"Obsessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Edwin Clayhanger and Charlie Orgreave as being about twenty-two, and tried in her imagination to endow the mature George Cannon with their youth and their simplicity and their freshness. She was saddened and overawed; not wrathful, not obsessed by a sense ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to a point in the evolution of Self most people find life quite exciting and thrilling. But when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb—something has been lost. From this numbed condition ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... murderer? A passive conniver at theft? No, that were blasphemy! Yet, if He permitted such things—? No, that couldn't be, either. It was all an abominable enigma, as Aleta said. Unless—the thought came startlingly—it were all a dream, a nightmare. Thus Kant, the great philosopher, believed. Obsessed by the idea, he paused before a book-store. Its show window prominently displayed Francisco ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... The whole world seemed obsessed by the moonlight. Its white radiance, when Mrs. Martens at last turned off the glaring bulbs, seemed to cast a spell over sea and land. She stepped out on the porch, and was awed by the beauty of the wide sweep of shining sky and sea. Then, far below on the hidden road, ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... believe that the leaders of this Jewish conspiracy set up the Socialist movement and fostered it, while at the same time they enlisted their ablest minds to defeat it. Surely for the normal mind that is not obsessed this is a theory too absurd ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... must marry Owen, and under this conclusion she stopped like one who has come face to face with a blank wall. But did she love him well enough to marry him? She loved him, but was her present love as intense as the love that had obsessed her whole nature in Paris six years ago? She tried to think that it was, and found casual consolation in the thought that if she were not so mad about him now as she was then, her love was deeper; it had become a ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... "Yes. He is obsessed by a fixed idea, and must be given an opportunity to test the truth of that idea. The shock of finding it a false one may restore him to his normal condition. He believes that he shot Mr. Hasbrouck with no other guidance ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... that of maladjustment in thought. Protestantism is still suffering from the effects of extreme individualism in religious belief. Strong leaders, obsessed with some one variation in interpretation of the Scriptures, have pulled off from the main body of the church and have started independent organizations committed to the development of the particular interpretation they have made. When once these ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... Great Shepherd. Well, I do not feel that Love; or Charity, or Hope are expressed in this way in Watts, and that the ethical spirit is not fundamental with him as the religious spirit is with Millet. He has an intellectual conception of his moral idea, but is not emotionally obsessed by it, and the basis of a man's art is not to be found in his intellectual conceptions, which are light things, but in his character or rather in his temperament. We know, for all the poetical circumstances of Rossetti's pictures, what desire it ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... when he began to muse. What a fitting companion she would make for a man of his rank and dignity! That she was socially ambitious and obsessed with a passion for display he well knew. She was not yet twenty but the disparity in their ages,—he was about thirty-seven and a widower with three sons,—would be offset by the disparity of their stations. No one in the city kept a finer stable of horses nor gave more costly dinners than ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Northern Africa. I did not know one word of Arabic, but it happened that in garrison at Lyon I had taken at the Faculte des Lettres, a course with Berlioux,—a very erudite geographer no doubt, but obsessed by one idea, the influence the Greek and Roman civilizations had exercised on Africa. This detail of my life was enough for Dom Granger. He provided me straightway with Berber vocabularies by Venture, by Delaporte, by ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... still, he was of low birth, a crime in the eyes of nobles and courtiers who for nearly half a century had seen the prestige of the Chancery enhanced by the lordly airs and whims of Kaunitz. Fear of courtly intrigues ever obsessed the mind of Thugut; and thus, whenever the horizon darkened, this coast-hugging pilot at once made for the nearest haven. In particular, as the recovery of Belgium in the year 1793 brought no financial gain, but unending vistas of war, he sought other means of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... locking of the door would probably have been regarded by the villagers as equivalent to a reflection on their honesty, and should the passage of time ultimately bring to the ancient rectory a fresh parson, obsessed by conventional opinion concerning the uses of bolts and bars, it is probable that the inhabitants of Crailing will manifest their disapproval in the simple and direct fashion of the Devon rustic—by placidly ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... described the field for educators. The latter have failed to seize the chance in the present industrial arrangement for the development of "the originating, choosing power" in the working man because they have been obsessed by the business appreciation of the working man's power of adaptation. It is because they labor under this obsession that they turn industrial education into industrial training whenever they include industry in their curricula. Educators know that there is ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... through the tangle, keeping well hidden. Once on the bank of the stream all above was concealed from view, but I listened in vain for any sound indicative of pursuit. The night was mysteriously still, unbroken, even the air motionless. Obsessed now by the one controlling impulse to get away safely, I drove the horse into the water, and as he reached swimming depth, grasped a stirrup leather, and compelled him to strike out for the opposite shore. It was not a hard struggle, nor were we long at it, although ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... found. Slaves of your slaves, caged in your furnished rooms, Ushered to meals when reft of appetite— Though hungry, bound to wait a stated hour— Your dearest contemplation broken off By the appointed summons to your bath; Racked with more thought for those whom you may flog Than for those dear; obsessed by your possessions With a dull round of stale anxieties;— Soon maintenance grows the extreme reach of hope For those held in respect, as in a vice, By citizens of whom they are the pick. Of men the least bond is the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... man-made mechanism of great nicety, may readily be thrown into confusion, its exquisite balance disturbed, its functioning confounded. Thirst, near-exhaustion, severe bodily distress and, on top of all, blood-lust anger made Alan Howard over into another man. He was possessed, obsessed. As the night wore on endlessly he created for himself visions; he came a thousand times upon the Indian; he sank his fingers and thumbs into a corded throat; he beat with his fists at the pulp of a face. He grew accustomed to his own voice, muttering ceaselessly. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... those on the other hand, who censured him did so because, obsessed by their hate or dread of him, they failed to eliminate their imaginary tyrant or dictator, their fixed idea of the man from consideration of the immense value and far-seeing statesmanship of his act. To such men it was but ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... the sentimental Agathe. She playfully scolds the nail which she is hammering into the wall again for so rudely dropping the old ranger to the floor, and seeks to dispel the melancholy which has obsessed her cousin by singing songs about the bad companionship of the blues and the humors of courtship. She succeeds, in a measure, and Agathe confesses that she had felt a premonition of danger ever since a pious Hermit, to whom she had gone for counsel in the course ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... had persuaded his new friend to finish the night among the cafes of Montmartre. The sudden change from the overheated restaurant to the cold outside increased the effects of the alcohol and Fandor realized that he himself was far from sober. As his companion seemed to be obsessed with the idea of seeing the Fountains, the journalist piloted him to the Place de ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... to make safe the Sinai front. There was an all-important meeting of Turkish Generals in the latter half of August, and Jemal stood to his guns. Von Falkenhayn could not get him to abate one item of his demands, and there can be no doubt that Falkenhayn, obsessed though he was with the importance of getting Bagdad, could see that Jemal was right. He admitted that the Yilderim operation was only practicable if it had freedom for retirement through the removal of the danger on the Palestine ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here, perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we have ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... unreasonable; heart's blood was rushing about his system inconveniently; his pulse was hammering—why? He knew why; this sudden vision of a girl reminded him—took him back—he cut through that idea swiftly; he was ill, unbalanced, obsessed with one memory, but he would not allow himself ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... daily contact. They could defy him to withdraw his respect now; and, without knowing it, they did. He was left brooding, pained, bewildered. The explanation was simply this: he had failed to perceive that the grandiose idea of the ninefold organ fund had seized, fired, and obsessed the imaginations of the Wesleyan community, and that under the unwonted poetic stimulus they were capable of acting quite differently from ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Bakuma was obsessed by terror inspired by the fact that Bakahenzie had discovered her presence; the inherent awe of the witch-doctor which had been temporarily allayed by the presence of the white, was revived, as well as the inevitability ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... informed her. He made no attempt to analyze his feeling for Arlee Beecher. She had enchanted him in those two days that he had known her. She had obsessed his thoughts in those two days of her disappearance. Now that he was aware of her peril every selfish thought was overwhelmed in burning indignation. He told himself that he would do as much for any girl in ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... business of the conference related to ore deposits and not to the dangers of the traffic, the men were so obsessed with the latter fact, that it crept out in their talk in spite of the Admiral's obvious displeasure at such confession of fear. I particularly marked the outspoken frankness of one, Captain Grauble, whose vessel was the next one scheduled to depart ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... soonest. Nine out of ten children—particularly present-day children, whose doting parents encourage their every desire—are fonder of cramming their bellies than of playing cricket or skipping; games soon weary them, but buns and chocolates never. The truth is, buns and chocolate have obsessed them. They think of them all day, and dream of them all night. It is buns and chocolates! wherever and whenever they turn or look—buns and chocolates! This greed soon develops, as the occult brain intended it should; enforced physical labour, or athletics, or even ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and injustice of it all. The baby at La Panne—why should it go through life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer—why should he have died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion that dead men ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the timid lad at once became passionate, engrossed—nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of somber reticence had settled over him, he had been impressed with the majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... wisdom,' of 'walking worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing,' of 'fruit in every good work,' and now of 'all power,' and lastly of 'all patience and longsuffering.' These are not instances of being obsessed with a word, but each of them has its own appropriate force, and here the comprehensive completeness of the strength available for our many-sided weakness is marvellously revealed. There is 'infinite riches in a narrow room.' All power means every ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of all detail—his power to palliate—to guard—would be near the semblance of the tenderness he would have shown to Alixe. His old habit of mind caused him to call it an obsession, but he admitted he was obsessed. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... drifts, while the congealed air pelted icy particles of frozen moisture into the confused uproar upon forest and field. Fear that the child had started out to find her mother and had been overtaken by the blizzard obsessed Waldstricker. He sent messengers in all directions, and himself rode furiously through the snow inquiring everywhere. Finding no trace of her at the neighboring houses, he instituted a systematic search ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... exhaustion of starvation; and the successful effort to keep away from the studio building till four o'clock called for all his will power. Suppose the boy blundered, or wasn't in time. Suppose the girl really had not eaten anything since last Tuesday! These thoughts, and similar ones, obsessed him. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... They have lived, they have eaten, drunk, loved, bathed, suffered, talked, danced in the night and rejoiced in the dawn, warmed, in fact, both hands before the fire of life, but still they are not ready to depart. For they are behindhand with time, obsessed with so many worlds, so much to do, the petty done, the undone vast. It depressed Milton when he turned twenty-three; it depresses all those with vain and ambitious temperaments at least once a year. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... expect to get into touch with the enemy. But try as he might, and tired as he was, sleep refused to visit him, and the harder he tried the wider awake did he become. He also found that he was rapidly becoming obsessed by a horrible feeling that all was not right, that there was some unknown but terrible danger hovering over the sleeping camp. He strove to dispossess his mind of such fancies by assuring himself that sentries ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... sang, till October, 1884, when he died. He was twice married, the first time to Kate Duckworth, an English contralto, known on the platform as Mlle. Morensi, and, after her death, to Isabella McCullough, an American soprano. Richard Grant White's mind was still obsessed by memories of Salvi, Benedetti, and Mario when Brignoli was basking in the sunshine of popular favor, and his estimate of the tenor in The Century Magazine for June, 1882, is scarcely flattering either to the singer or the public that liked him. It was Mr. White's observation that Brignoli ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... animal and vegetable world, not a single species has been traced to another. Until species in the animal and vegetable world can be linked together, why should we assume without proof that man is a blood relative of any lower form of life? Those who become obsessed with the idea that they have brute blood in their veins devote their time to searching for missing links in the hope of connecting man with life below him; why do they prefer a jungle ancestry to creation by the Almighty for a purpose ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... We had both been so obsessed with the scene at Mrs. Dane's that we had not thought of ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a self-helped man, if ever there was one. When less than fourteen years of age, he left school and started to earn his own living. He never afterward returned to school. In adolescence, his eager mind was obsessed by the glamor of the sea, so he began life as a sailor. After a few years came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... a terrible thing to be obsessed by a milkman. To Constable Plimmer's disordered imagination it seemed that, dating from this interview, the world became one solid milkman. Wherever he went, he seemed to run into this milkman. If he was in the front road, this milkman—Alf Brooks, it appeared, was his loathsome name—came ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... nothing; but what could she do? Mashenka could not bear the sight of the lady of the house nor of her little room; she felt stifled and wretched here. She was so disgusted with Fedosya Vassilyevna, who was so obsessed by her illnesses and her supposed aristocratic rank, that everything in the world seemed to have become coarse and unattractive because this woman was living in it. Mashenka jumped up from ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Sundays. But now the good lady was in the throes of making herself a silk dress for best—a black silk. It was the thing she had longed for most, and now she could satisfy the craving for clothes that had so obsessed her. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... endure since his wedding, these occasions, upon which he had to sit close beside her in a motor, were the worst. An ordinary young man, not in love with her, would have found something intoxicating in her atmosphere—and how much more this poor Tristram, who was passionately obsessed. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... among them. These are a grass which crams the clothes and feet with maddening needles; once in they seemed there 'for duration.' The soldier out East knows them for his worst foe on a march. Lest we should be obsessed with these, we were infested with sandflies and mosquitoes. But large black ants were the principal line in vermin. At dinner they swarmed over us. Man after man dropped his plate and leapt into a dervish-dance, frenziedly slapping his nose and ears. ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... that there is a power over them, they deny it, and in the process they misinterpret the various things of life as physical things, not the spiritual things that they represent. For instance, love: men in many "advanced," that is to say, self-obsessed, civilizations, view it only in its physical materializations, but not in its spiritual context. When they see the results of love, romance especially, they do not understand that the romance is only the fruit of the spiritual essence of love, but instead think that the romance is love. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... natural generosity survived. Royally courageous, loyal and straightforward; to her personal enemies almost magnanimous; to the poor and afflicted pitiful; loving her country passionately: she was blind to the forces at work in the world, obsessed with the idea of one supreme duty, and she set herself, as she deemed, to do battle with Antichrist by the only methods she knew, though they were alien to her natural disposition, facing hatred and ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... just seen Atherton. Of course I didn't repeat our conversation of this morning, and I'm glad I didn't. He almost makes me think you are right, Walter. He's obsessed by the fear of Burroughs. Why, he even told me that Burroughs had gone so far as to take a leaf out of his book, so to speak, get in touch with the Eugenics Bureau as if to follow his footsteps, but really to pump them about Atherton ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... And instantly he was obsessed with the flaming color of that man's unappeased passion. Red—red! The hovels were spattered with the red clay. The man, the skinny, wretched creature who begged for a moment of his gracious mercy ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the more trivial causes of complaint, but Mr. Blakiston had too big a mind to suffer himself to be obsessed by the accidentals. He was fighting, and consciously fighting, a much bigger battle. Dr. Arnold had fought and won it at Rugby some years before, but the path at Giggleswick was not therefore the easier. The real point at issue was the 1844 Scheme for ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... his way through the press, his clinched fists waving over his head, was young, pallid, typically an academic devotee of radicalism, a frenetic disciple, obsessed by furor loquendi He was calling to the mob, trying to rouse followers. "You have been standing here, freezing in the night, damning tyrants, boasting what you would do. Why don't you do it? Do you let a smirking ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... there cancelled) by passages in Burn in Exile (vol. i.) and in Ryecroft. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of Veranilda, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen—after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... idea obsessed Mrs. Dalton, and that was to hold on till the assassin could be secured. He should not escape to remain a menace ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... their shelter, their chief article of barter. Bereft of these and deprived at the same time of the supreme joy of existence, the chase, bitten with cold, starved with hunger, fearful of the future, they offered fertile soil for the seeds of rebellion. A government more than usually obsessed with stupidity, as all governments become at times, remained indifferent to appeals, deaf to remonstrances, blind to danger signals, till through the remote and isolated settlements of the vast west and ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... personality; case after case where apparitions played a vital part in the plot which was brought to me to investigate. I'll tell you this, Captain: I, personally, never saw an apparition, never was obsessed by premonitions, never received any communications from the outer void. But I have had to do with those who undoubtedly did. Therefore I listen with all seriousness and respect to what ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... averted his eyes from the irreparable present of the war and its dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March on! This ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... their power. It became a race between Allied and enemy countries as to who first should attain the mastery of the air. The British nation, as usual, started well behind in the race, and their handicap would have been increased to a dangerous extent had Germany not been obsessed by the possibilities of the air-ship as opposed to the aeroplane. Fortunately for us the Zeppelin, as has been described in an earlier chapter, failed to bring about the destruction anticipated by its inventor, and so we gained breathing space for catching ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... Maroons were, and when well away put their horses to a canter and got into the hills. Once in the woods, however, they rode alertly, and Dyck's eyes were everywhere. He was quick to see a bush move, to observe the flick of a branch, to catch the faintest sound of an animal origin. He was obsessed with anxiety, for he had a dark fear that some ill had happened to the two. His blood almost dried in his veins when he thought of the fate which had followed the capture of ladies in other islands like Haiti ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rare editor who rightly gauges his public psychology. Perhaps that is why, in the enormous growth of the modern magazine, there have been produced so few successful editors. The average editor is obsessed with the idea of "giving the public what it wants," whereas, in fact, the public, while it knows what it wants when it sees it, cannot clearly express its wants, and never wants the thing that it does ask for, although it thinks it ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... frenzy she rushed on, tearing her dress, her hands, her hair. Violence of some kind was imperative. All at once a pale gleaming open space, shimmering under the stars, lay before her. It was water. Deep Lake! And instantly a hideous terrible longing to destroy herself obsessed her. She had no fear. She could have welcomed the cold, slimy depths that meant oblivion. But could they really bring oblivion? A year ago she would have believed so, and would no longer have endured such agony. She had changed. A cursed strength had come to her, and it was ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... store sidled in between a bakeshop that six days a week poured forth sweet hot breath, and an undertaking establishment with a white-satin infant's coffin de luxe tilted in the window. The sight of it caught Lilly like a pain. That peculiar power of an obsessed mind to see in everything its own state reflected had set in. Queer that this infant's coffin should tilt at her. A bouncing youngster leaned out of its perambulator ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... one another, and that their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected?" [Footnote: Time and Free Will, p. 100 (Fr. p. 76).] Such a duration is Real Time. Unfortunately, we, obsessed by the idea of space, introduce it unwittingly and set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them alongside one another; in a word, we project them into space and we express duree in terms of extensity and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... comforted. He wondered how, in the old days that were only yesterdays, people could have endured separation without any means of communication, and he blessed the name of Marconi as cordially as he cursed the name of Brutgal. To exasperate him further, the rest of the day seemed obsessed by Victor Mahr. He was in the elevator that took him up to his office; he was at the club in the afternoon; he was a guest at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in the evening, and was placed opposite Marcus Gard. Despite his desire to let the man alone, he could ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... religious principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices; at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates to ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... it all," Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... voicing his gratitude than in merely seeing her again. He was not sure but that she would resent his thanks; nevertheless, it was necessary to seek her out, for already her image was nebulous, and he could not piece together a satisfactory picture of her. She obsessed his thoughts, but his intense desire to fix her indelibly therein had defeated its purpose and had blurred the photograph. Who was she? What was she? Where was she going? What did she think of him? The possibility that she might leave Dyea before answering those questions spurred him into ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... OBSESSED, p.p. Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... girl roughly, and simultaneously there burst into the hut a raging demon of jealousy. Naratu had come. Kicking, scratching, striking, biting, she routed the terrified Usanga in short order, and so obsessed was she by her desire to inflict punishment upon her unfaithful lord and master that she quite forgot the object of ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a hermit when he discovered that a few drinks completely removed this feeling. From that time on he became a steady drinker, with now and then a short period when he would try to stop drinking, only to resume when he found himself obsessed again by ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... got over the crisis and being on the fair road to recovery,—children recover quickly,—my heart turned towards home—and a longing to get back obsessed me. I could think of nothing but home, now that Diana's immediate need of me was over. She begged me to stay with her. To fail her at such a moment was a great grief to me, but I could make no further sacrifice. ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... She was as tidy as the desk, as obsessed by order, as wooden. She placed a pad before the small ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... predicament. She had always been an emotional girl of strong will and self-restraint. She had always longed for she knew not what—perhaps freedom. Certain places had haunted her. She had felt that something should have happened to her there. Yet nothing ever had happened. Certain books had obsessed her, even when a child, and often to her mother's dismay; for these books had been of wild places and life on the sea, adventure, and bloodshed. It had always been said of her that she should have been ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... confess had somewhat irritated me. Thus wrote Wells: "Frankly I grieve over Boston as a great waste of leisure and energy, as a frittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too much to the past.... We are obsessed by the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness."[150] Pondering this iconoclastic utterance, how delightful it is to light upon evidence in the way of well-worn volumes that, since 1807, men ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived, and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand your 'What next?'—'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of all ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... me by the same physician, serves to throw a light upon the connection of vital and physical energies. The doctor in question was treating a patient, who was apparently "obsessed," by means of electricity. The galvanometer needle showed what slight variations in the current there were during the course of the treatment. In the middle of the process, while the patient was conversing with the doctor, she was suddenly "obsessed." Coincidental ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... a young cow-puncher, who boasted of being a "homemade" athlete, and would take a back seat for nobody, least of all young Merriwell. He was not exactly "cracked" on the subject of his prowess in athletic sports, but his views were certainly warped. Obsessed with the idea that it was his duty to take Merriwell down a peg. Blunt was continually, and in the most weird and wonderful ways, contriving to force Merry into tests of strength ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... from prison walls. Just then he was psychologically incapable of standing up for himself as a real man ought. His sense of innocence had not been able to withstand that feeling of intimidation with which a prisoner becomes obsessed. Right along with him was the man who had been persistently his guard in the prison. Wagg's narrow rut of occupation had had its full effect on his nature. His striated eyeballs had a vitreous look; they were as hard as marbles. ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... interview had not lasted three minutes and I went away obsessed by a feeling of astonishment. Mr. Rayne had not cross-questioned me, as I naturally had expected him to do, nor had he asked for my credentials. In addition he had fixed my salary at six hundred pounds, without even inquiring what wages ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... obsessed with the stupidity of the American mass and more particularly with the grossness (as he sees it) of New ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. For Borrow was not a man of science—a philologist, a folk-lorist ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... too. There is only one great difficulty," he went on, "in the consolidation of my party, and that is to get a little more breadth into the views of these men who represent the leading industries. They are obsessed with the duties that they owe to their own artificers and the labour connected with the particular industry they represent. It is hard to make them see the importance of any other subject. Yet we need these very men as lawmakers. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pretend that Martin was waiting for her and take a look at the outside of the house alone? Why not? No one need know, and she had a sort of aching to see the place again that was so essentially a part of Martin. Martin—Martin—he obsessed her, body and brain. If only ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... meal. Since Virginia's departure he had seldom had the courage to dine at home. The large dining room with the big table set for himself alone only served to remind him the more keenly of his loss. Especially empty and cheerless they looked that day and his mind was obsessed by thoughts of the absent one when suddenly the loud ringing of the telephone bell had aroused his reveries. He picked up the receiver thinking it was Hadley calling him or possibly someone in his office, when to his amazement he heard ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... hidden among the shadowed hills, his friends rested themselves for the coming battle, waiting impatiently his return, and timing it to the rising sun. Down in the valley to his left were the two he followed, while he, obsessed and unreasoning, now cursing like a madman, now grim and silent, spurred southward towards town and into ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... imagination becomes obsessed by an unpleasant idea there is a natural tendency for anxiety to grow while one is held in suspense; at all events it was so with me on that particular occasion, for it seemed to me that daylight would never come. Meanwhile, however, our flare, after blazing fiercely for a ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons and work a bore. Platt revealed himself alone as a tiresome companion, obsessed by romantic ideas about intrigues and vices and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... with the first hypocrite that had come his way, a follower of strange gods, cold, calculating, too selfish even to be sinful! Eheu! She was getting on my nerves. Analysis—always analysis! I could not let her be. She obsessed me as she had obsessed Jerry—a slender wisp of a thing that I could have broken in my fingers and would still, I think, unless ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... subject has been fully discussed in the section on Etiology (see page 148). In any case, we must avoid exaggerating the importance of sexual feelings in the child. Ribbing[87] contends that we must regard it as abnormal when a boy of thirteen or fourteen is obsessed (hante) by erotic ideas. This is true enough if there is real obsession by such ideas, but it is not true if there is no more than an occasional uprising of sexual feelings. On page 118 of this work, I explained that an over-development of the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... be more enlightening than a description of a chat between the great war-lord of Germany and a leading pacifist: the one completely equipped with knowledge of the history, temper, and temperament of his people; the other obsessed by a fantastic exaggeration of the power and influence of money, even in the world of culture and international politics, and preaching his panacea in the land, of all others, where even now mere money has the least influence, all honor ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... in first visiting California are obsessed with the flowers, the abundant callas, the monstrous roses, the giant geraniums. But I never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the trees. And remember, I have not as yet seen what they call the ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... had cultivated Nickleby's confidence. It was apparent from the first that the man was utterly devoid of common honesty. It was his idea that government graft was an established method of revenue and he seemed to be obsessed with the belief that no Minister of the Crown would allow his oath of office to interfere with the acquisition of personal wealth. As their relations had ripened he had grown bolder and had organized a construction company with the object of using his "connection" ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... reflection on the honour or ability of the other competitors. But to Felix everything suddenly became flat, stale, and unprofitable, because Peter continued to hold the championship of bitter apples. It haunted his waking hours and obsessed his nights. I heard him talking in his sleep about it. If anything could have made him thin the way he worried over this matter would ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... strange irony of fate, all the colonel's wealth came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy. It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept the inheritance and would distribute it in ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... is based on an inherited and automatic acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans" and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there any one who would confess that character and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he also being tied with the bondage of yearning to his distant son; his son appeared, lonely as well, the boy, greedily rushing along the burning course of his young wishes, each one heading for his goal, each one obsessed by the goal, each one suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... man, tortured by a sense of guilt, and obsessed with the idea that Mary Whittaker's act of sacrifice was a cold-blooded device to shame him and aggravate his misery, had hanged himself, choosing as the scene of his death the spot where, fifteen years before, he had exposed ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... argument of expediency; and the Missouri Compromise drew sharply the lines of the contest. The South now came to regard slavery as its peculiar heritage; public men were forced to defend the institution; and in general the best thought of the section began to be obsessed and dominated by the Negro, just as it is to-day in large measure. In taking this position the South deliberately committed intellectual suicide. In such matters as freedom of speech and literary achievement, and in genuine statesmanship ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... encouragement Bob put in the next two weeks to good advantage. In fact, so obsessed was he with his new employment that it was not long before his imaginary bet with Cady assumed reality in his mind. Moreover, it became gossip around his clubs; and in quarters where he was well known his method of winning the wager was deemed not only characteristic, ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Glogowski in the doorway and was saying something in an enthusiastic voice about the theater when Rosinska interrupted her with derision: "Goodness, you seem to be obsessed by the theater! . . . Well, well, I would never have believed such a thing possible had I not heard it . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... granted when he set his big traps in the trail. In the first place, he was assuming that the man was still there, after a lapse of six weeks and more; and in the second place that he was bold enough, or so obsessed by blood-lust, that he would follow him across Death Valley; whereas as a matter of fact, he knew nothing whatever about him except that he had shot him in the leg. His aim had been good but a little too low, ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In To a Skylark, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." Employing the opposite figure in the Defense of Poetry, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... on the one side are those who, though not without sympathetic feeling for the well-intentioned, earnest-minded believers in the errors now being exposed, yet cast aside all scruples in the interest of humanity and truth. On the other side are those obsessed by care and compunction for these accredited practitioners who by reason of age or temperament are unable or unwilling to assimilate new ideas or to relinquish the theories of a life time in order to enter the field of competition with the men ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann |
