"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such vigour and precision as at this time. It combines a profound and certainly sincere—almost severe—religiosity with a very vigorous practice of some things which the religion it professes does not at all countenance. It has an almost morbidly pronounced simultaneous sense of the joys and the sorrows of human life, the enjoyment of the joys being perfectly frank, and the feeling of the sorrows not in the least sentimental. It unites a great general refinement ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... She was morbidly afraid of him and of his opinion. Caspar Brooke would have been as much hurt as astonished if he knew in what ogre-like light ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... done it months ago and saved me so much woe if you had not been a dear, modest, morbidly conscientious bat," sighed Christie, pleased and proud to learn her power, yet ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... flight could satisfy my instinct, my impulse of self-preservation. I must go, even if blown like a leaf before the gales of heaven; must fly, if even to certainty of destruction. I had felt this necessity once before, be it remembered, but never so stringently, so morbidly as now. I was yielding under the agony, the anxiety incident to my condition; my nervous system, too severely taxed, was breaking down, and it would succumb entirely, unless relief came to me (of this I felt convinced), ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... had finished the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but really always running from himself. Rome was his favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he made a pilgrimage ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Material relief tests us too. If we give it believing that, in itself, it can carry any blessing to the poor, we are taking a grossly material view of human life. If, on the other hand, our knowledge of the mischief done by reckless giving makes us morbidly sceptical of all material assistance, we are losing a valuable tool; for relief at the right time, and given in the right way, may be made an incentive to renewed exertion, and a help to a ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... princes in the temple of God," Bishop Wilson was even morbidly jealous of the authority of the Church, and he resisted that of the State when the civil powers seemed to encroach upon it. More than once he came into collision with the State's highest functionary, the Lieutenant-Governor, representative ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... be an orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair—she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes—almost neurotically. But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only laughed at her, or smiled—for she had been ill a ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... men, hampered by no western prejudice in favour of carrying any plan to completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's protegee and betrothed; yet she ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... reminiscence of this first lady in the land that her marriage was an unhappy one. I think, that as a matter of fact, it was quite the contrary, for subsequent to the wedding each was too busy with other matters to get thinking either morbidly or otherwise on the subject of their individual happiness. They took it as a matter of course, and in the division of labor which the social conditions of the day involved, found too much to occupy them to worry over such unimportant abstractions ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... understood to be caused by inhaling the fumes from the carbolic acid used in the wards. Her rich colour had to Rose's dismay grown poor and pale for a time. She had laboured under the still more trying and more dangerous infliction, when the senses morbidly excited become morbidly acute, and she seemed still to smell the peculiar air of the wards wherever she went. Then Mrs. Hull insisted on Annie's leaving for a few days, and bundled her off, without the power of resistance, to a sister of the matron's, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... smoked and gave no heed, and Bud retorted by eating in silence and in straightway washing his own cup, plate, knife, and fork and wiping clean the side of the table where he always sat. He did not look at Cash, but he felt morbidly that Cash was regarding him with that hateful sneer hidden under his beard. He knew that it was silly to keep that stony silence, but he kept telling himself that if Cash wanted to talk, he had a tongue, and it was not tied. Besides, Cash had registered pretty plainly ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... an intense earnestness in analyzing the state of her own mind, and perhaps rather too much proneness to dwell morbidly upon it, also evinces the tender joy and peace with which she was often blessed by the manifested presence of her Lord. It unfolds an advancement in Christian experience to which her conduct bore living testimony, and proves that in humble reliance on the hope set before her in the gospel, with ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... perceived in him, I could more and more clearly distinguish an under-current of thought and feeling setting towards the faith which Christianity preaches. He said little or nothing, even when I attempted to draw him out on the matter; for he was almost morbidly careful not to seem to know any thing he did not know, or to appear what he was not. The most I could get out of him was—but I had better give a little talk I had with him on one occasion. It was some time before we began to go to Marion's ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... symptoms somewhat like those of ordinary fever, but with this difference: the patient, instead of losing his appetite, has often a morbidly increased desire for food. He complains of severe pains in the back, and more or less headache. Both the head and backache are of a peculiar character: the pains resembling rheumatic pains, the head feeling full and too large, ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that money was an ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... assaults, the prolonged and cruel famine, the final destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror. She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering that her trouble was eating into her boy's ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... ghastly spice of reality that there was about it—against the ludicrous element with which tradition flavors the name of old maid—caught the young woman at unawares, and threw her rudely out of her nervous control. It was a result which could scarcely have happened, had she been less morbidly and unnaturally excited and strained to begin with; as it was, it may have been an outbreak which had long been brewing, and to which Sophie's answer had ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... linger on. 'It was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in Notre Dame de la Breche.' Yes, but what sort of convert is this who is so insensible to substantials, so morbidly sensitive about mere accidentals? We come to the Church for the true faith and the sacraments, not for 'sensations.' In fine, Durtal has not observed the route prescribed by the apologetics for reaching the door of the sheep-fold, but has climbed over in his own way, like a thief and a ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... me of Grassy Spring, bidding me purchase it, I did so, although I dreaded coming to this neighborhood of all others. I had carefully kept everything from Grace, who, while hearing that I was in some way interested in a Florida estate, knew none of the particulars, and I became morbidly jealous lest she or anyone else should hear of Nina's misfortune, or what she was ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... reaction wrote that if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the head of the creek, and anybody'll tell you where Red King lives. There's plenty of moonshining up that way, and if anybody asks your name and your business—tell 'em quick. They won't bother you. And if I were you I wouldn't criticise these people to anybody. They're morbidly sensitive, and you never know when you are giving mortal offense. And, by the way, most offenses are ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... was not morbidly introspective, and by the end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution had waned. At times, however, I actually yearned for someone in whom I could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not find Mark more difficult to deal with than most budding authors, and in this case Mark was morbidly anxious to get the money part of the transaction over as soon as possible; he could not decide whether his conscience would be better or worse satisfied if he insisted on the best pecuniary terms he could obtain, so in his indecision he took ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost upon them. Contempt and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... relinquishment of preferment, position, and influence—the persevering hostility of persons whom they cannot help comparing with him—not permitted even to submit in peace to those irregular censures, to which he seems to have been even morbidly alive, but dragged forth to suffer an oblique and tardy condemnation; called again to account for matters now long ago accounted for; on which a judgment has been pronounced, which, whatever others may think of it, he at least has accepted ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... wealth of his rivals, the ambitious views of her father, and the temptations to which she herself was hourly exposed, kept his jealousies and fears perpetually on the watch. He is supposed, indeed, to have been indebted to self-observation for that portrait of a wayward and morbidly sensitive lover, which he has drawn so strikingly in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... which the moderns have scarcely retained any recollection, were heightened to an incredible degree by the Black Death, which spread boundless devastation and misery over Italy. Men's minds were everywhere morbidly sensitive; and as it happened with individuals whose senses, when they are suffering under anxiety, become more irritable, so that trifles are magnified into objects of great alarm, and slight shocks, which would scarcely affect the spirits when in health, gave rise in them ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... urgent private business." This was clearly one of Hubert's most decisive victories. He had his day's extension solely in order to interview the politician at 6 P.M.; he was to interview the politician solely in order to obtain his day's extension. But Hubert insists morbidly that his was a moral defeat, amounting to utter suppression. He called upon the politician at 6 P.M. to thank him personally. Again he could get no further than the secretary, who, learning that Hubert's train would not depart at all that day, regretted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... I had felt complete master of me the evening before—'a mere boy.' Also he could not fight it because it took him so utterly by surprise. He had been all the time as completely without self-consciousness, as I had been morbidly full of it. His whole thought had been of me. Mine had been of him ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... and his bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the title of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems—the one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of Lionel, drawn ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... "you are a kind brother in all but the constructions you put upon my doings. I think it would be better if there were more difference between our ages. You are a young guardian, over anxious, and often morbidly fanciful about me during your illness. I think we shall be happier together when you no longer feel ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strangely precocious, and a morbidly sensitive child, when it was decided in 1755 to send him to Westminster. The headmaster, Dr. Markham, was a friend of his father's. Westminster, he says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood for paradise. The instruction 'was wretched,' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... pressure of a father and mother who have always oppressed him any more than he can cope physically with a powerful full-grown man. True, he may allow himself to be killed rather than yield, but this is being so morbidly heroic as to come close round again to cowardice; for it is little else than suicide, which is universally condemned ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... to a cure which I have witnessed, has been tuberculosis of the chest or abdominal viscera, or of both at the same time, and still more the vaccine-virus; likewise a tendency to paralysis in persons who were otherwise morbidly affected. Tuberculosis has often been combated by a single dose of a high potence of Sulphur between the doses of Apis, no Apis being given after the Sulphur, as long as the course of the typhoid symptoms would render it safe to postpone this medicine. I have found it much more difficult to conquer ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... impossible," said Sartoris, who had lapsed into his bland manner once more. "I am sensitive of people's remarks and all that kind of thing. I dare say you will think that I am morbidly self-conscious, but then I have not always been a cripple. I was as straight as yourself once. Fancy a little crooked figure like me ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,' said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And, by the way, I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... stood between her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical—a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his broken heart upon ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... close-to, on a wrong bearing, in thick weather, and during a fresh onshore gale. Going below to speak to him soon after, I was unlucky enough to catch my captain in the very act of hasty cork-drawing. The sight, I may say, gave me an awful scare. I was well aware of the morbidly sensitive nature of the man. Fortunately, I managed to draw back unseen, and, taking care to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the foot of the cabin stairs, I made my second entry. But for this unexpected glimpse, no act of his during ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of chumber spaniels, and fifty pounds for a memorial ring. Mr. Wendover could not find fault with a will which left his wife seven hundred a year; but he felt that his position was diminished by his father-in-law's death, and he was morbidly jealous of the boy, who had absorbed so much of his wife's care and affection from the first hour of their coming ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... me. It seemed as though a fear which had hitherto stood vague and shadowy in the background, began now to advance towards me, gathering more distinctness as it approached. There was to me something morbidly terrible about the apparition of this man at such a momentous crisis in my brother's life, and I at once recognised that unknown form as being the shadow which was gradually stealing between John and myself. Though ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... morbidly far-sighted. Mr. Carleton had a very large tenantry around him and depending upon him, in bettering whose condition, if he had but known it, all those energies might have found full play. It never entered into his head. He abhorred business,—the detail of business; and his fastidious taste ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... moments, Dr. Eben, in his heart, thought undevoutly of ministers. "A bruised reed, he will not break," came to his mind, often as he looked at this anguish-stricken woman, watching her only child's suffering, and morbidly believing that it was the direct result of her own sin. But Dr. Eben found little time to spare for his ministrations to Sally, when Hetty was in such distress. He had never seen any thing like it. She ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... approaches it, or which it takes into itself, and, if it cannot assimilate, at least makes it indifferent. In case of any great excess, indeed, it must yield to the elements in spite of all resistance, as the many endemic diseases and the effects of brandy convince us. Could we, without being morbidly anxious, keep watch over ourselves as to what operates favorably or unfavorably upon us in our complicated civil and social life, and would we leave off what is actually pleasant to us as an enjoyment, for the sake of the evil consequences, we should thus know how to remove ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... indeed, think of it yourself: I was kept by impecuniosity in the country, which I hated; I was not fitted for managing my land, nor for the public service, nor for literature, nor anything; my neighbours I didn't care for, and books I loathed; as for the mawkish and morbidly sentimental young ladies who shake their curls and feverishly harp on the word "life," I had ceased to have any attraction for them ever since I gave up ranting and gushing; complete solitude I could not face.... I began—what ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Mr. Nixon, the solicitor, asked him to spend a Sunday at Hampstead, and Philip passed a happy day with a set of exuberant strangers; he ate and drank a great deal, took a walk on the heath, and came away with a general invitation to come again whenever he liked; but he was morbidly afraid of being in the way, so waited for a formal invitation. Naturally enough it never came, for with numbers of friends of their own the Nixons did not think of the lonely, silent boy whose claim upon their hospitality was so small. So on Sundays he got up late and took a walk along ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... self- enfolded. He came into power at a time when the fortunes of the Liberal party were at their lowest; and this, coupled with his peculiar sensibility, put a severe strain upon him. Some people thought that he was a man of genius, morbidly sensitive shrinking from public life and the Press, cursed with insufficient ambition, sudden, baffling, complex and charming. Others thought that he was a man irresistible to his friends and terrible to his enemies, dreaming of Empire, besought by kings and armies to put countries and ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... stinging repartee which would send her, flushed and biting her lip, to have her laugh out in private. But Langham for a long time was defenceless. Many of her friends in his opinion were simply pathological curiosities—their vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so morbidly developed. He felt a doctor's interest in them coupled with more than a doctor's scepticism as to all they had to say about themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume a quasi-intimacy ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... boy be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... stationed himself alongside the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious—that was ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Tyson was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint; this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an insignificant episode in the long roll of his epic past. Now for the first time for years it was recalled to him ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or his head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an active—though far from morbidly sentimental—compassion for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another Englishman, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that his friend was perfectly well, Dr. Smith soon discontinued his visits, and, not being called upon, never saw him again. But just at this time the poet's condition got rapidly worse, and the first tokens of insanity began to show themselves. Morbidly occupied with one set of thoughts, he had now lost the consciousness of his own identity, and addressed his wife and children as strangers. When the former first heard her husband speaking of 'John Clare' as a ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... exceptional qualities were required. The conjugal complement to a Nausicaa must be a man of ponderous presence and statuesque demeanor—not a shrill and nervous modern like himself, with second-rate physique, and a morbidly active intellect. No, it mattered little what he did or left undone. The world would be no better and no worse for anything he could do. Very likely, in the arms of this chair where he was now sitting, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... him about it, though they sat so near each other. After the foolish, proud manner of sensitive boys, Walter and Kenrick, though each liked the other none the less, were not on speaking terms. Walter, less morbidly proud than Kenrick, would not have suffered this silly alienation to continue had not his attention been occupied by other troubles. Neither of them, therefore, liked to be the first to break the ice, and now in ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... her own personal regrets. She had no reason to look upon marriage as a state of perfect felicity. Her own had been unhappy. She knew the dark phantom that haunted our wedded hours; and what if the same hereditary curse should cling to Edith,—who might become morbidly sensitive on account of her ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... desultory, more or less speculative conversation anent the fatality, until they grew morbidly weary of contemplating the poor broken body. Yorke slid off the ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... subject than previous authors. He understands by pseudologia phantastica not merely the bare habit of telling fantastic lies, and what they bring forth, but rather the yielding up of consciousness of reality in the presence of the morbidly fantastic wish in its widest consequences. Since the wish in order to exist is not permitted to lose entirely the conscious presentation of what it hopes for, so memory and recognition of reality emerge disconnected in consciousness, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... He remained in this shelter for about a year, concealed in the guise of a knight. His chief employment was his translation of the Scriptures into his native language. He composed various treatises besides, and injured his health by sedentary habits and hard study. His imagination became morbidly excited, and he thought he saw and heard the Evil One mocking him while engaged in his literary tasks; the blot from the inkstand that he hurled at him is still shown on the wall of his chamber. The subject of the personality and presence of Satan was a familiar one with Luther, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... with fourteen crowned heads, read a most interesting report. The writer had then to address the meeting. After him three other gentlemen spoke. There was no collection! Strange to say, that, with all their revivals, our friends in America seem to be morbidly afraid of doing anything under the influence of excitement. Hence the addresses on occasions like this are generally stiff and studied, half-an-hour orations. This feeling prevents their turning the voluntary principle, in the support of their religious societies, to so good an account ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present over-managed, morbidly organised institutions, with ordered-around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with, instead of superintendents. We are going to have superintendents who will desire such ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Bellister sat on, "glooming" morbidly to himself. Bitter feud existed between him and a neighbouring baron. Had he not cause to distrust that baron, and to believe that means neither fair nor honourable might be employed by his enemy to wipe out the feud? What if ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy of hard-hitting, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... return to Fanny,—she grew up, not fierce, sullen, nor yet hypocritical, but timid and distrustful, miserably sensitive and anxious, and morbidly conscientious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the boy saw her eyes travelling him down from head to foot: somehow he was reminded of the way Marjorie had looked at him back in the mountains and somehow he felt that the change that he resented in Mavis went deeper than her clothes. The morbidly sensitive spirit of the mountaineer in him was hurt, the chasm yawned instead of closing, and all he ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... the last days of the old regime,—the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English. Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in friendship and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companionship of his loom, in which his muscles moved "with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Moulines was, like more than one of Sterne's efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of its birth. These abortive efforts are no natural growth of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from certain morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which he forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command; but it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... little person in her way, and she already surmised that Richard Sefton was not at ease in his stepmother's presence. She found out afterward that this was the case; that in spite of his strength and manhood, he was morbidly sensitive of her opinion, and was never so conscious of his defects as when he was presiding at his own table, or playing the part of host in her drawing-room, under her critical eye. And yet Richard ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... intellectual people, to take part in the competition of their life. For the most part these were men and women of intense personalities, absorbed in their own ideas, keenly critical, and not very merciful to any sort of weakness. And Corydon was morbidly aware of her own lack of accomplishments, and acutely sensitive as to what others thought about her. A strange figure she must have made in any one's drawing-room—with the old dress she had fixed up, and the lace-collar she had borrowed for the occasion, and the sad face with the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... tid-bits, setting forth Carlyle's querulousness, arrogance, and domestic storms with Mrs. Carlyle. Behold the man! exclaims Mr. Watkinson. Begging his pardon, it is not the man at all. Carlyle was morbidly sensitive by nature, he suffered horribly from dyspepsia, and intense literary labor, still further deranging his nerves, made him terribly irritable. But he had a fine side to his nature, and even a sunny side. Friends like ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... the news of him was not favourable. Those differences with his father, which had been weighing almost morbidly upon his high-strung nature, were renewed. By mid-October his letters told of failing health. He came to London, and instead of presenting himself, as had been proposed, to be examined for admission to one of the London Inns of Court, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his father Huayna Capac." 23 From this day a sadness seemed to take possession of him, as he looked with doubt and undefined dread to the future. Thus it is, that, in seasons of danger, the mind, like the senses, becomes morbidly acute in its perceptions; and the least departure from the regular course of nature, that would have passed unheeded in ordinary times, to the superstitious eye seems pregnant with meaning, as in some way or other connected with the destiny ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... a change had taken place in Lucille—she was anxious and excited, and appeared morbidly and passionately eager to share in those amusements which before she had desired ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... L'Homme-dieu, but I did like her. She was so different from me, and, when I first knew her, so gay and so full of conversation. But after awhile she changed and was either feverishly cheerful or morbidly sad, so that my visits caused me more pain than pleasure. The reason for these changes in her was patent to everybody. Though her husband was a handsome man, he was as unprincipled as he was unfortunate. He gambled. This she once ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... wishing that the wedding were over, morbidly dreading the heat and crush and excitement which she knew awaited her and to which ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive and unstable insane mind; an age in which he who strikes a needless shackle from human form or heart, or removes a cause of human torture, psychical or physical, is regarded as a greater moral ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... friend, I fear you are morbidly sensitive I used to know your father, and I always esteemed him as a noble man—one whose honor ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... silks and beautiful paintings and clean white linen and flowers; I love good food, good clothes, good wine, good music, good sermons, and good books. All—all it is within me to love and to desire mightily. How I want those things—not morbidly—but because I have five good senses and God knows how many more; because I was ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... girl or woman is tiresome and unpleasant as a companion, but the morbidly discontented woman is far worse. Perhaps you have met her, with her eternal complaint of the ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... newsboy's attack. Even the newsboy, inured to the short words of an unfriendly world, and usually quite indifferent thereto, was impressed by the asperity of the suggestion and moved somewhat hastily on. Possibly his cold, wet little existence had been rendered morbidly susceptible by the general good feeling of the hour, one lady having even spontaneously given him ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... Macaulay tells us, hardly feels the scalping-knife as he shouts his death song. The soldier in the excitement of battle is often bereft of all sense of pain. On the other hand, the patient who is morbidly self-conscious becomes oblivious of his surroundings while he suffers intensely from sensations which are usually not appreciated at all. Self-conscious children will complain much of breathlessness and a sense of suffocation, ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... been introduced new influences of a more or less general character; such as a more vigorous or a more relaxed police; some temporary excitement from political or religious causes; or some incident generally notorious, of a nature to act morbidly on the imagination. That in spite of these unavoidable imperfections in the data, there should be so very trifling a margin of variation in the annual results, is a brilliant continuation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... these interviews. I might possibly have done so had they come earlier, while yet the freedom of easier days and of sunshine was in my veins. But my mean street period had affected me materially. It had made me morbidly self-conscious, and suspiciously alive to the least hint of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... peace. Indeed, the one hope of the new Ministry, and of the king who supported it as the only alternative to Catholic Emancipation, was bound up with the cause of peace. In the next chapter it will appear how disastrous were the results of that strange political situation, when a morbidly conscientious king clung to the weak Addington, and jeopardised the interests of Britain, rather than accept a strong Minister and a measure of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... that it was really the feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune—you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... morbidly analyze, not even to feel remorse. He put the past behind him easily. Before him small grasshoppers arose in clapping, buzzing clouds. Prairie dogs squeaked and frisked and dived needlessly into their dens. Hawks sailed like kites in the glorious, golden, hazy air, and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... knitting. A sock for Leander it was—one of many of all sizes. She remembered the first that she had measured for the bare pink toes which he had brought there, forlorn candidates for the comfortable integuments in which they were presently encased, and how she had morbidly felt that every stitch she took was a renunciation of her own children, since a stranger was honored in their place. The tears came into her eyes. It was only this afternoon that she had experienced a pang of self-reproach to ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say—I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John appealed to Christ. He did exactly what ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... imagination loves to rest upon its salient angles and projecting lines. When we commenced her sketch, our sole design was to describe her influence on the minds of others, and to make her a warning beacon to the mariners of life, that they might avoid the shoals on which the peace of so many morbidly sensitive minds have been wrecked. But we found a fascination in the subject which we could not resist. A heart naturally warm, defrauded of all natural objects on which to expend its living fervor, a mind naturally strong confined within close and narrow limits, an energy concentrated ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... hands." He was so morbidly shy from living alone in his dreamland that he could not open a letter without trembling. He would often rally from his purposeless life, and resolve to redeem himself from the oblivion he saw staring him in the face; but, like Mackintosh, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... almost unpleasantly fast when, a moment later, she moved on quietly straight toward him. She looked what she was, a lady of station, and her companion's attire suggested the same thing, while, though Weston now wore city clothes, he was morbidly afraid that the stamp of defeat and failure was upon him. Much as he had longed for her it would almost have been a relief to him if she had passed. Ida, however, did nothing of the kind. She stopped and held out her hand while she looked ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... is something really pathetic about the Eugenist's neglect of the aristocrat and his family affairs. People still talk about the pride of pedigree; but it strikes me as the one point on which the aristocrats are almost morbidly modest. We should be learned Eugenists if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are of their hairdressing. We see the modern aristocrat in the most human poses in the illustrated papers, playing with his dog or parrot—nay, we see him playing with his ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared! You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in working order. We tried them. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... world.[186] Yet to teach children what some of their parents consider as too sacred to be taught, and others as too disgusting, and to begin this teaching at an age when the children, having already imbibed these parental notions, are old enough to be morbidly curious and prurient, is to open the way to a complicated series of social reactions which demand ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... one carefully and filed it away. He had hoped for this, but the results had far exceeded his expectations, and he found himself bewildered rather than assisted by the response from nameless individuals who were morbidly ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... in it, it is incapable from its mere bulk, as is commonly but erroneously supposed, of producing this effect." "Nor does the serous discharge always take place into the abdomen, in every case where these organs are morbidly affected, but only where their peritoneal covering participates in the disease; for the chronic inflammation in those cases, where it occasions ascites, does so by extending from the cellular tissue of the internal structure of the organ, to the serous tissue investing in it." "When ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... its influence, however, is felt by only a set of the elite, and its adherents are scattered through every age and every country. Mlle. de Scudery was a perfect representative of that type, but healthy and normal rather than morbidly aesthetic. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his dream fulfilled; and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps, to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes—that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... unselfish than Mr. Mackenzie. He would rather suffer extreme hardship than accept a doubtful favour. Even in regard to kindly and reasonable offers of help, he was morbidly sensitive (as mentioned on page 298 of his "Life and Times"); and yet, looking at the conduct of many men in like circumstances, he deserved commendation rather than censure for his ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... runs for miles on the lip of the glen. It was a grey day, with snow waiting in cloud-banks in the north sky and a thin wind whistling through the pines. The scene matched his humour. He was in love for the moment with the stony and stormy in life. He hungered morbidly for ill-fortune, something to stamp out the ease in his soul, and weld him into the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... in all her fiction, gives it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed, at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman's worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious; she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration, communion of souls, these were to her ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... to the eye itself, the highest authority in England, Mr. Bowman, has been so kind as to give me the following remarks on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... which he followed him with his eye, when an interval of peace and comparative happiness had set childhood's spirit free, and lent a degree of graceful gayety to all his motions,—I saw the brimming measure of the father's love. Could it be but his morbidly repellant pride, his jealous guarding of the domestic privacies, his vigilant pacing up and down forever before the close-drawn curtain of the heart?—was there no Bluebeard's chamber there? No! Pride was all the matter,—pride was the Spartan fox that tore the vitals of Pintal, while he but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... talked of nothing but Enid and her troubles. Even as they rode in the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... feeling that Miss Seymour was no more truly in holiday spirits than was he that he turned toward her, as toward a spot of shadow amid too fervid sunshine. It would be more congenial, drifting with her to the languid measure of this very modern, morbidly emotional waltz, knowing that, whatever their light talk, they alike felt life to be a sad affair, than going through livelier evolutions with a young person who would secretly desire him to flatter and flirt. An ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... was to be told and to be respected, and that nothing was more wicked or more ungentlemanly than a broken promise. He learned very early to do as he was told, and not to do, under any consideration, what he had said he would not do. Upon this last point he was almost morbidly conscientious, although once, literally, he "beat about the bush." His aunt Margaret, always devoted to plants and to flowers, had, on the back stoop of his grandfather's house, a little grove of orange and lemon trees, in pots. Some of these were usually ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... her father," he said. "I give Estelle best. Nothing can spoil her, because she's so utterly uninterested in herself. Another thing: she's so fair—almost morbidly fair. The only thing that makes her savage is injustice. If she sees an injustice, she won't leave it alone if it's in her power to alter it. That's her father in her. What he calls 'sporting,' she calls 'justice.' And, of course, the essence ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never robust, and always reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and more, he ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating from within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely irresolute. It could be foreseen that morally he was of that sort who avoid evil through good taste, lack ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... break the serpent-folds that were tightening around him; but the fire that had been kindled seemed to be quenchless. An uncontrolled evil passion is hellfire. He writhed in its burnings in an agony that could be understood only by such as knew how almost morbidly sensitive was his nature, and how vital was his conscience. I became a pastor in the town where he lived, and renewed my association with him as far as I could. But there was a constraint unlike the old ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... large fat rat ran over the leaf. (By this time a special cascade of rats was rolling down my back, and the whole of my small listening person was overrun with them. At intervals ever since, I have been morbidly afraid of my own pocket, lest my exploring hand should find a specimen or two of those vermin ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... the letter with him in his pocket throughout the next morning, and in the course of the day he called upon Lady Milborough. Though he was obstinately bent on acting in accordance with his own views, yet he was morbidly desirous of discussing the grievousness of his position with his friends. He went to Lady Milborough, asking for her advice, but desirous simply of being encouraged by her to do that which he was resolved to do ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the character and appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly nervous and impressionable, disposed to take a dark view of everything, and bore no resemblance to the type of hero which Hortense had imagined. Moreover, the unhappy husband endured a hidden anguish which he had to conceal from every one and which tortured his heart; he imagined that his ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... thrown on my hands to entertain. So of course I had to renounce all thoughts of visiting the sloop. I should not have dared to go there anyway, with Mr. Shaw and the captain able more or less to overlook my motions from the beach, for I was quite morbidly afraid of attracting attention to the derelict. It seemed to me a happy miracle that no one but myself had taken any interest in her, or been inspired to ask by what chance so small a boat had come to be wrecked upon these desolate shores. Fortunately in her position ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... developed, and which was nearly ready to moult, there were, within the filamentary appendages on the prosoma, small irregular balls of calcareous matter, appearing to me as if calcareous matter had been morbidly excreted, and not like a provision ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... innumerable household, inestimable jewels and furniture. All the sap and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated and unwholesome excrescence. The nation was withered. The court was morbidly flourishing. Yet it does not appear that the associations which attached the people to the monarchy, had lost strength during his reign. He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests; but he had struck their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We don't care a rap about the truth now, so long as they'll give us a thrill. We must have onions. We used to demand of the novelist a love-story; now he must be morbidly sexual and grimly sensational. Our grandfathers went to a magic lantern entertainment and thought it a furious frolic. And on Sundays they prayed. 'From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... grotto at Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus of The Suppliants we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me on like as the liquid ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and son. The youth knew perfectly the faces of both; and as he stopped short, gazing at this stranger with wide-open eyes, he knew in a moment that Roger's malevolent foe was nigh at hand, and that the sensitive and morbidly acute faculties of the boy had warned him of the fact, when he could by no possibility have known it ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... went off en masse to Switzerland for July and August. Darsie morbidly told herself that they were anxious to avoid the depression of her own presence during the chief holiday of the year. She was, as she expressed it, "too proud to say so," but the inward soreness made her so cold and abrupt in manner that her friends had good cause ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... some form of control. It is thought with the friction of worry which injures, and unless we can secure an absence of this, it is vain to hope for help by the method I am describing. The man harassed by business anxieties, the woman with morbidly-developed or ungoverned maternal instincts, will only illustrate the causes of failure. Perhaps in all dubious cases Dr. Playfair's rule is not a bad one, to consider, and to let the patient consider, this mode ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... anecdotes—one is tempted to call them the stock stories of the boyhood of any great composer. In infancy Chopin could not hear music without crying. Mozart was morbidly sensitive to the tones of a trumpet. Later the Polish lad sported familiarly with his talents, for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father's school. Another story ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... days of its establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist fight. A ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Burr, whose term as Vice-President of the United States had expired, became unpopular because of his criticisms of the administration of President Jefferson, and because of his having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Being ambitious, Burr was morbidly restless because of the turn his fortunes had taken. He visited Kentucky and different points between New Orleans and St. Louis. He succeeded in drawing into his plans one Blennerhassett, a wealthy man who lived on a beautiful ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank
... there is an irresistible tendency in the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past. The urgent needs of the present, the fast-crowding and momentous interests of the future appear to be forgotten. Duty for to-day, hope for to-morrow, are ideas which seem oblivious to even leading minds among us. Enter our schools, and the theme which ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the personages in ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... is," he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... laughter and tears; between joyful carelessness and melancholy reverie; between daring improvidence and serious, incessant anticipation of the future: between a nature exquisitely delicate, elevated, poetic, morbidly sensitive, incurably wounded by remorse, and a disposition gay, lively, happy, unreflective, although good and compassionate; for, far from being selfish, Miss Dimpleton only cared for the griefs of others; with them she sympathized entirely, devoting herself, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... beneath her eyelids.—How was it, Susan, that you talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence had you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought gayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your sunshine and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you do not understand me from what I have already said, the further you follow the wider you will wander. The truth, in short, is this: I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics. But if I tell you that I have chosen ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... like that of Byron, the most effectual means of success, Mr. Millingen tried, as he himself tells us, all that reasoning and persuasion could suggest towards attaining his object. But his efforts were fruitless:—Lord Byron, who had now become morbidly irritable, replied angrily, but still with all his accustomed acuteness and spirit, to the physician's observations. Of all his prejudices, he declared, the strongest was that against bleeding. His mother had obtained from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... recommended a course of metaphysical study to a young lady, who, from physical weakness and other causes, had become morbidly nervous and introspective. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... favoured, at least equally devoted, lovers of the wild and beautiful in nature; and many a moonlight walk did we take together this winter among the woods and rocks of the hill. It was once said of Thomson, by one who was himself not at all morbidly poetic in his feelings, that "he could not have viewed two candles burning but with a poetical eye." It might at least be said of my friend, that he never saw a piece of fine or striking scenery without being deeply moved by it. As for the mere candles, if placed ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... sort of nullity, which more and more terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. She became morbidly sensitive, depressed, apprehensive. It was anguish to her when she saw one rook slowly flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill-omen. And the foreboding became so black and so powerful in her, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... well-disposed to me; with me he felt at ease, with me he used to talk—in my presence he ventured to leave the strange pedestal on which he had been placed either by his own efforts or by chance. Agonisingly, morbidly vain as he was, yet he was probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but I, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread of saying something ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... think so altogether. The Kaiser has scattered too much. In an age of specialists on many subjects he speaks like an amateur. He is always the hero, and often the victim, of his own imagination; like a star actor, he cannot bear to be outshone; he is morbidly, almost pruriently, conscious of the effect he is producing. And on all matters of intellect and taste his influence makes for blatant mediocrity. But he is not meretricious; at bottom he is not by any means as superficial and insincere as he often seems. He is one of ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... it into her head that she was a burden to me and that I would like to get rid of her. Two or three days ago she got up while I was out, and began working in the house—I suppose as a return for my keeping her. She's morbidly sensitive. When I distinctly forbade her she declared that she wouldn't owe me anything and meant to go away. I knew that she might very likely do it in spite of her being ill, so I stayed at home. At midday to-day I just went down to fetch ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... detected in a first glance is a sufficient apology for a second,—not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may inoffensively yield to a passing image. It is astonishing how morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest demonstration of this kind. When a lady walks the streets, she leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... been doubted if they may take precedence of the legislative counsellors. But the rights of rank are best determined by the heralds, and I have only to remark, that it is almost inconceivable that such things should have so morbidly affected the sensibility of Lord Byron; yet they certainly did so, and even to a ridiculous degree. On one occasion, when he lodged in St James's Street, I recollect him rating the footman for using a double knock in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... himself a university professor,[117] and had something of Luis de Leon's fearlessness.[118] Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was a man of a very different type: pedantically attached to the letter of the law, morbidly scrupulous on points of discipline. There seems to be no touch of burlesque intention in Luis de Leon's presentment of the man. According to Luis de Leon, Zuniga (alias Rodriguez) was half-crazed with vanity, much given to boasting of the esteem in which he was held at the Papal ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... lived for ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... impressed by what he had heard. The longer he had listened to her, the more irresistibly the conviction of the woman's wickedness had forced itself on him. He tried vainly to think of her as a person to be pitied—a person with a morbidly sensitive imagination, conscious of the capacities for evil which lie dormant in us all, and striving earnestly to open her heart to the counter-influence of her own better nature; the effort was beyond him. A perverse instinct in him said, as if in words, Beware how ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... will return to her people." He sighed deeply. "It was all very foolish to come out here. But it was natural. She was stricken, and sensitive—so morbidly sensitive—to pity, to gossip. Then, too, a romantic notion about the healing power of the mountains was in her thought. She wished to go where no one knew her—where she could live the simple life and regain serenity and health. ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... how to say it," she began slowly, "but you seem to me to be feeling rather morbidly about the virtue of personal discomfort. If you will pardon me, I can't think that you really believe it to be any merit in the sight of heaven that a man should ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... replied Mr. Denham, "and my wife is almost morbidly quick to take alarm about her. In fact, we both are. Do you know how the trains run to Geneva? Is there anything ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... very clever; half of her acquaintances, even the men, did not know how very "gay" she was. Only those—like Vandover—who knew her best, knew her for what she was, for Ida was morbidly careful of appearances, and as jealous of her reputation as ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... might have outlined the case to a consulting physician. The boy had been born in the trouble of her early exile; he could not help his temperament. He had countless virtues; she extolled him in beaming parentheses. But he had too much imagination and too little balance. He was morbidly wrapped up in the whole subject of romantic crime, and no less than possessed with the personality of this ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... to burn them and complain that he was neglected. Studying the man as he reveals himself at this time in his Note-Books (published in a garbled edition by the Hawthorne family), one has the impression that he was a shy, sensitive genius, almost morbidly afraid of the world. From a distance he sent out his stories as "feelers", when these were ignored he shrank into ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... at the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to be the highest element of character. But there is no tyranny more complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support. The most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heightening their value for his opinion—feel an additional triumph in conquering the reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot |
