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More "Obsession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was an obsession of his in any case. He had loathed her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be veiled. Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable screens. He was a stickler for that sort of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... there was Rosalie, put out from her mother's knee to the schoolroom like a small new ship out from the haven to the bay; and there was that small mind of hers come in to the company of Hilda and of Flora and of Anna with the obsession that men were infinitely more important and much more wonderful than women. She knew now that the world did not belong to men in the literal sense, but belonged, as her mother had instructed her, to God; but she knew with the abundant evidence of all ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... wish to purchase a peerage or a baronetcy in this fashion or in that, and, as in my father's case, my tastes were so many and so catholic that I could not lose myself in any one of them. They never became more than diversions to me. A hobby is only really amusing when it becomes an obsession. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... be perceptible the very slightest rift within the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is afraid that his delicate ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... into the friendly shade, she backed round the inner end of the table, but found the way blocked by a rough bench. Something must be said or done to extricate herself. The dread that her voice might break was becoming an obsession. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... and regeneration, held in common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which my mother was subjected by those theological ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... (1) sedulous, sedentary, supersede, subside, preside, reside, residue, possess, assessment, session, seige; (2) sediment, insidious, assiduous, subsidy, obsession, see ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... condemned to death. Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept. Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon's every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... expected to uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of skill ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... that Carter and King had written their chapters and read them aloud, the Scorpions were all frankly adorers of Kathleen; by midterm she had become an obsession. Eric Twiston and Bob Graham, "doing a Cornstalk" (as walking on Cornmarket Street is elegantly termed) were wont to dub any really delightful girl they saw as "a Kathleen sort of person." At the annual dinner of the club, which took place in a private dining room at the "Clarry" (the Clarendon Hotel) ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... that she loved Henry, he would make himself go ahead with the freedom scheme; but if he commenced actual proceedings now, by no possibility could she come to Arranstoun—and this idea—to get her to Arranstoun, began to be an obsession. Just in proportion as his nature was wild and rebellious, so the mad longing grew and grew in him to induce her to come ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,—the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... will find but few such British utterances at the moment, and these few not by men of great weight either in politics or in commerce. The South was labouring under an obsession and prophesied results accordingly. So strong was this obsession that governmental foreign policy neglected all other considerations and the first Commission to Europe had no initial instructions save to demand recognition[662]. The failure of that Commission, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... far outlands was the culmination of an ideal, spurred by dissuasion and antagonism into a determination, and developed by longing into an obsession. Since infancy the girl had been left much to her own devices. Environment, and the prescribed course at an expensive school, should have made her pretty much what other girls are, and an able satellite to her mother, who managed ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Weston, with a faint, dry smile. "Still, you see, I couldn't stay away. The thing has become an obsession." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... taking his usual before-bedtime stroll. Of old, that evening stroll had been confined to the Place's grounds, a quarter-mile beyond. But, lately, his new obsession for finding treasures for the Mistress had lured him often ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... up an object without first investigating with a board or stick lest there be a snake under it. It became such an obsession that if anyone did pick up something without finding a snake under it he felt as disappointed as if he had run to a fire and found it out when he ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... exhortations of press and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true relation with ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... must be shown not only the result of her triumph over death, but the very process of the struggle through which by sheer volition she forced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession by her soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions of the story, her body could not be present: and the difficulty ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... coward, he would have been ashamed of it; and whatever he might have done afterwards, he would never have done that thing again. He would have been sensitive: not saving his own life would have turned into an obsession with him. But there is left, I admit, the murder. And murders always take the public. So I'll give you the murder—though it throws no light on Ferguson, who is the only thing in the whole accursed affair that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... cutting his mutton into very small pieces Mr Cupples replied: 'The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite erroneous, which ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... let him see. Poor Bruce! Well, they were linked together. There were Archie, the angel, and Dilly, the pet.... She was twenty-eight and Aylmer forty. He ought not to hold so strong a position in her mind. But he did. Yes, she was in love with him in a way—it was a mania, an obsession. But she would now soon wrestle with it and conquer it. The great charm had been his exclusive devotion—but also his appearance, his figure, his voice. He looked sunburnt and handsome. He was laughing as he talked to the miserable creature (so Edith ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... time. As a rule, the mineral trail leads poor men to greater poverty, and sometimes to a grave; but once you have set your feet on it you follow it again. The thing becomes an obsession; you feel forced ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... to the reader that all this insistence upon the supreme necessity for an organized literature springs merely from the obsession of a writer by his own calling, but, indeed, that is not so. We who write are not all so blinded by conceit of ourselves that we do not know something of our absolute personal value. We are lizards in an empty palace, frogs crawling over ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... adventure with the girl, his failure to ask her name frankly, his folly of bashful backwardness in putting questions when she was at arm's length from him, his mournful certainty that he would never see her again—all conspired curiously to make her an obsession rather than ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... enormously, and he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and wonderful—the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him, filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... refreshingly new and entertaining. This is one of the instances where exaggeration has served as a healthy antidote to the tendency toward extreme dinginess rampant about ten years ago, resulting from an obsession to antique everything. The reaction from this, a flaming rainbow of colours, struck a blow to the artistic sense, drew attention back to the value of colour and started the creative impulse along the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... France. Do you recollect the scar on his temple? It was not made by a saber; it is the mark of a bullet. He received it while a correspondent in the Balkans. Well, it left a mark on his brain also. That is to say, he is conscious of what he does but not why he does it. He is a sane man with an obsession. This wound, together with the result of Germany's brutal policy toward him and France's indifference, has made him a kind of monomaniac. You will ask why I, an accredited agent in the employ of France, have not stepped in and arrested him. My evidence ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... anger on ordinary occasions, McTeague when finally aroused became another man. His rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... put the man and everything concerning him out of my mind for good and all?" she asked herself more than once. And, whatever the reply to her query, the fact remained that she couldn't; the thought had become something of an obsession. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... and easily than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no Balzac, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... pretty kind of obsession for a man to have, wasn't it? Somebody running after him all the time, and then ... running on ahead? And, of course, on a broad pavement there would be plenty of room for this running gentleman to run round; but on an eight- or nine-inch kerb, such as ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... looked at Percy, he seemed supremely ignorant of it all, unconscious of this trap of the existence of which everyone here present was aware, save indeed himself. She would have fought against this weird feeling of obsession, of being a mechanical toy would up to do certain things, but this she could not do; her will appeared paralysed, her tongue even refused ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation."[48] "The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... mannerism that made her tremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust herself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession with her, that hideous breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might never ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... to seize the chance in the present industrial arrangement for the development of "the originating, choosing power" in the working man because they have been obsessed by the business appreciation of the working man's power of adaptation. It is because they labor under this obsession that they turn industrial education into industrial training whenever they include industry in their curricula. Educators know that there is adventure in industry, but they believe that the adventure is the rare property of a few. They believe ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... of Verona, this idea, the idea that treachery caused by some obsession is at the root of most tragedy, was treated by him at length, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a greater ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the gooseflesh rise over the surface of his body, and it was with difficulty that he refrained from following an instinctive urge to fire upon the nocturnal intruder. Better, far better would it have been had he given in to the insistent demand of his subconscious mentor; but his almost fanatical obsession to save ammunition proved now his undoing, for while his attention was riveted upon the thing circling before him and while his ears were filled with the beating of its wings, there swooped silently out of the black night behind him another weird and ghostly shape. With its huge wings partly ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... read, but if to be read profitably, with its application in mind to the present social awakening to the waste, the enormous and stupid waste, of the gifts of women. To one fresh from the consideration of the roots of life as they lie close to the surface of primitive society, this obsession of the recent centuries, that the community can only be served by a gift for architecture, for administration, for healing, when it occurs in the person of a male, is only a trifle less ridiculous than that other social stupidity, namely, that a gift of mothering must ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... lies in the brain parts and those where it lies outside of the brain. But the situation becomes still more complex by the mutual relations of those various processes. The impulse to take morphine injections may have reached the character of a mental obsession and thus represent an abnormality of the mind, but yielding to it produces at the same time disturbances in the whole body which thus become again external sources for abnormal experiences in otherwise ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... of the canticle: "At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of thoughts, is almost ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... idiot; very often he is an ex-churchwarden, guardian, way-warden, or other official, who has resigned in dudgeon or been ousted from his post for some neglect or failure. He is a man with whom the world has gone wrong, a sufferer, perhaps, from some disaster which has become an obsession. He views everything with distorted eyesight; nothing pleases him, and he wants to put everybody right. He cherishes a perpetual grievance against some individual or clique for a fancied slight, and goes about trying to stir up ill-feeling ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... attributed to the cave man, but this is an error. (See cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory to his early youth, when he was taught that big, overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them in their pockets and carried them home. Has the kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand, and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and is very early for all appointments. Appetite small. Does not sleep. In small communities shows occasional semi-paralysis ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him, but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... remove that temptation of the reward. It is only an inducement to crime. Time alone will solve the mystery, and as long as he continues to brood over it, he will go on failing in health. It's coming to an obsession with him to live to see Richard Kildene hung, and some one will have to swing for it if he has his way. Now he will return and find this man in jail, and will bend every effort, and give all his ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the door of his own lodge was evidence of his obsession, Jack firmly believed and from which he deduced the opinion that as long as his equipment held out he was ready to keep up that hot bombardment under the belief that the enemy were falling like dead leaves in the frosts ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... It was the only idea he had: to find them—to find them—to find them. His other thoughts were without stimulating power—irresolute, vague, uncertain. This one idea grew and grew until it became an obsession. He could no longer bear the sound of music; so it was no sacrifice to him to give up his profession. He hated the very streets he walked in, for had Elene not walked in them? He must find her; he must find his child. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... do much to elevate the taste and refine the habits. They would bring to the enlightenment of the world an "educational mode," because the time-honored artistic feeling of a people with a very ancient civilization would breathe new life into those moderns who seemed to be suffocating under the obsession of physical hygiene, and to be actuated solely by a despairing effort to ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... action of that night's events became more and more accelerated, Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal, merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked by nothing—that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was impossible for him to make her hear him, or when she heard to understand what ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Prime, he endured this obsession. The day's round was filled with the amazing image of a crowned, hollow-eyed, tattered little drab, the mock and wonder of throngs of witnesses, appreciable only by himself as a pearl of priceless ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... days, and was loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... of self-sufficiency, the obsession for exclusiveness and separation—so distinctively a Jewish trait at that time—was inculcated at the maternal knee and emphasized in synagog and school. The Talmud,[165] which in codified form post-dates the time of Christ's ministry, enjoined all Jews ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... time that I was writing my last article, that the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia (who has a perfect obsession for being in the middle of the picture), was carrying out at the army manoeuvres at Narva, a certain strategic design, long-prepared and tested, by means of which he proposed to fill with amazement and admiration not only the Russian army but the Imperial Court—nay, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... me to be the work of a slightly unbalanced mind. He is not violently insane; probably just has this one particular obsession. His scientific bump certainly shows no sign of weakness. He might even be some new type of kleptomaniac. He steals things, and he has already stolen far more than any man could ever have any need of, and he leaves in its place a 'stock' certificate ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... to one who feels himself congenial to some Great or Significant Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession with him to communicate to others what he sees in his Idol, his Divinity. Yet it is not Inspiration for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. Some point that has no marked attraction in itself may be inexpressibly precious to the Author as Material, presenting ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the same they guard in force and perplex with their ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... your question over in it," I explained, "and wondering what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the unfortunate baby used to be dragged about in a kind of caged ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... other horses. Darkness was upon us with the camp-site Edd knew of still miles to the fore. No grass, no water for the horses! But we had to camp there. All hands set to work. It really was fun—it should have been fine for me—but my gloomy obsession to hurry obscured my mind. I marveled at old Doyle, over seventy, after that long, hard day, quickly and efficiently cooking a good hot supper. Romer had enjoyed the day. He said he was tired, but would ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... not only have all our substantial and permanent victories over bodily ills been won by physical means, but a large majority of our successes in mental and moral diseases as well. Yet the obsession persists, and we long to extend the realm of mental treatment in ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, divined in him that his power of obsessing the minds of other men had become, or was on the way of becoming, a temptation and obsession to himself. She was wise enough to realize that hardly any man in the world can stand too much popularity, also to see the rocks ahead for Druro in a country where men drink and gamble far too much, and are fast in the clutches of these vices before ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was a lovely ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... is the true patriotism. When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion—the methodical diabolism—which this obsession has produced in Germany. It has startled us because ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... groans. A weighty and mournful obsession is stifling him. In his harsh breathing it seems to me that I can hear his heart beating and muttering. Looking at Volpatte, hooded in bandages, and then at the strong man, muscular and full-blooded, with that profound and eternal yearning whose sharpness he alone can gauge, I say to myself that ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... to me personally, was the honor of American citizenship—an ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy; for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going to the other extreme and refusing to write ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... quite familiar to him, so much so that he started in his chair as though about to rise and greet him. The stranger, also, seemed for a second under the same obsession, but only for a second; he made a half pause and then passed on, becoming lost to sight beyond the palm trees at the entrance. Jones leaned back in ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... innocence had been proved and his hatred for me being his great obsession, since I had the thing he had wanted but no longer wanted, let that be understood—he saw the misery he had planned for me and my dear wife being brought to a sudden end. He had, by the way, already ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... irascible and almost brutal. Yet he was at times even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling with his wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend. It is no desire to exaggerate this side of his nature that impels this plain writing. Chopin left compositions that bear witness to his masculine side. Diminutive in person, bad-temper became him ill; besides, his whole education and tastes were ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... we continued to press back the enemy. For me the film story of the taking of St. Quentin is an obsession. It holds me as a needle to a magnet. And in this section, at the ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Chloe, pathetically. "I've wanted some—oh, so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession." ...
— Options • O. Henry
... continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Perhaps such obsession was natural. How could he foresee the variety of new methods that were so soon to transform book illustration? Anyhow, herein partly lies the explanation of the following notice in a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... times, even after starting on her pilgrimage, when the whole adventure had appealed to her as one that was no better than a weird, senseless obsession, one that she would do well to turn back from and forget. Probably, at first, she had only been kept to the task by a certain spirit of adventure, a youthful and long-repressed urge for romance, ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm for ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... not follow his thoughts any further. She wished absolutely to make her way into Natacha's chamber. The obsession ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... of ours," I explained, shortly. "He was born twenty years ago or so—at least we heard that he was; and we haven't heard anything of him since, except by the dream route, which is not entirely convincing. He is Hephzy's pet obsession. Kindly forget ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... themselves as facing a world in arms. The hater subjects his mind to the domination of what he hates; he loses his independence and volition and becomes the prey of the hated idea. At last he cannot free his mind from the obsession; and the deliberate cultivation of hate in the conscientious German manner is ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... face with the necessities of existence, knowing what it is to work and to struggle, to co-operate and to compete, to suffer and to relieve suffering, though they may be less well-informed than the instructed classes, are also less liable to obsession by abstractions. They see little, but they see it straight. And though, being men, with the long animal inheritance of men behind them, their passions may be roused by any cry of battle, though they are the fore-ordained dupes of those who direct the policy of nations, ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... anguish, his agonized obsession of the possibility of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical powers of resistance. He could not constrain his muscles to rise from the recumbent position against the carcass. He started up, then sank back, and in another moment ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the following canon (No. 73): "That no minister or ministers, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast 'out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture, or cozenage, and deposition from the ministry." This penalty at the present day not many of the clergy ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... endeavours to create a friendly impression upon the natives encountered; but in the present case he was utterly opposed to their usual methods, the fact being that the idea of penetrating to the heart of the country inhabited by the mysterious white race had gradually come to be an obsession with him, and he would hear of nothing being done that might by any chance interfere with this project; his conviction being that if they adopted their usual methods they would inevitably be stopped and sent to the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... schoolmaster came back and realised the trick played on him, he grew pale with anger; he immediately suspected the bookseller; but when his eyes fell on Gustav who was standing in a corner of the room, laughing, his old obsession returned to him: "He's paying me out!" Without a word he seized his property, threw a few coins on the counter and ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... diversion, by means of the pantomime that had so successfully deceived me—by dramatically shooting out his wrist, consulting his watch, instantly stepping out and presently breaking into a run—to induce any gentleman behind him who had reached an age when the fear of missing trains has become an obsession to accelerate his progress. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... station between Sardinia and the African coast, resolved not to move till he "knew something positive." In the absence of information, the safety of Naples, Sicily, and Egypt was perhaps not merely an obsession on his part, but a proper professional concern; but it is strange that no inkling should have reached him from the Admiralty or elsewhere that a western movement from Toulon was the only one Napoleon now had in mind. It was April 18 before he received further news ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending his original passion ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... good clerk. Still, it wouldn't do. It wasn't only that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken. That wouldn't have mattered so much, as she left after he had made his third attempt, and got married. But the thing became an obsession with him, and we found that he had a fixed idea that every red-haired woman who came into the office was the girl who had deceived him. You can see how awkward that made it. Red hair ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... strongest feeling I ever had. Since the War has changed everything and everybody, all one's feelings have grown stronger. I never was furious before—and I've been furious. I've felt savage. I've raged. And the thing I'm thinking of is like a kind of obsession. It's this—" he caught her hands again and held her face to face with him. "I—I want to have ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her had by that time become an obsession. I picked up my hat, threw open the door, and, oblivious of the shock to the office force of my presence, followed so immediately by my exit, I dashed out to the elevator. As I went down in one cage I caught a glimpse of Johnson and two ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... superstitious nonsense is becoming an obsession to you," it said one fine April morning. "Yes, I mean what I say—an obsession! You must pull yourself together or you'll go stark mad, and then you'll probably go and throw yourself over the Embankment. That legend is all bosh! You're in the ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... moment of dazzling revelation till now I have nursed this infinite desire. To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... may say. And why should not the executive artist reassure himself by having his music with him? It seems to me a pianist would feel so much more certain of himself if he had the notes before him; he of course need not look at them, but their presence would take away the fear that is often an obsession. With the notes at hand he could let himself go, give free reign to fancy, without the terrible anxiety ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of a sense of shame and unhappiness in the child. There comes a time when the child passionately desires to regain control and is miserable about her failure, until the concentration of her thoughts on the subject becomes a veritable obsession. Every night she goes to bed with this only in her mind. Every night she falls asleep, miserably aware that she will wake to find the bed wetted. The suggestion impressed in the first place on the mind of the tiny child by injudicious management has become fixed by the growing sense of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... the hotel bar were beginning to work off, and I felt a little weak. Through a sort of mist I seemed to have a vision of Aunt Agatha hearing that the head of the Mannering-Phippses was about to appear on the vaudeville stage. Aunt Agatha's worship of the family name amounts to an obsession. The Mannering-Phippses were an old-established clan when William the Conqueror was a small boy going round with bare legs and a catapult. For centuries they have called kings by their first names and helped dukes with ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the lavatory, and in the ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... he hoped contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the "damned race," the hopeless horde of millions "mostly ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... looked like Gregory. And he was angling in the direction of the Lang hill. The idea clung tenaciously. When he reached his rooming-house it became an obsession. He decided to find out if the runner could have been his employer. Calling up the cannery it was some time before a sleepy voice answered ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... The particular idea which now began to occupy the thoughts of E. A. Partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... given him a second thought. But all that day he had been oppressed by a sense of hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had followed him from the moment he had landed in Genoa. He had tried to argue it down, inwardly protesting that such must be merely the obsession of all fugitives. And now, even to find an unknown and innocent-appearing young woman trying to force an entrance into his room aroused all his latent cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... save that of the multitudinous stars—which, to my mind, never betray their immeasurable distance so clearly as when one is in mid-ocean—with the sough and moan of the night wind and the soft, seething hiss of the sea whispering in one's ears, the feeling of loneliness becomes almost an obsession, the sense of all-pervading mystery persistently obtrudes itself, and one quickly falls into a condition of readiness to believe the most incredible of the countless weird stories that sailors love to relate ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... said Lady Agatha. "The hunt had become a monomania with him. It had become an obsession. He had given his whole mentality to it and it had absorbed all his faculties. He was now the victim of it. He had grown powerless in the grip of the idea; he had lost ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... "It is an obsession to-day," said Reanda to himself, reflecting that though the girl lived in Rome he had never noticed her before, and had now seen her twice ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... mistaken, he went and sat down in his armchair again and thought of the boy, and he thought of him for hours, and whole days. It was not only a moral, but still more a physical obsession, a nervous longing to kiss him, to hold and fondle him, to take him onto his knees and dance him. He felt the child's little arms round his neck, his little mouth pressing a kiss on his beard, his soft hair tickling ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Jack Belllounds, and I'm never going to be. There will be trouble here. I feel it. I see it coming. Dad keeps at me persistently. He grows older. I don't think he's failing, but then there's a loss of memory, and an almost childish obsession in regard to the marriage he has set his heart on. Then his passion for Jack seems greater as he learns little by little that Jack is not all he might be. Wilson, I give you my word; I believe if dad ever really sees Jack as I see him or you see him, then ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... believed, more control over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely gave lip agreement to this project.... Only he didn't believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this particular obsession. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... piling up about him came from his own mistakes. Over and over again he threshed the past. Molly Brownwell's cry, "You have sold me into bondage, John Barclay," would not be stilled, though at times he could smile at it; and the broken body and shamed face of her father haunted him like an obsession. Night after night when he tried to sleep, Robert Hendricks' letter burned in fire before his eyes, and at last so mad was the struggle in his soul that he hugged these things to him that he might escape ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Protestant, accepted the old belief and enforced it in the old way by the faggot and the stake. It was not until human reason at last awoke after the long slumber of the Middle Ages that this dreadful obsession gradually passed away like a dark cloud from the intellectual horizon ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... When they think, it's only of their farms and their wives. That other little thin chap is a Parisian bookkeeper. I'd like to bet that he's thinking of his wife, and only of her. He's wondering if she's faithful to him. It's almost become an obsession. I've never known such jealousy, it's ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... remarks, "when they see artists produce with facility, are ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit, that forbid you to carry on any ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a province in which he stated that his troops would not give quarter to those who surrendered. The documents proving that this proclamation had been issued were received by Bolivar in Trujillo. In Bolivar's mind this idea was a permanent obsession: "Americans are dying because they are Americans, whether or not they fight for American freedom." He took into account the long list of crimes committed, the harmless citizens, women and children who had died, the barbarous asphyxiation of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... hangs over every serious crisis in French politics. The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated. Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear. Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension. The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... his thoughts clogged his very motion. Anxiously eying him, his father sneaked after. The eccentric movements of his son filled him with a certain anguish. He was a god-fearing man; erratic behavior meant to him the obsession of the devil. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... was occupied with the run down to Pueblo and occasional stops for speeches at way-stations, was uneventful save for the growing obsession of Charlie Moore. He was overflowing with pride and importance. That night, in the presence of five thousand people, he was going to reply to the great Jimmy Grayson, and show to them and to him his errors. Mr. Grayson was sound in most things, but there were several in which he should be ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... after this experience of mine? Has not faith, has not hope perished? If the danger were mine alone, I should give the matter no heed,—I was not born to be immortal,—but since there has been a public secession (or rather obsession) and war is fastening its clutches upon all of us alike, I should desire, were it possible, to invite Cassius here and argue the case with him in your presence or in the presence of the senate; and I would gladly, without a contest, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... by the fact of Justin's illness. There was something newly impassioned in the duskiness of her eyes, in the fulness of her red lips, in every sweeping movement of her body, which seemed caused by the obsession of a hidden fiery force that held her apart and afar, goddess-like, even while she spoke of and handled the things of every-day life. She looked at the common-place surroundings, at the children, at Dosia; but she saw only Justin. When she was beside ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the letter to Miss Martin. She lay prone in a corner of the sofa, dreaming, as she had done all her life; save that the faculty—of setting in motion at will a stream of vivid and connected images—which had always been one of her chief pleasures, was now an obsession and a torment. How often, in her wakeful nights at Rydal, had she lived over again every moment in the walk to Blea Tarn, till at last, gathered once more on George's knees, and nestling to his breast, she had ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the primitive conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of Weir of Hermiston, a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the elements of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... regard to eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of psychasthenia by Janet. See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who, from the age of 12 or 13 (the epoch of puberty) ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... francs for a consultation," said Giuditta. "But I am so much obliged to you for coming to free me from this obsession, that I shall ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with a bygone ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of the Rome that was to be. His unerring choice of subject and his brilliant execution seemed to close to his successors all paths to epic fame. They had but well-worn and inferior themes wherefrom to choose, and the supremacy of Vergil's genius dominated their minds, becoming an obsession and a clog rather than an assistance to such poetic genius as they possessed. The same is true of Horace. As complete a master in lyric verse as Vergil in heroic, he left the after-comer no possibility of advance. As for Ovid, there could be only one Ovid: the cleverest and most heartless ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... to cling to your seed definitely for a considerable time, and maintain throughout an alert attention. It is the emptiness of alert expectation. not the emptiness of impending sleep. If your mind be not in that condition, its mere emptiness is dangerous. It leads to mediumship, to possession, to obsession. You can wisely aim at emptiness, only when you have so disciplined the mind that it can hold for a considerable time to a single point and remain alert when that ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... this one obsession Miss Deane, as Rachel soon discovered, had a clear and well-balanced mind. For, now that she had received her desired assurance from this new quarter, she began to talk of other things. Her boasted "modernism," it is true, had a smack of the stiff, broadcloth savour of the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... proposition, even if he had wanted to. What reason could he give for such a course? He could not explain that he already had a family—with stepchildren, so to speak, who adored him. And what could he say to his mother's obsession, to which she came back again and again—her longing to see her grandchildren before she died? Madame Dupont waited only long enough for George to stammer out a few protestations, and then in the next breath to take them back; after which she proceeded to go ahead with the match. The family lawyers ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... between Sim and his inclinations. His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still held him in the hollow of his hand, and besides these reefs of menace were yet other ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... seeing the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab, to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... men, flogged out of crews and stained by the blood of primitive and dull savages—the Cliffords were notorious for their brutal driving—now served only to support Madra's debility and a horde of unscrupulous panderers to her obsession. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... wealth of these bells in their number only, but also in their use; for they are not reserved in any way, but ring tunes and add harmonies at every half and quarter and at all the hours both by night and by day. Nor must you imagine that there is any obsession of noise through this; they are far too high and melodious, and, what is more, too thoroughly a part of all the spirit of Delft to be more than a perpetual and half-forgotten impression of continual music; they render its air sacred and fill it ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... enormous privileges, even if I am allowed to do them at all. Is it so with everything they say is wrong? Is all sin artificial, and do people sin so zestfully only because they are cramped? Or is there a residue of real wickedness?" Thus she thought, struggling against the obsession of an inquisitorial system which merely clouded her perceptions of real right and wrong. And alone she ate silently, a saintly figure amid ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... That was an obsession with Kelly. He drilled it into me daily. Kelly himself was a settled married man. Of his state we talked often. I asked Kelly the very first day if he ever ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... at him bravely and listened. "Mother's planning to go East," she heard him say. "She's always wanted to, and as she grows older it's almost an obsession. So father's finally decided to go, too, and let me run the business ... I'll be an ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... before her clearly with all the expressions she had learned to know and dread. She tried to banish it, striving with all her might to put him from her mind, twisting this way and that, writhing on the soft sand as she struggled with the obsession that held her. She saw him all the time plainly, as though he were there before her. Would he pursue her always, phantom-like? Would the recollection of the handsome brown face haunt her for ever with its fierce eyes and cruel mouth? She buried her head deeper in her arms, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... characteristic features, each set of laws are framed to cover the phenomena presented by that group. Otherwise there would be no need of these special laws. It is astonishing how paralysing is the effect of the theistic obsession on the minds of even scientific men, since it leads them to ignore what is really a basic consideration ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... became more and more startling. She had his dark, smiling eyes; his wavy brown hair; her very manner of speech was like his. To David Windom, she was the re-incarnation of the youth he had slain. Out of her eyes seemed to look the soul of Edward Crown. He could not stand it. She became an obsession, a curious source of fascination. He could not bear her out of his sight, and yet when she was with him, smiling up into his eyes,—he was deathly afraid of her. There were times when he was almost overcome by the impulse ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... trouble means fear,—just terrible fear without object or meaning or reason (anxiety neuroses); or a definite fear of some harmless object (phobia); or a strange, persistent, recurrent idea, quite foreign to the personality and beyond the reach of reason (obsession); or an insistent desire to perform some absurd act (compulsion); or perhaps, a deadly and pall-like ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... roads by which it reaches us are also unexpected and varied. Often, as in the examples quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Sometimes, it is an auditory or visual hallucination which seizes upon us while awake; sometimes, an indefinable but clear and irresistible presentiment, a shapeless but powerful obsession, an absurd but imperative certainty which rises from the depths of our inner darkness, where perhaps lies hidden the final answer ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... possibly discover unless she herself recovers her normal memory so far as to be able to assist us. I see that I have noted how she constantly repeats the words 'red, green and gold.' That combination of colours has apparently impressed itself upon her mind to such an extent that it has become an obsession. Often she will utter no other words than those. She was seen by a number of eminent men, but nobody could suggest ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... having left home.[7] The social worker who attempts to deal with the situation the deserter creates should know this attitude in advance and be prepared, through some simple rule-of-thumb psychology, to attack the obsession and bring him, first of all, to see and face squarely ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... plainly showed that she loved Henry, he would make himself go ahead with the freedom scheme; but if he commenced actual proceedings now, by no possibility could she come to Arranstoun—and this idea—to get her to Arranstoun, began to be an obsession. Just in proportion as his nature was wild and rebellious, so the mad longing grew and grew in him to induce her to come once more ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... grew my pain and bane and blight: I read the marvel-lines made wax my love * And wore my body out till slightest slight.[FN386] Would Heaven ye wot the whole I bear for love * Of you, with vitals clean for you undight! And all I do t' outdrive you from my thought * 'Vails naught and 'gainst th' obsession loses might: Couldst for thy lover feel 'twould ease his soul; * E'en thy dear Phantom would his sprite delight! Then on my weakness lay not coyness-load * Nor in such breach of troth be traitor-wight: And, weet ye well, for this your land I fared * Hoping to 'joy the union-boon ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Luis," he said. "There's red down there. Nature's palette is a little short of red in this valley. Too much blue. Even nature sometimes gets a one-color obsession, like the painters. Here she's gone off on blue. It's the most dangerous color. Darwin says it was the last color produced in nature's laboratory. Ordinarily it's the least common in flowers and birds and insects. Hearn—Have you read ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... attached a widow) and proceeded to deal decisively with the East and the Sabre (Mark Sabre's grandfather) of that day. Both were old men. The East, young Mr. Fortune bought out neck and crop. The Sabre, who owned then a fifth instead of a third interest in the business, and had developed, as an obsession, an unreasonable fear of bankruptcy, he relieved of all liability for the firm at the negligible cost of giving himself a free hand in the conduct of the business. The deed of partnership was altered accordingly. It was to this fifth share, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence, because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... record I have divided the various stages of my waterwagoning into these parts: the obsession stage; the caramel stage; the pharisaical stage, and the safe-and-sane stage. I drank my Scotch highball and went over to the club. The crowd was there; I sat down at a table and when somebody asked me what I'd have I took a glass of water. Several of ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... This obsession must be a real nightmare. The people you used to detest are becoming your friends, you like them and ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... fruition, if it is frustrated, consciousness of it may become exceedingly intense. There is the constant thought of the object, a vivid feeling of tension, of a striving to attain the object. Desire may become an obsession, a torment filling the horizon, and the volition in which it finds its fruition stands forth as a marked relief. This condition of things may be brought about by the inhibition occasioned by the physical impossibility of attaining the object; but it may also ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the obsession of the principal European nations that, in order to be great and successful in the world as it is, they must possess military power available for instant aggression on weak nations, as well as for effective defense ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of spirit that breathed out of the night and the silence to her. Dorn would go to war as no ordinary soldier, to obey, to fight, to do his duty; but for some strange, unfathomable obsession of his own. And, therefore, if he went at all he was lost. War, in its inexplicable horror, killed the souls of endless hordes of men. Therefore, if he went at all she, too, was lost to the happiness that might have been hers. She would never love another ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... throwing the old one away, "he must be pretty lonely all by himself in that big house of his. On top of that he's getting old and isn't in very good health. Explain it any way you like. The simple fact is that within this last year or so, it's gradually gotten to be a kind of obsession with him, an out-and-out, down-and-out monomania, to know that kid—to have her come and spend part of every year with him. That's ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the woman herself, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Jabberwocks became an obsession with their unwilling owners, who hinted darkly at mutiny when told that no more Scarffs could be obtained, the Naval Air Service having contracted for all the new ones in existence. But chance, in the form of ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... reasoning I followed during that foolish year I have never been able to determine. I must have believed it to be imperative that I live up to the expectations of my new friends. As a complement to this idiotic obsession there must have been a grotesque belief that somehow, by accident or miracle, I would be kept in funds indefinitely. I do recall my amazement at the abrupt ending of my dreams. I woke up one morning to discover I had no money, no assets. There were no odds and ends, even, of wreckage ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... feared for their power and malignity. They were reputed to be cannibals on the sly, and, though generally appearing in human form, were capable of various metamorphoses, thus eluding detection. They were believed to have the power of taking possession of men through spiritual obsession, as a result of which the obsessed ones were enabled to heal sickness as well as to cause it, to reveal secrets, and to Inflict death, thus terrifying people beyond measure. The names of these, two demigods, especially that of Palamoa, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... else to think about there was John. Always John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war; he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him, to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait for more volunteers. They could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars, his father would send out any number. She suspected John of not really ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... with reality; but, in a deep essential sense, is the projection of the novelist's own passionate imagination. A thundering tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic, sweeps, with its weight of ponderous details, through every page of these dramatic volumes. Every character has its obsession, its secret vice, its spiritual drug. Even when, as in the case of Vautrin, he lets his demonic fancy carry him very far, there is a grandeur, an amplitude, a smouldering flame of passion, which redeem ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... very much this obsession," he said rising. "I will not attempt to reason with you again, Helen, but"—he made no effort to lower his voice, "the world—our world will soon know what manner of man James Turnbull was, ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... willingly have occupied himself with other things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain to ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... endeavoring to keep from going beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so, through his scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession, an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when she was a child, and still more, later, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... consistent in this matter. It worships the destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I confess I do not see what is left of Christianity. There is only one way out of the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... combine the qualities of booking-clerk, station-master, goods-agent, information clerk, and day and night watchman all into one. In consequence of this it is necessary for the traveller's speech and attitude to be strictly soothing and complimentary. Talbot's obsession at this moment was as to whether B—— was near or ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... almost like an obsession with them. They must find out definitely what it was that was spoiling all their fun. They began to haunt the river, especially at the foot of the falls, in the hope of seeing something, anything that would put an end ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... become enormous privileges, even if I am allowed to do them at all. Is it so with everything they say is wrong? Is all sin artificial, and do people sin so zestfully only because they are cramped? Or is there a residue of real wickedness?" Thus she thought, struggling against the obsession of an inquisitorial system which merely clouded her perceptions of real right and wrong. And alone she ate silently, a saintly figure ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... which now began to occupy the thoughts of E. A. Partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... the tuberculosis death-rate is, of course, only a part of the general improvement of physique which is taking place under civilization. If we could only get out from under the influence of the "good old times" obsession and open our eyes to see what is going on about us! There is nothing mysterious about it. The soundest of physical grounds for improving health can be seen on every hand. We point with horror, and rightly, to the slum tenement house, but ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... excite his nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the Kuenstlerhaus in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... verged upon the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going to the other extreme and refusing to ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... in their passage from the brain and the spinal cord through the body with manifestations of life. She has a series of chapters with regard to psychology normal and morbid. She talks about frenzy, insanity, despair, dread, obsession, anger, idiocy, and innocency. She says very strongly in one place that "when headache and migraine and vertigo attack a patient simultaneously they render a man foolish and upset his reason. This makes ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... been condemned to death. Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept. Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon's every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had lost ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... hideous evening. Alec was here—the man I'm to marry if nothing saves me—and it was bad. He won't release me, and I won't break my word unless he does. And after he was gone I went through a queer time; I think a novel would call it an obsession. Almost without my will, almost as if I were another person, I tried to get the pistol. And your letter guarded it. My first personality couldn't lift your letter off to get the pistol. Did you hypnotize me? It's like the queer things one reads in psychological books. ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... you a wild legend of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered your first attack of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent dreams are a common phenomenon even in healthy persons. In this case, no doubt the exact repetition of the physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or semi-delirious imaginings. These were of course varied ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... met up with a homesick American. He was marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely gave lip agreement to this project.... Only he didn't believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this particular obsession. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... impulse, mania, to set fire to buildings, for the thrill they get out of seeing the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab, ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: See A Vision of Poets.] Swinburne [Footnote: See A New Year's Ode.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See Sister Songs.