"Obsessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still obsessed by his anguished desire to reassure her with the normality of his touch. "See, Annie, it's daddy. Ann Elizabeth's daddy." With a flash her arm and the glint of the paper cutter eluded him again and again, but finally he caught her by the waist, struggling, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... the cold or the great Wilderness itself. It did not seem possible that he could feel the need for food, for rest, that ever his vital forces could wane. In the north was starvation for them, a starvation to which they drew ever nearer day by day, but irresistibly the notion obsessed them that this forerunner, the forerunner of the Trail, proved no such material necessities, that he drew his sustenance from his environment in some mysterious manner not to be understood. Always on and on and on the Trail ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... from an exaggerated ego. Her trouble was psychological. The men who study the strange workings and twists of the human mind which land some men in the institutions for the criminal insane, agree that when any man becomes obsessed with an idea and "rides a hobby" to the exclusion of all else, he loses his balance and develops an obliquity of view which makes ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the gendarmerie more ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... is a pathetic exception in the outward lives of so many men of genius, the bloom being, to the instructed eye, only the indication of some subtle nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay." The overmastering cerebral agitation that obsessed Wagner's life, was as with Chopin a symptom, not a sickness; but in the latter it had not yet assumed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... have just seen Atherton. Of course I didn't repeat our conversation of this morning, and I'm glad I didn't. He almost makes me think you are right, Walter. He's obsessed by the fear of Burroughs. Why, he even told me that Burroughs had gone so far as to take a leaf out of his book, so to speak, get in touch with the Eugenics Bureau as if to follow his footsteps, but really to pump them about Atherton ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... me once more. But I would not stay on the scene. I was still obsessed by the desire to catch the steamer. And abruptly I set off walking down the line. I left the crowd and the confusion and the ruin, and hastened ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... joy of the Hebrews was at their deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, it was exceeded by that of Pharaoh's people at seeing their slaves depart, for with them went the dread of death that had obsessed them. They were like the portly gentleman riding an ass. The rider feels uncomfortable and longs for the moment of alighting, but his longing cannot compare in intensity with that of the ass groaning under the corpulent ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... all was that the Abati became obsessed with the saying of the Fung scouts to the shepherds, which, after all, was but a repetition of that of their envoys delivered to the Council a little while before: that they should hasten to destroy the idol Harmac, lest he should move himself to Mur. How an idol of such proportions, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... on the dying embers. The fire itself was to Marion a source of continual dread; for not only did it consume their precious and unrenewable supply of wood with a terrifying voracity, but she was fairly obsessed by the fear that she might let it go out. In that event they might never waken, clutched by the cold in their sleep; or wakening, find that something had happened to the matches. There remained a good store of ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... whom I could not tolerate, however, was his wife, who, to my fancy, more resembled a vessel, a very unattractive vessel, full of vinegar than a woman. Her name was Sarah and she was small, plain, flat, sandy-haired and odious, quite obsessed, moreover, with her jealousies of the Rev. Basil, at whom it pleased her to suppose that every woman in the countryside under ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... these conventional things, I continued to be obsessed by the great event that had ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... by high magistrates have established the fact that German officials are very frequently guilty of premeditated lies. It is probable, all the same, that many German soldiers, on entering Belgium or France, were obsessed by the idea of civilians firing on them. The cry of a soldier trembling with fear, drunk, or thirsting for pillage—"Man hat geschossen (they have fired)"—is enough for a locality to be delivered up at once to the wildest fury. "When ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... It was hopeless, she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his idee fixe, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, while she was humouring him, it suddenly occurred ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted the Book of Articles, came to write the history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the New Testament was written by Luther, and demanded ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... haunting to artists and poets, had obsessed Des Esseintes for years. How often had he read in the old Bible of Pierre Variquet, translated by the theological doctors of the University of Louvain, the Gospel of Saint Matthew who, in brief and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... came forcing his way through the press, his clinched fists waving over his head, was young, pallid, typically an academic devotee of radicalism, a frenetic disciple, obsessed by furor loquendi He was calling to the mob, trying to rouse followers. "You have been standing here, freezing in the night, damning tyrants, boasting what you would do. Why don't you do it? Do you let a smirking ruler bluff all the courage ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... the life and happiness of those he had assisted for his own selfish purpose mattered little to him. He had so long brooded and thought upon one idea, so planned and schemed to bring about one thing, that a desire for revenge fairly obsessed him. ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... wrong! He'll die. He'll find nothing and the shock will kill him. My God, Webber, you can't tamper with a man's mind like this and hope to save his life! You're obsessed; you've always been obsessed by this impossible search for something in our society, some undiscovered factor to account for the mental illness, the divergent minds, but you can't kill a man to trace ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... times, not even the Bourbons nor the Habsburgs, have been more obsessed with the pride of race. A double avenue of gaudy statues in Berlin has been erected in the Siegesallee, or Alley of Victory, to illustrate the glories of the House. And Carlyle, in his "History of Frederick the Great," devotes ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... attitude today is based on an inherited and automatic acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans" and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there any one ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... morsel firmly stuck on his fork, it was only necessary for him to open his mouth and swallow it. He himself was at a loss to understand how it was that the face of a little girl whom he had met but once on a steamer could have upset all his plans of many years' standing. He was bewitched, obsessed. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... might have found an analysis of her feelings interesting. She had reached the border-line of monomania, yet he would have been a daring man who would have called her absolutely insane. Except to Foyle she had said nothing of the feeling that obsessed her. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Speed. As for Larry, once he had grasped the full significance of the telegram, he became a different person. Some fierce electric charge wrought a chemical alteration in his every fibre; he became a domineering, iron-willed autocrat, obsessed by the one idea of his own preservation, and not hesitating to use physical force when force became necessary ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... to conceal some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived, and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand your 'What next?'—'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Apparently, therefore, we are to believe that the leaders of this Jewish conspiracy set up the Socialist movement and fostered it, while at the same time they enlisted their ablest minds to defeat it. Surely for the normal mind that is not obsessed this is a theory ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... the musty hay from the bunk with the brand-new broom. Thumbed and torn magazines littered the floor, a few discarded garments hung dejectedly from nails driven into the wall, while from the sagging door of the rough board cupboard bulged a miscellaneous collection of rubbish. A sense of depression obsessed her; this was to be her home! She sneezed and drew back hastily from the cloud of dust raised by Microby's broom. As she dabbed at her eyes and nose with a small and ridiculously inadequate handkerchief, she was conscious of an uncomfortable lump in her ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... interest in procuring the old man's death. The body bore no marks of violence; besides, the minds of those concerned did not for a moment entertain the thought of an assault. The poor man, whose mental derangement was known to all those about him, obsessed by the desire and thought of death, had gone quietly and obstinately to seek it in the nearest coppice. There was therefore no criminal in the case, in other words, there was no possible or imaginable communication between the medium's subconsciousness, and that of any ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Morriston, obsessed by the subject, "the case is not one of suicide it must be one of murder. Where is Mr. Gervase Henshaw, or any one else, going to look for ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... him. She told herself that there was either a weak streak in him or a low one, else he would not be so obsessed by the disappearance of this flirtatious little fool who had tried to entrap him. But she did not believe it. A glance at this brown-faced man was sufficient evidence that he trod with dynamic force the way of the strong. A look into his clear ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... rooms were crowded, and preoccupied as he was, it struck Vanno oddly, as it always did strike him anew in the Casino, to hear every one who passed talking of the all-absorbing game. They were obsessed by it, and threw questions to each other, which elsewhere would have meant nothing, or some very different thing; but here no explanations were needed. "Doing any good?" asked a pallid young man with a twitching ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... are talking to a man who is a member of a traditionally reticent and unexpansive race; who says about one third of what he feels; who is obsessed by a mania for understating his country's case, exaggerating its weaknesses, and belittling its efforts; who is secretly shy, so covers up his shyness with a cloak of aggressiveness which is offensive to those who are not ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons and work a bore. Platt revealed himself alone as a tiresome companion, obsessed by romantic ideas about intrigues ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... bakeshop that six days a week poured forth sweet hot breath, and an undertaking establishment with a white-satin infant's coffin de luxe tilted in the window. The sight of it caught Lilly like a pain. That peculiar power of an obsessed mind to see in everything its own state reflected had set in. Queer that this infant's coffin should tilt at her. A bouncing youngster leaned out of its ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... in June, the most imposing candidate was the brilliant leader of the New York Republicans, Seward. But no man in the country had more bitter enemies. Horace Greeley whose paper The Tribune was by far the most influential Republican organ, went to Chicago obsessed by one purpose: because of irreconcilable personal quarrels he would have revenge upon Seward. Others who did not hate Seward were afraid of what Greeley symbolized. And all of them knew that whatever else happened, the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of this, that, or the other trifling thing, and in that way perpetually loses sight of the realities of life. There is a great deal of good in her that you have never seen because for the moment she is absolutely obsessed by her objection to your name and her conviction that Dorothea might and should marry a title. My sister married Reginald Valentine more for the effect on her future visiting-card than anything else, but Dorothea's father bequeathed ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Although she had only just eaten her piece of bread, a terrible thought obsessed her. Where would she next get a mouthful? She now knew what torture she would have to go through ... the pangs of hunger were terrible to endure. Where should she get her next meal? She walked through two more villages. She was getting thirsty now, very thirsty. Her tongue was ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... news had been communicated to the authorities, but not given out over the BBC. This was an obvious precaution against a wave of concerted invasion by the fear obsessed horde beyond the Channel. While they might respect our barriers if the hope for survival was dim, a chance pickup of the news that the Grass was doomed would be sure to send its destined victims frenziedly seeking a refuge until the consummation occurred. If such a thing happened our tiny ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... tell you what I mean by that. I am frightened and timid, because I am obsessed by the presence of ghosts that I never can ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... Paul found himself again in his taximeter cab. In a state of mind quite different from that which had obsessed him on his way to the dinner, he arrived ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... right, hidden among the shadowed hills, his friends rested themselves for the coming battle, waiting impatiently his return, and timing it to the rising sun. Down in the valley to his left were the two he followed, while he, obsessed and unreasoning, now cursing like a madman, now grim and silent, spurred southward towards town and into the ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... his aunt—or his interpreter. And such clothes, my dear, one doesn't behold. Worth and Paquin and Doucet must go sleepless for weeks to invent them. They are without a flaw in shade or line or texture." Which was true, because Mrs. Mellish of the Bond Street shop had become quite obsessed by her idea and committed extravagances Miss Alicia offered up contrite prayer to atone for, while Tembarom, simply chortling in his glee, signed checks to pay for their exquisite embodiment. That he was not reluctant to avail himself ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is obsessed by a wonderful idea. You people call him 'Bolshevist' and 'anarchist,' because he is trying to overthrow the existing order of things. In working out his great theory, he would stamp out a nation if it interfered ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... younger generation? I'm not sure—although I prefer the happy medium myself—that they are not wiser than their grandmothers and their maiden aunts. On the principle that confession is good for the soul, I don't believe that women will be so obsessed by—well, let us say, sex, in ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Some glorious half-seen stranger had taken him under her care; but her face was hidden in a queer mist that floated before his eyes. At times he had tried to rise from the bed, his unbalanced mind obsessed with the idea of washing for gold, but those same strange, soft hands had always ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... tradition in dealing predominantly—one might almost say always—with his own person. The feeling of the awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also some strength from his own sense of matter and the material—again a typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as much body as soul, or rather ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... thirteenth century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here, perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something else distinctively our own—a vast ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... re-reading the two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling their perfumed pages with his tears. And when he was not thus burying himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his childhood—the fear of ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... influence, if not actual dominion, centred in Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the increase of wealth and therefore power in the ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... soul in Paris seemed obsessed with the idea of going somewhere else; and the chances of the stranger within their gates approached those of an icicle in Hades, as our friends across the water would say. Finally, in despair, Draycott rushed into the road and seized a venerable flea-bitten grey that was ambling along with ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... said that all rulers become obsessed with the passion of rule. They lose their balance, clearness of sight, judgment, and only desire to rule, rule, rule! He was able to quote many examples. I thought of him and his theory when following, as closely as one is able to do six thousand miles ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... too much. Suppose the Karluk fought up to Kotzebue Bay and found a dozen power-vessels hanging about, waiting for us to lead them to the beach? And we'd have worried all the way up, with you loose. You're a newspaperman. The suppression of this yarn would have obsessed you, lain ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Parnell would have given his life for—they held the balance of power and they could order the Government to do their bidding or quit. Yet instead of regarding themselves as the ambassadors of a nation claiming its liberty they seemed to be obsessed with a criminal selfishness passing all possible belief. When it was proposed to make Members of Parliament stipendiaries of the State, they at first protested vehemently against the application of this principle to the Irish representatives, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... unusual only in that she had adopted a particularly exacting form of charitable work. Nursing, even as a rich woman's diversion, must be anything but agreeable. O'Reilly pictured this Evans person in his mind—a large, plain, elderly creature, obsessed with impractical ideas of uplifting the masses! She would undoubtedly bore him stiff with stories of her work: she would reproach him with neglect of his duties to the suffering. Johnnie was too poor to be charitable and too deeply engrossed at the moment with his own ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... him, the lonely man, obsessed, going up and down the China Coast, shipping at distant ports, one after another, on fruitless quests, looking for a place to disembark. The proper place to disembark, the place which he should recognise, should ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... for something she expected him to give. Drew became obsessed with this thought. Not the consecration of marriage—No! but something ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody mentioned a specific event in which a ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... became a race between Allied and enemy countries as to who first should attain the mastery of the air. The British nation, as usual, started well behind in the race, and their handicap would have been increased to a dangerous extent had Germany not been obsessed by the possibilities of the air-ship as opposed to the aeroplane. Fortunately for us the Zeppelin, as has been described in an earlier chapter, failed to bring about the destruction anticipated by its inventor, and so we gained breathing ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... onward he averted his eyes from the irreparable present of the war and its dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... obsessed by the thought of international conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors." That quite justifiable ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... but puzzled. As the night grew late she told herself that she must cease from thinking and try to sleep. She must leave the near future in the lap of the gods. But she could not make her mind a blank. Over and over again she revolved the matter which obsessed her in her mind. Almost for the first time in her life she ardently wished she were a man, able to take the initiative in ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Tristram had had to endure since his wedding, these occasions, upon which he had to sit close beside her in a motor, were the worst. An ordinary young man, not in love with her, would have found something intoxicating in her atmosphere—and how much more this poor Tristram, who was passionately obsessed. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And the reader remembers Duerer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went into nearly all the Duerer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt is a prophet-wizard, not only in his shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of holy scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become incantations. Other artists ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... obsessed with his thoughts and feelings against the man James. With every passing day his resentment against him piled up, till now he could think of nothing much else but a possible way to dislodge him from the pinnacle of his local notoriety, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Bakuma was obsessed by terror inspired by the fact that Bakahenzie had discovered her presence; the inherent awe of the witch-doctor which had been temporarily allayed by the presence of the white, was revived, as well as ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... Suddenly obsessed by the idea that he was master in his own house, he began strutting about the kitchen, taking mental note of the things that needed attention, with a view to reproving Bridget when she came back to the fold. He burnt his fingers trying ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... editor who rightly gauges his public psychology. Perhaps that is why, in the enormous growth of the modern magazine, there have been produced so few successful editors. The average editor is obsessed with the idea of "giving the public what it wants," whereas, in fact, the public, while it knows what it wants when it sees it, cannot clearly express its wants, and never wants the thing that it does ask for, although it thinks it does at the time. But woe to the editor and ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... preoccupied; or like liquor it accentuated their weaknesses of fiber in sullenness or bravado. But it did not make them furtive. He could not believe that it was the mere danger of death or physical violence that obsessed his employer. That sort of danger perhaps there might be, but the fear that he had seen in McGuire's fanatical gray eyes was born of something more than these. Whatever it was that McGuire feared, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... lessons is the fact that the destinies of states and peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret arrangements of diplomatists and the agreements or jealousies of kings. For fifty years Germany has been unifying the mind of her people against the world. She has obsessed them with an evil ideal, but the point we have to note is that she has succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No other modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as bad ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... a nation of Jews firmly established in their ancient home. A people that has been tortured in turn by all the governments can hardly be expected to produce un-nervous politicians. He was at the mercy of emotions, obsessed by one paramount idea. A little praise just then of his loyalty to an ideal, to which he had sacrificed time, means, health, energy, everything, would have soothed him and hurt nobody. But the acidity of his scorn had bitten beneath the surface ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... to me by the same physician, serves to throw a light upon the connection of vital and physical energies. The doctor in question was treating a patient, who was apparently "obsessed," by means of electricity. The galvanometer needle showed what slight variations in the current there were during the course of the treatment. In the middle of the process, while the patient was conversing with the doctor, she was suddenly "obsessed." Coincidental with this obsession, the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... from the prison-house. He has begun to realise that fear—a nameless fear of he knows not what—has taken hold upon him. "I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous." Fear affects men in widely different ways. We have seen how this same vague "sense of enemies" obsessed the youthful spirit of Marius the Epicurean, until it cleared itself eventually into the conscience of a Christian man. But Teufelsdroeckh is prouder and more violent of spirit than the sedate and patrician Roman, and he leaps at the throat of fear in a wild defiance. "What art thou ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... to detect the workings of my mind as well as the variations of my body, had noticed these changes when I disembarked the previous week, and had become obsessed with the idea that I stood tottering on the brink of abysmal wretchedness. So, while I was marking time the few days at camp until the hour of demobilization, she summoned into hasty conference my father, our family doctor, and the select near relatives whose advice was a matter ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the state of the public mind, be it understood, up to the time of the notorious and scandalous defection of this obsessed creature, an occasion which I cannot recall without shuddering, and which inspired me to a course that was later to have the most inexplicable ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... interested in the Legion!" Already he was obsessed by thoughts of it. Sidi-bel-Abbes, which at first had struck him as being a dull provincial town, now seemed the only place where he could have lived through his dark hours. Elsewhere he would have felt surrounded by a gay and happy world in ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... not a big town and the foreign population is not vast. Besides, there are traditions. I am the second Barry Craven to live in Yokohama—my father lived several years and finally died here. He was obsessed with Japan." ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Hindu who was suspected of wearing stays—went so far in his indifference as to declare that the only result of the drying-up of the fountain would be "one smell less on Nepenthe." A small but compact minority, however, thought otherwise. Obsessed by vague forebodings, they found an able and eloquent interpreter of their fears in the Commissioner who, rather redder in the face than usual, strode fussily up and down the premises, tugging at his disreputable ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... world seemed obsessed by the moonlight. Its white radiance, when Mrs. Martens at last turned off the glaring bulbs, seemed to cast a spell over sea and land. She stepped out on the porch, and was awed by the beauty of the wide sweep of shining sky and sea. Then, far below ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... pleasantly, and asked no further questions. He was obsessed with the engines of the Amelia Ricks. It was going to cost a lot of money to put them in condition again, and he remarked as much to Cappy. Thus it happened that they entered into a discussion of other ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... such a precaution would have been deemed entirely superfluous; indeed, the locking of the door would probably have been regarded by the villagers as equivalent to a reflection on their honesty, and should the passage of time ultimately bring to the ancient rectory a fresh parson, obsessed by conventional opinion concerning the uses of bolts and bars, it is probable that the inhabitants of Crailing will manifest their disapproval in the simple and direct fashion of the Devon rustic—by placidly boycotting the church of their fathers and betaking themselves to the chapel ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... paced him for a quarter of a mile, Henry never opened his mouth again. He was curiously obsessed, as men under heavy mental pressure are so often obsessed, by a ridiculously trivial detail. How was he going to enter that forty-five dollars ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... obsessed her to the exclusion of all others, and made her watch her teacher as if by her very concentration of thought upon her some way out of the difficulty might be evolved; as if Margaret herself might give forth a ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... said, carelessly, "There's no accounting for the doings of people who are obsessed by that sort of thing. But, look here, Julie, if it is any comfort to your parents to think they have messages from Peter, you wouldn't disturb their belief, ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... with a pre-existing eating disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of fasters, I've known two of these. I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to assist them, because they carry the practices ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... was going his way and mother hers; they were not unaware of the fact that their parents cordially distrusted each other and even went so far as to lay traps for each other. He insisted that his mother, with all her amiability and gentleness, was obsessed with the idea of teasing, annoying, and wounding his father on that very point where she had already and so often teased, annoyed, and wounded him before; and that this lack of reason and consideration ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the morning bore but slight resemblance to that same environment during the hours of darkness—especially on a night immediately following pay-day at the mines. As Miss Donovan, now thoroughly awake, and obsessed by the memory of those past hours of horror, cautiously drew aside the corner of torn curtain, and gazed down upon the deserted street below, she could scarcely accept the ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... obsessed by Uptons of all shapes and sizes. Some he beheld with agony, cut down by the ruthless binder to duodecimo size; others there were no larger than Pickering's Diamond Classics; some (on his chest) were of a size which I can only describe as 'Atlas,' or, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... all the persons who got out of the cars seemed as fresh as if they had just got out of bed. Mr. Prohack was astonished at the vast number of people who didn't care what time they went to bed because they didn't care what time they arose; he was in danger of being morbidly obsessed by the extraordinary prevalence of idleness. The rooms were full of brilliant idlers in all colours. Everybody except chorus girls had thought fit to appear at this ball in aid of the admirably charitable Chorus Girls' Aid Association. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances, Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to him like ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Some patients are obsessed by a peculiar sensation (the "aura") just before a fit. This warning takes many forms, the two most common being a "sinking" or feeling of distress in the stomach, and giddiness. The character of the aura is very variable—terror, excitement, numbness, tingling, irritability, twitching, ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... obsessed his mind that he must speak of it, if it be only to his lackey. Rabecque's sharp face assumed a chastened look. He sighed most dutifully. He sought for ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... differently. He became obsessed by the idea that it was his duty to kill Dennin; and whenever he waited upon the bound man or watched by him, Edith was troubled by the fear that Hans would add another red entry to the cabin's record. Always he cursed Dennin savagely and handled ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... and he came grumbling, in answer to my call. He thought I wanted drink, but John Winters had effectually doused the flame in my vitals. I had happened upon the probable clew to a vast treasure, and the thought of it obsessed me. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... was a sober man—except upon occasions. The occasions were not numerous, but they left an undying impression on his neighbors and fellow townsmen; for the late private had a way all his own. He was a big Welshman, so strong that he never knew how strong he was; and when he became obsessed with the desire to get drunk, no one could stop him. He had to have it out. At such times his one ambition was to ride a horse up the steps of the hotel, and then—George Washington-like—rise in his stirrups and deliver an impassioned ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... first time what place he had taken in the school. He sat with the other new-comers, staring, open-eyed, at nearly six hundred boys, big and small, assembled together in the Speech-room. So engrossed was he that he scarcely heard the Head Master's opening prayers. John was obsessed, inebriated, with the number of Harrovians, each of whom had once felt strange and shy like himself. From his place close to the great organ, he could look up and up, seeing row after row of faces, knowing that amongst them sat his future friends ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... wondered how, in the old days that were only yesterdays, people could have endured separation without any means of communication, and he blessed the name of Marconi as cordially as he cursed the name of Brutgal. To exasperate him further, the rest of the day seemed obsessed by Victor Mahr. He was in the elevator that took him up to his office; he was at the club in the afternoon; he was a guest at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in the evening, and was placed opposite Marcus Gard. Despite his desire ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... been nicely adjusted, but now he saw that there were still heights to be reached—perhaps in this welcome that he was giving to Dune's success he might attain his position. . . . Not, in any way, a bad fellow, this Cardillac—but obsessed by a self-conscious conviction that the world was looking at him; the world never looks for more than an instant at self-consciousness, but it dearly loves self-forgetfulness, for that implies a compliment ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... fictitious marriage; she had, also, stated that for the present she wished this fact, together with the parentage of her child, to be kept a strict secret. Mavis little recked the risk she ran of discovery. She was obsessed by the desire to breathe the Melkbridge air. She believed that her presence there would in some way or other make straight the tangle into which she had got her life. The fly had left Dippenham well behind, and was ambling up and down the inclines of the road. Mavis ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Montmartre—the interests of home. While he waxed eloquent to customers on the tone of pianos, or the excellence of rival composers' melodies, he was envying Florozonde in Paris. Florozonde, whom he had created, obsessed the young man. In the evening he read about her at Van der Pyl's; on Sundays, when the train carried him to drink beer at Scheveningen, he read about her in the Kurhaus. And then the ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... their subjects to abstain from food, thus rendering them still more negative and submissive. Psychic patients, when controlled or obsessed, will frequently not eat unless they are forced or fed like an infant. When asked why they do not want to eat, these patients reply: "I mustn't. They will not let me." When we say: "Who?" the answer is: "These people. Don't you ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger, incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... grew upon me until I became obsessed by the idea although I did not think that he ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... than in merely seeing her again. He was not sure but that she would resent his thanks; nevertheless, it was necessary to seek her out, for already her image was nebulous, and he could not piece together a satisfactory picture of her. She obsessed his thoughts, but his intense desire to fix her indelibly therein had defeated its purpose and had blurred the photograph. Who was she? What was she? Where was she going? What did she think of him? The possibility that she might leave Dyea before answering those ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... watching it, obsessed by a strange sensation. This morning he had been utterly alone; this morning the fair, cold face of Paris had been immobile and speculative. Now a miracle had come to pass; the coldness had been swept aside and the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... thing when he began, after satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that Marlowe—obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness—had taken a leaf, the guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at the time, in all his broodings ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... She was as tidy as the desk, as obsessed by order, as wooden. She placed a pad before the small man and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... set by New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility. Radical newspapers referred with enthusiasm to the erection of a new federal edifice. Little wonder that the harassed President was obsessed with the idea that New England was on the ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Or was the whole thing a mere coincidence? Was he obsessed by FitzGerald and suspecting an honest man, who might have been shooting in the ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... office of the state, and four of the strongest fortresses of the country, La Rochelle, Montauban, Cognac, and La Charite were to be delivered to them for their protection and as a guarantee of good faith. The whole policy of Charles IX. underwent a complete change. Obsessed with the idea that the Catholic party, led by the Duke of Anjou, was becoming too powerful to be trusted, he turned to Coligny and the Calvinists, broke off the alliance concluded with Spain the previous year, and sought to bring over ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... some of the girls he knew. She was dressed in a half-formal house-gown, and the one curl of her waving brown hair that would persistently straggle down upon her forehead was in its accustomed place. He had always been obsessed with a nearly irresistible impulse to put his finger ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... persuaded his new friend to finish the night among the cafes of Montmartre. The sudden change from the overheated restaurant to the cold outside increased the effects of the alcohol and Fandor realized that he himself was far from sober. As his companion seemed to be obsessed with the idea of seeing the Fountains, the journalist piloted him to the Place ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... youth, on looking down from a height upon the city with its smiling environs, he had felt obsessed by gloomy thoughts. In the sunshine-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in a superior ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... marry August Keil, if he's so crazy about the fellow. Why, he's positively obsessed. It's madness the way ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... sapping of their physical well-being and the defilement of their minds. Habits of self-abuse, when once they are established, are apt to be extremely difficult to break. The minds of their victims are liable to be morbidly obsessed by the physical facts of sex, and their thoughts continually directed into turbid channels. But it is possible by the grace of GOD to conquer, though there may be relapses before the final victory is won. It is important neither on the one hand to belittle the gravity of the evil, nor ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... leader's conduct became even stranger in fact he was as a man obsessed. He rarely spoke to us, but spent his whole time with the Bushmen, wandering away into the mountains and the thick jungle bordering the river, refusing our company, and no longer even carrying a rifle in a country at that time teeming with wild animals. His sole desire was to come into contact ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... his tongue refuses to form sounds and words. I confess that I am anxious, for I think his mind may prey too far upon his physical strength. Only last week Varius told me that he thinks Virgil himself is obsessed by the idea that he may die before he has finished his work, he has begged him so often to promise to destroy whatever ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... said without enthusiasm. My heart sank like lead. Ludicrous? Was that the way it appeared to her? I had a little spirit left. "Quite as ludicrous as the fancy Britton has about me. He is obsessed by the idea that I am in love with you. What do you ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... characteristic union of grip and detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be judged by its new mind. 'Youth is knocking at the door,' as it is said of Hilda ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... almost at once and struck off through the forest, reflecting with a frown that Silas would doubtless look up the marshal and demand a warrant for his arrest. Fate was at his heels again obsessed by a mania for disturbing the peace of mind he craved. He might even be hunted by a village posse. And bloodhounds! The adventurous side of this rather pleased him. It simply narrowed down to this—it behooved him to loiter no longer in the green world of spring. Penance ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... anxiously, "Do I look nice, Philip? It doesn't seem too—young for me, this white?" She was in need of all her vanity just then. The mirror had shown her a face pale and luminous, not less beautiful—she knew that—but far older than the face whose memory Jacques carried with him into prison. She was obsessed by the fear that he would not ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Shepherd. Well, I do not feel that Love; or Charity, or Hope are expressed in this way in Watts, and that the ethical spirit is not fundamental with him as the religious spirit is with Millet. He has an intellectual conception of his moral idea, but is not emotionally obsessed by it, and the basis of a man's art is not to be found in his intellectual conceptions, which are light things, but in his character or rather in his temperament. We know, for all the poetical circumstances of Rossetti's ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I'm making a fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are—I don't know what you are—you are wonderful, that's all. But how do you do it? How do you ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Thereafter, he had been obsessed with one ambition, and that was to win Joyce for his wife, in spite of the fact that he was fifteen years her senior and held ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... self-sacrifice to protect her helpless father's honour and welfare had come. She had suffered much in silence—suffered as no other girl would suffer; but she had tried to conceal the bitter truth. Her spirit had been broken. She was obsessed by one ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux |
