"Cataleptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... his eyes. His first nod had followed, as usual, about three minutes after the commencement of the sermon. He had then opened his eyes wide, met the fascinated gaze of a small singing-girl opposite to him, glared at her, and, having reduced her to a state of cataleptic terror, pushed aside the red curtain and transferred his glare to the body of the church. The bald head of a respectable farmer and the bonnet of his wife, which were all he could see of the congregation at the moment, ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... just taking as long as a man walking at a steady pace would occupy. Then he was by, leaving Dick staring after him as if in a cataleptic fit, his face full ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... selected a spot about fifteen paces from the magic circle. I will not describe minutely the tricks and wonders that we saw, but will proceed at once to the main fact. With the aid of a vaguda, a kind of musical pipe of bamboo, the buni caused all the snakes to fall into a sort of cataleptic sleep. The melody that he played, monotonous, low, and original to the last degree, nearly sent us to sleep ourselves. At all events we all grew extremely sleepy without any apparent cause. We were aroused from this ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... cow or mother will deny. It is a joyous function to eat large quantities of pleasant food and turn it into milk. Heredity impels the cow to do this, and it would take generations of wild life to wean her from it. As well say that the cataleptic trance of the pointer, when the game bird lies close and the delicate scent fills his nostrils, is not a joy to him, or that the Dalmatian at the heels of his horse, or the foxhound when Reynard's trail is warm, receive no pleasure from ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... "I assented to set my eyes in the face of the crucifix if I could; and so I did; for methought I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"—a touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pass into the region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image of the cross, wherein ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... which might show his hand. But the little Doctor continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill work. Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor's smile and silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible silence which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before. About the Professor's makeup and all his antics there was always something merely grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... assembling in Lantern Yard. He was believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith, and a peculiar interest had been centred in him ever since he had fallen at a prayer-meeting into a trance or cataleptic fit, which lasted ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... something of the sort, and Mr. Amidon rushed away with him. What would this man have thought and said, if I had subjected his employer to the treatment necessary to restore him—put him into the cataleptic state, and then into the normal, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... about a dead mother of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if cataleptic, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.—What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... their work, and Schmucke looked on precisely as an idiot might have done. Broken down with sorrow, wholly absorbed, in a half-cataleptic state, he could not take his eyes from the face that seemed to fascinate him, Pons' face refined by the absolute repose of Death. Schmucke hoped to die; everything was alike indifferent. If the room had been on fire he would ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... better bring the Royal Apothecary at once. Be careful to keep it from the Court, as I wish to avoid unnecessary alarm." The others endeavoured to restore the afflicted Fairy, but, though still alive, she was in some kind of cataleptic condition which was beyond the ordinary remedies. The Court Apothecary arrived and applied blisters without result, and finally gave it as his opinion that, while she might survive for some time, she would in all probability ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... silence that ensued was broken by Mr F.'s Aunt, who had been sitting upright in a cataleptic state since her last public remark. She now underwent a violent twitch, calculated to produce a startling effect on the nerves of the uninitiated, and with the deadliest ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... ready to go off with hair- triggers. The two elder detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures by coming back cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark, we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... outset of their frenzy, in that they would be destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely because of boredom as because of belief ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook's Court re-echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic, she has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano. After unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost consternation, she is pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, free from pain, though much exhausted, in which state of affairs Mr. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... together, I believe I am right in saying that the achievement in question is one which only some of the high initiates are qualified to attempt, which exacts a total suspension of animation in the body for periods of time compared to which the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary science are insignificant; the protection of the physical frame from natural decay during this period by means which the resources of occult science are strained to accomplish; and withal it is a process involving ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant |
