"Abnormal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more or less politicians. It is a singular fact that many of the "chiefs", well known as such to the American public, were not chiefs at all according to the accepted usages of their tribesmen. Their prominence was simply the result of an abnormal situation, in which representatives of the United States Government made use of them for a definite purpose. In a few cases, where a chief met with a violent death, some ambitious man has taken advantage of the confusion ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... flat-bottomed boat was punting his way towards her. She stood and waited for him, admiring his height, and the long powerful strokes with which he propelled his clumsy craft. He was very tall, and against the flat background his height seemed almost abnormal. As soon as he had attracted her attention he ceased to shout, and devoted all his attention to reaching her quickly. Nevertheless, the salt water was within a few feet of her when he drove his pole into the bottom, and brought the punt to ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... neurotic who leads the world; he is a rebel and he is an idealist. Yet when you analyse him you find what a poor devil he is. His noble crusade against vivisection is due to the abnormal strain of cruelty he is repressing in himself; his passion for Socialism comes from his infant fear of and rebellion against his father. The ardent suffragette who smashes windows in a just cause is merely doing so because the vote ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... such manifestations of God as intelligible, and indeed to be expected. So far from regarding divine interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its inheritance. The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary; but it is the fact of the intervention that is important: the mode in a special case will be determined by the needs of that case. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... embryonic vesicle. The belly is drawn up by the large yelk-sac (d), and fastened to the inner wall of the embryonic membrane by the short and thick pedicle (b). Hence the normal convex curve of the back (Figure 1.190) is here changed into an abnormal concave surface. h heart, m parietal mesoderm. The spots on the outer wall of the serolemma are the roots of the branching chorion-villi, which are free ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... study of complicated social and political problems. No wonder, then, that the second decade of his maturity shows a falling off in abundance, though not in intensity of creative power; and that the gradual breaking down of his health, under the strain of his ceaseless efforts and of his abnormal habits of life, made itself more and more felt in the years that followed the great preface which in 1842 set forth the splendid design of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... but when I proved to him that I would really see the thing through, he was convinced. It was on the question of beds. Our friends professed themselves astonished that we contemplated the extravagance of a guest-chamber, for here in New York, where rents are so abnormal, people economize first of all upon their friends, and I am told that an extra bedroom where a chance guest may be asked to remain overnight is the exception with people of moderate means. Such monstrous selfishness ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... mere doubters by profession—an unprofitable and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... between safety and danger in the use of alcoholic drink is dangerously unstable. Safety lies back of total abstinence. The normal man has no legitimate use for alcohol as a beverage, and he has no right to render himself abnormal by its use when lives are dependent upon his efficiency. None but normal men should run railway trains. The traveling public has unqualified right to demand and expect none less safe.' This statement deals, not with the moral ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... the idea though he was aware that the truth was unimpeachable. The perfection of his accompaniments had arisen in his youth from a secret feeling for fitness and harmony. Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. His expression of this as a masculine creature had its limits which resulted in a concentration on perfection. Even at five-and-twenty however he had never been called a dandy and even ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... carried it over to the fireplace and decided to chuck it behind the Japanese umbrella in the grate; then he thought it absurd to waste an expensive frame. There was no good in beating about the bush. Anna looked like a stranger—abnormal, a freak—it might be a picture taken ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... that to any gentleman there could be a doubt. Instead of the existence of a difficulty, there was a flood of light upon his path,—so the reader will think;—a flood so clear that not to see his way was impossible. A man carried away by abnormal appetites, and wickedness, and the devil, may of course commit murder, or forge bills, or become a fraudulent director of a bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of Eternal City really wanted to make out the processes of this abnormal mind. He wrinkled his brows, and thought very ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... one-sided position of the body which frequently leads to curvature of the spine. The well-known physiologist, Professor Brown-Sequard, insists on the equal use of both hands, in order to induce the necessary equal flow of blood to the brain. Through the effect of our irregular and abnormal development, the cause of which is the too persistent use of the right hand, one lobe of our brains and one side of our bodies are in a neglected and weakened condition, and the evils resulting from this weakness ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... disease of the sebaceous glands, characterized by an excessive and abnormal secretion of sebaceous matter, appearing on the skin as an oily coating, ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... Christian Church. People say there are not any miracles now, and say we are worse off than when there used to be. That Divine Spirit does not come to give gifts of healing, interpretations of tongues, and all the other abnormal and temporary results which attended the first manifestations. These, when they were given, were but means to an end, and the end subsists whilst the means are swept away. It is better to be made good than to be filled with all manner of miraculous power. 'In this rejoice, not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... reviewer turns the strange thing over and over, and inside out—and some fifteen years after it has vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his mind about in any clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross with it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into any established pigeon-hole or drawer of the then existing anthropological museum. Burns is "a literary prodigy," ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... our understanding, the perversity of our will—inclined always to evil rather than to good—the violence of our passions, which are constantly waging war in our hearts? How well does the Catholic doctrine explain this abnormal state. Hence, Paschal truly says that man is a greater mystery to himself without original sin than ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... potato paring in it! And here am I—I'm real enough—but I'm not a bad woman—I haven't got what is euphoniously called 'a past,' and I don't belong to the right-down vicious company of 'Souls.' So I should never do for a heroine of latter-day fiction. I'm afraid I'm abnormal. It's dreadful to be abnormal! One becomes a 'neurotic,' like Lombroso, and all the geniuses. But suppose the world were full of merely normal people,—people who did nothing but eat and sleep in the most perfectly healthy and regular manner,—oh, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... constitution—for so its advocates looked upon the Covenant—could be drafted perfectly or even wisely in eleven days, however much thought individuals may have previously given to the subject, seems on the face of it to show an utter lack of appreciation of the problems to be solved or else an abnormal confidence in the talents and wisdom of those charged with the duty. If one compares the learned and comprehensive debates that took place in the convention which drafted the Constitution of the United States, and the months that were spent in the critical examination word by word of the proposed ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... in history in colors so dark that the reader wonders how, amidst such scenes, peaceful human beings could continue to exist. He forgets that the historian describes only the abnormal incidents which broke the current of ordinary life, and that between the spasms of violence there were long quiet intervals when the ordinary occupations of men went on as usual. Cinna's continuous consulship was uncomfortable to the upper classes, but the daily business ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... improvement, by laws akin to those which make the sun-flower turn to the sun or the willow to the stream. Ladies of this disposition, permanently thwarted in their affectionate bias, gradually languish away into intellectual inanition, or sprout out into those abnormal eccentricities which are classed under the general name of "oddity" or "character." But, once admitted to their proper soil, it is astonishing what healthful improvement takes place—how the poor heart, before starved and stinted of nourishment, throws out its suckers, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... of abnormal size went up with a whir. Big he was, in comparison with his kind, as the monster steer in the side-show, the Cardiff giant, or Jumbo ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... hair and beards were long, and seemed one with the fur covering of their bodies. Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat—fat as things bloated and swollen are fat. It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterward destroys. The men moved about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended, round, and slate-coloured, like the tongues of parrots, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... now. And from the very beginning—from the very first day of our arrival, somehow or other I was conscious that there was something abnormal about ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... to be forced to the recognition of that prodigious figure as it really was. But, after all, it is not quite impossible that a similar awaking may await the grown man who imagines himself to have mastered something of the real philosophies of life. The cadaverous peeler with the abnormal appetite fades out of recollection, and my next hero is a blacksmith, who, in a countryside once rich in amateur pugilists, had earned a local distinction for himself before he made a settlement for life at the "Farriers' Arms," in Queen Street. His name was Robert Pearce, and he dawns ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Rivals Women as Private Property Horrible Punishments Essence of True Jealousy Absence of Masculine Jealousy Persian and Greek Jealousy Primitive Feminine Jealousy Absence of Feminine Jealousy Jealousy Purged of Hate A Virtuous Sin Abnormal States ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... are mounted on the outside of the receiver shell, as indicated, and are thus subject to danger of mechanical injury and they are also exposed to the touch of the user, so that he may, in case of the wires being charged to an abnormal potential, receive a shock. Probably a more serious feature than either one of these is that the terminals of the flexible cords which attach to these binding posts are attached outside of the receiver shell, and are therefore ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... be expected of men in the position of guards of a prison? The function is abnormal, and unless it be undertaken from high motives and with an exceptional endowment of intelligence and humane feeling, it will steadily deteriorate a man; from being at the start to all practical purposes a social derelict, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... readers will not like it. The plan of jumping at once into the middle has been often tried, and sometimes seductively enough for a chapter or two; but the writer still has to hark back, and to begin again from the beginning,—not always very comfortably after the abnormal brightness of his few opening pages; and the reader who is then involved in some ancient family history, or long local explanation, feels himself to have been defrauded. It is as though one were asked to eat boiled mutton after woodcocks, caviare, or maccaroni cheese. I hold that ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... most bitter enemies. Even when he was normal there are only moments when, through some recorded speech or action of his, we can peer past the man's personality into his brain; how great a sealed mystery must his thoughts remain to us when held in that abnormal state by Eliot Leithgow's V-27! Envision it: this arch-foe of Hawk Carse and Leithgow helping their designs, lending all his intellect, his great skill, to their purposes, aiding them in everything! Certainly, afterwards, ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... they are not so in fact. Accused of disregarding the interests of the community, I will show that they are abnormally sensitive to their obligations in this direction. While legislatures claim the right to fix rates, I shall show that the abnormal conditions under which the railway system has grown up and its chaotic nature render the exercise of such a privilege impossible. I will show that while it is assumed that rates may be fixed arbitrarily, they must, on the contrary, be based on natural ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... his breakdown: first the intense heat, which had made his stay in Paris very trying; the fatigue he had undergone there; and lastly the weakness supervening after the loss of appetite, also due to the abnormal heat, which was causing several sunstrokes every day, even in England. He announced his intention of making another attempt with me in the autumn, when the chances would ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... demand upon the world's mercantile tonnage and its sudden curtailment, it is surprising that ocean commerce has not been more interfered with or made to pay even higher rates than the abnormal ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... the past. It does not mark a revival, but rather the supreme desperate effort of the spirit of tyranny to compass the political subjection and consequent social degradation of the black man. Its provocation does not consist in any abnormal or perilous condition in southern communities arising from a numerical preponderance of Negroes. It is not made to meet a merely temporary emergency with the intent to return to the principles of republican government upon the advent of intelligence ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... beautiful tone—Thalberg, Henselt, Liszt, Tausig, Heller—yes, Stephen of the pretty studies—Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, Pachmann and Essipoff, sat low before the keyboard. When you sit high and the wrists dip downward your tone will be dry, brittle, hard. Doubtless a few pianists with abnormal muscles have escaped this, for there was a time when octaves were played with stiff wrists and rapid tempo. Both things are an abomination, and the exception here does not prove the rule. Pianists like Rosenthal, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... and myths concerning subterranean fires grew up the enormously important beliefs in Hell and Purgatory, which attained such abnormal proportions in medieval times, and which are by no means yet extinct. The most vivid picture of Hell, founded largely on ancient material, though with a Biblical basis, is found in Milton. In language which recalls ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... more or less the same kind; and in these, too, we come upon that racy sense for narration which can enhance dramatic import by emphasising some seemingly trivial circumstance, as in the gouty stiffness of one of Christ's scourgers in the Flagellation, or the abnormal ugliness of the man who with such perfect gravity holds the basin while Pilate washes his hands: while in the Crown of Thorns and Descent into Hades we have peculiarly fine and suitable black and white ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... types, meaning the majority of our politicians, thinkers, and writers, get to realizing that bolshevism isn't a Red Terror with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other, but a state of society surpassing even their own in points of weakness and abnormal silliness, they'll start arresting everybody who isn't a bolshevist. Capital will put up a fight, but capital is already doomed in this country. It isn't respected for its strength, vision, and creative powers. It is tolerated ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... this natural law, whether in the material world or in the human mind.... What has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the multitude, and the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and abnormal; it ever will be tinctured with fanaticism and superstition while men are what they are. A people's religion is ever a corrupt religion. If you are to have a Catholic Church you must put up with fish ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... must be gifted with keen instincts; or, at all events, with an experience that would enable them to detect the slightest "fault" in the aspect of a landscape, so well known to them,—in short, that they would notice anything that might appear "abnormal" in it. ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... to give me a hand, Val," he said in his most agreeable manner. "I begin to find out my age when I put my poor old bones into abnormal attitudes. I daresay packing a trunk or two will be only child's-play ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... of pain which is increased by the bearing of weight upon the affected member, or by the moving of such a distressed part, results in an irregularity in locomotion, which is known as lameness or claudication. A halting gait may also be produced by the abnormal development of a member, or by the shortening of the leg occasioned by the ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... The Terrible Meek; for two and a half years she lulled Germany and astonished the Allies by her abnormal patience. The most terrifying warriors of history have been peace-loving nations hounded into hostility by outraged ideals. Certainly no nation was ever more peace-loving than the American. To the boy of the Middle West the fury of kings must ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... with her tail. It slanted far to one side, one feather in it twice as long as the rest. Feathers on her breast there were none. These had been worn entirely off by her habit of sitting upon potatoes and other rough abnormal objects. And this lent to her appearance an air of being decollete, singularly at variance with her otherwise prudish ensemble. Her eye was remarkably bright, but somehow it had an outraged expression. It was as if she went about the world perpetually scandalized over the doings that fell beneath ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... toothache one morning. At breakfast every one would be feeling very sorry for himself; by lunch-time, when it had become common knowledge that the entire world had the same kind of ache, toothache would have ceased to exist. It's the loneliness of being abnormal ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... interior force of initiative is making a violent way to the light, producing explosions, upheavals, all sorts of grave disorders. And where there are no outward manifestations, the evil lies dormant; beneath apparent order are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made by an abnormal existence, apathy, death. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... I do know, since I experienced it, that as we sat now encamped upon this ledge, the ground under us felt only a trifle different from when we had full contact with it. There was a lightness upon us—an abnormal feeling of weight-loss—a feeling of indefinable abnormality to the rocks. Yet, to observers in New York, we were faintly to be seen, and the rocks upon which we ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... young woman who isn't longing for a home of her own—for a little kingdom in which as Queen, she may rule jointly with a chosen King in loving ministration to their natural subjects—such a young woman is an abnormal specimen. The desire of every little girl for a doll, the craving of every boy for an animal pet, is but the manifestation of the deep-seated instinct of parenthood. Do nothing to stifle it. Minister to its growth and development. And young man—young woman, you who have ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... beginning to settle down more or less to the abnormal state of things prevailing in the city since the departure of the reservists. Those who remain behind are showing an admirable spirit. Nowhere are complaints voiced in regard to the complete disorganization of ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... which can be elicited in the somnambulistic state. They are of interest for the most part, to students of abnormal behavior and are pertinent from an academic viewpoint. They do not fall within the province of this book or of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes and might lead the reader astray. Should readers be interested in ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnormal religious zeal. A young woman of my acquaintance, whose conduct has given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a reincarnate Messalina, while at other times she is the very embodiment of ethical and religious purity. ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... of extreme caution on this point. For as long as 6 months after entering service, some men are under abnormal constraint because they are in a new element, and feel a little frightened inside. Whether this is the case is to be judged best by getting full information on the man. If the record shows that he had led his class in college, managed ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... it has an ordinary, indifferent, French look which does not suit. The sentiment is not given, and I almost wonder whether I should not have done better to falsify the perspective—Japanese style—exaggerating to the very utmost the already abnormal outlines of what I see before me. And then the pictured dwelling lacks the fragile look and its sonority, that reminds one of a dry violin. In the pencilled delineation of the woodwork, the minute delicacy ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... for the most part, off on the large grassy carpet spread for them, and with the elbow of the old city-wall, not elsewhere erect, respectfully but protectingly crooked about, to the tune of a usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of the Leaning Tower—so abnormal a member of any respectable family this structure at best that I always somehow fancied its three companions, the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into which their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... average individual to avoid literature that deals with the morbid and pathological, that depicts and analyzes abnormal psychological conditions. Such studies are better left for alienists. Literature of mawkish sentimentality should also be avoided. Within the range of sound literature there is a wide choice of abundant material ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... demonstrated that paying so much for ten acres of barren land, and so much for planting it with vines or oranges, the income in three years will be a competence to the investor and his family. People do not spend much time now in gaping over abnormal vegetables, or trying to convince themselves that wines of every known variety and flavor can be produced within the limits of one flat and well-watered field. Few now expect to make a fortune by cutting arid land up into twenty-feet lots, but notwithstanding ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... times has usually a poor tale to tell, some mean and trivial thing has been his undoing, but they that dined in that basement had mostly fallen like oaks on nights of abnormal tempest, had fallen mightily and shaken a nation. Those who had not been kings themselves, but claimed through an exiled ancestor, had stories to tell of even grander disaster, history seeming to have mellowed their dynasty's fate as moss ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... her, she grew conscious of a personal freedom not unlike what she had vainly desired in the days of petulant girlhood; the sense came only at moments, but was real and precious; under its influence she forgot everything abnormal in her situation, and—though without recognising this significance—knew the exultation of a woman who has justified ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... were miles of dry forest, like powder. Fire backed by a heavy gale could rage through dry pine faster than any horse could run. He might fail to save Lucy. Fate had given him a bitter ride. But he swore a grim oath that he would beat the flame. The intense and abnormal rider's passion in him, like Bostil's, dammed up, but never fully controlled, burst within him, and suddenly he awoke to a wild and terrible violence of heart and soul. He had accepted death; he had no fear. All that he wanted to do, the last thing he wanted ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... With his official duties, the conduct of the 'Review,' an extensive correspondence, and, at this time, the preparation of the second part of the 'Greville Memoirs,' with dinner parties or receptions three or four times a week, it would seem as if Reeve's days must have consisted of an abnormal number of hours. And effectively they did; for, though on pleasure—at proper seasons—Reeve might be bent, he had always a frugal mind as to the disposal of time. Most, if not all, of his correspondence, much even of his more serious work, was got ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... and apparently very ancient belief among the Babylonians and Assyrians was that certain human beings possessed demoniac power, and could exercise it for evil purposes over whomsoever they pleased. This belief may have originated in the abnormal appearance presented by certain individuals in consequence of physical deformities or peculiarities. The uncanny impression made by dwarfs, persons with misshapen limbs, with a strange look in their eyes, and, above all, the insane would give rise to the view that some people, for ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... calculating their periods; so that when we remember the difficulties of the question our doubts are not altogether dispelled. Extreme acuteness of vision will, in individual instances, lead to success of abnormal character, and certainly in Mr. Ward's case the remarkable accordances in the observed and calculated positions appear to be conclusive evidence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... registered. Y'see, they don't register mixed farm stock. Anyways, he got me laffin' all the time. But he's bright—oh, yep, he's bright, sure. He's a little feller. To git him right you need to think of a buck louse with a think-box developed abnormal. He's a great amusin' little cuss when you see him on his patch of land. You'd think he was runnin' a cirkis he's so busy fixin' things wrong. I'd like him fine if it wa'an't fer his habits. I can't stand the feller who eats the top of his fingers raw, an' sings hymns o' Sunday in ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... had female rulers that make figures in history, such as Lu of the Han and Wu of the T'ang dynasties, but she has no law providing for the succession of a female under any conditions. A female reign is abnormal, and the ruler a monstrosity. Her character is always blackened so as to make it difficult to delineate. Yet in every instance those women have possessed rare talent; for without uncommon gifts it must have been impossible to seize ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... of local dominion. His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... triumph of the infinitesimal. It saw itself through a microscope and loomed up gigantic. Fairbridge was like an insect, born with the conviction that it was an elephant. There was at once something ludicrous, and magnificent, and terrible about it. It had the impressiveness of the abnormal and prehistoric. In one sense, it was prehistoric. It was as a giant survivor of ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... "That is new to me. As I remember the affair, it was highly sensational, perplexing—a blend of romance and Japanese knives—but I do not remember any abnormal element save ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... Similarly, under abnormal conditions, jobbers located at points requiring several weeks in transit prior to delivery, must assume greater risks than those located at the source of supply. In the event of serious delays in deliveries or in shipments, even buyers located at shipping ...
— About sugar buying for Jobbers - How you can lessen business risks by trading in refined sugar futures • B. W. Dyer
... waking or asleep, that is not specifically determined by ascertainable causes. Psychoanalytic therapy would be impossible otherwise. Psychiatry, too, has conclusively demonstrated that only metaphorically is the subject matter it deals with in the region of the "abnormal." Actually, the insane are subject to laws of behavior which can be scientifically studied no less than the sane. They are no more possessed of an evil, designing spirit, as our witch-burning ancestors consistently believed, than the ordinary human ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... us that there are systems of worlds in outer space, presided over by green suns; it was as if I had been transported to such a world. Moreover, the effect was cool and calm and healthful; cities are abnormal places of abode; man originated and during all the early ages of his development, lived in the green, arboreal country, surrounded by rustic scenery and sylvan quiet. The clangor and roar of a great city, particularly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the reflected colors ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... unnatural ones. A vigorous life of the senses not only does not tend to sensuality in the objectionable sense, but it helps to avert it. Health finds joy in mere existence; daily breath and daily bread suffice. This innocent enjoyment lost, the normal desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal prize-fighter is compelled to recognize the connection between purity and vigor, and becomes virtuous when he goes into training, as the heroes of old observed chastity, in hopes of conquering at the Olympic Games. The very word ascetic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... in its injury. I do not say this to discourage you—far from it—but in sincerity I must call your attention to the fact that every new phase of her grief has tended to some extreme manifestation, showing a disposition toward, not exactly mental weakness, but certainly an abnormal mental condition. I speak of this that you may intelligently guard against it. If due precaution is used, the happy mean between these reactions may be reached, and both mind and body recover a healthful tone. I advise that you all seek some resort by the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... imply, and rightly, that we are calling that language which is not true language at all. People, again, sometimes talk to themselves without intending that any other person should hear them, but this is not well done, and does harm to those who practise it. It is abnormal, whereas our concern is with normal and essential characteristics; we may, therefore, neglect both delirious babblings, and the cases in which a person is regarding him or herself, as it were, from outside, and treating himself as though he ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... her abnormal, excited state, she had heard enough. Trembling from the tragedies of sleep, she thought she had fallen into the greater ones of reality. These men were going to kill somebody—and "she" was to feel dreadfully about ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression of it from her husband—for her temperament was of the morbid kind that is happiest when it is most miserable. Her heart had fed upon the sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men—if not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could cut even more deeply. She turned in the direction of sentiment ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... treated in the Spectator has no parallel in the "Caracteres." In that volume, the chapter "Des Femmes" is perhaps the least agreeable to a sensible reader of to-day. It is crowded with types of pretentious and abnormal womanhood, which it caricatures very effectively. Addison had manifestly studied it, for here we see the origin of his coquettes and prudes, with their "brocade petticoat which rises out of the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... thinly, with an abnormal shrilling. Shann, nursing his bleeding forearm against his chest, rolled free from the waves of sand it threw about, bringing up against one of the rock pillars. With that to steady him, he somehow found his feet, and stood weaving, trying to see through the ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... period," he explained, frowning. "The plants people need to live on aren't adapted to the new climate and new plants fit for food are scarce. They have to grow food under shelter, now, and their machines take an abnormal amount of supervision—I don't know why. The air-conditions for the food plants; the machines that fight back the jungle creepers which thrive in the new climate and try to crawl into the city to smother it; the power machines; the clothing machines—a million machines have ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was going to bear his child, had become necessary to her. She was unconscious of the reason of this need—not a spiritual one, but purely physiological. She did not hate him for this news. Such hatred is abnormal. Nor did she love him. That would have been still more abnormal. But she must be in his house; she must sew for him, share his daily doings, sleep in the big four-poster, and not in the small virginal bed at the Mountain. It would be grievous to leave Edward. He was the shelter between her flickering ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... are not all dead—"they're just away." And they come back on leave. But life is not normal. War is abnormal, and there is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its normal function. So all over Europe we heard whispers about the moral break-down among the women of England. In England we were asked about the dreadful things that were happening in France. The things ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... enough in her youthful egoism, and entirely du jour in her flagrantly shown vanity, Miss Van Tuyn, as Craven was to find out, was really something of an original. Her independence was abnormal and was mental as well as physical. She lived a life of her own, and her brain was not purely imitative. She not only acted often originally, but thought for herself. She was not merely a very pretty girl. She was somebody. And somehow she had trained people ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... skrenning ability. In their misshapen bodies were unusual powers and talents, odd and abnormal abilities which the normal man shunned by day but secretly courted by night. Mutants were said to be in the particular favor of The Black One. Some people felt that the great art of Black Magic, about which the priests boasted, could only be performed by ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... to view the back. "You might as well get your clothes chick, while you're about it—and I didn't have to dig up twenty bones, neither—nor anything like it—" a reflection on Janet's most blue suit and her abnormal extravagance. For it was Lise's habit to carry the war into the enemy's country. "Sadie's dippy about it—says it puts her in mind of one of the swells snapshotted in last Sunday's supplement. Well, dearie, how does the effect ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him on his brilliant achievement, jestingly adding that I knew he was leagued with sorcery and helped on by diabolical arts. The cold evasiveness of his reply confirmed my belief that the condition I have described was abnormal, and that he was himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... direct her thoughts more closely and more intimately to the man outside whose door he had found her; nor less natural that she should institute a comparison between the two, should picture the manner of the one and the manner of the other, should consider how the one had treated her in an abnormal crisis, when he had held her struggling in his arms, when in her despair she had beaten his face with her hands, when, after her attempt on his life, he had subdued her by sheer force; and how the other had treated her in the few hours he had ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... did most thoroughly, without any calculation or care for the future. On all points of taste and opinion they differed widely; but there was no doubt about their both being good-hearted fellows, without any affectation of abnormal vice ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was sleepy, but he could not recall a moment ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... mighty form came forth and slew the Daitya that doubted, in order that he might learn the omnipresence of the Supreme. A story? facts, not fiction; truth, not imagination; and if you could look back to the time of those struggles, there would seem to you nothing strange or abnormal in the story; for you would see it repeated with less vividness in the smaller struggles where the Sons of the Fire were purging and redeeming the earth, in order that the later human evolution might ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... horseback but she brought home something—something found, or something bought. If she trotted to town or village, her burden was books. If to hills, woods, or the seashore, it was wonderful mosses, abnormal twigs, a handkerchief of wet shells ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... family of the kind of being her husband was, and they all agreed to keep the matter of the shark-mouth on the child's back a secret, as there was no knowing what fears and jealousies might be excited in the minds of the King or high chiefs by such an abnormal being, and the babe might ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... hardly less abnormal in her way than Sir Richard. She had shared his wanderings, and was intimate, as no one else was, with the eccentricities of his thoughts and deeds. Whatever these might happen to be, she worshipped ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... philosopher and amuse myself detecting essence beneath semblance and tracing the same principle running through things the outward aspect of which is widely different. I have studied the Dhobie in this spirit and find him to be nothing else than an example of the abnormal development, under favourable conditions, of a disposition which is not only common to humanity, but pervades the whole animal kingdom. A puppy rending slippers, a child tearing up its picture books, a mungoose killing twenty chickens to feed on one, a freethinker ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... as other wedding feasts. People ate and drank and made believe to be intensely glad, and drank more sparkling wine than was good for them at that abnormal hour, and began to feel sleepy before the speeches, brief as they were, had come to an end. The August sun shone in upon the banquet, the creams and jellies languished and collapsed in the sultry air. The ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he filled, he invariably assumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... liked moving pictures before. Here they are presented differently than in America. Some of the plays I've seen have the naivete and simplicity of a confession. Others interpret abnormal, psychopathic characters whose feelings and thoughts are expressed by the actors with a fine and vivid realism. There is the exultation of life, and the despair, the aggression and apathy, the frivolity and the revolt. The action is taken slowly. There are no stars. You look at ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... class may be arranged in three subclasses. First, the operations of mind exhibited in individuals in various stages of growth, various degrees of culture, and in various conditions, normal and abnormal; second, the operations of mind as exhibited in technology, arts, and industries; third, the operations of mind as exhibited in philosophy; and these are the explanations given of the phenomena of the universe. On such a ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... another of them—whenever any chemical action is needed; as, in decomposing or neutralizing virus in the system, destroying cancers, reducing glands when chronically enlarged, removing tumors or other abnormal growths, and in treating old ulcers and chronic irritation of mucous membranes. The other three, being Faradaic or induction currents, and having no perceptibly chemical action, are used where only change of electro-vital ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... state is the normal state of the subjective mind. It always conceives of itself in accordance with some suggestion conveyed to it, either consciously or unconsciously to the mode of objective mind which governs it, and it gives rise to corresponding external results. The abnormal nature of the conditions induced by experimental hypnotism is in the removal of the normal control held by the individual's own objective mind over his subjective mind and the substitution of some other control for it, and thus we may say that the ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... it is expected that Mr. CHAMBERLAIN will spend the vacation incognito in the neighbourhood of Blackpool, partly for the sake of the invigorating air, but mainly, in view of the abnormal prosperity of Lancashire, for the purpose of considering on the spot the possibilities of a levy on capital as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... matter relating to his dearest hopes galled him to the quick. He possessed the strong common sense of his class; his wife had been like him in this respect, and her influence had intensified the trait. Queer people with abnormal manners excited his intense aversion. The most charitable view that he could take of Mrs. Mumpson was that her mind—such as she had—was unbalanced, that it was an impossibility for her to see any subject or duty in a sensible light or ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... being much attached to his mother, he is horrified by this desire. She goes on a railroad journey without him—just an ordinary journey with no special danger—but all the time she is away he is in an agony of suspense lest the train may be wrecked. Such an abnormal degree of worry calls for explanation. Well—did not the worry perhaps conceal a wish, a wish that the train might be wrecked? So he would be set free without any painful effort on his part; and he {498} was a young man who shrank from all ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth |
