"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I well know that I am writing this requiem for myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not last long. No doubt some one has given me poison; I cannot get rid of the thought." It is now known that this suspicion was only the result of his morbid thoughts; but when it was publicly uttered, most unjust accusations were made against his rival, Salieri, embittering the old composer's life until its close. As the work progressed, his gloom increased. "The day before his death," Nohl ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... T. Morgan Carey dropped off the north-bound train at San Pasqual, and learning that he had two hours to waste while waiting for the stage to start up country, he was seized with a morbid desire to wander through San Pasqual's queer cemetery. The only monument in the cemetery attracted his attention, and presently he found himself standing at the foot of Mr. Hennage's grave, reading the epitaph. It impressed him so greatly that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... and I think you need friendly, cordial surroundings to bring out your usefulness, and give you the freedom that will take constraint out of your family life, and, without diminishing your good sensibilities, dispel any morbid ones. This will open a way for Vesta to see her domestic career, which, otherwise, might become so rapidly contracted as to disappoint you both. You have seen her the idol of her wide circle, free as a bird, indulged by her kind, and by Providence also, till joy and grace, beauty ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... and the most ill-used of all God's creatures. To genius, in any intelligible sense of the term, he has in truth no pretension. He is endowed, however, with a kind of reflective talent, which is often mistaken by fools for creative power. The morbid fancies and melancholy scorn of a Byron, for instance, such gentry reflect back from their foggy imaginations in exaggerated and distorted feebleness of whining versicles, and so on with other lights celestial or infernal. This, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... to make it not only unreliable, but almost unreadable. Only its human interest gives value to the first part; from the second part human interest is totally absent. The unhappy creature, besotted with intellectual pride, was already insane, inhuman; and this morbid condition had been aggravated by years of brooding rancour before he wrote this miserable indictment of men who had done their best ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... a morbid state of mind, Iris silently regretted that the message had not been written, instead of being delivered by word of mouth. Here, again, she (like the wild lord) ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... which wastes her gradually away, and which her physician declares himself unable to stop. I supplied her as far as could be desired, with all conveniences to make her excursion and abode pleasant and useful. But I am afraid she can only linger a short time in a morbid state of weakness ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... beneath the eye of the Turk; then little by little, the sting of the master's whip falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound at once plaintive and menacing, danced, their dance, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... we find in the Diptera the habit of obtrusion and intrusion, of coming in actual contact with our food and our persons, combined with another propensity—that of feeding upon carrion, excrement, blood, pus, and morbid matter of all kinds. This is a combination far more serious than is generally imagined. If the fly—which may at any moment settle upon our lips, our eyes, or upon an abraded part of our skin—were cleanly in its habits, we need feel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... contending strife Dale was immeasurably removed from that dark gulf of self which had made his winter a nightmare. And when he stood erect again it seemed that the old earth had a stirring, electrifying impetus for his feet. Something black, bitter, melancholy, and morbid, always unreal to him, had passed away forever. The great moment had been forced upon him. He did not believe Roy Beeman's preposterous hint regarding Helen; but he had gone back or soared onward, as if by magic, to his ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... great blessing of cheerful spirits. The special means by which this shall be accomplished we leave to the care of the gentlemen abovenamed, and their compeers—merely putting in one word for gentle exercise, and two words for the cherishing of mental health, the expulsion of morbid excitements, assume what guise they may. We should take extreme care not to admit decay at the summit. A healthy soul is a better prophylactic than belladonna. Refusing to despond respecting American health, we cheerfully trust that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... household. Affection, as distinguished from simple kindliness, may or may not exist: when it does it either depends on qualities in the parties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to one another, or it is a more or less morbid survival of the nursing passion; for affection between adults (if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... but myrtle vines are tough and Dorothy came off a partial victor with one spray in her hand. It had lost most of its leaves and otherwise suffered mischance, yet she was not wholly hopeless of saving that much alive; and in any case the incident had banished all morbid thoughts from her mind, and she was quite the merriest of all during that long drive ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her chin and says I'm the last ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... der Stubenvogel' 1840 s. 243; see s. 252 on the inherited song of Canary-birds. With respect to their baldness see also W. Kidd 'Treatise on Song-Birds.') It would appear as if the top-knot were due to some morbid condition, which is increased to an injurious degree when two birds in this state are paired. There is a feather-footed breed, and another with a kind of frill running down the breast. One other ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... source failed to elate the young poetess, or even to give her a due sense of the importance and value of her work, or the dignity of her vocation. We have already alluded to her modesty in her unwillingness to assert herself or claim any prerogative,—something even morbid and exaggerated, which we know not how to define, whether as over-sensitiveness or indifference. Once finished, the heat and glow of composition spent, her writings apparently ceased to interest her. She often resented any allusion to them on the part of intimate friends, and the public verdict ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold. A hard husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the baby of the family that her repressed affections outpoured themselves most fully. It was ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Achilles who sulked when I was at school; but it certainly never was Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of his natural reserve from that artificial and morbid reserve which embittered the last years of his life. The former was not connected with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give out the treasures ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... of husbands would merely have yawned." I felt one coming and stopped it just in time. Waiting for limpets to go to sleep is drowsy work. "But why are you so morbid about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... those earnest souls in earlier times, who shut themselves up behind monastic walls, and inflicted pain upon themselves by privation and by bodily self-infliction. And we cannot help admiring their earnestness and saintliness, even while we see how morbid was their conception of life, and how completely they got the true order reversed. And there can be found some here and there, among us to-day, with ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... the shelter of your wise laws, the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to quote the sacred formula of your Declaration of Independence; this it is which explains why neither the difference of race and language, nor the morbid influence produced in the mind by secular despotism, nor the infinite diversity of religion, is an obstacle to the hundreds of thousands of helpless beings whom year by year the Old World is casting on your shores, to be transformed ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... into one of the moods which my little mother used to call my "morbid streaks" and which she had vainly tried to cure ever since I was a ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... don't think so," said the minister. "The cases are quite different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save their feelings, would be against nature; it would ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... of an unbroken residence with such inmates, on a man of irritable temper subject to morbid melancholy, may be guessed; and the merit of the Thrales in rescuing him from it, and in soothing down his asperities, can hardly be over-estimated. Lord Macaulay says, they were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated preferred their house to every other in London; and suggests that ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... in harness, fighting his battle with the morbid energy of a man already ill. To the very end he had held his position, resisting even that last tender appeal Hilda had made to him, but the strain upon his nerves had been too great. He was strong, indeed, but he was young and not yet toughened into that strange ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... extraordinary development of powers adapted to merely aggressive ends; and yet it is rather through these than through any others that Western individuality most commonly and readily manifests itself. Now there is, as yet, a remarkable scarcity in Japan, of domineering, brutal, aggressive, or morbid individuality. What does impress one as an apparent weakness in Japanese intellectual circles is the comparative absence of spontaneity, creative thought, original perceptivity of the highest order. Perhaps this seeming deficiency is racial: the peoples of the Far East ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... bitter melancholy, there is joined a sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,—with other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be analysed by extreme care,—is found, to the full, only in five men that I know of in modern times; namely Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... plain teachings of Christ on any subject? There can be but one answer. The responsibility lies between the church and the world, and the world surely has not done it. The church herself has made this sentiment, has created the factitious conscience, has awakened the morbid sensibility, by preaching on this subject a theory which shrivels at the touch of Christ, and which she has clearly shown her inability to carry into practice. And the fact that such a sentiment exists, ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... are some of the sickening French and German sentimentalities against which I have been warned. There is such a thing as a wholesome sense of repulsion, an honest manly recoil, a pure instinct of loathing, a thousand times to be preferred to this morbid mixture of good and evil, friend and foe, life and death, this defiance of decency ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... this was rather a morbid turn of character, and so affected Carrie. Indeed, it affected the entire atmosphere of the flat, as such things are inclined to do, and gave to his wife's mind its subdued and tactful turn, anxious to avoid taciturn replies. Under the influence ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... felt and knew, to obtain the summit of his desires, to be placed in a public situation, where his ambition would have full scope, required a much larger fortune than his father possessed. He clothed himself in what he believed to be resignation and contentment, but which was in truth a morbid sensitiveness to his lot in life, which he imagined poverty would separate from every other. Association with Herbert Hamilton, to whom in frankness he confided these secret feelings, did much towards removing their bitterness; and the admiration which he felt for Herbert, whose unaffected piety ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... can be put in two extreme classes, those who render the children insufferably conceited and unbearable by overestimating their abilities and overpraising their achievements, and those who render them morbid and self-depreciating by ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... anything criminal himself. On the contrary, his was rather the work of the criminal specialist, and his morbid interest in the doings of all queer characters, his knowledge of their methods, their present whereabouts, and their past deeds of transgression often rendered him a valuable ally to our police reporter, whose daily feuilletons ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... window, feeling that the dreariness without and within was a very transitory and inconsequent thing. And lo! a change had come. The influx of youth would appear to have put to flight other clouds than those of a morbid mind. The rain had altogether ceased. He could see the roses gleaming moistly in the circles of electric light. The serenaders were just pushing away in their big barge, with coloured lanterns swaying in the breeze. They were beginning to sing, and their voices sounded sweet and melodious ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... a morbid and excessive sensibility on such a subject can be termed insanity. Yet I will not deny that this governing feeling and apprehension carried the person who entertained it, to lengths which indicated a deranged imagination. He appeared to think that it was necessary for ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... shrew, and I should think that Heber was not master in the house where Sisera died. The calm deliberation, the preliminary coaxing, the quick, cool determination, and the final shrill exultation which was reflected in Deborah's song all speak of the shrew. Thackeray had a morbid delight in dwelling on the species, and we know that all of his portraits were taken from real life. If he really was intimate with all of the cruel figures that he draws, then I could pardon him for manifesting the most ferocious of cynicisms even if he had been a cynic—which ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... meats, and abstains from no action whatever," and enjoys lawlessness as far as is practicable in visions and phantasies, that end in no complete pleasure or satisfaction, but can only stir up and inflame the passions and morbid emotions. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Quite mechanically I turned my attention to the right arm. It was unscarred, but on the back of the hand was a faint red mark, not unlike the imprint of painted lips. I examined it closely, and even tried to rub it off, but it evidently was caused by some morbid process of local inflammation, if it ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... weeks she had altered fundamentally, unbelievably, she could not question. The very first night out, ere they had slept, she had begun to talk of change on the morrow. The next day it was the same—and the next. When they were moving the morbid restlessness gradually wore away; for the time being she became her old careless-happy self; and in sympathy her companion opened as a flower to the sun. Then would come a pause; and the morbid, dogging ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... perhaps, a young and handsome soldier, pensive when away from the lady of his thoughts, but not when in her company." M. Reville goes on: "Such a character could not understand the sensitiveness, the shrinking, morbid melancholy of the husband thrust upon her. Her gaiety, her devotion to pleasure, the frivolity of her talk, could only pain more and more a man of a gloomy temperament, who took the greatest care of his health, who fretted himself over the most trivial details, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... line of demarcation between the legitimate spirit of inquiry and mere apish curiosity. I could recognise it, I have no doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o'-the-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it fell into a state of collapse, and was useful ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... constructive effects on body, mind, and spirit. So many contemporary artists are being converted to sport that the artistic type seems to be changing under our eyes. It was only yesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or music was a sickly, morbid, anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit of the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience." He was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or a "Je-ne-sais-quoi ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the Reformation and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, should dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment on them dramatically enough to make his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of horrors.' If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of 1793 was really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien regirne, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien regime unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have a right to ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... soul-power. Is any religion better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message ...
— Progress and History • Various
... forty-two deadly sins of the Ancient Egyptians. Thou shalt not consume thy heart, says the Ritual of the Dead, the negative justification of the soul or ghost (Lepsius Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs). We have borrowed competitive examination from the Chinese; and, in these morbid days of weak introspection and retrospection, we might learn wisdom from the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings Abjure the Why and seek the How, he refers to the old Scholastic difference of the Demonstratio propter quid (why is a thing?), as opposed to Demonstratio ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the number of cups poured for him by obliging hostesses, for, oddly enough, he was a great favorite with the ladies, and knew how to turn a pretty compliment. His temper was at times very irritable and morbid, and he occasionally had violent fits of rage. Yet, with all these peculiarities, he had a kind heart and was sincerely religious. His devotion to his wife and his aged mother[18] was very touching, and the poor ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... And thus, though naturally and commonly of a silent and quiet disposition, she was now not a moment still, for the irregular starts of a terrified and disordered imagination, were changed into the constant ravings of morbid delirium. ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... years ago. I presume he is dead. He had been rather a wild young fellow; but after his wife's death he changed completely, reproached himself for having, as he said, broken her heart, and got some morbid notion of not being a fit father for his child. He had lost his faith and was altogether unbalanced, poor man! Luckily, Freddy inherits a fortune from his mother, and is well provided for; and now comes this other heritage from the old ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... the opposite effect. At least from this time, the spring of 1513, he was afflicted with infirmities before unknown to him. Instead of his habitual equanimity and cheerfulness, he became impatient, irritable, and frequently a prey to morbid melancholy. He lost all relish for business, and even for amusements, except field sports, to which he devoted the greater part of his time. The fever which consumed him made him impatient of long residence in any one place, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... and only an artist. In his tranquil, unimpassioned, remorseless diagnosis of morbid phenomena, in his cool method of treating the morbid anatomy of the heart, in his curiously accurate dissection of the passions, in the patient and painful attention with which, stethoscope in hand, finger on pulse, eye everywhere, you see him watching every symptom, alive to every ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... than none at all; since on the one hand there is a deficiency of food material which can be used for the upbuilding of brains, muscles, and nerves; while on the other hand it contains an abundance of material calculated to induce dyspepsia, headache, dullness of intellect, and other morbid conditions. Left in an ante-room, during the school session, until, in cold weather, it becomes nearly frozen, and then partaken of hurriedly, that there may be more time for play, is it to be wondered at that the after-dinner ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... Lima graduate, who appears to have left for Spain to continue his studies at the University of Alcala de Henares, was deposited in the public library of Quito which was housed in the Augustinian monastery there.[69] This episode denotes a morbid curiosity which must have been revolting to Luis de Leon's austere nature. He candidly avowed doubts as to the prudence of facilitating the reading of the Song of Solomon in Spanish, and would have cancelled all manuscript copies if he could.[70] In this respect, however, he was powerless, ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... "Let others live where they will—here I propose to stay." I lived there until I seemed to take it for my own—to know it on the surface and under it, and over it, and around it; until I had a sort of morbid jealousy when I found any one who knew it half as well as I did, or presumed to love it half as much, and dared to say so. You will please note that I have not ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... spirit, never blamed Abner Dimock for his absence or his coldness; rather, with the divine unselfishness that such women manifest, did she blame herself for having linked his handsome and athletic prime with her faded age, and struggle daily with the morbid conscience that accused her of having forgotten his best good in the indulgence of her own selfish ends of happiness. She still thought, "He is so good to me!" still idealized the villain to a hero, and, like her kind, predestined to be the prey and the accusing angel of such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... theory, and it is probable that the fascinating study of Physiology is of more use intellectually than physically to most school-girls. If they are allowed to dwell much on diseases of the body instead of on its normal action, the study may be a positive injury to them by leading to morbid conditions. ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... "War-Worship," "Ruthlessness" and "Machiavelism," are grouped evidences of the methods of force and fraud by which it was hoped that these ambitions were to be realized. Then, in a final section, I have assembled evidences of the inevitable corollary to morbid self-adoration—the boundless and almost equally unprecedented contempt and loathing for all adversaries, but especially ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a profound impetus in the business world—an impetus which ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... you, Godfrey," she said, addressing him, I grieve to add, in the off-hand manner of one young man talking to another. "I wish you had brought Mr. Luker with you. You and he (as long as our present excitement lasts) are the two most interesting men in all London. It's morbid to say this; it's unhealthy; it's all that a well-regulated mind like Miss Clack's most instinctively shudders at. Never mind that. Tell me the whole of the Northumberland Street story directly. I know the newspapers have left some ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... hope these feelings are not infectious, or I certainly would not inflict on thee the description. But do not take this as a general picture of me. It is a morbid occasional state of things; consequent, by reaction, on the exclusiveness of aim with which those things were followed. I learned sooner than I suppose many do, the earnestness, coldness, reality of life; and there has come an impression of its being too late to prepare for life, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... public Letter to Washington. The Secretary certainly read that letter on its arrival, January 18, 1796, and yet Washington does not appear to have told him of what had been officially done in Paine's case! Such being the secrecy which Washington had carried from the camp to the cabinet, and the morbid extent of it while the British Treaty was in negotiation and discussion, one can hardly wonder at his silence under Paine's ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Is there anything wonderful in that? She taught me the love of evil with her milk—she sang it in lullabies over my cradle—she gave it me in the playthings of my boyhood; her schoolings have made me the morbid, the fierce criminal, the wilful, vexing spirit, from whose association all the gentler virtues must always desire to fly. If, in the doom which may finish my life of doom, I have any one person to accuse of all, that person ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... home, to discover her true character and genius; and that at an age, in a position, when most girls would be too busy with visions of a happy future for themselves to sympathise with the strange activities, the morbid sensitiveness, of such a mind as Charlotte possessed. But so early this girl loved her; and lives still, the last to have an intimate recollection of the ways, persons and habits of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... no real need for the morbid anxiety that now prevails in certain quarters, and surely no serious alarm should be felt for the perpetuity and stability of truth. Truth is truth, and all the bad captains that ever sailed that bark, and all the bad navigators that ever misdirected its course, have never been able ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... "and a little morbid, poor thing. Patty, I think a little iron in the water would do ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... in a fair way to be cured of her morbid seriousness," Mr. Randolph thought as he saw the cavalcade set forth; and, well pleased, he went in to breakfast. Daisy and Preston had breakfasted already, before the family; and now were off to the hills just as other people were stirring ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... savage, and up to the moment when he had fallen asleep, after having passed so close to the border of the dark Unknown. And now that she knew he would recover, she felt strangely disinterested in her work at the hospital. But being a rather practical young person, never in the least morbid, she attributed this unusual indifference to her own condition. She would not allow herself to believe that the life she had seen slipping away, and which she had drawn back from the shadows, could ever mean anything to her, aside from her profession. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... loved my uncle, and sure as I was that anything concerning him was as sacred to her as to me, I dared not commit such a breach of confidence as even to think in her presence that my uncle had a secret. From that hour I had recurrent fits of a morbid terror at the very idea of a secret—as if a secret were in itself a treacherous, poisonous guest, that ate away the ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... repeat what you said to me just now; I deserve no thanks. What I have done, has been done in deference to Doctor Allday—against my own convictions; in spite of my own fears. Ridiculous convictions! ridiculous fears! Men with morbid minds are their own tormentors. It doesn't matter how I suffer, so long as you are at ease. I shall never thwart you or vex you again. Have you a ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... the special sanction of Buonaparte, and there is little doubt was mainly dictated by his morbid jealously of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... had said, proceeded in the least from that narrow selfish feeling, which, under the blustering pretension of equality, presumes to deny the existence of a very potent social fact; but simply from the sensitiveness of feelings, which, on this subject, were somewhat in danger of becoming morbid, through the agency of the most powerful passion of the human heart—or, that which has well been called the master-passion. Nevertheless, Mr. Hardinge was much too honest a man to deny a truth, and much too sincere to wish even to prevaricate about it, however unpleasant it might be to acknowledge ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... with morbid curiosity to the babble of the idiot Feklusha. At home he read in the most desultory way. He deemed the secrets of Eastern magic, Russian tales and folk-lore, skimmed Ossian, Tasso, Homer, or wandered with Cook in strange lands. If he found ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... time for you to indulge in that morbid talk of yours to-day, Maggie, darling. Let us consider what's best ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... one story he had to hear every day. It was the one relating to what he had missed—the sight of Rojas pursued and plunged to his doom. The thing had a morbid fascination for the sick ranger. He reveled in it. He tortured Mercedes. His gentleness and consideration, heretofore so marked, were in abeyance to some sinister, ghastly joy. But to humor him Mercedes racked her soul with the sensations ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the body so as to prevent the rapid radiation of animal heat. In most cases there is an inherited tendency or acquired weakness, which frequently may be associated with a scrofulous condition of the whole system, that render these points less resistant, and consequently invite the morbid changes which result from exposure and cold. Acute Catarrh also occurs during the initial stage of such eruptive diseases as ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... you will surely find it—that living and practical communication between your souls, and that Father in heaven who created them. It will not be real, but morbid, even imaginary, just in proportion as your souls are tainted with self-conceit, ambition, self-will, malice, passion, or any wilful vice; especially with the vice of bigotry, which settles beforehand for God what he shall teach the soul, and in ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... The next moment he was on his feet, holding in his hands the bottle of brandy, half empty. He stared stupidly at the bottle that had sent Ada to her death and set him free, wondering who had paid for it and brought it into the house. As he turned the bottle in his hands, examining it with the morbid interest with which one examines a bloodstained knife, he heard a ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... often thought of it, and of course such a thing might happen at any time; but you forget that while we are out on the broad and boundless ocean we enjoy ourselves. We are free. People with morbid curiosity cannot come and call on us. We cannot get the daily newspapers, and we do not have to meet low, vulgar people who pay ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... take it as seriously as it deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that, here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined, as a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of the aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body or ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... his peace with Hugh, of meeting Westervelt's hard stare, aided this resolution, and, sitting at his desk, he wrote a long and passionate letter, wherein he delineated with unsparing hand his miserable failure. He took a pride and a sort of morbid pleasure in punishing himself, in denying himself any ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... their imagination by horror-loving nurses—were actually close at hand! Supposing the brutes caught them, who would be eaten first? Anno, Stanislaus, or the driver? Would they devour them with their clothes on? If not, how would they get them off? Then, filled with morbid curiosity, they strained their ears and listened. Again—this time nearer, much nearer—came that cry, dismal, protracted, nerve-racking. Nor was that all, for they could now discern the pat-pat, pat-pat of footsteps—long, soft, loping footsteps, as of huge furry paws ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" itself exerted a powerful influence, because it everywhere struck a responsive chord and publicly and tangibly exhibited the true inwardness of a morbid ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... fails to touch us, when it has found stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their own personality, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... cage, ever growing less and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images—the hospital, the prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... then, a strong suspicion that Odette's daily activities were not hi themselves passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with other men did not exhale, naturally, in a universal sense, or for every rational being, a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised, at such moments, that that interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist, and that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... up for a bloody-minded nihilist of the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order of things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I happen to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the backwater, and you know what the backwater of a big city will do to ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... arises the morbid mania for imitation, which is called in Java Sakit-latar, and here Mali-mali. In Java many believe that the sickness is only assumed, because those who pretend to be afflicted with it find it to their advantage to be seen by newly arrived Europeans. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... of word-turning and little play of fancy with those who make style everything," said Beth, glad to get away from love, "and that makes your Jack-of-style a dull boy and morbid in spite of his polish. Less style and more humour would be the saving of some of you, the making ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... no better, no more honourable or worthy than many other men, one of whom was bound to be victimized. I don't think she would have been attracted to a fool or a cad; I am positive she would have married a gentleman. These women have a morbid craving for the caste they are so close upon ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... mental pleasure and pain you would pronounce morbid on account of its intensity. The happiness we enjoy in the society of those who are congenial, or near and dear to us through family ties, is inconceivable to you. The touch of my mother's hand carries a ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... interesting facts bearing on the question. Accepting the propositions, then, that the more adjacent causes of headache are (1) cerebral hyperaemia, (2) cerebral anaemia, and (3) irritation of the cerebral plasma itself, let us now consider how these morbid factors are most scientifically and speedily met at the bedside; and how, more particularly, those distressing conditions of engorgement, which are so baneful an item in the causation of a certain form ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... identity with the disease known in the Middle Ages. Three others regarded it as a specific deterioration of the blood and the humors. The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection. Bianchon produced Professor Duval's analysis of the blood. The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... He seemed almost morbid on the subject, and would dispute himself half a hour, to get a thing or a story he wuz tellin' jest exactly right. But he drinked; that I know for I know the symptoms. Coffee can't blind the eyes of her that waz once Smith, nor peppermint cast a mist before 'em. My nose could have ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past life as morbid. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... abnormal or morbid phenomena in man have proved the existence of this vehicle, which we will call the higher consciousness, for it is far greater than normal, waking consciousness, that of the brain. In the somewhat ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... man's devotion to one absorbing object. The opening chapters were written amid the bright dreams of youth, and in the happiest circumstances; the closing ones were composed amid the dark clouds of a morbid melancholy, and during an imprisonment tyrannical in all its features. Placed side by side with Homer and Virgil, it may be said with Voltaire that Tasso was more fortunate than either of these immortals in the choice of his subject. It was based, not upon tradition, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... was to him the art of arts; there was something quite fine in his devotion to it. The little refectory had its air of distinction, though it was without decoration. There had been, we always said in the family, something whimsical or even morbid in my grandsire’s devotion to architecture; but I felt that it had really appealed to something dignified and noble in his own mind and character, and a gentler mood than I had known in years possessed my heart. He had asked little of me, and I determined that in that little ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... murderer! The Marquis de Crequi was absolutely besieged by applicants to sign, and had to refer their claims to this singular honor, to the Prince de Ligne, the grandfather of the Count. Many who were excluded, were highly incensed, and numerous feuds took place. Nay, the affronts thus given to the morbid pride of some aristocratical families, passed from generation to generation; for, fifty years afterward, the Duchess of Mazarin complained of a slight which her father had received from the Marquis de Crequi; which proved to be something connected with the signature of this petition. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... sandstone residence, standing in its own grounds. On Kent's arrival he found that the police had already drawn a cordon around it with cords. Groups of morbid curiosity-seekers hung about it in twos and threes, some of them in fours and fives. Policemen were leaning against the fence in all directions. They wore that baffled look so common to the detective force ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... man is a changed man, and his life is more or less delusional. In view of this fact, we should endeavor always to so surround him that his environments may not augment the morbid change in him and intensify his perverted, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dwell; Quit the Caribian tribes who eat their slain, Fly that grim gang, the Inquisitors of Spain, Boast not thy deeds in Moloch's shrines of old, Leave Barbary's pirates to their blood-bought gold, Let Holland steal her victims, force them o'er To toils and death on Java's morbid shore; Some cloak, some color all these crimes may plead; Tis avarice, passion, blind religion's deed; But Britons here, in this fraternal broil, Grave, cool, deliberate in thy service toil. Far from the nation's eye, whose nobler ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... work with the needle, where it is done to gratify a taste for display, or morbid fancy for exquisite work, is a crime. Shoulders are bent, spines are curved, the blood, lacking its supplies of oxygen, loses vitality and creeps sluggishly through the veins, carrying no vivid color to the cheek and lips, giving no activity to the brain, no fire to the eye. Let women throw away ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... old man! You would be quite sure, if you had ever felt it. I mean a sense of feebleness and wretchedness, as if there was much to be done, and no desire to do it—as if your life had been a long mistake from beginning to end. Of course it is quite morbid and unreal, I know that! It is a temptation of the devil, sure enough, and it is an uncommonly effective one. He gets inside the weakness of our mortal nature, and tells us that we have come down to the truth at ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... straightforward. It is the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly. There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry, both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion, but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... thoroughly recognised and understood. I remembered, too, something that Martha had told me, about these same fellows doing "a power o' good," and other hints I had collected vaguely, of renouncements, rules, self-denials, and the like. Thereupon, out of the depths of my morbid soul swam up a new and fascinating idea; and at once the career of arms seemed over-acted and stale, and piracy, as a profession, flat and unprofitable. This, then, or something like it, should be my vocation and my revenge. ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... all the resources at his command, might equal and possibly surpass the famous Boxtel creations. He almost choked with envy, and from the moment of his discovery lived under continual fear. The healthy pastime of tulip growing became, under these conditions, a morbid and evil occupation for Boxtel, while Van Baerle, on the other hand, totally unaware of the enmity brewing, threw himself into the business with the keenest zest, taking for his motto the old aphorism, "To despise flowers ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... observe how curiously the later Valois represented their epoch. Francis I. had personified the Renaissance; Charles IX. sums up in himself all the crises of the religious wars—he is the true type of the morbid and disturbed society where all is violent; where the blood is scorched by the double fevers of pleasure and cruelty; where the human soul, without guide or compass, is tossed amid storms; where fanaticism is joined to debauchery, superstition to incredulity, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rest; but then it won't always come, sometimes sleep is impossible." Mary sighed again, for to-night her mood verged on the morbid. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... greater proportion the men of the two Prussian cavalry regiments and artillery batteries which Napoleon had taken with him to Moscow, that is into ruin, succumbed to the morbid potencies which acted upon them ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... to vice and violence. He sought to bring these extremes of European society into harmonious relation with each other,—to raise the one from hereditary dependence and degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts he was eminently successful,—in the latter, more so, in my judgment, than any educator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth of cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of cure. What concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and irritated and re-consoled Leopold, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... and if you hadn't worked yourself into an unhealthy, morbid state you would know it. No, old fellow, we've never quarrelled yet, and don't let ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... wholesome lesson to my morbid discontent and pride to hear what trials she had surmounted already, and how many more she ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... accordingly—a silly self-compassionate way of saying that one was good to her, and a surly suspicion of another who did not pay her an expected attention, and these traits offended Betty Leicester, who was not given to putting either herself or other people under a microscope. There was nothing morbid about Betty and no sentimentality in her way of looking at herself. Becky's sensitiveness and prejudice were sometimes very tiresome, but they made nobody half so miserable as they did Becky herself; the talk she ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... inherited from their father, perhaps inconvenienced and no doubt frightened him. In fact, though his harsher judges are wrong in attributing to him any undue haste to be rich, he certainly does seem to have been under a dread of being poor; a dread no doubt not wholly intelligible and partly morbid in a young man still under thirty-five, with brilliant literary and some legal prospects, who had, independently of fees, literary or legal, a secured income of about a thousand a year. He probably thought, and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... dramatists as a class exhibit not only a decrease of originality in plot and characterization, but also a lowering of moral tone, which results largely from the closer identification of the drama with the Court party. There is a lack of seriousness of purpose, an increasing tendency to return, in more morbid spirit, to the sensationalism of the 1580's, and an anxious straining to attract and please the audiences by almost any means. These tendencies appear in the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... him like a hag from dawn to dark and from dark to dawn again, till in his complete loneliness, in the isolation of that simple, primitive life, where no congenial mind relieved the monotony by so much as a word, morbid, hounded, tortured, the man grew desperate—was ready for anything ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... the death of Simon Varr. Some were there as witnesses or because they had a personal interest in the proceedings, some because they were part of the legal machinery, and many because they were driven by morbid curiosity. The Coroner, an alert, bewhiskered old gentleman named Merton, took possession of the big living-room and had one end of it fenced off with chairs the better to mark the dignified ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... known many of them personally for years, and been distinctly the better, too, for that knowledge. Such boys stand at the antipodes alike of the unreal abstractions of an effeminate sentimentalism—the paragons who prate platitudes and die young—and of the morbid specimens of youthful infamy only too frequently paraded by the equally unreal sensationalism of to-day to meet the cravings ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the most devoted of friends? I remained silent, because the man in whom I have the fullest confidence requested me to do so; but he knew, that, if you questioned me, I would speak. Did you question me? And now what more do you want? That I should stoop to quiet the suspicions of your morbid mind? That I do not mean ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... swallowed. There was no doubt that he was scared. The American's morbid details had been enough to frighten anybody. He was so frightened that he had the pluck to ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... certainly was disinclined to their society,—an oddity, I beg leave to say, in any man, and a most surprising eccentricity in a poet. Constitutional timidity may have founded this habit during youth; for, as I have already observed, his modesty was sensitive and almost morbid. Then came his multitudinous studies, which absorbed him utterly, and in which, unfortunately for Percival, if not for the ladies, these last took so little interest that conversation was not mutually desirable. A remark he made to a scientific friend, who had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... not, however, be ambitious of an early fame: such is apt to shrivel and to drop under the tree." The poetical dictum, "Whom the gods love, die young," has worked untold mischief, having created a morbid dislike to a fine physique, on the theory that great minds are antagonistic to noble bodies. There never was error so fatal: the larger the brain, the larger should be the reservoir from which to draw vitality. Were Seneca alive now, he would write no such letter as he once wrote to Lucilius, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... adds a third king to his list an' feels like sunny weather. Cherokee picks up his hand after the draw, an' the avaricious gent, who's viewin' him sharp, notes that he looks a heap morbid. ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis |
