"Neurotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "the maid of Kent," was, according to her own statement, born in 1506 at Aldington, Kent. She appears to have been a neurotic girl, subject to epilepsy, and an illness in her nineteenth year resulted in hysteria and religious mania. She was at the time a servant in the house of Thomas Cobb, steward of an estate near Aldington owned by William ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... means degeneration and disaster, is so altogether removed from the sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself, and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will have the same results as the ancient ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... indignation, and opposition, which had successively given way before her husband's quiet, masterful good humor, here took the form of a neurotic fatalism. She shook her head with ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... he belongs is fading out and becoming extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment of God ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... liver, gall bladder, appendix, or other abdominal organ is clinically well recognized. A perpetuating cause in established cases is undoubtedly "nerve cell habit," and in many cases there is an underlying neurotic factor. Shock as an exciting cause has been well exemplified by the number of cases of phrenospasm developing in soldiers during ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... as womanhood becomes more sacred in our eyes it is subjected to fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our civilization—of our education, our business, even our religion—is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied up and whipped for the cowardly crime of wife-beating. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... with Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would, appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... of the young men of this country need is restraint, not stimulant; what this Nation needs is reserve. The only serious fear I entertain for our future is that the great rapidity of our common lives will make us neurotic. I prefer a young man to be a little less scintillant, than that his brilliancy should be at the expense of exhausted ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population was affected; the current literature of the day flourished upon it; the people of England, neurotic from the stress of the last sixty years, became unstable as water. And with the petty reverses of the beginning of the war, the last barriers of shame were broken down; their arrogance was dissipated, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... super-normal had been remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort. She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell upon or talk of them.—Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body, are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer's sixth sense.—For while, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday night when her meager wages, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... Russian." This latter is to be preferred, for it leads your companion to say, "But don't you like TschaiKOWsky?", pronouncing the second syllable as if the composer were a female bull. You can then reply, "Why, yes, TschaiKOFFsky DID write some rather good music—although it's all neurotic and obviously Teutonic." Don't ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... observation of the latter had been limited to the most casual inspection through the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class—intelligent, neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the fact was ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of woman, neurotic from her very birth, is often the very best product of our civilization from the standpoint of character and ability, just as the male neurasthenic is often the backbone of progress and advancement. But we are concerned with these questions: "What ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... layers of swansdown. The sinuous figure bending over her grew taller with the passage of each minute, until the dark eyes of Mrs. Sin were looking down at Rita from a dizzy elevation. As often occurs in the case of a neurotic subject, delusion as to time and space had followed the depression of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... childhood to manhood. This is a very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction. What he knows he learns from others like himself. He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic ideas, which only add to his ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... have not been able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to learn their parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes full of a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become a member of the secret play-producing society, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... And I could work myself into a neurotic state if I kept running through the worry cycle. It took an effort to concentrate on anything else, but it had to be made. The next four days ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... special value in the cases of certain neurotic women and those of low vital resistance; especially those patients suffering from certain forms of heart, respiratory, kidney, and other ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... the whole room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... plays draw bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large cities running for over a year, I cannot help regarding this feature of theatrical life as so much theatrical chaos. It lacks culture, and is sometimes both bizarre and neurotic. I do not object to patter, smart give and take, in which the comical angles of life are exposed, if it is brilliant; neither have I anything to say against light comedy in which the ridiculous side of things is ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... effort, Carfax had been forgotten—forgotten, it seemed, by every one save Craven. He had been forgotten because his death did not belong to the Cambridge order of things, because it raised unpleasant ideas, and made one morbid and neurotic. It had, in fact, nothing in common with cold baths, marmalade, rugby football, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... In all neurotic ailments I hear that he excels, And he insures Immediate cures Of weird, uncanny spells; The most unruly patient Gets docile as a lamb And is freed from ill by the potent skill Of Hoodoo-Doctor Sam; Feathers of strangled chickens, Moss from the dank lagoon, And plasters ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... way of "salvation" for certain neurotic natures. Has that been properly understood? There are people who suffer frightfully—and they are often rare natures, too, though they are sometimes very vicious—from their loathing of the excremental side of life. Swift was one of these. The "disgusting" in his writing is a ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... remained unidentifiable to her, but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made: the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star, then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... logical. Even a virtuous woman could not stand the strain, and Laura was not virtuous. Of neurotic temperament, inherently weak, if not actually vicious in character, with the spirit of the courtesan strong within her from an early age, fond of luxury and personal adornment she could not legitimately afford, it was not surprising ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... individual. Both tendencies are eminently feminine; the affinity lies in a hysterical nature. Thus, excessive pietism is a frequent concomitant of excessive sexual passion; this, though notably the case with women, is common enough with men of unduly neurotic temperaments. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... tracked mud through this portal. No amount of foot-wiping could render the hired man fit for the kitchen steps after milking time—he used a step-ladder to bring up the milk to the back porch. Such intensity of attention to detail could not long fail to make this degenerating neurotic take note of her own body, which gradually became more and more sensitive, till she was fairly distraught between her fear of draughts and her mania for ventilation. It was windows up and windows down, opening the dampers and closing the dampers, something for her shoulders and more fresh ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... wrote us an unusually well-thought-out, detailed account of her daughter's early life. The paternal grandfather was insane and an aunt had epilepsy. Defective heredity in other respects is denied. We get no history of convulsions in the immediate family, nor of any other neurotic manifestation, except that one ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... violated. The problems of the social order are so massive that the interests of the individual often are sacrificed. Increasingly, people are unable to endure the frustrations caused by their social, political, and industrial environment, and develop neurotic responses in which their aggressions are turned in on themselves. The autonomy and initiative that once belonged to the individual have been transferred to the social order, with the result that instead of individuals receiving their direction from within, they now receive it from ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... the most successful application of it are found in Christian Science. Perhaps it is not so difficult to understand the frame of mind which brought about this theory on the part of Mrs. Eddy. Here was an hysterical, neurotic woman who knew nothing all her life but illness and misfortune. She had suffered much from many physicians and was none the better but rather worse. One physician had called her disease one thing, another had designated it another, until confusion and uncertainty were increased with ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... epileptoid. He closes his brief communication on the subject with the belief that it is quite possible for black hair to turn white in one night or even in a less time, although Hebra and Kaposi discredit sudden canities (Duhring). Raymond and Vulpian observed a lady of neurotic type whose hair during a severe paroxysm of neuralgia following a mental strain changed color in five hours over the entire scalp except on the back and sides; most of the hair changed from black to red, but some to quite white, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... out with infinite patience even to the smallest ramifications, the spiritual inventory of what was tucked away in the mind of the person undergoing it. Psychoanalysis is used in medical practice to discover and relieve the spiritual causes of neurotic phenomena. The patient is induced to tell more and more, starting from a given point, thereby going into the most intimate details, and yet we are aware, in the network of outcropping thoughts and memories, of certain points ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... alternating with fits of violent rage and resentment against life and the world in general. These people were deeply disturbed. No doubt about that. Yet they were not psychotic and hardly more than mildly neurotic. Now every doctor gets a good many patients of this type. Such a syndrome is characteristic of menopausal women and some men during the climacteric, but these people failed to fit into this picture. They were married and single persons of both sexes and of all ages. They ...
— Disturbing Sun • Robert Shirley Richardson
... act itself. A partially disorganized—or as we prefer to say "denuded"—brain may be fully capable of sane thought, except on some one topic, and able to exercise every intellectual function except of a particular order. Or there may be mental weakness and neurotic susceptibility in regard to a special class of impressions. It would be difficult to name any form of act or submission which may not be the outcome of incipient or limited disease. The practical difficulty is to avoid, on the other hand, treating the fruits ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... a highly sensitive or so-called "nervous" temperament, especially if there is "nervousness" in the family, must be particularly looked after. For it is during the years of puberty and adolescence that any neurotic traits are apt to develop and become emphasized. It is also the period when bad sexual habits (masturbation) are apt to develop, and the careful mother will devote special attention to her girls in their years of puberty, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of the Tube. A ballad of sorrow, A grey sort of lay of To-day and a greyer To-morrow; A dismal, abysmal, chaotic, neurotic Creation Of one who was done after running a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... who at grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager, and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves, and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive, dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years, strew ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... useful life, must not, however, be regarded, when present in a marked degree, as the mere result of old age. Entirely normal people of sound heredity do not tend to manifest signs of pronounced mental weakness or abnormality even in extreme old age. We are justified in suspecting a neurotic strain, though it may not be of severe degree. This is, indeed, illustrated by our records of British genius. Some of the eminent men of genius on my list (at least twelve) suffered before death from insanity which may probably be described as senile dementia. But several of these were somewhat ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... most interesting and important Anxiety may originate in psycho-sexual excitement, the repressed libido, as the Freudists call it. Neurotic fear has its origin in sexual life and corresponds to a libido which has been turned away from its object and has not succeeded in being applied. All so- called day dreams of women are erotic; of men they are either ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... analyse causes, what bitter reproaches many poor little diseased, neurotic children might truly throw at their irresponsible mothers for endowing them with ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... to have been a stroke of any sort," explained that worthy and anxious man. "If Mrs. Kildare were an ordinary woman, I should call it hysteria, but she's not the neurotic type. It appears to be acute exhaustion, following, possibly, a shock of some kind." He looked at Jemima inquisitively, but without eliciting the information he sought. "At any rate, I am glad you have come, and I should suggest that ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... piety portended an early death, and youthful pranks led to a miserable old age. Neither prospect offered much encouragement to hope for a happy life, and from conversations with those brought up on this form of religious culture, it is certain that if a child escaped without becoming morbid and neurotic, there were dark and secret resolves to risk the unpleasant future in favor of a ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... before the night. The friend he loved to-day he loathed to-morrow. Scheme after scheme formed in his fertile brain, and jostled confusingly together. All in succession were pressed with enthusiasm. All at times were rejected with disdain. A temperament naturally neurotic had been aggravated by an acquired habit of smoking; and the General carried this to so great an extreme that he was rarely seen without a cigarette. His virtues are famous among men; his daring ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... lunch here to-morrow, he will. He's as near as possible through the wood. Coming up in the train, he suggested a little conversation to-night and afterwards the normal life. He means it, too. There's nothing neurotic about Ledsam." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... based on the assumption that all women are adapted to as well as specialized for reproduction. Neurotic tendencies which unfit women for marriage—the desire for domination. Sexual anaesthesia another neurotic trait which interferes with marital harmony. The conditioning of the sexual impulse to the parent ideal and the erotic fetish as factors which determine mating. Homosexual ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... a person as contained and repressed as yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In neurotic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits off, and we get a syndrome known ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... accounted for his wife's absence, and confessed that he did not believe either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It had not gone so far as this in the judge's experience of a neurotic invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain, and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pleasure, the foundation of her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination—an imagination nourished upon a wide range of literature, connected with her sex and perpetually stimulated by neurotic excitement. Possessed of a certain degree of intellectual capacity, brought up in all the luxury of a princely Roman house—that papal luxury which is made up of art and history—she had received a thin coating of aesthetic varnish, had acquired a graceful ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... woman, with a masculine capacity for deep friendship. The latter was made in a slighter mould, with charming, delicate features, set off by a mass of pale-brown hair. Mr. Frederick Fairlie I found to be a neurotic, utterly selfish gentleman, who passed his life in his own apartments, amusing himself with bullying his valet, examining his works of art, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... an extraordinary religion that flourishes in such a place, an artificial faith that needs heat like tropical plants, that desires unnatural vows. It breathes of neurotic emotions with its damask-covered walls, with its carpet that deadens the footfall, its sombre, gorgeous pictures. The sweet breeze of heaven never enters there, nor the sunlight; the air is languid with incense; one is oppressed by a strange, heavy silence. In ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... letters have all been published and read, when the memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness, shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a strange, ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... insanity. Mental strain, overwork, and worry come next. Adverse conditions, bereavement, business troubles, etc., rank third, equally with heredity. The arterial diseases of old age, epilepsy, childbirth (generally in the neurotic), change of life, fright and nervous shock, venereal diseases, sexual excesses or irregularities follow in ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... again of what Eve had said about yachts and world traveling and wondered how she could hope to do so if the radius of influence was only five miles. Eve might be passionate, headstrong and neurotic, but she was not a fool. If she had planned travel on a world of two decades past she must have found a way of making his and her stay in ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... a little cold laugh and said, 'I see you have been seeking the consolation of religion. Neurotic women like confessors. I do not object to your confessing, if you confess your own backslidings and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... alarm you, McCulloch—not that you are of the neurotic habit, judging by the way you took a chance of having a hole bored through you while searching that blessed barge—but if you believe you can frame a cut-and-dried programme during the time you have retained John D. Curtis's ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. But his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium. The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... of Julius Caesar, is, of all the ancient lyrical poets, the one most modern and neurotic in feeling. One discerns in his work, breathing through the ancient Roman reserve, the pressure of that passionate and rebellious reaction to life, which we enjoy in the most magical of all later poets from Villon ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... I am attracted by neurotic types. Insanity has its source in the unconscious, and we English are afraid of looking inward." He glanced around the crowded room with an amused and cynical look. "Most of these people are as bad as my Trojans, Doctor Fenton. Only they conceal their badness, and it isn't ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the last is indispensable for the understanding of the morbid nature of the symptoms; it almost regularly controls some portion of the social behavior of the patient. The transformation of love into hatred, of tenderness into hostility, which is characteristic of a large number of neurotic cases and apparently of all cases of paranoia, takes place by means of the union ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation of the ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Drive reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great one ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... sorrow, seen his health failing under the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect. Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have recognized ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, tread the primrose path which leads down to futility and death. He was always pre-eminently sane. While composing his transcendent Lear and Othello, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person's thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. Nobody can help their thoughts; ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... case in court, but proved unusually efficient in developing a collection agency, and gradually represented the Bad Accounts Department of more and more important concerns. At thirty- five he was out of debt. They were living well—too well it proved, for his nervous health. There must have been a neurotic taint, as expressed in Aunt Fannie's asthma. Early that fall he had his first attack of hay-fever. For years he had been self-indulgent; he always drank when drinks were offered; he used much tobacco and rich ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... man, and this is not a neurotic story. It is, as a matter of fact, the same old rot to which the shilling shockers have made us accustomed. I cannot account in any way for my experiences last night in the Haunted Room, but they certainly were not due to nervousness. I had not been asleep long before I had a most curious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... Montenegrin, and when "freedom" was attained hoped to force Montenegro into the correct path. His idea of education was primitive. He despised every form of game, exercise, and gymnastics as waste of time, and had never done any himself. "That is why you are so absurdly neurotic and you have never learnt to keep your temper." I chaffed him. He retorted: "Fishblood, fishblood." An interesting specimen of ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... lecherous clergy, and concludes with an account of the sufferings of Big-Endian exiles and extensive observations on the dangers of political factionalism. But he is most attracted by prurient sexual adventures. A vulgar work obviously meant to appeal to a neurotic taste for sexuality, it includes no attack on Swift as it explores at length some topics to which Gulliver in his memoirs only tangentially alludes. The second abortive effort, an animal satire of exotic talking fowl, also ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... that rustles and sways By the gurgling river that plashes and plays, And the beasts of the dread, neurotic night All know the Glugs quite well by sight. And, "Why," say they; "It is easily done; For a dexter Glug's like a sinister one!" And they climb the trees. Oh, they climb the trees! And they bark their knuckles, and chafe their knees; And 'tis ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... without meaning, without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to a certain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong and active woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer, a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almost neurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom "rest cures" are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving red floor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hated feebleness. So she blew out the candle and, with misplaced energy, strove resolutely ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Aunt Dide, Pierre Rougon, his wife, Felicite, and their sons Eugene, Aristide and Pascal, and, on the other, Macquart, his daughter Gervaise of "L'Assommoir," and his son Jean of "La Terre" and "La Debacle," together with the members of the Mouret branch of the ravenous, neurotic, duplex family—these are analysed or sketched in a way which renders their subsequent careers, as related in other volumes of the series, thoroughly consistent with their origin and their up-bringing. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... written down but by himself, so we are the victims not of circumstances but of disposition. Those who succumb to tragic events are those who, like Mrs. Gummidge, feel them more than other people. The characters that break down under brutalising influences, evil surroundings, monotonous toil, are those neurotic temperaments which under favourable circumstances would have been what is called artistic, who depend upon stimulus and excitement, upon sunshine and pleasure. Of course, a good deal of what, in our ignorance of the working of psychological laws, we are accustomed to ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the whole. "Jazz," whether in Music or in any other direction, gives just the very opposite effect, marring the sense of proportion and distorting the feeling of satisfaction. It exists as a testimony to a morbid dissatisfaction with life, it gives emphasis to the unbalanced and neurotic. The true beauty of Art—as of Music—consists on the contrary of this larger rhythm which makes for wholesomeness and proportion, which achieves at once the rest and the satisfaction that the soul craves. Its wholesomeness ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... laugh—or was it cry?—herself at the way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon—she wasn't sure whose—and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott—she had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt and outraged—that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it impossible ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... of the strongest and healthiest women I have ever attended," Doctor Mayson added; "superb health. It's a pleasure to see any one like that. I look after so many neurotic women in London. They give themselves up for lost when they are confronted with a perfectly natural crisis. Mrs. Leith is ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... alter the ethical truth, which stands apart from any considerations of nationality; nor can it affect the conclusion that the German Nation has been plunged into this abyss by its scheming statesmen and its self-centred and highly neurotic Kaiser, who in the twentieth century sincerely believes that he is the proxy of Almighty God on earth, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... for the statesman, the educator, the vocational expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents, deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and dull types, as well as of those ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... attention, and, besides, he wrote a series of aphorisms of his own. The most interesting of his writings, however, is a series of letters on dietetics written for the son of his patron Saladin. The young prince seems to have suffered from one of the neurotic conditions that so often develop in those who have their lives all planned for them, and little incentive to do things for themselves. The main portion of his complaints centred, as in the case of many another individual of leisure, in disturbances of digestion. Besides, he suffered from constipation ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... so I knew in a general way what to expect. I know that modern science vindicates these things, demonstrating that any powerful stimulus given to the unconscious can awaken new vital impulses, and heal not merely the hysterical and neurotic, but sometimes actual physical ailments. Of course, to these ignorant Mexicans and Italians, there was no possible excitement so great as that caused by Carpenter's appearance and behavior. I understood the thing clearly; and yet, somehow, I could not watch it without being startled—thrilled in ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... janitor, and remark at once a band of three performing dogs, who are, as the guide-book would say, "discoursing sweet music." In neither ward of the city does there seem to be the slightest restraint upon the use of musical instruments. It is no place for neurotic people. ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... place to avoid provoking in others bad autosuggestions which may have disastrous consequences, and secondly, consciously to provoke good ones instead, thus bringing physical health to the sick, and moral health to the neurotic and the erring, the unconscious victims of anterior autosuggestions, and to guide into the right path those who had a tendency to ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... that," said Hilda. She was not angry, but bored, by this characteristic remark of Miss Gailey's. In three months she had learnt a great deal about the new landlady of the Cedars, that strange neurotic compound of ability, devotion, thin-skinned vanity, and sheer, narrow stupidity. "I've been quite warm enough," Hilda added as quickly as she could, lest Miss Gailey might have time to convince herself ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... in great discomfort. She did not see in Clare's hopeless passion the joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization of a neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... height of a bold and womanly choice in defiance of social prejudice and family tradition, and then relapsing under the disillusions of marriage into the weakest failings of her class, rising again, from a self-torturing neurotic into a kind of Niobe at the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... clears the mind of vapours, as thunder clears the air. And, finally, it is a natural function of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrelling—by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anaemic, and all these things. And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Scientists and Befaymillites are all studiously avoided. The object is to fill depleted pews of orthodox Protestant churches—these pay the freight, and to the victor belong the spoils. The plot and plan is to stampede into the pen of orthodoxy the intellectual unwary—children and neurotic grown-ups. The cap-and-bells element is largely represented in Chapman's select company of German-American talent: the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us—we dodge, laugh, listen and no one ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... sharp-featured, neurotic-looking woman. One of her Cabinet is speaking earnestly to her and she is paying ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... let himself go. But a wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the outcome of repression; the neurotic is a person whose libido or life force is bottled up; he can be cured only by letting his pent up emotions free. The aim of education is to allow emotional release, so that there will be no bottling up, and no future neurosis; and this release comes through interest. The boy who hates algebra ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... mechanical effects than are at present afforded by the ordinary Punch Show. In M. MAETERLINCK's version, Ponsch becomes the Prince of Half-seas-over-Holland; he is the victim of hereditary homicidal mania, complicated by neurotic hysteria. Inflamed by the insinuations of Mynheer Olenikke—a kind of Dutch Mephistopheles and Iago combined—he is secretly jealous of his consort the Princess Joedi's preference for the society of Djoe, the Court Jester and Society Clown. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... said Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a private job for Hopkins—one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter. She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and your team of tame scientists—we're on our way to the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naive joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... however, a sufferer from strength, like a true artist, but from weakness—the weakness of his age, which he never overcame. It is for this reason that he should be rather pitied than judged as he is now being judged by his German and English critics, who, with thoroughly neurotic suddenness, have acknowledged their revulsion of feeling a little ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... experience young and robust persons are subject to recurrent periods of wakefulness at night which they attribute to the action of the full moon. One may perhaps refer also to the tendency of bright moonlight to stir the emotions of the young, especially at puberty, a tendency which in neurotic persons may ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... gazing blankly into the fire. The light shone on his bald forehead and accentuated the lines which wounded vanity, petty purposes thwarted, and an ignoble life had written prematurely on his face, and his attitude emphasised the attenuation of his body. He looked a poor, peevish, neurotic specimen; and although he had only himself to thank for it, Beth, remembering the promise of his youth, felt a qualm ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... story of modern life, written in the author's very best manner. The scheme, the root motive of the book, may be said to be a vindication of the present generation—the generation that was condemned as neurotic and decadent by common consent a little more than three years ago, but is now enduring the ordeal of the war with great singleness of heart. This theme, in Miss Sinclair's hands, assumes big proportions and gives her at the same time ample opportunity for character analysis, ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... relates how he once plagued himself and his friends by believing that he had elephantiasis, and says that he was really very healthy The truth seems to be that his constitution was naturally strong, though weakened from time to time by neurotic conditions, in which mental pain brought on much physical pain, and by irregular infrequent, and ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... eyes are superficial, frivolous, given to embrace false idols, running down blind alleys, following false prophets, thoughtless, inconsiderate, wanting in sympathy, neurotic, unstable, not firm and deliberate, ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... out. "That means that as far as you're going to be concerned, I'm just another Ihelian private first class for awhile, not a space-neurotic Earthman! And our girls ... well, I think—I think they'd prefer anything to the living death in store for them—the rotting away of their lives in some infested alien jungle. Anyway, somebody's got to be judge. So let's get this damned thing ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... habit of subdued elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives, moves and has her being in neurotic novels written ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... strange creature!" he said—"I cannot make you out. If I were asked to give a 'professional' opinion of you I should say you were very neurotic and highly-strung, and given over ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... life stripped of all purpose. She does not even sleep enough because she hears through the thin wall every sound made by her neighbor in the next room, while arriving or departing Englishmen bang doors all night. In a short time she has become a neurotic, sated with company, surfeited with herself and the place. She is ready to go off with the next halfway respectable organ grinder that happens along. And so she pairs off with the most casual visitors, flirts with the guide, hovering about him and making bandages for his fingers, ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... 