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it has been overdone, and ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... apparently thought it would be, to prove that I had an obsession on the subject of ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... two children, she felt that she could live for years without the desire, without even the thought of romantic love in her mind. "I wonder why I, who have known and lost love, should be so much freer from that obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has never been loved in her life?" she asked herself while she carried the supper tray down the long ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... flung himself into the life-boat because he was a coward, he would have been ashamed of it; and whatever he might have done afterwards, he would never have done that thing again. He would have been sensitive: not saving his own life would have turned into an obsession with him. But there is left, I admit, the murder. And murders always take the public. So I'll give you the murder—though it throws no light on Ferguson, who is the only thing in the whole accursed affair that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... saber; it is the mark of a bullet. He received it while a correspondent in the Balkans. Well, it left a mark on his brain also. That is to say, he is conscious of what he does but not why he does it. He is a sane man with an obsession. This wound, together with the result of Germany's brutal policy toward him and France's indifference, has made him a kind of monomaniac. You will ask why I, an accredited agent in the employ of France, have not stepped in and arrested him. My evidence might bring ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... on the mind of every American parent tonight: education. We all know the sorry story of the sixties and seventies—soaring spending, plummeting test scores—and that hopeful trend of the eighties, when we replaced an obsession with dollars with a commitment to quality, and test scores started back up. There's a lesson here that we all should write on the blackboard a hundred times: In a child's education, money can never take the place of basics like discipline, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... larger quantities as the system becomes accustomed to their use; they are almost without exception excreted by the kidneys, thus adding an additional burden to organs already badly overworked. They produce a habit of gaining relief which becomes an obsession and ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... friendship shall henceforth be deemed secure after this experience of mine? Has not faith, has not hope perished? If the danger were mine alone, I should give the matter no heed,—I was not born to be immortal,—but since there has been a public secession (or rather obsession) and war is fastening its clutches upon all of us alike, I should desire, were it possible, to invite Cassius here and argue the case with him in your presence or in the presence of the senate; and I would gladly, without a ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... midst of all other occupations I was constantly rearing these structures on that queenly site above the finest of the New York lakes, and dreaming of a university worthy of the commonwealth and of the nation. This dream became a sort of obsession. It came upon me during my working hours, in the class-rooms, in rambles along the lake shore, in the evenings, when I paced up and down the walks in front of the college buildings, and saw rising in their place and extending to the pretty knoll ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... this being a case of desperate necessity, nothing is more unanimously acknowledged by all except those who labor under an obsession, than that the evil of drink has been steadily diminishing. Not only during the period of Prohibition agitation, but for many decades before that, drunkenness had been rapidly declining, and both temperate drinking and total abstinence correspondingly ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life and live again in the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... dramatic heroes, a young prince with real nobility of soul. Lord Camillo and Lady Paulina are well-drawn types of loyalty and devotion. Leontes alone, the jealous husband, is unreasoning in the violence of his jealousy. As the study of a mind overborne by an obsession, it is a ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... showed that he had lost the ability to see things with a soldier's eye. They declared that he made pictures and presented them to himself as facts; that he thought as an Emperor, not as a Captain. They said that in this very campaign in France, the same imperial obsession had taken such hold upon him that in striving to retain everything from Holland to the end of the Italian peninsula he stood to lose everything. They said that, if he had concentrated all his armies, withdrawn them from outlying dependencies, he could have overwhelmed ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... fifty; but a born insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... just at the time that I was writing my last article, that the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia (who has a perfect obsession for being in the middle of the picture), was carrying out at the army manoeuvres at Narva, a certain strategic design, long-prepared and tested, by means of which he proposed to fill with amazement and admiration not only the Russian army but ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... more subtle, is the case of A Winter's Tale, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... thoughts of his jealousy, then all courage fell from her. "Jealous? Great God! No!" She knew it was finished when he had said that and, beneath the weight of his contempt, she crumbled into the dust of pitiful obsession. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of the President's appeal for a Democratic Congress in 1918 which has never been fully told, illustrates the bearing this Lodge obsession had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the Congressional election was approaching ex-Congressman Scott Ferris, then acting as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went to the President and told him that ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Francis' blindness to her own interest I still had a prospective superintendent for the gathering and shipping of the grass: George Thario. Unless his obsession had sent him down into Mississippi or Louisiana, I expected to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... affectionate deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed, professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... word explains almost every inexplicable act in life." He took up a knife and held it level on his palm. "There you have the normal condition, but once one end swings up you get Genius and all the Arts, or madness and crime and the obsession of one idea: one definite, over-mastering idea that drives every force ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... calm or cool her passions. Her evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,—the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it smoking into her brain ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... or ministers, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture or cozenage, and deposition from the ministry." In the same year, licenses were actually granted, as required above, by the Bishop of Chester; and several ministers were duly authorized by him ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... gross type of astral person who has a desire to seize upon the physical body of another. The purpose is to gratify desires that have outlived the physical body. The dead drunkard is perhaps the commonest example of the obsessing entity, and if the obsession is only partial it may lead to nothing worse than strong and perhaps irresistible impulses toward alcoholic stimulation. Obsession may, of course, occur without the psychic door being opened deliberately. But no obsession is possible, in any case, unless there ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... comfort she felt in touching the things he had worn, the books he had handled, the cushions his head had rested against. She had indeed mentioned to the housekeeper at Berkeley Square that she wished his lordship's apartments to remain untouched until she herself had looked over them. The obsession which is called Love is an emotion past all explanation. The persons susceptible to its power are as things beneath a spell. They see, hear, and feel that of which the rest of their world is unaware, and will remain unaware for ever. To the endearing and passion-inspiring qualities Emily ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me personally, was the honor of American citizenship—an ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy; for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. The patriotic reading of my boyhood had made ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... the means of quenching thirst? Not at all. It might rather be called the art of making thirst inextinguishable. Frank libertinage, does it deaden the sting of the senses? No; it envenoms it, converts natural desire into a morbid obsession and makes it the dominant passion. Let your needs rule you, pamper them—you will see them multiply like insects in the sun. The more you give them, the more they demand. He is senseless who seeks for happiness in material prosperity alone. As well undertake ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... the invaders have gradually thinned their numbers. The Spanish adventurers worked to death the soft inhabitants of the American islands. Many perished by the sword, many in a species of national decline, the wonders of civilization, for good and for bad, working an obsession in their childish imaginations which in time reacted upon the ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... his body at times wreaked a fearful revenge on his spirit. The satyr in him suddenly took possession, and he was powerless in the grip of an instinct which had all the strength of the primitive forces of nature. It was an obsession so complete that there was no room in his soul ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... matters his judgment was often colored, but seldom warped, by feeling. The line between sentiment and common sense is clearly drawn in his comment upon the Kossuth obsession which held New York in 1852. "I have heard and seen Kossuth both in public and private, and he is really a noble fellow, quite the beau ideal of a poetic hero.... He is a kind of man that you would idolize. Yet, poor fellow, he has come here under a great mistake, and ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... came out as we started. Had it not been for the horses, we should have been entirely happy. But sympathy for them had become an obsession. We rode slowly to save them; we walked when we could. It was strange to go through that green wonderland and find not a leaf the horses could eat. It was all moss, ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... consider the great music written by men. Almost invariably one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty, produced by thoughts of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the abstract—that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... drawing-room, their work on their knees, thinking of him. In the excitement of criticism his thoughts wandered to his own work, and the women's eyes filled with reveries, and their hands folded languidly over their knees. He spoke without emphasis, his words seeming to drop from the thick obsession of his dream. At ten the ladies gathered up their work, bade him good-night; and nightly these good-nights grew tenderer, and nightly they went up-stairs more deeply penetrated with a sense of their happiness. But at heart he was a man's man. He hardly perceived ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... second thought. But all that day he had been oppressed by a sense of hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had followed him from the moment he had landed in Genoa. He had tried to argue it down, inwardly protesting that such must be merely the obsession of all fugitives. And now, even to find an unknown and innocent-appearing young woman trying to force an entrance into his room aroused all his latent cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ashamed ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... throat and chest operations, succeeding in some which older and more experienced men refused to attempt. Months passed, and into his busy life had never come the wished-for chance of vengeance; but all who knew him knew that Herter's hatred of Bavarians was an obsession. He was not one who would forget; and when a lot of seriously wounded Bavarians came into the field-hospital where he was at work, the two young doctors under him looked one another in the eyes. Even the stretcher-bearers had heard of Herter's ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... people. The greater number of the ceremonies appear to have been practised for the purpose of securing fertility. Of these the sexual ritual has been given an overwhelming and quite unwarranted importance in the trials, for it became an obsession with the Christian judges and recorders to investigate the smallest and most minute details of the rite. Though in late examples the ceremony had possibly degenerated into a Bacchanalian orgy, there is evidence to ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... most generous of men, the kindest of fathers. It was an indication of his strange obsession, in regard to horses, that he never would see that Lucy was teasing him. As far as horses were concerned he lacked a sense of humor. Anything connected with his ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... man, and a little because I want to get rid of Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... dreadful obsession arose from a fisherman, who, coming into the harbor of a nightfall after a stormy day, had, as he affirmed, beheld the old meeting-house all of a blaze of light. Some time after, a tinker, making a short-cut from Stapleton by way of the ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices and the utmost outrageous ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of Weir of Hermiston, a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the elements of his ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation, feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling with his wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend. It is no desire to exaggerate this side of his nature that impels this plain writing. Chopin left compositions that bear witness to his masculine side. Diminutive in person, bad-temper became him ill; besides, his whole education and tastes were opposed to scenes of violence. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the rhymes of the canticle: "At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of thoughts, is almost ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... gave—that she couldn't make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of psychasthenia by Janet. See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who, from the age of 12 or 13 (the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a rule, the mineral trail leads poor men to greater poverty, and sometimes to a grave; but once you have set your feet on it you follow it again. The thing becomes an obsession; you feel ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... manners, of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,— the Russian does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only occasionally lifted; he has no room to wander widely through human nature. And yet his work gives an impression of variety that the American magazine never attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of gloom is off him, he experiments ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Of the head or mind. Subs. 3. In disposition; as all perturbations, evil affection, &c. Or Habits, as Subs. 4. Dotage Frenzy. Madness. Ecstasy. Lycanthropia. Chorus sancti Viti. Hydrophobia. Possession or obsession of Devils. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the world, was more and more cordially adopted. In a sense this was a perfectly natural and logical programme, and amid the surrounding European conditions excusable—as I shall point out presently. But before long it became a weird enthusiasm, almost an obsession. It was taken up over the land, and repeated in a thousand books and on as many platforms. One of these propagandists was General von Bernhardi, who entered in more detail into the technical and ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... practicality, the results are refreshingly new and entertaining. This is one of the instances where exaggeration has served as a healthy antidote to the tendency toward extreme dinginess rampant about ten years ago, resulting from an obsession to antique everything. The reaction from this, a flaming rainbow of colours, struck a blow to the artistic sense, drew attention back to the value of colour and started the creative impulse along the line of a ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... existence, to be nothing but a tragedy that would finally wreck his domestic happiness? It could not be. It must not be. He must be patient, and wait. Billy loved him. He was sure she did. By and by this obsession of motherhood, which had her so fast in its grasp, would relax. She would remember that her husband had rights as well as her child. Once again she would give him the companionship, love, and sympathetic interest so dear to him. Meanwhile there was his work. He ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... were devils. James I. and his opinion. 56. The common people believed in the ghosts. Bishop Pilkington's troubles. 57. The two theories. Illustrated in "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth." 58. And "Hamlet." 59. This explains an apparent inconsistency in "Hamlet." 60. Possession and obsession. Again the Catholics and Protestants differ. 61. But the common people believe in possession. 62. Ignorance on the subject of mental disease. The exorcists. 63. John Cotta on possession. What the "learned physicion" ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... began to engross her whole thought. She pried into the obscurest corners, she questioned the slaves, she lay awake at night listening to Esteban's breathing, in the hope of surprising his secret from his dreams. Naturally such a life was trying to the husband, but as his wife's obsession grew his determination to foil her only strengthened. Outwardly, of course, the pair maintained a show of harmony, for they were proud and they occupied a position of some consequence in the community. But their ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... sprang up in Myla's empty heart and rapidly grew into an obsession; but soon she realized with a sinking sensation how futile were her desires. She was no match for the Jaguar; indeed, the mere sight of the fearsome beast made her tremble. Never could she muster the courage to descend from her lofty perch while such a creature roamed ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... into the train, just this time yesterday turned and seen the face which had refused to leave him since. Fever recurs at certain hours, just so did the desire to see her mount within him, becoming an obsession, because it was impossible to gratify it. One could not call at seven o'clock! The idea of his club, where at this time of day he usually went, seemed flat and stale, until he remembered that he might pass up Bury Street to get to it. But, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... made many metaphorical words from joining together two Latin words and making a new meaning. We speak of a person having an "obsession" about something when he is always thinking of one thing. But the word obsession comes from the Latin word obsidere, "to besiege;" and so in the word obsession the constant thought is pictured as continually trying to gain entrance into the mind. We use the word besiege ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... that the organizers, forgetting that this was a mimic battle, had made it into a real battle, and that there was an imperfect appreciation of what strictly amateur sport is. The desire to win, laudable and essential in itself, may by excessive indulgence become a morbid obsession. Surely, I thought, and still think, the means ought to suit the end! An enthusiast for American organization, I was nevertheless forced to conclude that here organization is being carried too far, outraging the sense of proportion and of general fitness. For me, such ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... in eagle's plumes and bear-skins. To affect the imagination of the people when he was going to visit the sick, he had been accustomed to walk upon his two hands and one foot, with the other foot moving up and down in the air. He believed that sickness was caused by obsession, or the influence of some evil spirit, and he endeavored, by howlings, jumpings, and rattling of snake-skins, to drive this imaginary spirit away. But he did not begin his incantations here; he looked upon Benjamin with staring eyes, ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... impossible goal which he and his fellow-leaders had set before themselves. I saw that this fellow Fernandez, at all events, had dwelt upon the mad scheme of conquest, first of Hayti, then of the West Indian Islands, and ultimately, as he had declared, of the whole world, until it had become an obsession with him in which all difficulties were swept away and his gorgeous dream had seemed to be a thing already almost within reach. It occurred to me that by pretending to listen to this dreamer, to appear to treat his dreams as though ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Cupples replied: "The most curious feature of it, in my judgment, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week, and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, always walking in his shadow, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... live in the one fond, imperishable hope! It's the only thing that keeps you alive and going—this idea of your Fate. It's an obsession—this mysterious Knight somewhere in the ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... taken prisoner. Then he discovered the depths to which a mercurial nature could descend. He had been fiercely alive all day; the roar of the battle, the plunging horses, the quickening stench of the powder, that obsession by the devil of battles which makes the tenderest kill hot and fast, all had made him feel something more than himself, much as he had felt in the hurricane when he had fancied himself on high among the Berserkers of the storm. In his ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... gentleman," this was the sum of feminine opinion. Captain Sears was inclined to picture him as what he would have called a "sissy," and not much more dangerous than that. The judge's hatred, he came to believe, was an obsession, a sick ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... fears and impulses (see Chapter XVIII), for it is useless to try to "reason them out", though it is useful for a brief period each day to try deliberately to turn the mind away from the obsession, by singing or whistling, gradually prolonging ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... was there, and the unconscious Serena believed it to be real. That meeting was the beginning of her obsession. Thereafter she talked chapter and society and opportunity and advancement, and ate them and drank them, too—at least the meals—those at home—seemed to the captain to be made up of very little else. Their evenings alone together ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... ago on the Illinois prairie, and he has devoted practically all of his life to the pursuit of wild animals. It has been a pursuit which owed its unflagging energy and indomitable purpose to a singular passion, almost an obsession, to capture alive, not to kill. He has caught and broken the will of every well-known wild beast native to western North America. Killing was repulsive to him. He even disliked the sight of a sporting rifle, though for years necessity compelled him ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... about the volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... every coyote that caught a fugitive scent of the gray killer, but Breed did not share this dread. He was Flatear's match in size and strength and so was not concerned. Breed could not know that Flatear's hatred had become almost an obsession; that night after night the slayer was craftily trailing him and that killing coyotes was but a side line to lighten the hours of a protracted stalk for Breed himself. Flatear was a veteran warrior and he waited only for an opportunity to attack when he should find Breed alone. Nose and ears kept ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... is an obsession; it is rapidly becoming a superstition. To the stranger it is an infliction; but, bad as the bean is to the uninitiated, it is a luscious morsel compared with the flavorless cod-fish ball which lodges in the throat and stays there—a second Adam's ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... group of phenomena has its characteristic features, each set of laws are framed to cover the phenomena presented by that group. Otherwise there would be no need of these special laws. It is astonishing how paralysing is the effect of the theistic obsession on the minds of even scientific men, since it leads them to ignore what is really a basic ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... sustained by a sheer obsession akin to the old-time belief in the potent spell of "the black arts" that their military masters were invulnerable and invincible, that by some power—good or evil, they did not care which—they had been made so, and that the world was bound to fall ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... the nervous temperament a much more formidable difficulty—all the sensitive faculties are more sensitive—irritability becomes an obsession and idleness ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... merry bravado, at his illicit successes with Gentile women. Maximum Max, on the other hand, would treat his lascivious topics with peculiar earnestness, and even with something like sadness, as though he dwelt on them in spite of himself, under the stress of an obsession ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... evidence to produce, and that, where they pronounce within the limits of their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... these forces; naturally, therefore, the suspicion that Great Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... They were told that they might have opened the Exchange sooner after the actual opening had proved a success, and they were informed in the editorial columns of a prominent journal that their fear of foreign liquidation had been an "obsession" which lacked justification. These critics never were heard from while the event was in doubt, and consequently the Committee did not profit ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... reverie. Several times he halted as if the burden of his thoughts clogged his very motion. Anxiously eying him, his father sneaked after. The eccentric movements of his son filled him with a certain anguish. He was a god-fearing man; erratic behavior meant to him the obsession of the devil. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... moralised is the true patriotism. When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion—the methodical diabolism—which this obsession has produced in Germany. It ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... departs therefrom, which relegates it to the middle ground is deceitful, chimerical, fatal. All the resources accumulated in time of peace, all the tactical evolutions, all the strategical calculations are but conveniences, drills, reference marks to lead up to it. His obsession was so overpowering that his presentation of it will last as long as history. This obsession is the role of man in combat. Man is the incomparable instrument whose elements, character, energies, sentiments, fears, desires, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... into something fine,—had idealized it,—until he'd come to take a kind of religious pride in it. Skinner and his wife had watched their little bank account grow, bit by bit, from ten dollars up. It had become an obsession with them. They had gone without many little things dear to their hearts that it might be fattened. Surely, it was a greedy creature! But, unlike most greedy creatures, it gave them a great deal of ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... woman of the brown cloak, still watching everything with eyes that missed no detail. She annoyed Prescott; she had become an obsession like one of those little puzzles the solution of which is of no importance except when one cannot obtain it. So he lingered in her neighbourhood, taking care that she should not observe him, and he asked two or ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... his agonized obsession of the possibility of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical powers of resistance. He could not constrain his muscles to rise from the recumbent position against the ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... I would wait until I got home. Then I would talk and forget myself—only by forgetting myself would I enjoy the present. Only those who forget themselves are happy. The obsession of self is the most oppressive of ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... to Hedin an obsession; they spoke a language he knew. He hated the grosser furs, as he loved the finer. He despised the trade tricks and spurious trade names by which the flimsiest of furs are foisted upon the gullible purchasers of "seal," "sable," "black fox," "ermine," ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... go by what the poor lady's friends told me," Panton said uncomfortably. "She was not under my care long. But I need hardly tell you, Sir Lyon, that any obsession that takes hold of a human being may in ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... had worked himself into an obsession of fury against her. He only wanted her gone. She had come, she had got worse as the weeks went on, she was absolutely no good. His system, which was his very life in school, the outcome of his bodily movement, was attacked and threatened at the point where Ursula was included. She was the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... such a craft. Despite his "ticket" there was none so foolish as to trust him with one—a condition of affairs which had tended to sour a disposition not naturally sweet. The yearning to command a steamboat gradually had developed into an obsession. Result—the "fast and commodious S.S. Maggie," as the United States Marshal had had the audacity to ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... those who knew him best were wont to say that Sir John practiced few arts so studiously as that of enjoyment—he could not banish the figure of Narcisse from his reverie. A horrible thought assailed him that this obsession might spring from the fact that on this very morning Narcisse might have taken his last brief walk out of the door of La Roquette, and that his disembodied spirit might be hovering around. Admirable as ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It's general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That's what it's doing for me now. I'm always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I'm considering at present for instance something ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Mechanical subluxations, distortions and displacements of bony structures, muscles and ligaments; weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... you out," mused Van quietly. "I wish you could win. But 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 ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Darkness was upon us with the camp-site Edd knew of still miles to the fore. No grass, no water for the horses! But we had to camp there. All hands set to work. It really was fun—it should have been fine for me—but my gloomy obsession to hurry obscured my mind. I marveled at old Doyle, over seventy, after that long, hard day, quickly and efficiently cooking a good hot supper. Romer had enjoyed the day. He said he was tired, but would like to stay up beside the mighty ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... more, my forced leisure, the obsession of one besetting thought, my contempt for all besides, the want of money to procure other amusement, and the almost claustral seclusion in which I lived, disposed me to a life of more intense and eager study than I had yet led. I passed my whole day seated at a little writing-table, which was ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... our organism, and what do I know of it myself? Was it the sudden upcropping of some lower stratum in my nature—a brutal primitive instinct suddenly asserting itself? I could almost believe the tales of obsession by evil spirits, so overmastering ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... throughout an alert attention. It is the emptiness of alert expectation. not the emptiness of impending sleep. If your mind be not in that condition, its mere emptiness is dangerous. It leads to mediumship, to possession, to obsession. You can wisely aim at emptiness, only when you have so disciplined the mind that it can hold for a considerable time to a single point and remain alert when that point ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and flew away. Chesterton cultivated this attitude of always expecting to be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... becoming an obsession. He tried not to think about it, but that only made him think about it the more; he would think about not thinking about it and about not thinking about that— and all the time he was growing thirstier. He wondered how long one could live without water; and as the torment grew worse he began ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... and spring passed, and she did not come back. They passed monotonously, like all the springs and winters he had known. He had got his rise at Michaelmas; but he was free from the obsession of the matrimonial idea and all that he now looked forward to was an indefinite extension of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... quarter of a mile from the Yanceyville court house, within plain view of it. His house was veritably his castle, where he had fortified himself. He was besieged at home and was under obsession everywhere; yet he seemed to hold ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Republican attack and Federalist resistance, through the clamour over Hamilton's death, the denunciation and upholding of Burr, the impeachment of Chase, the situation in Louisiana, the gravitation towards France, and the check of England, the consciousness of Pitt and the obsession of Napoleon,—through all the commotion and fanfaronade of that summer Rand kept a steady hand and eye, and sent his arrows into the gold. In the law, as in politics, he was successful. A comprehensive knowledge and an infinite painstaking, a grasp ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... know, Carley," replied Eleanor, helplessly. "How you harp on things! We must dress to make other women jealous and to attract men. To be a sensation! Perhaps the word 'immoral' is not what I mean. A woman will be shocking in her obsession to attract, but hardly more than that, if ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... mind before the rise of Christianity or rather of rationalism; for Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, accepted the old belief and enforced it in the old way by the faggot and the stake. It was not until human reason at last awoke after the long slumber of the Middle Ages that this dreadful obsession gradually passed away like a dark cloud from the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... off, and I felt a little weak. Through a sort of mist I seemed to have a vision of Aunt Agatha hearing that the head of the Mannering-Phippses was about to appear on the vaudeville stage. Aunt Agatha's worship of the family name amounts to an obsession. The Mannering-Phippses were an old-established clan when William the Conqueror was a small boy going round with bare legs and a catapult. For centuries they have called kings by their first names and helped dukes with their weekly rent; ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa, was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... carefulness about money had been a long-standing joke amongst his assistants when Bruce Wright had belonged to Hartley Parrish's secretarial staff. Thrift had become with him more than a habit. It was a positive obsession. It revealed itself in such petty meannesses as a perpetual cadging for matches or small change and a careful abstention from any offer of hospitality. Never in the whole course of his service had Bruce Wright heard of Mr. Jeekes taking anybody out to lunch ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... content with his lot which had been his obsession that day. "We have everything, darling. We shall have all that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly happiness that they'll never know—or miss," he added, giving them ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
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