"Hysteria" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... similarity of the symptoms of so-called possession to recognized mental and physical derangements such as insanity, epilepsy, and hysteria, suggests the conclusion that possession should be classed with other ailments due to ill adjustment of the relations of the mental and physical life. If this conclusion is valid, the idea of actual possession by evil spirits becomes only an ancient ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... from slight discomfort to the most intense uterine colic, which is experienced in the lower part of the abdomen. In severe cases the general health becomes undermined, the nervous system gives way, and hysteria and other disorders ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... likeness to the leader whom he worshipped, upon whom he had moulded himself—for the moment it was as though Sir Mortimer Ferne had cried encouragement to their sunken hearts, was beckoning them on to ultimate victory plucked from present defeat. A cheer, wavering, broken, touched with hysteria, broke from throats that were dry with the horror of past moments. On with Henry Sedley, their leader now, they struggled, making what mad haste they ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... "Hysteria," declared Sir Walter. "I don't blame them. It is natural. Everybody is free to go, if they desire to do so. But tell them what you have heard to-night, Masters. Tell them that no good Christian need fear ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... hysteria, and other spasmodic affections have often been mistaken for rabies, there is no doubt, and we can easily imagine the mental effect produced upon an individual of a highly nervous temperament, by ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... and tense with eager curiosity. Some, indeed, talked casually and carelessly, as though a murder trial were an everyday occurrence, but in the main the atmosphere was electric. Men's faces were set and stern, and more than one woman showed signs of hysteria. Outside, a great throng of people, who were unable to gain admission, waited as if held by a spell. The ushers found difficulty in maintaining anything like order. The hum ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... more, she insisted on seeing him alone in the breakfast-room, where she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa. Her father and brothers objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded, afraid that a refusal might induce hysteria and worse things. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... in—save one woman from being knifed by another. Fight five armed men with your fists and boots. Knock out four of them. Run a mile, dragging a girl—from a man chasing you, and shooting at you with a revolver. Kill a murderer with a murderess's dagger. Nurse a girl with an attack of hysteria. Drive a coach, humbug a woman, a parson, a railway porter, a guard and a station-master. Kill a man armed with that steel-clawed thing there, steal a car, knock a man off a train, and bring home the exhausted woman alive and your ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... that had held them emotionally taut was ended. With outstretched hands Diane ran toward him, and her broken laugh betrayed the hysteria she was ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... had a right to live—to eat what would have been wasted on dying people!" Bemmon twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, his words quick and ragged with hysteria. "You can't hang ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... like one who has slept (but not much) in a train for two nights and fought with Germans about windows but also like an elderly virgin martyr (spiritually tense and strung-up, and distraught, and on the line between exultation and hysteria). ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... siriasis[obs3]. fanaticism, infatuation, craze; oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania (caprice) 608; kleptodipsomania[obs3]; hypochondriasis &c. (low spirits) 837[Med]; melancholia, depression, clinical depression, severe depression; hysteria; amentia[obs3]. screw loose, tile loose, slate loose; bee in one's bonnet, rats in the upper story. dotage &c. (imbecility) 499. V. be insane &c. adj. become insane &c. adj; lose one's senses, lose one's reason, lose one's faculties, lose one's wits; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... later he was back in the ward again (not his ward), and this time he found the courage of hysteria. There in the middle of the ward, under the glaring Christmas lights, with the eyes of every interested man in every bed glued upon us, he presented me with a fan wrapped in white paper: "A little present I bought you, nurse." I took it, eyes sizzling and ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... in, and one said; "Why, what on earth's the matter? Have they blown you up for your didoes to-night? What need you care. You pleased the audience." The other said, quietly: "Just get a glass of water for her; she has a touch of hysteria. I wonder who caused it?" No person had caused it. Clara Morris was merely waking from a sound sleep, unconsciously visioning that woman of the dim future who was to conquer the public in her portrayal of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... very weak. Although her periods of unconsciousness had not returned, she was still subject to paroxysms of hysteria. At times she sank into forgetfulness, then started nervously, sometimes trembling in every limb. The thought of the blow of her daughter's flight never left ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... amazed and confounded. Did she rave? Was she mad? He studied her with a curious, half-doubting scrutiny, and noted the composure of her attitude, the cold serenity of her expression,—there was evidently no hysteria, no sur-excitation of nerves about this calm statuesque beauty which in every line and curve of loveliness silently