"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the number and wealth of his rivals, the ambitious views of her father, and the temptations to which she herself was hourly exposed, kept his jealousies and fears perpetually on the watch. He is supposed, indeed, to have been indebted to self-observation for that portrait of a wayward and morbidly sensitive lover, which he has drawn so strikingly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... approval in the glance she gave him. She understood the spirit that had moved him to drive the mare that forty miles; nor, in spite of a certain sympathy for the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment. It was the stubborn, purposeful character of the man that she admired, and thought most of. He had carried out a task ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... what some of their parents consider as too sacred to be taught, and others as too disgusting, and to begin this teaching at an age when the children, having already imbibed these parental notions, are old enough to be morbidly curious and prurient, is to open the way to a complicated series of social reactions which demand ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the trail of tragedy, under all the heart-ache of a hunted race. There are few more plaintive chants in the world than the recitation of the Psalms by the "Sons of the Covenant" on Sabbath afternoons amid the gathering shadows of twilight. Esther often stood in the passage to hear it, morbidly fascinated, tears of pensive pleasure in her eyes. Even the little jargon story-book which Moses Ansell read out that night to his Kinder, after tea-supper, by the light of the one candle, was prefaced with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... afraid that is impossible," said Sartoris, who had lapsed into his bland manner once more. "I am sensitive of people's remarks and all that kind of thing. I dare say you will think that I am morbidly self-conscious, but then I have not always been a cripple. I was as straight as yourself once. Fancy a little crooked figure like me in a ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... appearance of polychromatophilia is a sign of degeneration. To explain the presence of erythroblasts which have undergone these changes we must suppose that in severe injuries to the life of the blood these elements are not produced in the usual fashion, but from the very beginning are morbidly altered. Analogies from general pathology suggest themselves in ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... forget, the impression of overwhelming horror which his words produced upon me. It seemed as though a fear which had hitherto stood vague and shadowy in the background, began now to advance towards me, gathering more distinctness as it approached. There was to me something morbidly terrible about the apparition of this man at such a momentous crisis in my brother's life, and I at once recognised that unknown form as being the shadow which was gradually stealing between John and myself. Though I feigned incredulity as best I might, and employed those arguments ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... Eliot, "some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is to hear a deep truth uttered by lips that have no right to it." Poor Gourlay was conscious of some feeling of this sort when he heard such truths proclaimed from such lips. To his morbidly-sensitive nature, such irony seemed an aggravation of all he had endured. To think that, after such experiences as had fallen to his share, a Family Compact judge should gravely inform him that in Upper Canada the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly nervous and impressionable, disposed to take a dark view of everything, and bore no resemblance to the type of hero which Hortense had imagined. Moreover, the unhappy husband endured a hidden anguish ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them the more. They ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... was more unselfish than Mr. Mackenzie. He would rather suffer extreme hardship than accept a doubtful favour. Even in regard to kindly and reasonable offers of help, he was morbidly sensitive (as mentioned on page 298 of his "Life and Times"); and yet, looking at the conduct of many men in like circumstances, he deserved commendation rather than censure ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the command to Burnside, as he had declared he would do if Lee's was allowed to regain the interior line. The order was presented and obeyed on the 7th, and McClellan left the army. The fallen general brooded morbidly over it all for twenty years, and then wrote his "Own Story," a most curious piece of self-exposure, in which he unconsciously showed that the illusions which had misguided him in his campaigns ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... with only contemptuous admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal painter uncovering a picture, which had cost him months of care, (curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity of St. Thomas, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... scarcely to be expected, and, if attained, might not be quite enough. The studies of the naturalist, exclusively pursued, may tend to make a man too conscious and critical,—patronizing Nature, instead of enjoying her. He may even grow morbidly sensitive, like Buffon, who became so impressed with the delicacy and mystery of the human organization, that he was afraid to stoop even to pick up his own pen, when dropped, but called a servant to restore it. The artist, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... with his eye, when an interval of peace and comparative happiness had set childhood's spirit free, and lent a degree of graceful gayety to all his motions,—I saw the brimming measure of the father's love. Could it be but his morbidly repellant pride, his jealous guarding of the domestic privacies, his vigilant pacing up and down forever before the close-drawn curtain of the heart?—was there no Bluebeard's chamber there? No! Pride was all the matter,—pride was the Spartan fox that tore the vitals of Pintal, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... few moments give me ease and sleep. Yet thus agonized and half delirious, I notwithstanding left it untouched. I was mostly confined to the house about four weeks. The inflammation gradually subsiding left me as weak as a child—so morbidly sensitive that tears flowed on the slightest occasion, and with my whole frame pervaded by a dull, incessant ache. To these symptoms were added coldness of the extremities, an obstinate determination of blood to the head, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... same process which had caused that appearance of indifference in Drake was now repeating itself in Clarice. Drake was superseding Gorley in her mind. She struggled against the obsession and morbidly strove to picture to herself the actual execution: the black troops ranged in a clearing before the smouldering village, looking up at one figure—Gorley's—spinning on a rope. But even upon that picture Drake's face obtruded. She thrust out her hands to keep it off, as though it was ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... The gin-shops receive those who might be entertaining themselves with the works of art in a public gallery. The whole animal portion of our being is fostered at the expense of the spiritual. We become brutalized, because we are morbidly afraid of being frivolous and of wasting our time. The devil keeps possession of an Englishman's heart, through the instrumentality of his carnal passions, because he is too proud and too stupid ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... it will only set us back a day in our plans. I can imagine how desperately forlorn the thing will be. Some parson will say a perfunctory prayer for a poor devil he believes to have gone straight to the fiery pit and they'll bury him in a pauper's grave. There will be the usual morbidly curious crowd hanging round, wagging their heads and whispering. I shall go, Archie, and you can wait for me. It will take only a few hours and we can spend the night here ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... interviews. I might possibly have done so had they come earlier, while yet the freedom of easier days and of sunshine was in my veins. But my mean street period had affected me materially. It had made me morbidly self-conscious, and suspiciously alive to the least hint of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... so bitterly; and after all these years so morbidly! God has wiped away all tears from her eyes. She has been a saint ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Art's best gift to life. And "develop"—like some cancer (in the Art-sphere) whose best answer is the silent surgeon's knife! And every man will say, As you wriggle on your way, "If 'emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of Art,' dear me! What a morbidly muckily emotional young man the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... right in his theory, that when we have known real adventures we grow less morbidly sentimental. Life is a sleep in which we dream most at the commencement and the close—the middle part absorbs us too much for dreams. But still, as Maltravers said, we can enjoy a fine night, especially on the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of St. Bartimeus chafed under the law's delay. They became morbidly sensitive to the incubus of Ginx's Baby, especially as the press had been reviewing some of their recent acts with great bitterness. The Guardians were defiant. Having served their notices, they were induced by Mr. Stink to resolve not to maintain ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... apparently regarded as a crime, and to fit herself to her environment, under the scrutiny of Mrs. de Tracy and the decidedly inimical looks of the companion, took all her time. A burden of self-consciousness lay upon her such as her light and elastic spirit had never known. She found herself morbidly observant of minute details; the pattern of the tablecloth; the crest upon the spoons; the curious red knobs upon Miss Smeardon's fingers, and the odd mincing way she held her fork; the almost athletic efforts of the butler ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... respect to the eye itself, the highest authority in England, Mr. Bowman, has been so kind as to give me the following remarks on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Ribera, Zurbaran, Murillo are hardly to be ranked with the painter of the Burial of the Count of Orgaz. While this undiscriminating admiration may be deplored, there are reasons enough for the canonisation of El Greco in the church of art. Violent to exaggeration in composition, morbidly mystic, there are power and emotional quality revealed in his work; above all else he anticipated Velasquez in his use of cool gray tones, and as a pupil or at least a disciple of Titian he is, as his latest biographer, Senor Manuel B. Cossio, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... To prevent which, we must take a more nutritious diet, and join a portion of wine, and perhaps take some tonic medicines. This however ought to be done gradually, for fear of exhausting the excitability, which in these cases is morbidly accumulated. ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... when her husband was away on one of his mysterious visits. I never liked Mr. L'Homme-dieu, but I did like her. She was so different from me, and, when I first knew her, so gay and so full of conversation. But after awhile she changed and was either feverishly cheerful or morbidly sad, so that my visits caused me more pain than pleasure. The reason for these changes in her was patent to everybody. Though her husband was a handsome man, he was as unprincipled as he was unfortunate. ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... us grow one way and some the other. You had a large conscience once; if you've a small conscience now I reckon there are reasons for it. However, both of us are to blame, you and I. You see, you used to be conscientious about a great many things; morbidly so, I may say. It was a great many years ago. You probably do not remember it now. Well, I took a great interest in my work, and I so enjoyed the anguish which certain pet sins of yours afflicted you with that I kept pelting at you until I rather overdid the matter. You began to rebel. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable with no cause. She was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. To those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her mental growth over ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... refusal. Often he was paralysed with pain, sometimes he would morbidly allow his thoughts to dwell on the moment when he would hear her say, it was impossible, that she did not and could not love him. The young grey light of the eyes would be fixed upon him; she would speak her sorrow, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Studying the man as he reveals himself at this time in his Note-Books (published in a garbled edition by the Hawthorne family), one has the impression that he was a shy, sensitive genius, almost morbidly afraid of the world. From a distance he sent out his stories as "feelers", when these were ignored he shrank into himself more deeply ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... stimulant of amiability, and, after an altercation on the pavement just outside of the store, during which the derisive fish man continually called to them to go on and take that there basket out of the neighbourhood, the cousins moved morbidly away, and walked for a ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... possession of her. But she was alone for the evening and it had free access. She actually believed that she was grown unlovable, and the conviction that her voice was not worth considering haunted her morbidly. ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... powerful in proportion to its soundness. The propensities play a prominent part in the education of the child. When properly disciplined and held in subordination to the higher faculties, they constitute an important factor in the economy of man. Boys are more liable to be morbidly excited when secluded from the society of girls, and vice versa. Again, when the sexes are accustomed to associate, the passions are not apt to be aroused, because of the natural antagonistic constitutional elements. The influence of the one refines, and ennobles the other. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Well, well, you needn't cry any more. I think you are a very good little girl, though rather a silly one, I am afraid, and quite too morbidly conscientious." ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... argument; for if you do not understand me from what I have already said, the further you follow the wider you will wander. The truth, in short, is this: I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics. But if I tell you that I have chosen this common pugilist because, after seeing half the culture ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... feel compelled to offer a few remarks. We think every great composer owes it to his own God-gift, and to the human beings whom he is to influence, not to select intrinsically repulsive subjects, and such have we found both 'Don Juan' and 'Faust.' Now we are not morbidly fastidious, and we well know the freedom that must be accorded to art, that it may have ample scope and range in the delineation of human feeling and romantic situation; but when we see a representation of 'Don Juan,' we instinctively strive to ignore the plot, with ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the individual conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in Little Eyolf; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... outlined the case to a consulting physician. The boy had been born in the trouble of her early exile; he could not help his temperament. He had countless virtues; she extolled him in beaming parentheses. But he had too much imagination and too little balance. He was morbidly wrapped up in the whole subject of romantic crime, and no less than possessed with the personality ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... is one of the most important allies that England has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and Portugal, to French influence, or even dominion! Upon my word, the English people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his taking ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... had been baffled and buffeted in the world. He had gone down into the darkness, praying all the way; and now that he had come out of it, and had so little society; now that his young life was all behind him, and so few earthly hopes beckoned him on, he turned with a heart morbidly religious to what seemed to him the only source of comfort open to him. Jim had watched him with pain. He had seen him, from day to day, spending his hours alone, and felt that prayer formed almost the staple of his life. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... letter with him in his pocket throughout the next morning, and in the course of the day he called upon Lady Milborough. Though he was obstinately bent on acting in accordance with his own views, yet he was morbidly desirous of discussing the grievousness of his position with his friends. He went to Lady Milborough, asking for her advice, but desirous simply of being encouraged by her to do that which he was resolved to do ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of ideal beauty that no poet has exhibited in such Grecian perfection since the death of Keats. A poem, on page 115, is one that awakens peculiar emotions; it describes a state of half consciousness, when the senses are morbidly alive, and the perceptive faculties are fettered with dreams, or inspired by a strange memory that bears within it things not of this world, and hints at a previous and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... despite the early hour, and to the dismay of Plume, who had planned to start without farewell demonstration of any kind, lights were blinking in almost every house along the row, and a flock of women, some tender and sympathetic, some morbidly curious, had gathered to wish the major's wife a pleasant journey and a speedy recovery. They loved her not at all, and liked her none too well, but she was ill and sorrowing, so that was enough. Elise they could not bear, yet even Elise came in for a kindly word or two. Mrs. Graham ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... under her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical—a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... midst of green-baize- covered tables, lighted candles, packs of cards, and a dozen or so of silent, absorbed gentlemen, intent upon the trumps and honours, points and odd tricks. The girl, already excited, and morbidly susceptible, stopped short at this spectacle, as one struck with a sudden blow. Not for years, not since that evening the memory of which ever came upon her with a sudden sting, when she had met Monsieur ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... own to an admiring group in the Y.M.C.A. hut, Doggie, his nerves rasped to the raw by the false notes and maddening intervals, snatched it out of his hand and began to play himself. Hitherto, shrinking morbidly from any form of notoriety, he had shown no sign of musical accomplishment. But to-day the musician's impulse was irresistible. He played the Marseillaise as no one there had heard it on penny whistle before. The hut recognized a master's touch, for Doggie was a fine executant ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... to the tortured and morbidly excited girl that there was but one way out of her troubles, and dark and dreadful as was that path, she thought it could lead to nothing so painful as that from which she ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... him, I could more and more clearly distinguish an under-current of thought and feeling setting towards the faith which Christianity preaches. He said little or nothing, even when I attempted to draw him out on the matter; for he was almost morbidly careful not to seem to know any thing he did not know, or to appear what he was not. The most I could get out of him was—but I had better give a little talk I had with him on one occasion. It was some time before we began to go to Marion's on a Sunday evening, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was more ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... you by recalling all the unfolding stages of this miserable story with the minuteness of detail which my own memory morbidly lingers on, I will hurry to the catastrophe. I grew more and more doubtful of the existence in Ottilie's mind of any feeling stronger than friendship for me; and as this doubt strengthened, there arose the flattering suspicion that I was becoming an object of greater interest to Agalma, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... self-preservation. I must go, even if blown like a leaf before the gales of heaven; must fly, if even to certainty of destruction. I had felt this necessity once before, be it remembered, but never so stringently, so morbidly as now. I was yielding under the agony, the anxiety incident to my condition; my nervous system, too severely taxed, was breaking down, and it would succumb entirely, unless relief came to me (of ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... legacies, I owed it to my good housekeeper, Mrs. Mozeen, not to forget the faithful services of past years. Need I add—if I had been free to act as I pleased—that I should have gladly made Rothsay the object of a handsome bequest? But this was not to be. My friend was a man morbidly sensitive on the subject of money. In the early days of our intercourse we had been for the first and only time on the verge of a quarrel, when I had asked (as a favor to myself) to be allowed to provide for him in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... heart yearns—affection—that which alone 'can minister to a mind diseased, can pluck from the memory its rooted sorrow, and rase out the written troubles from the brain.' That is just what Ireland needs above all things. She wants to be kept from brooding morbidly over the dismal past, and to be induced to apply herself in a cheerful spirit to the business of life. The prescriptions of state physicians cannot fully reach the root of the disease. Say that it is a sentimental malady—a delusion. What is gained by saying that, if the sentiment or the delusion ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... hunter, a leash of chumber spaniels, and fifty pounds for a memorial ring. Mr. Wendover could not find fault with a will which left his wife seven hundred a year; but he felt that his position was diminished by his father-in-law's death, and he was morbidly jealous of the boy, who had absorbed so much of his wife's care and affection from the first hour of their coming ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Except in "Pensees," by Pascal, a few notes dotted down by a morbidly exalted Christian, and which certainly, in the perfect work, would not have been allowed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Exercise, walk, run, play, work, and learn to rest. Change your habits of living. Cut out the grouch. Stop nagging. You're sour because your pores are stopped up; get a buck-saw and take a sweat. You're morbidly blue because your solar plexus has gone to sleep; give it half an hour of internal vibration. Don't knock the weather, like it, get into it, let it put iron into your blood. Plunge into a storm, it will act as tonic on your spirit. A dip in the ocean will add magnetism to your body. Your body is ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... was any serious alarm about the consequences of immediate emancipation among those who were acquainted with the peasantry of Jamaica. The fears of the morbidly humane were purposely excited to increase the amount of compensation, or to lengthen the duration of the apprenticeship; and the daily ridiculous and untruthful statements that are made by the vitiated portion of the Jamaica ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... doubtful or bad morality is as likely to corrupt the Affections as to associate with low and wicked companions. There is an abundant supply of pure and noble compositions of this sort on which the Imagination may feed without fear. If it morbidly craves the licentious pictures that come from the pen of such writers as Ainsworth or George Sand, its longings should be resisted as steadfastly as those which incline us to the gaming table or other scenes of licentious indulgence. On the other hand, the danger to the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... luster of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,' said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And, by the way, I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... popular fibre. It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature. But it is altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle. Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy, and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate work is in blank verse, and that in itself ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanctioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language, a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, timorous, and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress which are full of mother-wit and sly fun. Mr. Honest confesses, "I came from the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction." Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company with his illimitable and anxious introspection. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint; this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an insignificant episode in the long roll of his epic past. Now for the first time for years it was recalled to ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... any plan to completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments, lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... lord of Bellister sat on, "glooming" morbidly to himself. Bitter feud existed between him and a neighbouring baron. Had he not cause to distrust that baron, and to believe that means neither fair nor honourable might be employed by his enemy to wipe out the feud? What ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... one to morbidly analyze, not even to feel remorse. He put the past behind him easily. Before him small grasshoppers arose in clapping, buzzing clouds. Prairie dogs squeaked and frisked and dived needlessly into their dens. Hawks sailed like kites ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... he had, on one occasion in a railway carriage, begun abusing the Germans, and it had afterwards appeared that all the persons he had been conversing with were German. In the second place he felt that Meier would never come and see him again. These intellectuals who have risen from the people are morbidly sensitive, obstinate ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... begins with premonitory symptoms somewhat like those of ordinary fever, but with this difference: the patient, instead of losing his appetite, has often a morbidly increased desire for food. He complains of severe pains in the back, and more or less headache. Both the head and backache are of a peculiar character: the pains resembling rheumatic pains, the head feeling full and too large, the eyes early turn red, almost bloodshot and watery, a chill comes ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... faltered, in hopes to dodge and turn back, he drew nearer and gave the snake a fling. It whizzed about her head, and she gave an awful shriek of horror as she felt its slimy folds about her neck. It was too much! Never a strong woman, and morbidly afraid of these cobras, living or dead, she sank down in a faint, just before her amazed husband, who nearly stumbled ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to her people." He sighed deeply. "It was all very foolish to come out here. But it was natural. She was stricken, and sensitive—so morbidly sensitive—to pity, to gossip. Then, too, a romantic notion about the healing power of the mountains was in her thought. She wished to go where no one knew her—where she could live the simple life and regain serenity and health. She said: 'I will not go to a convent. I will make ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... into circulation," was one of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... were tightening around him; but the fire that had been kindled seemed to be quenchless. An uncontrolled evil passion is hellfire. He writhed in its burnings in an agony that could be understood only by such as knew how almost morbidly sensitive was his nature, and how vital was his conscience. I became a pastor in the town where he lived, and renewed my association with him as far as I could. But there was a constraint unlike the old times. When under the influence of ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Cressy to play on had superinduced an "innerd rash," and a threatened attack of "palsy creeps" had only been warded off by the timely postponement of an evening party suggested by her daughter. The old nomadic instinct, morbidly excited by her discontent, caused her to lay artful plans for a further emigration. She knew she had the germs of "mash fever" caught from the adjacent river; she related mysterious information, gathered in "class meeting," of the superior facilities for stock ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, point d'honneur and punctilio, however varied their ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... plaintively. "Everybody thinks I am because I'm fat, and they expect me to do things they never dream of asking anybody else to do. I'd like to see 'em even ASK 'Gene Bantry to go and do some of the things they get me to do! A person isn't good-natured just because he's fat," he concluded, morbidly, "but he ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... reassuring, but repel another beholder (or the same in a different mood) as dull and lifeless; while the unstable equilibrium and syncopated rythm of Botticelli may either fascinate or repel as morbidly excited. And Leonardo's systems of whirling interlaced circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much of) the perfunctory beholder, while rewarding more adequate empathic imagination by allowing us to live, for a while, in the modes of the ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... Marty was very angry, the hairs did actually seem to bristle, as a cat's whiskers do. When Stephen could not speak plain, he used to point his little dimpled finger at this mole and say, "Do doe away,—doe away;" and to this day it was a torment to him. His eyes seemed morbidly drawn toward it at times.. When he was ill, and poor Marty bent over his bed, ministering to him as no one but a loving old nurse can, he saw only the mole, and had to make an effort not to shrink from her. To-night, as she lingered ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... even though she was quite sure that he would not lose his self-control and wax violent, as had Nick on that terrible night at Simla. She was almost morbidly afraid of ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are morbidly like machines on the one hand, or by people who are ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... only instinctively truthful but also almost morbidly honourable. In other words, she was simple-minded. The idea of a community of goods between husband and wife had never established itself in her mind, she took all Sir Isaac's presents in the spirit in which he gave them, presents she felt they were ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... need not allow him so many opportunities that the strain would become unbearable. You are busy, owing to the certain increase of work brought about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable excitement ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... good to remember. As he sat staring down on the distant Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of the life she led, morbidly eager for change, she was a secessionist from the first, and had welcomed the war. Moreover, strange as it may seem, she loved this worthless Lysander. She hated him for the misery he had caused her; she was exceedingly bitter against him; yet love lurked under all. She was secretly proud ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... qualities gradually photographed out of him. This could well be the result of too prolonged indulgence in the effort to "look natural." First the man loses his charming simplicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an asylum for incurable egotists. His death might be brought about by a cold caught in going out bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat in the market of sufficient circumference to meet his ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... most suspicious, with the rude forefathers of the hamlet supplying a scandalous chorus. The strongest part of the story is the tragedy, suggested with a poignancy almost too vivid, of the wretched elder woman, tortured in mind and body, morbidly aware of the contrast between her own decay and the vitality of her rival. As to Inglebury and Mary, the causes of all the pother, they struck me as conspicuously unworth so much fussing over; and, when their final flight together landed them—well, where it did, I could only feel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... the king became morbidly pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways of Paris, we learn from the Journal, games—quoits, tennis, contreboulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school; ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... domiciled in his palace, with all his sycophancy of rank, with all his courtly flattering. In like manner, when the grand seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the economical theories ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... "Tell General Jackson that, if he will sign my Land Bill, I will pledge myself to retire from public life and never to re-enter it," he meant what he said, and would have stood to it. It is our privilege to believe this of Henry Clay; nor do we think that there was ever anything morbidly excessive in his desire for the Presidency. He was the head and choice of a great political party; in the principles of that party he fully believed; and we think he did truly desire an election to the Presidency more ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... ahead. 'Civil Service,' was my prepared answer to the next question, but again (morbidly, perhaps) I saw a pitfall. That letter from my chief awaiting me at Norderney? My name was known, and we were watched. It might be opened. Lord, how casual ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... flesh, and it is the pride of the generous to forgive and forget them; but the slanders of the pen pierce to the heart; they rankle longest in the noblest spirits; they dwell ever present in the mind, and render it morbidly sensitive to the most trifling collision. It is but seldom that any one overt act produces hostilities between two nations; there exists, most commonly, a previous jealousy and ill-will, a predisposition to take offence. Trace these ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... she said, a bacchanalian affair—she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes—almost neurotically. But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only laughed at her, or smiled—for she had been ill ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... friend, I fear you are morbidly sensitive I used to know your father, and I always esteemed him as a noble ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... knew that her smile irritated him, for he did not resemble her in the very least. He was slightly aggressive, as shy persons often are: and yet, like a good many men who profess 'realism,' brutal frankness and a sweeping disbelief of everything not 'scientifically' true, Mr. Lushington was almost morbidly sensitive to the opinion of others. Criticism hurt him; indifference wounded him to the quick; ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford |
