"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have heard sounds, and witnessed happiness, such as is not likely to be my lot again. PHILEMON is at rest in his grave, as well as MENANDER and SICORAX. The two latter, it is well known, were Tom Warton and Joseph Ritson. "The husband of poor Lavinia" was a most amiable gentleman, but timid to a morbid excess. Without strong powers of intellect, he was tenacious of every thing which he advanced, and yet the farthest possible from dogmatic rudeness. There are cankers that eat into the heart as well as the cheek; and because Mr. Shacklewell ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... that matter of his "thinking" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation—which ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... upon Crime. By degeneracy we mean, to use Morel's definition, "a morbid deviation from the normal type." That is, degeneracy is such an alteration of organic structures and functions that the organism becomes incapable of adapting itself to more or less complex conditions. Ordinary forms of degeneracy that are well recognized ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... But her face wore again the puzzled look. She began to watch Doctor McCall. He really knew but little, she saw, of rare books: his reading of them was a mere pretence. He was neither a lazy nor a morbid man: what pleasure could he have in neglecting his work day after day, sitting alone in the dusky old shop as if held there by some enchantment? Kitty knew that she herself had nothing to do with it: she appeared ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... that no one noticed the morbid state of Aunt Amy at this time. But it would have been more strange if any one had noticed it. Of outward signs there were practically none. Even the silent hand-wringing had ceased. She ceased to rebuke Jane for stepping upon the third stair; she ceased to talk of ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... which seemed to say, "I am not afraid to trust you with the knowledge that I am unhappy—you will not betray me". Yet, though she seemed to find pleasure in discussing subjects which afforded opportunity for expressing the morbid and desponding views she held of life, she never allowed the conversation to take a personal turn, always skilfully avoiding the possibility of her words being applied to her own case: any attempt to do so invariably rendering her ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... brain, nourished by a well sustained body; his intelligence was apt and rapid, but these unheard-of complications demanded a morbid analysis ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... feeling fails to touch us, when it has found stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their own personality, which lies ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with the present ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... real: you ought to be made cordially to detest, scorn, loathe, abhor, and abominate all people of this kidney. Men of genius like those whose works we have above alluded to, have no business to make these characters interesting or agreeable; to be feeding your morbid fancies, or indulging their own, with such monstrous food. For our parts, young ladies, we beg you to bottle up your tears, and not waste a single drop of them on any one of the heroes or heroines in this history: they are all rascals, every ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to moor my mind And cast the anchor Hope, A puff of breath will put to death The morbid misanthrope That lurks inside—as errors hide In standing forms of type To mar at birth some line of worth; And so ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... repeats the barbaric Persian when he says that the wife and husband form but one person—that is the husband. Sir, it would be extremely amusing, if it were not tragical, to trace the consequences of this theory on human society and the unhappy effect upon the progress of civilization of this morbid estimate of the importance of men. Gibbon gives a curious instance of it, and an instance which recalls the spirit of the modern English laws of divorce. There was a temple in Rome to the goddess who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... you by prostrating you—perhaps He means by giving you blessings almost without your asking, to show you how little avails morbid sensitiveness or self-tormenting struggles. Synthetical minds are subject to this self-torture. Such a period in your life is the time to become again a little child! I do not mean a re-regeneration, but a permitting of the mind to assume that tone of ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... Courtenay. He was so keenly engaged on the business in hand, so bent on achieving accuracy in his figures, that she chided herself for her morbid reverie. Then she wondered if he ever gave a thought to that promised wife of his, who must soon suffer the agony of knowing that ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... circumstances, however, served to embolden many hitherto undecided sympathisers into openly declared and vehement Boer partisans, revealing the singular spectacle, among English people even, of a morbid cult apparently ready to sacrifice their nation just to vindicate their judicial dicta about Boer innocence and to parade their own darling sense of shocked ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... Geneva"—delineated by another seer or visionary as "the dreamer of love-sick tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs; shy of light as the mole, but as quick-eared too for every whisper of the public opinion; the teacher of Stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct."—The Friend; Works of S. T. Coleridge, 1853, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... over it, if we feed our minds upon it, especially if we are by necessity non- combatants, it is all apt to turn to a festering horror which makes us useless and miserable. Whatever happens, we must try not to be simply the worse for the war—morbid, hysterical, beggared of faith and hope, horrified with life. That is the worst of evils; and I believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped minds in easier postures, and to let our ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... needs help. She cannot bear it that this disaster has come, through her. It has made her morbid. She says things about herself, that make me tremble. Has ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... his plays do not deserve the sweeping condemnation with which Macaulay once spoke of them in the House of Commons, they are not likely to attract any critics but those for whom the inferior efforts of a great genius possess a morbid fascination. Some of them serve, in a measure, to illustrate his career; others contain hints and situations which he afterwards worked into his novels; but the only ones that possess real stage qualities are those which he borrowed from Regnard and Moliere. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a single fact stated in the following pages which I have not verified with a chemist's analysis, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child's nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect. These morbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did not believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I had never hit anything I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... terrestrial things. What did the little hasty sojourner find so forbidding and disgustful in our upper world to occasion its precipitate exit?' The tomb of a young lady calls forth the following morbid horrors:—'Instead of the sweet and winning aspect, that wore perpetually an attractive smile, grins horribly a naked, ghastly skull. The eye that outshone the diamond's brilliancy, and glanced its lovely lightning into the most guarded heart—alas! where ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... said Miss Jerrold, with a sigh. "It's very sad, you see, poor girl, she's going through a curious morbid phase which has completely changed her. All that time she had her ideas that it was her duty to wait and suffer; and I do honestly believe that if that man had behaved himself, been released on a ticket of—ticket of—what do they ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... words of Petronius,[289] that is better done by the historians. The adventures on the march are not likely as a rule to be peculiarly interesting; there are no heroic single combats to vary and glorify the fighting. Conscious of this inevitable difficulty, and with all the rhetorician's morbid fear of being commonplace, Lucan betakes himself to desperate remedies, hyperbole and padding. If he describes a battle, he must invent new and incredible horrors to enthral us; his sea-fight at Massilia is a notable instance;[290] death ceases to inspire horror and becomes grotesque. If ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul, filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly, but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing its final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed in the supernatural, and might almost be said to have contracted a miracle-habit, as morbid as any other form of artificial stimulant; they stood, like children, in an attitude of gaping wonder before the miracle of miracles which they felt in their own consciousness; but one can see in this emotion, which is, after all, not exclusively ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged, which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to arraign the Most High; and then came dark thoughts, the thoughts of death—everlasting death—that human beings returned as earth to earth, and then all was over. Amidst thoughts morbid and impious as these were there could be nothing to console her, and she sank into the darkest depth ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... had been made leaving the estate to him, and his namesake would be the heir-at-law. Thus he would be utterly beggared. It was not that he actually believed that this would be the case; but his thoughts were morbid, and he took an unwholesome delight in picturing to himself circumstances in their blackest hue. Then he would strike the ground with his stick, in his wrath, because he thought of such things at all. How was it that he was base enough to think of them while the accident, which had robbed him ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... and soreness of the bill. No animal deviates so far from the simplicity of nature in its habits, as man; none is placed under the influence of so many circumstances, calculated to act unfavourably upon the frame. His morbid affections are hence abundant and diversified, as may be seen by referring to the different nosological arrangements; these long catalogues of diseases affording strong evidence that man has not carefully followed that way of life which has been marked ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... Dorothy scarcely left Wade's bedside, for to her mother now fell the burdens of the ranch household. From feeling that she never would be equal to the task of caring for so many people, Mrs. Purnell came to find her health greatly improved by her duties, which left her no opportunity for morbid introspection. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... a dream city, a creation of some morbid imagination, presented to her mind's eye as the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the head of all the armies whom the Generals, soldiers, as well as the country at large, had entire confidence. General Lee filled this position to the perfect satisfaction of all, still his modesty or a morbid dislike to appear dictatorial, his timidity in the presence of his superiors, often permitted matters to go counter to his own views. It appears, too, that when General Sherman allowed Hood to pass unmolested to his right, and he began tearing up the railroads in his rear, it was a move so different ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... nature, and which never leaves them, even in their old age. The elder of the two, whose native name was Binoke, but who had been given the nickname of "Tommy Topsail-tie," had this facial characteristic to a great degree, and was, in addition, of a somewhat morbid and sullen disposition, disliking all strangers. But he was yet the veriest slave to Flemming's children, who tyrannised over him most mercilessly, for young as they were, they knew that his savage heart had nothing ...
