"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 on ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of refusal. Often he was paralysed with pain, sometimes he would morbidly allow his thoughts to dwell on the moment when he would hear her say, it was impossible, that she did not and could not love him. The young grey light of the eyes would be fixed upon him; she would speak her sorrow, and her thin hands would hang by her side ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... a complete stranger, I should not have insisted. One of the best singers I ever knew was so morbidly shy that on the platform she was an absolute failure. Her vocal chords became so contracted that she sang quite out of tune, and yet among ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, point d'honneur ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... grand fury, but their refuge answered every purpose, and not a thread of Edith's clothes was wetted. Darkness came on prematurely, and, as the reader already knows, the storm continued nearly through the entire night. Fully, and almost morbidly alive to the danger that ever menaced them, Lewis kept his station at the mouth or entrance of their shelter until daylight, not willing that for a moment a free entrance to any foe ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... to complaints about her food and to helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior being she knows herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants should, by some mistake, treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if the patient gives more trouble than she had expected, intensely injured and disagreeable if he is made so courageous by his wretchedness as to wake her during ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... anything by 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
... the flood-gates of feeling are loosened, and the full tide of mutual affection gushes forth uncontrolled. It is, however, at this moment—the agony-point to the embarrassed lover, who "doats yet doubts"—whose suppressed feelings render him morbidly sensitive—that a lady should be especially careful lest any show of either prudery or coquetry on her part should lose to her for ever the object of her choice. True love is generally delicate and timid, and may ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... 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 so it is, alas! with natures unsullied by the world, with the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... harmonized. We were both of us, if not alike 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 ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... bodily sensations, even extreme pain, may pass altogether unnoticed. The Mohawk, Lord 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, of headache, of palpitation, of intolerable itching, of the pressure ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... within himself at the repulse. He would not have regarded or hardly noticed it once, but, his mind had become morbidly sensitive. A word, a look, a tone had now power to inflict a wound. He was like the Sybarite whose repose was disturbed by a wrinkled rose-leaf; with this difference, that they were spiritual, not material hurts he felt. Did the forecast of Holden penetrate ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... exhibits 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 ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... popular fibre. It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature. But it is altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle. Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy, and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... of the boys would, on some slight provocation, point at him and call him 'Bellows's nigger,' or make faces and cry 'charity boy,' 'town's poor.' Now, fortunately, Joel had a happy, joyous nature—somewhat fiery and irascible, but still joyous—else he might have become morbidly miserable. As it was, these manifestations only provoked his anger, and led him forthwith into a rough-and-tumble fight, in which, whether victor or not, he always showed unquestionable pluck. If he came off second-best a dozen times, he went confidently ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... de Merrivale is my mother's grandniece, we have no control over her actions or inclinations. Her uncle, the Marquis de Merrivale, who is her guardian, is morbidly jealous of any influence exerted over his niece, even by ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... said Dr. Trevelyan, drawing a large coil from under the bed. "He was morbidly nervous of fire, and always kept this beside him, so that he might escape by the window in case ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... a 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
... feet lay stretched the limp body of his antagonist. The disappearance of one eye; under a large red swelling, combined with a patulous and rubescent nose, detracted to some extent from the dignity of his appearance. An ugly patch of crimson over his left ribs held the attention fantastically, morbidly. It was blood, human blood, his own ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... first inspired him. And richly she deserves his love! She does, indeed, dote upon him; she studies, or rather, perhaps, anticipates his every wish; in short, had the whole sex been searched for one calculated to make happy the morbidly fastidious Aubrey, the choice must surely have fallen on Miss St. Clair; a woman whose temper, whose tastes, and whose manners were at once in delicate and harmonizing unison and contrast with his own. She has hitherto brought him but two children—and those very ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension. Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from his grandfather ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... society. In referring to these early years, she said: "I was not a happy child, nor a happy woman, until in mature life, I outgrew my early religious faith, and felt free to think and act from my own convictions." Having joined the church in extreme youth, and being morbidly conscientious, she suffered constant torment about her own sins, and those of her neighbors. She was a religious enthusiast, and in time of revivals was one of the bright and shining lights in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... polychromatophilia is a sign of degeneration. To explain the presence of erythroblasts which have undergone these changes we must suppose that in severe injuries to the life of the blood these elements are not produced in the usual fashion, but from the very beginning are morbidly altered. Analogies from general pathology suggest themselves ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... joined, I thought them all so many Lady Dashers in disguise. I could hardly believe that such cheerful fellows should be at heart so morbidly exacerbated! ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the effect of such a faith upon the sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... would have asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to the excusable prejudices of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... out of health in soul and body. Perhaps God has sent him to us and to his childhood's home for healing. Let us, therefore, be very careful, very tender and considerate. He is naturally proud and sensitive, and is morbidly ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... present 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 ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... time 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 with ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... 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. She said: 'I will not go to a convent. ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... aware of far keener distress which he afterwards endured from yet greater injustice, we might suppose that the sufferings he had to bear from placing himself in opposition to the custom of the school, by refusing to fag, had made him morbidly sensitive on the point of liberty. At a time, however, when freedom of speech, as indicating freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to established authorities; when no allowance could be made on the score of youth, still less on that of individual peculiarity, Shelley became ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... they sat at tea; but Kenrick didn't ask 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 his most serious difficulty Walter ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... 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 to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, grewsome fuss. I ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... more familiar and dramatic. Again it is a group of morbidly curious and spiteful doctors who desire to see whether a human being can be killed by the power of his imagination. A condemned criminal is accordingly turned over to them. He is first allowed to see a dog bled to death, one of the physicians ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... people singularly, and, as we should say, morbidly, addicted to the seeming enjoyment of the most horrid discords, on Good Friday Eve, have the custom of jangling the church bells with the utmost violence, in execration of the memory of Judas; and I have seen there a large ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... becomes too highly seasoned with pity, it doesn't make a pleasant morsel to swallow, specially if you don't like the taste of the pity—and there are people who don't, you know. The Greggorys were that kind. They were morbidly so. From their cheap little cottage, where they did their own work, they stepped out in their shabby garments and old-fashioned hats with heads even more proudly erect than in the old days when their home and their gowns and their ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... Seaton, thoughtfully. "Such a one as that beast Luigi has planted in Enoch's mind can warp his entire life. He evidently is of a morbidly sensitive temperament, proud to a fault, high strung and introspective. Until some one can prove to him that his mother was not a harlot, he'll never be entirely normal. And it's been my observation that ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... overbearing to the last degree, never dreaming that two destitute and defenceless women could escape from his control. This conviction was strengthened by his vanity and conceit, a conceit to the point of fatuity. Pyotr Petrovitch, who had made his way up from insignificance, was morbidly given to self-admiration, had the highest opinion of his intelligence and capacities, and sometimes even gloated in solitude over his image in the glass. But what he loved and valued above all was the money he had amassed by his labour, and by all sorts of devices: that money made him ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... laudanum, which I knew would in a few moments give me ease and sleep. Yet thus agonized and half delirious, I notwithstanding left it untouched. I was mostly confined to the house about four weeks. The inflammation gradually subsiding left me as weak as a child—so morbidly sensitive that tears flowed on the slightest occasion, and with my whole frame pervaded by a dull, incessant ache. To these symptoms were added coldness of the extremities, an obstinate determination of blood to the head, which swelled the vessels of the ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... point from which the nutrient liquid is supplied to the cells of the cuticle above. It is also at this point that the active changes of inflammation are especially concentrated; it is the immediately superposed cell layers (mucous) that become morbidly increased in the earlier stages of inflammation; it is on the surface of the papillary layer that the liquid is thrown out which raises the cuticle in the form of a blister, and it is at this point mainly that pus forms in the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... exist in marriage. And besides, the fundamental policy of our laws which not only permits, but requires an investigation of divorce causes, is highly productive of evil. Many of the divorce cases in New York are simply food for a set of morbidly curious scandal-mongers. Even the Mohammedans consider our practice in this respect extremely vulgar: there is no more reason why a court should know why a husband and wife wish to separate than why ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not, I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 would not ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the city of New York, in pursuits various, but energetic and laborious. There is little of interest in the story of these years. He was a proud, affectionate, sensitive, and generous boy, hampered by circumstance, but conscious of great capabilities,—not morbidly addicted to day-dreaming, but always working heartily for something beyond. He was still very young—when he went to Chicago, and associated himself in business with Mr. Devereux of Massachusetts.[A] They managed for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... a certain loss of strength. One expected 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 of decision, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... off of the hotel guests was destined to fail. The old hostelry was crowded. Newspaper men and women from all parts of the country flocked there, and also many not connected with the press, who were morbidly curious and revelled in the sickly excitement of thinking they might be living in the house of a poisoner. Lucinda Hart sent in her resignation from the church choir. Her experience, the first time she had sung after Eliza Farrel's death, ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... would not have been her choice for Laura, but if a strong attachment became the means of steadying him and of inciting to the formation of a fine character, all might be well in the end. She was morbidly anxious, however, that her niece should not meet with any such disappointment in life as had fallen to her lot, and should the current of the young girl's affection tend steadily in his direction she would deeply ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... 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 earlier ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... restlessly in his chair. He had only detestation for the slain man, yet there was something morbidly distasteful in the thought that he himself had contrived the situation which had resulted in the murder of his confederate. It was only by an effort that he shook off the vague ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... he left London. In after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death, because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every human being to prepare his soul. The platitudes of age may often be for youth divine ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and that when he 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 to the Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his soul. Something of this ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... crossed the mielles, while the sea droned its sing-song on his left, was the parson droning his sing-song on the right "In the midst of life we are in death," etc. There were the grumbling drums, and the crowd morbidly enjoying their Roman holiday; and there, looming up before him, were the four stone pillars on the Mont es Pendus from which he was to swing. His disgust deepened. He was not dying like a seafarer who had fairly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that he would apply it to his tormentor should he ever show his nose in the room. As Philips was celebrated for skill with the sword, the mode of vengeance was certainly unmanly, and stung the soul of his adversary, always morbidly sensitive to all attacks, and especially to attacks upon his person. The hatred thus kindled was never quenched, and breathes in some ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 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, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Bartimeus chafed under the law's delay. They became morbidly sensitive to the incubus of Ginx's Baby, especially as the press had been reviewing some of their recent acts with great bitterness. The Guardians were defiant. Having served their notices, they were induced by Mr. Stink to resolve not ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... in years, had 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; ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 at him with gracious composure. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... 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 with them; and Langham as well as everybody else had ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... therefore, that it should, if possible, be banished, in the case of Sir Graham as in other cases. Your amiable deception has quite possibly averted a tragedy. Continue in it, I counsel you. The knowledge that his fears are well founded, that the boy—for whose fate he morbidly considers himself entirely responsible—has in very truth been lost at sea, and lies buried in the ground beneath his feet, might, in his present condition of invalidism, be attended by most evil results. Some day it is quite possible that he may be able to learn all the facts with ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... still, listening, wishing that the wedding were over, morbidly dreading the heat and crush and excitement which she knew awaited her and to which she ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... woman that I had known. She avoided everything that might recall to me the life which she had been leading when I first met her. Never did wife or sister surround husband or brother with such loving care as she had for me. Her nature was morbidly open to all impressions and accessible to all sentiments. She had broken equally with her friends and with her ways, with her words and with her extravagances. Any one who had seen us leaving the house to go on the river in the charming little boat which I had bought ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... will not pass a picture in which there is a suicide or any suggestion of a suicide, with incidents leading thereto. The purpose of the Board is to prevent all suggestion of self-destruction to those who are morbidly inclined. ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... were rich,' she thought, 'I would give way to the luxury of being morbidly faithful to him ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Poor Fanny was morbidly sensitive, always imagining insults. Polly was curt and businesslike. The two departments were for ever at war, and Paul was always finding Fanny in tears. Then he was made the recipient of all her woes, and he had to plead ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... so many children might be allowed to be morbidly jealous of the health of the rest. But it was a cruel stroke to her to be obliged to part with her noble little boy, just when his daily advances in walking and talking made him more charming than ever. Her eyes were full of tears, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by recalling all the unfolding stages of this miserable story with the minuteness of detail which my own memory morbidly lingers on, I will hurry to the catastrophe. I grew more and more doubtful of the existence in Ottilie's mind of any feeling stronger than friendship for me; and as this doubt strengthened, there arose the flattering suspicion that I was becoming an object of greater ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Millwall? Even as I mark the grimness of the scene, I am conscious of a sort of hyperaesthesia against which one ought to be on guard. The note-taking traveller is very apt to forget that the mere act of note-taking upsets his normal perceptivity. He becomes feverishly observant, morbidly critical. He compares incommensurables, and flies to ideal standpoints. He is so eager to descry differences, that he overlooks similarities—nay, identities. Thus only can I account for many statements about New York, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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, he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... 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
... while Jason looked, Mavis was looking, too, and 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 ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular direction of flying from his honors. No! it is as I have always suspected. He heard, in some way, of the girl's English lover, and he, with his besotted devotion to her, was just the man to be morbidly, madly jealous, and to do some such idiotic thing as he has done, and get himself murdered and burned to ashes for his pains! Yes; and it serves him ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. Her final record of it is: "for twenty-nine years we lived contentedly together." But her rugged hypochondriac of a Husband, morbidly sensitive to the least interruption of his whims and habitudes, never absent from their one dim sitting-room, except on the days in which he had to attend at the Library, was in practice infinitely difficult to deal with; and seems to have kept ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... it looked slender, and its firm white roundness was flawless from wrist to shoulder. He shut his eyes, but he could see it through his eyelids. Sitting beside her like this, in the semidarkness, morbidly aware of the perfume of her hair and dress, he suddenly forgot that he had been rude, and she indifferent. He was conscious only of the wish to drive it home to her, how unhappy she ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... think every great composer owes it to his own God-gift, and to the human beings whom he is to influence, not to select intrinsically repulsive subjects, and such have we found both 'Don Juan' and 'Faust.' Now we are not morbidly fastidious, and we well know the freedom that must be accorded to art, that it may have ample scope and range in the delineation of human feeling and romantic situation; but when we see a representation of 'Don Juan,' ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... only by the patients' utterances but by their expressions. The stuporous face is empty, that of the other lined with melancholy. The intellectual defect, too, is different. In retarded depression the patient is morbidly aware of difficulty and slowness, but on urging often performs tests surprisingly well. In the stupor, however, one is faced with an unquestionable ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... 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. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... propitiating the evil ghosts that the ethically rational character of Shinto reveals itself. Ancient experience and modern knowledge unite in warning us against the deadly error of trying to extirpate or to paralyze certain tendencies in human nature,—tendencies which, if morbidly cultivated or freed from all restraint, lead to folly, to crime, and to countless social evils. The animal passions, the ape-and-tiger impulses, antedate human society, and are the accessories to nearly all crimes committed against it. But ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Galileo! It was a shock from which, perhaps, the zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanctioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language, a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, timorous, and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some consolation that the manuscript was ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... performance of which 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, a dozen Roman Romeos, in powdered wigs and silk ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... had been one to excite in him strong feelings of revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature. His father was a gambler and a spendthrift. His mother was eccentric to a degree. Byron himself, throughout his boyish years, had been morbidly sensitive because of a physical deformity—a lame, misshapen foot. This and the strange treatment which his mother accorded him left him headstrong, wilful, almost from the first an enemy to ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... 