowded round were whether it was true that officers shot passengers, and then themselves; whether passengers shot ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... the healing art, is the most noble in its object and beneficial in its effects, of all the many subdivisions of the sciences, because, it alleviates the pains and morbid afflictions of suffering humanity. We have given quite sufficient of its astrological aspect in the second part of "The Light of Egypt," Vol. I, wherein the four ancient elements are translated into their chemical correspondences of oxygen, hydrogen, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... him, balancing on a single crutch. His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated patches of wispy grey. His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... a self-confident, or, as some people call it, a conceited manner; and so, for a time, I pretended to be modest, too, and I never spoke of my athletic successes. But I was never very good at pretending, and soon gave it up. Then I grew morbid over my inability to make friends, and moped by myself, having as little to do with my classmates as possible. In my loneliness I began to think that I was a much misunderstood individual. My solitary state bred in me a most unhealthy disgust for myself, and, as it always is with ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... said Aunt Susan, recovering herself on the spot. "And I do not mean to be morbid about it; only, at the time, my conscience troubled me, and your poor aunty had a very bad time. It was soon afterwards that my dear father wrote to me, and I shall always keep his letter. Since ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... their wishes. This is one of the worst blots on the male man's character, a blot from which the female character is entirely free. And some men—fortunately their number is not very large—are such moral skunks that they take morbid pleasure in boasting publicly of their sexual conquests, and unscrupulously peddle about the name of the girl whom, by cunning false promises or other means, they succeeded in seducing. And of course such a girl finds it difficult or impossible to get married, and must end her days in solitude, without ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... touched this theme and that, and finally drifted in a direction which enabled Mr. Ridley to refer to what he had heard Mr. Elliott say about the healthy effect of pure wine on the taste of men whose appetites had become morbid, and to ask him if he had any ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... Physical Degeneracy upon Crime. By degeneracy we mean, to use Morel's definition, "a morbid deviation from the normal type." That is, degeneracy is such an alteration of organic structures and functions that the organism becomes incapable of adapting itself to more or less complex conditions. ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Babbicombe Bay. The fears caused by this report became certainty three days later, on the recovery of the bodies. The effect on Miss Barrett may be partially imagined. Not only had she lost her best-loved companion, but she was haunted by the morbid feeling that she had caused his death, since he had come to Torquay only to be with her. Twelve years afterward she wrote: "I have lived heart to heart with my husband these five years. I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... but in the result, his treatment will probably be found to be more exhaustive than that of any other English writer. The Shakespearean drama is peculiarly fertile in illustration of the virtuous or beneficent working of the patriotic instinct; but it does not neglect the malevolent or morbid symptoms incident either to its exorbitant or to its defective growth; nor is it wanting in suggestions as to how its healthy development may be best ensured. Part of Shakespeare's message on the subject is so well known that readers may need an apology for reference to it; but Shakespeare's ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... natural continuous development of our life here and not some utterly unconnected existence. If consciousness, personal identity, character, love, memory, fellowship, intercourse go on in that life why should there be a question raised about recognition? True, there are morbid times with most of us when we are inclined to doubt all desirable things, and there are some gloomy Christians who are always suspicious of anything especially bright and hopeful in the Gospel of Christ. But to the normal Christian man who knows what is revealed and who believes in the love ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... you see the Apache relics hanging high on the rear wall. We shall have to shift those to some other place just as soon as we can recover from this horror. I don't want the finest spot in the whole museum made a Mecca for the morbid and ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... all feeling of displeasure, or even of ridicule, was lost in pity. One of these was a pretty girl, whose natural disposition must have been gentle and kind; but her good feelings were soured, and her gentleness turned into morbid sensitiveness, by having heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women too, and that it was a sin and a shame for a free-born American to be treated like a servant. When she found she was to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... examination into, and discussion of, her feelings; it was an interest and amusement to her, while he dreaded and avoided all such conversation. There were times when his feelings, which were always earnest, and sometimes morbid, burst forth, and defied control, and overwhelmed him; when a force was upon him compelling him to speak. But he, in general, strove to preserve his composure, from a fear of the compelling pain ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... earlier novels of Bulwer-Lytton. On both sides of the Atlantic there was a reign of sentiment and a prevalence of what was then called "delicacy." It was a die-away, unwholesome attitude toward life and was morbid to the last degree. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... see, when I was at school I found division so uncommonly difficult, and suffered so much, mentally and physically, in the learning of it, that I have a species of morbid antipathy to the very name. I even intend to refuse a seat in parliament, when offered to me, because of the divisions that are constantly going on there. If you could only make me a ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... rang, creating a blessed diversion. Miss Blair, rendered absent-minded by her grief, went to the table still in her bonnet and veil; and this dramatic entrance gave rise to such morbid though unexpressed curiosity that every one forbore, for a time, to wonder why Miss Dyer did not appear. Later, however, when a tray was prepared and sent up to her (according to the programme of her ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... insanity. We believe that careful clinical studies confirm our opinion and that his classification is based on less thorough observation and analysis. This subject will be discussed at greater length in a forthcoming book on "The Psychology of Morbid and ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... their mother," Mr. Fentolin continued, leaning again a little forward in his chair, "their mother whom I saw pass along the beach just now—a widow, too, poor thing. She comes here often—a morbid taste. She spoke ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Olympus tenanted by Gorgons, Hydras and Furies. It is only fair to say that Tibetan art sometimes represents with success gods and saints in attitudes of repose and authority, and has produced some striking portraits,[1013] but its most marked feature (which it shares with literature) is a morbid love of the monstrous and terrible, a perpetual endeavour to portray fiends surrounded with every circumstance of horror, and still more appalling deities, all eyes, heads and limbs, wreathed with fire, drinking blood from ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... hearth. Like a boy before a jam-closet, for a few minutes he would hover indecisive, but lust always prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up his chair, lighting a candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its pigeon-holes and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he had painfully entered he gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed; ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... him to himself immediately; with a little gesture of impatience as if annoyed at his own weakness, he put from him these morbid memories of the past. "You wonder—what?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... too beautiful to-day. Oh, I was right! One may grow morbid over books, but I defy anybody, in the company of those chick-a-dees. I should think it would be hard to keep quite ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... COQ, MARGUERITE MARIE (1647—1690), French nun and mystic, was born at Lauthecourt, a village in the diocese of Autun, on the 22nd of July 1647. She would seem to have been from the first of a morbid and unhealthy temperament, and before the age of thirteen was the subject of a paralytic seizure. Having been cured of this, as she believed, by the intercession of the Holy Virgin, she changed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Nor is this morbid species of sagacity by any means to be looked upon as a literary novelty. Justus Lipsius, a scholar of no ordinary skill, seems to revel in the imaginary discovery, that the tragedies attributed to Seneca are by ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... have turned hastily from him; but in her present morbid mood she acted from a different impulse. The artist had not observed her approach, and standing a little back in the shadow of the hall-way she found a cruel fascination in comparing the man she loved with the low fellow whose shadow now fell so darkly across her own character. She looked ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... your mother was so simple and open that I knew every little grievance she had. She never would conceal anything seriously affecting her health from me: would she, eh, Margaret? I am quite sure she would not. So don't let me hear of these foolish morbid ideas. Come, give me a kiss, and ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... been listenin' to what Boggs says, squar's 'round an' half-way erects his crest for an argyooment. Texas has had marital troubles, an' him ponderin' the same constant renders him some morbid an' morose. ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew more than the name, at ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... altar whence he daily looks down with secret scorn on the prostrate dupes who believe that he can turn a drop of wine into blood, from the confessional where he daily studies with cold and scientific attention the morbid anatomy of guilty consciences, he brings to courts some talents which may move the envy of the more cunning and unscrupulous of lay courtiers; a rare skill in reading characters and in managing tempers, a rare art of dissimulation, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... peculiar characteristics of the people who live upon it. Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, namely, between 83 and 85 per cent; and that dates possess precisely the same nutritious substances as rice does, with ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... morbid phenomena in man have proved the existence of this vehicle, which we will call the higher consciousness, for it is far greater than normal, waking consciousness, that of the brain. In the somewhat rare cases in which this consciousness ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... who look upon the bond linking audience and actor as a mercenary contract, for the hours during which the latter yields his quantum of strength and spirit to the former for so much coin, and there is an end. Were I, unhappily, possessed by such a morbid feeling, I could no longer act, the spell would be broken. It is true, I might constrain bone and sinew to administer to my necessities, and continue to barter these with the public for bread; but the inspiring spirit would be away, sunk ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... rather full than slim, with clear, intelligent, dark eyes, a broad, open forehead, a nose somewhat delicately cut, a wide mouth, with thin lips, and teeth of dazzling whiteness. Her whole aspect was that of physical and mental health,—not only removed from morbid sensitiveness, but as far from sentiment even as a breezy spring wind, and yet as prompt to fathom it in others as the wind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This, at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general impression of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of him with a convulsive grasp, his eyes fixed on this figure. Something in its outline served to create all this new fear that had arisen, and fascinated his gaze. To his excited sensibility, now rendered morbid by the terrors of the last few hours, this figure, with its white robes, seemed like something supernatural sent across his path. It was dim twilight, and the object was a little indistinct; yet he could see it sufficiently well. There was that about it which sent an awful suspicion over ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... conjured up a new apparition if Sylvia were to seek the solace of untroubled rest. At present the girl felt that she had never before been so distressfully awake. Splendidly vital in mind and body as she was, she almost yielded now to a morbid horror of her environment. Generations of men and women had lived and died in that ancient house, and tonight dim shapes seemed to throng its chambers and corridors. Physically fearless, she owned to a feminine dread of the unknown. It would ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... pinchbeck reward for exploits neither Irish nor pinchbeck. Nevertheless, while requesting a speedy recall so that he might hide his chagrin in retirement, he uttered no vindictive word against Pitt. Despite its morbid expressions, the letter is that of a friend to a friend. On 27th September Pitt wrote in reply one of the longest of his private letters. With equal tact and frankness he reviewed the whole question, proving that ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... would sit at the club, nervously pulling at his beard and looking through the magazines and books; and from his face one could see that he was not reading, but devouring the pages without giving himself time to digest what he read. It must be supposed that reading was one of his morbid habits, as he fell upon anything that came into his hands with equal avidity, even last year's newspapers and calendars. At home ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... out all the objections to his political advancement before that advancement was pressed upon him. He was not a statesman; he was not an administrator; he could not do any genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk; he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still. His whole public career was at best but a harmless mistake. It has done no harm to his literary fame. The ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... for the boy that his mother had gifted him with her hopeful nature, for his father had Celtic traits in his character, and was oppressed with a morbid sense of his own unworthiness. It is Carlyle who vouches for the fact "that wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance." Little store of bodily vigour had ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... shaken at what has just happened; I am beginning to fear that that old pedant was right in saying that it was bad for me to live all alone in a strange country, that it would make me morbid. It is ridiculous that I should be put into such a state of excitement merely by the chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead these three hundred years. With the case of my uncle Ladislas, and other suspicions of insanity in my family, I ought really ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... standard, though in itself often highly valuable and interesting. "The Improvisatore," upon which, next to "The Wonder-Tales," his fame rests, is a kind of disguised autobiography which exhibits the author's morbid sensibility and what I should call the unmasculine character of his mind,[19] To appeal to the reader's pity in your hero's behalf is a daring experiment, and it cannot, except in brief scenes, be successful. A prolonged strain of compassion ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... run away from the "Belle Dame sans merci," and no amount of fairy songs or manna dew would have enabled her to have me in thrall. But I could understand how Ascher, who evidently has a taste for that kind of thing, might have been fascinated by the morbid beauty of the girl in the picture. I could understand how the fascination might become an enduring thing; a great love; how Ascher would still be drawn to the woman long after the elfishness of girlhood passed away. The soul would still remain gleaming ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... ever pretend that in going through a long course of fever, when his nerves were impaired, his brain inflamed, his blood fermenting, and his strength reduced, that he would be able, through all the commotion and change of organism, to govern his tastes, control his morbid cravings, and regulate his words, thoughts and actions? Yet these same persons will accuse, blame, and curse the man who does not control his appetite for alcohol, while his stomach is inflamed, blood vitiated, brain hardened, nerves exhausted, senses ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... spirit pervading a region or even a single house, which in part defies analysis; it is in the air; it overhangs; it may be light and joyous and animating, or forbidding. And Bareges is a striking instance; morbid, abhorrent, funereal, there seems here some influence at work which is not entirely to be accounted for, yet to which it is impossible not ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... his musings there was not a tremor or a doubt; he would have as soon questioned the reality of the old farm-house and the faces of the family gathered about the table. Of the susceptibility of the nerves to morbid activity, or the powers of the overdriven brain to objectify its concepts, he had never even dreamed. He was a credulous and unsophisticated youth, dwelling in a realm of imagination rather than in a world of reality and law. He had much to learn. His education was ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... stain upon it was seized upon eagerly, and hairs of the unfortunate woman were at a premium, men and boys, and even young women, examining every branch and twig of the bush in the midst of which the struggle took place, in the hope of finding one. The inherent, morbid love of the horrible the mass of humanity possesses was well illustrated in the scenes witnessed. The heavy rain which fell nearly all afternoon was not deterrent to these ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... under the special sanction of Buonaparte, and there is little doubt was mainly dictated by his morbid jealously of the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... He was still young, as every man of forty-three will agree, but he was getting older. A few years ago a windfall of three hundred and forty-one pounds would not have been followed by morbid self-analysis; it would have been followed by unreasoning, instinctive elation, which elation would have ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... generosity; his private was equally unstrained. The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must do it soon, to make a living, and their prospects are, at present, not very bright. Thus that nervous anxiety to hastily repair broken fortunes, and to prevent still greater ruin and distress, embraces nearly all classes, and imprints upon all the movements of the social body a morbid character. ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... and purpose, stirring his resolute ambition. Too late? Was it too late? Living or dead she was his, though he should never see her face, by some subtile power that had made them one, he knew not when nor how. He did not reason now,—abandoned himself, as morbid men only do, to this delirious hope, simple and bonny, of a home, and cheerful warmth, and this woman's love fresh and eternal: a pleasant dream at first, to be put away at pleasure. But it grew bolder, touched under-deeps in his nature of longing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... prevailing tone is gloomy, relieved by an occasional touch of brightness; and in the other it is brightness, heightened by a background of darkness. And so you can do with life, fixing attention on its sorrows, and hugging yourselves in the contemplation of these with a kind of morbid satisfaction, or bravely and thankfully and submissively and wisely resolving that you will rather seek to learn what God means by darkness, and not forgetting to look at the unenigmatical blessings, and plain, obvious mercies, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... apparently so evident, that, unless severe or of long duration, they rarely form the subject of minute inquiry. Hence these complaints are, perhaps, not so often attributed to deteriorated milk as they ought to be, although the fact of their occasionally originating from a morbid condition of this fluid, (and therefore from protracted lactation as one cause of the latter effect,) is too well established to be questioned. Dr. Underwood observes, 'has not every Physician of experience seen infants frequently thrown into tormina immediately after ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... and implacable on an allusion to some personal defect —on the obscurity of their birth—on some peculiarity of habit; and have suffered themselves to be governed in life by nervous whims and chimeras, equally fantastic and trivial. This morbid sensibility lurks in the temperament of genius, and the infection is often discovered where it is not always suspected. Cumberland declared that the sensibility of some men of genius is so quick and captious, that you must first consider whom ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... concerned have to do is to play the patriotic stop, and they stand a good chance of getting what they want. Just now there is a good bit of fleecing going on in this fashion—both of the public and the wage-workers. Even in its more healthy forms, when delayed in too long, patriotism easily becomes morbid and delays also the birth of the larger spirit which is waiting behind it. The Continental Socialists complain that their cause has hitherto made little progress in Alsace-Lorraine and Poland for the simple reason that political circumstances have over-accentuated ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation. She was pensive, the next day, and subdued; but that was not matter for remark, for she did not differ from the mournful friends about her in that respect. Clay and Washington were ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... not even exaggerated but are from the beginning imaginary; and there are no more industrious imps of evil than these sham feelings. The imps have no better field for their destructive work than in various forms of morbid, personal attachment, and in what is commonly called religion,—but which has no more to do with genuine religion than the abnormal personal likings ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... let the master into the secret of her passion, telling him unblushingly of the most intimate details of their meetings, which were often in her own house. They took advantage of the blindness of the count, who seemed almost stunned by his failure to receive the Fleece; they took a morbid delight in the danger of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... more than a schoolgirl. She had lived with Stanford White, however, on terms of precocious intimacy. Subsequently Thaw, a rich "degenerate," had married her, but the thought of Stanford White was always ready to sting him into moods of morbid jealousy. He took her one evening after dinner to a roof garden in New York. Stanford White was by accident sitting at a table in front of him. Watching his wife closely, Thaw detected, or thought he detected, signs of a continued understanding between her and her late "protector." ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... He was a morbid youth and a nervous lover. Often had he wished to tell the maiden how he longed to make her all his own. Again and again had his nerve failed him. But to-night there was a ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... that bitter feeling now? Where that morbid pain at my heart? As I drank it all seemed to pass away. Magical change! What a fool I was! What was there to make such a fuss about? Take life easy. Laugh alike at the good and bad of it. It was all a farce anyway. What would it matter a hundred years from now? ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... in her most dismal moods that this question would get itself asked within her mind, and then she would recover herself, and answer it stoutly with an indignant protest against her own morbid weakness. It would not be well that she should be away from her girls,—not though their uncle should have been twice a better uncle; not though, by her absence, they might become heiresses of all Allington. Was it not above everything to them that they should have a mother near them? And as she ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... her duties; respectful and affectionate to her parents; kind and forbearing to her brothers and sisters; not easily ruffled in temper; if her mind be prone to cheerfulness and to hopeful aspiration, instead of to the display of a morbid anxiety and dread of coming evil; if her pleasures and enjoyments be those which chiefly centre in home; if her words be characterised by benevolence, goodwill, and charity: then we say, let him not hesitate, but hasten to enshrine so precious a gem ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a profound impetus in the business world—an impetus ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... done: and to me it is also apparent that he and you were right: that his character could not have been understood without a full disclosure of what was least attractive in it: and that those defects—the product mainly of morbid physical conditions—do not really take away from his greatness, while they explain much that was dark, at least to me, in his writings." Lord Derby's opinions were not lightly formed, and he was as much guided by pure reason as ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... lay the normal machinery bare. In the first number of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Janet has discussed five cases of morbid impulse, with an explanation that is precious for my present point of view. One is a girl who eats, eats, eats, all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and gets her food from an automobile that escorts her. Another is a dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... studies:—There is genuine but unassuming poetry, which is, after all, only another way of saying fine feeling finely expressed, in Corn and Poppies, by COSMO MONKHOUSE (ELKIN MATHEWS). Much of the verse is musical, and there is throughout a vein of thoughtfulness which never degenerates into a morbid brooding. I commend particularly "Any Soul to any Body," "A Dead March," and "Mysteries," as good examples of Mr. MONKHOUSE's style. So much for verse. Let me now to prose. Like my baronial Chief, I say, "Bring me my boots!" and let them be thick, so that I may trudge safely through ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... man is a changed man, and his life is more or less delusional. In view of this fact, we should endeavor always to so surround him that his environments may not augment the morbid change in him and intensify ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... "moral insanity." Herbert Spencer supplied the key-note to this mystery of madness when he propounded the doctrine of "dissolution;" and Dr. Hughlings Jackson has since applied that hypothesis to the elucidation of morbid mental states and their correlated phenomena. When disorganizing—or, if we may borrow an expression from the terminology of geological science, denuding—disease attacks the mental organism, it, so to say, strips off, ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... this affair concerns you more nearly than you imagine. Don't neglect her; she has a powerful temperament, and enjoys violent health; all this reacts upon her. Nature has its laws, which, when disregarded, compel obedience. She may get into a morbid state, which would cause you bitterly to repent having neglected her. If you love her, why, love her: but if you don't love her, and nevertheless desire to preserve the mother of your children, the resolution to come to is a matter of hygiene, but ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... on the first of June. If you want a house-party at Shenstone this summer, you may invite your guests for the first of July. Lady Ingleby will be at home again by then, fully able to maintain her reputation as a hostess of unequalled charm, graciousness, and popularity. Morbid self-consciousness is a condition of mind from which you have hitherto been so completely free, that this unexpected attack has altogether unnerved you, and requires prompt and uncompromising measures.... ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... monstrous that she, Hilda, the secretary, the priestess, should share this uncivil apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past life as morbid. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... irritable tribe, from which no modern poet but Walter Scott has been able wholly to escape. While he was bearing himself thus manfully to outward appearance, inwardly he was scrutinizing himself and others with a morbid sensitiveness. In the heyday of his Edinburgh popularity, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted friends, what he repeats to other correspondents, that he had long been at pains to take a true measure ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... lower bowel causes, as I have pointed out, excessive activity and thereby excessive nutrition of the tissues involved in the morbid process. But sphincter ani gymnastics have been suggested by some one who thinks chronic constipation is owing to a lack of muscular activity of the lower bowels; and the ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... for the first time in my life I know myself to be—a coward. Last night I lay in bed with my eyes shut to see how it would seem to be blind. It was a pretty morbid thing to do—and ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... the Christ of Andernach, as the old woman in spectacles told it to Flemming. It made a painful impression on his sick and morbid soul; and he felt now for the first time in full force, how great is ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... honest men was worth, even to the dead, he waited to hear one word. But he never heard it. He had heard other things, however, but always veiled, like the menacing outbreak of old man Jocelyn—nothing tangible, nothing that he could answer or refute. At times he became morbid, believing he could read reproach in men's eyes, detect sarcasm in friendly voices. Then for months he would shun men, as he was doing now, living alone month after month in the great, silent house ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to be owned by nice little girl-mothers, and all for the church organ, the minister's salary and such like. Of this description was the church fair held in Brookville to raise money to pay the Reverend Wesley Elliot. He came early, and haunted the place like a morbid spirit. He was both angry and shamed that such means must be employed to pay his just dues, but since it had to be ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... quartz-reef at all, for it seemed quite possible that he had, as the track-grader suggested, merely fancied that he had done so, and the man's manner had borne out that supposition. Cut off from the whisky, he had now and then fallen into fits of morbid moodiness, during which he seemed very far from sure about the gold. This had naturally occasioned Weston a good deal of anxiety. He had thrown up his occupation and sunk his last dollar in the venture, and the finding of the quartz-reef would, he ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... single exception of Marshall. He was induced to undertake the office of Chief Justice very reluctantly, by the strong personal urgency of Mr. Webster. Mr. Webster used to give a humorous account of the difficulty he had in overcoming the morbid scruples of the great simple-hearted intellectual giant. He found Mr. Shaw in his office in a cloud of tobacco-smoke. Mr. Webster did not himself smoke, and was at some disadvantage during the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... delusions which now threaten to fatally undermine her health. Even taking matters at their worst—even assuming that Mr. Aldersley has died in the Arctic seas—it will be less injurious to her to discover this positively, than to leave her mind to feed on its own morbid superstitions and speculations, for weeks and weeks together, while the next news from the Expedition is on its way to England. In one word, I want you to be in a position, before the week is out, to put Miss Burnham's present conviction to a practical test. Suppose you could ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... if it lasted his life out, he would never dream of evading or lessening it. In this fine fibre of loyalty, Stephen White and Mercy Philbrick were alike: though it was in him more an exalted sentiment; in her, simply an organic necessity. In him, it would always have been in danger of taking morbid shapes and phases; of being over-ridden and distorted at any time by selfishness or wickedness in its object, as it had been by his selfish mother. In Mercy, it was on a higher and healthier plane. Without being a shade less loyal, she would be far clearer-sighted; would render, but not surrender; ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... poisoning by chloral hydrate, the symptoms may be summarized as those of profound coma. The treatment is to give a stimulant emetic such as mustard; to keep up the temperature by hot bottles, &c.; to prevent or disturb the patient's morbid sleep by the injection of hot strong coffee into the rectum; and by shouting, flipping with towels, &c.; to use artificial respiration in extreme cases; and to inject strychnine. Strychnine is much less likely, however, to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... collection of animal and human skulls. All this, however, was rather an accidental outbreak of exuberant intellectual activity than serious and well-directed study. He was full of the vague and morbid aspirations ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... kindness towards this good friend in her heart, of which she herself was not aware? She tried to detect it—to weigh it for what it was really worth. But it lay too deep to be discovered and estimated, if it did really exist—if it had any sounder origin than her own morbid fancy. In the broad light of day, in the little bustling duties of life, she forgot it again. She could think of what she ought to wear on the wedding day; she could even try privately how her ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... crime to have based the more sordid part of her narrative upon her brother's transgressions. This is sheer nonsense. She wrote Wuthering Heights because she was impelled thereto, and the book, with all its morbid force and fire, will remain, for all time, as a monument of the most striking genius that nineteenth century womanhood has given us. It was partly her life in Yorkshire—the local colour was mainly derived from her brief experience as a governess ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... confined for five years—from the age of fourteen to that of nineteen—in the rigid and aristocratic convent of Picpus, she had been enabled to see much of Paris life, during the waning epoch of Louis XVI's reign and the times of morbid fashionable excitement immediately preceding the great Revolution. Her natural disposition, and the curiosity incident to her previous Colonial training, led her to mingle with keen interest in all the forms of French existence, ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... beneath him, and her kitchen, with its usually open door, was entered from the staircase. Thus, whenever the young man went out, he found himself obliged to pass under the enemy's fire, which always produced a morbid terror, humiliating him and making him knit his brows. He owed her some money and felt afraid ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... This, and the increasing knowledge of aseptic technique, has brought the mortality from this operation to less than 3% for the mother and about 5% for the child; and every year it is being advised more freely for a larger number of morbid conditions, and with increasingly favourable results. Craniotomy, i.e. crushing the head of the foetus to reduce its size, is now very rarely performed on the living child, but symphysiotomy, i.e. the division ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to mental pleasure and pain you would pronounce morbid on account of its intensity. The happiness we enjoy in the society of those who are congenial, or near and dear to us through family ties, is inconceivable to you. The touch of my mother's hand carries a ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... that the brave, little, fat father was carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the girl's dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face, her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of something ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... possession'[BR]—the being in the power or possession of a betraying spirit; and the definite sign of such insanity is delight in witnessing pain, usually accompanied by an instinct that gloats over or plays with physical uncleanness or disease, and always by a morbid egotism. It is not to be recognized for demoniacal power so much by its viciousness, as its paltriness,—the taking pleasure in minute, contemptible, and loathsome things.[BS] Now, in the middle of the gallery of the Brera at Milan, there is an elaborate study of a dead Christ, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... sensation that joy almost killed Nell's father. But Pan Tarkowski, though he was an exceptionally self-controlled person, in the first moments after the receipt of the despatch, knelt in prayer and began to beseech God that the intelligence should not prove to be a delusion, a morbid chimera, bred from sorrow, longing, and pain. Why, they had both toiled so hard to learn that the children were even alive! Mr. Rawlinson had despatched to the Sudan whole caravans, while Pan Tarkowski, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... your own death as an exception to the rule. Besides, when sensation had left you—the soul, the spirit, whatever you liked to call it—what did it matter what afterwards became of your body? It was, then, in reality, nothing but lumber, fresh nourishment for the soil; and it was morbid to care so much how it was treated, just because it had once been your tenement, when it was now as worthless ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... an unfortunate accident," said the doctor, with mock seriousness, which was taken up by the Scotsman, who remarked in his best drawl—"May his soul ken rest!" and they all shouted with infamous laughter, but I listened with a morbid interest ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Hetherington, of morbid and woeful countenance, was one who looked across a world glorious with spring sunshine, as if he saw nothing but the earwigs, and black-beetles, and creepy, crawly things of existence, and he promised readily to pray also: ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... so! Hurt you! I hurt you, my love, my love! I had hoped no pang of the lightest sort would ever reach you through me, and now I've grieved you sorely! It's all due to my morbid fancies, dear. I could not ask to sing to you lest you should not like my singing: I think I should have gone mad if you had not liked my voice, Ross I have so hoped it would be pleasant to your ear! Do you like it, Ross? Is my voice ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... doctor on this point; whereupon he cited those visions and dreams, which, according to the light of science as it now shines, demonstrate that Bunyan's digestion must have been morbid. And, forthwith, he overwhelmed me with learned instances from Galen and Hippocrates, from Spurzheim and Binns, from Locke and Beattie, from Malebranche and Bertholini, from Darwin and Descartes, from Charlevoix and Berkeley, from Heraclitus and Blumenbach, from Priestley and Abercrombie; in fact, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... in that healthy hatred of the affectation with which so much good art is husked. In more recent times Punch did not ignore the fine decorative qualities of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's art, though he plainly loathed the morbid ugliness of much ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... this remark was a ringing laugh, in which the others, in the inevitable reaction from the morbid gloom, joined with a heartiness that was most annoying ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... once more at the familiar spot which had so often been the goal of his short walks with Willy. Scarcely ten months had elapsed since he had looked at it for the last time, but his morbid mental vision prolonged that time to an eternity. He felt like the sultan of the Eastern legend, who fancied he had lived an entire lifetime, while, in reality, he sank for one moment into his bath in ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... falsifies the perspective. When from the dark recesses of the apartment one perceives at a certain distance this diminutive landscape dimly lighted up, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not oneself the victim of some morbid illusion; and if it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the wrong end ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... whether bondage is to cease throughout the world; but whether it is compatible with a free government, such as we claim our own to be. In other words, is Slavery in the United States to-day on trial? We must all abandon our morbid sensitiveness and come squarely to the consideration of the vital point, to wit, can this great Republic be held together while the 'peculiar system' exists in a part of it? No matter who first posed this ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the vagaries of an excited imagination; and, laid open to the inroads of delusion as her mind had long been by perpetual tamperings with spiritual ideas and phantoms, she may have lost the balance of reason and sanity. This, added to a morbid sensibility, probably gave a deep intensity to her voice, action, and countenance. The effect upon the excited multitude must have been very great. Although she lived to realize the utter falseness of all her ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... because you have got out of health since you came here; you have not been able to enjoy life. But you are better, you know. You are assured that you have good hope of coming back recovered. I devoutly trust you may. Forget any morbid feelings that may have oppressed you. The place is not to blame. Well, and these letters—I only see two. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... mere sentimentalism, when put into cold print, are not stimulating to the imagination; moods and states of feeling often approaching the morbid, their oral expression needs the reenforcement of voice, tone, countenance, the whole attitude. They are for this reason most difficult of translation and when rendered literally into a foreign speech often become meaningless. The figures employed also, like the watergourds ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... a handsome sandstone residence, standing in its own grounds. On Kent's arrival he found that the police had already drawn a cordon around it with cords. Groups of morbid curiosity-seekers hung about it in twos and threes, some of them in fours and fives. Policemen were leaning against the fence in all directions. They wore that baffled look so common to the detective force of the metropolis. "It seems to me," remarked one ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of any great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of disease—some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so high an order as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail to be in general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical inference which would argue that because some ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the enterprise, the merchant admiral being but an indifferent seaman. Michel, whose skill was great, held a high command and the title of Rear-Admiral. He was a man of a sensitive temperament, easily piqued on the point of honor. His morbid and irritable nerves were wrought to the pitch of frenzy by the reproaches of treachery and perfidy with which the French prisoners assailed him, while, on the other hand, he was in a state of continual rage at the fancied neglect and contumely of his English ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the Antichrist (Aphorism 43):—"At present nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals,—FOR PATHOS OF DISTANCE...Our politics are MORBID from this want of courage!—The aristocracy of character has been undermined most craftily by the lie of the equality of souls; and if the belief in the 'privilege of the many,' makes revolutions and WILL CONTINUE TO MAKE them, it is Christianity, let us not doubt it, it is CHRISTIAN valuations, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea: ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the material ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to this possibility with a hope that was passionate in its intensity. She had a morbid dread of separation, albeit the danger she feared seemed to have sunk into obscurity during the weeks that had intervened. If there yet remained unrest in the State, it was below the surface. The Rajah came and went in his usual romantic way, played polo with his British friends, danced ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... the convent where I visited you, you became quite ill at the contemplation of my hand, which you declared was like the hand of your deceased husband; and now—this same foolish idea is returning, when I hoped it had gone, with other morbid notions of an oversensitive brain, forever. Perhaps you think I am ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... every one who has attained real greatness. What a pity to destroy time-old illusions! Some prefer to think of their artist heroes dreaming their lives away in the hectic cafes of Pesth or buried in the melancholy, absinthe and paresis of some morbid cabaret of Paris. As a matter of fact, the best known pianists live a totally different life—a life of grind, grind, grind—incessant study, endless practice and ceaseless search for means to raise their artistic standing. In some quiet country villa, miles away from the center of unlicensed ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... her woe to arraign the Most High; and then came dark thoughts, the thoughts of death—everlasting death—that human beings returned as earth to earth, and then all was over. Amidst thoughts morbid and impious as these were there could be nothing to console her, and she sank into the darkest depth ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... horrible fascination of their own. I have even known them prolonged to gratify a morbid thirst for excitement; but I think Miss Bruce was chiefly anxious to be released from her precarious position, and to get rid of her visitor as soon as she could. Even her resolute nerves were beginning to give way, and she knew her own powers well enough to mistrust a protracted trial of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... as an incongruity into my father's life, and in spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat and made ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Duncan, "I don't want to set up an asylum! What's the good of books on insanity and morbid ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... than Judith wished to learn it. Her mother made the advances towards a marriage, to the surprise, not to say horror of her daughter, and she actually found a relief when she discovered traces of what struck her as insanity—or a morbid desperation, bordering on that dire calamity—in the earlier letters of that ill-fated woman. The answers of Hovey were coarse and illiterate, though they manifested a sufficient desire to obtain the hand of a woman of singular personal attractions, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the past darkened even that bright day, and built in the crystal air a barrier that he could not pass. They would give him a place at their rustic board, but he could not take it. He knew that he would be a discord in their harmony, and their innocent merriment smote his morbid nature with almost intolerable pain. With a gesture indicating immeasurable regret, he turned and hastened away to his lonely home. As he mounted the little piazza his steps were arrested. The exposed end of a post that supported the inner side of its roof formed ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Morbid sensitiveness requires heroic treatment. A sufferer who wishes to overcome it must take himself in hand as determinedly as he would if he wished to get control of a quick temper, or to rid himself of a habit of lying, or stealing, or drinking, or any other defect ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... don't," he cried boisterously. "You are sound as a bell, strong as a young horse. Why, you ought to be proud of yourself instead of fidgeting with a lot of morbid fancies. You have been for years and years a boy, fresh—larky, as you would say—full of mischief, as ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Lennox regarded his model with morbid interest. A subtle change was perceptible in her. Her rich color deepened, she held herself more erect, her eye had a larger pride and light. She was a finer creature than ever, and yet—she came at his call. He never ceased to wonder at it. Sometimes the knowledge of his power stirred within ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Science of Living he discharged his physician and came under my personal care. These ulcers were treated with the idea of giving them the same rest as if each had been the end of a fractured bone. To relieve pain, to hold the bowel still, and to abolish the morbid hunger, a few doses with the hypodermic ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse attractions of a young farmer in the neighbouring valley of Shanmoor. He was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains of heart and conscience might have been interfused ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... little, the sting of the master's whip falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound at once plaintive and menacing, danced, their dance, at first slow and melancholy, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... qu'un seul malheur, celui d'etre ne." Nevertheless, the avowed joyousness bred by the laughing tides and purple skies of Greece is certainly more conducive to human happiness, though at times even Greeks, such as Theognis and Palladas, lapsed into a morbid pessimism comparable to that of Tolstoy. Metrodorus, however, more fully represented the true Greek spirit when he sang, "All things are good in life" ([Greek: panta gar esthla bio]). The Roman pagan, Juvenal, gave a fairly satisfactory ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... situation, where his ambition would have full scope, required a much larger fortune than his father possessed. He clothed himself in what he believed to be resignation and contentment, but which was in truth a morbid sensitiveness to his lot in life, which he imagined poverty would separate from every other. Association with Herbert Hamilton, to whom in frankness he confided these secret feelings, did much towards removing their bitterness; ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... fondle it in my embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