— The Flemmings And "Flash Harry" Of Savait - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... the Arab word anber (pronounced amber) a ambergris, i.e. the morbid secretion of the sperm-whale; but the context appears to point to amber, i.e. the fossil resin used for necklaces, etc.; unless, indeed, the allusion of the second hemistich is to ambergris, as worn, for the sake of the perfume, in amulets or pomanders (Fr. ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... so illustrious a source failed to elate the young poetess, or even to give her a due sense of the importance and value of her work, or the dignity of her vocation. We have already alluded to her modesty in her unwillingness to assert herself or claim any prerogative,—something even morbid and exaggerated, which we know not how to define, whether as over-sensitiveness or indifference. Once finished, the heat and glow of composition spent, her writings apparently ceased to interest her. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... are, and if you hadn't worked yourself into an unhealthy, morbid state you would know it. No, old fellow, we've never quarrelled yet, and don't ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... here as elsewhere, lay the normal machinery bare. In the first number of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Janet has discussed five cases of morbid impulse, with an explanation that is precious for my present point of view. One is a girl who eats, eats, eats, all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and gets her food from an automobile that escorts her. Another is a dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... purposes of corrupting the national taste, and of lowering the standard of manners and morals. The tendency of his writings is to vitiate that purity of mind, intended by Providence as the companion and preservative of youthful virtue; and to produce, if the expression may be permitted, a morbid sensibility in the perception of indecency. An imagination exercised in this discipline is never clean, but seeks for and discovers something indelicate in the most common phrases and actions of ordinary life. If the general style of writing and conversation were to be formed on that ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... current of anxiety in her life. Her thoughts dwelt on the invalids at home; she wearied for letters; she trembled before the arrival of the mails; even her dreams influenced her. But she would not allow herself to grow morbid. Every morning she went to the houses in the Mission before breakfast to have a chat and cheer up the inmates. On New Year's Eve, fearing the adoption of European customs by the natives, and wishing to forestall them, she invited all the young men who were Christians to a prayer-meeting from ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... and to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... representatives at the Conference had been not merely ignored, but reprimanded like naughty school-children by a harsh dominie and occasionally humiliated by men whose only excuse was nervous tenseness in consequence of overwork combined with morbid impatience at being contradicted in matters which they did not understand. Other states had contemplated open rebellion against the big ferrule of the "bosses," and more than once the resolution was taken to go on strike unless certain concessions ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Necessities versus possibilities. 'Possibility' defined. Three views of the world's salvation. Pragmatism is melioristic. We may create reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed choice before creation. The healthy and the morbid reply. The 'tender' and the 'tough' types ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... This morbid life was very different from what she had fancied the rich future would be, as she looked into the grave, the end of her struggle, that September afternoon. But she had grown to demand so much more from him; she had grown so ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... religion' had taken the form of suppression of self. I never have been able to do things by halves, or even with a decent moderation. As an egoist I had been thorough in my egoism; and now, fate having bludgeoned that vice out of me, I found myself possessed of an almost morbid sympathy with the troubles ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... to enhance feminine beauty; the thoughts it excites are soothing and serene, the gentle enthusiasm that is felt during this delightful occupation not only dissipates melancholy and morbid sensibility, but by developing the judgment and feeling, imparts a higher tone of character to the expression of ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... material; what a pattern! Did she get it second-hand from a lady's-maid? Will there be an incongruity in her conversation to match? Let us see. Grace making inquiries—Quite at my best—Ah! she is not one of the morbid sort, never ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... self-compassionate way of saying that one was good to her, and a surly suspicion of another who did not pay her an expected attention, and these traits offended Betty Leicester, who was not given to putting either herself or other people under a microscope. There was nothing morbid about Betty and no sentimentality in her way of looking at herself. Becky's sensitiveness and prejudice were sometimes very tiresome, but they made nobody half so miserable as they did Becky herself; the talk she had always heard ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... extremes of heat and cold, as also to the various dangers dependent upon the chase of wild animals. Those diseases resulting from specific causes, either natural to the race or artificially produced by the animal itself in a state of morbid derangement, are most frequent and fatal, as witnessed in distemper, rabies, mange, &c. The intimate connexion existing between the diseases of our canine friends and those of the human race, as ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... understand, I'm afraid, this morbid hankering of mine to keep my family about me, to have the two chicks that are left to me close under my wing. And never once, since Pee-Wee went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... than solitary gratification. The former is not always at hand; is attended, it may be, with expense; and with more or less danger of exposure. But the latter is practicable whenever temptation or rather imagination solicits, and appears to the morbid eye of sense, to be attended with no hazard. Alas! what a sad mistake is made here! It is a fact well established by medical men, that every error on this point is injurious; and that the constitution is often more surely ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Also there are the "sharks" waiting to follow out the released prisoners, to prey upon them as the circumstances may favor; and a number of curiosity seekers watching intently. For them it can be nothing but a morbid dumb show, for they are so far from the bench that not a word of the proceedings could be heard. Only once in a while the shrieks and imprecations of a struggling hysterical woman as she is hurried out of court can enliven ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... core that gives the point and the splendid audacity to French literature and art,—its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, and is insatiable ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... old duke crazy. His hatred of Lupin assumed morbid proportions. Much as it went against the grain, he called on the prefect of police, who advised him to be on ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... he sat down to the morbid sort of a meal one gets in London lodgings: a calm soup; a segment of vague fish smothered painlessly in a pale pink blanket of sauce; a cut from the joint, rare and lukewarm; potatoes boiled dead; sad sea-kale; nonconformist pudding; conservative ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... you should have heard this sad story about the girls," he said. "Still, don't let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Voyt after a moment returned. "Your real calculation is that my interest will be sacrificed to my vanity—so that, if your other idea is just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to her morbid conscience, expire by her taking fright at seeing me so pleased. But I promise you," he declared, "that she shan't see it. So there you are!" She kept her eyes on him and had evidently to admit after a little that there she was. Distinct as he had made the case, however, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... volumes of poems, in the two following years. He died at Brompton, near London, on the 2d April 1820, and his remains were conveyed for interment to the churchyard of his native parish. Amidst a flow of ornate and graceful language, the poetry of Dr Brown is disfigured by a morbid sensibility and a philosophy which dims rather than enlightens. He possessed, however, many of the mental concomitants of a great poet; he loved rural retirement and romantic scenery; well appreciated ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Tolstoi's morbid horror of decay and death was not in any sense due to a lack of physical courage. It was the inevitable repulsion of a strong and robust animalism of the body, coupled with a powerful mentality—both of which are barriers to the "still small voice" ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... up the steep staircase. It was scarred in many places by fire and smoke. No amount of scrubbing could quite efface the traces of the catastrophe. I looked at them for a long time before beginning my sad task, and did not shrink from the sight. My state of mind was distinctly morbid. Children were not reckoned to have nerves at that date, and little notice was taken of their silent moods. That I should voluntarily seek a solitary quarter of the house, which was shunned by others, never entered my mother's or ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... would have turned hastily from him; but in her present morbid mood she acted from a different impulse. The artist had not observed her approach, and standing a little back in the shadow of the hall-way she found a cruel fascination in comparing the man she loved with the low fellow whose shadow now fell so darkly across her own ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the covering. And how exquisite was his joy, how great his amazement, how sincere his thanksgivings, when he beheld but a blank piece of canvas. The horrible picture of the Wehr-Wolf, a picture which he had painted when in a strangely morbid state of mind—had disappeared. Here was another sign of Heaven's goodness—a ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Esther wiped his forehead, and he signed to her how he wished the bed-clothes to be arranged, for he could no longer speak. Mrs. Collins whispered to Esther that she did not think that the end could be far off, and compelled by a morbid sort of curiosity she took a chair and sat down. Esther wiped away the little drops of sweat as they came upon his forehead; his chest and throat had to be wiped also, for they too were full of sweat. ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... three fourths ounces of bread; a trifle of cheese, salad, or fruit; six to eight ounces of light wine diluted with an eighth volume of water. The quantity of beverage may be slightly augmented at each meal if necessary, especially if there is no morbid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... master's whip falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound at once plaintive and menacing, danced, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... him, she was watching him. And once or twice he got it into his head that she was a little puzzled and uncertain, though whether it was about what to think or what to do, he had no conception. He told himself that all this was only his own morbid imagination. Still, it made that walk an uncomfortable ordeal and seldom did actor have to work harder to keep ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning, saw Guida pass the window. With a hungry instinct for the morbid they stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d'Driere after her. The Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd? The way the apprentice craned his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed "hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... were a man," he replied, "you would probably find some one whom you preferred to live for. Do you know, you are rather a morbid sort of person, ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... morbid-minded people are developing a sense of humor," said Matsukuo, "but I'm not sure I care ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... yielded to, but could not explain, bound her waist with a black sash, like a strain of mourning in a song of innocence. She wore no ornaments save a ring, the love-gift of Bigot, which she never parted with, but wore with a morbid anticipation that its promises would one day be fulfilled. She clung to it as a talisman that would yet conjure away her sorrows; and it did! but alas! in a way little anticipated by the constant girl! A blast from hell was at hand to sweep away her young life, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... That absurdly morbid fit passed, of course. It could not continue, except in a woman who was physically ill, and Lady Sellingworth was quite well. But it left its mark in her mind. From that day she began to take intense trouble with herself. Hitherto she had been inclined ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those morbid cases in ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... breath sharply. At once I had the feeling of a marauder. Here slept the guardian of the treasure—and yet in defiance of him I meant to have it. So, too, had Peter—and I didn't know yet what he had managed to do to Peter—but I guessed from his journal that Peter had been a slightly morbid person. He had let the wild solitude of the island frighten him. He had indulged foolish fancies about crucifixes. He had in fact let the defenses of his will be undermined ever so little—and then of course there was no telling what They ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... morbid on the subject, at one time. Mamma Grove was a perfect night-mare to me. And really, she is well! she is not a ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Though a confirmed invalid, and condemned to spend most of his days on a sofa, Mr. Smedley managed to write several fine novels, full of the joy of life, and free from the least taint of discontent or morbid feeling. He was one of those men—one meets them here and there—whose minds rise high above their bodily infirmities; at moments of depression, which come to them as frequently, if not more frequently, than to other men, ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the very foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years afterwards, I used to throw my self-reproaches with regard to that infirmity into this shape, viz., that if I were summoned to seek aid for a perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... predisposing causes, such as feebleness of constitution of the variety planted, rendering them an easy prey to the disease; by planting on low, moist land, or on land highly enriched by nitrogenous manures, causing a morbid growth which invites the disease; also by insects or their larvae puncturing or eating off the leaves or vines. But by far the most wide-spread and most common cause of the disease is sudden changes of atmospheric temperature, particularly when accompanied by rain. Drought, though quite ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... Antony. I know it is foolish, but I cannot help it. I think living in this place has made me morbid. She seems so alive—so evil, so cruel. I am sorry you bought her, Antony. I cannot bear to look at her. Won't you take her away? Take her up into the wood. Keep her there. Take her now. I shall not be able to sleep all night if I know she is in ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... fine perspective on life—yours and mine. But I imagine that you make the more conspicuous silhouette. To him you represent 'the New York Idea'—only more so. Besides that you're a vellum edition of the Feminist Movement with suffrage expurgated. In other words, darling, to a lonely and somewhat morbid philosopher like Markham you're a horrible example of what may become of a female person of liberal views who has had the world suddenly laid in her lap; the spoiled child launched into the full possession of a fabulous fortune with no ambition more serious than ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... society, elegant in dress, and, as the host of the Eagle announced, decidedly eccentric. This eccentricity manifested itself in one way, and one only, and that altogether incomprehensible to the greedy Nikolskians—namely, a morbid desire to part with his money. If Tchitchikof met a serf on the highway, he would offer him a ruble for a stick, a cap, or any other article he wore, intrinsically not worth a handful of corn; and when the bewildered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... class-room? These may seem wanton charges to some, but I am not speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact with the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational magazines. A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes me read everything I catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one of the faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the Times. In these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon the questions of their calling ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... hadn't. Lots of husbands would merely have yawned." I felt one coming and stopped it just in time. Waiting for limpets to go to sleep is drowsy work. "But why are you so morbid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... In a moment of morbid irritation, I had written on the blank page of the book, the words which had remained coupled in my mind with this gift of Edward's: "Beware; I know your secret!" and now they were before his eyes; and now he was reading them; and now the explanation was at hand; and all that I ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... at her, noting with a morbid minuteness the exquisite finish of her dress, that finish which seemed so much a part of herself that it had never before struck him as a merely purchasable accessory. He knew so little what a woman's dresses cost! For a moment he lost himself in vague calculations; finally, he said: "What ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... thing to have in your possession," he said, devouring the little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the morbid pleasure in his visitor's expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... restlessness of unsatisfied desire," said Mr. Allison, "by giving it more stimulating food, instead of firmly repressing its morbid activities. Think you not that there is something false in the life we are leading here, when we consider how few and brief are the days in which we experience a feeling of rest and satisfaction? And if our life be false—or, in other words, our life-purposes—what hope for us is there ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... which kept Nona and Barbara from a morbid dwelling on their worries. Barbara had written to Judge and Mrs. Thornton in the way that Mildred had directed. But she could not feel that either of Mildred's parents would feel any the less wretched ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... course use his Preludes, not only the well-known ones—the C and G minor—but the set of thirteen in one opus number; they are most interesting. I use a good deal of Russian music; Liadow has composed some beautiful things; but Tschaikowsky, in his piano music, is too complaining and morbid, as a rule, though he is occasionally in a more cheerful mood. It seems as though music has said all it can say along consonant lines, and regular rhythms. We must look for its advancement in the realm of Dissonance; not only in this but in the way of variety in Rhythm. ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... make head against misfortune Jacqueline owed the fact that she did not fall into those morbid reveries which might have converted her passing fancy for a man who was simply a male flirt into the importance of a lost love. Is there any human being conscious of energy, and with faith in his or her own powers, who has not wished ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... stand aghast at their Promethean agonising or their Wertherean despair. Healthy human nature revolted against the poetical enthusiasts who had lost the faculty of seeing things in their natural light, and who constantly indulged in that morbid self-analysis which is fatal to genuine feeling and vigorous action. And in this healthy reaction the philosophers fared no better than the poets, with whom, indeed, they had much in common. Shutting their ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... endured, this type must alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the Last Word—who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in lovely women, and even in them bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must curb them wholly. ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Barker, had he been there. Claudius had plenty of vanity, but it did not assume the personal type. Some people call a certain form of vanity pride. It is the same thing on a larger scale. Vanity is to pride what nervousness is to nerve, what morbid conscience is to manly goodness, what the letter of the law ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Isora also influenced Gerald in his absence from home. After a fruitless and inconclusive meditation on that head, my thoughts took a less selfish turn, and dwelt with all the softness of pity, and the anxiety of love, upon the morbid temperament and ascetic devotions of Aubrey. What, for one already so abstracted from the enjoyments of earth, so darkened by superstitious misconceptions of the true nature of God and the true ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... right, I thought of his morbid forebodings before we came up with the ship, and determined to take a rise out ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... monarchs, whom we might possibly call maniacs; and in eastern jewels which a Bond Street jeweller (if the hundred staggering negroes brought them into his shop) might possibly not regard as genuine. Quinton was a genius, if a morbid one; and even his morbidity appeared more in his life than in his work. In temperament he was weak and waspish, and his health had suffered heavily from oriental experiments with opium. His wife—a handsome, hard-working, and, indeed, over-worked woman objected to the opium, but objected ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... be complicated with various morbid conditions of the lungs and heart, which require appropriate treatment. To allay the cough, No. 42 is an admirable remedy. Avoid cold, damp, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... Gertrude," said Mrs. Campbell, in a wholesome voice. "We must not be morbid. But this I say to you, one and all: Since the men of Siskiyou refuse, it is for the women to vindicate the town's humanity, and show some sympathy for ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... practice than by theory, and it is probable that the fascinating study of Physiology is of more use intellectually than physically to most school-girls. If they are allowed to dwell much on diseases of the body instead of on its normal action, the study may be a positive injury to them by leading to morbid conditions. ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... you are constitutionally retiring, self-distrustful, easily embarrassed. You have a morbid shrinking from whatever would ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... soft heart, clever head, and brave spirit is no morbid presentment of the angelic child 'too good to live,' and who is certainly a nuisance on earth, but a charming creature, if not a portrait, whom it is a privilege to meet ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger |
