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Hysteric   /hˌɪstˈɛrɪk/   Listen
Hysteric

adjective
1.
Characterized by or arising from psychoneurotic hysteria.  Synonym: hysterical.  "Hysterical amnesia"






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"Hysteric" Quotes from Famous Books



... He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject—but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate habit—the habit of inferiority to our full ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... eminently the attribute of the Countess de Saldar. After that dreadful dinner she (since the weaknesses of great generals should not be altogether ignored), did pray for flight and total obscurity, but Caroline could not be left in her hysteric state, and now that she really perceived that Evan was progressing and on the point of sealing his chance, the devoted lady resolved to hold her ground. Besides, there was the pic-nic. The Countess had one dress she had not yet appeared in, and it was for the picnic she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... in her glittering, hysteric eyes. Miss Ingate noticed it ironically. "You, pretending to be a widow, and so knowing and so superior! Why, you're a schoolgirl!" said the expressive curve of ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... I was naturally anxious to witness the man's funeral, which I understood was to be a gorgeous affair, six respectably-attired females having been sworn in to kiss the body, amid the hysteric weeps of three more in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various

... black, crisp hair. Near her was one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio the blacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her flowered kerchief. I determined to speak to the child, but without startling her now, for she is a nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the rocks, screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till the girl had gone. Dionea, seated listless on the sands, leaned over the sea and took some of its water in the hollow of her hand. "Here," she said to the Lena of Sor Tullio, "fill your bottle ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... Jim stumbled to his feet with an inarticulate and hysteric exclamation. Yet the apparition that now stood in the doorway was far from being terrifying or discomposing. It was evidently the stranger,—a slender, elegantly-knit figure, whose upper lip was faintly shadowed by a soft, dark mustache indicating early manhood, and whose unstudied ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... to rise; her limbs refused their office; she tottered; she fell again into her seat with an hysteric cry. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... prigione era stato ascarmato." "Vita di Cola di Rienzi", lib. ii. cap. 18.)—his high soul still supported him, but the nerves gave way. Tears came readily into his eyes, and often, like Cromwell, he was thought to weep from hypocrisy, when in truth it was the hysteric of over-wrought and irritable emotion. In all his former life singularly temperate, ("Solea prima esser sobrio, temperato, astinente, or a e diventato distemperatissimo bevitore," &c.—Ibid.) he now fled from his ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... scene, in the society of the Saviour and a throng of saints. Hilda wondered if it were not possible, by some miracle of faith, so to rise above her present despondency that she might look down upon what she was, just as Petronilla in the picture looked at her own corpse. A hope, born of hysteric trouble, fluttered in her heart. A presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her, that, before she had finished the circuit of the cathedral, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... they were ducked, they were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... in a frown, And wink a reputation down; Or by the tossing of the fan, Describe the lady and the man. But see, the female club disbands, Each twenty visits on her hands. Now all alone poor madam sits In vapours and hysteric fits; "And was not Tom this morning sent? I'd lay my life he never went; Past six, and not a living soul! I might by this have won a vole." A dreadful interval of spleen! How shall we pass the time between? "Here, Betty, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... which do not occur in the sphere of health. A degenerated brain cell looks differently under the microscope from a normal one, but the ideas of a paranoiac, the emotion of a maniac, the volition of a hysteric, the memory idea of a paralytic is each in its own structure not different from such elements in any one of us. The total change lies thus only in the proportion; there is too much or too little of it. The pathological mental life is like a caricature of a face—each feature is ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... astonished, does now eagerly answer his Prussian Majesty, "Was from home, was ill, thought he had answered; is the most ill-used of Bishops;" and other things of a hysteric character. [Ib. ii. 85, 86 (date, 16th September).] And there came forth, as natural to the situation, multitudinous complainings, manifestoings, applications to the Kaiser, to the French, to the Dutch, of a very shrieky character on the Bishop of Liege's part; sparingly, if at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... long, hopeless silence, broken only by hysteric sobs from Miss Prissy, and answering ones from the mother; but she lay still and quiet, her blue eyes wide and clear, making an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... manner, with the veil lowered as before, motioned him to advance. The singular height of her form, coupled with the circumstance of her not speaking, caused the idea to pass across his brain for an instant, that it might be a man disguised in woman's attire. The hysteric sobs which issued from beneath the veil, and the convulsive attitude of grief of the whole figure, however, at once exposed the absurdity of the suspicion; and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... the stage manager was worse than the conductor, and that, when Cleo once lost her head, which she did very easily at rehearsals, she became almost hysteric. She was, however, always ready to explain away her exhibitions of temper, saying that the stupidity of the players and the worry of making things go right were trying beyond human endurance. Which explanation he had ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... merciful, and that I should have worshiped her; but I never did. Do you suppose I ever thought he was perfect, as the rest of you thought? He is full of faults. I thought he was dependant on me. He knows how I feel. Oh, what shall I do?" She threw up her arms, and dropped on the floor in a hysteric fit. I locked the door, and picked her up. "Come out of it, Fanny; I shall stay ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... and by a violent effort, which did him good, hushed his hysteric sobbing. After a while he heard the cab rattle ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... once more by my own fair fountain! The thought is madness. And Miriam too! I fear I am sadly tender-hearted.' He leant against his horse's back, with a feeling of utter exhaustion, and burst into hysteric sobs. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... front of that house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing also a doll with a foolish smirk caught in a wire and dangling from a rafter. The doll danced in hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were fired. That was the only movement in Richbourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only sound. I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril among the wreckage and hardly remembered relics of what used to be familiar. Richbourg ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... brutal announcement the poor girl herself gave a hysteric giggle, which I at first thought proceeded from heartlessness, but I was told afterwards, by the person under whose immediate protection she came out, and who was a sister of her betrothed, that the tender woman's heart received such a fearful shock at the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... you want?" it said. Its trepidation was out of all proportion to the needs of the case. So thought Mr. Wix, and decided that this Aunt M'riar was some poor nervous hysteric, perhaps ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... end to end, she fanned the fiery emotion that was consuming her. Now, she reviled herself in language that broke through the restraints by which good breeding sets its seal on a woman's social rank. And now, again, she lost herself more miserably still, and yielded with hysteric recklessness to ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... in a vehement excitement half-hysteric. Very quietly Flavia disengaged her arm from the grasp holding it; for the moment Isabel's ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram

... I am, dearest," says her mother, blushing over her whole sweet face—"and—and it is your hand, my dear, and not your foot he wants you to give him," and she said it with a hysteric laugh, that had more of tears than laughter in it; laying her head on her daughter's fair shoulder, and hiding it there. They made a very pretty picture together, and looked like a pair of sisters—the sweet simple matron ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... enough: for I saw her eye stir, And ope like an oyster wide, As in accents hysteric she whispered, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... although if intense it may involve not only the extraordinary muscles of respiration, but most of the muscles of the body. There are many degrees of laughter, from the mere brightening of the eyes, a fleeting smile, tittering andgiggling, to hysteric and convulsive laughter. Under certain circumstances, laughter may be so intense and so long continued that it leads to considerable exhaustion. The formation of tears is sometimes associated with laughter. When integrated with laughter, the nervous system can perform no ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... ingenuity could turn them out. If our ancestors were capable of appreciating the literary excellence of their pamphleteers, as many of those who have replaced them to-day could not, it must be admitted that we do not rage and hate so violently. The most hysteric effusions of our yellow press, or the caustic utterances of our reputable newspapers, are tame indeed before the daily cyclones of a time when everybody who did not love his political neighbor hated him with a deadly virulence of which we know little to-day. We ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... displayed her sensibility and feeling for the sick prelate by the extravagance of hysteric fits; except at those times when she talked seriously with her husband upon the injustice which she thought would be done to him, and to his many pamphlets and sermons, if he did not immediately rise ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... from a child, now and again had manifested itself in her—though happily unattended by morbid or hysteric tendencies, thanks to her radiant health—grew with her growth. To her, in certain moods and under certain conditions, the barrier between things seen and unseen, material and transcendental, was pervious. It yielded before the push of her apprehension, sense of what it guards, what ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... heavy as a nightmare, without the partial unconsciousness of sleep. This blackness must be "the horrors" she had heard women of her stage-world speak of. She wanted to spring out of bed, to run to her mother's room. But that would have meant hysteric confession, so she bit her lips and stuck her nails into the sheet. Perhaps suicide would be simplest. She was nothing; it would not even be blowing out a light. No, she was something, she was a retailer of gross humours, a vile sinner; it might ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... which fails to recognize and accept any truth which is opposed to her wishes. As she looks back over the vista of years, filled with many activities, no monument of wholesome constructiveness remains; she has blighted what she touched. Lena Platt, a wilful, spoiled, selfish hysteric! ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... panting, tidying their hair and their dress unconsciously, and watching him. He looked at none of them. He espied his cap in a corner, and went and picked it up. He put it on his head, and one of the girls burst into a shrill, hysteric laugh at the sight he presented. He, however, took no heed, but went straight to where his overcoat hung on a peg. The girls moved away from contact with him as if he had been an electric wire. He put on his coat and buttoned ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... when I get ready, Abby Atkins! I ain't afraid of them if you be. They dassen't hit me. Scab, scab!" the girl yelled back, with a hysteric laugh. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Florence said some boy had coaxed him off somewhere, but she was desperately afraid that he laid crushed in some hospital. And now they all hugged and kissed him; and what with the fatigue, the fright and all, Jack really had an hysteric. ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas

... again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of "exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some one has called the President of the United States a liar,—or that some one has been called a liar ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... He was rather a small man, and I am in stature nigh on six feet. When he came down to us in my clothes, we had the merriest evening that I can remember for years past. I thought Felicia would have had a hysteric fit; and even sister Judith laughed—he did look such a comical ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... door closed behind her he slid from his chair and bowed his head upon it, crying out in a voice of tearful agony, "Thank God! thank God!" again and again, while his unfinished form shook with hysteric sobs. "And she said I was not wise!" he half laughed, as the tears ran down his face and he resumed his invocation of thankfulness. Thus Nimbus found him and carried him home with his wonted tenderness, soothing him like a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... strangest sound went up from that big assembly, a mingled sound of groans and smothered outcries, and also what one might have sworn—had it not seemed impossible—was wild hysteric laughter. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... poor ladies appeared parched and exhausted, he brought a basket of oranges and prevailed on some of them to refresh themselves by sucking a little of the juice. At this time they were all tolerably composed, except Miss Mansel, who was in hysteric fits, on the floor of the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... new key, so to speak. Through the gesticulating assembly swept that murmur of expectation which crowds know when the procession is coming at last. By some mysterious magnetism all were aware that the BRIDE herself—the poor hysteric bride—had left the paternal camp, was coming in person to plead ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... his impression of inevitable truth. There is the greatest moral value, as well as intellectual value, in the independence that comes from knowing, and knowing that one knows and why he knows. This gives spinal column to character, which is not found in the flabby goodness of imitation or the hysteric virtue of suggestion. Knowing what is right, and why it is right, before doing it is the basis ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... still holder assumption, everywhere giving it out, that the inconceivable powers of this subtile fluid were centered in his own person. Now, the mona-drama began; and Messmer, at once the hero and chorus of the piece, performed his part in a masterly manner. He placed the most nervous, hysteric, and hypocondriac patients opposite to him; and by the sole act of stretching forth his finger, he made them feel the most violent shocks. The effects of this wonderful power excited universal ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... criminals, and executioners. Some of the people there made a practice of attending every execution. They were fountains of interesting gossip, and the lions of the meal. There was a woman who could recall the dying words of all the victims of justice for twenty years past. The table roared with hysteric laughter at one of this woman's anecdotes. Sophia learned that she had related how a criminal had said to the priest who was good-naturedly trying to screen the sight of the guillotine from him with his body: "Stand away now, parson. Haven't I paid to see it?" Such ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... the Gnome thro' this fantastic band, 55 A branch of healing Spleenwort in his hand. Then thus address'd the pow'r: "Hail, wayward Queen! Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen: Parent of vapours and of female wit, Who give th' hysteric, or poetic fit, 60 On various tempers act by various ways, Make some take physic, others scribble plays; Who cause the proud their visits to delay, And send the godly in a pet to pray. A nymph there is, that all thy pow'r disdains, 65 And thousands more in equal ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... father was an Irishman banished from Great Britain because of his political agitations. His mother was a French woman of Huguenot extraction who died of cancer before the patient reached his teens but to whom he was greatly attached. He has a sister two years older than himself, given to hysteric attacks, for whom his love is "Platonic," to use his own term. Although of more than normal intellectual vigor, judging by his success in school work, he probably always had a psychotic tendency. At seven or eight he saw a vision of God in the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... Hysteric ecstasy, new fierce, now faint, But ever fever-sick, shook not his lyre With epileptic fervours. Sensual taint Of satyr heat, or bacchanal desire, Polluted not the passion of his song; No corybantic clangor clamoured through Its manly harmonies, as sane as strong; So that the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various

... and devote our entire energies to bailing. "Tip her a little more," I cried, and the next instant we were both rolled into the water. It was an absurd experience, and after scrambling out, our clothes so heavy we could scarcely step, we vowed, between hysteric fits of laughter, to keep our ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... delicacy and propriety of its decoration, and in the beauty of its general effect, it surpasses any church erected in England since the revival of the pointed style.' In a notice of the 'Writings of Miss BREMER,' MARY HOWITT 'suffers some,' on account of a certain hysteric preface of hers to a translation of one of the Swedish lady's productions, in which she complains of the American translations from this popular writer. Among the 'Critical Notices' which compose the last article in the Review, is a critique upon Mr. CORNELIUS MATHEWS'S ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... hysteric emotion spent itself, and Madame Patoff grew more calm. Then she spoke, and, to Hermione's ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... of hysteric laughter threatened him. He pressed his mouth hard with his hand to choke back this ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... not expect, considering that before going there I had had long conversations with eminent specialists in nervous diseases. I saw cures which would be called extraordinary by such as ignore the curative power of faith in hysteric complaints and its derivatives. But I did not see limbs straightened or replaced, nor has any monk or priest showed me or ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the rope, Joan ran to the washstand and dipped a towel in the pitcher. But Julie called to her, "Bring the jug of water here, we've got to break this hysteric spell!" ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... it into his hand, and then, her errand done, began to gather chips together to make a fire, choking down hysteric sobs. ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... Black Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of a wild-rose thicket nor the singing of a cricket, But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, And their tired lids will flutter with the street's hysteric screams. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... gentle breathing and the circulation are distinguishable. The body is flexible, relaxed, perfectly impassive to ordinary stimuli. The pupils of the eyes are not contracted, but yet are fixed. This state is witnessed occasionally in hysteria, after violent fits of hysteric excitement. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... the room, and then at once to discern her. On waking, she said she did not see the maid, but said she saw the chair on which the maid sat. Presently, however, she saw the maid, was agitated, had an hysteric fit, and passed into the sleep-waking state. I now inquired how she came to see her maid, as I had not left the room, and told her she must not (see the maid), when I awoke her again. I then awoke her again; she could not see the maid, was ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... diseases occasioned by a defect of sensorial exertion, as in cold fits of ague, hysteric complaint, and nervous fever, the following means are those commonly used. 1. Increase the stimulation above its natural quantity for some weeks, till a new habit of more energetic contraction of the fibres is established. This is to be done by wine, opium, bark, steel, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... attention to what are known as the attacks. The hysteric patient (usually a woman, and so we shall speak of the patient as "she") under emotional stress and strain, following a quarrel or a disagreement or perhaps some disagreeable, humiliating situation, shows alarming symptoms. Perhaps she falls (never ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... wondered, not alone at what he saw but at the strange sensations which played up and down his naked spine, sensations induced, doubtless, by the same hypnotic influence which held the black spectators in tense awe upon the verge of a hysteric upheaval. ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... amount of four ounces, night and morning for several weeks, is very efficacious in scorbutic complaints, and other cutaneous eruptions. The smell of garlic is an infallible remedy against the vapours, faintings, and other hysteric affections. The common poppy is an antidote to the stings of venomous insects, and a remedy for inflammation of the eyes: it also cures the pleurisy, and spitting of blood. Sage taken in any form tends to cleanse and enrich the blood: ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... love which a ballet girl inspires is very delusive; in her we find, under an appearance of an artificial springtime, a soil which is cold as well as greedy, and senses which are utterly dulled. The Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... Esther, and her breath was checked by a hysteric hiccup, "Mr. Lanigan, you are to bring up the key of the green-room, and plenty of venison, roast beef, and a bottle ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... that they might gaze on him." The Arabs are highly imaginative, and their world is peopled with supernatural beings, whilst Ovid is surpassed in the number and ingenuity of their metamorphoses. Their nerves are highly strung, they are emotional to the hysteric degree, and they do everything in the superlative fashion. They love at first sight, and one glimpse of a face is enough to set them in flames; they cease to sleep or to eat until they are admitted to the adored presence, they weep till they faint, they rend their garments, pluck their ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... me trouble during the next day, but that was more in the way of unreasonable demands and petulance than through hysteric exhibitions. She did not repeat her request to be landed, which was now quite impracticable, as we were well out in the Atlantic, but ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... appearance in his history had so affrighted him, he hurriedly attired himself for out-of-doors, crammed the bundle of notes into an inner pocket of his overcoat, and, after a final appeal to the decanter, left his room with a somewhat hysteric sense of courage and self-approval. He had been tempted—he was ready to recognise that the temptation was over, that he had well-nigh succumbed to it—but he had triumphed! He was a man again. He had been weighed in the balances and not found wanting. There ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... as unnatural and incongruous as her brother's chief mourner himself, and although she shrank from his passing figure she uttered no word. Chester Brooks's youthful emotions, following the expression of Miss Sally's face, lost themselves in a vague hysteric smile, and the other gentlemen looked sheepish. Joseph Corbin ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... husband; and was not the man, let him be ever so mad, still her husband? Madame Goesler was sore of heart, as well as broken down with sorrow, till at last, hiding her face on the pillow of the sofa, still holding the Duchess's letter in her hand, she burst into a fit of hysteric sobs. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... generally—than Aunt Pen would challenge some lobster-salad to mortal combat, and, of course, come out floored by the colic. A little whiskey then; and as a little gave so much ease, she would try a great deal. The result always was a precipitate retreat up-stairs, a howling hysteric, bilious cramps, the doctor, a subcutaneous injection of morphine in her arm; then chattering like a magpie, relapsed into awful silence, and, convinced that the morphine had been carried straight to her heart, a composing ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... boy," Wilkins said. "Drowned in your little old Weeping Water River. They have got you now and you're all damp and drippy, and your best girl is having one hysteric after another. Don't you think you ought to throw that cigarette away and show some respect to yourself? We've all quit playing cards and are going to bed ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... was at this here rich place down from San Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.' Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... brought back the associated sensations of choking,—without, however, uncovering the buried emotion.[61] Many a painful hysterical affliction is based on just such mechanisms as these. As Freud remarks, "The hysteric suffers mostly from reminiscences."[62] ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... us from our natural rest, and pull The whole Oda from their beds at half-past three, Would make us think the moon is at its full. You surely are unwell, child! we must see, To-morrow, what his Highness's physician Will say to this hysteric of a vision. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... vain that he tried to sleep; so he got up, resolving to try whether he could borrow twenty guineas from any of his friends, to pay the most pressing of his gaming companions. The first person he asked was Mrs. Dolly: she fell into an hysteric fit when she heard of his losses; and it was not till after she had swallowed a double dram of brandy that she was able to speak, and to tell him that she was the worst person in the world he could have applied to; for that she was in the greatest distress herself, and all her ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... of that. She would have preferred to have discussed the details of the funeral—the splendid white velvet casket Mr. Gillis had insisted on having for Ruby—"the Gillises must always make a splurge, even at funerals," quoth Mrs. Rachel Lynde—Herb Spencer's sad face, the uncontrolled, hysteric grief of one of Ruby's sisters—but Anne would not talk of these things. She seemed wrapped in a reverie in which Diana felt lonesomely that she ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... heavily and stared at Calverley, who was still shaking with hysteric laughter; while I, now consumed with curiosity, walked over to the closet to discover the cause of their singular behaviour. As I flung open the door, which the lawyer had closed, I must confess to being very considerably ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... the organ of sensibility, or sensitiveness, was sufficiently developed and predominant, the conditions of neurological experiments for scientific purposes were satisfactory, and to make such experiments, the subjects, instead of being ignorant, passive, emotional, hysteric, or inclined to trance, should be as intelligent as possible, well-balanced and clear-headed,—competent to observe subjective phenomena in a critical manner. Hence, my experiments, which have been made upon all sorts of persons, were ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various

... help you—no!—how should that be? don't I love the very dust he treads on!' she screamed out violently at last, and went into a hysteric fit. The sound of her maniacal voice brought her brother to the door with anxious inquiry, but as I told him Mary was a little over excited, and quiet would soon restore her, at my earnest request he retired. In a short time I was able, with bathing her head in cold water, and constantly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... subsistence. Jessica, armed with certificates of examinational prowess, got work as a visiting governess. At the same time, she nourished ambitions, discernible perhaps in the singular light of her deep-set eyes and a something of hysteric determination about her lips. Her aim, at present, was to become a graduate of London University; she was toiling in her leisure hours—the hours of exhaustion, that is to say—to prepare herself for matriculation, which she hoped ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... Scone. The shades of evening were fast setting in as, overcome with the joyous prospect of seeing her husband home again, she withdrew to her chamber, and, flinging herself on her bed in a state of hysteric delight, fell asleep. But her slumbers were broken, for at every sound she started, mentally exclaiming "Can that ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... indeed they were. Sudden outcries, hysteric weeping and laughter, faintings, catalepsies, trances, were customary concomitants of the revival preaching. Multitudes fell prostrate on the ground, "spiritually slain," as it was said. Lest the helpless bodies should be trampled on by the surging ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... bowed itself to meet sorrow more patiently and peacefully, it was at the expense of the bodily frame. Already weakened by the intermittent fever, the long strain of nursing had told on her; and that hysteric affection that had been so distressing at the time of her brother's trial recurred, and grew on her with every occasion for self-restraint. The suspense in which she lived—with one brother in the camp, in daily peril ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... it—the look of its fixed eyes, its outspread locks, and the purple indentation on the temple she saw as clearly as she had seen them in that first mad moment when she had stood staring downward at the thing itself; but the coursing of her blood was stilled, the gallop of her pulses, and that wild hysteric leaping of her heart into her throat, choking her and forcing her to gasp and pant in that way which in women must ever end in shrieks and cries and sobbing beatings of the air. But for the feminine softness ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... own, and where there seemed still to lie moveless on the bed, the stiff hard figure. It was when she recalled this that the unnatural silence of the drawing-rooms was intruded upon by the brief half-stifled hysteric shriek, and the moaning which made its way through the ceiling. She felt almost as if the door handle might turn and something stiff and cold ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... through this fantastic band, A branch of healing spleenwort in his hand. Then thus addressed the power: "Hail, wayward Queen! Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen: Parent of vapours and of female wit, Who give the hysteric, or poetic fit, On various tempers act by various ways, Make some take physic, others scribble plays; Who cause the proud their visits to delay, And send the godly in a pet to pray. A nymph there is, that all thy power disdains, And thousands more in equal ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... through this fantastic band, A branch of healing spleenwort in his hand. Then thus address'd the power—'Hail, wayward Queen! Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen: Parent of vapours and of female wit, Who give the hysteric, or poetic fit, 60 On various tempers act by various ways, Make some take physic, others scribble plays; Who cause the proud their visits to delay, And send the godly in a pet to pray; A nymph there is, that all thy power disdains, And thousands more in equal mirth maintains. But oh! ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... couldn't 'ave 'appened. 'No time for 'osspitles,' ses I. She's not twenty breaths to dror; let 'er die in 'er own bed, pore thing!" And both she and her baby breaking into wails at one and the same time, other women, some hysteric, some maudlin with gin, joined them in a ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... wore wearily away. Falling ever more densely, the snow drew an impenetrable wan curtain between Amber and the world of life and light and warmth; while with each discordant blast the strength of the gale seemed to wax, its high hysteric clamour at times drowning even the incessant deep bellow of the ocean surf. Once Amber paused in his patrol, having heard, or fancying he had heard, the staccato plut-plut-plut of a marine motor. On impulse, with a swelling heart, he swung his gun skywards and pulled both ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance



Words linked to "Hysteric" :   neurotic, psychoneurotic, hysteria, mental case



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