"Neurotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his glass and glared at me as if I were the guilty party. "She's a worry-wart," he continued. "A hypochondriac, a neurotic, an escapist, and a communist." He studied the ceiling thoughtfully. "And sometimes I ...
— Compatible • Richard R. Smith
... still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made: the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star, then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and retold, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were talking of medicine ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... for the statesman, the educator, the vocational expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents, deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and dull types, as well as of those ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... really superbly beautiful; but Valgrand knew too much about women of every temperament, neurotic, hysterical, and many another kind, not to suppose that here he was merely taking part in a sentimental comedy. He made a rough gesture and laid his hand on ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... limited to the most casual inspection through the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class—intelligent, neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the fact was not apparent; she dressed with ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... time, to his sorrow, seen his health failing under the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect. Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as I live, his ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of repression; the neurotic is a person whose libido or life force is bottled up; he can be cured only by letting his pent up emotions free. The aim of education is to allow emotional release, so that there will be no bottling up, and no future neurosis; and this ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a private job for Hopkins—one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter. She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and your team of tame scientists—we're on our way to the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... anxiety, run into the danger of protecting and controlling their children too much. The father or mother spends too much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home is more dangerous than the first, for children without sufficient home care often discover a substitute for their ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... In all neurotic ailments I hear that he excels, And he insures Immediate cures Of weird, uncanny spells; The most unruly patient Gets docile as a lamb And is freed from ill by the potent skill Of Hoodoo-Doctor ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... to no one save to the Emperor alone. His work was of so delicate, so confidential a nature, that he rendered an account of his services only to his Imperial master. There was none to stay his hand, to check him in his courses, save only this neurotic, capricious cripple who ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... resemblance is quite pronounced, is readily explained by the difference in personal habits, the circumstances of different periods or the domestic regulations instituted by medical counsel. Also the fact that consumptives so frequently spring from neurotic parentage and the victims of dissipation, especially alcoholic, still farther goes to show that the hereditary element is essentially a reduced power of resistance to formative evils, and that as a negative condition it may hold the balance of power in focusing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... pains, due to local irritations, as uterine disease, stricture, neurotic or nerve tumors, pressure of trusses, eye strain from weakened eye muscles, or lenses that need the help of proper spectacles, require for a permanent cure the removal of the cause. Sciatic neuralgia, one of the most common and painful forms of nerve irritation, is particularly ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... desire, because the question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature are priced at "a shilling net," and are avidly purchased and read by the simple, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... is of special value in the cases of certain neurotic women and those of low vital resistance; especially those patients suffering from certain forms of heart, respiratory, kidney, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... without any preliminaries, Telzey decided. The Moderator's picture of her must be that of a spoiled, neurotic brat in a stew about the threatened loss of a pet animal. He expected her to start arguing with ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... 1506-1534), "the maid of Kent," was, according to her own statement, born in 1506 at Aldington, Kent. She appears to have been a neurotic girl, subject to epilepsy, and an illness in her nineteenth year resulted in hysteria and religious mania. She was at the time a servant in the house of Thomas Cobb, steward of an estate near Aldington owned by William ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... traditions of the Teutonic race. Nevertheless, this cannot alter the ethical truth, which stands apart from any considerations of nationality; nor can it affect the conclusion that the German Nation has been plunged into this abyss by its scheming statesmen and its self-centred and highly neurotic Kaiser, who in the twentieth century sincerely believes that he is the proxy of Almighty God ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... them—resent a severely logical view of anything, and to disturb their small sentimentalities is to be cold-blooded and cynical. Once, when I wasj imprudent enough to wonder if the "young person" with the well-known cheek, to which blushes were brought, existed any longer in this age of neurotic novels written by ladies for gentlemen, I received a delicious communication from an Australian damsel informing me that she had been in love with me up till the fatal day on which she read my cynical conception ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... vapours, as thunder clears the air. And, finally, it is a natural function of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrelling—by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anaemic, and all these things. And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a "jolly ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... are greedy of pleasure, the foundation of her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination—an imagination nourished upon a wide range of literature, connected with her sex and perpetually stimulated by neurotic excitement. Possessed of a certain degree of intellectual capacity, brought up in all the luxury of a princely Roman house—that papal luxury which is made up of art and history—she had received a thin coating of aesthetic varnish, had acquired a graceful ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... applied to a functional affection of the spine occasionally met with in neurotic females between the ages of seventeen and thirty, and liable to be mistaken for Pott's disease. The patient complains of pain in some part of the spine—usually the cervico-thoracic or thoracico-lumbar region—and there is marked hyperaesthesia ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... nobody's fault. And you ought to be thankful it has turned out as it has. I am, I can tell you. As for me, I shall get over this, don't worry! I'm not neurotic or anything queer, whatever that man wanted to make you believe. I am ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... with civilization by having too much eaten of it."[11] Whether or not this characterization of Tolstoi is justified, there can be no question that many of this type rushed to the aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some artists, decadents, and declasses. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back,"[12] awakens in ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... eyes for a moment, and I thought she was going to faint. I was a little impatient with her; I had not suspected that she was so neurotic a woman. Then I heard Stroeve's voice again. It seemed to ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... believe either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It had not gone so far as this in the judge's experience of a neurotic invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain, and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sanative; prophylactic, preventative, immunizing; salutiferous &c (salutary) 656 [Obs.]; medical, medicinal; therapeutic, chirurgical [Med.], epulotic^, paregoric, tonic, corroborant, analeptic^, balsamic, anodyne, hypnotic, neurotic, narcotic, sedative, lenitive, demulcent^, emollient; depuratory^; detersive^, detergent; abstersive^, disinfectant, febrifugal^, alterative; traumatic, vulnerary. allopathic^, heteropathic^, homeopathic, hydropathic ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... on the canvas a typical Rommany chi or callee, and a little too little to that of bodying forth a probable and individual human girl? As an advocate I think I could take a brief on either side of the question without scandalising the, on this point, almost neurotic conscience of the late Mr. Anthony Trollope. But, as a juryman, my verdict on either indictment would be "Not guilty, and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... people who listen to these sayings sometimes attach importance to them, so that a habit has grown up of describing morbidly neurotic people as "over-sensitive" and cowardly ones as "too quick of imagination." Ultimately, this leads to the thought that both sensitiveness and imagination are mental luxuries too costly for ordinary folk to grow, and that it is safest to check, crush or uproot ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... others have told all that there is to be told, there will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness, shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... involves, causes neuropathic disturbances; or, there is no relation of cause and effect between genius and neurosis, but mere coexistence, since there are found very mediocre neuropaths, and men above the average without a neurotic blemish; or, the two states—the one psychic, the other physiological—are both effects, resulting from organic conditions that produce according to circumstances genius, insanity, and divers nervous troubles. Every one of these hypotheses ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment of God ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... life's good things in their name before ever they saw the light. Man makes his god in his own image; and thus it comes to pass that while the strong and joyous Greek adored Zeus on Olympus, the anaemic and neurotic Englishman worships Christ on Calvary. Do you tell me that if people were happy they would bow down before a stricken and crucified God? Not they. And I want to make them so happy that they shall cease to have any desire ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... laugh—or was it cry?—herself at the way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon—she wasn't sure whose—and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott—she had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt and outraged—that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... me. I am attracted by neurotic types. Insanity has its source in the unconscious, and we English are afraid of looking inward." He glanced around the crowded room with an amused and cynical look. "Most of these people are as bad as my Trojans, Doctor Fenton. Only they conceal their ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes full of a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become a member of the secret play-producing society, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our civilization—of our education, our business, even our religion—is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied up and ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... sensitive or so-called "nervous" temperament, especially if there is "nervousness" in the family, must be particularly looked after. For it is during the years of puberty and adolescence that any neurotic traits are apt to develop and become emphasized. It is also the period when bad sexual habits (masturbation) are apt to develop, and the careful mother will devote special attention to her girls in their years of puberty, and guard them as much as possible ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... shall be yours," the physiologist said with decision, "for you are a good-hearted young man, and one of the best neurotic subjects that I have ever known—that is when you are not under the influence of alcohol. My experiment is to be performed upon the fourth of next month. You will attend at the physiological laboratory at twelve o'clock. It will be a great occasion, Fritz. Von Gruben is ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imagination. Imagination he certainly had, but it fed on strong meat for an unhealthy mind; it fattened on the sordid history of the earlier bushrangers; its favorite fare was the character and exploits of Stingaree. The sallow and neurotic face would brighten with morbid enthusiasm at the bare mention of the desperado's name. The somewhat dull, dark eyes would lighten with borrowed fires: the young fool wore an eye-glass in one of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... Fay prodded quietly, "quit stalking around like a neurotic bear and suggest something for my invention team to work on. I enjoy visiting you and Daisy, but I can't stay ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of "bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday night when her meager ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand; the daughters of Judaea were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is one of the strongest and healthiest women I have ever attended," Doctor Mayson added; "superb health. It's a pleasure to see any one like that. I look after so many neurotic women in London. They give themselves up for lost when they are confronted with a perfectly natural crisis. Mrs. Leith is all courage ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... I sent him back to see if the cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,—life was too dull down there! ... And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,—similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,—the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,—rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,—a tremendous worker; ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and most of all—a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition—I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock- ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Australia is greatly starred. England loses matches, and the nation seems as much plunged in gloom as she was at the failures of the old South African War. In the golf and tennis and polo competitions there is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for the mens sana of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... The man came to a pause beside Amber, looking down almost pitifully into his face. "I daresay all this sounds hopelessly melodramatic and neurotic and tommyrotic, David, but ... I can tell you ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Song of the Tube. A ballad of sorrow, A grey sort of lay of To-day and a greyer To-morrow; A dismal, abysmal, chaotic, neurotic Creation Of one who was done after running a mile To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... super-normal had been remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort. She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell upon or talk of them.—Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body, are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer's sixth sense.—For while, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naive joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. Some day when the weather is wretched, when ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... indignation, and opposition, which had successively given way before her husband's quiet, masterful good humor, here took the form of a neurotic fatalism. She shook her head with ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Chopin, a neurotic being, met the polyandrous Sand, a trampler on all the social and ethical conventions, albeit a woman of great gifts; repelled at first he gave way before the ardent passion she manifested toward him. She was his elder, so could veil the situation with ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... neurotic parents, particularly where they are reared in cities, are exceedingly prone to nervousness in one form or another. The condition is undoubtedly often due to heredity, but may be induced in otherwise healthy children by unhygienic surroundings and improper food. Infants exhibiting ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousness of ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of my young days, whom I remember chiefly by her ramrod back and sharp tongue, used to say, "Nerves! nerves! nothing but nerves!" She thanked God she was born before the doctors had discovered nerves. Though neurotic theories had not been sufficiently elaborated for me to ascribe my state to the most refined of modern ills—nervous prostration—I was aware, as I dragged over the prairie with the horse at the end of a trailing bridle rein, that something was seriously out of tune. It was daylight before I ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all that still breathing forth the "cat-life." ... The face ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... a functional disorder of the sweat-glands characterized by a secretion variously colored, and usually increased in quantity. It is, as a rule, limited to a circumscribed area. The most common color is red. The condition is probably of neurotic origin and tends to recur. (True chromidrosis is extremely rare; most of the cases formerly thought to be such are now known to be ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defies analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb, but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden in the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... we'd had a baby," Bill murmured softly. "You'd be different. You'd have something to live for besides this frothy, neurotic existence that has poisoned you against the good, clean, healthy way of life. I wish we'd had a kiddie. We'd have a fighting chance for happiness now; something to keep us sane, something outside of our own ego ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... He hesitated a moment, then took the plunge. "The fact of the matter is, I have a neurotic prejudice against murder. I would rather not kill. So I want to find out why I committed murder ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... Elaborately, with great care and some considerable effort, Carfax had been forgotten—forgotten, it seemed, by every one save Craven. He had been forgotten because his death did not belong to the Cambridge order of things, because it raised unpleasant ideas, and made one morbid and neurotic. It had, in fact, nothing in common with cold baths, marmalade, rugby football, and ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... that I am talking to the greatest nerve specialist of the day, and only realise the pleasure of entertaining so good a friend of Michael's and my own. Otherwise I should be tempted to consult you; for I really believe, Sir Deryck, for the first time in my life, I am becoming neurotic." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... man fit for the kitchen steps after milking time—he used a step-ladder to bring up the milk to the back porch. Such intensity of attention to detail could not long fail to make this degenerating neurotic take note of her own body, which gradually became more and more sensitive, till she was fairly distraught between her fear of draughts and her mania for ventilation. It was windows up and windows down, opening ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... say so," he rejoined, "though there again it is more my misfortune than my fault. If my patients elect to make me the butt of their neurotic imagination, surely I am more ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of modern life, written in the author's very best manner. The scheme, the root motive of the book, may be said to be a vindication of the present generation—the generation that was condemned as neurotic and decadent by common consent a little more than three years ago, but is now enduring the ordeal of the war with great singleness of heart. This theme, in Miss Sinclair's hands, assumes big proportions and gives her at the same time ample opportunity for character ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... readily "losing the temper," and there is a type known as the irascible in whom anger is the readiest emotion. The bluff English squire, the man in authority, is this type, and his anger lasts. In its lesser form anger becomes irritability, a reaction common to the neurotic and the weak. When anger is not frank, but manifests itself by a lowered brow and sidelong look, we speak of sullenness or surliness. The sullen or surly person, chronically ill-tempered and hostile, is regarded as unsocial and dangerous, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and its pathological twin brother, the neuropathic diathesis, roams at large unrestrained from without or that self-restraint which, bred of adequate self-knowledge, might come from within, and contaminates with neurotic and mental instability the innocent unborn, furnishing histogenic factors which the future will formulate in minds dethroned to become helpless wards of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... distressed by sad news of any kind. I have heard him say that he often had great difficulty in forcing himself to open a letter which he thought likely to be distressing or unpleasant. He was naturally, I imagine, of an almost neurotic tendency; but he did not seem so much to combat this by occupation and determination as to have arrived at some mechanical way of dealing with it. I remember that he said to me once: "If you have a bad business on hand, an ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... maladies "He must have cured many more dangerous cases than mine," Des Esseintes reflected. "I shall certainly be on my feet in a few days." Disenchantment succeeded his confidence. Learned and intuitive though they be, physicians know absolutely nothing of neurotic diseases, being ignorant of their origins. Like the others, this one would prescribe the eternal oxyde of zinc and quinine, bromide of potassium and valerian. He had recourse to another thought: "If these remedies have availed me little in the past, could it not be due to the fact ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... This type of woman, neurotic from her very birth, is often the very best product of our civilization from the standpoint of character and ability, just as the male neurasthenic is often the backbone of progress and advancement. But we are concerned with these questions: "What happens to her in marriage?" ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... I could work myself into a neurotic state if I kept running through the worry cycle. It took an effort to concentrate on anything else, but it had to be made. The next four days passed ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... production of insanity. Mental strain, overwork, and worry come next. Adverse conditions, bereavement, business troubles, etc., rank third, equally with heredity. The arterial diseases of old age, epilepsy, childbirth (generally in the neurotic), change of life, fright and nervous shock, venereal diseases, sexual excesses or irregularities follow in the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... subject with the belief that it is quite possible for black hair to turn white in one night or even in a less time, although Hebra and Kaposi discredit sudden canities (Duhring). Raymond and Vulpian observed a lady of neurotic type whose hair during a severe paroxysm of neuralgia following a mental strain changed color in five hours over the entire scalp except on the back and sides; most of the hair changed from black to red, but some to quite white, and in two days all the red hair became white ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his correct taste and habit of subdued elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives, moves and has her being in neurotic novels ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... attitude which is distinguished by the fact that we are never quite aware of it but are much subject to it. According to Lipps[1] and Lotze,[2] there is to be observed in neurotic attitudes a not rare and complete indifference to feeling, and in consciousness an essential lack of feeling-tone in perception. Our existence, our own being, seems to us, then, to be a foreign thing, having little concern with us—a story we need not earnestly consider. That in such condition ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... excited, and nothing more, and from what I have heard since he had reason to be excited. Neither at the breakfast table nor in his room subsequently did his actions strike me as the actions of a man of insane, neurotic, or violent temperament. He was simply suffering from nerves. It is important to remember, in recalling the events which led up to this case, that Penreath was invalided out of the Army suffering from shell-shock, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... smallest ramifications, the spiritual inventory of what was tucked away in the mind of the person undergoing it. Psychoanalysis is used in medical practice to discover and relieve the spiritual causes of neurotic phenomena. The patient is induced to tell more and more, starting from a given point, thereby going into the most intimate details, and yet we are aware, in the network of outcropping thoughts and memories, of certain points of connection, which have dominating significance for the affective ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... we are almost entirely ignorant. Our only information concerning such matters comes from Jean d'Aulon, who, on the evidence of several women, states[2750] that she was never fully developed, a condition which frequently occurs in neurotic subjects. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... makes much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results, therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Virgin and St. Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... conditions; (d) Post-traumatic sensual perversions; (e) Pains, vertigos, deafness, etc., following trauma; (f) Distant post-traumatic psychic disorders with cerebral lesions; (g) Unclassifiable observations. To this comprehensive material is added an appendix on the topic of psychic and neurotic disturbances ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... she belonged to a Woman's Club, but was by no means the neurotic and dismal type of member who was always thinking of her rights. She took her rights unconsciously, they came natural to her, and she knew exactly how to make the most of them without exciting anything but admiration amongst that great class to whom she was affiliated, not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... profound mental depression, anxiety, insomnia, alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. ...
— Disturbing Sun • Robert Shirley Richardson
... dozen years Miss Frost supported the heart-stricken, nervous invalid, Clariss Houghton: for more than twenty years she cherished, tended and protected the young Alvina, shielding the child alike from a neurotic mother and a father such as James. For nearly twenty years she saw that food was set on the table, and clean sheets were spread on the beds: and all the time remained virtually in the position of an outsider, without ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... bewildered by the keen absorption of their children in the cheap theater. This anxiety is not, indeed, without foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician may be the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... giving way to the dismal dumps. These neurotic feelings are the limit, old man. You must get well, for you have to play Mitka in 'The Terrible Tsar' to-morrow. There is nobody else to do it. Drink something hot and take some castor-oil? Have you got the money for some castor-oil? Or, stay, I'll ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... tell me that," said Hilda. She was not angry, but bored, by this characteristic remark of Miss Gailey's. In three months she had learnt a great deal about the new landlady of the Cedars, that strange neurotic compound of ability, devotion, thin-skinned vanity, and sheer, narrow stupidity. "I've been quite warm enough," Hilda added as quickly as she could, lest Miss Gailey might have time to ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... oftener that which once quickened the heart of man is repeated and surpassed, the greater is the possibility that new things may grow out of it. Atavism therefore is not so much the persistence of the earlier as the absence of the later stages. (This agrees with Freud's conception of the neurotic subject.) ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of the weaknesses of the neurotic and artistic temperament, but he had assuredly the noblest virtues of it: he was true to his friends, and more than ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... neurotic temperament had led him into a number of escapades, but he gave evidence of improvement after he enlisted in the American Army at Boston in 1827. He served two years, and was promoted sergeant-major. He was then 20 years old, and on ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous |