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 is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... treatment of the nude was stiff and his style full of mannerisms, but he painted a great deal and was well paid, and did not regret his early life. But herein consisted his peculiarity: he was, as his biographers assert, a man incredibly, morbidly and ridiculously timid. When he knew that the arquebusiers were to pass he climbed the roofs and steeples, and trembled with fear when he saw their arms in the street. If any one thinks this an idle story, there is a fact which serves to prove it true: he was in the town of Haarlem when ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the purpose; she had removed any shade of doubt that might have lingered in the young man's spirit as to her charm of line. He was aware that the education of Paris, acting upon a natural aptitude, had opened him much—rendered him perhaps even morbidly sensitive—to impressions of this order; the society of artists, the talk of studios, the attentive study of beautiful works, the sight of a thousand forms of curious research and experiment, had produced in his mind a new sense, the exercise ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... noble aspiration is a prayer; hence, she prays without ceasing in obedience to the admonition of the Apostle. And, let it be said in reverence, she helps to answer her own prayers. Her spirit yearns out toward higher and wider attainments every hour of the day, not morbidly but exultantly. And while she aspires she worships. The starry sky holds her in rapt attention and admiration, and the modest flower does no less. She is thankful for the rain, and revels in the beauty and abundance of the snow. The heat may enervate, but she is grateful, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... not gained an ounce in weight in these two years," he said, "and she isn't an inch taller. If anything, she seems to be more morbidly self-conscious and shy than ever. What shall ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable with no cause. She was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. To those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she could do things, her nature ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever mortgaged to a life of noble reparation, and even the terror of it all would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 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, lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, educated in ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... frowning morbidly. There was a visible droop to his shoulders. "There is no use having hard feelings over it," he said, dejectedly. "You have a right to do as you please with your interests. But the truth is, I am not financially able to take over as big a block ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... to certain private conversations which had passed between her late daughter-in-law and herself, she declared that Mrs. Eustace Macallan was morbidly sensitive on the subject of her personal appearance. She was devotedly attached to her husband; the great anxiety of her life was to make herself as attractive to him as possible. The imperfections in her personal appearance—and especially in her complexion—were ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... itself to the preachers of the gospel of charity. He picks from Mr. Froude's four volumes a number of 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 Professor Tyndall, Professor Norton, Sir James Stephen, and Mrs. Gilchrist, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... on the margins of books,) wrote for him the story of her life, and drew on the resources of her marvellous memory for his amusement. The old woman's kindness was one of the few bright things in poor Conway's unhappy life. His temperament was morbidly sensitive; and when, in 1821, while acting in London, Theodore Hook attacked him in the most cruel and offensive manner in the columns of the "John Bull," he threw up his engagement, determined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... end of a week was not only infuriated but alarmed. He knew the imagination of woman, and guessed that Concha, in her brooding solitude, distorted all that was unfortunate in the present and dwelt morbidly on the future. He knew that she must resent his part in the long separation, no doubt his lack of impulsiveness in not proposing elopement. There was a priest in his company who, although he ate below the salt and found his associates ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... 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
... this sheltered 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 in ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Meigs, after a parting interview on the steamboat as Thomas left Nashville for Eastport. "He opened his heart to me," says Donaldson. "He feels very sore at the rumored intentions to relieve him, and the major-generalcy does not cicatrize the wound. You know Thomas is morbidly sensitive, and it cut him to the heart to think that it was contemplated to remove him. He does not blame the Secretary, for he said Mr. Stanton was a fair and just man." [Footnote: Id., vol. xlv. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... 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, then, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... commissioner of the President, or perhaps as a special commissioner could not act at all. She was very aggressive, and when any of the travelling arrangements in Europe did not suit her ideas she was won't to shrilly exclaim: " Well ! New York is good enough for me." Nora, morbidly afraid that her ex- pense bill to the Daylight would not be large enough, had dragged her bodily off to Greece as her companion, friend and protection. At Arta they had heard of the grand success of the Greek army. The Turks had not stood for a moment ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... 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 ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... little 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
... religion which will render such assistance.... The feeling Schleiermacher advocates, is not the fanaticism of the ignorant or the visionary emotion of the idle. It is not an aimless reverie shrinking morbidly from the light of clear and definite thought. Feeling, in its sound condition, affects both our conception and our will, leads to knowledge and to action. Neither knowledge nor morality are in themselves the measure of a man's religiousness. Yet religion is ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... delicacy in M. Ude leaving it to us, as to whether the communication should be anonymous. We think not, as the peculiarity of the style would at once establish the talented authorship, and, therefore, attempted concealment would be considered as the result of a too morbidly modest feeling. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various |
