"Abnormal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... protected. It would have been quite useless for Vergil to prepare for this career had it been obviously closed. We have no sure record in Cicero's epoch of any young man rising successfully from the business or industrial classes to a career in public life except through the abnormal accidents provided by the civil wars. Presumably, therefore, Vergil's father belonged to a landholding family with some honors of municipal service ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Mrs. Browning has been so often portrayed as that of some abnormal being, half-nervous invalid, half-angel, as if she were a special creation of nature with no particular relation to the great active world of men and women, that it is quite time to do away with the category of nonsense and literary hallucination. One does not become less ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... point, more difficult to accept and understand than any other requiring belief in a base not usually accepted, or indeed entered on—whether such abnormal growths could have ever changed in their nature. Some day the study of metabolism may progress so far as to enable us to accept structural changes proceeding from an intellectual or moral base. We may ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... near the right edge. There are 5 posterior cirri and 4 anal cirri, of much smaller size. The cirri may or may not be fimbriated, the latter condition indicating the approaching disintegration of the body and is abnormal. The macronucleus is long and band-formed or horseshoe shape. The contractile vacuole lies on the right side dorsal ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... barbarians just at the time when a warlike nation, long settled on the borders of Assyria, and within a short distance of her capital, was increasing, partly by natural and regular causes, partly by accidental and abnormal ones, in greatness and strength. It will be proper, in treating of the history of Media, to trace out, as far as our materials allow, these various causes, and to examine the mode and extent of their operation. But such an inquiry is not suited ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... by the sleep which follows all abnormal displays of strength, and dimly conscious that she was safe from violence, gradually unbent her fingers. Brigaut's letter fell from them ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... require large outlays of money which should be raised through normal investment channels. But while private capital should finance this expansion program, the Government should recognize its responsibility for sharing part of any special or abnormal risk of loss attached ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... distantly related to Mr. Rickman the young man about town. And that made four. Besides these four there was a fifth, the serene and perfect intelligence, who from some height immeasurably far above them sat in judgement on them all. But for his abnormal sense of humour he would have been a Mr. Rickman of the pure reason, no good at all. As it was, he occasionally offered some reflection which was ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... appendage of sociological studies, is commenced betimes; while physical geography, comprehensible and comparatively attractive to a child, is in great part passed over. Nearly every subject dealt with is arranged in abnormal order: definitions and rules and principles being put first, instead of being disclosed, as they are in the order of nature, through the study of cases. And then, pervading the whole, is the vicious system of rote learning—a ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... people here live five miles from home. Not a house have I been in but the tavern and one Irishman's." The tavern was kept by Thomas Allen, an Irishman from the island of Antigua, whose "antipathy to the British was abnormal"—and so we may well believe he was a kindred spirit to that of ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... he had no personal motive for what he might or might not do. He had reached that pass when he was himself, as far as he himself was concerned, beyond hate of that man outside. It was a principle for which he argued. Should a monster, something abnormal in strength and subtlety and wickedness, something which menaced all the good in the world, be allowed to exist? Gordon argued that it should not. He was driven to it by years of fruitless struggling against this monstrous creation in the shape of man. He had seen ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... combined causes of his breakdown: first the intense heat, which had made his stay in Paris very trying; the fatigue he had undergone there; and lastly the weakness supervening after the loss of appetite, also due to the abnormal heat, which was causing several sunstrokes every day, even in England. He announced his intention of making another attempt with me in the autumn, when the chances would be more ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Delinquency.—The third class of abnormal citizens are the delinquents, both adult and juvenile. Almost every rural community has a certain number of adults and children who, although not definitely criminal, are constantly committing various misdemeanors, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... indisposition, disturbed sleep, grinding of the teeth, fretfulness, languor, loss of weight and anaemia. There are besides local symptoms: flatulence, abdominal pain, abdominal distention, constipation, or looseness of the bowels with mucus in the stools, foul breath, coated tongue, loss of appetite, or an abnormal capricious appetite. Such symptoms are often wrongly ascribed to ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... the fog was outside—thick enough for a man to lose himself in it. The yellow mist which had crept in under the doors and through the crevices of the window-sashes gave a ghostly look to the room—a ghastly, abnormal look, he said to himself. The fire was smouldering instead of blazing. But what did it matter? He was going out. He had not bought the pistol last night—like a fool. Somehow his brain had been so tired and crowded that he ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Psychological investigations of the reliability of human evidence make the science of service in the court room. The study of the laws of attention and interest give us the psychology of advertising. The study of suggestion and abnormal states make psychology of use in medicine. It may be said, therefore, that psychology, once abstract and unrelated to any practical interests, will become the most useful of all sciences, as it works out its problems and finds the ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Supernatural. Supernormal, not Abnormal. The Prevailing Ignorance. Prejudice Against the Unusual. Great Changes Impending. The Naturalness of Occult Powers. The World of Vibrations. Super-sensible Vibrations. Unseen Worlds. Interpenetrating ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... has been done by women, until early in the nineteenth century in England and its colonies, it gradually became customary for men-doctors to attend such cases; apart from this, the work of midwifery has never been in the hands of men, except when abnormal cases have required the assistance of a doctor with knowledge of anatomy and skilled in instrumental delivery. Even before the passing of the Midwives Act in 1902, statistics proved that three-quarters of all confinements in this ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... with any supreme paroxysm of human emotion, whether it be joy or pain, will retain a certain atmosphere or association which it is capable of communicating to a sensitive mind. By a sensitive mind I do not mean an abnormal one, but such a trained and educated mind as you or ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "I'll just run upstairs and put on my things. I'll say it's 'orders' from you. And I'll wear my new frock—it's longer." (The colonel was slightly relieved at this; it had seemed to him, as a guardian, that there was perhaps an abnormal display of Pansy's black stockings.) "You ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... And now and then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetites and cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty and his liking for human flesh. Modern physiology knows how to classify and explain these abnormal cases, but to the unscientific mediaeval mind they were explicable only on the hypothesis of a diabolical metamorphosis. And there is nothing strange in the fact that, in an age when the prevailing habits of thought ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... But having placed my ear against one of the outhouses, the better to discover what this strange disturbance was that was inside my house, I became convinced, certain, that something was taking place in my residence, which was altogether abnormal and incomprehensible. I had no fear, but I was—how shall I express it—paralyzed by astonishment. I did not draw my revolver, knowing very well that there was no need of my ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... tried to put Lady Blakeney's sudden infatuation down to foreign eccentricity, and finally consoled itself with the thought that after all this nonsense could not last, and that she was too clever a woman and he too perfect a gentleman to keep up this abnormal state of things for any ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... have to choose our food with care. If we are frank with ourselves, some of us will have to admit that our own ailments seem interesting, while the other person's ills are "merely nervous" or imaginary or abnormal. After all, a good many of us will have to plead guilty to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... fully alive. It was unfair to blame them for missing marriage certificates. True, his father had never committed a theft, but there was no necessity for a man to steal if he had an income of six thousand crowns and could please himself. The act would be absurd or abnormal in such a case. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... can become of greater significance to us than the solution of the above problem. Our attention is called to the fact that we have assumed a too close connection between the sexual impulse and the sexual object. The experience gained from the so called abnormal cases teaches us that a connection exists between the sexual impulse and the sexual object which we are in danger of overlooking in the uniformity of normal states where the impulse seems to bring with it the object. We are thus instructed to separate this connection between the impulse and the object. ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... of walnuts for individual sample trees averaged by crop years are presented in Table 1. Nuts of all crops collected from four trees, 57, 58, 60, and 139, were shriveled or abnormal, and afforded no test of nut quality during the six-year period. Thus, nut quality data, based on 440 nut crop samples, are complete for 128 of the 132 sample trees. From this study, the average common black walnut in the Tennessee Valley has a nut weight of 17 grams, a ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... sudden and abnormal appearance of boot-blacks. One had set up an ornate stand on the rue de Rivoli. He was an American, Tom Wilkins, and the first ever known to practise his profession in the South Seas. He had come like a non-periodic comet, and suddenly flashed his brass-tagged platform ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... that novel-reading engenders false and unreal ideas of life, but the descriptions of love-scenes, of thrilling, romantic episodes, find an echo in the girl's physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex, which she recognizes only as a pleasurable mental emotion, with no comprehension of the physical origin or the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... rejected because they are physically unfit; and the shameful condition of the children of the poor. More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or physical defect; defects in development; defects of eyesight; abnormal nervousness; rickets, and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... people in pain are strange and abnormal, and sometimes seem unaccountable; it is not the mere suffering at which any are amused. We can sometimes laugh at a person, although we feel for him, where the incentive to mirth is much stronger than the call for sympathy. Still we confess that some ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... been effaced—heredity, which transmits to children the faculties of the parents. We have never seen a monkey bring a man into the world, nor a man produce a monkey. All men having a Simian (monkey-like) appearance are simply pathological variants, (abnormal varieties, due to some diseased condition). It was generally believed a few years ago that there existed a few human races which still remained in the primitive inferior condition of their organization. But all these races have been objects of minute investigation, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... trot, whilst I went on down the fence. Before I had gone three-quarters of a mile, my attention was arrested by the peculiar apple-green hue of a tall, healthy-looking pine, standing about a hundred and fifty yards from the fence. Knowing that this abnormal deviation in colour, if not forthwith inquired into, would harass me exceedingly in after years, I turned aside to inspect the tree. It was worth the trouble. The pine had been dead for years, but every leafless twig, right ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... if I could; and so I did; for methought I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"—a touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pass into the region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image of the cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And all that was beside the cross was ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... and whatever other privileges might have been obtained for its merchants by the same power. The necessity for obtaining such concessions arose from the habit of looking at all international intercourse as to a certain degree abnormal, and of disliking and ill-treating foreigners. Hence the Germans in London, the Venetians in Alexandria, the Genoese in Constantinople, for instance, needed to have permission respectively from the English, the Mameluke, and the Greek governments ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... remained with her, as had already been said, for some months, until, to be exact in regard to the date, the other young women, whom she had been watching with interest, had bought their brilliant blouses with the newest and, consequently, most abnormal sleeves, casting aside the sober-hued bodices which they had worn ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... will force for itself unnatural ones. A vigorous life of the senses not only does not tend to sensuality in the objectionable sense, but it helps to avert it. Health finds joy in mere existence; daily breath and daily bread suffice. This innocent enjoyment lost, the normal desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal prize-fighter is compelled to recognize the connection between purity and vigor, and becomes virtuous when he goes into training, as the heroes of old observed chastity, in hopes of conquering at the Olympic Games. The very word ascetic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... convince himself of this, he plunged desperately into a forlorn attempt to make head or tail of Belgian railway schedule, complicated as these of necessity are by the alternation from normal time notation to the abnormal system sanctioned by the government, and vice-versa, with every train that crosses a ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... erudite and sage, When writing of the past stone age, Tell us man once was clothed in skins And tattooed patterns on his shins. Rough bearded and with shaggy locks He lived in dug-outs in the rocks. Was often scared and run to earth By creatures of abnormal girth: Mammoths and monsters; truth to tell We find their names too long to spell. He joined in little feuds no doubt; And with his weapons fashioned out Of flint, went boldly to the fray; And cracked a skull or two ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... expected of men in the position of guards of a prison? The function is abnormal, and unless it be undertaken from high motives and with an exceptional endowment of intelligence and humane feeling, it will steadily deteriorate a man; from being at the start to all practical purposes a social derelict, incompetent for productive employment, and often suffering from an incurable ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... partisans of the existing order, and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be menaced by phantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. A woman who reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Victory" would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "Jenseits von Gut und Boese" or "The Inestimable Life of the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... will keep twice as long," said his nurse, "in dirty water. It is such a waste to put fresh water on roses!" This remark—slight in itself—remained in his memory as the first truth—the Logos, in fact—from which all other truths generated. He was now nine-and-thirty: he had executed an abnormal amount of work, and he had a just reputation as a portrait-painter. His technical skill was considered unique. The something lacking was that mysteriousness which belongs to all great art, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... inspiratory stridor. Diagnosis is quickly made by the inspection of the larynx with the infant diagnostic laryngoscope. No anesthetic, general or local, is needed. Stridorous respiration may also be due to the presence of laryngeal papillomata, laryngeal spasm, thymic compression, congenital web, or an abnormal inspiratory bulging into the trachea of the posterior membranous tracheo-esophageal wall. The term "congenital laryngeal stridor" should be limited to the first described condition of ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... hold up a battalion, we made such rapid progress, and how having got so deep into the range it was possible for us to feed our front. We had no luck with the weather. In advancing over the plain the troops had suffered from the abnormal heat, and many of the wells had been destroyed or damaged by the retreating enemy. In the hills the troops had to endure heavy rains and piercingly cold winds, with mud a foot deep on the roads and the earth so slippery on the hills that only donkey transport was serviceable. ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... knew (with one or two exceptions) as little of Europe as he did, and they were only called in irregularly as he might need them for a particular purpose. Thus the aloofness which had been found effective in Washington was maintained, and the abnormal reserve of his nature did not allow near him any one who aspired to moral equality or the continuous exercise of influence. His fellow-plenipotentiaries were dummies; and even the trusted Colonel House, with vastly more knowledge of men and of Europe than the President, from whose sensitiveness ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... ache to look at the poor baby, and think what an unsatisfactory, profitless, miserable life that may be. I need not remind you, Katy, that all this is a little piece of Freemasonry between ourselves. You are one of the exceptional and abnormal human people before whom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... help us all! a very uncommon occurrence these days: a woman almost unsexed by misery, starvation, and the abnormal excitement engendered by daily spectacles of revenge and of cruelty. They were to be met with every day, round every street corner, these harridans, more terrible far than were ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... preceded by the violent throes of the heart to propel the carbonized blood from the overworked tissues and have them set free at the lungs where the air is rushing in at the normal ratio of four to one. This is not an abnormal action, but is of necessity, or asphyxia would instantly result and the runner would drop. Such sometimes occurs where the runner exerts himself too violently at the very outset; and to do so he is compelled to hold his breath for this undue effort, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the exception that the cavity is at the top. Clearly these New Zealand chaffinches were at a loss for a design when fabricating their nest. They had no standard to work by, no nests of their own kind to copy, no older birds to give them any instruction, and the result is the abnormal structure I have ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... rather the assumptions of that Latter-day Pamphlet, Mr. Bayne takes a view of our duty to criminals with which we agree, and he quotes the fact that the majority of those who belong to the criminal class are found to have abnormal brains and often diseased bodies. He also treats just in the way we might expect the dictum that stupidity means badness. The last meaning of that, we almost fear, Mr. Bayne has not quite caught; as ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... was missing about the place—and there seemed to be an abnormal amount—was attributed to the ha'nt. I do not doubt but that the servants made the ha'nt a convenient scapegoat to answer for their own shortcomings, but still there were several suggestive depredations—horse blankets from the ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... third period of the development of her ideas, there came to Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the hidden griefs of genius,—to know not only what it wanted but what it was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy, these excursions ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... test of love and of life is in sacrifice yielded to as the need may come. In God's first plan of life there is no sacrifice. God never chooses sacrifice as His first choice for any one, not even for His Son. But sin is here, an abnormal, foreign thing. Life is shot through and through with its ugly markings. You can't go a foot's length down the pathway of obedience without finding the keen edge of a knife, freshly sharpened, held across the path with ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... said before that demonstrations of affection were strictly prohibited; but I have not remarked that in the by-laws subsequently drafted by Miss Jones for the regulation of their abnormal relation, oral references to the same interesting topic were likewise forbidden. When Miss Jones had her own way, she usually talked music, and talked intelligently and well. She seemed to find a kind of humorous satisfaction in confining her adorer strictly ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... matted crop of short red hair that fell in a disordered entanglement over the upper part of the forehead and ears. All else was lost in a loathsome, disgusting mass of detestable decomposition, too utterly vile and foul to describe. On the abnormal thing beginning to move forward, the spell that bound Mrs. Murphy to the floor was broken, and, with a cry of horror, she fled to the bed and awoke ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... indeed, been in all ages of the world temperaments of supernormal or abnormal responsiveness to influences which seem to make little or no impression upon the ordinary mind. In all periods natures of this type have been looked upon as organs of religious revelation. So valuable have abnormal experiences seemed that all manner of expedients have been utilized ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... with it, although it is very remarkable that the anomalous condition of this part never excited any particular attention on the part of either of these distinguished naturalists; and De Haan describes Fabricius's species, Hexapus sexpes, as if there were nothing especial or abnormal in a Decapod having only six pairs of legs besides the claws. Mr. White made a similar mistake on one occasion, when he described an anomourous genus allied to Lithodes, in which the fifth pair of legs were not visible; but when, at my suggestion, a more careful examination ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... cabinet; no tener su alma en su —, not to have one's soul in the right place; to have one's soul in an abnormal condition. ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... cosmic element in ourselves is so closely united with our more conscious powers of volition and reasoning, that they constitute a single unity; and this is how it should be, only, as we shall see later on, with a difference. But there are certain abnormal states which are worth considering, because they make clearer the existence in us of this impersonal self, which in academical language is called the subliminal consciousness. The work of the subliminal consciousness ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... retiring little villa with its marigold-tinted curtains. He had by no manner of means decided on his course of action. He could not have told you what he was going to say to Maisie. In this as in so many other ways, he believed himself abnormal. No one had ever told him that ninety-nine out of a hundred married men, if they spoke the truth, would have to confess that they had been unaware thirty seconds before they proposed that they were going ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... descent;[242] rather they are poetical explanations, plainly invented to account for women's predominance at a time when such power had come to be considered as unusual. The same may be said of many of these old myths. Man's fancy begins to weave poetic inventions around anything he considers abnormal or is not able to understand. The idea or custom for which an explanation is being sought must, however, have been present for long in the common life and thought of the people. Without realising this, all these old stories become unintelligible. I believe they have been greatly ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... was called odd; and the poor girl felt that she was not like other people, yet could not help it. Her brother, too, laughed at her without the slightest idea of the pain he occasioned, or the remotest feeling of curiosity as to what the inward and consistent causes of the outward abnormal condition might be. Tenderness was the divine comforting she needed; and it was altogether absent from her brother's character ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... common sense—well-balanced habits of thinking and living, supported by an intellect so clear and so keen that I knew of none to excel it. What the Science Community was, no one knew exactly; but that there was something abnormal, fanatical, about ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman—occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble family—carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title—the count ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... gifted with keen instincts; or, at all events, with an experience that would enable them to detect the slightest "fault" in the aspect of a landscape, so well known to them,—in short, that they would notice anything that might appear "abnormal" in it. ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... table. Last night, no: I discard all mention of last night. We failed: as none else in this neighbourhood could fail, but we failed. If we have among us a cormorant devouring young lady who drinks up all the—ha!—brandy and water—of our inns and occupies all our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for accidental circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have missed seeing Professor Crooklyn! And what was he doing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was different from my kind. I was abnormal with something they could not understand, and the telling of which would cause only misunderstanding. When the stories of ghosts and goblins went around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of my nights of fear, and knew that mine were ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... had this incident occurred and been bandied round with sundry exaggerations, than the life of the Legations and the nondescripts who have been coming in from the country became more abnormal than ever. For in spite of our extraordinary position, even up to to-day we were attempting to work—that is, writing three lines of a despatch, and then rushing madly out to hear the latest news. Now not so ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... this abnormal and changeable condition of Mexican affairs will, in some measure, explain why Colonel Miranda so suddenly ceased to be commandant of Albuquerque. Santa Anna's new accession to power brought in the Padres, turning out the Patriotas, many of the latter suffering death for their patriotism, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... eventually the burglar is found with your property on his person, and the marks correspond to his hand and to his boots. Probably any jury would consider those facts a very good experimental verification of your hypothesis, touching the cause of the abnormal phenomena observed in your parlour, and would ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Richard Davy, by which the common iliac is compressed from the rectum, has in many cases proved of great service in preventing haemorrhage, but has dangers of its own in cases of abnormal position of rectum, or even in ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... preparation for the culminating work as disorder, intervenes, calling the children to her, and making them rest, etc., their restlessness persists, and the subsequent work is not undertaken. The children do not become calm: they remain in an abnormal state. In other words, if they are interrupted in their cycle, they lose all the characteristics connected with an internal process regularly ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... boat-race day, and smiles itself into a very pleasant appearance of briskness and of youth. As a rule, Julian went to see the race and to lunch with his friends at Putney or elsewhere, without either abnormal experience of excitement or any unusual vivacity. He was naturally full of life, and had hot blood in his veins, loved a spectacle, and especially a struggle of youth against youth. But no boat-race day had ever stirred him as this one did—found him so attentive ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the polite society of the world, has despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it. When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal. But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it; the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but, doubtless, with an ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to the state of a second but far larger egg, the pupa, from which the winged insect could take origin. Others again, following de Reaumur (1734), have speculated whether the development of pupa within larva, and of winged insect within pupa might not be explained as abnormal births. But a comparison of the transformation of butterflies with simpler insect life-stories will convince the enquirer that no such heroic theories as these are necessary. It will be realised that even the most profound transformation among insects ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... obliged to depend on such inaccurate or interested hearsay as has just been quoted above. It seems likely that he came to the conclusion that stupidity was the boy's normal condition and that his seven years of brilliance had been something essentially abnormal and temporary, and important only from a pathological point of view. Indeed, there was nothing in the transmuted Archibald's condition that was susceptible of being treated as a disease. He was as healthy as the average of boys of fourteen (if he were a boy of fourteen, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... the Tissue Change in Late Syphilis—Gummatous Infiltration.—The essential happening in late syphilis is that body tissue in which the germs are present is replaced by an abnormal tissue, not unlike a tumor growth. The process is usually painless. This material is shoddy, so to speak, and goes to pieces soon after it grows. The shoddy tissue is called "gummatous infiltration," and the tumor, if one is formed, is called a "gumma." The syphilitic process ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... "But we frequently do strange things, and apparently senseless ones, in scientific work. Madmen have made the world's greatness. Our most wonderful inventors, our greatest men of all ages, have in a way been insane—for they have been abnormal, and what is that but a certain form ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... War is abnormal. It undermines ideas of justice prevalent in time of peace. Thus it came about that the treatment of the Loyalists reacted unfortunately on the patriots. They had harried the royal sympathisers out of the land. They had grown accustomed to using force ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... her abnormal, excited state, she had heard enough. Trembling from the tragedies of sleep, she thought she had fallen into the greater ones of reality. These men were going to kill somebody—and "she" was to feel dreadfully about it. It must be that the ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... First was neither a power-mad dictator nor an altruist, although he had been called both. He was, purely and simply, a strong, wise, intelligent man—which made him abnormal, no matter how you look at it. ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... adamantine, as millstone or hard as one o' your cannon balls that shall not save him, if mind and body agreeably seek and desire death, and mind (pray understand, sir) is the more potent factor, thus (saving and excepting the abnormal vigour of his body) by all the rules of chirurgical science he should ha' died three days agone—when the seizure ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... many women like her; she is a rare type— but not, therefore, to be passed over in silence. It is little consolation that the man-eating tiger is a rare animal, if one of them be actually on the path; and to the philosopher a possibility is a fact. But the true value of the study of abnormal development is that, in the deepest sense, such development is not abnormal at all, but the perfected result of the laws that avenge law-breach. It is in and through such that we get glimpses, down the gulf of a moral volcano, to the infernal possibilities ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... safety and danger in the use of alcoholic drink is dangerously unstable. Safety lies back of total abstinence. The normal man has no legitimate use for alcohol as a beverage, and he has no right to render himself abnormal by its use when lives are dependent upon his efficiency. None but normal men should run railway trains. The traveling public has unqualified right to demand and expect none less safe.' This statement deals, not with the moral side, but with the fact that a man who drinks unfits himself ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... miles of dry forest, like powder. Fire backed by a heavy gale could rage through dry pine faster than any horse could run. He might fail to save Lucy. Fate had given him a bitter ride. But he swore a grim oath that he would beat the flame. The intense and abnormal rider's passion in him, like Bostil's, dammed up, but never fully controlled, burst within him, and suddenly he awoke to a wild and terrible violence of heart and soul. He had accepted death; he had no fear. All that he wanted to do, the last thing he wanted to do, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... even as I sat looking at her the light grew, her outline sharpened and became clear and distinct, and my heart gave a great bound of delight as the conviction forced itself upon me that I knew her. Yes, that long low hull, with its abnormal length of counter, and its bold sheer forward, the high, dominating bow with its excessive rake of stem, and the peculiar steeve of the bowsprit were all familiar to me. I had seen and noted them ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... how it came to pass that she was especially honoured by the close and warm attachment of Mrs. Browning. I have scores of letters signed "Isa," or rather Sibylline leaves scrawled in the vilest handwriting on all sorts of abnormal fragments of paper, and despatched in headlong haste, generally concerning some little projected festivity at Bellosguardo, and advising me of the expected presence of some stranger whom she thought I should like ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... case is not isolated and abnormal, but is typical of the way in which a large class of readers treat books, there is, as we shall see, only too ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... subsequently in Psychical Research, and it was whilst vainly watching for a ghost in a haunted house at Notting Hill—the house was unoccupied: we had obtained the key from the agent, left the door unlatched, and returned late at night in the foolish hope that we might perceive something abnormal—that he first discussed with me the teachings of Henry George in "Progress and Poverty," and we found a common interest in social ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... century the attention of the medical profession has been directed to the special and ultimate results of Phthisis, instead of the primary condition of the system causing the formation of tubercles. The new knowledge, derived from the stethoscope, by detecting those abnormal deposits of abortive nutrition, called tubercles, has been received for more than its worth, and has greatly served to keep up the delusion of treating effects instead of causes. The tubercular ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fatigued and wispy lady in a very long vermilion gown, and an extremely small gentleman—apparently of the Hebrew persuasion—who was smartly dressed, wore white gloves and a buttonhole, and indulged in a great deal of florid gesticulation while talking with abnormal vivacity. Miss Minerva, who was playing quietly with a lemon ice, looked even more sensible than usual, the Prophet thought, in her simple white frock. She seemed to be quite at home and perfectly happy with her silly friends, but, as soon as ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... this revelation must have had a very painful effect on Robert's mind," he added. "You must remember that he was an abnormal type. An ordinary man would not have made such a disclosure on the day of the funeral of the woman who was supposed to be his wife. But all Robert's acts hinged on his one great obsession. He allowed nothing to come between him ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... of destiny, which has its roots in the throne of an All-wise and an All-good; that in the wildest illusions by which muititudes are frenzied, there may be detected gleams of prophetic truths; that in the fiercest crimes which, like the disease of an epidemic, characterise a peculiar epoch under abnormal circumstances, there might be found instincts or aspirations towards some social virtues to be realised ages afterwards by happier generations, all tending to save man from despair of the future, were the whole society to ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... repressed her amusement. "The picture you draw is a lurid one," she conceded, "but your modesty strikes me as abnormal, especially in an author. The chances are that some of the clippings will be rather pleasant reading. The critics are ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... ardour of a man whose faith is refreshingly great, he tells us that the time has at last come when the atmosphere must yield to man. "It is for man," he says, "to restrain and subdue this insolent and abnormal rebellion, which has for so many years laughed at our vain efforts. We are in turn about to make it serve us as a slave, just as the water on which we launch the ship, as the solid earth on which we press ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... callousness was surely abnormal! She had married him, lived with him for nearly a year. To the Jetsons she had given the impression of being a woman deeply in love with her husband. It could not have been mere acting kept up day ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... scoundrels gave her alternately buckets full of dry biscuit-dust and water which so inflated the poor beast that she became the size of a balloon in less than a week; and, if she had not through this been suffocated, she would of course have burst from the 'abnormal expansion!' That is how our doctor, old Nettleby, the same we've got on board here now, described it to the admiral when he was sent to inspect the cow, when the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... peas of their skin, and I dry them with abnormal rapidity, placing them in glass test-tubes. The grubs prosper as well as in the intact peas. At the proper time the preparations for emergence ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... at Oxford would be even more pleasant than it is if it did not start in April and finish when the summer is just beginning. I do not wish to say anything about weather, but without taking an interest in the abnormal quantities of rain or wanting to know why the sun shines so seldom, I do think that if the success of a term depends largely upon an English May, it is apt to be very limited. I have been told so often by quite truthful men that there are other people besides undergraduates ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the second decade of his maturity shows a falling off in abundance, though not in intensity of creative power; and that the gradual breaking down of his health, under the strain of his ceaseless efforts and of his abnormal habits of life, made itself more and more felt in the years that followed the great preface which in 1842 set forth the splendid design ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... over the by-gones of a grand epoch. We have entered upon a new dispensation. The withdrawal of the slavery question from the strife of parties has changed the face of our politics as completely as did its introduction. The transition from an abnormal and revolutionary period to the regular and orderly administration of affairs, has been as remarkable as the intervention of the great question which eclipsed every other till it compelled its own solution. Although this transition has ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... to overcome these difficulties by applying to the scratched area sandarach, resin, alum, paste, or two or three of these together, the effect being to prevent an unusually large flow of ink from the pen and its abnormal ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... that Napoleon's brain was to any great degree abnormal, but I am satisfied that criminal's brains are generally abnormal, for there are many criminals whose heads do not, by their exterior form, indicate their depravity, but wherever I have examined the interior of the skull I have found ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... people of England have doubled their numbers, but those of Ireland have divided by two. It would be idle to pretend that the great exodus which took place after the famine was in all respects to be regretted. The abnormal increase in population which took place in the first forty years of the nineteenth century was in itself out of all proportion to the increase of productive capacity in the country, and was closely related to the unnatural inflation of prices, and ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... reasons most nearly approached the normal, and therefore the safe; Ruth had been urged by a motive, lofty perhaps, visionary, but supremely abnormal. Therefore the adjustments to be made, the problems to be mastered, the difficulties in their road to a comfortable, reasonably happy future, were multiplied many times. Instead of being probable, the success of their little social ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... is," burst out Aveline, "you're suffering from an over-developed conscience. You've got an abnormal appetite for work, and it ought to be checked. It isn't good for you. Promise us you won't write or learn a ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the struggle moved on to another quarter. Nearer, we heard the trailing of heavy artillery down the mountain and against our will the thought formulated itself, "Will that wave of terror roll back to us?" Our ears have developed an abnormal acuteness, so that almost a pin falling will make taut nerves scream, though in reality nobody moves—a glance is enough to both ask and answer a question. A marvelous new self-possession seems to have come to everybody which bridges over a natural despair and forms, at least, a skeleton ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... such physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the nervous system ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D. |