mutinied against him, and despised him. Puzzled, yet fascinated, he sought in his mind for some ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... business element with the progressive party that had been so long in safe, sane and conservative control of municipal affairs, except for the temporary setback of the recent so-called "citizens' movement" hysteria. Bobby frowned more deeply as he read on, and Mr. Bates grinned ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... and hypocritical; but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate fin-de-siecle-ism, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... people who were preparing to assume it. She had a favourite quotation, adroitly mangled, to suit such occasions. "When we begin to inculcate morality as a science, we must discard moralising as a method," she declared; and she would also beg us to stop the hysteria. "It is the mortal malady of all well-beloved measures," she said; "and it spreads to an epidemic if the infected ones are not suppressed at once ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... fanaticism, infatuation, craze; oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania (caprice) 608; kleptodipsomania^; hypochondriasis [Med.] &c (low spirits) 837; melancholia, depression, clinical depression, severe depression; hysteria; amentia^. screw loose, tile loose, slate loose; bee in one's bonnet, rats in the upper story. dotage &c (imbecility) 499. V. be insane &c adj.. become insane &c adj.; lose one's senses, lose one's reason, lose one's faculties, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Hysteria burned my lungs as I continued the dreamlike battle upward. Fear may have confused me, but it seemed as though the enveloping weed was now positively rather than merely negatively hampering me. The runners ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... owing to the large amount of uric acid in his body, he will probably be subject to attacks of some form of gout or chronic rheumatism." Dr. Haig ascribes to the presence of uric acid in the system, not only gout and rheumatism, but epilepsy, hysteria, mental and bodily depression, diseases of the liver, ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... the girl into sudden life, surprising Pierre, so that she managed to wrench herself free and ran from him. He sprang after her with a shout, fearing that in her hysteria she might fling herself into the fire, but that was not her purpose. Straight to the black horse she ran, swung into the saddle with the ease of a man, and rode furiously off through the ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... nerves. The genital apparatus is richly endowed with nerves from the sympathetic system, and I have shown how frequently evident signs of disturbance in these centers coincided or alternated with headaches, nervousness, hysteria, and epilepsy. What wonder, then, if the same powerful influence of the sexual organs, through the instrumentality of the sympathetic system, should at times produce a permanent derangement of the mental and moral ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... historical precedent. In olden days, pins were stuck in suspected witches. They had patches of skin in which there was no sensation, and discovery of such areas condemned them to death. Psychologists in later centuries found that patches of anaesthetic skin were typical of certain forms of hysteria, and therefore did not execute their patients. But the Invaders, by the fact that their seemingly human bodies were not flesh at all, ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... perceive, a determined liar. Condemned, she behaved with no fortitude. "I am a dead woman!'' she cried, when brought back to Newgate. She wept and prayed, lied still more, pretended illness, and had fits of hysteria. They put her in the old condemned hold with a constant guard over her, for fear that she would ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... snapped like a bow-string and his breast shook with sudden hysteria. "Will I take it?" he cried with a gasping laugh that was rather more like a sob. "Will I take the Court of St. James? Will I take money from home? Oh, my ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 'Fix bayonets!' Gods! we have our fill Of fear, hysteria, exultation, rage, Rage ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... complain too much; I'd asked for it. I think that this group of seven pilots pretty much represented the feelings of a lot of the airline pilots. They weren't wide-eyed space fans, but they and their fellow pilots had seen something and whatever they'd seen weren't hallucinations, mass hysteria, balloons, or meteors. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... so remarkably like those she had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she understood, was the right treatment for hysteria. ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... somewhat more elaborate mounting and mechanical effects than are at present afforded by the ordinary Punch Show. In M. MAETERLINCK's version, Ponsch becomes the Prince of Half-seas-over-Holland; he is the victim of hereditary homicidal mania, complicated by neurotic hysteria. Inflamed by the insinuations of Mynheer Olenikke—a kind of Dutch Mephistopheles and Iago combined—he is secretly jealous of his consort the Princess Joedi's preference for the society of Djoe, the Court Jester and Society Clown. Here is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... was totally abolished. It was normal at the time of examination. The author offered no explanation of this case, but the patient gave a decidedly neurotic history, and the symptoms seem to point with some degree of probability to hysteria. Pope reports a peculiar case in which there were daily attacks of neuralgia preceded by sweating confined to a bald spot on the head. Rockwell reports a case of unilateral hyperidrosis in a feeble old man which he thought due to organic ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... brethren began to rise up in their pews and say what they would give. The wonderful woman had something smart and apt to say about each fresh contribution, and used it to screw up the general interest a notch further toward benevolent hysteria. With songs and jokes and impromptu exhortations and prayers she kept the thing whirling, until a sort of duel of generosity began between two of the most unlikely men—Erastus Winch and Levi Gorringe. Everybody had been surprised when Winch gave his first $50; but when he rose again, half ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would tell you—-it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of American ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... which she was arousing, Audrey leaned on the rail of the screen of flowers, and gave herself up afresh to laughter. Monsieur Dauphin was decidedly puzzled. The affair might have ended in hysteria and confusion had not Miss Ingate, with Nick and Tommy, come hurrying ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... that's enough to excuse profanity," said Mrs. Richards witheringly. "Persis Dale is a coarse scheming creature." Then as her husband burst into astonished protests, she showed signs of hysteria. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... brilliant with a somewhat glassy brightness, and there was a touch of hysteria in her manner. Mrs. Lewin thought she had been drinking. Many of her customers ended that way—took to cognac and ratafia, when choicer pleasures were exhausted and wrinkles began to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there. They prayed with the most touching sincerity and gratitude for Bodger, and for the anonymous donor of the 5000 pounds. ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... many remarkable manifestations by which hysteria exhibits itself, for the astonishment of the credulous and uneducated portion of the public, and—alas, that it should have to be said,—for the delectation of an occasional weak-minded and ignorant physician, ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... Another evil result from the impetuous way in which we make laws is that they are not enforced because they are not in harmony with the views of the community. The statute books of every State are encumbered with laws passed in moments of hysteria and never put into operation, or else allowed to lapse after a few months of confusion. Every newspaper in California, for example, breaks the law every day when it prints a news item without appending the name of the writer, and probably we are all of us breaking laws of which ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson
... her eyes, yet had no power to check them. He was still addressing Mrs. Westlake; herself he deemed incapable of appreciating what he said. Perhaps he even—the thought made clanging in her ears, like a rude bell—perhaps he even regarded her as a social inferior since her marriage. It was almost hysteria, to such a pitch of unreason was she wrought. Her second self looked on, anguished, helpless. The voices in the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... distinctly heard the name of a person, never to be mentioned again in my family circle, issue (if I may use the expression) from Blanche's lips that I began to be really alarmed. I said to my maid: 'Hopkins, this is not Hysteria. This is a possession of the devil. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... Master said, 'Ye will not come unto me,' He taught us that unbelief is not a mere intellectual deficiency or perversity, but that it is the result, in the majority of cases—I might almost say in all-of an alienated will. Therefore, if you wish to love, do not try to work yourself into a hysteria of affection, but take into your hearts and minds the Christian facts, and mainly the fact of the Cross, which will set free the frozen and imprisoned fountains of your affections, and cause them to flow out abundantly in sweet water. First ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of yourselves!" cried Dora after them, and then turned to quiet her mother, who had come downstairs in a state of excitement bordering on hysteria, for, as old readers know, Mrs. Stanhope's ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... more of those brief interludes from toil Which leave us still the labour-despot's spoil, Slaves of long hours and unrelaxing strain, Unstrengthened and unsolaced, soon again To tread the round, and lift the lengthening chain; Stand—till hysteria lays its hideous clutch On our girl-hearts, or epilepsy's touch Thrills through tired nerves and palsied brain. Again—again—again! How long? Till Death, upon its kindly quest, Gives a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... mean to say you have forgotten the case?" he resumed. "We called it hysteria, not knowing what else it was. I don't forgive the girl for slipping through our fingers; I hate to be beaten by Death, in that way. Have you made up your mind what to do, on the next occasion? ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... three minutes Mrs. Armine heard nothing but the noise of the wind, which seemed to have taken entire possession of the chamber, and she felt as if she were its prey and the prey of the darkness. Something that was like hysteria seized upon her, a desperate terror of fate and the unknown. In the wind and in the darkness she had a grievous sensation of helplessness and of doom, of being lost for ever to happiness and light. And when the wind was shut out, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Futvoyes' door, was admitted and shown into the drawing-room, where Sylvia presently came to him, looking as lovely as ever, in spite of the pallor due to sleeplessness and anxiety. "It is kind of you to call and inquire," she said, with the unnatural calm of suppressed hysteria. "Dad is much the same this morning. He had a fairly good night, and was able to take part of a carrot for breakfast—but I'm afraid he has just remembered that he has to read a paper on 'Oriental Occultism' before the Asiatic Society this evening, and it's worrying him a ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... down beside the excited girl, whose eyes were burning with a feverish light, and who showed symptoms of returning hysteria. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... literature for nearly a century." He does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist attitude to nature." Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But these were not published ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... her small hand five infant Chaters had been nourished; the massive bosom was advertisement that they had done well. Beneath the mingled gusts of hysteria and of wrath it violently contracted and dilated; but the heart, terrificly though Mrs. Chater said it throbbed, lay too deep ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... least difficulty; she could not do the easiest sums with accuracy; geographical names were her despair. The second point in which she had suffered harm was of more serious nature. She was subject to fits of hysteria, preceded and followed by the most painful collapse of that buoyant courage which was her supreme charm and the source of her influence. Without warning, an inexplicable terror would fall upon her; like the weakest child, she craved protection from a dread inspired solely by her imagination, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... I shall be able to meet your wishes in a much simpler way, and yet throw sufficient safeguards around the new system to keep it from proving hurtful, should an attack of political hysteria overtake you. ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... field-day. The sudden cut-backs into side branches of the story are but hurdles also, not plot complications in the stage sense. This is as it should be. The pursuit progresses without St. Vitus dance or hysteria to the end of the film. There the spoilers are discomfited, the gold mine is recaptured, the incidental girls are won, in a flash, by the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... evening, when she had behaved with entire want of self-control, or, perhaps, rather with a kind of instinctive premeditated hysteria, she appeared to recognise that manner had not been a real success. She had tried, at all costs, to prevent him going to ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... worked herself into a state bordering on hysteria. Harriet was out most of the day. She came in at three o'clock, and Katie gave her a cup of tea. At the news of her sister's condition, she merely shrugged ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... what does a blush prove, and what does its absence prove, on one of these innocent faces? There is nothing in all this world that can lie and cheat like the face and the tongue of a young girl. Just give her a little touch of hysteria,—I don't mean enough of it to make her friends call the doctor in, but a slight hint of it in the nervous system,—and "Machiavel the waiting-maid" might take lessons of her. But I cannot think our Scheherezade is one of that kind, and I am ashamed of myself for noting such a trifling coincidence ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... cried. Casey, astonished. For a moment he appeared crushed; then leaped to his feet flourishing a long knife he had drawn from his boot. "I'll, not be taken from this place alive!" he shrieked, beside himself with hysteria. "Where are all you brave fellows who were going to ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... and their forefingers on a paragraph in Baedeker; but just because of this, because everybody on earth who ever has been to Naples—man or woman, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free—has wept and gurgled and had hysteria over its mild and placid beauty, is one reason why I find it somewhat tame. Italian scenery seems to me laid out by a landscape-gardener. Its beauty is absolutely conventional. Nobody will blame you if you admire it. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... is rather friendly toward the United States. Japan, the "yellow peril" is a great war dirigible that is inflated with war scares and hysteria. This aims to keep the United States preoccupied on their Western coastline, so they will not have any desire to meddle with certain plans that may eventuate in Europe within the next few years. The Japanese ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... The heavens were dumb above him as the snow-bound earth was dumb beneath. There was no sign!—Never had been. Never would be, save in the fond imaginations of religious enthusiasts, crazed by superstition, by austerities, and hysteria, duped by ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... affection produced by hysteria, during which the patient's body becomes rigid. It is claimed by some that somnambulism is one phase of the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... spring, with the result that he found himself incarcerated in the fortress of Peter and Paul. When the general was arrested, madame his wife—an adventuress named Gaskevitch, who had commenced life as a typist in a solicitor's office, and who was many years his junior—had a terrible attack of hysteria, for things had taken for her a most unexpected turn. The woman had been implicated in intrigue and treachery ever since. After copying some secret papers for a man in Kiev, she had blackmailed him, obtained a big ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... away. The make-believe of ferocity passed out of his growls; the ferocity in them became real. Also, in the moments when he was shoved away and was springing back to the attack, he yelped in high-pitched puppy hysteria. And Captain Van Horn, realizing, suddenly, instead of clutching, extended his hand wide open in the peace sign that is as ancient as the human hand. At the same time his voice rang out the single word, "Jerry!" ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... luxury of wise men and the necessity of fools—which indicates how few men are wise. It is usually the man who does not know what to say, or who has nothing worth saying to impart, that does the talking. It is a form of verbal hysteria, a kind of babbling dust which he stirs by way of concealing his incapacities. And the discourse is more characteristic of women than of the opposite sex, because the lives they live tend to the innocuous, ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... autumn walk through Sussex and Hampshire while his wife was at Bognor. In the next year his wife died, after being afflicted for some time by troubles connected with her property, by dropsy, valvular disease of the heart, and "hysteria." Borrow was melancholy and irritable, but apparently did not go for another walk in Scotland as was suggested for a cure; nor ever again did he get ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... probable that within a few days your secretary will make an appointment for you to see a Miss Valerie French. This is my niece. She does not know we are friends. When she tells you her tale, you need make no allowance for hysteria. Believe every word she says. She will not exaggerate. And please remember this. It is most desirable that she should marry the man about whom she will consult you. But it is still more desirable that she ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... look inside the saddle pouch." Then she sat up, and her eyes burnt with feverish expectation, "Quick, quick, please," and then she began to laugh wildly, but clenching her hands tightly together she overcame her hysteria, and attempted ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke
... it had certainly been made easier by the theological passage of arms, which brought out all her latent antagonism to the prejudiced young pietist. Her hostility gave rather a scornful ring to the laugh, which ended with a suspicion of hysteria. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... electric radiance flashing its outline against the stars, and I was eager to be on board. We were, however, delayed by an 'attack of nerves' on the part of Catherine, who during the morning was seized with a violent fit of hysteria to which she completely gave way, sobbing, laughing and gasping for breath in a manner which showed her to be quite unhinged and swept from self- control. Dr. Brayle took her at once in charge, while Mr. Harland fumed and fretted, pacing up and down in the saloon with an angry face and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... reads. She had been quite sure she could swim after six correspondence lessons. She had all the movements exactly, and had worried her trained nurse almost into hysteria for a week by turning on her face in bed every now and then and trying the overhand stroke. She got very expert, and had decided she'd swim regularly, and even had Charlie Sands show her the Australian crawl business so she could go over ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were hopelessly jammed by the great magnetic attraction of the Sun. They had been jammed for hours now. He forced his way back to his bunk, and securely lashed himself to it again. Sleep was his only hope now, his only real escape from the growing, screaming hysteria ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... give expert opinion. The editor is grateful to all these men, and to Florence Read, Secretary of Reed Extension Courses, who has given valuable aid. With their help he has endeavored to avoid the errors, the exaggerations, the narrowness of view, and the hysteria that characterize some of the current discussions concerning sex and the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... can be flatly denied, for the supposition of unknown causes and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence, although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming from the same lips with the same attestation are still ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... to laugh seized Kerns; he struggled against it; hysteria lay that way; and he covered his face with both ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... 21, 1886, the trial began. Eight men were singled out as victims—August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe. Efforts to postpone it until the hysteria had died down failed. The men who came forward to defend the Haymarket victims were conservative lawyers headed by one, Captain Black. Convinced of their innocence and enraged by the efforts to ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... was very much overwrought, G. G.'s mother had a mild little attack of hysteria; and Cynthia beat her on the back and shook her and kissed her until she was over it. Then G. G.'s mother told ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... me ill. A wave of giddiness swept over me, and passed. My heart was beating slowly and heavily. Something in my head pulsed in unison. I felt a frightful depression, that suddenly burst into an attack of fear gripping me like hysteria. I wanted to shriek aloud like a woman, to cover my eyes and run blindly. But at the same time my muscles failed me. Will and strength were arrested ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... what is one to do—depression will drive a man to such a pitch of hysteria? But nothing happened. It seemed that I was not even equal to being thrown out of the window and I went ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... patted the hand in his reassuringly; he tried his best to pat it in the old, big-brother way. "You've had an awfully trying day—most women would be in their rooms having hysteria ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... been trying to look over some papers, started up and paced the room hurriedly. "This—this is very curious!" he was trying to say to himself. "Hysteria pure and simple—very interesting— I must note the duration of the paroxysms. Good God! can't somebody stop her? perfectly inhuman, to let a creature ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... reflect that such an opening would certainly lead to tears and hysteria now, and might easily begin an estrangement that would sadden and disappoint Richard. A few more such exchanges, and his mother would retire worsted to her room, might possibly leave his house, and punish Harriet cruelly through him. She determinedly ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... slightly larger of the two advanced with a half-hearted attempt at solemnity, though unable to resist a Parthian shaft at his companion, who was seized on the instant with a paroxysm of suppressed hysteria. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... lapsed into a pose of deep concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension—panic—hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... between two short i's was considered to need support, and so we find michi, nichil, occurring quite regularly. The difficulty of i and y was met by the suppression of the latter; so that though it sometimes appears unexpectedly, as in hysteria, it is only treated as i. Between f and ph there was much uncertainty; phas, phanum, prophanus are well-known forms, or conversely Christofer, flenbothomari, Flegeton. B and p were often confused, as in babtizare, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... movement the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit. The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous preparation for a—rabbit! In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the tone-poem was petty. And the churning of the orchestra, foaming hysteria of the strings, bellowing of the brass—would they never cease! Such an insane chase after a rabbit! Yes, she said the word to herself and found her lips carved into a hard smile, which she saw reflected as in a trick mirror upon the face of Elvard ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... little French officer sped away to her own room, and brought back the smelling-salts and was most eagerly solicitous that Nina should conquer this passing attack of hysteria, as she deemed it. And, indeed, Nina managed to get through the rest of her part without any serious ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... characters in your poem, 'The Vision of Helen,' are neurotics. They suffer from morbid fears, delusions, hysteria, violent mental and emotional ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... thing, about "ye become as little children"? He started to laugh, and his juvenile larynx made giggling sounds. They seemed funny, too, and aggravated his mirth. For a little while, he was on the edge of hysteria and then, when he managed to control his laughter, he felt calmer. If he were dead, then he must be a discarnate entity, and would be able to penetrate matter. To his relief, he was unable to push his hand through ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... library. "Ellen will wait on us and we'll have the baby down and play games and be as merry as ever we can be,—to keep the ghosts away," she cried in fresh, defiant tones that had just the faintest suggestion of hysteria in them. "We shall succeed; I don't mean to think of it again. I'm right in that, am I not? You look as if you thought so. Ah, Mr. Packard was kind to secure me such a companion. I must prove my gratitude to him by keeping you close to me. It was a mistake to have those light-headed ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... all forms of chronic, constitutional diseases, especially those of a nervous character: chorea, sciatica, hysteria, insanity, and above all, epilepsy, may give rise to criminality ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night's experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... mine, and because you have learned to trust me. But who else would credit it? I have only my word against his—an unknown nurse's against the great Professor's. Everybody would say I was malicious or hysterical. Hysteria is always an easy stone to fling at an injured woman who asks for justice. They would declare I had trumped up the case to forestall my dismissal. They would set it down to spite. We can do nothing against him. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... conventional—a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep—indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his mother?' cried the good woman, her hysteria having much the same effect on Lord Durwent's smoothly developing monologue as a heavy pail dropped by a stage-hand ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... following day we explored the caves, and found human bones and things, which I helped Richard to sort, much to the disgust of the Vicomte de Perrochel, who was shocked at my want of sensibility, and said that a Frenchwoman would certainly have had hysteria. We also explored the ruins, and wrote descriptions of our journey to Palmyra. We had all retired to rest, when I was aroused by hearing a roaring like that of a camel. I ran out of my tent to see what was the matter; and being guided by a ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... objective descriptions of the behavior of primitive people. In psychology interest developed in the study of the child and in the comparative study of human and animal behavior. The psychiatrist, in dealing with certain types of abnormal behavior like hysteria and multiple personality, was forced to study human behavior objectively. All this has prepared the way for a science of human nature and of society based upon ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... action that took the world completely by surprise. People had expected hysteria, argument, and passionate exhortation; disguised emissaries, plots, and protests. There were none of these. It was as if progress had not yet begun, and volors were uninvented, as if the entire universe had not come to disbelieve in God, and to discover that itself was God. Here was this silly ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson |
