"Obsession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marching to their doom singing their hymns of love as well as their hymns of hatred. It is these which explain the two million volunteers which in August, 1914, went to swell the huge German conscript armies. It is the obsession of that mystical German creed which explains the epic achievements of the German offensive and the even more astounding achievements of the German defensive. We may continue to denounce the crimes of Germany and the atrocities of the German soldiery—and I have personally denounced them until ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... rising within the United States and falling into the Gulf of Mexico which is not entirely our own, the Appalachicola excepted." From this moment to the end of his administration, the acquisition of West Florida became a sort of obsession with Jefferson. His pursuit of this phantom claim involved American diplomats in strange adventures and at times deflected the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... border to graze, the prohibition being based on the ground that the herdsmen were really Italian army officers in disguise. In recent years the fear of Italian spies has become with the Austrian military authorities almost an insane obsession. Innocent tourists, engineers, and commercial travellers were arrested by the score on the charge of espionage. The mere fact of being an Italian was in itself ground for suspicion. Compared with the attitude ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... was to lower the curtain on her side, the side on which the procession was to pass. But, when she heard the drums close at hand, seized with a nervous frenzy at her inability to escape that obsession, or, it may be, infected by the unhealthy curiosity that encompassed her, she raised the curtain with a jerk, and her pale, ardent little face appeared, resting on both hands, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... wore my body out till slightest slight.[FN386] Would Heaven ye wot the whole I bear for love * Of you, with vitals clean for you undight! And all I do t' outdrive you from my thought * 'Vails naught and 'gainst th' obsession loses might: Couldst for thy lover feel 'twould ease his soul; * E'en thy dear Phantom would his sprite delight! Then on my weakness lay not coyness-load * Nor in such breach of troth be traitor-wight: And, weet ye well, for this your land I fared * Hoping to 'joy the union-boon forthright: ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... was an obsession of his in any case. He had loathed her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be veiled. Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable screens. He was a stickler for that sort of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... there was Rosalie, put out from her mother's knee to the schoolroom like a small new ship out from the haven to the bay; and there was that small mind of hers come in to the company of Hilda and of Flora and of Anna with the obsession that men were infinitely more important and much more wonderful than women. She knew now that the world did not belong to men in the literal sense, but belonged, as her mother had instructed her, to God; but she knew with the abundant evidence of all ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... wish to purchase a peerage or a baronetcy in this fashion or in that, and, as in my father's case, my tastes were so many and so catholic that I could not lose myself in any one of them. They never became more than diversions to me. A hobby is only really amusing when it becomes an obsession. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... be perceptible the very slightest rift within the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is afraid that his delicate ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... into the friendly shade, she backed round the inner end of the table, but found the way blocked by a rough bench. Something must be said or done to extricate herself. The dread that her voice might break was becoming an obsession. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... and regeneration, held in common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which my mother was subjected by those theological ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... (1) sedulous, sedentary, supersede, subside, preside, reside, residue, possess, assessment, session, seige; (2) sediment, insidious, assiduous, subsidy, obsession, see ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... condemned to death. Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept. Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon's every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... expected to uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of skill ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... that Carter and King had written their chapters and read them aloud, the Scorpions were all frankly adorers of Kathleen; by midterm she had become an obsession. Eric Twiston and Bob Graham, "doing a Cornstalk" (as walking on Cornmarket Street is elegantly termed) were wont to dub any really delightful girl they saw as "a Kathleen sort of person." At the annual dinner of the club, which took place in a private dining room at the "Clarry" (the Clarendon Hotel) ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... that she loved Henry, he would make himself go ahead with the freedom scheme; but if he commenced actual proceedings now, by no possibility could she come to Arranstoun—and this idea—to get her to Arranstoun, began to be an obsession. Just in proportion as his nature was wild and rebellious, so the mad longing grew and grew in him to induce her to come ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,—the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... will find but few such British utterances at the moment, and these few not by men of great weight either in politics or in commerce. The South was labouring under an obsession and prophesied results accordingly. So strong was this obsession that governmental foreign policy neglected all other considerations and the first Commission to Europe had no initial instructions save to demand recognition[662]. The failure of that Commission, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... far outlands was the culmination of an ideal, spurred by dissuasion and antagonism into a determination, and developed by longing into an obsession. Since infancy the girl had been left much to her own devices. Environment, and the prescribed course at an expensive school, should have made her pretty much what other girls are, and an able satellite to her mother, who managed ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Weston, with a faint, dry smile. "Still, you see, I couldn't stay away. The thing has become an obsession." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... taking his usual before-bedtime stroll. Of old, that evening stroll had been confined to the Place's grounds, a quarter-mile beyond. But, lately, his new obsession for finding treasures for the Mistress had lured him often ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... up an object without first investigating with a board or stick lest there be a snake under it. It became such an obsession that if anyone did pick up something without finding a snake under it he felt as disappointed as if he had run to a fire and found it out when he ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... exhortations of press and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true relation with ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... must be shown not only the result of her triumph over death, but the very process of the struggle through which by sheer volition she forced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession by her soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions of the story, her body could not be present: and the difficulty ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... coward, he would have been ashamed of it; and whatever he might have done afterwards, he would never have done that thing again. He would have been sensitive: not saving his own life would have turned into an obsession with him. But there is left, I admit, the murder. And murders always take the public. So I'll give you the murder—though it throws no light on Ferguson, who is the only thing in the whole accursed affair that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... cutting his mutton into very small pieces Mr Cupples replied: 'The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to think, move unconsciously among a network of opinions, often quite erroneous, which ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... let him see. Poor Bruce! Well, they were linked together. There were Archie, the angel, and Dilly, the pet.... She was twenty-eight and Aylmer forty. He ought not to hold so strong a position in her mind. But he did. Yes, she was in love with him in a way—it was a mania, an obsession. But she would now soon wrestle with it and conquer it. The great charm had been his exclusive devotion—but also his appearance, his figure, his voice. He looked sunburnt and handsome. He was laughing as he talked to the miserable creature (so Edith ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... time. As a rule, the mineral trail leads poor men to greater poverty, and sometimes to a grave; but once you have set your feet on it you follow it again. The thing becomes an obsession; you feel forced ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... to the reader that all this insistence upon the supreme necessity for an organized literature springs merely from the obsession of a writer by his own calling, but, indeed, that is not so. We who write are not all so blinded by conceit of ourselves that we do not know something of our absolute personal value. We are lizards in an empty palace, frogs crawling over ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... adventure with the girl, his failure to ask her name frankly, his folly of bashful backwardness in putting questions when she was at arm's length from him, his mournful certainty that he would never see her again—all conspired curiously to make her an obsession rather than ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... enormously, and he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and wonderful—the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him, filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... refreshingly new and entertaining. This is one of the instances where exaggeration has served as a healthy antidote to the tendency toward extreme dinginess rampant about ten years ago, resulting from an obsession to antique everything. The reaction from this, a flaming rainbow of colours, struck a blow to the artistic sense, drew attention back to the value of colour and started the creative impulse along the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... France. Do you recollect the scar on his temple? It was not made by a saber; it is the mark of a bullet. He received it while a correspondent in the Balkans. Well, it left a mark on his brain also. That is to say, he is conscious of what he does but not why he does it. He is a sane man with an obsession. This wound, together with the result of Germany's brutal policy toward him and France's indifference, has made him a kind of monomaniac. You will ask why I, an accredited agent in the employ of France, have not stepped in and arrested him. My evidence ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... anger on ordinary occasions, McTeague when finally aroused became another man. His rage was a kind of obsession, an evil mania, the drunkenness of passion, the exalted and perverted fury of the Berserker, blind and deaf, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... put the man and everything concerning him out of my mind for good and all?" she asked herself more than once. And, whatever the reply to her query, the fact remained that she couldn't; the thought had become something of an obsession. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... and easily than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no Rembrandt, no Balzac, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... pretty kind of obsession for a man to have, wasn't it? Somebody running after him all the time, and then ... running on ahead? And, of course, on a broad pavement there would be plenty of room for this running gentleman to run round; but on an eight- or nine-inch kerb, such as ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... looked at Percy, he seemed supremely ignorant of it all, unconscious of this trap of the existence of which everyone here present was aware, save indeed himself. She would have fought against this weird feeling of obsession, of being a mechanical toy would up to do certain things, but this she could not do; her will appeared paralysed, her tongue even refused ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation."[48] "The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... mannerism that made her tremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust herself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession with her, that hideous breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might never ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... to seize the chance in the present industrial arrangement for the development of "the originating, choosing power" in the working man because they have been obsessed by the business appreciation of the working man's power of adaptation. It is because they labor under this obsession that they turn industrial education into industrial training whenever they include industry in their curricula. Educators know that there is adventure in industry, but they believe that the adventure is the rare property of a few. They believe ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... of Verona, this idea, the idea that treachery caused by some obsession is at the root of most tragedy, was treated by him at length, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a greater ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the gooseflesh rise over the surface of his body, and it was with difficulty that he refrained from following an instinctive urge to fire upon the nocturnal intruder. Better, far better would it have been had he given in to the insistent demand of his subconscious mentor; but his almost fanatical obsession to save ammunition proved now his undoing, for while his attention was riveted upon the thing circling before him and while his ears were filled with the beating of its wings, there swooped silently out of the black night behind him another weird and ghostly shape. With its huge wings partly ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... read, but if to be read profitably, with its application in mind to the present social awakening to the waste, the enormous and stupid waste, of the gifts of women. To one fresh from the consideration of the roots of life as they lie close to the surface of primitive society, this obsession of the recent centuries, that the community can only be served by a gift for architecture, for administration, for healing, when it occurs in the person of a male, is only a trifle less ridiculous than that other social stupidity, namely, that a gift of mothering must ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... lies in the brain parts and those where it lies outside of the brain. But the situation becomes still more complex by the mutual relations of those various processes. The impulse to take morphine injections may have reached the character of a mental obsession and thus represent an abnormality of the mind, but yielding to it produces at the same time disturbances in the whole body which thus become again external sources for abnormal experiences in otherwise ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... of the canticle: "At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of thoughts, is almost ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... idiot; very often he is an ex-churchwarden, guardian, way-warden, or other official, who has resigned in dudgeon or been ousted from his post for some neglect or failure. He is a man with whom the world has gone wrong, a sufferer, perhaps, from some disaster which has become an obsession. He views everything with distorted eyesight; nothing pleases him, and he wants to put everybody right. He cherishes a perpetual grievance against some individual or clique for a fancied slight, and goes about trying to stir up ill-feeling ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... attributed to the cave man, but this is an error. (See cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory to his early youth, when he was taught that big, overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them in their pockets and carried them home. Has the kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand, and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and is very early for all appointments. Appetite small. Does not sleep. In small communities shows occasional semi-paralysis ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him, but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... remove that temptation of the reward. It is only an inducement to crime. Time alone will solve the mystery, and as long as he continues to brood over it, he will go on failing in health. It's coming to an obsession with him to live to see Richard Kildene hung, and some one will have to swing for it if he has his way. Now he will return and find this man in jail, and will bend every effort, and give all his ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the door of his own lodge was evidence of his obsession, Jack firmly believed and from which he deduced the opinion that as long as his equipment held out he was ready to keep up that hot bombardment under the belief that the enemy were falling like dead leaves in the frosts ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... It was the only idea he had: to find them—to find them—to find them. His other thoughts were without stimulating power—irresolute, vague, uncertain. This one idea grew and grew until it became an obsession. He could no longer bear the sound of music; so it was no sacrifice to him to give up his profession. He hated the very streets he walked in, for had Elene not walked in them? He must find her; he must find his child. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... do much to elevate the taste and refine the habits. They would bring to the enlightenment of the world an "educational mode," because the time-honored artistic feeling of a people with a very ancient civilization would breathe new life into those moderns who seemed to be suffocating under the obsession of physical hygiene, and to be actuated solely by a despairing effort to ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... action of that night's events became more and more accelerated, Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal, merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked by nothing—that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was impossible for him to make her hear him, or when she heard to understand what ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Prime, he endured this obsession. The day's round was filled with the amazing image of a crowned, hollow-eyed, tattered little drab, the mock and wonder of throngs of witnesses, appreciable only by himself as a pearl of priceless ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... days, and was loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... of self-sufficiency, the obsession for exclusiveness and separation—so distinctively a Jewish trait at that time—was inculcated at the maternal knee and emphasized in synagog and school. The Talmud,[165] which in codified form post-dates the time of Christ's ministry, enjoined all Jews ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... time that I was writing my last article, that the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia (who has a perfect obsession for being in the middle of the picture), was carrying out at the army manoeuvres at Narva, a certain strategic design, long-prepared and tested, by means of which he proposed to fill with amazement and admiration not only the Russian army but the Imperial Court—nay, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... me to be the work of a slightly unbalanced mind. He is not violently insane; probably just has this one particular obsession. His scientific bump certainly shows no sign of weakness. He might even be some new type of kleptomaniac. He steals things, and he has already stolen far more than any man could ever have any need of, and he leaves in its place a 'stock' certificate ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... to one who feels himself congenial to some Great or Significant Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession with him to communicate to others what he sees in his Idol, his Divinity. Yet it is not Inspiration for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. Some point that has no marked attraction in itself may be inexpressibly precious to the Author as Material, presenting ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the same they guard in force and perplex with their ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... your question over in it," I explained, "and wondering what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the unfortunate baby used to be dragged about in a kind of caged ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... other horses. Darkness was upon us with the camp-site Edd knew of still miles to the fore. No grass, no water for the horses! But we had to camp there. All hands set to work. It really was fun—it should have been fine for me—but my gloomy obsession to hurry obscured my mind. I marveled at old Doyle, over seventy, after that long, hard day, quickly and efficiently cooking a good hot supper. Romer had enjoyed the day. He said he was tired, but would ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... not only have all our substantial and permanent victories over bodily ills been won by physical means, but a large majority of our successes in mental and moral diseases as well. Yet the obsession persists, and we long to extend the realm of mental treatment in ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, divined in him that his power of obsessing the minds of other men had become, or was on the way of becoming, a temptation and obsession to himself. She was wise enough to realize that hardly any man in the world can stand too much popularity, also to see the rocks ahead for Druro in a country where men drink and gamble far too much, and are fast in the clutches of these vices before ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was a lovely ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... is the true patriotism. When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion—the methodical diabolism—which this obsession has produced in Germany. It has startled us because ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... groans. A weighty and mournful obsession is stifling him. In his harsh breathing it seems to me that I can hear his heart beating and muttering. Looking at Volpatte, hooded in bandages, and then at the strong man, muscular and full-blooded, with that profound and eternal yearning whose sharpness he alone can gauge, I say to myself that ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... to me personally, was the honor of American citizenship—an ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy; for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going to the other extreme and refusing to write ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... quite familiar to him, so much so that he started in his chair as though about to rise and greet him. The stranger, also, seemed for a second under the same obsession, but only for a second; he made a half pause and then passed on, becoming lost to sight beyond the palm trees at the entrance. Jones leaned back in ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... innocence had been proved and his hatred for me being his great obsession, since I had the thing he had wanted but no longer wanted, let that be understood—he saw the misery he had planned for me and my dear wife being brought to a sudden end. He had, by the way, already ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... irascible and almost brutal. Yet he was at times even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling with his wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend. It is no desire to exaggerate this side of his nature that impels this plain writing. Chopin left compositions that bear witness to his masculine side. Diminutive in person, bad-temper became him ill; besides, his whole education and tastes were ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... we continued to press back the enemy. For me the film story of the taking of St. Quentin is an obsession. It holds me as a needle to a magnet. And in this section, at the ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Chloe, pathetically. "I've wanted some—oh, so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession." ...
— Options • O. Henry
... continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Perhaps such obsession was natural. How could he foresee the variety of new methods that were so soon to transform book illustration? Anyhow, herein partly lies the explanation of the following notice in a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... times, even after starting on her pilgrimage, when the whole adventure had appealed to her as one that was no better than a weird, senseless obsession, one that she would do well to turn back from and forget. Probably, at first, she had only been kept to the task by a certain spirit of adventure, a youthful and long-repressed urge for romance, ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm for ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... not follow his thoughts any further. She wished absolutely to make her way into Natacha's chamber. The obsession ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... of ours," I explained, shortly. "He was born twenty years ago or so—at least we heard that he was; and we haven't heard anything of him since, except by the dream route, which is not entirely convincing. He is Hephzy's pet obsession. Kindly forget ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... themselves as facing a world in arms. The hater subjects his mind to the domination of what he hates; he loses his independence and volition and becomes the prey of the hated idea. At last he cannot free his mind from the obsession; and the deliberate cultivation of hate in the conscientious German manner is ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... face with the necessities of existence, knowing what it is to work and to struggle, to co-operate and to compete, to suffer and to relieve suffering, though they may be less well-informed than the instructed classes, are also less liable to obsession by abstractions. They see little, but they see it straight. And though, being men, with the long animal inheritance of men behind them, their passions may be roused by any cry of battle, though they are the fore-ordained dupes of those who direct the policy of nations, ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... anguish, his agonized obsession of the possibility of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical powers of resistance. He could not constrain his muscles to rise from the recumbent position against the carcass. He started up, then sank back, and in another moment ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the following canon (No. 73): "That no minister or ministers, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast 'out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture, or cozenage, and deposition from the ministry." This penalty at the present day not many of the clergy ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... endeavours to create a friendly impression upon the natives encountered; but in the present case he was utterly opposed to their usual methods, the fact being that the idea of penetrating to the heart of the country inhabited by the mysterious white race had gradually come to be an obsession with him, and he would hear of nothing being done that might by any chance interfere with this project; his conviction being that if they adopted their usual methods they would inevitably be stopped and sent to the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... schoolmaster came back and realised the trick played on him, he grew pale with anger; he immediately suspected the bookseller; but when his eyes fell on Gustav who was standing in a corner of the room, laughing, his old obsession returned to him: "He's paying me out!" Without a word he seized his property, threw a few coins on the counter and ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... diversion, by means of the pantomime that had so successfully deceived me—by dramatically shooting out his wrist, consulting his watch, instantly stepping out and presently breaking into a run—to induce any gentleman behind him who had reached an age when the fear of missing trains has become an obsession to accelerate his progress. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... station between Sardinia and the African coast, resolved not to move till he "knew something positive." In the absence of information, the safety of Naples, Sicily, and Egypt was perhaps not merely an obsession on his part, but a proper professional concern; but it is strange that no inkling should have reached him from the Admiralty or elsewhere that a western movement from Toulon was the only one Napoleon now had in mind. It was April 18 before he received further news ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Laurier, when it comes to be adequately made by the historian, can fail to take account of this sentiment in an old leader to whom the unity of Canada had become an obsession far transcending his original passion ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... good clerk. Still, it wouldn't do. It wasn't only that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken. That wouldn't have mattered so much, as she left after he had made his third attempt, and got married. But the thing became an obsession with him, and we found that he had a fixed idea that every red-haired woman who came into the office was the girl who had deceived him. You can see how awkward that made it. Red hair ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... strongest feeling I ever had. Since the War has changed everything and everybody, all one's feelings have grown stronger. I never was furious before—and I've been furious. I've felt savage. I've raged. And the thing I'm thinking of is like a kind of obsession. It's this—" he caught her hands again and held her face to face with him. "I—I want to have ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her had by that time become an obsession. I picked up my hat, threw open the door, and, oblivious of the shock to the office force of my presence, followed so immediately by my exit, I dashed out to the elevator. As I went down in one cage I caught a glimpse of Johnson and two ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... superstitious nonsense is becoming an obsession to you," it said one fine April morning. "Yes, I mean what I say—an obsession! You must pull yourself together or you'll go stark mad, and then you'll probably go and throw yourself over the Embankment. That legend is all bosh! You're in the ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... moment of dazzling revelation till now I have nursed this infinite desire. To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... may say. And why should not the executive artist reassure himself by having his music with him? It seems to me a pianist would feel so much more certain of himself if he had the notes before him; he of course need not look at them, but their presence would take away the fear that is often an obsession. With the notes at hand he could let himself go, give free reign to fancy, without the terrible anxiety ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of a sense of shame and unhappiness in the child. There comes a time when the child passionately desires to regain control and is miserable about her failure, until the concentration of her thoughts on the subject becomes a veritable obsession. Every night she goes to bed with this only in her mind. Every night she falls asleep, miserably aware that she will wake to find the bed wetted. The suggestion impressed in the first place on the mind of the tiny child by injudicious management has become fixed by the growing sense of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... the hotel bar were beginning to work off, and I felt a little weak. Through a sort of mist I seemed to have a vision of Aunt Agatha hearing that the head of the Mannering-Phippses was about to appear on the vaudeville stage. Aunt Agatha's worship of the family name amounts to an obsession. The Mannering-Phippses were an old-established clan when William the Conqueror was a small boy going round with bare legs and a catapult. For centuries they have called kings by their first names and helped dukes with ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the lavatory, and in the ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... he hoped contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the "damned race," the hopeless horde of millions "mostly ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... looked like Gregory. And he was angling in the direction of the Lang hill. The idea clung tenaciously. When he reached his rooming-house it became an obsession. He decided to find out if the runner could have been his employer. Calling up the cannery it was some time before a sleepy voice answered ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... The particular idea which now began to occupy the thoughts of E. A. Partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... given him a second thought. But all that day he had been oppressed by a sense of hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had followed him from the moment he had landed in Genoa. He had tried to argue it down, inwardly protesting that such must be merely the obsession of all fugitives. And now, even to find an unknown and innocent-appearing young woman trying to force an entrance into his room aroused all his latent cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... save that of the multitudinous stars—which, to my mind, never betray their immeasurable distance so clearly as when one is in mid-ocean—with the sough and moan of the night wind and the soft, seething hiss of the sea whispering in one's ears, the feeling of loneliness becomes almost an obsession, the sense of all-pervading mystery persistently obtrudes itself, and one quickly falls into a condition of readiness to believe the most incredible of the countless weird stories that sailors love to relate ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... said Lady Agatha. "The hunt had become a monomania with him. It had become an obsession. He had given his whole mentality to it and it had absorbed all his faculties. He was now the victim of it. He had grown powerless in the grip of the idea; he had lost ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... "It is an obsession to-day," said Reanda to himself, reflecting that though the girl lived in Rome he had never noticed her before, and had now seen her twice ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... mistaken, he went and sat down in his armchair again and thought of the boy, and he thought of him for hours, and whole days. It was not only a moral, but still more a physical obsession, a nervous longing to kiss him, to hold and fondle him, to take him onto his knees and dance him. He felt the child's little arms round his neck, his little mouth pressing a kiss on his beard, his soft hair tickling ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Jack Belllounds, and I'm never going to be. There will be trouble here. I feel it. I see it coming. Dad keeps at me persistently. He grows older. I don't think he's failing, but then there's a loss of memory, and an almost childish obsession in regard to the marriage he has set his heart on. Then his passion for Jack seems greater as he learns little by little that Jack is not all he might be. Wilson, I give you my word; I believe if dad ever really sees Jack as I see him or you see him, then ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... believed, more control over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely gave lip agreement to this project.... Only he didn't believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this particular obsession. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... piling up about him came from his own mistakes. Over and over again he threshed the past. Molly Brownwell's cry, "You have sold me into bondage, John Barclay," would not be stilled, though at times he could smile at it; and the broken body and shamed face of her father haunted him like an obsession. Night after night when he tried to sleep, Robert Hendricks' letter burned in fire before his eyes, and at last so mad was the struggle in his soul that he hugged these things to him that he might escape ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Protestant, accepted the old belief and enforced it in the old way by the faggot and the stake. It was not until human reason at last awoke after the long slumber of the Middle Ages that this dreadful obsession gradually passed away like a dark cloud from the intellectual horizon ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... When they think, it's only of their farms and their wives. That other little thin chap is a Parisian bookkeeper. I'd like to bet that he's thinking of his wife, and only of her. He's wondering if she's faithful to him. It's almost become an obsession. I've never known such jealousy, it's ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... remarks, "when they see artists produce with facility, are ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit, that forbid you to carry on any ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a province in which he stated that his troops would not give quarter to those who surrendered. The documents proving that this proclamation had been issued were received by Bolivar in Trujillo. In Bolivar's mind this idea was a permanent obsession: "Americans are dying because they are Americans, whether or not they fight for American freedom." He took into account the long list of crimes committed, the harmless citizens, women and children who had died, the barbarous asphyxiation of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... hangs over every serious crisis in French politics. The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated. Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear. Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension. The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... his thoughts clogged his very motion. Anxiously eying him, his father sneaked after. The eccentric movements of his son filled him with a certain anguish. He was a god-fearing man; erratic behavior meant to him the obsession of the devil. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... was occupied with the run down to Pueblo and occasional stops for speeches at way-stations, was uneventful save for the growing obsession of Charlie Moore. He was overflowing with pride and importance. That night, in the presence of five thousand people, he was going to reply to the great Jimmy Grayson, and show to them and to him his errors. Mr. Grayson was sound in most things, but there were several in which he should be ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... after this experience of mine? Has not faith, has not hope perished? If the danger were mine alone, I should give the matter no heed,—I was not born to be immortal,—but since there has been a public secession (or rather obsession) and war is fastening its clutches upon all of us alike, I should desire, were it possible, to invite Cassius here and argue the case with him in your presence or in the presence of the senate; and I would gladly, without a contest, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... by the fact of Justin's illness. There was something newly impassioned in the duskiness of her eyes, in the fulness of her red lips, in every sweeping movement of her body, which seemed caused by the obsession of a hidden fiery force that held her apart and afar, goddess-like, even while she spoke of and handled the things of every-day life. She looked at the common-place surroundings, at the children, at Dosia; but she saw only Justin. When she was beside ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the letter to Miss Martin. She lay prone in a corner of the sofa, dreaming, as she had done all her life; save that the faculty—of setting in motion at will a stream of vivid and connected images—which had always been one of her chief pleasures, was now an obsession and a torment. How often, in her wakeful nights at Rydal, had she lived over again every moment in the walk to Blea Tarn, till at last, gathered once more on George's knees, and nestling to his breast, she had ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the primitive conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of Weir of Hermiston, a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the elements of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... regard to eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of psychasthenia by Janet. See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who, from the age of 12 or 13 (the epoch of puberty) ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... francs for a consultation," said Giuditta. "But I am so much obliged to you for coming to free me from this obsession, that I shall ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with a bygone ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of the Rome that was to be. His unerring choice of subject and his brilliant execution seemed to close to his successors all paths to epic fame. They had but well-worn and inferior themes wherefrom to choose, and the supremacy of Vergil's genius dominated their minds, becoming an obsession and a clog rather than an assistance to such poetic genius as they possessed. The same is true of Horace. As complete a master in lyric verse as Vergil in heroic, he left the after-comer no possibility of advance. As for Ovid, there could be only one Ovid: the cleverest and most heartless ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... to cling to your seed definitely for a considerable time, and maintain throughout an alert attention. It is the emptiness of alert expectation. not the emptiness of impending sleep. If your mind be not in that condition, its mere emptiness is dangerous. It leads to mediumship, to possession, to obsession. You can wisely aim at emptiness, only when you have so disciplined the mind that it can hold for a considerable time to a single point and remain alert when that ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... this one obsession Miss Deane, as Rachel soon discovered, had a clear and well-balanced mind. For, now that she had received her desired assurance from this new quarter, she began to talk of other things. Her boasted "modernism," it is true, had a smack of the stiff, broadcloth savour of the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... proposition, even if he had wanted to. What reason could he give for such a course? He could not explain that he already had a family—with stepchildren, so to speak, who adored him. And what could he say to his mother's obsession, to which she came back again and again—her longing to see her grandchildren before she died? Madame Dupont waited only long enough for George to stammer out a few protestations, and then in the next breath to take them back; after which she proceeded to go ahead with the match. The family lawyers ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... between Sim and his inclinations. His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still held him in the hollow of his hand, and besides these reefs of menace were yet other ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... seeing the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab, to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... men, flogged out of crews and stained by the blood of primitive and dull savages—the Cliffords were notorious for their brutal driving—now served only to support Madra's debility and a horde of unscrupulous panderers to her obsession. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... wealth of these bells in their number only, but also in their use; for they are not reserved in any way, but ring tunes and add harmonies at every half and quarter and at all the hours both by night and by day. Nor must you imagine that there is any obsession of noise through this; they are far too high and melodious, and, what is more, too thoroughly a part of all the spirit of Delft to be more than a perpetual and half-forgotten impression of continual music; they render its air sacred and fill it ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... enormous privileges, even if I am allowed to do them at all. Is it so with everything they say is wrong? Is all sin artificial, and do people sin so zestfully only because they are cramped? Or is there a residue of real wickedness?" Thus she thought, struggling against the obsession of an inquisitorial system which merely clouded her perceptions of real right and wrong. And alone she ate silently, a saintly figure amid ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... That was an obsession with Kelly. He drilled it into me daily. Kelly himself was a settled married man. Of his state we talked often. I asked Kelly the very first day if he ever ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... at him bravely and listened. "Mother's planning to go East," she heard him say. "She's always wanted to, and as she grows older it's almost an obsession. So father's finally decided to go, too, and let me run the business ... I'll be an ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... before her clearly with all the expressions she had learned to know and dread. She tried to banish it, striving with all her might to put him from her mind, twisting this way and that, writhing on the soft sand as she struggled with the obsession that held her. She saw him all the time plainly, as though he were there before her. Would he pursue her always, phantom-like? Would the recollection of the handsome brown face haunt her for ever with its fierce eyes and cruel mouth? She buried her head deeper in her arms, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... characteristic features, each set of laws are framed to cover the phenomena presented by that group. Otherwise there would be no need of these special laws. It is astonishing how paralysing is the effect of the theistic obsession on the minds of even scientific men, since it leads them to ignore what is really a basic consideration ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen |
