"Abnormally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hate this stuffing a house with half-fading flowers, it always suggests a funeral to me, with the banked-up mantels for coffins. It's horrid, I know, but I can't help it. However, if I am writing in this vein it's time I stopped. My letter is abnormally long as it is—I hope the right number of stamps will be put on it. Forgive me for mentioning it, my dear, but we always have to pay double postage due on your epistles. I don't mind at all—they are quite worth it—only I thought you might like ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... slipped out of bed, carefully opened his knife and made a few judicious slits in the veiling canvas. My senses had become abnormally acute. I seemed to hear every shade of sound within and without the house. I could sense, I imagined, the very positions in which sat the persons in the kitchen below. Even Twinetoes was affected by the tense ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... however, for many things can be learned readily from books, even about the most difficult parts of surgery. Three things the surgeon has to do:—"to bring together separated parts, to separate those that have become abnormally united, and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... because he had no choice, limping piteously on his sprung leg with his jaw hanging so that the missing teeth were abnormally conspicuous. Outside his door a single torch flared and back of its waver stood a semicircle of unrecognized avengers, coated in black slickers with hats turned low and masks upon their faces. They led him away into the darkness while more lustily than before, ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... in a close embrace. The monster dwarf gripped the preacher's body in his terrible arms with a strength like that of a grizzly bear, and it seemed to Larkin as though his ribs would crack and his breath leave him. But while the dwarf's arms were abnormally strong, his legs were weak, whereas Larkin's limbs were as sturdy as an oak tree. Besides, in his school days he had learned several wrestling tricks, and now he used one to throw Turner to the ground. There they continued to struggle ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... abnormally alive to impressions and atmosphere, she shrank from ever intruding herself or her opinions where they were not welcome; but now all personal consciousness was dead. She was wholly unaware that she had worked the Senior Surgeon into a state where he had almost lost his self-control—a ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Miss Child, who had not chosen her own name, or else had shown little taste in selection, compared with the others. But she was somehow different, rather subtly different, from them in all ways; not so elaborately refined, not so abnormally tall, not so startlingly picturesque. "One always thinks of the ark animals in a procession, poor dears—showing off their fur or their stripes or their spots ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... an overpowering certainty of joy was the girl's eager caresses and endearing gestures. Howard had always curiously shrunk from physical contact with his fellows; he had an almost childishly observant eye, and his senses were abnormally alert; little bodily defects and uglinesses had been a horror to him; and the way in which Maud would seek his embrace, clasp his hand, lay her cheek to his, as if nestling home, gave him an enraptured sense of delight that transcended all experience. He was at first in these talks very tender ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... known, it is only in cases of abnormally increased sensibility—for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and thought transmission—that the motor counterpart of a mental state can be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is thereby enabled ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some years, and even when he ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Weather conditions were abnormally bad, the snow and floods precluding any active operations during the first three ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fact:—There will be a gradual bringing back to their normal condition of those facilities which have been dwarfed, or warped, or abnormally developed through sin and selfishness. Sometimes these moral twists and quirks in our mental faculties are an inheritance through one or more generations. The man with excessive egotism often carries the evidence of it in the very shape of ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... possessed abnormally long arms, had a heavy moustache, and very hairy, flexible fingers, with which he performed wondrous feats of craftsmanship, but to my fearful imagination he seemed to resemble at times a ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... were so, and who gave a certain finish to the solid work of the others. The advantages of these boarding-school girls were so far beyond those of the previous generation that the line between mothers and daughters became abnormally broad. The son had advantages at college which his father had not, but after all, he went to the same college, and the progress ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... with zeal, armed herself with an abnormally large scythe, and set to work on the ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... Presently we sighted the Jebel el-Maru', the strangest spectacle. The apex of the gloomy porphyritic trap is a long spine of the tenderest azure-white, filmy as the finials of Milan Cathedral, and apparently melting into thin air. Its crest seems abnormally tall and distant; and below it a huge grey vein, horizontal and wavy, cuts and pierces the peaklet of red rock; and is cut and pierced, in its turn, by two perpendicular dykes of porphyritic trap, one flanking ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... effect of his French upon her. She forced into her face a look of pious admiration, and he at once departed. Hermione opened the book rather furtively. She had the unpleasant sensation of doing a surreptitious action, and she was an almost abnormally straightforward woman by nature. The book was large, and contained an immense number of inscriptions and signatures in handwritings that varied as strangely as do the characters of men. She turned the leaves ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... heard of it," he said quietly, just as if all London were not talking of that very thing. Kombs was curiously ignorant on some subjects, and abnormally learned on others. I found, for instance, that political discussion with him was impossible, because he did not know who Salisbury and Gladstone were. This made his ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... examined, and in seven of these the pollen-tubes were in this state; but they had not as yet penetrated the stigma. Although so few insects visit the flowers of the pea in this country or in North Germany, and although the anthers seem here to open abnormally soon, it does not follow that the species in its native ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... was however, in the main pursued, and Mckinlay describes the country crossed as first-class pastoral land. As it was then the dry season of the year, immediately preceding the rains, it proves what an abnormally severe season must have been encountered by Sturt when that explorer was turned back on his last trip in much the same latitude. On the 27th of February, the wet season of the tropics set in; but fortunately the party found a refuge among some stony hills and sand-ridges, in the neighbourhood ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... of the world's madness, because of the human fear and weeping everywhere, because of the new abysses which seemed to yawn every day on every side, that both soul and senses were so abnormally overstrung. He was overwhelmed by exquisite compassions in his thoughts of Robin, he was afraid for her youngness, her sweetness, the innocent defencelessness which was like a child's. He was afraid of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... understand. Of course," she hesitated for an instant before being spurred on by her sense of scrupulous honesty, "there are exceptions. Once in a while a girl fails to find her special niche. Maybe she rooms off the campus and is not thrown in contact with her own kind. She may be abnormally shy—that hinders her from making friends. Or perhaps she does something that queers ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... Searle Lingard has seldom walked the streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so piercingly ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... racket of traffic was torture to his abnormally acute ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly against the heavy gravity that made all his movements ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... but too well that the burden of the abnormally high cost of living, caused largely by the war, weighs heavily indeed upon wage earners and still more upon men and women with moderate salaries. I yield to no one in my desire to see everything done that ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... must have been abnormally advanced, for although we continued to see a vast number of testaceans, we did not catch sight of a single whaling-ship ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy—of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... where you can get an old-fashioned dinner cooked as nowhere else in London, I believe, and enjoy an old port afterwards which those delightful sinners, our grandfathers, would have sat over half the night, and been pulled out from under the table in the morning perchance. I am not abnormally partial to the pleasures of the table, but I have found a good dinner in combination with first-rate port, rationally dealt with, an excellent tonic for ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... in. Soon there was a light on the ground floor. The door opened. A very stout man, barefooted, who had struggled into a pair of abnormally ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... as we read these later stories of Crabbe. We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature. We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... less under a cloud for the remainder of his professional life. I thought it was all that any of us knew, and Aunt Judith hated to have it mentioned." Rupert's tone was fairly aggressive now, for he was quite abnormally sensitive on this subject of his father's disgrace, which had indirectly cost his mother her life and had plunged the family into poverty, and bereft them ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... the lake and unmoored her boat. Her conscience was abnormally active this morning, and she reflected that she too was going to a tryst of which the world must know nothing. True, it was kept on the open lake and was as full of daylight as it was of impeccability, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... liked my address. The students were abnormally quiet for the first half-hour, and then made up for their reticence by a regular charivari for the rest of the time. However, I was consoled by hearing that they ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... who will not consent to suffering, and who are destined to participate in government, as well as a great many who are personally conscious of wrongs that need rectifying, should assume the administration of the SUPERFLUOUS WEALTH abnormally accumulated. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... This creature evidently plays an ugly part in the piece—that of a horrible old ghoul, spiteful and famished. Still more appalling than her person is her shadow, which, projected upon a white screen, is abnormally and vividly distinct; by means of some unknown process this shadow, which nevertheless follows all her movements, assumes the aspect of a wolf. At a given moment the hag turns round and presents the profile of her distorted snub nose as she accepts ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence which he had never experienced before. His brain was not only perfectly clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. The things of his own life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. The facts which he had learned in his long and minute ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... and inclined to be pendulous, the chin being equally weak. Altogether the face carried the suggestion of a once strong and handsome countenance entirely altered by physical violence or by degraded habits and thoughts. The man's arms were long, though not abnormally so, while his legs ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rather abnormally normal about this. Persons of robust emotions seldom think very much about them. The temperament that cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and watches anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for its pains. Which of these facts is cause and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... life an impression of remoteness that almost amounted to the uncanny. The fact that she affected brilliant colors and clothed both herself and brother in garments of a wellnigh fantastic make, added to this impression, and gave perhaps some excuse to those persons who regarded her as being as abnormally constituted as her brother, finding it impossible, I suppose, to reconcile waywardness with industry, and a taste for the rich and beautiful with a poverty so respectable, it scarcely made itself known for the reality it was. A blonde gypsy some called her, a dangerous woman some others; and the ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... needed Federal, State, and local construction projects were deferred in order to release sources for war production. In resuming public works construction, it is desirable to proceed only at a moderate rate, since demand for private construction will be abnormally high for some time. Our public works program should be timed to reach its peak after demand for private construction has begun to taper off. Meanwhile, however, plans should be prepared if we are to act promptly when the present extraordinary private demand begins ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... college campus. Football requires neither the intellect nor the perfect organization which is a sine qua non to success in our great "national game." Its chief requisites are long hair, leathery lungs and abnormally developed legs. The game owes its popularity to the average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game with savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I am not decrying football—I incline to the view that an occasional ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... portrait into McTee's hands. It showed a rather thin-faced girl with abnormally large eyes and a rather pathetic smile. It was an appealing face ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... the power of thought, also that at times it has an influence upon our general feelings, but I do not admit that it can have any direct influence upon the body." Here is one who has allowed herself to be long given to grief, abnormally so—notice her lowered physical condition, her lack of vitality. The New York papers within the past twelve months recorded the case of a young lady in New Jersey who, from constant grieving over the death of her mother, died, fell dead, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough to warrant a quickening ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the season was backward in spring and the summer was abnormally cool. There was sufficient rainfall for ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the man received an impressionist picture of which the salient features were a mop of black hair, a scarlet jersey, and a pair of abnormally long black legs. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... for their development, was a singular exception among the bodies swayed by the sun. Its peculiarity resides in the fact that the moon is proportionately by far the most massive attendant upon any known planet. Its disturbing power over its primary is thus abnormally great, and tidal friction has, in consequence, played a predominant part in bringing their mutual relations ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... woman, with abnormally long and sinewy arms. Her small, rather delicate face had a healthy coat of tan, and her iron-gray hair was braided with scrupulous care. She resembled her own house to a striking degree; she was fastidiously neat, but not in the least orderly. The Tiverton housekeepers ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... and alert. Often and often during his professional life his bare existence had depended on the faculty for scenting danger from behind the curtain of sleep; and his senses in this direction were so abnormally developed as to verge at times on the uncanny. Cat-like is a poor-word to describe his ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the fire burning lustily on the floor of it, unhemmed by dogs or grate. On a long, sand-scoured table in the middle of the room sat Theo, in his shirt-sleeves, deftly breaking eggs into a big, green-lined bowl, while before the fire, gently swinging to and fro over the flames a saucepan with an abnormally long handle—Madame Joyselle. Her short, dark-clad figure, half-covered with a blue apron, showed all its too-generous curves as she bent forward, and when, at Theo's remark, she turned to him with a smile, she showed a round, wrinkled, rosy face and small blue ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... and again little things would be said in her presence that would set her a-thinking—little things such as what the Professor has just said. She may easily have been abnormally sensitive on the point—made more prone to reflection than usual—by last night's momentous announcement. Anyhow, she resolved to talk to Tishy about her parentage as soon as they should get back to the drawing-room, where they were practising. All the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... in his chair; his hearing had become abnormally acute, but he could not make out what they were saying; and as the dull, intestinal aching grew sharper, parching, searing every strained muscle in throat and chest, he struck the table beside him, and clenched his teeth in the fierce rush of agony ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... copies of roles. Sowinska was holding in her hand the photograph of a young man with a strange face, long and so thin that all the cheek bones could be seen distinctly protruding through the skin. He had an abnormally high forehead with wide temples and a huge head. Large eyes gazed out of the pale face like the sunken hollows in ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... walked up and down the platform. He passed the closed and darkened windows of the sleeping-car; and it seemed to his abnormally quickened sense that he was beside her, bending over her, and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... days later the crew, while fishing, hooked a swordfish. Xiphias, however, broke the line, and a few moments after leaped half out of the water, with the object, it should seem, of taking a look at his persecutor, the Dreadnaught. Probably he satisfied himself that the enemy was some abnormally large cetacean, which it was his natural duty to attack forthwith. Be this as it may, the attack was made, and the next morning the captain was awakened with the unwelcome intelligence that the ship had sprung a leak. She was taken back to Columbo, and thence to Cochin, where she hove down. Near ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Clayton was always abnormally eager to talk over anything. Much of his artistic energy had trickled away in elusive snatches of talk. "Come," he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "I have it. I will begin a great work—a modern Magdalen or something ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... them then to repel the projectile, which must have added to its velocity. He seems to have overcome the practical difficulty that in order to obtain service velocities with service projectiles an enormous number of windings and a tremendously long barrel are necessary as well as an abnormally heavy current beyond the safe carrying capacity of the solenoid which would raise the temperature to a point that ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Goethe and Schiller on their native soil would kindle the sparks of interest in German literature that she supposed every well-taught child possessed, into the roaring flame of enthusiasm. She could not believe that Letty had no sparks. One of her children being so abnormally clever, it must be sheer obstinacy on the part of the other that prevented it from acquiring the knowledge offered daily in such unstinted quantities. She had no illusions in regard to Letty's person, and felt that ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... on her with a shock, thrilling, terrible, yet not altogether unpleasant. She rose, her hands clenched at her sides and her eyes abnormally wide as they stared in the same direction as the eyes of the two horses held. Yet for all her preparation she nearly fainted when a voice sounded directly behind her, a pleasantly modulated voice: "Look this way. I am here, in front of ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... her tall full form; every line in the calm, pale Sibylline face. The large steel gray eyes were shaded by drooping lids, heavily fringed with black lashes, but when raised in a steady gaze the pupils appeared abnormally dilated; and the delicately traced black brows that overarched them, contrasted conspicuously with the wealth of deep auburn hair darkened by mahogany tints, which rolled back in shining waves from her blue veined temples. While moulding the figure ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... failed to prove the existence of one of them. Yet there are the symptoms. Call it hysteria, or what you will. I call it an injustice on the part of the Higher Power. I suppose that is blasphemy, but I am forced to it. Can that girl help the longings for her rights, her longings which are abnormally acute because of her over-fine nervous system? Those longings, situated as she is, can never be satisfied in any way except for her own harm. Meantime she eats her own heart, since she has nothing else, and heart-eating produces all kinds of symptoms. I am ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... over the Williams's shop and the transmitters and receivers were whining there more dolefully than usual. Several of them, sensitive to the weather, were out of tune, and as Mr. Bell had trained his ear to sounds until it was abnormally acute, he was tuning the springs of the receivers to the pitch of the transmitters, a service he always preferred to perform himself. To do this he placed the receiver against his ear and called to Watson, who was in the adjoining room, to start the current through ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... little leathern pouch attached to his belt. The pouch contains a letter to the Governor of Herat, and he it is whom Mahmoud Yusuph Khan expects to take back a receipt. The chief responsibility for my safe delivery rests upon his shoulders, and he is disposed to be abnormally ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... was marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... nearer the market-place the progress became yet slower, for the crowd seemed suddenly and abnormally swelled. There was a great shouting of voices, too, in front, and the smell of burning came distinctly on the breeze. The man riding beside Robin turned his head and called out; and in answer one of the others riding ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the process of drainage, and some engineers believe that they will render the complete discharge of the waters impossible. It appears that the earthy and rocky strata underlying the lake are extremely porous, and that the ground already laid dry on the surface absorbs an abnormally large proportion of the precipitation upon it. These strata, therefore, constitute a reservoir which contributes to maintain the spring fed chiefly, no doubt, by underground channels from the neighboring ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face—and an uncomfortable one!—was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... ship, which seemed like a tiny toy when compared with the giant SF-22. I had observed very little of the construction of the Pioneer, but I could now see that she was quite different in design from the ordinary plane. A monoplane she was, but the wing structure was abnormally short and of great thickness, and there were a number of tubes projecting from the leading edge that gave the appearance of a battery of small cannon. The body, like all planes designed for travel in air-level six, was cigar-shaped, and had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... have been an art at that time, was in chaotic confusion, and only because of Edison's many years' study of the magnet was he enabled to conclude that insufficiency in quantity of iron in the magnets of such machines, together with poor surface contacts, rendered the cost of magnetization abnormally high. The heating of solid armatures, the only kind then known, and poor insulation in the commutators, also gave rise to serious losses. But perhaps the most serious drawback lay in the high-resistance armature, based ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... caustic soda at a concentration of 107 grams per liter and a causticity of 84.0 per cent acting at a temperature of 170 deg. C. for five hours, or a total time of seven hours. The steam condensation in the rotary used for these tests was abnormally high, due to the fact that the steam supply pipe was uncovered for a considerable distance and the rotary was entirely uncovered. It is believed, therefore, that a larger amount of caustic was necessary ...
— Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material - United States Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 404 • Lyster H. Dewey and Jason L. Merrill
... that prices for agricultural productions have been abnormally low, and that the farmers of the United States have suffered greatly from this cause. But this depression of prices is easily accounted for by the greatly increased amount of agricultural production, the wonderful development of agricultural implements, the opening of vast regions of new and fertile ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... is inferior in value to Peruvian. It exemplifies the influence of small quantities of rain on guano deposits in impoverishing them in their nitrogen. In much of the Ichaboe guano imported into this country a large amount of feathers is found. It also contains an abnormally large ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... the girl at her table, he admired the marble slab of it, admired the sunken set bowl with its tiny silver taps, and admired himself for being able to frequent so costly a place. When she withdrew his wet hand from the bowl, it was so sensitive from the warm soapy water that he was abnormally aware of the clasp of her firm little paw. He delighted in the pinkness and glossiness of her nails. Her hands seemed to him more adorable than Mrs. Judique's thin fingers, and more elegant. He had a certain ecstasy in the pain when she gnawed at the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... slightly parted, long, yellow tusks exposed. In general outline he was not unlike a hyaena, but with more of strength and fleetness in his general make-up, more, perhaps, of the suggestion of a great wolf, with an unusually savage-looking head, and an abnormally massive shoulder. From spine to flank, on either side, the strange creature was striped like a zebra, the ground colour of his coat being a light yellowish grey ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... who is taken to call is of an abnormally lively conversational habit, quick to think of something that may pass for a contribution to current thought, and even quicker to get it out, he had best accept his position as merely decorative, and try to be as decorative as possible. He should be so ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... perverse way his mentality was abnormally acute. He saw with eyes which were inspired by a brain capable of vast achievement, but which possessed none of that equipoise so necessary for a well-balanced manhood. And it told him all that, and forced conviction upon him. It told him so much of that which no man should believe until ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... one other possible result of the enforcement of wage standardization which requires brief notice, because it was displayed prominently during the war. The demand during the war for certain essentials of warfare was abnormally great, and the result was a steady bidding up of wages for the supply of labor which could assist in the production of these essentials. This led to a constant shifting about of the wage earners from plant to ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... you are not merely fighting people. You are fighting an idea. It is only for an idea that men and women martyr themselves. With Cara this idea has become morbid—an obsession. She has inherited it together with an abnormally developed courage, and her conception of courage is to face what she most hates ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... of mind, the body becomes suddenly weak or abnormally strong, showing mortal mind to be the producer of strength or weak- 377:15 ness. A sudden joy or grief has caused what is termed instantaneous death. Because a belief origi- nates unseen, the mental state should be continually 377:18 watched that it may not produce blindly ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... different rooms! She sent for a painter, and had the walls painted black. She had everything with an atom of colour in it taken away; and in these black rooms she lived, and in them she died. She wept so much—partly that, and partly the want of light—that her eyes became abnormally sensitive, and she could not bear even to see anything white. As time went on—Margaret, you will hardly believe this, but it is literally true—she would not even have white china on her table. She ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... life run the risk of chorea; children suffering from the after-effects of diseases such as rheumatic or scarlet fever, who need particularly to avoid over-exertion or too violent exercise; children of such marked general debility that their power of resisting disease is abnormally low—all these, if neglected, tend to become qualified candidates for the physically defective schools. If they could attend a school designed to suit their needs, they would in many cases be quite able to return, after varying periods, to their places in the ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... for the Royal Engineers. In peace times the work would have taken from one to two years to complete. A preliminary investigation and survey of the ground was made on February 14, and a scheme was submitted four days later. Owing to the shortage of transport and abnormally bad weather work could not be commenced till April 12. Many miles of pipe line had to be laid and a powerful pumping plant erected, but water was being delivered to the people of Jerusalem on the 18th of June. Other military works have done ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... (Addison's anemia, malignant anemia.) Severe anemia in older adults, caused by failure absorb vitamin B12; causes abnormally large red blood cells, gastrointestinal disturbances, and lesions of ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... I said earnestly, "I never knew but one man who saw when his wife needed coaling, and attended to her wants. When he died (for the gods loved him), it was found that his shoulder-blades were abnormally large—at least so the doctors said, but I knew all the time that ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... condenser is charged the fibers have their ends at different potentials, so a current passes to equalize them and energy is lost. This current increases the capacity. One condenser made of paper boiled in ozokerite took an abnormally large current and heated rapidly. At a high temperature it gave off water, and the power wasted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... with redoubled activity, to become abnormally acute. For the first time he was conscious of the imperative clamor of the electric bell in O'Hagan's quarters, as well as of the janitor's rich brogue voicing his indignation as he opened the basement door and prepared to ascend. Instantly the cause of the disturbance ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... coldness;—and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her own utter loneliness in the world; and she was just now strung up to such a nervous tension, that she would almost have consented to wed Lord Roxmouth if by ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... spot where the bomb had been dropped, the grass burst into bloom. Purple flowers appeared—not the usual muddy brown, faintly mauve—but a redviolet, brilliant and clear. The period of generation was abnormally shortened; seed was borne almost instantly—but ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... lantern or the screen. I believe they soon forgot there was anything unusual about me, but I think that as I worked up to my subject, and became more and more energetic, they could see that I wasn't altogether happy. That wretched shirt certainly fitted me round the neck, but the sleeves were abnormally long for me, and the cuffs being wide, they shot out over my hands with every gesture. If I uplifted my hands imploringly, up they went, halfway up the screen; if with outstretched arms I drove one of my best points home, those cuffs would come out ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... figure was a familiar one in the card-room of the Rag and Bobtail, at the bow-window of the Jeunesse Doree. Tall and pompous, with a portly frame and a puffy clean-shaven face which peered over an abnormally high collar and old-fashioned linen cravat, he stood as a very type and emblem of staid middle-aged respectability. The major's hat was always of the glossiest, the major's coat was without a wrinkle, and, in short, from the summit of the major's bald head to his bulbous finger-tips and his ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... themselves of vast and permanent importance. They were made under the stimulus of a more or less clear recognition of the truth of natural, inalienable rights. Fighting against a people whose frightful aggressions were the product of this principle abnormally developed, they yet had to borrow their own weapons from the same armory. Or, if the republican principle was not at all approved, the course of the Government showed that it was so far believed in by the people that certain ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... down at Morley's feet, noticed what Bristow had seen three seconds after Morley had entered the room—his feet were large, abnormally large for a man of his build. He must have worn a number ten or, ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... constant marvel to those who surrounded him. While he was without conceit or vanity he had almost unlimited self-confidence. While it cannot be said that he overrated his own abilities, neither can it be said that he underrated them. His sympathies were easily aroused and he was abnormally sensitive, but he never allowed his emotions to get the better of his judgment. He forgave easily and always tried to find excuses for people who wronged, insulted, or injured him. In repartee he could hold his own with any one and enjoyed ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... his departure. After such a display, it would be hard to return; that is what he tried to make Mademoiselle Afchin understand, but she replied only by prolonged groans. He strove to comfort her, to amuse her, but what form of distraction could be made to appeal to that abnormally apathetic nature? And then, could he change the skies of Paris, give back to the wretched Levantine her marble-tiled patio, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious state of drowsiness, listening to the plashing of the water in the great alabaster fountain ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... do better than to get him down," I suggested; "he's most abnormally keen at ferreting out a mystery that promises any news—if any one can learn the truth ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... the station to help Hilary to catch his train. The enterprise was a failure; it was not a job at which either Margerison was good. They had to wait in the detestable station for another. The annoyance of that (it is really an abnormally depressing station) worked on Hilary's nervous system to such an extent that he might have flung himself on the line and so found peace from the disappointments of life, had not Peter been at hand to cheer ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three staterooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess with shame that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary stateroom. It was no business of mine, to be sure; but with none ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... diseases, by abnormally stimulating the emotions, predispose strongly to religious fervor. Epilepsy is one of these, and in Swedenborg and Mohammed, both epileptics, we see distinguished examples of religious mystics, who, no doubt honestly, accepted the visions which accompanied ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... better than motioning him away from it, and was but a symbol of Brownson's own devious progress, swaying now to one side and again to the other, but always going forward to Rome. But young Hecker would learn for himself. Of an abnormally inquiring mind by nature, he never accepted a witness other than himself about any matter ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... hostility to a person he does not show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are so abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when an indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely anything within him to prevent his applying ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... difficulties are all of Nature's doing," he said. "It's just the abnormally hard rock that is bothering us. Only for that we'd be all right, though we might have petty difficulties because of the mean acts of Blakeson & Grinder. ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... cause. The nervous system of the higher animals is so complicated, so intricate, that it is hard to understand its derangement. The human nerve dies when isolated. It is killed by the shock of removal, and responds for the moment abnormally and therefore deceptively. But, if we study the simplest kind of a nerve,—and the simplest is that of a plant,—we may hope to understand what occurs when a hand or a foot cannot be made to move. To find out that plants have nerves, to induce paralysis in such nerves and then to cure them—such ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... abnormally developed in my lowest nature. I grew bolder, and from being able to return shy glances at first, was soon able to meet more daring ones, until the waltz became to me and whomsoever danced with me, one lingering, sweet and purely sensual pleasure, where heart beat against ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... It seemed to me that they must have been far away; they were very small. Abnormally small. I blinked. Horror surged over me. Their figures were dwindling as they stood there! Polter was saying something to the man at the microscope. Other men were nearby, watching. All normal, save Polter and Babs. A moment passed. Polter was standing by the chair in which the man at the microscope ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... uncommon among civilized people. Throughout Europe many men, who lived years ago, are reverenced as Saints, and, who, from the accounts given of them, were demented. Why, it is even claimed that there is but one step from the abnormally gifted to the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... encountered Lanyard's gaze, the adventurer was shocked to find himself staring into eyes like those of a dead man: eyes of a grey so light that at a little distance the colour of the irises blended indistinguishably with their whites, leaving visible only the round black points of pupils abnormally distended and staring, blank, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the laborer, shrinking up again; and Perkins now saw that the legs of his new acquaintance were of an abnormally unequal length, which forced him every time he shifted his weight from one foot to the other to change his apparent height to a startling degree. "An' a gude dale thinner," he repeated. "There's nothin' loike polithical exersoize to take off th' ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... age, penurious, unsocial, and almost churlish in his habits. His passion was to domineer and carry his point; of this the poet may have inherited something. His ideal of success was wealth and worldly position, things to which the poet was, on the contrary, abnormally indifferent. ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... the muscles, the heart, and the liver. These organs are encroached upon by globules of fat (a hydrocarbon), which, while very good in their proper place and quantity, become a source of disorder and even of death when they abnormally invade vital structures. Other poisons, as phosphorus, produce this fatty decay more rapidly; but alcohol causes it in a ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... perpetuation of those conditions by spending each year over L3,000 or $14,400 of the taxpayers' money in establishing and maintaining a system of immigration which demoralized the best labor market by providing the employers with an undesirable class of laborers whose standard of life is abnormally low, and to whom twenty-four cents a day is a considerable sum, and thereby compelled the native laborer either to accept the unsatisfactory ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... flyers; they probed in other directions. It was found that the subnormal magnetic field surrounding a metallic substance in a state of de-electroniration had two unusual properties: its color absorption was high; and it bent light rays from their normal straight path into a curve abnormally great. Yet, though it absorbed the color of the rays emanating from the de-electronired metal (the metal itself increasing this result), the magnetic field, while bending the rays passing through it from distant ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various |
