"Preoccupation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elements of his occupation are unknown. We have seen that when he wrote Catilina he had neither sat through nor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. The pieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation with Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschlaeger and (if we may guess what Norma was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one of the most far-sighted men of his time, must have ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... black, but he said nothing. Luncheon was promptly served, and done justice to in spite of much preoccupation; for if there is one thing that gives a better appetite than another, it is a Sunday morning's service with a charity sermon to follow. As the guests might not talk on the subject they wanted to talk about, and were in no humour to speak ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... farther preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she turned toward home, the early ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... life of the Hills," she said to herself as she watched him. "He is keener than ever. All this steadfast devotion to club work is the devotion of duty. Now I know the meaning of those long vigils, those walks by the lake in the rain—of his preoccupation. His heart is in Cedar Mountain." And she honoured him all the more for that he had never spoken a ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... day,[34] and he had a reflected glory in being the friend of Winckelmann, who was reputed to have profited by his teaching in art. Under the inspiration of Oeser Goethe's interest in the plastic arts in general, which had received its first impulse at home, became a permanent preoccupation for the remainder of his life. He took regular lessons in drawing from Oeser, made acquaintance with all the collections, public and private, to be found in Leipzig, and even made a secret visit to the galleries in ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... how the whole thing might pass as it did, between the abrupt check of the engine's career, heard by Uncle Moses and his friend, and the two or three minutes later when they emerged through the archway to find Dolly in despair; not from any knowledge of the accident to Dave, for intense preoccupation and a rampart of clay had kept her in happy ignorance of it, but because the water had broken bounds and Noah's flood had come with a vengeance. Questioned as to Dave's whereabouts, she embarked on a lengthy ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and an enjoyment increased by the thought that she was lightening the burden of his business, which she could see pressed more and more. Not that Henderson made any account of his growing occupations, or that any preoccupation was visible except to the eye of love, which is quick to see all moods. These were indeed happy days, full of the brightness of an expanding prosperity and unlimited possibilities of the enjoyment of life. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... me, but he noticed that in my anxiety and preoccupation I had forgotten to have my hat ironed. The hotel is quite full, and I am to sleep in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... full justice has been done to one section of Browning's dramatic work, his portraits of women. The presence of woman is not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as it is in the work of some other poets; woman is to him neither an exclusive preoccupation, nor a continual unrest; but as faithful and vital representations, I do not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite on a level with his portraits of men, and far beyond those of any other English poet of the last three centuries. In some of them, notably in Pompilia, there is a something ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... against the remnants of the Jacobin party, the declared enemies of the order of things which he wished to establish, capable, he thought, of any crimes, and whose works he had had the opportunity of judging. This exclusive preoccupation sometimes turned away his attention from more pressing perils and bolder enemies. A conspiracy to which the police had lent themselves, and which had failed without any of the accomplices daring to put their hands ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... in reading James's, work: "His one preoccupation was the criticism, for his own purpose, of the art of life." The emphasis is on the word art. His purpose is suggested by his own claim to have "that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... body; his hands were beautiful, and the nails did not detract from their beauty. He took the greatest care of them, as in fact of his whole person, without foppishness, however. He often bit his nails slightly, which was a sign of impatience or preoccupation. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the preoccupation of misery, grew very dreary. She had never had any resources in herself except her music, and even if here she had had any opportunity of drawing upon that, what is music but a mockery to a breaking heart? Was music ever born of ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... with a vengeance," said Perkins. "We've had more vacancies in this house to do our cooking and our laundering and our house-work generally than two able-bodied men could shake sticks at. It seems to me that the domestic servant of to-day is fonder of preoccupation than ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... little afraid lest in the white darkness she might miss the little church; once past it, though never so little, and looking back would be in vain. It was a question if she would not pass it even with her best endeavour. In her preoccupation it had never once occurred to Diana to speculate on what she would find at the church, if she reached it; and now she had but one thought, not to miss reaching it. She had some anxious minutes of watching, for her rate of travelling had been slower ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... and preoccupation passed, and she stepped backward again to sit down. She did sit down, but with such terrific force that the stove and nearly everything else in the room threatened to fall with her. She sat helplessly for a bewildered moment, while Jane, with the chair, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... has always been a powerful preoccupation of mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws, vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing of those ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... inches, contented himself with keeping up—his gait an apparently effortless, tireless, and comfortable amble, congruent with bowed shoulders, bended head, introspective eyes, and his aspect in general of patient preoccupation. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... that my eyes opened to the beauties of nature; then it was that the far-famed Rhine found justice in those poor little eyes, which hitherto, from mental preoccupation, or from expectations too high raised, had refused a cordial tribute to its eminent beauty, unless indeed its banks, till after Bonn, are of inferior loveliness. Certain it is, that from this time till my arrival at Coblenz, I thought myself ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... out the plan of entertaining the Bishop, to which she had assented but indifferently. She was secretly bound to another, on whose career she had staked all her happiness. Having thus other interests she evinced to-day the ease of one who hazards nothing, and there was no sign of that preoccupation with housewifely contingencies which so often makes the hostess hardly recognizable as the charming woman who graced a friend's home the day before. In marrying Swithin Lady Constantine had played her card,—recklessly, ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Sordello form a splendid prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its solution. "Soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and transfigures to his eyes. It is as ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... life, but, standing up, he stared at him intently. Garay shrank away and disappeared in the further ranges of the camp. Robert somehow was not afraid. The man would not make such a trial again at so great a risk, and his mind turned back to its preoccupation, the great battle that ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... dinner. Rostov looked inimically at Pierre, first because Pierre appeared to his hussar eyes as a rich civilian, the husband of a beauty, and in a word—an old woman; and secondly because Pierre in his preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not recognized Rostov and had not responded to his greeting. When the Emperor's health was drunk, Pierre, lost in thought, did not ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... that lie before us what will be the result of this constant preoccupation with desire? Will it kill us or save us? Will this trait and our insatiable curiosity interact on each other? That might further eugenics. That might give us a better chance to breed finely than ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... right to know him better,—to know him at least as well as he knew himself. It is significant of Mr. Trollope's temperament—a temperament, as it seems to us, eminently English—that he can have told such a story with so little preoccupation with certain spiritual questions. It is evident that this spiritual reticence, if we may so term it, is not a parti pris; for no fixed principle, save perhaps the one hinted at above, is apparent in the book. It belongs to a species of single-sightedness, by ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... glass. But day by day she returned to his camp with the assiduity of a mother to her nursing child; and by degrees growing bolder with custom, she no longer watched until Professor No No had departed, but moved here and there about his land, secure by reason of his blindness and preoccupation. Like a wild animal to whom one approaches with gentleness and precaution, thus it was with Professor No No in the hands of Salesa. First he saw her only at a distance as she cleaned and swept; then a little closer as she ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and among supernatural or magical conditions. But the forging of the shield and the wonderful house of Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes in Homer, but the consummation of what is always characteristic of him, a constant preoccupation, namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship, resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of the sun. We seem to pass, in reading him, through the treasures of some royal collection; in him the presentation ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... for a long time on his blanket roll, looking at the dribbling smoke from the ends of the charred pinon sticks. So deep was his preoccupation that he did not at first hear the shuffle of feet approaching over the carpet of pine needles; and when the sound came to his consciousness, he wondered merely how Tom Osby had gotten around the camp and come in on that side of the mountain. Then he looked up. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of those brilliant summer days when it is quite impossible to be pessimistic and exceedingly difficult to compass preoccupation. The light breeze bowling over the upland from the sea had just sufficient strength to blow away all mental cobwebs. Also, Christian Vellacott had suddenly given way to one of those feelings which sometimes come to us without apparent reason. The ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the spirit in which these essays have been written by an Englishman of English stock in the narrowest sense, whose national and family instincts of independence and warfare have been transmuted into a preoccupation with the more constructive tasks of life. It is a spirit which may give to these little essays—mostly produced while war was in progress—a certain unity which was not ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... outcome of a millennium of experience with the Crusades and extending to the present century. They are the outcome of preoccupation with material incentives that can be stated in ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... didn't happen," he resumed. "She died, they said, and by all the tests she had been dead two whole days. She died with her hand in mine. I was not trying to hold her back; she had a kind of majestic preoccupation in her going, so that I would not have dared to detain her if I could. You've seen them go, and how they seem to draw those last, long, deep breaths, as if they had no thought in the world but of the work of getting ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... Republican," because the political philosophy which he espoused was precisely that of Eisenhower (Larson is now, 1962, Director of the World Rule of Law Center at Duke University, where his full-time preoccupation is working for repeal of the Connally Reservation, so that the World Court can take jurisdiction over ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... material aspect of our epoch and how it is likely to be regarded in the future, when the paradise of ideal living is regained, a modern writer says: "Will not the intense preoccupation of material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the Crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... I went to the city together. He was very busy looking over papers, and noticing his preoccupation I did not attempt to engage in ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... groups of sexual perversions, urolagnia and coprolagnia, as may be sufficiently seen in this brief summary, are not merely olfactory fetiches. They are, in a larger proportion of cases, dynamic symbols, a preoccupation with physiological acts which, by associations of contiguity and still more of resemblance, have gained the virtue of stimulating in slight cases, and replacing in more extreme cases, the normal preoccupation with the central physiological ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the pair in a manner that at another time must have cost him a rebuke. As it was, I found something friendly, as well as curious, in his fixed frown; and ignorant of his name, though I knew him by sight, wondered both who he was and what was the cause of his preoccupation. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... Halleck's preoccupation, prejudice, or whatever it was that prevented him from giving any satisfaction to Steele soon yielded, as all things sooner or later must, to necessity; but not to the extent of sanctioning the employment of Indians in warfare except as against ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... of Buchanan and John Barclay, as belonging properly to the sphere of humanistic rather than of English letters, we come to the pretty thoroughly Latinized pastorals of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe. Their preoccupation with the humanistic poets is, in Barclay's case at any rate, no less dominant a factor than in that of the regular translators, from whom it is neither very easy nor clearly desirable to distinguish them. Of the professed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... regarded by the world. Moreover, they seem to represent but a single episode in the life of a very sensitive, many-sided nature.[87] There is no other evidence in Shakespeare's work of homosexual instinct such as we may trace throughout Marlowe's, while there is abundant evidence of a constant preoccupation with women. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the mind, even in this carriage to-day, with these animated companions, and in all this tribulation, ruin, and flight, here was a harrying instance: that every minute or two, whatever the soul's outer preoccupation or inner anguish, there would, would, would return, return and return the doggerel words and swaggering old tune of that song abhorred by the gruff General, but which had first awakened the love of so many hundreds of brave men for its brave, gay ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... retelling, it is dominant for good. The child imitates what he hears you say and sees you do, and the way you say and do it, far more closely in the story-hour than in any lesson-period. He is in a more absorbent state, as it were, because there is no preoccupation of effort. Here is the great opportunity of the cultured teacher; here is the appalling opportunity of the careless or ignorant teacher. For the implications of the oral theory of teaching English are evident, concerning the immense importance of the teacher's habit. ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... secretaryship can become the mother-cell of various activities which eventually will branch off—i.e., Welfare Bureau, Information Bureau, etc., etc. This therefore should be our first preoccupation, for on it depend the life and prosperity of our ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... beyond the sandy desert and the tree-crowned slopes, stretched a high cordillera, a curtain drawn between them and the unknown world of the interior. What lay there? Matters of grave interest and preoccupation! For beyond that far, blue maritime defence of Anahuac—they had that moment learned it—there dwelt a mighty potentate and people, steeped with savage soldier-craft, rendered more terrible by the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... of ornamental criticism; with him the appearance of form and colour, acted upon by light, the relative values of which flesh and draperies consist with reference to the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident a preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as to give certain of his works an almost startling air of being modern. But this tendency comes to nothing: the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Manes signified the friendly ancestral ghosts of a Roman household. To them, under the name of Lares, it was the solemn preoccupation of male descendants to offer food and sacrifice and to keep alight the hearth fire which cooked the offerings. Small waxen images of the Manes called Lares, clothed in dogskin, and on feast days crowned with garlands, stood round the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this preoccupation with him throughout the afternoon. It was still in the hinterland of his thoughts when he returned ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... hands I took such special notice of it as might be expected. Upon one corner of the lid I detected a peculiar device scratched slightly upon it, most probably with the sharp point of a steel pen, in such a moment of preoccupation of mind as causes most of us to draw odd lines and caricatured faces upon any piece of paper which may lie under our hand. It was the old revolutionary device of a heart with a dagger piercing it; and I wondered whether it ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... among Brazilian writers, and that their work lacks sincerity and form (1899). Poetry was too often reduced to the love of form while fiction was too closely copied from the French, thus operating to stifle the development of a national dramatic literature. Excessive preoccupation with politics and finance (where have we heard that complaint elsewhere?) still further impeded the rise of a truly ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... aide-de-camp Sulkowsky, so severely wounded at Salahieh that he left his pallet of suffering with the greatest difficulty only. Bonaparte, in his preoccupation forgetting the young Pole's condition, said to him: "Sulkowsky, take fifteen Guides and go see what that ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... matters is acute and universal. The relief and assistance which many boys have experienced from correspondence with me, and the interest which I find in their letters have caused me—spite of the extreme preoccupation of a strenuous life—to issue a special invitation to those who may feel inclined to write ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... the animal. To all the notary's questions, he replied only by monosyllables, passing his fingers every now and then through his bushy brown locks, and twining them in his forked beard, a sure indication with him of preoccupation ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the person of this none too welcome intruder, he saw a very different man from the one upon whom he had just turned his back with so little ceremony; and there appeared to be no good reason for the change. He had not noted in his preoccupation, how George, at sight of his stooping figure, had made a sudden significant movement, and if he had, the pulling of a necktie straight, would have meant nothing to him. But to Sweetwater it meant every thing, and ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... it is my work?" Brenton interrupted banally, for, in his secret heart, he was painfully aware that it was not the church alone which kept him so preoccupied that his preoccupation had come to be an occupation ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Charge it did and in those close quarters there was no room to fence for openings. Instantly the two beasts locked in deadly embrace, each seeking the other's throat. Pan-at-lee watched, taking no advantage of the opportunity to escape which their preoccupation gave her. She watched and waited, for into her savage little brain had come the resolve to pin her faith to this strange creature who had unlocked her heart with those four words—"I am Om-at's friend!" ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... unemotional; but that grief—there's no reason why she should go through life under that additional burden! She is exquisite, young, sure of many happy years with some one else, if she is cured of this preoccupation with that fellow who is gone. Shall I ask permission to try ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the moment when Isagani and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring sweet inanities. Behind them came Dona Victorina with Juanito Pelaez, who was talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating, and appearing to have a larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to say that all first-class men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand it must be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason of their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy estate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced that it is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And on the other hand one must not forget ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of his heart were bestowed on few; for in early life they had never been cultivated, but they were singularly warm, pure, and constant; characterized not by the ardour of passion, but by the constant preoccupation of real affection. He had lost his mother, to whom he was fondly attached, early in life; and with his father, a man of coarse feelings and boisterous manners, he had few sentiments in common. Always feeble in constitution, he was unequal to the sports of the field, and to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... November, and the great preoccupation of most of the Whigs was, of course, the distribution of the offices which they felt belonged to them as the spoils of battle. This demoralizing doctrine had been promulgated by Jackson, and acted upon for so many years ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... recognized this as a home-thrust, and wisely kept silent. She wet her finger-tips, twirled the thread, stopped the wheel, inspected some point in its mechanism with a scowl of intense preoccupation, and then spun on again with a severe concentration of interest as if lovers were of small consequence compared to spinning-wheels. Mother Uberta was a tall, stately woman of fifty, with a comely wrinkled face, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... prospered, and the growth of Summit sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his mind on the business. It worked out—his business preoccupation—much in the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact that he is ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... by the death of Sultan Mahmoud, the last of the determined autocrats of the race of Othman. Action on the part of the European fleet might arise at any moment, owing to these complications and the rivalries thereby excited between England and Russia—great Eastern powers both of them. Our sole preoccupation therefore during our cruise in the Dardanelles was to get our ships into such condition that they might make a good show in the event of anything of the kind occurring. I have related elsewhere how we succeeded, under the powerful will of Admiral Lalande, in reconstituting ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... of her chief characteristics. Although she was a reformer by nature there was no sternness in her composition. Forgetfulness of others there was certainly sometimes, arising from her hopeless absent-mindedness and the preoccupation consequent upon her work; but her whole life was swayed and ruled by ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... woodman South. Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused her parent's death and Winterborne's losses. She walked and thought, and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm. Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock, poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at her hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... preternatural activity of the imagination in certain directions, of which no very obvious explanation is discoverable. Thus, we sometimes find our minds dwelling on some absent friend, without being able to give any reason for this mental preoccupation. And in this way arise strong temporary leanings to illusory perception. It may be said, indeed, that all unwonted activity of the imagination, however it arises, has as its immediate result a temporary mode of expectation, definite or ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... do not set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold 'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from Cambridge. But ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the door and coming toward me, with one of her old smiles, and not a trace of preoccupation about her, "I suppose you expect me to devote myself ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... This preoccupation prevented his noticing the rustle and stir of a new-comer who had crowded up behind him, until he caught the wondering glances of those in front and saw that the Israelite was staring past him, his money forgotten, his eyes beady and sharp, his rat-like teeth showing in ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... know how long I sat there, playing with my gold, running it through my fingers, clinking the coins together in my palm. Benjy came and sniffed at them indifferently, unable to understand his master's preoccupation. He thrust his nose into my face and barked, and said as clearly as with words, Come, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... sufficient for him. His furniture must surely be adjudged to pay him but a coarse flattery in comparison with the subjection, yet the aloofness, of all this wild world. This is no flattery. The grass is lumpy, as Mr. Oscar Wilde remarks with truth: Nature is not man's lacquey, and has no preoccupation about his more commonplace comforts. These he gives himself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things carefully provided by self-love? But when that farouche Nature, who has never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an especially high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place. More than once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the church, so strange and dazzling was his look. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat. What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an aesthetic experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... Yet it seemed impossible that Washington himself could carry the burden much longer. The general government appeared to be on the point of disintegrating, leaving to the separate States the task of defending themselves. Everywhere lassitude, preoccupation with local matters, a disposition to leave the war to the French, a willingness to let other States bear the burdens, replaced the fervour of 1776. In other words, the old colonial habits were reasserting themselves, ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... lest they burst their container. Add to this sub-conscious or unconscious craving for a neutral outlet, the traditional pressure of the Latin inheritance, and we have the greater part of the causes that explain Schnitzler's preoccupation with the themes of love and death. For Schnitzler is first ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... they were not even acquaintances; never a word had passed between them. At intervals they met on the stairway; he on his way to his little dog hospital, she returning from a bit of marketing in the street. At such times they passed each other with averted eyes, pretending a certain preoccupation, suddenly seized with a great embarrassment, the timidity of a second childhood. He went on about his business, disturbed and thoughtful. She hurried up to her tiny room, her curious little false curls shaking with her agitation, the faintest suggestion of a flush coming and going in her ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... his intense preoccupation with present dangers and future contingencies, the thought of Natalie floated now and then vaguely but comfortingly. He had seen her for a moment, before leaving—barely long enough to explain the nature of his mission—but her quick concern, her unvoiced anxiety, had been very pleasant, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... walking very fast, for a vague anxiety about Isabelle had taken possession of him, and he was in haste to get back to her. In his hurry and preoccupation he did not notice Lampourde, who suddenly approached and laid hold of his cloak, which he snatched off, with a quick, strong jerk that broke its fastenings. Without stopping to dispute the cloak with his assailant, whom he mistook at first for an ordinary ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... such circumstances are liable to have, the interested community could not quite make out; but that something more than ordinary was going on, and that the prettiest of all the "Provident ladies" had a certain preoccupation in her blue eyes, was a fact perfectly apparent to that intelligent society. And, indeed, one of the kinder matrons in Prickett's Lane had even ventured so far as to wish Miss Lucy "a 'appy weddin' when the time comes." "And there's to be a sight o' weddings this ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... had a preoccupation now, and he was bent upon doing what he wished to do. Talbot and the two editors rallied him upon his absence of mind, and even Helen, despite her new interest in Wood, looked a little surprised and perhaps a little ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... upbringing of the girl; her own nature, and the suggestive influence of her fiance on a weak and degenerate brain; furthermore, and more directly: the festive mood of the Midsummer Eve; the absence of her father; her physical condition; her preoccupation with the animals; the excitation of the dance; the dusk of the night; the strongly aphrodisiacal influence of the flowers; and lastly the chance forcing the two of them together in a secluded room, to which must be added the ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... in the evening and fluting in the bower, and ever (as she thought) occupied with her image even when farther apart—she had little fault to find with the shabby interior of her home. Now that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared to him that she had the look of a mountain birch stricken by ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs. Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... that all things were now accomplished." It was only when His work, appointed by God and prescribed in Scripture, was completed, that He became sufficiently conscious of His bodily condition to say, "I thirst." Intense mental preoccupation has a tendency to cause the oblivion of bodily wants. Even the excitement of reading a fascinating book may keep at a distance for hours the sense of requiring sleep or food; and it is only when the reader ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... I had forgotten the mystery I had set out to track in the excitement of a new life and my sordid contest with Japp. But now this espionage brought back my old preoccupation. I was being watched because some person or persons thought that I was dangerous. My suspicions fastened on Japp, but I soon gave up that clue. It was my presence in the store that was a danger to him, not my wanderings about the countryside. It might be that he had engineered the espionage ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... might get you into trouble at Red Dog, and your money's a temptation to the evilly disposed. I think you said your address was San Francisco. I shall endeavor to call." It may be stated here that Tennessee had a fine flow of humor, which no business preoccupation ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... first settled upon him; but he seems to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him to write his Biathanatos, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying, was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... before the picture herself when they went in to look at it, but she did not turn round on hearing them. She had Tod in her arms yet, but she seemed to have forgotten his very existence in her preoccupation. And it was scarcely to be wondered at. The picture was only a head,—Mollie's own fresh, drowsy-eyed face standing out in contrast under some folds of dark drapery thrown over the brown hair like a monk's ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered, nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. John didn't matter. John didn't ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... the question, touched with her charming preoccupation, and passing his arm around her ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... unfailing zest in his work, and the majority of his labors had the character of experiments, which, nevertheless, were so guided by experience that they were rarely futile or unremunerative. On themes that accorded with his tastes and pursuits he would often talk earnestly and well, but his silence and preoccupation at other times proved that it is not best to be dominated by one idea, even though it be ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... propitiatingly and therein lay the sting, that he did not even take the trouble to conceal that he was trying to appease her. Their parting sank to the level of the commonplace for he shook hands hastily, and her look of appeal flattened itself ineffectively against his preoccupation. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... small, mocking eye of the lawyer begin to roam over the shelves, and beheld his jaw drop as it sometimes did when he sought to veil his purpose in an air of mild preoccupation, he knew what the next request would be, as well as if the low sounds which left Mr. Black's lips at intervals had been words instead of inarticulate grunts. He was, therefore, prepared when the question ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... glad you have reminded me of that, for I am choosing for life and not for the next ten months or ten years. As I said, then, all this present hurly-burly will soon pass away." Her face darkened, but in his embarrassment and preoccupation he did not perceive it. "I have inherited a very large property, and my mother's affairs are such that I must act wisely, if not always as ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... definitely advocated was, first, free education for the poor, and secondly, some fairer adjustment of the relations to each other of capital and labor. As to the first, authority has already sanctioned her opinion; the second question, if unsettled, has become a first preoccupation with statesmen and philosophers of all ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... conspiracy; Dona Violante and her daughters were incommunicative and in ugly humour. Dona Violante's inflated face at every moment creased into a frown, and her restless, turbid eyes betrayed deep preoccupation. Celia, the elder of the daughters, annoyed by the priest's jests, began to answer violently, cursing everything human and divine with a desperate, picturesque, raging hatred, which caused loud, universal laughter. Irene, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... for so many months the dominant issue; but he answered with reference to the European situation, as if that alone existed. Looking back, it seems to me strange that one should have been so engrossed in any preoccupation as in reality to ignore the vast and imminent possibilities. Yet, after all, I believe my case was typical of many. For us Irish, this was the crucial point, the climax of a struggle which had been intense and continuous now for a period of ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... full that it required an extraordinary effort to hold it there, brimming and suspended, during the awful interval before he could trust his hand to lower it again, untouched, to the table. It was this merciful preoccupation which saved him, kept him from crying out, from losing his hold, from slipping down into the bottomless blackness that gaped for him. As long as the problem of the glass engaged him he felt able to keep his seat, ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... write in fiction was dialogue. But there is surely one thing at least as difficult—a thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more difficult than dialogue; and that is the telling what happened. Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all the violence of our stage—our national undramatic character—is perceptible in the narrative of our literature. The things the usual modern author says are proportionately more energetically produced than those he tells. But Dickens, being simple and dramatic ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... wounded invader, taking advantage of their preoccupation in the final struggle with its mate, had dragged its crippled body over to the instrument enclosure. Dixon staggered toward it as fast as ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation. It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... important among a thousand children—indeed, the sole child of any real importance—had arranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, and had stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her child was indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A pretty sight—the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious engine in motion will ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... old couple so crossly, thus unconsciously making them, as he made the sidewalk, proxy for Mr. Atwater, so to speak, yet the sight of them penetrated his outer layers of preoccupation and had an effect upon him. In the midst of his suffering his imagination paused for a shudder: What miserable old gray shadows those two were! Thank Heaven he and Julia could never be like that! And in the haze that rose before his ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... moral as well as material progress. To a large number of people here, on the other hand, the bolting of food—ten-minute dinners, for instance—and general unconsciousness of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the Union spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the contrary. The rule, he said, never failed. This particular stupidity, if such it were,—and there was at least partial ground for the charge,—was simply another case of a most common form of human dulness of perception, preoccupation with a fixed idea. But were the policy wise or foolish, as regards herself, towards the Americans it was not a wrong, but an injury; and, consequently, what the newly independent people had to do was not to complain, but to strike ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... scene of the crime to waste time in conjecturing the reason of the young man's blushes. Yet the instinct of her sex might have told her the truth, and probably it would have but that it was blunted, or rather not exercised, by reason of her preoccupation. ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... docile body which he had pressed tightly in his arms and explored with his fingers, a woman of whom he might one day come into absolute possession if he succeeded in making himself indispensable to her. There she was, often tired, her face left blank for the nonce by that eager, feverish preoccupation with the unknown things which made Swann suffer; she would push back her hair with both hands; her forehead, her whole face would seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some worthy sentiment such as is to be found in all creatures when, in a moment of rest ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the romantic associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... once can you see them as anything but the creations of a highly talented brain. This is the more strange because Mr. BERESFORD'S people are as a rule so convincingly real. Perhaps to some degree the effect of artifice is due to the author's exclusive preoccupation with his central character. Cecilia's husband, her daughters, the home of her early married life, are shown to us only by the light of her flashing personality; this withdrawn, they simply cease to exist. On the whole, therefore, I should call An Imperfect Mother a highly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... imagination; his appeal to her for help had squared beautifully with her youthful dreams of Deliverance; the fact that he was the first young man who had ever talked to her probably had more than anything else to do with her preoccupation, though she did ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation that we must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance. And great ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... she said, and then they talked of trivial matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she said, in the course of the formal talk: "You ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... recriminations, I resigned myself and continued my performance, though I was a prey to frightful anxiety. While speaking, I fancied I could hear that cadenced yell of the public to which the famous song, "Des lampions, des lampions," was set. Thus, either through preoccupation or a desire to end sooner, I found when my performance was over I had gained five minutes out of the quarter of an hour. Assuredly, it might he called the quarter of ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Vecchia at nightfall had evidently been grossly exaggerated. So confident was Everard that he even whistled a tune as he walked, and planned how he would stroll into the drawing-room on his return to Casa Bianca, slip the necklace from his pocket, and casually mention where he had been. In his preoccupation he did not give any particular heed to the road, or see movement among the dark shadows of a group of prickly pears that ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... inlaid with gold and fist-sized gems. There was a high railing around its edge over which myriad faces peered down. Above it, elevated upon shining cables, were two glowing balls not more than two feet in diameter, and even in his preoccupation with more serious matters, Mike realized the whole craft was suspended from these two balls, that they were its means ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... We had said, How charming it would be to draw money in such an environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter at the window, where after a discreet interval I managed to call from their preoccupation some unoccupied persons within. They had not a very financial air, and I thought them the porters they really were, with some fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they joined in reassuring me, and told me that ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... enough his bodily distress had flown before that of the mind. Pocket would thankfully have changed them back again, for his brain was as clear as his bronchial tubes, its capacity for suffering undimmed by a single physical preoccupation. Between seven and eight the young lady of the house came in with candles and a kind of high-tea on a tray; she also brought a box of d'Auvergne Cigarettes and the latest evening paper, which her uncle thought that Mr. Upton would like to see. That was how the girl addressed the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... the tangle, where you can imagine it hunting about among the roots and fallen leaves for the larvae, caterpillars, spiders, and other insects on which it feeds, it sometimes amuses itself with a simple little song between the hunts. But the bird's indifference, you feel sure, arises from preoccupation rather than rudeness. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... six o'clock in the evening that the carriages containing the grand duke and his family passed through the Porta San Gallo, from which proceeds the road to Bologna, and thence to Vienna. The main preoccupation of the people at that moment was to assure themselves by the evidence of their own senses that the duke and dukelings were really gone. An immense crowd of people assembled round the gate and lined the road immediately outside it. Along the living line thus formed the cortege ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... him who assists them then as a friend, even if thus far he has been a foe, and him who opposes them then as a foe, even if he has thus far been a friend; indeed they allow their real interests to suffer from their absorbing preoccupation in the struggle. ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... and neglect his person, to such a degree that when he was occasionally carried by absolute violence to bathe, or have his body anointed, he used to trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and diagrams in the oil on his body, being in a state of entire preoccupation, and, in the truest sense, divinely possessed with his love and delight in science. His discoveries were numerous and admirable; and he is said to have requested his friends and relations that when he was dead, they would place over his tomb ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... conciousness, vaguely disturbing, then took slow shape and he sat up feeling in the pockets of his coat. The paper was gone; Knapp saying he had taken it was not a dream. For a space he sat, coming to clearer recollection, his partner's voice calling, vaguely heard, its request unheeded in his preoccupation. He gave a mutter of relief, and dropping back settled himself into comfort. The paper was as safe there as in his own pocket and he'd have it again inside of a week. With the first light in his eyes, he lapsed off again for ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a moment later, but so great was his preoccupation that he did not see me. I knew by the exalted look upon his face that I had played and lost. Raphael had awakened from his dreams to love. That instant of mutual enlightenment for two such natures was not alone an ineffaceable ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... because politeness forbids one to suggest that it was suspicious. Soft cheeks became rosy at his approach—partly, perhaps, because soft and dainty toes in satin slippers were trodden upon with maternal emphasis at that moment. Soft eyes looked love into eyes that, alas! only returned preoccupation. There was always room on an engagement card for Paul's name. There was always space in the smallest drawing-room for Paul's person, vast though the latter was. There was—fond mothers conveyed it to him subtly after supper ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... still gives character, ethical and otherwise, to the English tradition. The "Kalevala," which otherwise should seem nearest to the basic qualities of our poetry, is almost unique, as Hearn points out, in the extent of its preoccupation with enchantments and charms, with the magic of words. "Amis and Amile," which otherwise ought to seem more foreign to us, is strangely close in its glorification of friendship; for chivalry left with us at least this one great ethical feeling, that to keep faith in friendship ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... him through the "beautiful, the darling forests of Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania," and on one occasion he says he lost sight of the pack horses carrying his goods and his dollars, in his preoccupation with ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... prosaic lawyer suspect the preoccupation of his pupil during the next quarter of an hour. Sylvia did her best to obey him; and Edna, intent on keeping him in the best of humor, expressed her enjoyment of a situation whose finish she anticipated far more eagerly than did her friend; for ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... of my fellow citizens. For everybody thinks he has at least one motion picture in him. And so, though I had managed to visit studios and meet a few of the players, this was my very first shot at a manuscript actually in production. I took advantage of Kennedy's momentary preoccupation to turn ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... three times in the course of that morning—for she stayed with us all the morning—Fanny Meyrick rallied me on my preoccupation and silence: "He didn't use to be so, Bessie, years ago, I assure you. It's very disagreeable, sir—not an improvement ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... Charles went back to Lancaster Gate, as I could not fail to remark, with a strange air of complete and painful preoccupation. Never before in his life had ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... The preoccupation of my parents threw me more and more upon my own resources. But what are the resources of a solitary child of six? I was never inclined to make friends with servants, nor did our successive maids proffer, so far as I recollect, any advances. Perhaps, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... suffered in silence the chagrin of not being the only preoccupation of the family, as he had been at first. Pep and his wife still looked up to him as their master; Margalida and her brother venerated him as a powerful lord who had come from far away because Iviza was the best place in the world; but in spite ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his annoyance, or to keep himself from temptation, he bent closer over the article he was writing for The Museion. She came and stood beside him, watching him as he worked, still with his air of passionate preoccupation. Presently he found himself drawn against his will ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... father's room, with her mother only a few weeks dead, she reproached herself for her readiness to be deceived, for her preoccupation with her own affairs and the odious Mr. Jenkins, for the exuberance of life which hid from her the dwindling of her mother's, and the fact, now so plain, that when Reginald Mallett died his wife's capacity for struggling was at an end. She had suffered bitterly from the sight of his deterioration ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... should feel as if my country had spoken through the voice of my officer. I should feel proud and honored to be able to serve my country by obeying its commands. No thought of self—no vulgar preoccupation with my own petty vanity could touch my mind at such a moment. To me my officer would not be a mere man: he would be for the moment—whatever his personal frailties—the incarnation ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... is trite to refer to the numerous schemes of philanthropy in which American women have played so prominent a part, to allude to the fact that they have as a body used their leisure to cultivate those arts and graces of life which the preoccupation of man has led him too often to neglect. This chapter may well close with the words of Professor Bryce: "No country seems to owe more to its women than America does, nor to owe to them so much of what is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... o'clock before Charley got away. Out of the brilliantly lighted rooms he walked, stunned with grief, and a little heavy with the wine and punch he had drunk, for in his preoccupation of mind he had forgotten to be as cautious as usual. Following an impulse, he took a car and went directly downtown, and then made his way to Huckleberry Street. He stopped at a saloon door and asked if they could tell him ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... indeed the only piece of real characterization in the book is the delineation of Abe Mollett. This unscrupulous blackmailer is put before us with real art, with something of the loving preoccupation of the hunter for his quarry. Trollope loved a rogue, and in his long portrait gallery there are several really charming ones. He did not, indeed, perceive the aesthetic value of sin—he did not perceive the ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... quite ordinary complaints, like measles, being mysteriously "driven inside." It was a symptom of her low condition that she should worry about her health, which till then had never given her a minute's preoccupation. She consulted "The Family Doctor," and realized the number of diseases she might be suffering from besides suppressed rheumatics—cancer, consumption, kidney disease, diabetes, appendicitis, asthma, arthritis, she seemed to have them all, and in a fit of panic ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... his preoccupation with her was so vivid that it distracted him even while he was teaching that most teachable subject, algebra, and by the end of the school hours the issue was decided and the Career in headlong rout. That afternoon he would go, whatever happened, and see her and speak ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... the great centres of population, the common people are more trustworthy than the corporations, the colleges, or the newspapers. The selfishness, the preoccupation, the anti-republicanism of these, are proverbial. We know that editors are echoes, not leaders, printing what will sell, not what is true. Landor declared that there is a spice of the scoundrel in most literary men. Everybody understands that a corporation's ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... mind! When she had not any immediate and definite work to do, she did nothing, nothing; she did not even dream, not even at night, in bed: she either slept or thought of nothing. She had not the morbid preoccupation with marriage, which poisons the lives of girls who shiver at the thought of dying old maids. When she was asked if she would not like to have a ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... forehead; the weariness she had plead had been no pretence, but was written plainly in the languid gait, the drooped lids, and the dark patches beneath the eyes. By her side walked Charlemagne, and half a yard behind the three puppies trotted sleepily, Charlot lagging last; even in his anxious preoccupation La Mothe noticed it was Charlot, the best beloved of the three because ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... have been expected, from the general's excessive preoccupation with lobbyists and politicians, that the business of the bureau should languish, and so it did. The brunt of it was borne by a few clerks—of whom Barwood was not one—whose tenure of office depended upon efficient work rather than ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... on its shelf, and was about to leave the room when the title of a book lying on the table caught his eyes. It was Dante's "De Monarchia." He began to read it and soon became so absorbed that when the door opened and shut he did not hear. He was aroused from his preoccupation by Montanelli's ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Aminta, however, sat at a window which the moon did not light, and which opened on the court of the villa. She seemed to listen anxiously to some distant noise, perceptible only to her ear. So great was her preoccupation that she paid no attention to Maulear's entrance. Surprised at this statue-like immobility, Maulear approached ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... all the next day; and such was the natural quickness of the young man's mind, that he seemed to learn something every hour, in spite of the preoccupation which, as the reader may imagine, his affection ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... unmarried woman, under pain of being considered immoral or fallen, with the result of producing neurasthenia, impotence, depression, and a great variety of nervous complaints involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, and preoccupation with sexual desires and imaginings. The arbitrary and pernicious dictum of total continence probably also explains the mental inequality of the sexes. Thus Freud believes that the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... become the banker of his clients, and to furnish them money and arms in advance of the subscriptions which he obtained. His first donations were only entering wedges of his later; and, unlike other benefactors, he did not give money to excuse his entire preoccupation in his own pursuits, but as an earnest of the dedication of his heart and hand to the interests of the sufferers,—a pledge kept until the success he wrought and prayed for was consummated. In 1862, on the President's first or preliminary Proclamation ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... You said you'd been a partner. You have. Some day I'm going to tell you how grateful I am." In his preoccupation, he forgot to tie up the blankets; and, one hand on "Red's" shoulder, he let the ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... Hen did not see, but he said it was of no consequence. Then, coming to the edge of the wharf, he shook hands all round, never noticing, in the preoccupation of his mind, the knife that Franci flashed and brandished in his eyes as a parting dramatic effect. He held John's hand long, and seemed to labour for words, but found none; and so they slipped away and left him standing alone on the wharf, a ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards |
