"Obsessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he retorted, as he mopped the bubbles with a napkin. "You've started in badly." Shirley mentally disagreed. His stupor still obsessed him, but he noted with interest that Warren paid the check for his bottle with a new one-hundred dollar bill. Warren could elicit nothing from Helene but silly laughter, and so he arose impatiently, as Shine Taylor returned to whisper something in his ear. "I must be getting back to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... necessities. His intention was to wander for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted a couple of months in which to settle himself in the new personality; plan out his future work in detail; set the mental ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... old—the sport, in which I once rejoiced, involved such hours of wet and weary walking that I renounced it without too many sighs. But I had nothing to do. My pre-war dilettante excursions into the literary world had long since come to an end. I was obsessed by the story of Lackaday; and so, out of sheer taedium vitae, and at the risk of a family quarrel, I shut myself up with the famous manuscript and my own reminiscences, and began to reduce things to such coherence as you now have had ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... day onward he averted his eyes from the irreparable present of the war and its dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March on! This is no time to halt. We have not yet earned the right to rest with ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected?" [Footnote: Time and Free Will, p. 100 (Fr. p. 76).] Such a duration is Real Time. Unfortunately, we, obsessed by the idea of space, introduce it unwittingly and set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them alongside one another; in a word, we project them into space and we express duree in terms of extensity and succession thus ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... all his efforts, he was unable to move. He himself was fastened by invisible bonds. And, trembling, obsessed by a monstrous vision, he watched the dismal preparations, the cutting of the condemned men's hair and shirt-collars, ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... enjoy the present. But the calm waters of happiness had been ruffled and it was beyond my power to restore their tranquillity. I began to think of many things, of the war itself, of the possible offensive, and soon the fretful rebellious discontent, that obsessed all those of us who had not lost their souls, began to ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the truth, so obsessed was I with Zikali and his ghosts that for a few moments it occurred to me that this might be the Shape with which I had talked an hour or two before. I mean that which had seemed to resemble the long-dead lady Mameena, or rather the person made up to her likeness, ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... with cold sweat is suffused And Fear grips him tight in her toils Lest robbers the secret have used And shake out the gold from his breast. But, when they depart from his brain, These enchantments by which he's obsessed, And Truth comes again with her train Restoring perspective and pain, The phantasm lives to the last, The mind dwells with ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... moved. Had Singleton not been so obsessed with thoughts of an easy victory he might have noted that the pin point of fire that had glowed in Lawler's eyes had grown larger, and that his muscles had stiffened. Also, had Singleton been observant at this minute he must have seen a ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And the reader remembers Duerer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went into nearly all the Duerer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt is a prophet-wizard, not only in his shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of holy scenes ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... his brain—perhaps the ugliest, grimmest plot yet conceived and developed in that defiled temple. It was a crude plot, too, and quite unworthy of Francis Bullard, as he would have realised for himself had he not been obsessed by the new conviction that the real diamonds, now virtually Alan's, were hidden in the clock in that upper room. Further, it contained a serious flaw, in that it allowed nothing for the possibility of Alan's making a fresh will. And finally, if one may be permitted to put the ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... they deliberately had cultivated Nickleby's confidence. It was apparent from the first that the man was utterly devoid of common honesty. It was his idea that government graft was an established method of revenue and he seemed to be obsessed with the belief that no Minister of the Crown would allow his oath of office to interfere with the acquisition of personal wealth. As their relations had ripened he had grown bolder and had organized ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Union of the "good old thirteen States" on terms set by New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility. Radical newspapers referred with enthusiasm to the erection of a new federal edifice. Little wonder that the harassed President was obsessed with the idea that New England was on ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... on with varying success. Presently, holding aces up, and being persistently crosslifted by the Eminent One and the Judge, after a one-card draw all around, he became obsessed with the fixed idea that they were both bluffing and afraid to show down. When this delusion was dispelled, he noted with chagrin that the spoils of Egypt had departed, taking with them some ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... her reappearance, and finally the house darkened, and settled into quiet. Benton sought the open, driven by a restlessness that obsessed and troubled him. A fitful breeze brought down the dead leaves in swirling eddies. The moon was under a cloud-bank when, a quarter of a mile from the house, he left the smooth lawns and plunged among ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born; a soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... despite of the constraint he placed himself under, to be still and not disturb her needlessly. Impatience and apprehension of misfortune obsessed his mental processes in equal degree. The ten minutes seemed interminable that elapsed ere the grinding couplings advertised the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... his side of the correspondence have been preserved, our knowledge of the precise details of his conduct is incomplete; nevertheless, it is clear that, on the whole, throughout the long and painful episode, the principal motive which actuated him was an inexcusable egoism. He was obsessed by a fear of ridicule. He knew that letters were regularly opened at the French Post Office, and he lived in terror lest some spiteful story of his absurd relationship with a blind old woman of seventy should be concocted and set afloat among his friends, or his enemies, in England, which would ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... queer thing to do! But then, old Luddy was a character—apparently always in the most poverty-stricken condition, apparently hardly more than keeping body and soul together, trusting no one, and obsessed by the dread that by depositing in a bank some one would discover that he had money, and attempt to force it from him, he had put his savings, year after year, for twenty years, twenty-five years, perhaps, into unset stone—diamonds. How had she ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... were obsessed by perpetual fear of robbers. That, and no other motive, made them tolerate the hectoring of Rustum Khan, who had constituted himself officer of transport, and brought up the rear on his superb bay mare. As he had promised us he would, he rode well armed, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... to dine at home. The large dining room with the big table set for himself alone only served to remind him the more keenly of his loss. Especially empty and cheerless they looked that day and his mind was obsessed by thoughts of the absent one when suddenly the loud ringing of the telephone bell had aroused his reveries. He picked up the receiver thinking it was Hadley calling him or possibly someone in his office, when to his amazement he heard the voice of ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... began to dawn upon Alec. He remembered the fear that had so long obsessed Blue Bonnet; the fear ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... from the bishop at Ratisbon to Ellwangen, where by the mere word of command, "Cesset" (Give over), he cured the lame and blind, but especially those who were afflicted with epilepsy and convulsions, and who were thereby supposed to be obsessed. His cures were not permanent in some cases, and before he died ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... it was terrible to lose her place, to go back to her parents, who had nothing; but what could she do? Mashenka could not bear the sight of the lady of the house nor of her little room; she felt stifled and wretched here. She was so disgusted with Fedosya Vassilyevna, who was so obsessed by her illnesses and her supposed aristocratic rank, that everything in the world seemed to have become coarse and unattractive because this woman was living in it. Mashenka jumped up from the bed ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... became audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... answered pleasantly, and asked no further questions. He was obsessed with the engines of the Amelia Ricks. It was going to cost a lot of money to put them in condition again, and he remarked as much to Cappy. Thus it happened that they entered into a discussion of other matters, and the good ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Germany was obsessed by the idea that Britain was trying to strangle her by an encircling policy, is apparent in a diplomatic document quoted by Professor Oncken. Its author's name is not given, and it was doubtless a secret report sent to the German Foreign Office in 1912; its freedom from bias is also ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... as being over much obsessed by an objective treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought—number and definition and class and abstract form! But these things,—number, definition, class and abstract form,—I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity—regrettable conditions ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... forcing his way through the press, his clinched fists waving over his head, was young, pallid, typically an academic devotee of radicalism, a frenetic disciple, obsessed by furor loquendi He was calling to the mob, trying to rouse followers. "You have been standing here, freezing in the night, damning tyrants, boasting what you would do. Why don't you do it? Do you let a smirking ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... have just seen Atherton. Of course I didn't repeat our conversation of this morning, and I'm glad I didn't. He almost makes me think you are right, Walter. He's obsessed by the fear of Burroughs. Why, he even told me that Burroughs had gone so far as to take a leaf out of his book, so to speak, get in touch with the Eugenics Bureau as if to follow his footsteps, but ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... inaugurated during the reign of Shomu, when faith in the potency of supernatural influences obsessed men's minds, was severely dealt with by Konin. Office-seekers resorted to the device of contriving conflagrations of official property, rewarding the incendiaries with the plunder, and circulating rumours that these ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... fact, related to me by the same physician, serves to throw a light upon the connection of vital and physical energies. The doctor in question was treating a patient, who was apparently "obsessed," by means of electricity. The galvanometer needle showed what slight variations in the current there were during the course of the treatment. In the middle of the process, while the patient was conversing with the doctor, she was suddenly "obsessed." Coincidental ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... religion spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as an opus operatum—a grace of God objectively real. He retained infant baptism as an efficacious act, and, obsessed as he was by the literal words, Hoc est corpus—"this is my body"—he went back into the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious and miraculous real presence of Christ in the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... in Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the increase of wealth and therefore power in ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had." He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... this month, this day, this hour and this minute. My mind is obsessed and under control of the Divine Spirit, I recognize here and now only good. I see in my fellowmen only perfection and good. I see in nature all around me only perfection and good. I see in every transaction of life only the perfect good. I see in every activity ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... to regard them with serious intent. The poor soul was worried about the girls, as well she might be, since the strides of time were rapidly bearing both into the sere-and-yellow-leaf period of life. For her son, she had earnest, passionate mother love, but since, like all mothers, she was obsessed with the delusion that every girl in the world, eligible and ineligible, was busy angling for her darling, she had left his matrimonial future largely to his father. Frequently her conscience smote ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... her sodden clothing, her wet, tangled hair, her dreadful pallor. His imagination flashed a swift vision of the poor girl wandering alone in the streets of Cannes for two days and nights. What was this terrible idea that obsessed her? how had she come by it? He spoke to her as to a child, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... very good and valid point of view for Germans. He recognized its general source, for the Buchers, in the Dresden newspapers. But he did not enter into argument. He had satisfied himself that argument with Teutons, who do not have open minds, who are obsessed by fixed ideas bored into them, can only end in unpleasantness—a row. He had come to Germany to learn. It would be defeating this purpose to air what ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... taken in the school. He sat with the other new-comers, staring, open-eyed, at nearly six hundred boys, big and small, assembled together in the Speech-room. So engrossed was he that he scarcely heard the Head Master's opening prayers. John was obsessed, inebriated, with the number of Harrovians, each of whom had once felt strange and shy like himself. From his place close to the great organ, he could look up and up, seeing row after row of faces, knowing that amongst them sat his ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger, incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... into Lasse's old boots—this was the essence of manliness. But he was man enough to abstain from so doing—for here such conduct would be regarded as boorish. It was harder for him to suppress his past; it was so inseparable from Father Lasse that he was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so soon as he ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... For those who are obsessed with the scientific method and to whom God has given the rare talent of thinking scientifically, there is to my mind only one way out—the philosophy of creative art. One might collect together all the best works of art that have ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... He became obsessed by the idea that it was his duty to kill Dennin; and whenever he waited upon the bound man or watched by him, Edith was troubled by the fear that Hans would add another red entry to the cabin's record. Always he cursed Dennin savagely and handled him roughly. Hans tried to conceal his homicidal ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... unconnected with this hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget. To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as it was long, long before the war—there was refreshment and renewal in that! Once—last spring—I tried to base a ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... successful effort to keep away from the studio building till four o'clock called for all his will power. Suppose the boy blundered, or wasn't in time. Suppose the girl really had not eaten anything since last Tuesday! These thoughts, and similar ones, obsessed him. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... individual with a pre-existing eating disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of fasters, I've known two of these. I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... was intricate and deeply involved with the growing consciousness that property without anyone to leave it to is the negation of true Forsyteism. To have an heir, some continuance of self, who would begin where he left off—ensure, in fact, that he would not leave off—had quite obsessed him for the last year and more. After buying a bit of Wedgwood one evening in April, he had dropped into Malta Street to look at a house of his father's which had been turned into a restaurant—a risky proceeding, and one not quite in accordance with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I weren't determined to stay at home, I would half-admit to myself that my soul is obsessed ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... away from this barren study. She was obsessed by the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. They seemed to have fascinated her. Which of them it was, or what it was that had cast the spell over her, she did not know. But she was as if hypnotized. She longed to be with them. Her soul gravitated towards them ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... interested in voicing his gratitude than in merely seeing her again. He was not sure but that she would resent his thanks; nevertheless, it was necessary to seek her out, for already her image was nebulous, and he could not piece together a satisfactory picture of her. She obsessed his thoughts, but his intense desire to fix her indelibly therein had defeated its purpose and had blurred the photograph. Who was she? What was she? Where was she going? What did she think of him? The possibility that she might leave Dyea before answering those questions spurred him into a gait ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... was she who filled the sunbeams with golden light, who warmed the blue sky until it seemed of hazy fairy stuff, who sang among the leaves, who urged him on with a power that placed no limit on distance or time. Within less than a day she had so obsessed him as to cause him to focus upon the passion the entire strength of his being. The fortune of gold and jewels before him was great, but if necessary he could sacrifice it without hesitancy to bring her nearer to him. That ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all. Again there was the strong impulse to run away—far, far away from Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly the old monody began to ring in my ears, "WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!" Another moment, and I ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I'm making a fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are—I don't know what you are—you are wonderful, that's all. But how do you do it? How do you ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... asserts itself through my thoughts, and with a thrill I conceive of it—for we would-be authors are persons obsessed by one idea—as an effort of the people of Britain to make it possible for me to come through unhurt and save my story. I feel ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... completely obsessed with his visions of wealth ever just beyond the point of his pick. He toiled long hours in the damp darknesses below seas, with the sounds of crashing waves and rolling boulders close above him, ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes to me, that to all these slaves of the Elsinore the Real is real because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... civilized races. We know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has lost its taste for generations together in art, and in poetry. We remember that the Witchcraft Delusion obsessed our ancestors. It is not impossible, therefore, that between 194 and 1918 the American people passed through a stage in which it threw logic to the winds. This would account at least for its infatuation for President ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... stream sat Lida. Her graceful figure bending forward above the water seemed like that of some mournful spirit in the dusk. The sense of confidence inspired by the voice of her brother forsook her as quickly as it had come, and once more shame and fear overwhelmed her. She was obsessed by the thought that she had no right to happiness, nor yet to live. She spent whole days in the garden, book in hand, unable to look her mother in the face. A thousand times she said to herself that her mother's anguish would be as nothing to what she herself was now suffering, yet ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... attendant came in. She was as tidy as the desk, as obsessed by order, as wooden. She placed a pad before the small man and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... without conveying the slightest meaning, and that the other part of my mind was absorbed with thoughts of Miss Sharp—. If I only dared to be natural with her we surely could be friends, but I am always obsessed with the fear that she will leave me if I transgress in the slightest beyond the line she has marked between us—. I see that she is determined to remain only the secretary, and I realize that it is her breeding ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... a little bit excited," he apologised. "Every so often he becomes obsessed with mad desire to impose upon some simple and credulous nature like mine. And failure always unbalances him. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... perhaps, did that Dr. Jackson, who afterwards claimed to have given Morse all his ideas, apprehend the tremendous importance of that chance remark. The fixed idea had, however, taken root in Morse's brain and obsessed him. He withdrew from the cabin and paced the deck, revolving in his mind the various means by which the object sought could be attained. Soon his ideas were so far focused that he sought to give them expression ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... up to a point in the evolution of Self most people find life quite exciting and thrilling. But when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb—something has been lost. From this numbed condition is born much ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... much difficulty and assuming a drunken dignity he started to go away; but as if he were unable to free his intoxicated mind from the one idea that obsessed it, he turned and changed his tone to a ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... by light transitions, to the Prince of Wales at the front, and thus into the trenches. And then Herbertson was on the subject he was obsessed by. He had come, unconsciously, for this and this only, to talk war to Lilly: or at Lilly. For the latter listened and watched, and said nothing. As a man at night helplessly takes a taxi to find some woman, some prostitute, Herbertson had almost ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... as Odin toiled his way downward, he became aware of a growing stench in the stale air. Even this was welcome, for he was becoming obsessed with the idea that the cavern had not changed since the long-ago river had died, and that nothing in it could change. It was an odor of rottenness. Where there was decay, life had ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... he expected, with one exception. Every human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in the case had been revived he seemed unable to keep it out of his mind. Since our joint visit I had once or twice passed through the street by myself, and on the last occasion had again seen the raising of the blind. It obsessed him—the desire to meet the man face to face. A handsome, bold, masterful man, he conceived him. But there must be something more for such a woman to have sold her soul—almost, one might ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... this time that I began to gather the true source and import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... marry August Keil, if he's so crazy about the fellow. Why, he's positively obsessed. It's madness the way he's taken ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... only in that she had adopted a particularly exacting form of charitable work. Nursing, even as a rich woman's diversion, must be anything but agreeable. O'Reilly pictured this Evans person in his mind—a large, plain, elderly creature, obsessed with impractical ideas of uplifting the masses! She would undoubtedly bore him stiff with stories of her work: she would reproach him with neglect of his duties to the suffering. Johnnie was too poor to be charitable and too deeply engrossed at the moment with his own troubles ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... a babe upon the brine It is my dream to float supine And to the vast inane Banish awhile from off my chest The cares that hold it now obsessed, And even take a clean-cut ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... of those midsummer nights when the air, no longer void, teems with an indefinable influence of restlessness. Like prisoners beating on their iron doors at night, the repressed longings were all awake, too—and clamorous. A sense of fear obsessed her, almost of panic gaining force of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... eyes were wide and blank, like the eyes of a small boy in a frenzy of destruction, when he has forgotten what he started out to do and has become obsessed with ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... roguish, and serves as a pretty foil to the sentimental Agathe. She playfully scolds the nail which she is hammering into the wall again for so rudely dropping the old ranger to the floor, and seeks to dispel the melancholy which has obsessed her cousin by singing songs about the bad companionship of the blues and the humors of courtship. She succeeds, in a measure, and Agathe confesses that she had felt a premonition of danger ever since a pious Hermit, to whom she had gone for counsel in the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... was absorbing the attention of the fashionable world. The craze for making shoes suddenly obsessed Society. Shoemakers unexpectedly found themselves the most favoured of mortals. Lessons in their art were demanded on all sides and at all costs. They were so busy teaching it, they had little time to practise it. Men and women alike would forego engagements while they strove to perfect themselves ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... of fate, all the colonel's wealth came into my hands. At first I thought of refusing the legacy. It seemed odious to take a sou of that inheritance; it seemed worse than the reward of a hired assassin. For three days this thought obsessed me; but more and more I was thrust against this consideration: that my refusal would not fail to awake suspicion. Finally I settled upon a compromise; I would accept the inheritance and would distribute it in small ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... imagination, he had followed Graylock, night after night, slyly, stealthily, shirking after him through busy avenues at midday, lurking by shadowy houses at midnight, burning to see what expression this man wore, what was imprinted on his features;—obsessed by a desire to learn what he might be thinking—with ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... these conventional things, I continued to be obsessed by the great event that had ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... day; it spoils now, for a while, her own sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human—she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness, she finds it; she can only think "how pert that girl ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... cleared the way with which ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here, perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something else ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and to outlast the changes of fashion must go plummet-like to the basic root of things. It is nothing less than extraordinary that Voltaire, living in the age of all ages the most obsessed with the modishness of the hour, should have written "Candide," a book full of the old unalterable laughter. For "Candide" is not only a clever book, a witty book, a wise book. It is a book preposterously and outrageously funny. It tickles ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... attacks of facial erysipelas, for which he afterwards had to undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva. He began the score of Siegfried towards the end of 1856, while the thought of Tristan was stirring within him. In Tristan he wished to depict love as "a dreadful anguish"; and this idea obsessed him so completely that he could not finish Siegfried. He seemed to be consumed by a burning fever; and, abandoning Siegfried in the middle of the second act, he threw himself madly into Tristan. "I want to gratify my desire for love," he says, "until it is completely satiated; ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... was a self-helped man, if ever there was one. When less than fourteen years of age, he left school and started to earn his own living. He never afterward returned to school. In adolescence, his eager mind was obsessed by the glamor of the sea, so he began life as a sailor. After a few years came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... was the popular mind at that time obsessed with the rivalry of routes that a rumour was started imputing to the directors of the Oswestry and Newtown Company the intention of "disuniting the line between Oswestry and Welshpool." As if there were not disunion enough already! More genial humorists launched ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... Ishmael given way to the incursion of the personal, always before so jealously kept out of his life. His desire for impersonality now only kept by him in a fierce wish to blot out his own as much as possible, to sink it in that of the beloved, to drown in hers. He was obsessed by Blanche, she filled the world for him from rim to rim; and though with his mind he still admitted the absurdity of it, could even look at his own state dispassionately, he yet had to admit the fact. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... love with Tannis—he merely admired and liked her. In the second place, it never occurred to him that Tannis might be in love with him. Why, he had never attempted any love-making with her! And, above all, he was obsessed with that aforesaid fatal idea that Tannis was like the women he had associated with all his life, in reality as well as in appearance. He did not know enough of the racial ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the pencil-sketch obsessed the brain of Max. Tossing wakeful upon his bed, he saw the pageant of the future—touched the robe, all saffron and silver, of the goddess Inspiration—and, with the brushes and colors of imagination, gained ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... to win the war. This in a nut-shell explains the main reason why the United States was drawn into the World War. Von Tirpitz, the German Admiral, obsessed with the theory that no effective answer could be made to the submarine, convinced the German High Command and the Kaiser that only through unrestricted submarine warfare could England be starved and the war brought to an end with victory for Germany. Since August, 1914, the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... you what I mean by that. I am frightened and timid, because I am obsessed by the presence of ghosts that I ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... considerable. The percolation of the news of the police failure had reduced the male population to the condition of a joyful desire to celebrate in contraband drink. The female population became obsessed with a love of their own doorsteps, whence they could greet each other and exchange loud-voiced opinions with their neighbors, while their household "chores" awaited their later convenience. The children, too, were robbed of their delight in more familiar mischief, and turned ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... was a sober man—except upon occasions. The occasions were not numerous, but they left an undying impression on his neighbors and fellow townsmen; for the late private had a way all his own. He was a big Welshman, so strong that he never knew how strong he was; and when he became obsessed with the desire to get drunk, no one could stop him. He had to have it out. At such times his one ambition was to ride a horse up the steps of the hotel, and then—George Washington-like—rise in his stirrups ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... and Paul found himself again in his taximeter cab. In a state of mind quite different from that which had obsessed him on his way to the dinner, he arrived once more ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... wish to relate what had happened to her, but to acquaint Lennox with the cause of what had happened to him. In view of what had befallen her, the proceeding was certainly considerate. In the misadventures of life, the individual is usually so obsessed by his own troubles that they blind him to those of another. But ostensibly Cassy had sunk her troubles and had pulled them up, not to exhibit them, but to show Lennox the lay of the land as it affected not her at all but him. The proceeding ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... race. Apparently, therefore, we are to believe that the leaders of this Jewish conspiracy set up the Socialist movement and fostered it, while at the same time they enlisted their ablest minds to defeat it. Surely for the normal mind that is not obsessed this is a theory ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... first time to Kate Duckworth, an English contralto, known on the platform as Mlle. Morensi, and, after her death, to Isabella McCullough, an American soprano. Richard Grant White's mind was still obsessed by memories of Salvi, Benedetti, and Mario when Brignoli was basking in the sunshine of popular favor, and his estimate of the tenor in The Century Magazine for June, 1882, is scarcely flattering either to the singer or the public that liked ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the man became totally changed. He grew gloomy but resourceful, also full of patience. Only one idea obsessed him—to rescue his daughter and avenge the murder of his people; indeed, except his sins, he thought of and found interest in nothing else. Moreover, his iron constitution cast off all the effects of his past debauchery and he grew so strong that although I was ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... un bock," he said impatiently, obsessed by his new idea. "Tell me, Monsieur Cruchot, you who have used the Cure Sypher. It is well known in the French army is it not? You had it served out from the ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... development. They are distressed beyond measure to note their steady growth in spite of every attempt which they make to control or forbid them. And of all this unrest and unhappiness the child is acutely conscious. The whole household may become obsessed with the misfortune which has befallen it, and the mother, losing all sense of proportion, feels that she cannot regain her peace of mind until it has been overcome. The child is in need of mental and moral support from those around him, and all that he finds is an openly expressed ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... gone home. I was doing some work, and, having occasion to consult a book, lighted a candle, and put it in the small window near the bookcase. Then I fancied I saw a woman's face, her face, peering in, and was so obsessed by the notion that I went outside, but everything was so still that I ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... will say of this, that, or the other trifling thing, and in that way perpetually loses sight of the realities of life. There is a great deal of good in her that you have never seen because for the moment she is absolutely obsessed by her objection to your name and her conviction that Dorothea might and should marry a title. My sister married Reginald Valentine more for the effect on her future visiting-card than anything else, but Dorothea's father bequeathed his good looks, his sunny disposition, his charm, and his generous ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... beauty vanished, his eyes seeming to grow closer like an ape's. The mania for murder that obsessed him tautened his sinews. Cheeks, neck, forearms swelled with knotted strength. ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was epochal. It paved ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... then," I replied honestly. The thought of water obsessed. She must have read, for ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Hugo's famous novel, which had been filmed to perfection, Grace was obsessed with the question: "Where have I seen him?" The stranger's face haunted her. It was a low-browed, sullen face. She could not keep her mind on the story that was being unfolded on the screen. She watched the ill-fated Jean Valjean being led off to prison for stealing a loaf ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... to sit close beside her in a motor, were the worst. An ordinary young man, not in love with her, would have found something intoxicating in her atmosphere—and how much more this poor Tristram, who was passionately obsessed. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... them, and set themselves diligently to learn all that the strangers could teach. And Mawg, seeing here his opportunity both for vengeance on Grom and for the gratification of that mad passion for A-ya which had so long obsessed him, had gone about the business with shrewd ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... this international co-operation is not by any means always with similar and racially allied nations. Republican France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of autocratic Russia. Australia, that much more than any other country has been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese. And as to the ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation, there ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He admitted that a man obsessed with a Central Idea—and, after all, the only thing that mattered was the Idea—might become a bore, but the World's Work, he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he laid his bones down to that work till we abandoned ourselves to the ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... Sandy was obsessed by a sense of misgiving that would not be denied. Wheeling his bicycle round, he mounted and headed straight for Mallow ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... person fascinated me. It was a trace of stern hostility, yet I could not keep my eye away from it. I gazed and gazed at those foot-prints of hers till I seemed to be growing stupid and dizzy. "Am I losing my head?" I said to myself. "Am I obsessed? Why, I saw her yesterday for the first time and I have scarcely spoken to her. What the devil is the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... following him that night. On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high calling of ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gains. His features and figure were mean. Worse still, he was of low birth, a crime in the eyes of nobles and courtiers who for nearly half a century had seen the prestige of the Chancery enhanced by the lordly airs and whims of Kaunitz. Fear of courtly intrigues ever obsessed the mind of Thugut; and thus, whenever the horizon darkened, this coast-hugging pilot at once made for the nearest haven. In particular, as the recovery of Belgium in the year 1793 brought no financial gain, but unending vistas ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... millions of distinct species in the animal and vegetable world, not a single species has been traced to another. Until species in the animal and vegetable world can be linked together, why should we assume without proof that man is a blood relative of any lower form of life? Those who become obsessed with the idea that they have brute blood in their veins devote their time to searching for missing links in the hope of connecting man with life below him; why do they prefer a jungle ancestry to creation by the Almighty for a purpose ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... happiness of those he had assisted for his own selfish purpose mattered little to him. He had so long brooded and thought upon one idea, so planned and schemed to bring about one thing, that a desire for revenge fairly obsessed him. ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... madly to march along a road, while his feet drag heavily, and his tongue refuses to form sounds and words. I confess that I am anxious, for I think his mind may prey too far upon his physical strength. Only last week Varius told me that he thinks Virgil himself is obsessed by the idea that he may die before he has finished his work, he has begged him so often to promise to destroy whatever ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... what manner of meeting it is that I am breaking up." But as the speaker progressed, in periods punctuated by applause from what, by his experience at the door, Mr. Lavender knew to be a packed audience, he grew more and more uneasy. It cannot be said that he took in what the speaker was saying, obsessed as he was by the necessity of formulating a reply, and of revolving, to the exclusion of all else, the flowers and phrases of the leaders which during the day he had almost learned by heart. But by nature polite ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... generation? I'm not sure—although I prefer the happy medium myself—that they are not wiser than their grandmothers and their maiden aunts. On the principle that confession is good for the soul, I don't believe that women will be so obsessed by—well, let us ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Bob put in the next two weeks to good advantage. In fact, so obsessed was he with his new employment that it was not long before his imaginary bet with Cady assumed reality in his mind. Moreover, it became gossip around his clubs; and in quarters where he was well known his method of winning the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... When one's imagination becomes obsessed by an unpleasant idea there is a natural tendency for anxiety to grow while one is held in suspense; at all events it was so with me on that particular occasion, for it seemed to me that daylight would never come. Meanwhile, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... be a fact? Or was the whole thing a mere coincidence? Was he obsessed by FitzGerald and suspecting an honest man, who might have been ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... named as cognizant of the plot several persons "of known credit, fortune and reputations, and of religious principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices; at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... change that time would inevitably work upon her. She shrugged her shoulders. If there were indeed any sort of facial resemblance between herself and her aunt, no one would ever see it except in Miss Deane, and she was obsessed with a senile vanity. Yet was it, after all, Rachel began to wonder, an unnatural obsession? Might she not in time suffer from it herself? The change would be so slow, so infinitely gradual; and always one would be cherishing the old, loved image of youth and beauty, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... rebels are generally highly suggestible beings, whose mystic mentality is obsessed by fixed ideas. Despite the apparent energy indicated by their actions they are really weak characters, and are incapable of mastering themselves sufficiently to resist the impulses that rule them. The mystic spirit which animates them furnishes pretexts for their violence, and enables ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... her a year ago as a commencement present. Had not Marjorie declared over and over again that she would never part with it? And now she had deliberately given it to Constance. This proved beyond a doubt where Marjorie's true affection lay. Mary was obsessed with a wild desire to turn and run down the drive and away from this hateful girl. This was, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... face entreatingly between her thin toil-worn hands, crying over it for a while; then undressed herself and crept into bed beside her. She had once heard Granny say about some one she had been called to: "There is nothing to be done for him, he's quite cold!" And she was obsessed with that thought, Granny must not be allowed to get cold, or she would have no Granny left. She crept close to the body, and worn out by tears and exhaustion soon ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and unwieldy young person who possesses an inordinate appreciation of her own imaginary charms. Her father, whom I might designate as a fly-by-night sort of a gentleman, a character which I once ventured to portray myself, is obsessed by the one thought of getting rid of her as quickly as possible, but all the would-be suitors the moment they set eyes on her beat a hasty retreat. There were, of course, very many more pieces that Mr. Pittar played in, but these two ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... your offer—and I thank you for it," she returned. "I feel positive that father will buy a ranch here, for he has much faith in the future of Manti—he is obsessed ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Eleanor acknowledged the courtesy, but Barbara rudely failed to notice it as she was so obsessed with the desire to complain about the railroad, the natives of Oak Creek, the trails to Pebbly Pit, and everything ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Standing. I was caught red-handed. Now the right and the wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It was purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger, obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the ages, I killed my fellow professor. The court records show that I did; and, for once, I agree with the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... it amounted to. I was obsessed with the problem of human folly, and he focussed that obsession. It often happens that the character which inspires a book never appears in it. In all sincere work I think it must be so. And, with the mad artist in my mind all ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the timid lad at once became passionate, engrossed—nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of somber reticence had settled over him, he had been impressed with the majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... pirate treasure, if they found it, be to Allen Drew? This bitter query obsessed him. He would gladly give every coin and jewel Ramon Alvarez had buried here, were it his to give, to see Parmalee, leaning on his cane, walk ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... those youngsters have obsessed me," he thought, more than once. "They certainly are beautiful enough, and the last time I looked at them in that waning light they were fairly alive. Would that they were, and scampering ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... helped "spruce up" Aunt 'Mira long since, so that they could go to church together on Sundays. But now the good lady was in the throes of making herself a silk dress for best—a black silk. It was the thing she had longed for most, and now she could satisfy the craving for clothes that had so obsessed her. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... features of criminals," was the retort. "No, Wensdale, you are obsessed by the finger-print heresy, quite regardless of the fact that none but an amateur ever leaves such a thing behind him, and the amateur is never ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... morning bore but slight resemblance to that same environment during the hours of darkness—especially on a night immediately following pay-day at the mines. As Miss Donovan, now thoroughly awake, and obsessed by the memory of those past hours of horror, cautiously drew aside the corner of torn curtain, and gazed down upon the deserted street below, she could scarcely accept the evidence ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... spent in solitude and unusual circumstances, Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... preserving the human body in its state of death until the end of all earthly time—to that day when the earth would return to the sun from which it had sprung. Quite suddenly one day he had conceived the answer to the puzzling problem which obsessed his mind, leaving him awed ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... could not tolerate, however, was his wife, who, to my fancy, more resembled a vessel, a very unattractive vessel, full of vinegar than a woman. Her name was Sarah and she was small, plain, flat, sandy-haired and odious, quite obsessed, moreover, with her jealousies of the Rev. Basil, at whom it pleased her to suppose that every woman in the countryside under fifty ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... field for educators. The latter have failed to seize the chance in the present industrial arrangement for the development of "the originating, choosing power" in the working man because they have been obsessed by the business appreciation of the working man's power of adaptation. It is because they labor under this obsession that they turn industrial education into industrial training whenever they include industry in their curricula. Educators ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... and was comforted. He wondered how, in the old days that were only yesterdays, people could have endured separation without any means of communication, and he blessed the name of Marconi as cordially as he cursed the name of Brutgal. To exasperate him further, the rest of the day seemed obsessed by Victor Mahr. He was in the elevator that took him up to his office; he was at the club in the afternoon; he was a guest at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in the evening, and was placed opposite Marcus Gard. Despite his desire to let the man alone, he could not resist the temptation ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... new rooms were crowded, and preoccupied as he was, it struck Vanno oddly, as it always did strike him anew in the Casino, to hear every one who passed talking of the all-absorbing game. They were obsessed by it, and threw questions to each other, which elsewhere would have meant nothing, or some very different thing; but here no explanations were needed. "Doing any good?" asked a pallid young man with a twitching face, like ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that of maladjustment in thought. Protestantism is still suffering from the effects of extreme individualism in religious belief. Strong leaders, obsessed with some one variation in interpretation of the Scriptures, have pulled off from the main body of the church and have started independent organizations committed to the development of the particular interpretation they have made. When once these organizations have been ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... or his aunt—or his interpreter. And such clothes, my dear, one doesn't behold. Worth and Paquin and Doucet must go sleepless for weeks to invent them. They are without a flaw in shade or line or texture." Which was true, because Mrs. Mellish of the Bond Street shop had become quite obsessed by her idea and committed extravagances Miss Alicia offered up contrite prayer to atone for, while Tembarom, simply chortling in his glee, signed checks to pay for their exquisite embodiment. That he was not reluctant to avail himself of social opportunities was made ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... OBSESSED, p.p. Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week, and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... chief article of barter. Bereft of these and deprived at the same time of the supreme joy of existence, the chase, bitten with cold, starved with hunger, fearful of the future, they offered fertile soil for the seeds of rebellion. A government more than usually obsessed with stupidity, as all governments become at times, remained indifferent to appeals, deaf to remonstrances, blind to danger signals, till through the remote and isolated settlements of the vast ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... appears to be obsessed with the idea that the way to deal with the Allied blockade is to have a succession of sudden crises with neutrals, which may be used for striking diplomatic bargains. These bargains, in the mind of Germany, always take one form—that Germany is to refrain from violating ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... your furnished rooms, Ushered to meals when reft of appetite— Though hungry, bound to wait a stated hour— Your dearest contemplation broken off By the appointed summons to your bath; Racked with more thought for those whom you may flog Than for those dear; obsessed by your possessions With a dull round of stale anxieties;— Soon maintenance grows the extreme reach of hope For those held in respect, as in a vice, By citizens of whom they are the pick. Of men the least bond is the roving seaman Who hires himself to merchantman or pirate ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... of states and peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret arrangements of diplomatists and the agreements or jealousies of kings. For fifty years Germany has been unifying the mind of her people against the world. She has obsessed them with an evil ideal, but the point we have to note is that she has succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No other modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as bad ones, systematic inculcation, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... said without enthusiasm. My heart sank like lead. Ludicrous? Was that the way it appeared to her? I had a little spirit left. "Quite as ludicrous as the fancy Britton has about me. He is obsessed by the idea that I am in love with you. What ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon |