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, what a bore it would be! There would be no pictures, no sculpture, no poetry, no music, no ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... functional disorder of the sweat-glands characterized by a secretion variously colored, and usually increased in quantity. It is, as a rule, limited to a circumscribed area. The most common color is red. The condition is probably of neurotic origin and tends to recur. (True chromidrosis is extremely rare; most of the cases formerly thought to be such are now known ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,—life was too dull down there! ... And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,—similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,—the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,—rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,—a tremendous worker; can go three nights without sleep if necessary ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, must be designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) the result of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons, nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I therefore accept her evidence as true. And now, mark the consequence of that acceptance. I am driven to admit that there must, from some source, have been light in the room—a ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... silence. In aspect, he was the exact opposite to the podgy Governor. Slender, and loosely built, he had the large, sunken eyes of a dreamer, the narrow forehead of the self-opinionated, the delicate nostrils and mobile mouth of the neurotic temperament. It was easy to see that such a man would brood over an injury, real or imagined, till he had lashed himself into a tempest of wrath. His emotions could know no mean. From sullen despair ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... above all necessary that we be very gentle to one another and even a little patient with ourselves. I conceive it much better to use contraceptives than to bear unwanted children; I conceive it also better to use them than to be cruel to others or become neurotic oneself; but that it is the ideal I ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... Bordman, "you're all wrong. I'm not neurotic! I'm not. I'm annoyed. I'll get hopelessly behind schedule because of ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the moat-house. The difference went far beyond externals; there was a wide psychological gulf between them—the difference between a woman of healthy mind and calm, equable temperament, who had probably never bothered her head about the opposite sex, and a woman who was the neurotic product of a modern, nerve-ridden city; sexual in type, a prey to morbid ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... it was of much importance; speaking of degenerates, weren't we? We have a curious example of the neurotic here: a fellow who makes a good many dollars by victimizing farmers who are forced to borrow when they lose a crop, as well as young fools from England, and by way of amusement studies modern magic and ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... baths merely as a refreshing tonic—of those whom I have had the opportunity of observing, were in a condition that might be called normal. By far the greater majority were suffering from some complaint, in most instances of a neurotic or rheumatic nature, the presence of which, while it afforded admirable opportunity for observing therapeutic results, modified more or less the physiological effects of the baths, and served to deprive ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... much. The father or mother spends too much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home is more dangerous than the first, for children without ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... Slowly a little cruel smile played round her small mouth. She had married him. She was sure of him. But there was a price. He would be a nuisance, a futile nuisance to her. He would demand kisses, he would pry, would watch her, would fuss. He would be a lover with all the empty ardour of the neurotic man. Sally's heart sank. She did not want a restrained lover, because she was young and high-spirited; but this singular trembling possessiveness would soon be intolerable. He would be a nuisance. Again and again the threat pressed itself ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousness of their swinish and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defies analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb, but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... purples and oranges by the time the little caravan arrived at the Desert Edge Sanatorium, a square white building several miles out of Las Vegas. Malone, in the first car, wondered briefly about the kind of patients they catered to. People driven mad by vingt-et-un or poker-dice? Neurotic chorus ponies? Gambling czars with ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... He was a little excited, and nothing more, and from what I have heard since he had reason to be excited. Neither at the breakfast table nor in his room subsequently did his actions strike me as the actions of a man of insane, neurotic, or violent temperament. He was simply suffering from nerves. It is important to remember, in recalling the events which led up to this case, that Penreath was invalided out of the Army suffering from shell-shock, and that two nights before the scene at the hotel there ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees |
