"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... far from strong," replied Mr. Denham, "and my wife is almost morbidly quick to take alarm about her. In fact, we both are. Do you know how the trains run to Geneva? Is there anything earlier than ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... are to be conveyed from one person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is more ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was when he left London. In after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death, because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every human being to prepare his soul. The platitudes of age ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the stars creep along behind the shattered glass and the bent leads of the lofty windows; watching the fire fall together, and the strange shadows move mysteriously on the mouldering walls. The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but morbidly. So, it was from that hook that for twelve years, twelve long years of changing summer and winter, the body of Count Albert, murderer and suicide, hung in its strange casing of mediaeval steel; moving a little at first, and turning gently while the fire died out on the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... sister, of a finer stock, too fine, worn out and bloodless, wherein he was like his father. He was intelligent, well-endowed with bad instincts, demonstrative, and dissembling. He had big blue eyes, long, girlish, fair hair, a pale complexion, a delicate chest, and was morbidly nervous, which last, being a born comedian and strangely skilled in discovering people's weaknesses, he upon occasion turned to good account. Grazia was inclined to favor him, with the natural preference of a mother for her ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... about fourteen years old I went to live with my master's eldest son, a Presbyterian minister. His salary was small, and he was burdened with a helpless wife, a girl that he had married in the humble walks of life. She was morbidly sensitive, and imagined that I regarded her with contemptuous feelings because she was of poor parentage. I was their only servant, and a gracious loan at that. They were not able to buy me, so my old master sought ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... skill nor the scalpel to show the diseases of Mr. Hopper's mind; if, indeed, he had any. Conscience, when contracted, is just as troublesome as croup. Mr. Hopper was thoroughly healthy. He had ambition, as I have said. But he was not morbidly sensitive. He was calm enough when he got back to the boarding-house, which he found in as high a pitch of excitement as New ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... carried on a desultory, more or less speculative conversation anent the fatality, until they grew morbidly weary of contemplating the poor broken body. Yorke slid ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... volumes a number of tid-bits, setting forth Carlyle's querulousness, arrogance, and domestic storms with Mrs. Carlyle. Behold the man! exclaims Mr. Watkinson. Begging his pardon, it is not the man at all. Carlyle was morbidly sensitive by nature, he suffered horribly from dyspepsia, and intense literary labor, still further deranging his nerves, made him terribly irritable. But he had a fine side to his nature, and even a sunny side. Friends like Professor Tyndall, Professor Norton, Sir James Stephen, and Mrs. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... reassuring, but repel another beholder (or the same in a different mood) as dull and lifeless; while the unstable equilibrium and syncopated rythm of Botticelli may either fascinate or repel as morbidly excited. And Leonardo's systems of whirling interlaced circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much of) the perfunctory beholder, while rewarding more adequate empathic imagination by allowing us to live, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive and unstable insane mind; an age in which he who strikes a needless shackle from human form or heart, or removes a cause of human torture, psychical or physical, is regarded as a greater moral hero than he who, by storm or strategy of war ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... possession much resembling the child's toy. His heart to the last appeared too deeply imbued with the unsuspicious simplicity and carelessness of the boy to have much concern about it. On this point Tannahill was morbidly sensitive; his was an unfortunate cast of temperament, which, deepening more and more, surrounded him with imaginary evils, and rendered life insupportable. Lady Nairn was too modest not to be distrustful of the extent of her genius, and presumed only to exercise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... unknown in the days when this drawing was made; but the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called ecclesiastical sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated condition, forms one of the principal elements of "Puseyism,"—I use this word regretfully, no other existing which will serve for it,—had been known and felt in our ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... conscious effort that I shook myself out of this morbidly reflective mood, on finding that we had crossed the common and were come to the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... one of his mysterious visits. I never liked Mr. L'Homme-dieu, but I did like her. She was so different from me, and, when I first knew her, so gay and so full of conversation. But after awhile she changed and was either feverishly cheerful or morbidly sad, so that my visits caused me more pain than pleasure. The reason for these changes in her was patent to everybody. Though her husband was a handsome man, he was as unprincipled as he was unfortunate. He gambled. This she once admitted to me, ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... is even more familiar and dramatic. Again it is a group of morbidly curious and spiteful doctors who desire to see whether a human being can be killed by the power of his imagination. A condemned criminal is accordingly turned over to them. He is first allowed to see a dog bled to death, one of the physicians holding ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... that acts have little, if anything, to do with affection. She strove daily to win love, not knowing that love is a thing outside the power to win or bestow. Had she had understanding she would have spared the child with whom she worked; instead, she talked on with her dreary whine, morbidly seeking a sympathy of which she did not know how to avail herself when it was so ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's protegee and betrothed; yet she would ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in Little Eyolf; and the Rat-wife is neither ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to accomplish in a definite number of days, Radway grew to be more of a taskmaster. His anxiety as to the completion of the work overlaid his morbidly sympathetic human interest. Thus he regained to a small degree the respect of his men. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... once recommended a course of metaphysical study to a young lady, who, from physical weakness and other causes, had become morbidly nervous and introspective. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... It is strange that a people so tenacious of its opinions with regard to matters of fact should be so willing to surrender its ideal with regard to the thing of which a nation has most reason to be tenacious, its natural expression. But the whole race is so morbidly sensitive to the sneer that everything Filipino is necessarily crude that the young art student or the young musical student feels that his only hope of winning commendation is in painting or playing or composing after European models; while as for the populace at large it has ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... sunlight of imagination loves to rest upon its salient angles and projecting lines. When we commenced her sketch, our sole design was to describe her influence on the minds of others, and to make her a warning beacon to the mariners of life, that they might avoid the shoals on which the peace of so many morbidly sensitive minds have been wrecked. But we found a fascination in the subject which we could not resist. A heart naturally warm, defrauded of all natural objects on which to expend its living fervor, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... afraid that is impossible," said Sartoris, who had lapsed into his bland manner once more. "I am sensitive of people's remarks and all that kind of thing. I dare say you will think that I am morbidly self-conscious, but then I have not always been a cripple. I was as straight as yourself once. Fancy a little crooked figure like me in ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... polychromatophilia is a sign of degeneration. To explain the presence of erythroblasts which have undergone these changes we must suppose that in severe injuries to the life of the blood these elements are not produced in the usual fashion, but from the very beginning are morbidly altered. Analogies from general pathology suggest ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... friend, I fear you are morbidly sensitive I used to know your father, and I always esteemed him as a noble man—one ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... extreme youth I was, in spite of occasional falsehoods,—mainly the consequence of the severity of the parental discipline and the desire to escape the punishments I had to endure when transgressing the sometimes whimsical injunctions laid on me,—morbidly conscientious. I was absent-minded and often forgot my duties, feeling, however, always the sting of remorse for any omission, but, beyond taking apples or nuts for my own eating, I do not think that I ever transgressed a commandment deliberately or knowingly; I was, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly nervous and impressionable, disposed to take a dark view of everything, and bore no resemblance to the type of hero which Hortense had imagined. Moreover, the unhappy husband endured a hidden anguish which he had to conceal from ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... that is swollen like a sponge saturated with corruption; he can not raise his bloated eyelids, but, with his head thrown back, looks downward over his cheeks. Two of these lepers are as astonishing specimens as any that have ever come under my observation, yet I have morbidly sought them from Palestine to Molokai. In these cases the muscles are knotted, the blood curdled; masses of unwholesome flesh cover them, lying fold upon fold; the lobes of their ears hang almost to the shoulder; the eyes when visible have ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... without descrying one or more sails at varying distances, but our friends did not hail or approach any. Both Captain Bergen and Mate Storms were in a nervous condition, and were morbidly apprehensive of being anticipated by some one in dredging for the invaluable pearl-oysters. They were afraid their errand would be suspected, or they would be attacked after they ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... respect to the eye itself, the highest authority in England, Mr. Bowman, has been so kind as to give me the following remarks on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... but he had a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that money ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Bellister sat on, "glooming" morbidly to himself. Bitter feud existed between him and a neighbouring baron. Had he not cause to distrust that baron, and to believe that means neither fair nor honourable might be employed by his enemy to wipe out the feud? What if this self-styled harper should turn out to be no minstrel after ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... equally devoted, lovers of the wild and beautiful in nature; and many a moonlight walk did we take together this winter among the woods and rocks of the hill. It was once said of Thomson, by one who was himself not at all morbidly poetic in his feelings, that "he could not have viewed two candles burning but with a poetical eye." It might at least be said of my friend, that he never saw a piece of fine or striking scenery without being deeply moved by it. As for ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... hours into twenty, he said, he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too young, or too old, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... commissioner of the President, or perhaps as a special commissioner could not act at all. She was very aggressive, and when any of the travelling arrangements in Europe did not suit her ideas she was won't to shrilly exclaim: " Well ! New York is good enough for me." Nora, morbidly afraid that her ex- pense bill to the Daylight would not be large enough, had dragged her bodily off to Greece as her companion, friend and protection. At Arta they had heard of the grand success of the Greek army. The Turks had not stood for ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... faces. But as we have few domestic enjoyments in this country—no social snugness,—no sweet seclusion—and as our houses are as open as bird-cages,—and as we almost live in public and in the open air—we have little comfort when compelled, with an enfeebled frame and a morbidly sensitive cuticle, to remain at home on what an Anglo-Indian Invalid calls a cold day, with an easterly wind whistling through every room.[049] In our dear native country each season has its peculiar moral or physical attractions. It is not easy ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... had been reading my book of Prayers and Meditations. Do you know, Fan, at times the thought comes upon me with a force almost overpowering, that I am a Bishop; and that I must not shrink from believing that I am called to a special work. I don't think that I dwell morbidly on this, but it is an awful thought. And then I feel just the same as of old, and don't reach out more, or aim more earnestly at amendment of life and strive after fresh degrees of enlightenment and holiness. But probably I have to learn ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to add that there are acute cases, (particularly a few ophthalmic cases, and diseases where the eye is morbidly sensitive), where a subdued light is necessary. But a dark north room is inadmissible even for these. You can always moderate the light ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... from La Guayra, and in reply to several of mine, which, I gathered from what you said, reached you all at the same time, was my salvation, mentally and physically. Its healthy, manly common- sense tone acted upon my morbidly affected mind like a strong tonic mingled with wine; it swept away the mists which had beclouded my intellect, as the keen fresh mountain breeze sweeps the morning fog from out the valleys; it set me thinking, and asking myself questions which had never occurred to me before; nay, more, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... fear and apprehension. He knew that one of the sailors might be the author of it; but the fact that he had left the revolver with Jane, together with the overwrought condition of his nerves, made him morbidly positive that she was threatened with some great danger. Perhaps even now she was attempting to defend herself against ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said. "I give Estelle best. Nothing can spoil her, because she's so utterly uninterested in herself. Another thing: she's so fair—almost morbidly fair. The only thing that makes her savage is injustice. If she sees an injustice, she won't leave it alone if it's in her power to alter it. That's her father in her. What he calls 'sporting,' she calls 'justice.' And, of course, the essence of sport ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... necessary. Purity, carried to a needless extreme, became celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet, producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and undesirable perversions ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Burr, whose term as Vice-President of the United States had expired, became unpopular because of his criticisms of the administration of President Jefferson, and because of his having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Being ambitious, Burr was morbidly restless because of the turn his fortunes had taken. He visited Kentucky and different points between New Orleans and St. Louis. He succeeded in drawing into his plans one Blennerhassett, a wealthy man who lived on a beautiful island in ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank
... finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but really always running from himself. Rome was his favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... comprizing priestly officials, rulers of the Jews, and people of many nationalities, followed. Two convicted criminals, who had been sentenced to the cross for robbery, were led forth to death at the same time; there was to be a triple execution; and the prospective scene of horror attracted the morbidly minded, such as delight to gloat over the sufferings of their fellows. In the crowd, however, were some genuine mourners, as shall be shown. It was the Roman custom to make the execution of convicts as public as possible, under the mistaken and anti-psychological assumption, that the spectacle ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... fortune, or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... outward difference to be perceived in him, I could more and more clearly distinguish an under-current of thought and feeling setting towards the faith which Christianity preaches. He said little or nothing, even when I attempted to draw him out on the matter; for he was almost morbidly careful not to seem to know any thing he did not know, or to appear what he was not. The most I could get out of him was—but I had better give a little talk I had with him on one occasion. It was some time before we began to go ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Embittered as he was against society, this moody view of himself took deeper and deeper hold of Henchard, till the daily necessity of facing mankind, and of them particularly Elizabeth-Jane, became well-nigh more than he could endure. His health declined; he became morbidly sensitive. He wished he could escape those who did not want him, and hide ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... would have kept her promise. This was one good lesson, it is true, but it was only one. And the lesson was given by a method so gentle, that no nervous, cerebral, or mental function was in any degree irritated or morbidly excited by it. Moreover, no one who knows any thing of the workings of the infantile mind can doubt that the impulse in the right direction given by this conversation was not only better in character, but was greater in amount, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among Catholics or Protestants, do not find the soil and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... She was morbidly afraid of him and of his opinion. Caspar Brooke would have been as much hurt as astonished if he knew in what ogre-like ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... is my mother's grandniece, we have no control over her actions or inclinations. Her uncle, the Marquis de Merrivale, who is her guardian, is morbidly jealous of any influence exerted over his niece, even ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and generous ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... leader's residence, displaying a tawdry magnificence in his dress, sparkling with gold and silver, and with the inscription, "For the Men of Chili," set in his bonnet. It was a foolish taunt; but the poor cavaliers who were the object of it, made morbidly sensitive by their sufferings, had not ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... understood the spirit that had moved him to drive the mare that forty miles; nor, in spite of a certain sympathy for the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment. It was the stubborn, purposeful character of the man that she ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the ear, usually deafened by pain, is sometimes, on the contrary, rendered morbidly acute. Mr. Cargill assured her, there was no one present but himself. "But, O, most unhappy woman!" he said, "what does your introduction prepare ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... hairs did actually seem to bristle, as a cat's whiskers do. When Stephen could not speak plain, he used to point his little dimpled finger at this mole and say, "Do doe away,—doe away;" and to this day it was a torment to him. His eyes seemed morbidly drawn toward it at times.. When he was ill, and poor Marty bent over his bed, ministering to him as no one but a loving old nurse can, he saw only the mole, and had to make an effort not to shrink from her. To-night, as she lingered on the threshold, affectionately waiting to light his path, ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures unsullied by ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems—the one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biographer its chief interest ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... course in Irish, and showed enthusiasm for this branch of study. Wishing to find out something about his undergraduate career, I wrote to a member of the Faculty, and received the following reply: "Many persons found him almost morbidly indifferent and unresponsive, and he seldom showed the full measure of his powers.... I grew to have a strong liking for him personally as well as a respect for his intellectual power. But I should never have expected him to show the robustness of either ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... first year of their marriage, the Rolands lived in Paris. Manon had imagined a happy association with her friends, the Cannets; but her husband was morbidly jealous of these friends, and extracted a promise from her that she would see them as little as possible. She became his amanuensis and secretary, and scarcely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... the atmosphere contained a much less proportion of vital air, it would not stimulate the body sufficiently; the excitability would morbidly accumulate, and diseases ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... upon him. He felt somehow as though Paolo were present in the room with him, watching him over his shoulder, suggesting improvements to be made, in that voice of his which now rang distinctly in the artist's ear. His imagination worked morbidly, and he thought of Paolo standing beside him, ordering him to do this or that against his will, until he began to doubt his own judgment in regard to what he was doing. He wondered whether he should feel ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... of Galileo! It was a shock from which, perhaps, the zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanctioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language, a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, timorous, and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... to her husband's will. Her intellectual life, such as it was, had stopped short from the time of her intimate association with Menteith; and her spiritual nature had been starved in close contact with him; only her senses had been nourished, and these were now being rendered morbidly active by disease. The shadow of an awful form of insanity already darkened her days. The mental torture was extreme; but she fought for her reason with the fearful malady valiantly; and all the time presented outwardly only the same dull apathy, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... that Miss Seymour was no more truly in holiday spirits than was he that he turned toward her, as toward a spot of shadow amid too fervid sunshine. It would be more congenial, drifting with her to the languid measure of this very modern, morbidly emotional waltz, knowing that, whatever their light talk, they alike felt life to be a sad affair, than going through livelier evolutions with a young person who would secretly desire him to flatter and flirt. An instinct founded ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the cavities of the pleura were found to contain a considerable quantity of water. The pericardium was filled with water; the heart considerably enlarged; its parietes very thin, and its cavities, especially the right auricle and ventricle, morbidly large[9]. ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... like other old family servants in Euripides—the extreme case is in the Ion—is absolutely and even morbidly devoted to his masters. Delightful in this first scene, he becomes a little horrible in the next, where they plot the murders; not only ferocious himself, but, what seems worse, inclined to pet and enjoy the bloodthirstiness of ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... of this first lady in the land that her marriage was an unhappy one. I think, that as a matter of fact, it was quite the contrary, for subsequent to the wedding each was too busy with other matters to get thinking either morbidly or otherwise on the subject of their individual happiness. They took it as a matter of course, and in the division of labor which the social conditions of the day involved, found too much to occupy them to worry over such unimportant ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... I shrink morbidly from visiting strange houses. I shrink from the unknown discomforts and trivial humiliations they may hold for me. I hate, for instance, not to know what kind of a chair may be provided for me to sit on. I hate to be carried up many stairs ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... nation disdains to occupy itself in any wise with the arts of beauty or delight, not only a certain quantity of its energy calculated for exercise in those arts alone must be entirely wasted, which is bad economy, but also the passions connected with the utilities of property become morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation merely for the sake of accumulation, or even of labour merely for the sake of labour, will banish at last the serenity and the morality of life, as completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even the lavishness of pride, and the likeness of pleasure. ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... sometimes, of a man who is morbidly suspicious that he may be patronised—is shown in the manner in which he speaks of the grand ladies with whom he came in contact. He calls the Duke of Ormond's daughters "insolent drabs," and talks of his "mistress, Ophy Butler's wife, who is grown a little charmless." When the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... talk familiarly to the stars, and are so much above everybody, and try to walk like creatures with two legs, forgetting that we have but a pin's point to stand on up there. Probably the absence of natural motion inspires the prophecy that we must ultimately come down: our unused legs wax morbidly restless. Evan thought it good that Rose should lift her head to look at him; nevertheless, he knew that Rose would turn from him the moment he descended from his superior station. Nature is wise in her young children, though they wot not of it, and are always trying ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... influence on the well-being of the human mechanism being closely examined. A forcible exposition is also given of the evil consequences resulting from an ill-regulated imagination (acting through the instrumentality of the passions, morbidly excited by its licentious operation,) to the firmness of the nervous system, and the integrity of the general health. The volume is not addressed to any particular class of readers, and being free ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... the story. To read novels of doubtful or bad morality is as likely to corrupt the Affections as to associate with low and wicked companions. There is an abundant supply of pure and noble compositions of this sort on which the Imagination may feed without fear. If it morbidly craves the licentious pictures that come from the pen of such writers as Ainsworth or George Sand, its longings should be resisted as steadfastly as those which incline us to the gaming table or other scenes of ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... attentions. Carroll read each one carefully and filed it away. He had hoped for this, but the results had far exceeded his expectations, and he found himself bewildered rather than assisted by the response from nameless individuals who were morbidly eager to be ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... as a sufferer from mental derangement. Don't be communicative, and confine yourself to reassuring generalities, if you come across him. His mind's morbidly fixed on punishing Prescott. I don't think he can be convinced that ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... and vexation were extreme. He was angry with the opposition, with the ministers, with all England. The nation seemed to him to be under a judicial infatuation, blind to dangers which his sagacity perceived to be real, near and formidable, and morbidly apprehensive of dangers which his conscience told him were no dangers at all. The perverse islanders were willing to trust every thing that was most precious to them, their independence, their property, their laws, their religion, to the moderation and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... early hour, and to the dismay of Plume, who had planned to start without farewell demonstration of any kind, lights were blinking in almost every house along the row, and a flock of women, some tender and sympathetic, some morbidly curious, had gathered to wish the major's wife a pleasant journey and a speedy recovery. They loved her not at all, and liked her none too well, but she was ill and sorrowing, so that was enough. Elise ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... do my duty, Madam," I returned, thinking it all rather morbidly interesting, these weird details about their ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a way. Besides, you need not allow him so many opportunities that the strain would become unbearable. You are busy, owing to the certain increase of work brought about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable excitement ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... secured in the feelings as shall make fellowship itself more delightful, by its inter-communicate character, and such variety of feeling also in each of us separately as shall make us capable of enjoying scenes of different kinds and orders, instead of morbidly seeking for some perfect epitome of the beautiful in one; and also that deadening by custom of theoretic impressions to which I have above alluded, is counterbalanced by the pleasantness of acquired association; ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the interview, even though she was quite sure that he would not lose his self-control and wax violent, as had Nick on that terrible night at Simla. She was almost morbidly afraid of hurting ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... every effort of cordiality; but still there was a cobweb-veil of separation between them, to which Mary was morbidly acute; while in Jem's voice, and eyes, and manner, there was every evidence of most passionate, most admiring, and most trusting love. The trust was shown by his respectful silence on that one point of reserve on which ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... father of two such widely different children, was doubtless a man of stern principles, and an army officer as well, therefore a man with a doubly sensitive code of honour and a social position to maintain; and this man, morbidly sensitive probably, had a daughter who had inherited his sensitiveness and his high ideals of honour, a daughter married to a rich husband. But he had another child, a son without any sense of honour ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... their mutual lungs, until disease and often death are the consequences. Why won't they study and learn that a "draught" of pure air will injure only those who by draughts of Alcoholic poison or some other evil habit or glaring violation of the laws of life, have rendered themselves morbidly susceptible, and that even a cold is better than the noxiousness of air, already exhausted of its oxygen by inhalation? Nothing physical is so sorely needed by the great majority as a realizing sense of the blessedness, the indispensable necessity ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... a year at the Community, had now left. No one could have been more out of place than he in a mixed company, no matter how cultivated, worthy and individualized each member of it might be. He was morbidly shy and reserved, needing to be shielded from his fellows, and obtaining the fruits of observation at second-hand. He was therefore not amenable to the democratic influences at the Community which enriched the others, and made them declare, in after years, that the years or months ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... hesitate—never! As she phrased this conviction to herself, she turned a ring on her white slim finger and had a throb of pleasure in the color of the gem. What harmless, impersonal pleasures they were! How little they hurt any one! And as to this business of morbidly probing into healthy flesh, of insisting on going back of everything, farther than any one could possibly go, and scrutinizing the origin of every dollar that came into your hand ... why, that way lay madness! As soon try to investigate all the past occupants of a seat in a railway before using ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension. Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... to morality is not more dishonorable to the ethics which must ask than to the religion which will render such assistance.... The feeling Schleiermacher advocates, is not the fanaticism of the ignorant or the visionary emotion of the idle. It is not an aimless reverie shrinking morbidly from the light of clear and definite thought. Feeling, in its sound condition, affects both our conception and our will, leads to knowledge and to action. Neither knowledge nor morality are in themselves the measure of a man's religiousness. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... think every great composer owes it to his own God-gift, and to the human beings whom he is to influence, not to select intrinsically repulsive subjects, and such have we found both 'Don Juan' and 'Faust.' Now we are not morbidly fastidious, and we well know the freedom that must be accorded to art, that it may have ample scope and range in the delineation of human feeling and romantic situation; but when we see a representation of 'Don Juan,' we instinctively strive to ignore the plot, with its ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the leading journals, in referring to Principal Barclay's appointment, which was made in December, 1857, declared "that to stand up as he did against a mass of brethren in matters on which the esprit de corps is morbidly strong, requires not only the exercise of some of the higher moral and intellectual powers, but the sacrifice of some of the weaknesses especially incident to the clerical character, and those who in ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law," though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for "Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and was very silent and irresponsive. He too was morbidly conscious of the pictures, though he wished his father wouldn't talk about them. He was conscious of everything that meant money—of his mother's pearls for instance, which she wore every evening without thinking about them. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... more unselfish than Mr. Mackenzie. He would rather suffer extreme hardship than accept a doubtful favour. Even in regard to kindly and reasonable offers of help, he was morbidly sensitive (as mentioned on page 298 of his "Life and Times"); and yet, looking at the conduct of many men in like circumstances, he deserved commendation rather than censure ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... There was between these girls the same difference that exists between laughter and tears; between joyful carelessness and melancholy reverie; between daring improvidence and serious, incessant anticipation of the future: between a nature exquisitely delicate, elevated, poetic, morbidly sensitive, incurably wounded by remorse, and a disposition gay, lively, happy, unreflective, although good and compassionate; for, far from being selfish, Miss Dimpleton only cared for the griefs of others; with them she sympathized entirely, devoting herself, soul and body, to those ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... to the spring Yan was daily gaining in strength, and he and his mother came closer together. She tried to take an interest in the pursuits that were his whole nature. But she also strove hard to make him take an interest in her world. She was a morbidly religious woman. Her conversation was bristling with Scripture texts. She had a vast store of them—indeed, she had them all; and she used them on every occasion possible and impossible, ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the night morbidly berating the American father who is so afraid of his wife that he lets her bully him into sacrificing their joint flesh and blood upon the altar of social ambition. She had said that her father was opposed to the match ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, point ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... precocious, and a morbidly sensitive child, when it was decided in 1755 to send him to Westminster. The headmaster, Dr. Markham, was a friend of his father's. Westminster, he says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood for paradise. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of this kind. (b) Those which depend on mere verbal resemblances or other fortuitous correspondences. Nordau shows that the diseased brain is very ready to follow these false trains of association. (c) Those which are connected with the sense of smell, which seems to be morbidly developed in this kind of degeneracy. (d) Those which in any way minister to pride ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... came to tell my story the doctors said that the facts I related did not prove him to have been guilty of crime, as his condition was such that his own words could not be relied upon in a matter on which he had brooded more or less morbidly for years. So now when I see him pass through the churchyard or up and down the village street and note that he is affable as ever when he sees me, but growing more and more preoccupied with his own thoughts I do not know whether to look upon him with execration or profoundest pity, nor ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not reported it precisely as it had happened. And ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... remembered the first that she had measured for the bare pink toes which he had brought there, forlorn candidates for the comfortable integuments in which they were presently encased, and how she had morbidly felt that every stitch she took was a renunciation of her own children, since a stranger was honored in their place. The tears came into her eyes. It was only this afternoon that she had experienced a pang of self-reproach to realize how near happiness she was—as near as her temperament could ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of its establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... trotted quietly away. The wounded man succeeded in getting on to his horse and reaching his home. The hanging flesh was restored to its place and the ghastly rents sewn up, and in the end he recovered: but he was disfigured for life; his temper also completely changed; he became morose and morbidly sensitive to the ridicule of his neighbours, and he never again ventured to join them in their hunting expeditions. I inquired of the comandante, and of others, whether any case had come to their knowledge in that ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was visible of her full bust,—in a word, her womanliness incarnated,—compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to me, is where the old unflinching doctrines of sin and repentance have done harm. The old self-mortifying saints, who thought so badly of human nature, and who tore themselves to pieces, resisting wholesome impulses—celibate saints who ought to have been married, morbidly introspective saints who needed hard secular work, those were the people who did not dare to trust the sense of proportion, and were suspicious of the call of life. Look at St. Augustine in the wonderful passage about light, 'sliding ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror. She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering that her trouble was eating into her ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... by recalling all the unfolding stages of this miserable story with the minuteness of detail which my own memory morbidly lingers on, I will hurry to the catastrophe. I grew more and more doubtful of the existence in Ottilie's mind of any feeling stronger than friendship for me; and as this doubt strengthened, there arose the flattering suspicion that I was ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the matter with you, Lily?" cried Denzil, jumping up. "Come, come, this kind of thing won't do! You are overtaxing yourself. You are getting morbidly excited." ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... is," he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... was not morbidly introspective, and by the end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution had waned. At times, however, I actually yearned for someone in whom I could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... eventually give a tone to national opinion, there exists a cordial desire to be on terms of courtesy and friendship. But at the same time, there exists in those very minds a distrust of reciprocal good-will on the part of England. They have been rendered morbidly sensitive by the attacks made upon their country by the English press; and their occasional irritability on this subject has been misinterpreted into ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... point of the entire activity of art, which fashions peculiar forms for peculiar ideas, must have flagged in its exertions when the natural circle of ideas among the Greeks had received complete plastic embodiment, or it must have been morbidly driven to abnormal inventions. We find, therefore, that art, during this period, with greater or less degrees of skill in execution, delighted now in fantastical, now in effeminate productions, calculated merely to charm the senses. And even in the better and nobler works of the time there ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... strength. One expected to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating from within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely irresolute. It could be foreseen that ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... distant Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... watchful, keen-eyed attitude, apparently deeply absorbed in the evidence, and, it seemed to him, showing signs of a certain amount of anxiety. Anxiety—yes, that was it, anxiety. The other spectators were curious, morbidly curious, most of them, but Mrs. Saumarez he felt sure was anxious. And about what? He wondered, but wondering was no good. He must go and see her of course; and presently he made himself ready and set out. But as he crossed the hall of the hotel he encountered Tansley, who ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on his bed—the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots, the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll kill him when I get home." But he knew very ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Epileptics are morbidly sensitive, and reference to their malady must be avoided. Victims are intensely suspicious, and a pitying look will reveal to them the fact that some outsider knows all about the jealously-guarded skeleton. Resentment, distrust and misery follow such an exposure, for ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs |
