"Atavistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mastery of himself. Emmanuel was still in process of formation and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his face came from the contradictory elements that were at grips in him; a mighty stoicism, struggling to tame a nature consumed by atavistic desires,—(he was the son of a drunkard and a prostitute);—a frantic imagination which tugged against the bit of a will of steel; an immense egoism, and an immense love for others, and of the two it were impossible to tell which would be the conqueror; an heroic idealism ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... famous mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for over-susceptibility. But it seems that from the atavistic source whence he inherited his beautiful hands, there survived in him an instinct which craved in woman the indefinable quality that he could never meet, the quality which was common to Melisande and Phedre ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... individual. Earlier writers, therefore, felt the need of special theories of play. The best known of these theories are, first, the Schiller-Spencer surplus energy theory; second, the Groos preparation for life theory; third, the G. Stanley Hall atavistic theory; fourth, the Appleton biological theory. Each of the theories has some element of truth in it, for play is complex enough to include them all, but each, save perhaps the last, falls short of an ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... pleased. "But even with your childhood experiences there must be an atavistic streak in you—a throwback to your adventurous Earth forebears who ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we could study these outbreaks of atavistic ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... brother?" All remembered the brutal encounter of the two brothers years before, when, throwing him to the ground, Attalaq jumped on his brother's body and striking his head with stones beat him to death. Attalaq was a type of the older warriors; unlike his more gentle tribesmen he possessed the atavistic savagery of his forebears of centuries ago when it was customary to ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... replaced later by summer ones. A potted primrose sat behind the plate glass of the Eagle Pharmacy, among packets of flower seeds and spring tonics, its leaves occasionally nibbled by the pharmacy cat, out of some atavistic craving survived through long generations ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... first it was merely the exuberant spirits of their release and the unaccustomed altitude that inspired them, but their countenances grew more and more sombre, their eyes wilder, their voices more war-like. They were no longer doing a stunt, they were atavistic. Their ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... back from his holidays full of Whitby, and its sailors and whalers, and fishermen and cobles and cliffs—all of which had evidently had an immense attraction for him. He was always fond of that class; possibly also some vague atavistic sympathy for the toilers of the sea lay dormant in his ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of his heart Neeland believed this, too; wished for it when his higher and more educated spiritual self was flatly interrogated; and yet, in the everyday, impulsive ego of James Neeland, the drop of Irish had begun to sing and seethe with the atavistic instinct for ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... in these moments of supreme fear that the lurking hatred in the soul takes full possession of it, distorting the imagination, bringing back the most atavistic moral ideas, giving birth to falsehoods of every description, and widening the gulf of misunderstanding which seems to part ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... did not look inviting and there were, no doubt, snakes and poisonous spiders inside, but he could go no farther and the broken walls offered some protection. Perhaps Kit was moved by an atavistic fear of the dark forest, and he owned that he was influenced by the civilized man's longing for the shelter of a house. They went in, and after putting down the coffin in a room where vines crawled about ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... boy begins to put me in a difficulty. As I told you, he has been brought up on the most orthodox lines of Anglicanism; his mother—best of mothers and best of wives, but in this respect atavistic—has had a free hand, and I don't see how it could have been otherwise. But now the lad begins to ask awkward questions, and to put me in a corner; the young rascal is a vigorous dialectician and rationalist—odd result of such training. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing |
