"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... object of Warren's amorous attentions. Carroll read each one carefully and filed it away. He had hoped for this, but the results had far exceeded his expectations, and he found himself bewildered rather than assisted by the response from nameless individuals who were morbidly eager to be ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... wife to set the example of approaching it, and the wife waited for the husband. The trial of temper produced by this state of hesitation, and by the secret doubts which it encouraged, led insensibly to a certain estrangement—which Linley in particular was morbidly unwilling to acknowledge. If, when the dinner-hour brought them together, he was silent and dull in his wife's presence, he attributed it to anxiety on the subject of his brother—then absent on a critical business errand in London. If he sometimes left the house the first thing in the ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... thought of. Leave it to me to devise a way. Besides, you need not allow him so many opportunities that the strain would become unbearable. You are busy, owing to the certain increase of work brought about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical—a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his broken heart ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... His mood became morbidly introspective. He was weighed down by a sense of his own unworthiness. He submitted himself to a thorough examination, and the conclusion to which he came was that, as an aspirant to the regard, of a girl like Betty, he did not score a single point. No wonder she had ignored ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... passionate ardor with which she had first inspired him. And richly she deserves his love! She does, indeed, dote upon him; she studies, or rather, perhaps, anticipates his every wish; in short, had the whole sex been searched for one calculated to make happy the morbidly fastidious Aubrey, the choice must surely have fallen on Miss St. Clair; a woman whose temper, whose tastes, and whose manners were at once in delicate and harmonizing unison and contrast with his own. She has hitherto brought him but two ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... the case to a consulting physician. The boy had been born in the trouble of her early exile; he could not help his temperament. He had countless virtues; she extolled him in beaming parentheses. But he had too much imagination and too little balance. He was morbidly wrapped up in the whole subject of romantic crime, and no less than possessed with the personality of this one ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... obstacle to a cure which I have witnessed, has been tuberculosis of the chest or abdominal viscera, or of both at the same time, and still more the vaccine-virus; likewise a tendency to paralysis in persons who were otherwise morbidly affected. Tuberculosis has often been combated by a single dose of a high potence of Sulphur between the doses of Apis, no Apis being given after the Sulphur, as long as the course of the typhoid symptoms would render it safe to ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... physical phenomena and individual influence on the well-being of the human mechanism being closely examined. A forcible exposition is also given of the evil consequences resulting from an ill-regulated imagination (acting through the instrumentality of the passions, morbidly excited by its licentious operation,) to the firmness of the nervous system, and the integrity of the general health. The volume is not addressed to any particular class of readers, and being free from technical ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... leash of chumber spaniels, and fifty pounds for a memorial ring. Mr. Wendover could not find fault with a will which left his wife seven hundred a year; but he felt that his position was diminished by his father-in-law's death, and he was morbidly jealous of the boy, who had absorbed so much of his wife's care and affection from the first hour of their ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished finish, a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... weather, or extra exertion, told on him, till in August he was caught in a thunder-storm, and the cold that ensued ran on into a feverish attack, which barely left him in time for the Ordination, and then with a depressed system, and nerves morbidly sensitive. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... early. They exhibit the feminine tendency to periodicity of function, their moods, activities, efficiency are cyclic, reminding one of the menstrual variations of the female. This rhythmicity saturates their personalities, so that poetry and music almost morbidly appeal to them. A number of the great poets and musicians are to be classified as of the feminine pituitary species. Last, but not least, they are the hen-pecked lovers and husbands. Sex difficulties are ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the grimness of the scene, I am conscious of a sort of hyperaesthesia against which one ought to be on guard. The note-taking traveller is very apt to forget that the mere act of note-taking upsets his normal perceptivity. He becomes feverishly observant, morbidly critical. He compares incommensurables, and flies to ideal standpoints. He is so eager to descry differences, that he overlooks similarities—nay, identities. Thus only can I account for many statements about New York, occurring in the pages of recent and reputable travellers, both French ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... But he is too great an artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us—as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... congratulated on their success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand quiet firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread widely, and the tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any public man or politician, whose taste is so morbidly depraved and whose aim in life is so debased as to prefer notoriety to honest, useful service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being the especial theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that so many of our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... than Mr. Mackenzie. He would rather suffer extreme hardship than accept a doubtful favour. Even in regard to kindly and reasonable offers of help, he was morbidly sensitive (as mentioned on page 298 of his "Life and Times"); and yet, looking at the conduct of many men in like circumstances, he deserved commendation rather than censure for his ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... taken first to change the course of the nervous power that is expressing itself morbidly, to open for it a healthy outlet, to guide it into that more wholesome channel, and then help the owner to a better control and a clearer understanding, that she may gain a healthy use of her wonderful nervous ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an active—though far from morbidly sentimental—compassion for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher—for which those who have lived with philosophers ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... our relation is, that even when he's displeased with me, he thinks aloud with me and can't stop himself. And I know ultimately that whatever takes him out of a certain circle (where habits of introvision and analysis of fly-legs are morbidly exercised), is life and joy to him. I wanted his poems done this winter very much—and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to use. But he had a room all last summer, and did nothing. Then, he worked himself ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... entering, suddenly found herself in the midst of green-baize- covered tables, lighted candles, packs of cards, and a dozen or so of silent, absorbed gentlemen, intent upon the trumps and honours, points and odd tricks. The girl, already excited, and morbidly susceptible, stopped short at this spectacle, as one struck with a sudden blow. Not for years, not since that evening the memory of which ever came upon her with a sudden sting, when she had met Monsieur Horace at the ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... glen. It was a grey day, with snow waiting in cloud-banks in the north sky and a thin wind whistling through the pines. The scene matched his humour. He was in love for the moment with the stony and stormy in life. He hungered morbidly for ill-fortune, something to stamp out the ease in his soul, and weld him into the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... than by under culture in the moral training of youth. Judicious letting alone is a precious element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of both under ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart. So ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... a strangely precocious, and a morbidly sensitive child, when it was decided in 1755 to send him to Westminster. The headmaster, Dr. Markham, was a friend of his father's. Westminster, he says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... were rich,' she thought, 'I would give way to the luxury of being morbidly faithful to him for ever ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... there dimpled, mischievous, naively looking around, yet in her careful soul shrewdly pursuing her wise policy of airing all sentimental matters in the family circle—letting in fresh air and sunshine on what so often takes root and flourishes rather morbidly at sixteen. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his life-work, and morbidly conscious of his hosts ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was written at this period and holds a portrait of the devout and tender mind, sensitive and morbidly conscientious, but full of an aspiration that never left her. The few hints as to her early life are all embodied here, though the biographer is forced to work ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the competition of their life. For the most part these were men and women of intense personalities, absorbed in their own ideas, keenly critical, and not very merciful to any sort of weakness. And Corydon was morbidly aware of her own lack of accomplishments, and acutely sensitive as to what others thought about her. A strange figure she must have made in any one's drawing-room—with the old dress she had fixed up, and the lace-collar she had borrowed for the occasion, and the sad face with the large ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... spot where we so often go to find out the real truth of things with our own ears, one meets nearly all one's friends from the neighboring villas who have come for the same purpose, morbidly attracted as we all, no doubt, are by these dreadful signs of a world ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... one amazing minute, believed the woman and the child to be not human but divine. They were, as they struck upon his eyes, a vision, and he would have been in no sense surprised to see the vision fade. It was the Virgin Mary and her Son. Now, as he realized with the lightning rapidity of a morbidly excited mind how terribly sensitive to his own needs he must be to have clutched so irrationally at a world-old remedy, he took off his hat and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... solicitor, asked him to spend a Sunday at Hampstead, and Philip passed a happy day with a set of exuberant strangers; he ate and drank a great deal, took a walk on the heath, and came away with a general invitation to come again whenever he liked; but he was morbidly afraid of being in the way, so waited for a formal invitation. Naturally enough it never came, for with numbers of friends of their own the Nixons did not think of the lonely, silent boy whose claim upon their hospitality was so small. So on Sundays he got up late and took ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... replied Mr. Denham, "and my wife is almost morbidly quick to take alarm about her. In fact, we both are. Do you know how the trains run to Geneva? Is there anything earlier than the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... is my mother's grandniece, we have no control over her actions or inclinations. Her uncle, the Marquis de Merrivale, who is her guardian, is morbidly jealous of any influence exerted over his niece, even by ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Its adherents were variously denominated as Grahamites, and, from the fact of their using bread made of unbolted wheat-meal, bran-eaters. There was little of muscular Christianity in them. They were a pale, harmless set of valetudinarians, who were, like all weakly persons, morbidly alive to their own bodily states, and principally employed in experimenting on the effects of various insipid articles of diet. Tea and coffee were tabooed by these people. Ale and wine were abominations in their Index Expurgatorius of forbidden ingesta. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... ears like a last farewell. Then, there being none to witness his weakness, he laid his head down upon the battered old desk, and wept as he had not wept since his childhood. He had a proud spirit, and circumstances had made him morbidly sensitive. He was very young to indulge in a man's hopes and aspirations; but age is not always determined by years. Already he had dreamed his dreams, had his visions of a glorious future, in which he should build up a home for himself. Yet not for himself alone—it could ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... painfully impressed by what he had heard. The longer he had listened to her, the more irresistibly the conviction of the woman's wickedness had forced itself on him. He tried vainly to think of her as a person to be pitied—a person with a morbidly sensitive imagination, conscious of the capacities for evil which lie dormant in us all, and striving earnestly to open her heart to the counter-influence of her own better nature; the effort was beyond him. A perverse instinct ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... apply it to his tormentor should he ever show his nose in the room. As Philips was celebrated for skill with the sword, the mode of vengeance was certainly unmanly, and stung the soul of his adversary, always morbidly sensitive to all attacks, and especially to attacks upon his person. The hatred thus kindled was never quenched, and breathes in ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... personal regrets. She had no reason to look upon marriage as a state of perfect felicity. Her own had been unhappy. She knew the dark phantom that haunted our wedded hours; and what if the same hereditary curse should cling to Edith,—who might become morbidly sensitive on account ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to be expected that he should have remained a bachelor for their sake; she only wished he had waited till she was dead and Kate was married One of these events, it was true, was much less sure than the other; Kate might never marry,—much as she wished she would! She was quite morbidly unselfish, and did n't think she had a right to have anything of her own—not even a husband. Miss Mildred talked a good while about Kate, and it never occurred to her that she might bore Captain Benyon. She did n't, in point of fact; he had none of the ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... could satisfy my instinct, my impulse of self-preservation. I must go, even if blown like a leaf before the gales of heaven; must fly, if even to certainty of destruction. I had felt this necessity once before, be it remembered, but never so stringently, so morbidly as now. I was yielding under the agony, the anxiety incident to my condition; my nervous system, too severely taxed, was breaking down, and it would succumb entirely, unless relief came to me (of this I felt convinced), before another weary month should roll away. Had I been imprisoned ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... trouble and expense of taking Mrs. Baggs with us, I encountered, of course, solely out of regard for Alicia's natural prejudices. She had led precisely that kind of life which makes any woman but a bad one morbidly sensitive on the subject of small proprieties. If she had been a girl with a recognized position in society, I should have proposed to her to run away with me alone. As it was, the very defenselessness of her situation gave ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... man," said Carey when he had gone. "A sort of male Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they're both worth knowing. People with that temperament who don't use hair-dye must ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... more and more childish and more flighty in her thoughts as her time of trial drew near, and she became more subject to her jailer. She grew morbidly silent, and her large eyes were restless and ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... with premonitory symptoms somewhat like those of ordinary fever, but with this difference: the patient, instead of losing his appetite, has often a morbidly increased desire for food. He complains of severe pains in the back, and more or less headache. Both the head and backache are of a peculiar character: the pains resembling rheumatic pains, the head feeling ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... seemed as if Sylvia Whitman's prophecy concerning the falling off of the hotel guests was destined to fail. The old hostelry was crowded. Newspaper men and women from all parts of the country flocked there, and also many not connected with the press, who were morbidly curious and revelled in the sickly excitement of thinking they might be living in the house of a poisoner. Lucinda Hart sent in her resignation from the church choir. Her experience, the first time she had sung after Eliza Farrel's death, did not exactly daunt ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Seaton, thoughtfully. "Such a one as that beast Luigi has planted in Enoch's mind can warp his entire life. He evidently is of a morbidly sensitive temperament, proud to a fault, high strung and introspective. Until some one can prove to him that his mother was not a harlot, he'll never be entirely normal. And it's been my observation that one of the most fundamentally weakening things for a boy's character is his not being able ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... produced upon me. It seemed as though a fear which had hitherto stood vague and shadowy in the background, began now to advance towards me, gathering more distinctness as it approached. There was to me something morbidly terrible about the apparition of this man at such a momentous crisis in my brother's life, and I at once recognised that unknown form as being the shadow which was gradually stealing between John and myself. Though I feigned incredulity as best I might, and employed those ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... set us back a day in our plans. I can imagine how desperately forlorn the thing will be. Some parson will say a perfunctory prayer for a poor devil he believes to have gone straight to the fiery pit and they'll bury him in a pauper's grave. There will be the usual morbidly curious crowd hanging round, wagging their heads and whispering. I shall go, Archie, and you can wait for me. It will take only a few hours and we can spend the night here and ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... moved restlessly in his chair. He had only detestation for the slain man, yet there was something morbidly distasteful in the thought that he himself had contrived the situation which had resulted in the murder of his confederate. It was only by an effort that he shook off the vague ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... this connection, for the benefit of those who wish a real insight into German social life, that few people discriminate between the old nobility, or men who take their titles from the possession of land and their descendants, and the new and morbidly disliked nobility, who have bought or gained their patents of nobility, as is done often enough in England, by profuse contributions to charity or to semi-political and cultural undertakings favored by the court, or by direct contributions to party funds, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... understood the spirit that had moved him to drive the mare that forty miles; nor, in spite of a certain sympathy for the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment. It was the stubborn, purposeful character of the man that she admired, and ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... well-disposed to me; with me he felt at ease, with me he used to talk—in my presence he ventured to leave the strange pedestal on which he had been placed either by his own efforts or by chance. Agonisingly, morbidly vain as he was, yet he was probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but I, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread of saying ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... he, 'provided your conscience be not too morbidly tender, and your ideas of God not too erroneously severe; but can you suppose it would offend that benevolent Being to make the happiness of one who would die for yours?—to raise a devoted heart from purgatorial torments to a state of heavenly bliss, ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... myself to retire from public life and never to re-enter it," he meant what he said, and would have stood to it. It is our privilege to believe this of Henry Clay; nor do we think that there was ever anything morbidly excessive in his desire for the Presidency. He was the head and choice of a great political party; in the principles of that party he fully believed; and we think he did truly desire an election to the Presidency more from conviction than ambition. This may not have ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... on a desultory, more or less speculative conversation anent the fatality, until they grew morbidly weary of contemplating the poor broken body. Yorke slid off ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... occurrence. Jason in his new joy had almost forgotten that withered token. In deep remorse at his thoughtlessness, he sought his treasure, and, horror of horrors! every leaf had fallen from the stem, the blossom was annihilated for ever. He dwelt upon this episode morbidly, as upon a presentiment: he pictured in his mind the hill-slope cottage deserted, the rose-garden wasted and full of tares, and the bleak wind blowing whither it listed through those avenues of beauty, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... beauty into circulation," was one of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... are the usual anecdotes—one is tempted to call them the stock stories of the boyhood of any great composer. In infancy Chopin could not hear music without crying. Mozart was morbidly sensitive to the tones of a trumpet. Later the Polish lad sported familiarly with his talents, for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father's school. Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps too ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... to teach children what some of their parents consider as too sacred to be taught, and others as too disgusting, and to begin this teaching at an age when the children, having already imbibed these parental notions, are old enough to be morbidly curious and prurient, is to open the way to a complicated series of social reactions which ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... will return to her people." He sighed deeply. "It was all very foolish to come out here. But it was natural. She was stricken, and sensitive—so morbidly sensitive—to pity, to gossip. Then, too, a romantic notion about the healing power of the mountains was in her thought. She wished to go where no one knew her—where she could live the simple life and regain serenity and health. She said: ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... I tell you there has been nothing between us—never anything except the most flawless idealism. I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circumstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them. I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute—'Oh, be thou ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... to be told and to be respected, and that nothing was more wicked or more ungentlemanly than a broken promise. He learned very early to do as he was told, and not to do, under any consideration, what he had said he would not do. Upon this last point he was almost morbidly conscientious, although once, literally, he "beat about the bush." His aunt Margaret, always devoted to plants and to flowers, had, on the back stoop of his grandfather's house, a little grove of orange and lemon trees, in pots. Some of these were usually in ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... hand, if one considers the innocent, the young and inexperienced, who are not a few; and likewise the morbidly curious of sensual tendencies, who are many, this matter must appear as a high explosive, capable of doing any amount of damage, if not handled with the utmost ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... writings, was first roused in the mind of Shelley. Were we not aware of far keener distress which he afterwards endured from yet greater injustice, we might suppose that the sufferings he had to bear from placing himself in opposition to the custom of the school, by refusing to fag, had made him morbidly sensitive on the point of liberty. At a time, however, when freedom of speech, as indicating freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to established authorities; when no allowance could be made on the score of youth, still less on that of individual peculiarity, Shelley ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... like that of Byron, the most effectual means of success, Mr. Millingen tried, as he himself tells us, all that reasoning and persuasion could suggest towards attaining his object. But his efforts were fruitless:—Lord Byron, who had now become morbidly irritable, replied angrily, but still with all his accustomed acuteness and spirit, to the physician's observations. Of all his prejudices, he declared, the strongest was that against bleeding. His mother had obtained from him a promise never to consent to being bled; and whatever argument might ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror. She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering that her trouble was eating ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... hospital or infirmary sore throat, because it is understood to be caused by inhaling the fumes from the carbolic acid used in the wards. Her rich colour had to Rose's dismay grown poor and pale for a time. She had laboured under the still more trying and more dangerous infliction, when the senses morbidly excited become morbidly acute, and she seemed still to smell the peculiar air of the wards wherever she went. Then Mrs. Hull insisted on Annie's leaving for a few days, and bundled her off, without the power of resistance, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... quite conscious that they do not "get on" with others; and they are tempted to be morbidly irritable and exacting, or else to shut themselves up and say, "It's no use, no one wants me." If no one wants you, it is your fault; for if you were always ready to be unselfish and thoughtful for others in small ways, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... number and wealth of his rivals, the ambitious views of her father, and the temptations to which she herself was hourly exposed, kept his jealousies and fears perpetually on the watch. He is supposed, indeed, to have been indebted to self-observation for that portrait of a wayward and morbidly sensitive lover, which he has drawn so strikingly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... it exhibits an intense earnestness in analyzing the state of her own mind, and perhaps rather too much proneness to dwell morbidly upon it, also evinces the tender joy and peace with which she was often blessed by the manifested presence of her Lord. It unfolds an advancement in Christian experience to which her conduct bore living testimony, and proves that in humble reliance on the hope set before her in the ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... that the possibility of a catastrophe, in spite of all he could do, was ever present to him; and she saw also, or thought she saw, that his conception of his own part in the great religious campaign was strangely—morbidly—dependent upon the fate of Hester. If he was able to save her from herself and from the man who threatened her, well and good; if not, as he had said to Mary once before, he was not fit to be any man's leader, and should feel himself the Jonah of any cause. There ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... young woman who is disappointed, as she has had no legacy; evidently Madame Danterre intended to add her name in the last codicil, but somehow failed to do so. This woman is sure that Madame Danterre had an evil conscience as to her wealth. She also said that she was always morbidly anxious as to a small box. Once, when the nurse had reassured her by showing her the box, which was kept in a little bureau by the bed, she said, with an odd smile: 'If I believed in the devil I should be very glad that I can pay him back all he lent me when I don't ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... arm, and closely followed by Elise. Then, despite the early hour, and to the dismay of Plume, who had planned to start without farewell demonstration of any kind, lights were blinking in almost every house along the row, and a flock of women, some tender and sympathetic, some morbidly curious, had gathered to wish the major's wife a pleasant journey and a speedy recovery. They loved her not at all, and liked her none too well, but she was ill and sorrowing, so that was enough. Elise they could not bear, yet even Elise came in for a kindly word or two. Mrs. Graham ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... thinks I am because I'm fat, and they expect me to do things they never dream of asking anybody else to do. I'd like to see 'em even ASK 'Gene Bantry to go and do some of the things they get me to do! A person isn't good-natured just because he's fat," he concluded, morbidly, "but he ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... special commissioner of the President, or perhaps as a special commissioner could not act at all. She was very aggressive, and when any of the travelling arrangements in Europe did not suit her ideas she was won't to shrilly exclaim: " Well ! New York is good enough for me." Nora, morbidly afraid that her ex- pense bill to the Daylight would not be large enough, had dragged her bodily off to Greece as her companion, friend and protection. At Arta they had heard of the grand success of the Greek army. The Turks had not stood for a moment before that gallant and terrible ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... not fail to move a very deep sympathy with his situation. Here for instance we read the ground of Wordsworth's 'Glen Almain.' Did he care for torpor again, lethargic inertia? Such a spectacle as that in the midst of a nation so morbidly energetic as our own, was calculated to strike some few chords from the harp of a poet so vigilantly ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... called, but without being able to explain to her the purpose I had in view. I also looked up the Herold family, who had received me in such a friendly way on my last visit to Paris; but I found Mme. Herold in a strange and morbidly excitable state of mind, the result of ill-health, so that instead of discussing my views with her, my only thought was to keep her calm and avoid upsetting her by even the slightest appeal for help. In my passionate longing ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... matters should be reserved for the diseased mind, for the boy or girl who has already been morbidly instructed. Discussion of immoral sex diseases should be confined to individual talk. This field teachers have already entered. Repeated physical examination of children will detect symptoms of sex abnormality. When detected, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... no mathematician, and had to submit his calculations to another to be worked out in definite mathematical formulae. Thomas Stevenson gave one the impression of a remarkably sweet, great personality, grave, anxious, almost morbidly forecasting, yet full of childlike hope and ready affection, but, perhaps, so earnestly taken up with some points as to exaggerate their importance and be too self-conscious and easily offended in respect ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... in silent submission to her husband's will. Her intellectual life, such as it was, had stopped short from the time of her intimate association with Menteith; and her spiritual nature had been starved in close contact with him; only her senses had been nourished, and these were now being rendered morbidly active by disease. The shadow of an awful form of insanity already darkened her days. The mental torture was extreme; but she fought for her reason with the fearful malady valiantly; and all the time presented outwardly only the same dull ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Rezanov, at the end of a week was not only infuriated but alarmed. He knew the imagination of woman, and guessed that Concha, in her brooding solitude, distorted all that was unfortunate in the present and dwelt morbidly on the future. He knew that she must resent his part in the long separation, no doubt his lack of impulsiveness in not proposing elopement. There was a priest in his company who, although he ate below the salt and found his associates ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... windows; watching the fire fall together, and the strange shadows move mysteriously on the mouldering walls. The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but morbidly. So, it was from that hook that for twelve years, twelve long years of changing summer and winter, the body of Count Albert, murderer and suicide, hung in its strange casing of mediaeval steel; moving a little at first, and turning ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... would have revolted against the practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the personages ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... that generation. They were looked upon as fearful demonstrations of diabolical power, and preludes to the coming of Satan, with his infernal confederates, to overwhelm the land. The imaginations of all were excited, and their apprehensions morbidly aroused. The very air was filled with rumors, fancies, and fears. The ministers sounded the alarm from their pulpits. The magistrates sharpened the sword of justice. The deputy-governor of the colony, Danforth, began to arrest ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... every series, there will have been introduced new influences of a more or less general character; such as a more vigorous or a more relaxed police; some temporary excitement from political or religious causes; or some incident generally notorious, of a nature to act morbidly on the imagination. That in spite of these unavoidable imperfections in the data, there should be so very trifling a margin of variation in the annual results, is a brilliant continuation of the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... famous quarrel was first told by Pope, and his version was long accepted in many quarters as final; but later opinion inclines to hold Addison guiltless of the grave accusations brought against him. Pope was morbidly sensitive to slights, morbidly eager for praise, and extremely irritable. To a man of such temper, trifles light as air became significant of malice and hatred. Such trifles unhappily confirmed Pope's suspicions; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... he broke down altogether and was ill for a long time. Worry about his condition finally affected his mind and he became quite melancholy at times and mentally unbalanced. It was nothing permanent, the doctors said, and the mental trouble would pass away if he regained his health, but Clement was morbidly sensitive about it and was terribly afraid people would find it out and consider him crazy all the rest of his life, and that his career would be ruined ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... the short words of an unfriendly world, and usually quite indifferent thereto, was impressed by the asperity of the suggestion and moved somewhat hastily on. Possibly his cold, wet little existence had been rendered morbidly susceptible by the general good feeling of the hour, one lady having even spontaneously given him ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... first thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "why do you give way to so much useless regret? You are so morbidly sensitive that you seem to blame yourself as though you had been guilty of poor ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... one to morbidly analyze, not even to feel remorse. He put the past behind him easily. Before him small grasshoppers arose in clapping, buzzing clouds. Prairie dogs squeaked and frisked and dived needlessly into ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... pounds, were sold for seventeen thousand and ninety-four pounds. As Turner grew older and his manner deteriorated he was assailed by the wits, the art critics, and the amateurs with cruel badinage, and to these censures Turner was morbidly sensitive. But even Ruskin admits that the pictures of his last five years are of "wholly inferior value," with unsatisfactory foliage, chalky faces, and general indications of feebleness ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... been—to be so stupid without being more brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. Here were a case and a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be morbidly curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no instance whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. I should even probably have missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had I missed ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's protegee and betrothed; yet ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... propensities play a prominent part in the education of the child. When properly disciplined and held in subordination to the higher faculties, they constitute an important factor in the economy of man. Boys are more liable to be morbidly excited when secluded from the society of girls, and vice versa. Again, when the sexes are accustomed to associate, the passions are not apt to be aroused, because of the natural antagonistic constitutional elements. The influence of the one refines, and ennobles the other. Let children ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not, I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... ease and sleep. Yet thus agonized and half delirious, I notwithstanding left it untouched. I was mostly confined to the house about four weeks. The inflammation gradually subsiding left me as weak as a child—so morbidly sensitive that tears flowed on the slightest occasion, and with my whole frame pervaded by a dull, incessant ache. To these symptoms were added coldness of the extremities, an obstinate determination of blood ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles became beauty-spots beneath her eyelids.—How was it, Susan, that you talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence had you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought gayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your sunshine and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. She made ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... This sentiment pervades the laws, customs, and religions of all countries, both Christian and heathen. Is it any wonder, then, that woman regards herself as a mere machine, a tool for men's pleasure? Verily is she a hopeless victim of his morbidly developed passions. But, thank God, she suffers not alone! Man too pays the penalty of his crimes in his enfeebled mind, dwarfed body, and the shocking monstrosities of his deformed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of degeneration. To explain the presence of erythroblasts which have undergone these changes we must suppose that in severe injuries to the life of the blood these elements are not produced in the usual fashion, but from the very beginning are morbidly altered. Analogies from general pathology ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... add that there are acute cases, (particularly a few ophthalmic cases, and diseases where the eye is morbidly sensitive), where a subdued light is necessary. But a dark north room is inadmissible even for these. You can always moderate the ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... before our Lord's journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of things—a practical pessimist—and yet with a certain kind of frank outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, grewsome fuss. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures unsullied by the world, with ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... population there must exist a dangerously large proportion of persons who are always in a condition of mind to be injuriously influenced by any force which powerfully affects them. As a matter of history, it would seem that the majority of such persons are controlled rather than morbidly excited by the opportunity of throwing themselves into any popular movement. They may suffer afterward for the stimulation they receive at the time of public commotions, but while these are in progress they ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... sat on the throne of England. Think of the brilliant Queen, whose glories our greatest poets were not ashamed to sing, with the Tudor masterfulness in her, and not a little of the Tudor grossness and passion, and remember the blots that stained her glories. Think of her sister, the morbidly melancholy tool of priests, who goes down the ages branded with an epithet only too sadly earned. Think of another woman that ruled over England in name, the weak instrument of base intrigues. And then turn to this life which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... on to the spring Yan was daily gaining in strength, and he and his mother came closer together. She tried to take an interest in the pursuits that were his whole nature. But she also strove hard to make him take an interest in her world. She was a morbidly religious woman. Her conversation was bristling with Scripture texts. She had a vast store of them—indeed, she had them all; and she used them on every occasion possible and ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... parting with Johnson he had witnessed the execution of fifteen men before Newgate and been clouded in his mind by doubts as to whether human life was or was not mere machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These cravings are clearly the marks of a mind morbidly affected and diseased, the result of the Dutch marriage as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell is conscious of his 'distempered imagination,' and the letters to Temple are scattered with irrelevances and repetitions, fatuities and inconsistencies that can be explained only ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... me to spare nothing to secure for him the consolations of the Church. I obeyed him. I caused masses to be said for him. I procured for him the visits of his priest. I left nothing undone to give him peace and joy. Would it not have been monstrous had I acted otherwise? He was morbidly anxious for the future: he, righteous man, who was as pure in spirit, as guileless, as an infant! I alone followed him to the grave; and after I had seen his sacred dust consigned to earth, I crawled home with a heart almost broken with its grief. I hid myself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the feeling that Miss Seymour was no more truly in holiday spirits than was he that he turned toward her, as toward a spot of shadow amid too fervid sunshine. It would be more congenial, drifting with her to the languid measure of this very modern, morbidly emotional waltz, knowing that, whatever their light talk, they alike felt life to be a sad affair, than going through livelier evolutions with a young person who would secretly desire him to flatter and flirt. An instinct founded less upon ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... himself took deeper and deeper hold of Henchard, till the daily necessity of facing mankind, and of them particularly Elizabeth-Jane, became well-nigh more than he could endure. His health declined; he became morbidly sensitive. He wished he could escape those who did not want him, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... hence, she prays without ceasing in obedience to the admonition of the Apostle. And, let it be said in reverence, she helps to answer her own prayers. Her spirit yearns out toward higher and wider attainments every hour of the day, not morbidly but exultantly. And while she aspires she worships. The starry sky holds her in rapt attention and admiration, and the modest flower does no less. She is thankful for the rain, and revels in the beauty and abundance of the snow. The heat may enervate, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... months ago and saved me so much woe if you had not been a dear, modest, morbidly conscientious bat," sighed Christie, pleased and proud to learn her power, yet sorry for ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... and verticals will appeal to one beholder as grave and reassuring, but repel another beholder (or the same in a different mood) as dull and lifeless; while the unstable equilibrium and syncopated rythm of Botticelli may either fascinate or repel as morbidly excited. And Leonardo's systems of whirling interlaced circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much of) the perfunctory beholder, while rewarding more adequate empathic imagination by allowing us to live, for a while, in the modes of the intensest and most purposeful and ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... hours and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among Catholics or Protestants, do ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... sustained their cabin, and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices, swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... every-day life into enormous evils. Think, rather, how much we have to be thankful for. The world in which we live, in spite of all the scars of sin and suffering upon it, is a happy world. It is not, as many would morbidly paint it, flooded with tears and strewn with wrecks, plaintive with a perpetual dirge of sorrow. True, the "Everlasting Hills" are in glory, but there are numberless eminences of grace, and love, and mercy below; many green spots in the lower ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... Lord Macaulay tells us, hardly feels the scalping-knife as he shouts his death song. The soldier in the excitement of battle is often bereft of all sense of pain. On the other hand, the patient who is morbidly self-conscious becomes oblivious of his surroundings while he suffers intensely from sensations which are usually not appreciated at all. Self-conscious children will complain much of breathlessness and a sense of suffocation, of headache, of palpitation, of intolerable ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... mob. The contemporary process, which was leading to pauperism and to the evils of the factory system, profoundly affected Wordsworth, as well as the impulsive Southey; and their frequent denunciations gave colour to the imputations that they were opposed to all progress. Certainly they were even morbidly alive to the evil aspects of the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo, which to them seemed to prescribe insensibility and indifference to most serious and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... deposited the lost manuscript of Galileo! It was a shock from which, perhaps, the zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanctioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language, a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, timorous, and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some consolation that the manuscript was totally unknown—for having got mixed with others, it ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... bad morality is as likely to corrupt the Affections as to associate with low and wicked companions. There is an abundant supply of pure and noble compositions of this sort on which the Imagination may feed without fear. If it morbidly craves the licentious pictures that come from the pen of such writers as Ainsworth or George Sand, its longings should be resisted as steadfastly as those which incline us to the gaming table or other scenes of licentious indulgence. On the other hand, the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... says Taylor, beyond all 'shyness that you could imagine in anyone whose soul had not been pre-existent in a wild duck.'[43] His extreme sensibility showed itself too in other ways. He was the least sanguine of mankind. He had, as he said in a letter, 'a morbidly vivid perception of possible evils and remote dangers.' A sensitive nature dreads nothing so much as a shock, and instinctively prepares for it by always anticipating the worst. He always expected, if I may say so, to be disappointed in his expectations. The tendency showed ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Weary of the life she led, morbidly eager for change, she was a secessionist from the first, and had welcomed the war. Moreover, strange as it may seem, she loved this worthless Lysander. She hated him for the misery he had caused her; she was exceedingly bitter against him; yet love lurked under all. ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... hampered by no western prejudice in favour of carrying any plan to completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments, lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... descrying one or more sails at varying distances, but our friends did not hail or approach any. Both Captain Bergen and Mate Storms were in a nervous condition, and were morbidly apprehensive of being anticipated by some one in dredging for the invaluable pearl-oysters. They were afraid their errand would be suspected, or they would be attacked after they should secure ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... extreme, became celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet, producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and undesirable perversions ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... correspondence of this excellently tiresome man. Tantae molis Romanam condere gentem! The dulness of Coddington, always that of no ordinary man, became irritable and aggressive after being stung by the gadfly of Quakerism. Running counter to its proper nature, it made him morbidly uneasy. Already an Anabaptist, his brain does not seem to have been large enough to lodge two maggots at once with any comfort to himself. Fancy John Winthrop, Jr., with all the affairs of the Connecticut Colony on his back, expected to prescribe alike for the spiritual and bodily ailments of all ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Bartimeus chafed under the law's delay. They became morbidly sensitive to the incubus of Ginx's Baby, especially as the press had been reviewing some of their recent acts with great bitterness. The Guardians were defiant. Having served their notices, they were induced by Mr. Stink to resolve not to maintain the infant. The poor child ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... Morbidly sensitive to the supernatural, she had turned toward him, and her face was ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... the extreme modesty of the people in this particular—but who, outside of medicine, were about as virtuous as the average Tabby or Tom cats in the midnight hour—to write the chapter touching on nymphomania in Latin, so as not to shock the morbidly sensitive modesty of the French nobility, who then enjoyed Le Droit de cuissage,—down through to Bienville, who wrote the first extended work on nymphomania, and Tissot, who first broached the subject and the danger of Onanism, all have felt that ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... father—sentimental as he—read with him), poetry, and gushing biographies; although a little later he became, with impartial facility, equally delighted with the sturdy Plutarch. His nature was passionate and inconstant, his sensibilities morbidly acute, and his imagination lively. He hated all rules, precedents, and authority. He was lazy, listless, deceitful, and had a great craving for novelties and excitement,—as he himself says, "feeling ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus of The Suppliants we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... wit, fortune, or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, which, emanating from the South, have contributed so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... dreadful variations of his own to an admiring group in the Y.M.C.A. hut, Doggie, his nerves rasped to the raw by the false notes and maddening intervals, snatched it out of his hand and began to play himself. Hitherto, shrinking morbidly from any form of notoriety, he had shown no sign of musical accomplishment. But to-day the musician's impulse was irresistible. He played the Marseillaise as no one there had heard it on penny whistle before. The hut ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... he is delivering a particularly exasperating joke. One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house next door to us, and Riley said that our landlady would be oppressively emotional at breakfast, because she generally made use of such opportunities as offered, being of a morbidly sentimental turn, and so we should find it best to let her talk along and say nothing back—it was the only way to keep her tears out of the gravy. Riley said there never was a funeral in the neighborhood but that the gravy was watery ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... afternoon ensued, and whatsoever Hogarth's hand found to do he did it with his might, though his face now seemed all eyes—brown, bloodshot, imperially large, morbidly staring. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... my own standing has told me that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate the smallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of some dangerous disease. Let me quote the well-known case of Hans Andersen, whose imagination was morbidly strong. He found one morning when he awoke that he had a small pimple under his left eyebrow. He reflected with distress upon the circumstance, and soon came to the rueful conclusion that the pimple would probably increase in size, and deprive ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little dull-breasted swallow sitting motionless by her nest a very insipid subject of study. Probably no other man, as active and busy in the world as Neckart, would have wasted so much thought on a chance young girl sitting on a log. But women being forbidden fruit to him, he was morbidly curious about them all. Old Chrysostom, barred into his cave by an impassable line, was much more inquisitive about the princess asleep outside than if he had been a hearty young fellow free to go out and kiss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various |
