"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peccable is the individual imagination, unchastened by tradition! I find among the illustrations of Mr. Berenson's very valuable monograph on Lotto, a most curious instance in point. This psychological, earnest painter has been betrayed, by his morbid nervousness of temper, into making the starting of a cat into the second most important incident ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... remnant of the fugitives who survived, in freedom, the fatal battle of Camden. A laudable anxiety to be active at such a time, to show to the approaching Continentals that there was a spirit in the State which they came to succor, of which the most happy auguries might be entertained, prompted his morbid impatience at the long delay of his absentees. There were other causes which led him to feel this delay more seriously now than at other times. The Tories were again gathering in force around him. Under these ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... interests. The circumstances, however, served to embolden many hitherto undecided sympathisers into openly declared and vehement Boer partisans, revealing the singular spectacle, among English people even, of a morbid cult apparently ready to sacrifice their nation just to vindicate their judicial dicta about Boer innocence and to parade their own darling sense of ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... Pantheon of the romantic school is that of the popularizer of pianoforte sentiment. His compositions, by whatever name they may be called, are essentially lyric pieces, songs, ballads and fanciful stories in rhyme. The subjects are frequently tender or sad, sometimes morbid—in short, Byronic. The treatment is always graceful and high-bred, and the contrasts strong. The melodies are embroidered with a peculiar kind of fioratura, which he invented himself, founded upon the Italian embellishment of that ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... of them, neither knowing nor caring anything about the evils which may follow wounds, which do follow wounds, in pampered bodies. He could not understand why his uncle, who was certainly not otherwise given to morbid coddling, should insist upon such excessive care of a cut which was ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... principal aims of the National Citizen will be to make those women discontented who are now content; to waken them to self-respect and a desire to use the talents they possess; to educate their consciences aright; to quicken their sense of duty; to destroy morbid beliefs, and fit them for their high responsibilities as citizens of a republic. The National Citizen has no faith in that old theory that "a woman once lost is lost forever," neither does it believe in the assertion that "a woman who sins, sinks to depths of wickedness lower ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... mob. One especially—Ann Putnam, a child of twelve years—showed great precocity and played a striking part in the performances. The mania spread to other children; and two or three married women also, seeing the great attention paid to the afflicted, and influenced by that epidemic of morbid imitation which science now recognises in all such cases, soon became similarly afflicted, and in their turn made charges against various persons. The Indian woman was flogged by her master, Mr. Parris, until she confessed relations with Satan; and others were forced or deluded ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... from it; the first is this—that you were an irresponsible infant, when you were required to make it—the second is, that it is impossible to perform it; these two considerations fairly release you from its obligations. Look upon these matters in this rational light, and all your dark and morbid dreams and visions will disappear; and we shall have you joyous as any young bird, sure enough. And I assure you, that your cheerfulness will be one of the very best medicines for our brother. Will ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... delight and intoxication which more than effaced the memory of what had gone before. Now for several months he had dreaded the issue of the crisis, no less than the crisis itself. It left him unnerved as though some morbid sirocco had ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment, appealing to the emotions quite as vividly—although through a different channel—as the most elaborate ceremonial. When the soul is wrought to a certain pitch each hardship is merely an added opportunity to prove its faith. It was this ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... only—that is, due to an existing condition of the organism, which, whether natural or morbid, is of a transitory character. Such, for instance, are those due to dentition, the commencement or the cessation of the menstrual function, pregnancy, etc. These are frequently of a serious character, and require careful watching, especially ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... of the day he passed in a state of such humility that he could have wept when the waiters were civil to him. On the Monday morning he made his way to Park Row to read the files of the Chronicle—a morbid enterprise, akin to the eccentric behaviour of those priests of Baal who gashed themselves with knives or of authors who subscribe ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Esther's little brothers and sisters in bread for a week. At school, under her teacher's eye, Esther was very unobtrusive about the feet for the next fortnight, but as the fear of being found out died away, even her rather morbid conscience condoned the deception in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... own deprivations and toil. Maria heard her father and Miss Slome talk about the maid they were to have; Miss Slome would never dream of doing her own work, as her predecessor had done. All these things the child dwelt upon in a morbid, aged fashion, and, consequently, while her evenings with Mrs. Addix were not enjoyable, they were not exactly dull. Nearly every room in the house was being newly papered and painted. Maria and Mrs. Addix sat first in one room, then in another, as one after ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... T. Morgan Carey dropped off the north-bound train at San Pasqual, and learning that he had two hours to waste while waiting for the stage to start up country, he was seized with a morbid desire to wander through San Pasqual's queer cemetery. The only monument in the cemetery attracted his attention, and presently he found himself standing at the foot of Mr. Hennage's grave, reading the epitaph. It impressed him so greatly ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... spirit of action droops: and it is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely from too easy a life, and because all nobler agitations ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the doctor on this point; whereupon he cited those visions and dreams, which, according to the light of science as it now shines, demonstrate that Bunyan's digestion must have been morbid. And, forthwith, he overwhelmed me with learned instances from Galen and Hippocrates, from Spurzheim and Binns, from Locke and Beattie, from Malebranche and Bertholini, from Darwin and Descartes, from Charlevoix and Berkeley, from Heraclitus and Blumenbach, from Priestley and Abercrombie; ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... signs of depleted strength. He cannot concentrate his thoughts, he falls behind in his studies, his mental effort is sluggish, he becomes diffident and shy, shuns society, loses confidence in himself, is morbid and emotional and may even think ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Are we to regard him as a mere lawless egoist, or as something more? We are left in the dark. [Footnote: See the volume, Beyond Good and Evil, "What is Noble?" Sec 265.] But we note that Nietzsche disagrees with most moralists, in that he refuses to regard Caesar Borgia as a morbid growth. [Footnote: Ibid., The Natural History of Morals, Sec 197. DOSTOIEVSKY'S genius has portrayed for us an admirable Superman in the person of the Russian convict Orloff. See his House of the Dead, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... at least a shelf-full of volumes. He went through them avidly and asked few questions. Love between the sexes he now accepted as a matter of course, but he hadn't the slightest conception of what it meant and told me so. He had passed the morbid age between boyhood and manhood, his head in the air, his gaze upon the stars, and what he read now ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... practical possibilities are still in their infancy. The first successful modification of the action of the rays so that the varying densities of bodily organs will enable them to be photographed will bring all such morbid growths as tumours and cancers into the photographic field, to say nothing of vital organs which may be abnormally developed or degenerate. How much this means to medical and surgical practice it requires little ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Whig, who had supported General Taylor in 1848, and General Scott four years later, when the Whig party finally sacrificed both its character and its life on the altar of slavery. His nomination, moreover, had been secured through the diplomacy of conservative Republicans, whose morbid dread of "abolitionism" unfitted them, as I believed, for leadership in the battle with slavery which had now become inevitable, while the defeat of Mr. Seward had been to me a severe disappointment and a real personal ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... the Power which stood up boldly at the Treaty of Utrecht as the shameless champion of negro slavery was the very one which was celebrated in South Africa for its morbid love of the natives; the explanation, however, is that it was not so much love for the native that underlay the apparent negrophilistic policy as hatred and contempt of the Boer. As a result of this hatred of the Boer, disguised under the veneer of ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... in the matter of his courtship: there were elements in it of romantic, abandoned passion, but likewise of shrewd, calculating selfishness. In his callow youth his relations to the other sex had been either childish, morbid, or immoral. During his earliest manhood he had appeared like one who desired the training rather than the substance of gallantry. As a Jacobin he sought such support as he could find in the good will of the women related ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... morbid care this severity of dress and surroundings. There were moments when she could hardly tolerate the pale autumnal beauty which her glass reflected, when even this phantom of youth and radiance became a stumbling-block to her spiritual pride. She was not ashamed of being ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... to Mr. Carlyle, but we believe it to be true that by far the larger portion of the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully influenced, will look back upon the period of such subjection as the most miserably morbid period of their life. On awaking from such delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will discover the hollowness of that sneering, scowling, wailing, declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye of their unripe judgment, wore the air ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... knew, to obtain the summit of his desires, to be placed in a public situation, where his ambition would have full scope, required a much larger fortune than his father possessed. He clothed himself in what he believed to be resignation and contentment, but which was in truth a morbid sensitiveness to his lot in life, which he imagined poverty would separate from every other. Association with Herbert Hamilton, to whom in frankness he confided these secret feelings, did much towards ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... of being a kindly-hearted soul at bottom, she was really, I believe, the most morbid and melancholic person that ever breathed,—at least, in my experience. Should you, unfortunately, be forced to remain for any length of time in her presence, she had a most singularly depressing influence on your spirits. Wet blanket? Bless your ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... grafted on an excellent fund of common sense. He was well aware of the proportions of things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the Idea etherealize and fly away. Neither had he, for his personal honour, any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan's cat. His luck had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance, and the queer grip it ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... friend the part of architect, not of destroyer, in that future; architects, he said, were what was most wanted in public affairs, and Italy had always lacked them. There is no reason to think that Cassio's sympathy had chilled, but Cavour, in his morbid state, thought that it was so; he imagined that what had drawn Cassio to him "was not I, but my powerful intellectual organisation"; and with undeserved mistrust he did not turn to ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... herself indebted to those writers, who promise an ideal world of pleasure, which, like the mirage in the desert, bewilders the feverish imagination. I always suspected the imagination of these women of feeling to be more susceptible than their hearts. They want excitation for their morbid sensibility, and they care not at what expense it is procured. If they could make all the pleasures of life into one cordial, they would swallow it at a draught in a fit of sentimental spleen. The mental ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... all blue-eyed?" I queried, thinking the point interesting from a scientific point of view, hoping to discover that curiosity of a morbid character was always found in connection with eyes ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... eye of the Turk; then little by little, the sting of the master's whip falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound at once plaintive and menacing, danced, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... by himself. This was but one of the many channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained. The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only too bitterly, why her father so persistently shunned all English people. It would surely have been better to have placed her at an Italian school than among girls of her own nationality. Lorna, naturally morbid and over-sensitive, shrank yet deeper into her shell, and became more sphinx-like than ever. Her one bright spot at the Villa Camellia was her devotion to her buddy. Half a dozen other girls had at various periods tried to "take Lorna up," but all had promptly dropped ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable distress and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... common to every delicately organized person? They are purely physical; an indigestion, a change in the weather or fatigue will cause them; a dose of medicine or a night's repose will cure them. The brain becomes indisposed with the rest of the body, but to allow such morbid fancies to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... should not be burnt for their opinions. The lightest word about dignities, the slightest claim to freedom of thought or speech upon those matters which, perhaps, angelic natures would hardly venture to pronounce upon, even the wayward play of morbid imagination, were not unlikely in former times to lead to signal punishments. A man might almost in his sleep commit treason, or heresy, or witchcraft. The most cautious, official-spoken man amongst us, if carried back on a sudden to the days of Henry the Eighth, would, at the end of ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... sensibility of honor, forbids the countenance of meanness. South Carolinians, sir, are at the very top of the social ladder—awake to every high-minded consideration of justice and right. We are not moved by those morbid excitements and notions that so often lead people away at the North. Make no unnecessary preparation, Captain, and I will do myself the honor to call upon you in an hour." Thus saying, he shook ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... seem nonsense to you is not the same to her. You must be forbearing, Ethel. Remember that dependence is prone to morbid sensitiveness, especially in those who have a ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... her with pride and joy one minute, wrath and dismay the next. "This man says, 'An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness.' 'All is sweet, pure, and healthy.'" continued the perplexed authoress. "The next, 'The theory of the book is bad, full of morbid fancies, spiritualistic ideas, and unnatural characters.' Now, as I had no theory of any kind, don't believe in Spiritualism, and copied my characters from life, I don't see how this critic can be right. Another says, 'It's one of the best American novels which has appeared for years.' ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... holiness, as in the passage before us, from the Divine standpoint, and keep well in view the glorious realities of God's faithfulness, God's power, God's grace. To be occupied unduly with self in the matter of holiness is to become self-centred, morbid, fearful, and weak; to be occupied with God is to be restful, quiet, strong, confident, ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... something of a tremor—at the recollection of his strident accents and his angry eyes. It was yet far from her heart to desire a renewal, however brief, of this exhibition. She wished simply to efface from the young man's morbid soul the impression of a real contempt; for she knew—or she thought that she knew—that against such an impression he was capable of taking the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... things, will one unheeded uncared-for little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than its own morbid tendencies. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... would seem to have incorporated himself, and the result is interesting, but repulsive. In Julie we have Jean Jacques' ideal woman, a being of a noble nature, tinged and defiled with something low and morbid; but Claire and Sophie seem taken only from observation, not introspection, and although far from ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... pleasures enough for Cornelia if she would join therein. Lentulus had ordered his freedmen not to deny her amusements; anything, in fact, that would divert her from her morbid infatuation for Drusus. The consul-designate had indeed reached the conclusion that his niece was suffering some serious mental derangement, or she would not thus continue to pursue a profitless passion, obviously impossible of fulfilment. So Cornelia had every chance to make herself a centre to ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... pie for lunch again," said Natalie severely, "and it always makes you morbid. No; I don't think it possible at all. If I did, I should hang on to your coattails like fury and keep you in dreamland, whether you wanted to ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... with dust, a folding metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed "hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... there was one story he had to hear every day. It was the one relating to what he had missed—the sight of Rojas pursued and plunged to his doom. The thing had a morbid fascination for the sick ranger. He reveled in it. He tortured Mercedes. His gentleness and consideration, heretofore so marked, were in abeyance to some sinister, ghastly joy. But to humor him Mercedes racked her soul with the ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... thought of it, and of course such a thing might happen at any time; but you forget that while we are out on the broad and boundless ocean we enjoy ourselves. We are free. People with morbid curiosity cannot come and call on us. We cannot get the daily newspapers, and we do not have to meet low, vulgar people who pay ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... "I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air. And yet I cannot bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it's moving. This is extremely inconvenient. Mais que ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... kindly charities to the people of the devastated village of Niagara who still lingered in the neighbourhood engrossed all the time and energies of Katharine Drayton. These wholesome activities prevented any morbid breedings or introspections, and furnished the best possible tonic for the strengthening of her moral purposes. Captain Villiers found frequent opportunities of visiting The Holms. His manner to Kate ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... say this to me," he murmured. "I am a morbid man, with an ulcerated, wounded spirit.... I know that. But why say it to me? Do you take pleasure in ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... trifle of cheese, salad, or fruit; six to eight ounces of light wine diluted with an eighth volume of water. The quantity of beverage may be slightly augmented at each meal if necessary, especially if there is no morbid heart trouble. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... poetic, something gay, brilliant, something superior almost, and at once boldly presented it in its true figure, its spiritual and social and physical squalor. Beginning with Flaubert in his "Madame Bovary," and passing through the whole line of their studies in morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the Goncourts, as the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made me think of in his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... alive with the splendid, full-throated converse of Latin Americans ("Ah, they live, those Spaniards!" Henry sighed); while at the Beau Rivage the British Empire and the Dominions hastened, with the morbid ardour of their race, to plunge into ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... he said to me in private, waving his hands in despair. "It seems that our ingenue has remained to play a part in the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I've washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the Christ, pledging Him in their cups of sour wine in tragic mockery. Looking at the title affixed above the Sufferer's head, they bellowed forth the devil-inspired challenge: "If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself." The morbid multitude, and the passers-by "railed on him, wagging their heads, and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself, and come down from the cross." But worst of all, the chief priests and ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... to indulge the old lady's morbid curiosity as to the sights he had seen yesterday and today, as he had journeyed back into the city in the guise of a market lad. The things were terrible enough to satisfy even Lady Scrope, who seemed to rejoice in an uncanny fashion over the awful ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... literary power. The book was pretentious and inconsistent—the late Lord Tennyson was quoted, I remember, as a typically "sane" poet in spite of the scope afforded by his melodramatic personal appearance and his morbid passion for seclusion—but it did at least serve to show that if we cannot call a man stupid we may almost invariably call him mad with some show of reason. The public read the book for the sake of its abuse, applied the intended conclusion to every success ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... means till he experiences it. I worked all day without food. It seemed as if I must strike it then. Besides, I took a sort of morbid pleasure in abusing myself—as if I were to blame. I had been living on canned beans, and flapjacks, and coffee without milk or sugar, and I was weak and sick—but it all had to end. About four o'clock I dropped ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... "Yes, a morbid tendency often found in these cases of bony tumification of the vascular tissue of the mouth; but you must resist it, ma'am, as their life depends upon it." And with that Doctor Peppercorn glared gloomily on the young ducks, who were stealthily poking the objectionable little ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... wrong; you are morbid; not fit, in your present state of mind, to guide yourself. Be guided by me. Come with me to Washington. You will really enjoy yourself there—you cannot help it. Your beauty will make you the reigning belle; your taste will make you the leader of fashion; ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... suspicions about Edmee's marriage, he rejected them with contempt as morbid fancies. To him, indeed, Edmee's silence showed an admirable delicacy ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... a reactionary person who thinks only of the old and hates everything new in the most ferocious meaning of the word; she would exterminate the world and nature to give new life to her decayed gods. But this is not merely an obstinate, morbid mood in Ortrud; her passion holds her with the full weight of a misguided, undeveloped, objectless feminine desire for love: for that reason she is terribly grand. No littleness of any kind must occur in this representation; she must never appear simply malicious or ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... mind of Francis was different both in substance and in degree. It mortified his pride, alarmed his delicacy, and wounded his already morbid sensibility to such an extent, as to make him entertain the romantic notion of withdrawing from the world, and of yielding a birthright to one so every way more deserving of it ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... will you persist, all of you, in regarding this as a mere morbid infatuation, bred in the fumes of pastilles? It isn't so! Laugh, if you care to; but this is a meeting of affinities, of the solitary man and ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... nature so under lock and key that for the greater part of our lives we get no use of it? Of what benefit is a mine of love burning where it warms nobody, does nothing but blister the soul within with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows morbid, acts in a thousand perverse ways. These three women, I'll venture to say, are living in the family here like three frozen islands, knowing as little of each other's inner life as if parted by eternal barriers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... excitement sparkling in his vivid black eyes. 'It happens that this is the very book that you would most rejoice to see distasteful to him—low morality, false principles, morbid excitement, not a line that ought ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heights of Passy, overlooking Paris, the bottomless, boundless human sea, in face of which was unrolled this page of love: the sudden passion of Helene for a stranger, a physician, brought one night by chance to the bedside of her daughter; the morbid jealousy of Jeanne—the instinctive jealousy of a loving girl—disputing her mother with love, her mother already so wasted by her unhappy passion that the daughter died because of her fault; terrible ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the place being empty he shut himself up in the surgery, to indulge in a morbid taste for trying flavour or odour of everything in the place, and fortunately so far without fatal or even ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... not necessary to censure their lack of so-called chivalrous woman-worship. That artificial mood of emotion, though glorified by the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal, incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian romances. The love ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... It is rather painful. I do not know why people write about painful things when there are so many pleasant and interesting things to write about. It seems to me very morbid." ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... had grown up peculiarly shielded from evil, but ignorant of the cause of the almost morbid solicitude with which he was regarded by his grandfather. He was a very happy, joyous boy, leading an active, enterprising life, though so lonely as to occasion greater dreaminess and thoughtfulness than usual at such an early age. He was devotedly attached to his ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to what she says. Her morbid conscientiousness runs away with her. I tell you the plain truth, as man to man, without any hysterics—I kissed her of my own free will—your daughter, sir. And I am here now to stand by my act. If she will forgive my—my tardiness—as you know, I was in no position ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... had utterly forgotten the shop. She saw the delight of these people when they believed that this plan was given up, and from that day they never lost an occasion of twitting her on her dream that had toppled over like a house of cards, and she grew morbid and fancied they were pleased at the accident to their brother which had prevented the realization of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... despondency in mind, but in others it is not recovered again in this life. For, as fire under ashes, or the sun obscured from our sight by thick clouds, afford not their native lustre, so the soul, overwhelmed in moist or morbid matter, is darkened and reason thereby overclouded; and though reason shines less in children than it does in such as are arrived at maturity, yet no man must imagine that the soul of an infant grows up with the child, for then ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... believe that poverty is not sensitive, that the ill-fed, overworked boy of the slums is as callous as he seems dull. Because so many people believe that the weak and desperate boy can never be anything but a weak and vicious man. Because I came out of that morbid period of adolescence with a sympathy for children that helped to make possible one of the first courts established in America for the protection as well as the correction of children. Because I was never afterward as afraid of anything as of my own weakness, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... animum,—travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for "establishing raws" upon each other.—A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm," and forget all about Egypt. When ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... deadly plague of despotism, and the equally fatal disease of ministerial corruption, find victims of their influence only among people who are devoid of moral energies and public spirit, and whose stagnant and torpid condition generates morbid dispositions that invite, rather than resist, the attacks of any ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... I sought solitude at that early age, and sought it in a morbid excess, which must naturally have conferred upon my character some degree of that interest which belongs to all extremes. My eye had been couched into a secondary power of vision, by misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by experience too ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the material of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and so on, in natural objects; the beauty of mind and the moral faculties. Bk. ii. contemplates accidental pleasures arising from contrivance and design, emotion and passion, such as sorrow, pity, terror, and indignation. Bk. iii. Morbid imagination the parent of vice; the benefits ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the feeling of many men—men by no means given to morbid gusts of panic—amid a society that laughs overmuch in its amusement and exults in the very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting spectator. At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... line of demarcation between the legitimate spirit of inquiry and mere apish curiosity. I could recognise it, I have no doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o'-the-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it fell into ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... said to himself, 'I have passed along galleries wherein were many chambers, and the doors in the day were more commonly open than shut, yet this chamber door of my young friend is always shut. There must be a mystery in it.' And the doctor, not generally given to morbid curiosity, found himself very curious about this very ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... criminal to be serious all the time; it kills the real life and leads to melancholia. You would grow morbid through your fears if I did not laugh at them sometimes, and it would never—never do for me ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Their offers of service only would shackle me, if I accepted of their assistance. I will have none of them. Such were my reflections; and the reader must perceive that I was influenced by a state of morbid irritability—a sense of abandonment which prostrated me. I felt that I was an isolated being without a tie in the whole world. I determined to spurn the world as it had spurned me. To Timothy I would hardly speak a word. I lay with an aching head, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... "I recollect no occasion when I have experienced such elevation of feeling." This was the effect of that spirit of emulation which incited the whole course of his life of usefulness. There is now prevalent among us a morbid and sickly notion, that emulation, even as honorable rivalry, is a debasing passion, and not to be encouraged. It supposes that the mind should be left without such excitement, in a dreamy and undisturbed state, flowing or not flowing, according to its ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... physical constitution he had a mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone of them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the "seducer" is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was fastidiously correct, but ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... "I'm morbid," he said. "I'm too introspective. I ought to look out of myself. But I can't. It isn't my fault that my eyes are turned inwards. I'm made like that. I can't alter my make. I can destroy myself, but I can't alter ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... said she never shut her eyes to trials, but liked to look them in the face; she would never shrink from duty, but all was at present done mechanically; her highest ideas of purity and love were obtained from the Prince, and God could not be displeased with her love.... There was nothing morbid in her grief.... She said that the Prince always believed he was to die soon, and that he often told her that he had never any fear of death." It seemed that in this persuasion the Prince had made haste ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... nodded moodily. He had aged considerably during these two trying days. His hair was grayer. Now that the blaze and glow of the fight had passed he showed a subtle change, a fixed and morbid sadness, a resignation to a fate ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... his revolutionary opinions. The intrigue of the French government was successful, so far that the Queen of Spain was married to a Spanish Bourbon, brother to Don Enrique, a man whom the queen personally hated, a bigoted devotee and reactionary, whose fanaticism against liberty was morbid, and who was an avowed Carlist, openly denying the right of the Queen of Spain to the throne. Whatever could be supposed as likely to influence the fortunes of the young queen and of the Spanish nation, unfavourably, in connection with a royal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... habit of mind, to have seen and sought for ludicrousness under all conditions—it was the first thing that struck him as a matter of intellectual perception or choice. On the other hand, his nature being poetic, his sympathies acute, and the condition of his life morbid, he very frequently wrote in a tone of deep and indeed melancholy feeling, and was a master both of his own art and of the reader's emotion; but, even in work of this sort, the intellectual execration, when it takes precedence of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... me of the young girl who is making you so much trouble by her jealousy of all other pupils, interests and saddens me. Her devotion to you is of that morbid type, so unwholesome and so dangerous to her peace, and the peace of all her associates. It is a misfortune that mothers do not take such traits in early babyhood, and eradicate them by patient, practical ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... fountains of her heart seemed to have dried up, for she found it impossible to shed a tear. A dry, cold, impassive agony, silent, insidious, and exhausting, appeared to absorb the very elements of life, and reduce her to a condition of such physical and morbid incapacity as to feel an utter inability, or at all events disinclination, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... me: "Stop talking nonsense!" You are a good man and a clever one, but you haven't any red blood in your veins or any—well, enthusiasm. Why, if you wanted to, you and I could cut a dash together that would shame the devil himself. If you were a normal man instead of a morbid hypochondriac we would have a million in a year. For instance, if I had twenty-three hundred roubles now I could make twenty thousand in two weeks. You don't believe me? You think it is all nonsense? No, it isn't nonsense. Give me twenty-three hundred roubles ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... thought in this inscription. For if some bilious hyper-civilized stranger were its author, the sentiments might pass. But coming from a native, to what depths of morbid discontent do they testify! Considering the recent progress of these regions that has led to a security and prosperity formerly undreamed of, one is driven to the conjecture that these words can only have been penned by some cantankerous churl of an emigrant returning to his ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... honourable publicity his barrister son had attained. "You'll be a Judge, Davy; at any rate a K.C., before I'm dead! But marry, boy, marry. That's what you must do now. Marry and give me grandchildren." The burly curate privately thought David a bit morbid in his passionate devotion to the Woman's Cause, and this White Slave Traffic all rot. He had worked sufficiently in the bad towns of the South Welsh coast and had had an initiation into the lower-living parts of Birmingham ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... years, we shall see that the ideas of Calhoun respecting State Sovereignty have had a mighty influence in gradually preparing the slave States for the course which they have taken. Slavery, in its political power, has steadily become more aggressive in its demands. A morbid jealousy of Northern enterprise and thrift, with the contrast more vivid from year to year, of the immeasurable superiority of free labor, has brought about a growing aversion, in the South, to the free States, until with every opportunity presented for pro-slavery extension, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... alone in the twilight, With spirit troubled and vexed, With thoughts that were morbid and gloomy, And faith that ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... thought about a future life, the peculiar facts related in the following pages can certainly be regarded as helpful. Spiritualism, with its morbid tendencies, its infatuation and deceit, has not been of any substantial value in this inquiry. It may afford to those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... morbid," Maurice said; "but just at first it seemed that way to me. Then I began to realize that what poor Nelly wanted, wasn't to have me marry Lily—that was only a means to an end; she wanted Jacky taken care of"; (Edith nodded.) "And she thought marrying his mother was the best way ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... on this point is greatly enhanced in his delineations of mental disease. For his consciousness takes on, so to speak, or passes into, the most abnormal states without any displacement or suspension of its normal propriety. Accordingly he explores and delivers the morbid and insane consciousness with no less truth to the life than the healthy and sound; as if in both cases alike he were inside and outside the persons at the same time. With what unexceptional mastery in Nature's hidden processes ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... a passionate and sorrowful love, with a morbid love in which stuck the memory of death, but in which lived something of his worship for the dead mother. It was the flesh of his wife, her being continued, a sort of quintessence of herself. This child was her very life transferred to another ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... think that love and benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence are our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the receiver. Poison only because there is practically no spontaneous love left in the world. It is all will, the fatal love-will and insatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love long ago broke down. There is now ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... old fool," he said frankly. "I was spoiled when a child. As for you, Esther, you take after your mother; you have a morbid sense of duty, particularly for others; strive against it, my dear—strive against it. And as for the pigments, well, I'll use them some of these days; and to show that I'm in earnest, I'll get Dick here ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and he sidled over, rolling his eye and working his fingers in a way that upset Guy's composure. "And I tell you a feller with one foot in the grave should have his thoughts on seriouser things than chicken-stealing. This yere morbid cravin' for excitement is rooinin' all the young ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... by this means that Parry established a character for ready and happy expedients, accompanied by a sound judgment, which kept alive the active powers of the mind, and prevented it from falling into the worst of all conditions,—a state of morbid torpor. His plan was completely successful, and the crew, as well as the officers, were as happy as, under the ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... group was collected near a barred window; they seemed very fond of each other, and their kindly feelings were never interrupted by peevishness; indeed, the temperament of a negro child is generally so sound, that he is not affected by those little morbid sensations, which are the frequent cause of crossness and ill-temper in our children. I do not remember that I ever saw a young black fretful, or out of humor; certainly never displaying those ferocious fits of petty passion, in which the superior nature of infant whites indulges. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... this, his eye returned in hopes of seeing it again—he had an indescribable interest and pleasure in studying a countenance, which seemed so true an index to a noble and cultivated mind, to a heart of delicate, but not morbid sensibility. His manners and understanding had been formed and improved, beyond what could have been expected, from the few opportunities of improvement he had till lately enjoyed. He was timid, however, in conversation with those of whose information ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... particular day, more than a customary morbid diversion was thus apparent among the motley-garbed mass of men and women, and the ignominious way in which that prisoner was treated was horrible to look upon. The perpetual hum of voices sounded like the noise made by a thousand swarming bees. The band of soldiers guarding ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... of honesty, he would own to himself that, whether he would have it so or not, to his understanding, still hampered by the conditions of the flesh, perhaps made morbid by resistance to them, but that he could not tell, love was the one truth and reality and source of all things; that life was because of love, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... destroying his own fame in the eyes of the man whom he had taught to love him, was pleasant to his diseased imagination. It was the natural outcome of the morbid condition of mind into which he had drifted, and he provided for the complete execution of his scheme with cunning born of the mischief working in his brain. It was desirable that the fatal stroke should be dealt at the last possible instant; that he should suddenly unveil his own infamy, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... extenuation of the atrocity of this design, that a man perpetually brooding over one scheme, which to him has become the very sustenance of existence, and which scheme, perpetually frustrated, grows desperate by disappointment, acquires a heat of morbid and oblique enthusiasm, which may be not unreasonably termed insanity; and that, at the very time Wolfe reconciled it to his conscience to commit the murder of his fellow creature, he would have ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... city in the world, and saying, "Let others live where they will—here I propose to stay." I lived there until I seemed to take it for my own—to know it on the surface and under it, and over it, and around it; until I had a sort of morbid jealousy when I found any one who knew it half as well as I did, or presumed to love it half as much, and dared to say so. You will please note that I have not ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... But this morbid condition mostly affected her when she was at home, listening to the unpleasant bickerings of her father and mother, who quarrelled constantly over trifles that Beth completely ignored. Her parents seemed like two ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... what has just happened; I am beginning to fear that that old pedant was right in saying that it was bad for me to live all alone in a strange country, that it would make me morbid. It is ridiculous that I should be put into such a state of excitement merely by the chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead these three hundred years. With the case of my uncle Ladislas, and other suspicions of insanity in my family, I ought really to guard ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... of fiction is due to the fact that he introduced the Gothic romance to American literature. He loved to subject the weird, the morbid, the terrible, to a psychological analysis. In this respect he suggests Hawthorne, although there are more points of difference than of likeness between him and the great New England romancer. In weird subject matter, but not in artistic ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... thing about the morbid-minded specialists in fabricated woe is that they believe themselves to be telling the whole truth of human life instead of telling only the worser half of it. They expunge from their records of humanity ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... heart would permit him to ignore her and continue his conversation with Miss Martell. And yet it had seemed easier to go in a boat out among the ice than to think of any proper way to recognize the presence of one in whose eyes he had a morbid anxiety to ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... morbid over the word "Liberty!" What it really meant, in '48, was that human nature should restrain itself, in order that all men might, immediately, enter into so-called ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... through his vast experience in handling thousands of cases, has proven beyond a doubt that all sickness, poverty and unhappiness is caused by "KINKS" in the mind. When the store house of the intellect, the subconscious mind, becomes clogged up with morbid thoughts and destructive suggestions the physical being refuses to ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... seized upon eagerly, and hairs of the unfortunate woman were at a premium, men and boys, and even young women, examining every branch and twig of the bush in the midst of which the struggle took place, in the hope of finding one. The inherent, morbid love of the horrible the mass of humanity possesses was well illustrated in the scenes witnessed. The heavy rain which fell nearly all afternoon was not deterrent to these ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... referring to those works for the passages alluded to); and I conceived the design of shewing that instances of this kind are not peculiar to savage or barbarous tribes, and of illustrating the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases, and the progress and symptoms of the morbid action on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... disease called "touchiness"—a disease which, in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self-love inflamed to the acute point. . . The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place; to let men and things touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature; to become meek and lowly ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... it is even necessary, to refuse assent to the dictates of such a conscience. To persons thus afflicted the authoritative need of a prudent adviser must serve as a rule until the conscience is cured of its morbid and erratic tendencies. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... have been allowed out as yet. He was becoming aware of his physical insufficiency with humiliation and despair—but the morbid obstinacy of an invalid possessed him—and at the same time he felt, with dismay, his eyes filling with water. This trouble seemed too big to handle. A tear fell down the thin, pale cheek of Lieutenant D'Hubert. ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... satisfactory that it is still in use today. This, and the increasing knowledge of aseptic technique, has brought the mortality from this operation to less than 3% for the mother and about 5% for the child; and every year it is being advised more freely for a larger number of morbid conditions, and with increasingly favourable results. Craniotomy, i.e. crushing the head of the foetus to reduce its size, is now very rarely performed on the living child, but symphysiotomy, i.e. the division of the symphysis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... over our heroines' ramblings of three years. What a volume of sensation they suggest! Were we given to the doubtful utility of fictional biography, were we weak enough to enrich ourselves by pandering to the morbid and often depraved longings of modern literary taste, we might fill a couple of volumes with scenes of excitement, of "hair-breadth 'scapes," and with heart-palpitating suspenses of misplaced love. We could ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... time she would have turned hastily from him; but in her present morbid mood she acted from a different impulse. The artist had not observed her approach, and standing a little back in the shadow of the hall-way she found a cruel fascination in comparing the man she loved with the low fellow whose shadow now fell so darkly across her own character. She looked ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... common and these exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those morbid cases in which ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... consciousness comes in between—that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it is presented by Jesus Himself: 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you.' If our nineteenth century busy Christianity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... So strong is this morbid desire of the Ibans to obtain human heads, that a war-party will sometimes rob the tombs of the villages of other tribes and, after smoking the stolen heads of the corpses, will bring them home in triumph with ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall |
