"Obsessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visiting California are obsessed with the flowers, the abundant callas, the monstrous roses, the giant geraniums. But I never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the trees. And remember, I have not as yet seen what they ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... impatiently. But young Ames, standing rigidly before his desk exclaimed, "Just a moment longer, please, Mr. Secretary! Some of these facts you know unless Field was so obsessed with the thought of his brother's alleged wrongs that he did not mention them, but I'll state them anyhow. The mining and smelting property that caused the whole row was originally owned by an old timer named Post who struck ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... end they deliberately had cultivated Nickleby's confidence. It was apparent from the first that the man was utterly devoid of common honesty. It was his idea that government graft was an established method of revenue and he seemed to be obsessed with the belief that no Minister of the Crown would allow his oath of office to interfere with the acquisition of personal wealth. As their relations had ripened he had grown bolder and had organized a construction company with the object of using his "connection" ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not altogether grasp the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... under the sack, rather, that he probably used for a pillow! What a queer thing to do! But then, old Luddy was a character—apparently always in the most poverty-stricken condition, apparently hardly more than keeping body and soul together, trusting no one, and obsessed by the dread that by depositing in a bank some one would discover that he had money, and attempt to force it from him, he had put his savings, year after year, for twenty years, twenty-five years, perhaps, into unset stone—diamonds. How ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... The King dismissed his secretaries, and without turning on the light sat and thought alone. The effervescence had all gone from his brain, melancholy ruled him; and as he sat ruminating upon the past and his own present position his mind became obsessed by all the historical characters who had preceded him in the exercise of those royal functions now grown so exiguous in his hands, who had sat and labored at Statecraft in that very room, some of them, perhaps, in the very chair in which he ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the reign of Shomu, when faith in the potency of supernatural influences obsessed men's minds, was severely dealt with by Konin. Office-seekers resorted to the device of contriving conflagrations of official property, rewarding the incendiaries with the plunder, and circulating rumours that these calamities were visitations ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Peace Propaganda" should be forwarded as speedily as practicable. What a mad world it was, to be sure! Here was an important periodical waiting impatiently for the views of the millionaire on the best means of securing peace on earth and good will to all men, while that same master mind was obsessed with fear of a few Chinese bandits. Society was looking to Forbes for a promised panacea against war and its evils; Forbes himself was wondering whether bolts and locks and armed servants and policemen would protect him and his from the claws of ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... the Republican leaders, obsessed with a determination to win the presidential election, have attempted to satisfy too many divergent views. Inconsistencies, inevitable under the circumstances, rise to haunt them on every hand, and they find themselves arrayed, in public thought ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... her place, to go back to her parents, who had nothing; but what could she do? Mashenka could not bear the sight of the lady of the house nor of her little room; she felt stifled and wretched here. She was so disgusted with Fedosya Vassilyevna, who was so obsessed by her illnesses and her supposed aristocratic rank, that everything in the world seemed to have become coarse and unattractive because this woman was living in it. Mashenka jumped up from the bed and ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... way. Although she had only just eaten her piece of bread, a terrible thought obsessed her. Where would she next get a mouthful? She now knew what torture she would have to go through ... the pangs of hunger were terrible to endure. Where should she get her next meal? She walked through two more villages. She was getting thirsty ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... It was hopeless she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his idee fixe, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, while ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... established thing when he began, after satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that Marlowe—obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness—had taken a leaf, the guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... all was that the Abati became obsessed with the saying of the Fung scouts to the shepherds, which, after all, was but a repetition of that of their envoys delivered to the Council a little while before: that they should hasten to destroy the idol Harmac, lest he should move himself to Mur. How an idol of such proportions, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... grow coconuts; that would give him an occupation; and he would send for his books and a piano; but his quick mind saw that in all this he was merely trying to conceal from himself the desire which obsessed him. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... the right to regard Annas and Caiaphas as worse men than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Head Master of Eton. If Jesus had been indicted in a modern court, he would have been examined by two doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion; declared incapable of pleading; and sent to an asylum: that is the whole difference. But please note that when a man is charged before a modern tribunal (to take a case that happened the other day) of having asserted and maintained that he was ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... have no time for living. To be capable and efficient in one's work is a splendid thing; but efficiency can be made a great mechanical device that robs life of far more than it returns it. A nation can become so possessed, and even obsessed, with the idea of power and grandeur through efficiency and organisation, that it becomes a great machine and robs its people of the finer fruits of life that spring from a wisely subordinated and coordinated individuality. Here again it is the wise ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes to me, that to all these slaves of the Elsinore the Real is real because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... and Paul found himself again in his taximeter cab. In a state of mind quite different from that which had obsessed him on his way to the dinner, he arrived ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... individual with a pre-existing eating disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of fasters, I've known two of these. I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to assist them, because they carry the ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... had been obsessed with one ambition, and that was to win Joyce for his wife, in spite of the fact that he was fifteen years her senior and held an appointment in ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... romantic plays he troubles himself little concerning the moral which it may be possible to extract from his plot; he is rightly conscious that that at all events is not the business of art: but when he comes to create in vacuo he is at once obsessed by some Platonic theory regarding the ethical aim of the poet. The victory, therefore, shall be with the powers of good, purity and vestal maidenhood shall triumph and undergo apotheosis at his hands, the world shall see how fair a monument ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... did not shake hands like two ounces of cold fish, as did some of the girls he knew. She was dressed in a half-formal house-gown, and the one curl of her waving brown hair that would persistently straggle down upon her forehead was in its accustomed place. He had always been obsessed with a nearly irresistible impulse to put ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... portentous a change should have fevered his brain and disturbed his mental equilibrium? A new ideal, which he proudly called "progress," obsessed him, the ideal of quantity and not quality. His practical religion became that of acceleration and facilitation—to do things more quickly and easily—and thus to minimize exertion became his great objective. Less and less he relied upon the initiative of his own brain and ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... and religious saw God in the movement. It was inspired, they said, else why could so many thousand negroes all be obsessed at once with the same impulse. There were set afloat rumors that a great calamity was about to befall the Southland. In Georgia and Alabama, hundreds believed that God had cursed the land when he sent droughts and floods and destructive pests to visit ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... in homes made beautiful with all that gold can give Unhappy souls at odds with life, not knowing how to live. He saw fair, pampered women turn from motherhood's sweet joy, Obsessed with methods to prevent or mania to destroy. He saw men sell their souls to vice and avarice and greed; He heard race quarrelling with race and creed decrying creed; And shameful wealth and waste He saw, and ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... obsessed with the flaming color of that man's unappeased passion. Red—red! The hovels were spattered with the red clay. The man, the skinny, wretched creature who begged for a moment of his gracious mercy at the gate, dripped in ruby filth. The mule sank ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... wedding, these occasions, upon which he had to sit close beside her in a motor, were the worst. An ordinary young man, not in love with her, would have found something intoxicating in her atmosphere—and how much more this poor Tristram, who was passionately obsessed. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... pliant Nathan Pilley was elected chairman. This gentleman was obsessed by the notion that he possessed in a high degree the two qualities which he considered essential to the harmonious and expeditious conduct of a public meeting, namely, an invincible determination to agree with every speaker, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... comes the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man's wisdom and strength in the living of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... obsessed by the spirit of hell let loose—drawn by it, as by a magnet, although subsequent events proved him not to have been altogether without a plan. He got up, with his eyes fixed on the dance, and dragged King with him to a place ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... uncomfortable memory of a conversation with Mary the day before. They had been shopping, and had lunched together at a popular tea room. It was while they sat in their secluded corner that Aunt Frances had introduced in a roundabout way the topic which obsessed her. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the same time of the supreme joy of existence, the chase, bitten with cold, starved with hunger, fearful of the future, they offered fertile soil for the seeds of rebellion. A government more than usually obsessed with stupidity, as all governments become at times, remained indifferent to appeals, deaf to remonstrances, blind to danger signals, till through the remote and isolated settlements of the vast west and among the tribes of Indians, hunger-bitten and fearful for their future, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... myself with these reflections, and found amusement in them; but it was impossible to lead Harry into a discussion. His mind was anything but scientific, anyway; and he was completely obsessed by fear for the safety of Desiree. And I wasn't sorry for it; it is better that a man should worry about some one else ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... fact that the destinies of states and peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret arrangements of diplomatists and the agreements or jealousies of kings. For fifty years Germany has been unifying the mind of her people against the world. She has obsessed them with an evil ideal, but the point we have to note is that she has succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No other modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the very gown that Marjorie's aunt had given her a year ago as a commencement present. Had not Marjorie declared over and over again that she would never part with it? And now she had deliberately given it to Constance. This proved beyond a doubt where Marjorie's true affection lay. Mary was obsessed with a wild desire to turn and run down the drive and away from this hateful girl. This was, indeed, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... took whatever she offered; doubtless I drank it, but I don't remember. Nor do I remember what she said at first, for somehow I began thinking about my lions, and the thought obsessed me even while striving to listen to her, even in the tingling maze of other thoughts which kept me dumb under the exquisite spell of this ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility. Radical newspapers referred with enthusiasm to the erection of a new federal edifice. Little wonder that the harassed President was obsessed with the idea that New England was ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... cars seemed as fresh as if they had just got out of bed. Mr. Prohack was astonished at the vast number of people who didn't care what time they went to bed because they didn't care what time they arose; he was in danger of being morbidly obsessed by the extraordinary prevalence of idleness. The rooms were full of brilliant idlers in all colours. Everybody except chorus girls had thought fit to appear at this ball in aid of the admirably charitable Chorus Girls' Aid Association. And as everybody was also on the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the war are the pacifists. They see nothing more serious in the European agony than what can be disposed of easily at any time in a peace conference—by talk and adjustment. So obsessed are some of them by the slaughter of men, by the woe and travail of Europe, that they would turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque farce by any sort of compromise—a peace that could be no peace, merely the armistice for further war. Their eyes are so blinded by the economic waste of ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen of her she's ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... joy of the Hebrews was at their deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, it was exceeded by that of Pharaoh's people at seeing their slaves depart, for with them went the dread of death that had obsessed them. They were like the portly gentleman riding an ass. The rider feels uncomfortable and longs for the moment of alighting, but his longing cannot compare in intensity with that of the ass groaning under the corpulent burden, and when their journey's end is reached, the ass ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I'm making a fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are—I don't know what you are—you are wonderful, that's all. But how do you do it? How do you ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... "If," said Morriston, obsessed by the subject, "the case is not one of suicide it must be one of murder. Where is Mr. Gervase Henshaw, or any one else, going to look ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... Billy found it impossible to keep Isobel and the baby Isobel out of his mind night or day. The fear grew in him that somewhere in the wilderness they were suffering as others were suffering. So obsessed did he become with the thought that he had a terrible dream one night, and in that dream baby Isobel's face appeared to him, a deathlike mask, white and cold and thinned by starvation. The vision decided him. He would go to Fort Churchill, and if McTabb had not been driven in he would go to his cabin, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... as would naturally be dictated by the general mood of artificiality in an age when dreams were lived and the ruling classes obsessed by a passion for amusements, invented to divert the mind from actualities. This colour scheme was beautifully light in tone and harmoniously gay, whether in tapestries, draperies and upholstery of velvets, or flowered silks, frescoes or painted furniture. ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... fairly obsessed by that thought. Her vow before the picture of Tunis' mother in the Seamew's cabin must be in Sheila's view to the very end. She had a sufficient share of that vision of the Celt to be deeply impressed by a promise made as that had been made—though ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... chamber high above the Piazza just mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome and could hear the fountains plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs was composed—'The Night-Song'. About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... moment the bureaucratic circles of St. Petersburg became obsessed with the idea of picking out special groups from among the Jewish population, distinguished by financial or educational qualifications, for the purpose of bestowing upon them certain rights and privileges. It was the old coin—Nicholas' idea of the "assortment" of the Jews—with ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... in Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the increase of wealth and therefore power ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... "out-of-bounds" passion will of course be recognised as a Romantic trait, though it had Classical suggestions. Chateaubriand appears to have been rather specially "obsessed" by this form of it, for he not merely speaks constantly of Rene as le frere d'Amelie, but goes out of his way to make the good Father in Atala refer, almost ecstatically, to the happiness of the more immediate ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... courage to dine at home. The large dining room with the big table set for himself alone only served to remind him the more keenly of his loss. Especially empty and cheerless they looked that day and his mind was obsessed by thoughts of the absent one when suddenly the loud ringing of the telephone bell had aroused his reveries. He picked up the receiver thinking it was Hadley calling him or possibly someone in his office, when to his amazement he heard ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... retorted, as he mopped the bubbles with a napkin. "You've started in badly." Shirley mentally disagreed. His stupor still obsessed him, but he noted with interest that Warren paid the check for his bottle with a new one-hundred dollar bill. Warren could elicit nothing from Helene but silly laughter, and so he arose impatiently, as Shine Taylor returned to whisper something ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... when he died. He was twice married, the first time to Kate Duckworth, an English contralto, known on the platform as Mlle. Morensi, and, after her death, to Isabella McCullough, an American soprano. Richard Grant White's mind was still obsessed by memories of Salvi, Benedetti, and Mario when Brignoli was basking in the sunshine of popular favor, and his estimate of the tenor in The Century Magazine for June, 1882, is scarcely flattering either to the singer or the public that liked him. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... with me? Of course she would be lonely in her own house, and is too young to stay there alone anyhow, but I'd like to put her up, and you certainly could run down week-ends—possibly oftener. American men are always obsessed with the idea that they are twice as busy as they ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... today is based on an inherited and automatic acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans" and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there any one who would ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... exact credulity of his audience, should cause his exposure and lead to his being cast out of the camp as an impostor and hunted to death as a false prophet: a fate which more than once nearly overtook him. Indeed, as he aged and his nerves lost their elasticity under the tension, he became obsessed with the fixed idea that God had renounced him and that some horror would overtake him should he attempt to cross the Jordan and enter the "Promised Land." Defeated at Hormah, he dared not face another such check and, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... the morning bore but slight resemblance to that same environment during the hours of darkness—especially on a night immediately following pay-day at the mines. As Miss Donovan, now thoroughly awake, and obsessed by the memory of those past hours of horror, cautiously drew aside the corner of torn curtain, and gazed down upon the deserted street below, she could scarcely accept the evidence of her ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... of Captain Roots; apparently obsessed by the same vision and spirit, Mr. Willis O. Tyler, eminent Los Angeles race representative, attorney and Harvard graduate, also makes a plea for justice for Negro troops in the regular army, also for Negro ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... youth, on looking down from a height upon the city with its smiling environs, he had felt obsessed by gloomy thoughts. In the sunshine-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in a superior and omnipotent ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... The whole world seemed obsessed by the moonlight. Its white radiance, when Mrs. Martens at last turned off the glaring bulbs, seemed to cast a spell over sea and land. She stepped out on the porch, and was awed by the beauty of the wide sweep of shining sky and sea. Then, far below ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... whom it was inflicted merely grunted again and, under the avalanche of blows, managed to regain his balance and plunge back to the assault. A born fighter, he was now obsessed with but one idea, namely, to destroy this smaller and faster opponent who was hurting him so outrageously. As far as the beach comber was concerned: it was a murder-battle now, with no question of ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... bathed, suffered, talked, danced in the night and rejoiced in the dawn, warmed, in fact, both hands before the fire of life, but still they are not ready to depart. For they are behindhand with time, obsessed with so many worlds, so much to do, the petty done, the undone vast. It depressed Milton when he turned twenty-three; it depresses all those with vain and ambitious temperaments at least once a year. Some call it remorse for wasted days, and are proud of it; others call it vanity, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... hands had fed him with liquid foods. Some glorious half-seen stranger had taken him under her care; but her face was hidden in a queer mist that floated before his eyes. At times he had tried to rise from the bed, his unbalanced mind obsessed with the idea of washing for gold, but those same strange, soft hands had always succeeded in ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... servant, the excellent dragoman. By dawn the camp would be on its way to its objective, the hills beyond the outline of the lost "City of the Horizon." Abdul, the visionary and the pious Moslem, was as keen about reaching Akhnaton's treasure as Pizarro was obsessed with the reports of the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... says that Brindisi is too busy a place to keep anything quiet—if not secret—and he wants to be very dark indeed about this, as it is worked by the new radium engine. Ever since they found radium in our own hills he has been obsessed by the idea of an aerial navy for our protection. And after to-day's experiences I think he is right. As he wanted to survey the whole country at a glimpse, so that the general scheme of defence might be ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Joe Wilkinson was following him that night. On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... curiosity had led her to overdo persuasion. That cooing interpolation of "your sincere friend"—too strongly honeyed—suddenly recalled the Prophet to the fact that Lady Enid was not, and could never be, his confidante in the matter that obsessed him. He therefore sat down, but with an abrupt air of indefinite social liveliness, and exclaimed, not unlike ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... however, powerless against the disaffection due to perennial misgovernment. In Mesopotamia and Yemen disturbance was endemic; nearer home, a semblance of loyalty was maintained in the army and among the Mussulman population by a system of delation and espionage, and by wholesale arrests; while, obsessed by terror of assassination, the sultan withdrew himself into fortified seclusion in the palace ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... terribly disappointed, quite downcast. Ever since the British landed—she has such faith in the British—she has believed in a short war. Of course I don't know any more than she does. I have to guess, and I'm not a lucky guesser as a rule. I confess to you that even I am absolutely obsessed by the miracle which has turned the invaders back from the walls of Paris. I cannot get over the wonder of it. In the light of the sudden, unexpected pause in that great push I have moments of believing ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... a babe upon the brine It is my dream to float supine And to the vast inane Banish awhile from off my chest The cares that hold it now obsessed, And even take a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... marry August Keil, if he's so crazy about the fellow. Why, he's positively obsessed. It's madness the way ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... event. At the slightest sound they all jumped. Their sleeplessness was beginning to tell on them and their nerves were still obsessed by the unnaturalness of their experience. It was a long time before they quieted down, but the night passed without interruption. So did the next day. Another day went by and another, and during this time they did little ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the Silence this month, this day, this hour and this minute. My mind is obsessed and under control of the Divine Spirit, I recognize here and now only good. I see in my fellowmen only perfection and good. I see in nature all around me only perfection and good. I see in every transaction of life only the perfect good. I see in every activity of my experience, and in every form, ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... imagination, he had followed Graylock, night after night, slyly, stealthily, shirking after him through busy avenues at midday, lurking by shadowy houses at midnight, burning to see what expression this man wore, what was imprinted on his features;—obsessed by a desire to learn what he might ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... grasped the full significance of the telegram, he became a different person. Some fierce electric charge wrought a chemical alteration in his every fibre; he became a domineering, iron-willed autocrat, obsessed by the one idea of his own preservation, and not hesitating to use physical force when force became necessary to ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... in the doorway and was saying something in an enthusiastic voice about the theater when Rosinska interrupted her with derision: "Goodness, you seem to be obsessed by the theater! . . . Well, well, I would never have believed such a thing possible had I not heard it ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... Sandy was obsessed by a sense of misgiving that would not be denied. Wheeling his bicycle round, he mounted and headed straight for Mallow ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... conduct became even stranger in fact he was as a man obsessed. He rarely spoke to us, but spent his whole time with the Bushmen, wandering away into the mountains and the thick jungle bordering the river, refusing our company, and no longer even carrying a rifle in a country at that time teeming with wild animals. His sole desire was to come ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the lonely man, obsessed, going up and down the China Coast, shipping at distant ports, one after another, on fruitless quests, looking for a place to disembark. The proper place to disembark, the place which he should recognise, should know for his own place, which would answer ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... a strange perversity—due perhaps to our having the Declaration of Independence crammed down our throats as children—we in America seem obsessed with an ambition to create a social aristocracy, loudly proclaimed as founded on achievement, which, in point of fact, is based on nothing but the possession of money. The achievement that most certainly lands one among the crowned heads of the American ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... sink into the bosom of the East and be lost in it for ever. The far future was nothing to her. All she thought about, all she cared for, was to escape at once and have the one thing she wanted, the thing for which the whole of her clamoured unceasingly. She was obsessed by the one idea, as only the woman of her temperament, arrived at her critical ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... were considerable. The percolation of the news of the police failure had reduced the male population to the condition of a joyful desire to celebrate in contraband drink. The female population became obsessed with a love of their own doorsteps, whence they could greet each other and exchange loud-voiced opinions with their neighbors, while their household "chores" awaited their later convenience. The children, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the person who is looking at it. It is seldom made use of for a background. Mere description occupied a very small place in Tolstoi's method. The intense fidelity to detail in the portrayal of character, whether obsessed by a mighty passion, or playing with a trivial caprice, is the chief glory of his work. This is why, after the reading of Tolstoi, so many other "realistic" novels ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... her own sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human—she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness, she finds it; she can only think "how pert that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... nobody ever knew about"; for though the Doctor's daughter spent hours with her green golden eyes fixed upon the poet, the latter never suspected his good fortune; doubtless because the beauty of his patroness, the superannuated diva, had so obsessed him that the attractions of other women left him quite unmoved. How vividly Leonora remembered those days of poverty and dreams!... Little by little the modest capital the Doctor owned in Alcira vanished, what with living expenses and music lessons. Dona Pepa, at her brother's instance, sold one ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... said that all rulers become obsessed with the passion of rule. They lose their balance, clearness of sight, judgment, and only desire to rule, rule, rule! He was able to quote many examples. I thought of him and his theory when following, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... incursion of the personal, always before so jealously kept out of his life. His desire for impersonality now only kept by him in a fierce wish to blot out his own as much as possible, to sink it in that of the beloved, to drown in hers. He was obsessed by Blanche, she filled the world for him from rim to rim; and though with his mind he still admitted the absurdity of it, could even look at his own state dispassionately, he yet had to admit the fact. It was some time since he had been near Boase, because, although the Parson never so much as ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Jewish race. Apparently, therefore, we are to believe that the leaders of this Jewish conspiracy set up the Socialist movement and fostered it, while at the same time they enlisted their ablest minds to defeat it. Surely for the normal mind that is not obsessed this is a theory too absurd ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... He garbled his sentences so to speak with excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... interest to us. We spent months and years going through every vacant building into which we could force an entrance. Our setter dogs could point an empty doorway as well as a covey of quail, and seemed as curious about the interiors as we were ourselves. I became obsessed with a desire to know the age of these buildings and something of those early Alexandrians who ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... forcing his way through the press, his clinched fists waving over his head, was young, pallid, typically an academic devotee of radicalism, a frenetic disciple, obsessed by furor loquendi He was calling to the mob, trying to rouse followers. "You have been standing here, freezing in the night, damning tyrants, boasting what you would do. Why don't you do it? Do you let a smirking ruler bluff all the courage of real men out of you? He's only doing the bidding ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... people. Men such as Becker, Weise, Lorenz and Langrehr have proceeded upon a distinctly exaggerated ideal of Plautus' eminence as a master dramatic craftsman and literary artist and therefore have amputated with the cry of "Spurious!" everything that offends their ideal. Lessing is obsessed with too high an estimate of the Captivi. Lamarre, Naudet and Ritschl commit the error of imputing to our poet a moral purpose. Schlegel and Scott deprecate the crudity of his wit without an adequate appreciation of its sturdy and primeval robustness. Langen, Mommsen, Korting and LeGrand approach ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... or strolling the dances out, while they talked in low soft voices and gazed upon the wonder of flower-love. From the lanai drifted the love-caressing strains of "Hanalei" sung by the singing boys. Vaguely Lee Barton remembered—perhaps it was from some Maupassant story—the abbe, obsessed by the theory that behind all things were the purposes of God and perplexed so to interpret the night, who discovered at the last that the night was ordained ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... her lips—a ringing, happy laugh that was heard, I swear, in listening heaven. She seemed obsessed by a strange excitement—perhaps like my own, that sprang from a ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... before a battle; had known officers and soldiers to utter them—brave men, too, yet obsessed by the conviction of their approaching death. Sometimes they die; sometimes escape, and the premonition ends forever. But until the moment of peril is passed, or they fall as they had foretold, no argument ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There was always a tremendous lot of variety in my mind. In fact the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was obsessed by the idea of pairing off with one particular set and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over the mountains ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... protruding injected eye of the bear, then leaped aside, his dripping knife in his hand, and danced about the maddened beast with the agility of a modern prize-fighter. The bear, too, danced, as if obsessed by some infernal music; and the skipping, and leaping, and dodging, and waltzing of these two would have been ludicrous had it not been a matter of life and horrid death. Through it all Roldan was vaguely conscious of approaching hoofbeats, but there was ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... growing with the increase of their numbers. In his excitement he thought first of Jewish philanthropists. He sought an interview with Baron Maurice de Hirsch in May, 1895. He planned an address to the Rothschilds. He talked of his ideas to friends in literary circles. His mind was obsessed by a gigantic problem which gave him no rest. He was struggling to pierce the veils of revelation. He saw a world in which the Jewish people lacked a fulcrum for national action and therefore had to seek to create it through beneficence. He had a remarkably resourceful and agile ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... marry nor beget children. He was astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to illuminate with reason's ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... enlightening than a description of a chat between the great war-lord of Germany and a leading pacifist: the one completely equipped with knowledge of the history, temper, and temperament of his people; the other obsessed by a fantastic exaggeration of the power and influence of money, even in the world of culture and international politics, and preaching his panacea in the land, of all others, where even now mere money has the least influence, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... swallow it. He himself was at a loss to understand how it was that the face of a little girl whom he had met but once on a steamer could have upset all his plans of many years' standing. He was bewitched, obsessed. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... The thing so obsessed his mind that he must speak of it, if it be only to his lackey. Rabecque's sharp face assumed a chastened look. He sighed most dutifully. He sought for words of ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... So obsessed was she by the thought of her shattered love affair that she failed to see that a troubled conscience was equally responsible for her restlessness. Her life-long training in acquiescence and obedience was at grips with her desire to live her own life in her own way. She had ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... anxiously watch their development. They are distressed beyond measure to note their steady growth in spite of every attempt which they make to control or forbid them. And of all this unrest and unhappiness the child is acutely conscious. The whole household may become obsessed with the misfortune which has befallen it, and the mother, losing all sense of proportion, feels that she cannot regain her peace of mind until it has been overcome. The child is in need of mental and moral support from those around him, and all that he finds is an openly expressed apprehension ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... him. She told herself that there was either a weak streak in him or a low one, else he would not be so obsessed by the disappearance of this flirtatious little fool who had tried to entrap him. But she did not believe it. A glance at this brown-faced man was sufficient evidence that he trod with dynamic force the way of the strong. A look ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... new rooms were crowded, and preoccupied as he was, it struck Vanno oddly, as it always did strike him anew in the Casino, to hear every one who passed talking of the all-absorbing game. They were obsessed by it, and threw questions to each other, which elsewhere would have meant nothing, or some very different thing; but here no explanations were needed. "Doing any good?" asked a pallid young man with a twitching ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... cow-puncher, who boasted of being a "homemade" athlete, and would take a back seat for nobody, least of all young Merriwell. He was not exactly "cracked" on the subject of his prowess in athletic sports, but his views were certainly warped. Obsessed with the idea that it was his duty to take Merriwell down a peg. Blunt was continually, and in the most weird and wonderful ways, contriving to force Merry into tests of strength ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... of the Socialist Party; like the editors and the writers of the Revolutionary Age and the Class Struggle; like the Eastmans, the Nearings and the Frainas of our American movement, my critic is obsessed with Russia. To him, the Bolshevists and their mass action revolutions are like dazzling, fiery suns which blind and obscure ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... made a vain effort to free herself. He tried to reason with her, but nothing he urged could change her resolution. Her face was expressionless; her eyes dull; her mind appeared to be obsessed by a determination to take her life. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... threaten the city that had confined it in stone. And George, in the background of his mind, which was obsessed by the tormenting enigma of the girl by his side, also threatened the city. With the uncompromising arrogance of the student who has newly acquired critical ideas, he estimated and judged it. He cursed the Tate Gallery ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... and begged him to abandon his studies in these new murders, but, as before, his response was cold and discouraging. There was a wild and almost fanatical tone in his letter which was indicative of his obsessed mind, and an ugly premonition occurred to me that this would be the breaking-point ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... got over the crisis and being on the fair road to recovery,—children recover quickly,—my heart turned towards home—and a longing to get back obsessed me. I could think of nothing but home, now that Diana's immediate need of me was over. She begged me to stay with her. To fail her at such a moment was a great grief to me, but I could make no further sacrifice. I ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... serious mistakes were made in trying to do so. We will get to the bottom of this, and I will take whatever action is called for. But in debating the past, we must not deny ourselves the successes of the future. Let it never be said of this generation of Americans that we became so obsessed with failure that we refused to take risks that could further the cause of peace and freedom in the world. Much is at stake here, and the Nation and the world are watching to see if we go forward together in the national interest or if we let partisanship weaken us. And let there ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Lucy, yet they only came and went swiftly through her mind. She was obsessed by things ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... river, a little way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of this after their day's work they often wandered. They spent all day painting. Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they despised. Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they felt a desire ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... mysteries it almost absolutely ignored. Even Death seemed to lie a little beyond its vision. What a difference, in this respect, between the literature of Louis XIV and the literature of Elizabeth! The latter is obsessed by the smell of mortality; its imagination, penetrating to the depths and the heights, shows us mankind adrift amid eternities, and the whole universe the doubtful shadow of a dream. In the former, these magnificent obscurities find no place: ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... their modest Non Plush Ultras didn't get the scientific secret of this fact. They was still too obsessed with the idea that they ought to be ogled on account of them by any male beast in his right senses. But they knew they'd got in wrong somehow. By this time they was kind of bunching together and telling each other things in low tones, while not seeming to look at Hetty and her dupes, at which ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... too often obsessed with one idea. Across his mental firmament he sees only one blazing word: INJUSTICE. And, fine fellow though he often is, he is inclined to be impatient with any talk of art or beauty. "How can beauty grow in these vile cities?" he cries. "What is the use of your music, your statuary, ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... his interest in the case had been revived he seemed unable to keep it out of his mind. Since our joint visit I had once or twice passed through the street by myself, and on the last occasion had again seen the raising of the blind. It obsessed him—the desire to meet the man face to face. A handsome, bold, masterful man, he conceived him. But there must be something more for such a woman to have sold her soul—almost, one might say—for the sake ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome |
