"Morbidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... big gun had been trained on the city and a shell had fallen near the headquarters of the staff. Last night she had lain awake wondering if she did not miss the sound of the distant guns, as she had in Passy where there was no noisy traffic to take their place. There is a certain amount of morbidity in all highly strung imaginative minds, and although she had developed no love for Big Bertha nor for the sound of high firing guns attacking avions in the middle of the night, there had been something in that ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... interest. No doubt she early weighed the comparative moral effects of coats cut with capes and those cut without, of purely Quaker conjugal love and that deteriorated with Baptist affection. Susan had an earnest soul and a conscience tending to morbidity; but a strong, well-balanced body and simple family life soothed her too active moral nature and gave the world, instead of a religious fanatic, a sincere, concentrated worker. Every household art was taught her by her mother, and so great was her ability ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the respective proportions of the deaf in the population of the several states, we cannot say; and we are generally unable to determine to what the variations are to be ascribed—whether they are to be set down to particular conditions of morbidity, the intensity of congenital deafness, or other influences operating in different sections; or, perhaps in some measure, to the greater thoroughness with which the census was taken in some places than ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... avoided life. He avoided himself. Thin, pale, puny, he suffered from being so, and could not bear its being talked about. He was naturally pessimistic, no doubt inheriting it from his mother, and his pessimism was fed by his morbidity. He did not know it: thought everybody must be like himself: and the queer little boy of ten, instead of romping in the gardens during his play-time, used to shut himself up in his room, and, carefully picking his ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... criminalist who does not frequently see and deal with his subjects does not perform his duty. I do not mean, of course, that he should see them for the purpose of getting a confession out of an attack of morbidity; I mean only, that this is the one way of getting a just and correct notion of the case. Every criminalist of experience will grant that he sees the event, particularly the motives of the criminal, otherwise after the first examination ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... received. For self-love like his is an incurable disease of sensibility, a spreading canker which poisons the whole character, as an unsound spot in the flesh poisons the whole body. To those who have not come in close contact with this form of morbidity, it may seem impossible that William Pressley's love for Ruth, which had been real so far as it went, should have hardened into dislike almost as soon as the words that wounded it had left her lips. Yet that was precisely what had taken place, quite naturally and even inevitably. He ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... The soil was unfavorable and the seed was not of the right sort. In Spain, the king stands shrouded in etiquette like a mummy in its wrappings, while a too rigid pride, incapable of yielding to the amenities of the worldly order of things, ends in a sentiment of morbidity and in insane display.[2202] In Italy, under petty despotic sovereigns, and most of them strangers, the constant state of danger and of hereditary distrust, after having tied all tongues, turns all hearts towards the secret delights of love ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is an attempted revelation of Balzac's adolescent mind we have both Madame Surville's and Champfleury's additional testimony to prove. Discounting the exaggerations, due either to literary morbidity of the kind that produced Chateaubriand's Rene and Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme, or to the natural vanity of which the novelist had so large a share, there yet remains a considerable substratum of truth in this record of twin, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... always ready to revert, always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhaps the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity into which this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the white nightgown, blessing his ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... to think of modern Americans as shy, the most distinguished American author of our time was probably the shyest of men. Nathaniel Hawthorne was shy to the extent of morbidity. We have observed him, when a stranger entered the room where he was, turn his back for the purpose of avoiding recognition. And yet, when the crust of his shyness was broken, no man could be more ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... inhuman—cruelty of Clem Peckover, who has been compared to the Madame Cibot of Balzac's Le Cousin Pons, render the book an intensely gloomy one; it ends on a note of poignant misery, which gives a certain colour for once to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism. Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing |
