"Obsession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... makes him think—he thinks she thinks—Oh, I don't know how to 'splain it to you!" And Margaret Hamilton hastily abandoned so complicated a problem. In reality she was meeting it with a wisdom far beyond her years. The boy was in the grip of an obsession. Margaret Hamilton would have been sadly puzzled by the words, but in her wise little head lay the ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of that night's events became more and more accelerated, Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal, merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked by nothing—that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was impossible for him to make her hear him, or when she heard ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... word explains almost every inexplicable act in life." He took up a knife and held it level on his palm. "There you have the normal condition, but once one end swings up you get Genius and all the Arts, or madness and crime and the obsession of one idea: one definite, over-mastering idea that drives every force harnessed ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is afraid that his delicate ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... unless she herself recovers her normal memory so far as to be able to assist us. I see that I have noted how she constantly repeats the words 'red, green and gold.' That combination of colours has apparently impressed itself upon her mind to such an extent that it has become an obsession. Often she will utter no other words than those. She was seen by a number of eminent men, but nobody could suggest ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... would hold true in cases of possession and obsession; for if the bastion of the hand can thus be captured, so also may the citadel of the brain. Certain familiar forms of hypnotism are not different from obsession, the hypnotizer using the brain and body of his subject as though they were his own. All unconsciously to himself, ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... seemed at the same instant to cut the last bonds and ties that had stretched from one to another as long as vision lasted. The men felt as released from a spell. One idea rushed into their minds suddenly and became an obsession. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... the extreme content with his lot which had been his obsession that day. "We have everything, darling. We shall have all that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly happiness that they'll never know—or miss," he added, giving ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... shatter the door of his own lodge was evidence of his obsession, Jack firmly believed and from which he deduced the opinion that as long as his equipment held out he was ready to keep up that hot bombardment under the belief that the enemy were falling like dead leaves in the frosts of ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... concerning conversion and regeneration, held in common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which my mother was subjected by those theological problems and the daily anxiety she endured until ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... eighteen when she first entered the convent, directly after her father's death, when she felt very lonely—both morally and mentally lonely—and followed by the obsession of that oath. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... not only in giving her a goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions. It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell of Mary's flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a charwoman opened the door. All ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... sister of a man who had been condemned to death. Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept. Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon's every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... employed ridicule, others declared, in impassioned tones, that the good name of their state had been wantonly assailed, and pointed fervently to portraits on the walls of patriots of the past,—sentiments that drew applause from the fickle gallery. One gentleman observed that the obsession of a "railroad machine" was a sure symptom of a certain kind of insanity, of which the first speaker had given many other evidences. The farmer at my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... distortions and displacements of bony structures, muscles and ligaments; weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... no name for it! What do we know of the vagaries of the human mind? Three minds and one obsession!" he said with the utmost gentleness. "Three maiden ladies who have lived impeccable lives for far be it from me to say how many years; and now—this! Oh, Aunt Tish! ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... turn you out," mused Van quietly. "I wish you could win. But you are not merely fighting people. You are fighting an idea. It is only for an idea that men and women martyr themselves. With Cara this idea has become morbid—an obsession. She has inherited it together with an abnormally developed courage, and her conception of courage is to face what she most ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... their party was Ella's clamorous selection for the supper; but to Flora the more real thing was the atmosphere of excitement and mystery she had been moving in all the evening. She was pursued by the obsession of something more about to happen—something imminent—though, of course, nothing would; at least, how could anything happen here, to them? And by "them," she meant herself and these people around her so stupidly talking—the eternal repetition of the story ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... This tendency became particularly marked in his closing years when the consciousness of an immense amount of work to be done and a short and constantly lessening period in which to do it must have become an obsession and almost a nightmare ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... idea which now began to occupy the thoughts of E. A. Partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... visit my father's land, since to him it had been a land forbidden. But a few months after his death, when I was twenty-one, the longing to see Spain had become an obsession. And it must have been my evil star which influenced an anarchist to throw a bomb at a royal personage on the very day I arrived at Barcelona, thinly ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the scheme of life. As a deserted wife and the mother of two children, she felt that she could live for years without the desire, without even the thought of romantic love in her mind. "I wonder why I, who have known and lost love, should be so much freer from that obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has never been loved in her life?" she asked herself while she carried the supper tray down the long hall ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... for self-improvement soon became an obsession. With Miss Enid's assistance he got into a night course at the university, and proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He plunged through bogs of ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... up with a homesick American. He was marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a greater curiosity than ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... some friends right here in Chicago—I lived here about a month trying to learn a patent medicine business father had gone into. The thing was a fake; a ghastly imposition on the public. Such things have a weird fascination for father; it's simply an obsession, for he doesn't ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... woman of the brown cloak, still watching everything with eyes that missed no detail. She annoyed Prescott; she had become an obsession like one of those little puzzles the solution of which is of no importance except when one cannot obtain it. So he lingered in her neighbourhood, taking care that she should not observe him, and he asked two or three ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... not to deprive these laws of practical importance. They represent essential criteria of sound policy in the sphere of social reorganization no less than in ordinary business. In our days a curious obsession has led many people to disparage these criteria, as though they were the sordid prejudices of a stupid tradesman. Because it has been found a matter of obvious practical convenience to maintain the roads out of taxation or of rates, and to dispense with charges for their ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of skill added ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... except the love of heaven, of which it was a part. By heaven he meant not only the future state of the soul, but the earth on which he trod, and the only thing likely to become pernicious during the years that followed was his obsession with the one idea and his certainty that he had found the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... frequently a matter of surprise to minds whose view of what is "good" has excluded the concept of energy that persons obviously under the obsession of "evil" are able to display such immense reserves of inexhaustible power. But this surprise disappears when it is realized that such "worshippers of Satan" are drawing upon the creative energy and corrupting it, in the process of drawing ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... On a slight eminence overlooking the city from the west center-poles of native cedar which had supported Roman tents were still standing. But no garrison was there now, though the signs of the savage Roman obsession still lay on the remnants of the prostrate western wall. So as Costobarus' gaze wandered he did not see far above that heap of striped garments in his garden walk, fixed like an enchanted thing, moveless, dead-calm, a great desert vulture poised in air. Presently another and yet another ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... afternoon did he give me most positive proof of his obsession. It was four o'clock, the beginning of the first dog-watch, and he had just relieved me. So careless have we grown, that we now stand in broad daylight at the exposed break of the poop. Nobody shoots at us, and, occasionally, over the top of the for'ard-house, Shorty sticks up his ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... would be easy to prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of 'sublunary debate,' but it is sufficient to point out that Mr. Bailey's criticism of Racine affords an excellent example of the fatal effects of this obsession. His pages are full of references to 'infinity' and 'the unseen' and 'eternity' and 'a mystery brooding over a mystery' and 'the key to the secret of life'; and it is only natural that he should find in these watchwords one ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... comprehensive record I have divided the various stages of my waterwagoning into these parts: the obsession stage; the caramel stage; the pharisaical stage, and the safe-and-sane stage. I drank my Scotch highball and went over to the club. The crowd was there; I sat down at a table and when somebody asked me what I'd have I took a glass of water. Several of my friends looked ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... might have been. Wagner had the utmost contempt for the ordinary press criticism of the day: with that sort of thing, he wrote Uhlig, one could not tempt the cat from behind the stove. He knew what criticism should not be, but when he came to what it should be his view was warped by the obsession that pure music had reached its boundaries, and the future of music was involved with the future of the music-drama. When his prejudices were not aroused, he himself was the greatest critic who has lived: his programmes of the Choral and Eroica Symphonies ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... there is such a thing as hypnotism, thought transference—obsession—what will you? And any of these things I will believe sooner, than that Valmai Wynne can have changed. Cheer up, old fellow! I was born to pilot you through your love affairs, and now here's a step towards it." And from a ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... against its wicked strength, it should get free, be you the first to meet its weapon, even though the penalty be death." That was her thought, for what had Mo done that he should suffer by this man—this nightmare for whose obsession of her own life she ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... board the schooner, when surrounded by white faces, by unfamiliar sights and sounds, that Karain seemed to forget the strange obsession that wound like a black thread through the gorgeous pomp of his public life. At night we treated him in a free and easy manner, which just stopped short of slapping him on the back, for there are liberties one must not take with a Malay. He said himself that on such occasions he was only ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... melancholy] invites the devil into it, wheresoever it is in extremity, and, of all other, melancholy persons are most subject to diabolical temptations and illusions, and most apt to entertain them, and the devil best able to work upon them. 'But whether,' declares Burton, 'by obsession, or possession, or otherwise, I will not determine; ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... very much this obsession," he said rising. "I will not attempt to reason with you again, Helen, but"—he made no effort to lower his voice, "the world—our world will soon know what manner of man James Turnbull was, ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... evolve the restraining force from within himself. This makes it impossible for him to avoid the creation of a great deal of rubbish during a considerable length of time. The ambition to work wonders with the modest gifts at one's disposal is bound to be an obsession in the beginning, so that the effort to transcend at every step one's natural powers, and therewith the bounds of truth and beauty, is always visible in early writings. To recover one's normal self, to learn to respect one's powers as they are, is ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... enjoy his own generosity. His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age; but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an obsession with him. In vain the occasional college professors, who spent summer months at St. Saviour's, sought to interest him in science and history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the wild places where it led ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... most interesting artists and writers but does his utmost to reveal to the world every phase and aspect of his personal identity. What was but a human necessity, rather concealed and discouraged than reveled in and exploited before Montaigne, has, after Montaigne, become the obsession and preoccupation of us all. We have got the secret, the great idea, the "new soul." It only remains for us to incarnate it in beautiful and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of road through the woods that the obsession in her mind took its final and most hideous form. Close behind them, and ringing in their ears, she fancied she heard a cry in the voice of Shaw. It was not Shaw's human voice. She would not have ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... a cake is put in a cardboard box and lightly wrapped up in brown paper," a statement that is important in view of the common opinion that British parcels were specially maltreated. The idea of differential treatment had indeed become an obsession. An example of the extraordinary nonsense that is believed is the story that "on the hospital ship, Oxfordshire, on March 19, sixty wounded British soldiers, the majority of them from the Black Watch ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be over-rated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalising effect upon Spain (of which she is unconscious), headlines of murder, rape, and rubbish, excite and demoralise ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... a child have less instinct than an animal? On finding that he was mistaken, he would sit down in his armchair again and think of the boy. He would think of him for hours and whole days. It was not only a moral, but still more a physical obsession, a nervous longing to kiss him, to hold and fondle him, to take him on his knees and dance him. He felt the child's little arms around his neck, his little mouth pressing a kiss on his beard, his soft hair tickling his cheeks, and the remembrance of all those childish ways made ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... she laid as it were violent hands on him, to extract his secrets from him. She MUST know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession in her, to know all he knew. For some time he was silent, hating to answer her. Then, compelled, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... he rarely slept. He haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang. He, in turn, was haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn: Whatever you do, make westing! make westing! It was an obsession. He thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... way-warden, or other official, who has resigned in dudgeon or been ousted from his post for some neglect or failure. He is a man with whom the world has gone wrong, a sufferer, perhaps, from some disaster which has become an obsession. He views everything with distorted eyesight; nothing pleases him, and he wants to put everybody right. He cherishes a perpetual grievance against some individual or clique for a fancied slight, and goes about trying to stir up ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... "I forgot in my obsession, in what Jacob Boehme calls 'the shudder of divine excitement,' that I was talking to one of the uninitiated. I suppose you think by pyrotechny I mean the old-fashioned methods of set pieces, ghastly portraits in fire, big, spouting wheels, rockets, war scenes from contemporary ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... astral person who has a desire to seize upon the physical body of another. The purpose is to gratify desires that have outlived the physical body. The dead drunkard is perhaps the commonest example of the obsessing entity, and if the obsession is only partial it may lead to nothing worse than strong and perhaps irresistible impulses toward alcoholic stimulation. Obsession may, of course, occur without the psychic door being opened deliberately. But no obsession is possible, in any case, unless there is something within the victim ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... that will describe the nature of the man's psychic disturbance to any advanced student of occultism. Demoniac possession is not believed in by orthodox Christians of today, but Jesus evidently shared the belief in obsession held by students of Psychism and similar subjects, judging from the words He used in relieving this man from his malady. We advise our students to read the Gospel records in connection with these lessons, in order to follow the subject along the old ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Dweller on the Threshold, which every aspirant has to meet, usually at an early stage of his progress into the unseen worlds. It treats of the causes of obsession of men and animals. It describes how we create our environment and some of the causes of disease, pointing the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... resided about a quarter of a mile from the Yanceyville court house, within plain view of it. His house was veritably his castle, where he had fortified himself. He was besieged at home and was under obsession everywhere; yet he seemed to hold danger ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... it down disgustedly. It was poetry. This man Pett appeared to have a perfect obsession for poetry. One would never have suspected it, to look at him. Jimmy had just resigned himself, after another glance at the shelf, to a bookless vigil, when his eye was caught by a name on the cover of the last in the row so unexpected ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... easy," continued Malcolm Sage. "The outrages were clearly not acts of revenge upon any particular person; for they involved nine different owners. They were obviously the work of someone subject to a mania, or obsession, which gripped him when the moon was ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... was an obsession of his in any case. He had loathed her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be veiled. Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable screens. He was a stickler for ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... temptation it is often best, instead of trying to meet the assault directly, to change the immediate environment, or in some other way to concentrate the mind: for example, to sit down and read a clean novel until the stress of the obsession is past. Physical cleanliness, plenty of healthy exercise in the open air (it is unfortunate that the circumstances of many men's lives do not give adequate opportunity for this), temperance in food, and especially—in the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... obsession with Kelly. He drilled it into me daily. Kelly himself was a settled married man. Of his state we talked often. I asked Kelly the very first day if he ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... coffin, lying straight and still under cool, faintly scented flowers; dead, yet not dead enough to rest. The terrible longing to burst the coffin lid and live—live—made her draw a deep, quick breath as of one choking, just as she had often struggled gaspingly back to realities after this obsession, while the singing went on in the dim ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... other end of the journey. These were so outside her experience that she found it possible to thrust them almost out of sight by saying they would be "all right" in confident tones to herself. But still she knew they were not right, and at times they became a horrible obsession as of something waiting for her round the corner. She tried to imagine herself "getting something," to project herself as sitting down at a desk and writing, or as returning after her work to some pleasantly equipped and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of his wife amazed him. He was not intellectual enough to comprehend fully the deep imaginings of a mighty brain, the obsession work is ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week, and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, always walking in his shadow, when he had one, but ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... true enough, the side I had preached. And was not this side also true in its way? The preacher seemed at first to be referring to my own obsession with the words 'resist not evil,' my following of Tolstoy in my own evangel. He was warm in his commendation. 'And yet,' he said, 'let us remember a just God's resistance to evil. He resists and judges ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... sensibility. The two writers have had the same visions of the anomalies and the horrors of existence; but, where Tchekoff has only a disenchanted smile, Andreyev has stopped, dismayed; the sensation of horror and suffering which springs from his stories has become an obsession with him; it does not penetrate merely the souls of his heroes, but, as in Poe, it penetrates ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and those he met near area railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. "To hang for ever over." It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the needs of his self-love, and put some material means ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... constantly rearing these structures on that queenly site above the finest of the New York lakes, and dreaming of a university worthy of the commonwealth and of the nation. This dream became a sort of obsession. It came upon me during my working hours, in the class-rooms, in rambles along the lake shore, in the evenings, when I paced up and down the walks in front of the college buildings, and saw rising in their ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... as we were walking through the village and could not have looked more horrified if she caught me walking with the Kaiser himself. Mrs. Elliott detests the Methodists and all their works. Father says it is an obsession with her." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... and her lovers was no longer his problem; their passions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearly that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching consequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with the possible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, or whatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he could harbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to pass through that ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... This obsession must be a real nightmare. The people you used to detest are becoming your friends, you like them ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... He had one obsession now—to destroy Adrian Fellowes, his agent for Paul Kruger in the secret places of British policy and in the house of the Partners, as it were. But how should it be done? What should be the means? On the very day in which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... argue over the names of things!" he answered gravely. "I don't care what you call the influence or obsession that threatens this lady. I ask, What do you propose to do about it? Do you believe that Mrs. Wells will die tomorrow night? ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... and departure of the Japanese gunboat, they attacked the little U-shaped beach that lay between two buttresses of the volcano and sloped sharply down to the sea. Twenty-one men, a lad and a woman, they went at the despoiling of it with a sort of obsession, led, rather than driven, by Lund, who worked among the rest of them like ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... considered herself to be, young when she had married him. The contrast between him and herself had been flattering to her vanity. It would be different now. And besides, with the coming of middle age, and the fatal fading of physical attraction, there had come into her a painful obsession. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the floor to gaze at the darkening sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, "subliminal up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Francis' blindness to her own interest I still had a prospective superintendent for the gathering and shipping of the grass: George Thario. Unless his obsession had sent him down into Mississippi or Louisiana, I expected to find him ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... month, until one day in mid-July, when the heat wave had surged to its record height. It just chanced—if there be such a thing as chance—to happen on the day when the girl's craving for a change had become an obsession, ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... head or mind. Subs. 3. In disposition; as all perturbations, evil affection, &c. Or Habits, as Subs. 4. Dotage Frenzy. Madness. Ecstasy. Lycanthropia. Chorus sancti Viti. Hydrophobia. Possession or obsession of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of psychasthenia by Janet. See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who, from the age of 12 or 13 (the epoch of puberty) had been ashamed to eat in public, thinking ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... object without first investigating with a board or stick lest there be a snake under it. It became such an obsession that if anyone did pick up something without finding a snake under it he felt as disappointed as if he had run to a fire and found it out when he ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... killed Morgan on numberless occasions, but a consuming desire for a more adequate revenge than mere death had taken hold of him, and he deferred action until he could contrive some means by which to strike him in a way that he conceived would glut his obsession ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... social sciences an inquiry into the chief literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there are two, one invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, under the matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and neglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up the bulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history there is the purely descriptive part, the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation, feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... observance of it harmless to the Church. Pride contributed to hold him from the degradation of a renegade and apostate priest. And both rested primarily on an unshaken basis of maternal affection, which fell little short of obsession, leaving him without the strength to say, "Woman, what have I to do ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Pastourelles looked at him in astonishment. What an extraordinary obsession! They seemed not to be able to escape from Arthur Welby's name: yet it never cropped up without producing some sign of irritation in this strange young man. Poor Arthur!—who had always shown himself so ready to make friends, whenever the two ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... different kind of mustard, then for beer, without saying a word to Liputin. He was pondering deeply. He was capable of doing two things at once—eating with relish and pondering deeply. Liputin loathed him so intensely at last that he could not tear himself away. It was like a nervous obsession. He counted every morsel of beefsteak that Pyotr Stepanovitch put into his mouth; he loathed him for the way he opened it, for the way he chewed, for the way he smacked his lips over the fat morsels, he loathed ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... legend of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered your first attack of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady fixed the idea into an obsession. Recurrent dreams are a common phenomenon even in healthy persons. In this case, no doubt the exact repetition of the physical sensations of miasmic poisoning tended to reproduce in your mind the same sequence of ideas or semi-delirious imaginings. These were ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the canticle: "At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of thoughts, is almost ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among these poems, ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... It was the voice of a great alienist, a good friend of his, with whom he had discussed the sanity of a man whose crime had shocked the country. He knew that the words were true. Once possessed by an idea the madman will not forget it. It becomes an obsession with him—a part of his existence. In his warped brain a suspicion never dies. A fear will smolder everlastingly. A ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... more often the invaders have gradually thinned their numbers. The Spanish adventurers worked to death the soft inhabitants of the American islands. Many perished by the sword, many in a species of national decline, the wonders of civilization, for good and for bad, working an obsession in their childish imaginations which in time reacted upon the physique of ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... even if he had wanted to. What reason could he give for such a course? He could not explain that he already had a family—with stepchildren, so to speak, who adored him. And what could he say to his mother's obsession, to which she came back again and again—her longing to see her grandchildren before she died? Madame Dupont waited only long enough for George to stammer out a few protestations, and then in the next breath to take them back; after which she proceeded to go ahead with ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... instantaneously banished my lifelong obsession for the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to press back the enemy. For me the film story of the taking of St. Quentin is an obsession. It holds me as a needle to a magnet. And in this section, at the present, I ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... a mythical relative of ours," I explained, shortly. "He was born twenty years ago or so—at least we heard that he was; and we haven't heard anything of him since, except by the dream route, which is not entirely convincing. He is Hephzy's pet obsession. Kindly forget ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct. In Fraternity he showed how the idea of class differences becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of human community, of those common qualities in character which are not skin-deep, like class, but fundamental. In Strife he showed how the idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an abstraction hiding from master and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... and fierce, impotent rage, Serviss watched her descend. It was plain that she was again in the grasp of some soul stronger than herself; and he believed this obsession, close akin to madness, to be due to a living, overmastering magician—to Clarke, whose voice broke the silence. "There is your answer!" he called, and his voice rang out, with triumphant glee. "Her 'guides' have brought her to show you the folly of human interference. She is only an instrument ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... from the light, only the outer leaves know it, and so Elizabeth is pure in her first aspiration; she rejoices as the lark rejoices in the sky, without desiring to possess the sky. Ulick could not explain to himself the obsession of this singing; he was thrall to the sensation of a staid German princess of the tenth century, and the wearing of a large hat with ostrich feathers, and tied with a blue veil, hindered no whit of it. And the tailor-made ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... over in it," I explained, "and wondering what to answer. Of course, Miss Gilder's rather important, and I believe her father's obsession used to be when she was a child, that she'd be kidnapped for ransom. The 'little sprite of a woman' you admire so much, knew the Gilders in those days. She says that the unfortunate baby used to be dragged about ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... her question disturbed him. But it seemed to me that he tried most to avoid giving her a reply that would heighten her obsession. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... I put the man and everything concerning him out of my mind for good and all?" she asked herself more than once. And, whatever the reply to her query, the fact remained that she couldn't; the thought had become something of an obsession. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... had always been his master-passion. He would have sold his soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was in him—he could not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct. As the years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession—yet with every year the material conditions were more and more against it. He felt himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the process in his sister's wasted face. At eighteen she had been pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial, insignificant—she ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... driven the young man with the small chin from the house. This was the pleasantry to which his feeble resistance, his outbursts of anger, of jealousy, or of protest had but added piquancy, the ultimate sting of pleasure to the jaded palate of the performers. This was the obsession under which she lay, the trial and persecution which she had warned him he would find it hard ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. "Don't you see that it's become an obsession with me? That if I could strip myself down to the last lie—only there'd always be another one left under it!—and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don't you ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession, a cake of carmine. I knew of no object in the world of luxury more desirable than this, and its obsession in my waking hours is quite enough, I think, to account for 'carmine' having been the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and yet again. I knew I had a heavy fish. I expected him to break my line. I handled him gingerly. Imagine my amaze to beach a little fish that weighed scarcely more than two pounds! But it was a bonefish—a glistening mother-of-pearl bonefish. Somehow the obsession of these bonefishermen began to be less puzzling to me. Sam saw me catch this bonefish, and he was as amazed as I was at the gameness and speed and strength ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... thoroughly quiet, intelligent, sensible man. Only his conduct has ceased to be swayed by any selfish interest, and there is some tremendous force working in his life that puzzles the physician. It is amusing how the latter tries to shake off his obsession, how he tries to persuade himself that Lazarus had a prolonged epileptic fit, or that he is now mad; how he tries to interest himself once more in the fauna and flora of the country. Impossible! the story of Lazarus ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of various ages and sexes dropped in and told him things about Boomfood—it was Punch first called the stuff "Boomfood"—and afterwards reproduced what they had said as his own original contribution to the Interview. The thing became quite an obsession with Broadbeam, the Popular Humourist. He scented another confounded thing he could not understand, and he fretted dreadfully in his efforts to "laugh the thing down." One saw him in clubs, a great clumsy presence ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... moments when Elizabeth had left him and gone back to Martha's room. By some strange miracle, the strong, sweet, understanding woman had simply taken possession of the friendless child. The thought of her sat now in Martha's heart, an obsession, almost a worship. Perhaps that was why the sense of companionship between the two, notwithstanding certain obvious disparities, seemed ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... minister or ministers, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture or cozenage, and deposition from the ministry." In the same year, licenses were actually granted, as required above, by the Bishop of Chester; and several ministers were duly authorized ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... little except a campaign against these forces; naturally, therefore, the suspicion that Great Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... time of the overthrow of the Tories, she had pushed obsession of her royal mistress even as far as constraint. To the Whigs, who had proscribed her brother, Anne preferred the Tories; but, in spite of these sympathies the favourite had demanded the dismissal of the Ministry, and the Queen had yielded, though not without the ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... in the obsession of the principal European nations that, in order to be great and successful in the world as it is, they must possess military power available for instant aggression on weak nations, as well as for effective defense against ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... studio-and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and anarchy era, the futurist fad, the "free love" cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball period, the psychoanalysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, the arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting mania; and other violent and more or less transient enthusiasms which had possessed the Village during the years he had lived there. Not wholly transient, he admitted. Something of each and all of them had ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... and evening, accompanied by terrible clouds of dust and the blowing of a horn. He thought of long conversations in which he had taken part quite lately in Moscow—conversations in which it had been maintained that one could live without love, that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes—and so on, in the same style; he remembered them and thought mournfully that if he were asked now what love was, he could not ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... money, to enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge more factories, to make more ploughs, and so on, ad infinitum. Where is the sense of it. Such conduct has well been termed money-madness. It is an obsession, a disease, a form of hypnotism, a ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... me personally, was the honor of American citizenship—an ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy; for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... in the little hall, conventional with its waxed wood and its mirror, clicked an electric-light switch and passed through a portiere into the salon, which was the chief room of his abode. A large room, oblong and high-ceilinged, designed by a man with palace architecture that obsession of the Russian architect on the brain. He advanced to it, still with that vagueness of sense, and stopped, ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... pardon me, my lady, if I am blunt ... the late Count was somewhat of a playboy. No. I will make that stronger. He was a satyr, a lecher; he was a man with a sexual obsession. ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... for water was becoming an obsession. He tried not to think about it, but that only made him think about it the more; he would think about not thinking about it and about not thinking about that— and all the time he was growing thirstier. He wondered how long one could live without water; and as the torment grew worse ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... to his future course. Nelson took station between Sardinia and the African coast, resolved not to move till he "knew something positive." In the absence of information, the safety of Naples, Sicily, and Egypt was perhaps not merely an obsession on his part, but a proper professional concern; but it is strange that no inkling should have reached him from the Admiralty or elsewhere that a western movement from Toulon was the only one Napoleon now had in mind. It was April 18 ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his fluency in French, both of which he had learned from his Huguenot professors. The popular man, the popular ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... particular objection to people who take the gilt off the gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this: that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... submission, but a woman who is loved surrenders more fully to the very god of love himself, and so she becomes a slave, and is not alone deprived of her personal liberty, but is even infected in her mental processes by this crafty obsession. The fates work for man, and therefore, she averred, woman must be victorious, for those who dare to war against the gods are already assured of victory: this being the law of life, that only the weak shall conquer. The limit ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... fears and impulses (see Chapter XVIII), for it is useless to try to "reason them out", though it is useful for a brief period each day to try deliberately to turn the mind away from the obsession, by singing or ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Canby recalled how "Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!" sounded plaintively in his ears for days, bothering him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he felt a spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one. It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda Malone to know ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... easy now to understand how some of Efaw Kotee's henchmen could have discovered us, slipped up during the night and overpowered her! What had been a remote possibility yesterday, to-day grew into a certainty. With this obsession torturing me I dashed across the Oasis, finally coming out of the forest at its extreme ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... variations in the current there were during the course of the treatment. In the middle of the process, while the patient was conversing with the doctor, she was suddenly "obsessed." Coincidental with this obsession, the galvanometer showed a tremendous and permanent fluctuation, indicating that the resistance of the body to the current had ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... to go! I've got to go!" He repeated it as one repeats an incantation. "I've got to go!" And he went on methodically assorting and packing. Even at this moment of obsession his ingrained orderliness asserted itself; the things he rejected were laid back in their proper place with, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... he reassured his normal intelligence, because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... had hit that face. Still, anything was better than to leave him under this gruesome obsession! Then, to his consternation, Derek ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... idea is rather that probably it was neither quite pure accident nor pure design. I can imagine Mead meanly pluming himself over the fact that the life of this man who stands in his way, and whom he must cordially dislike, lies in his power. I can imagine the idea becoming an obsession as he dwells on it. A dozen times with his hand on the lever he lets his mind explore the possibilities of a moment's defection. Then one day he pulls the signal off in sheer bravado—and hastily puts it at danger again. He may have done it once or he may have ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... agonized obsession of the possibility of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical powers of resistance. He could not constrain his muscles to rise from the recumbent position against the carcass. He started up, ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... locust blossoms and touching that thatch of yellow hair, and glinting into those blue eyes. "He would call me 'Mamma'!" Then she hummed to herself, "'O Spring!' Oh, I must have him!" Her hope became such an obsession that its irrationality did not strike her. It was so in her mind that she even spoke of it once to Mrs. Houghton. "I know you know?" she said; "Maurice told me ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... wouldn't at first let him see. Poor Bruce! Well, they were linked together. There were Archie, the angel, and Dilly, the pet.... She was twenty-eight and Aylmer forty. He ought not to hold so strong a position in her mind. But he did. Yes, she was in love with him in a way—it was a mania, an obsession. But she would now soon wrestle with it and conquer it. The great charm had been his exclusive devotion—but also his appearance, his figure, his voice. He looked sunburnt and handsome. He was laughing as he talked to the miserable creature (so ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... they had meant her to say: and when she looked at Percy, he seemed supremely ignorant of it all, unconscious of this trap of the existence of which everyone here present was aware, save indeed himself. She would have fought against this weird feeling of obsession, of being a mechanical toy would up to do certain things, but this she could not do; her will appeared paralysed, her tongue even refused ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy |
