"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corresponding to the diseased hip-joint, and naturally raises the other half. From this apparently a curvature of the spinal column results in the lumbar region. Apparently only, for when the child is laid down and the morbid position of the thigh is restored the curvature ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... he cried boisterously. "You are sound as a bell, strong as a young horse. Why, you ought to be proud of yourself instead of fidgeting with a lot of morbid fancies. You have been for years and years a boy, fresh—larky, as you would say—full of mischief, as ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Last Days of Pompeii," which created great enthusiasm a quarter of a century ago. This, however, was painted during his career of dissipation, and its vivid coloring seemed to have been drawn from a soul morbid with secret woes and craving ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... these new feelings. Were they more egotistical than compassionate, more defiant than gentle? Among them, at any rate, there was gratitude. She had found an object in life, had splendidly emerged from her old sensations of incompleteness and inferiority. No longer that morbid humility struggling in vain to transform itself into a violent self-assertion. Not since she had become the virtual creatrix of beauty, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... great Sloughs of Despond waiting here and there for the pilgrim, but there are in almost every day little gutters of despond that must be jumped if one does not wish cold and soiled feet; so here his healthy mind cried out against morbid thoughts and he reviled himself for companioning the thing he held sacred with the thing he had always felt foredoomed to failure. He told himself that middle-age was not a dead level of hopes grown gray and withered, ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Hindu is a wonderfully fine type of manhood. One knows that he possessed a fascination for women, as they in turn fascinated him. One knows that children loved him. One becomes convinced that he never suffered any morbid, soul-shaking experience such as besetting religious doubt brings with it, or the pangs of despised love; that on the contrary he moved among men and women with a serene and godlike tread, neither self-indulgent nor ascetic, with mind ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... suppose not," said Miss Jerrold, with a sigh. "It's very sad, you see, poor girl, she's going through a curious morbid phase which has completely changed her. All that time she had her ideas that it was her duty to wait and suffer; and I do honestly believe that if that man had behaved himself, been released on a ticket of—ticket of—what do they ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... Barker, with a morbid obstinacy. "You don't know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it; you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... is all a morbid mood; but still this inactive, lifeless monotony, without any change, wrings one's very soul. No struggle, no possibility of struggle! All is so still and dead, so stiff and shrunken, under the mantle of ice. Ah! ... the very soul freezes. What would I not give for a single day of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... extremes of European society into harmonious relation with each other,—to raise the one from hereditary dependence and degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts he was eminently successful,—in the latter, more so, in my judgment, than any educator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... motion an avalanche of racial feeling to play off against the just and moderate measures taken by other powers to checkmate Austrian aggression. In addition to the racial hostility, which had been lashed into bitterness during the spring of 1914, came Germany's morbid conception of national and personal honour. Lastly the fear of a Russian invasion was astutely ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... relieved at learning that it was nothing but a "slight cold." I understood that. Poor Louie! Poor Jack! Would that "slight cold" grow worse, or would she get over it in time? She did not seem to be of a morbid, moping nature. There was every reason to hope that such a one as she was would surmount it. And yet it was hard to say. It is often these very natures—buoyant, robust, healthy, straightforward—which feel the most. They are not impressible. They are not touched by every ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... what has just happened; I am beginning to fear that that old pedant was right in saying that it was bad for me to live all alone in a strange country, that it would make me morbid. It is ridiculous that I should be put into such a state of excitement merely by the chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead these three hundred years. With the case of my uncle Ladislas, and other ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... under the suspicion of morbid sensitiveness when I confess that I never took my weekly wage in London without a qualm and a compunction, for I could never make myself believe that I had really earned it. What had I done? I had simply performed a few arithmetical processes which any schoolboy might have done as well. My labour, ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... in an agony of mawkish sentiment concerning the post-mortem grief of my friends. From this at length I snatched myself by calling to mind the many simple Highlanders who had preceded me in the past months without any morbid craving for applause. Back harked my mind to Aileen, imagination spanning the future as well as the past. Tender pity and love suffused me. Mingled with all my broken reflections was many a cry of the heart for mercy to a sinner about ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... me not wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... appalling was after it. It landed before the president and took off again for some far horizon. Then something sinuous and black dropped out of a tree upon it and instantly violent action took place in a patch of dust. A small cloud arose. The president watched, with morbid interest, as the sporting ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... who survived, in freedom, the fatal battle of Camden. A laudable anxiety to be active at such a time, to show to the approaching Continentals that there was a spirit in the State which they came to succor, of which the most happy auguries might be entertained, prompted his morbid impatience at the long delay of his absentees. There were other causes which led him to feel this delay more seriously now than at other times. The Tories were again gathering in force around him. Under these ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... undue importance to small indications of character; and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father, because he rebuked them constantly, and found frequent fault, doing almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the consequences of the unchecked development of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... happened, it was in vain for Turkey to hope escape from the discovery of his inattention, for the milk-pail would that same evening or next morning reveal the fact to Kirsty's watchful eyes. But fortunately for us, in so far as it was well to have an ally against our only enemy, Hawkie's morbid craving was not confined to old shoes. One day when the cattle were feeding close by the manse, she found on the holly-hedge which surrounded it, Mrs. Mitchell's best cap, laid out to bleach in the sun. It was a tempting morsel—more susceptible of ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... man sat in a rocking chair by a window. He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper, eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a chaser by the milder details ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... resolution to keep clear of what Mr Bradshaw had desired her to do. On her way home she resolved, if she could, to find out what were Jemima's secret feelings; and if (as, from some previous knowledge, she suspected) they were morbid and exaggerated in any way, to try and help her right with all the wisdom which true love gives. It was time that some one should come to still the storm in Jemima's turbulent heart, which was daily and hourly knowing less and less of peace. The irritating difficulty ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... behavior. At such times honest boys have given way to lying and theft, gentle boys have developed an unexpected savagery, ordinary boys—"the small apple-eating urchins whom we know"—have fallen into morbid brooding upon unhealthy subjects. In the immense majority of cases the crisis is soon over and the boy is himself again; but while it lasts, the disease will draw its sustenance from all manner ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... These may seem wanton charges to some, but I am not speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact with the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational magazines. A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes me read everything I catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one of the faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the Times. In these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... imparting these tidings to the mother, and even then she was nearly overcome by the transports of her joy. But how to impart them to Annette, was a matter of still greater perplexity. Her state of mind had been so morbid; she had been subject to such violent changes, and the cause of her derangement had been of such an inconsolable and hopeless kind, that her friends had always forborne to tamper with her feelings. They had never ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... is better off without Your uttered ignorance and morbid doubt. If you have faith in God, or man, or self, Say so; if not, push back upon the shelf Of silence lower thoughts ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... of joy are as long and perhaps as frequent as those of grief; but either the memory is treacherous or the mind is too morbid to admit this to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... it. How could I?" she said. "It is a queer whim of Coombe's. Of course, it is not the least like him. I call it morbid." ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... impulse she yielded to, but could not explain, bound her waist with a black sash, like a strain of mourning in a song of innocence. She wore no ornaments save a ring, the love-gift of Bigot, which she never parted with, but wore with a morbid anticipation that its promises would one day be fulfilled. She clung to it as a talisman that would yet conjure away her sorrows; and it did! but alas! in a way little anticipated by the constant girl! A blast from hell was at hand to sweep away ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... morbid, to be stalked by beastly journalists and stared at by gaping moon-faced idiots, wherever he goes! But there's worse ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... apologize is the last virtue to be acquired—if it ever is acquired—Dink in his pride would rather have chopped off his hand than admit his error. They had misjudged him; they would have to come to him. The breach, once made, widened rapidly—due, principally, to Dink's own morbid pride. Some of the things he did were simply ridiculous and some were ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... Innumerable things and events upon the earth appeal to him because of that full-bodied experience which they carry to the wakeful and the zestful, experience which is manifold, which fills all the chinks of memory, which may recall pain, which may be charged with pathos, but is never morbid; beautifully he masses vigorous impressions of sense under a large imaginative idea. Here there is no pale, languishing phantom of beauty, but that which men delight in without the verbal distractions ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... surely find it—that living and practical communication between your souls, and that Father in heaven who created them. It will not be real, but morbid, even imaginary, just in proportion as your souls are tainted with self-conceit, ambition, self-will, malice, passion, or any wilful vice; especially with the vice of bigotry, which settles beforehand for God what he shall teach the soul, and in what manner he shall teach it, ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... associated symptoms in connexion with kidney disease were first described in 1827 by Dr Richard Bright (1789-1858). Since that period it has been established that the symptoms, instead of being, as was formerly supposed, the result of one form of disease of the kidneys, may be dependent on various morbid conditions of those organs (see KIDNEY DISEASES). Hence the term Bright's disease, which is retained in medical nomenclature in honour of Dr Bright, must be understood as having ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... says there, "and can detect good from bad"; a rare thing among poets. In one of his letters he notes: "I hear in my brain ... sensations ... of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy pleasure.... I hear in my brain, and still more in my stomach." There we get the morbid physical basis of a sensitiveness to music which came to mean much to him. In a note referring to "Christabel," and to the reasons why it had never been finished, he says: "I could write as good verse now as ever I did, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... him in a car outside and in a few minutes they were at the scene of the tragedy. A curious little knot of spectators had gathered, looking with morbid interest at the place where the body had been found. There was a local policeman on duty and to him was deputed the ungracious task of warning his fellow villagers to keep their distance. The ground had already been searched very carefully. The two roads crossed almost at right angles ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... but it is yet not very near you since you so abhor it; and if you pray that you may hate it, it will go further from you till you may hope not even to understand how it could once have been so near. Take courage—take comfort. Do not be morbid. Resist temptation, but do not analyse it nor yourself too closely; for it is one of the chief signs of evil in us that when we dwell too much upon ourselves and upon our temptations, we ourselves seem good in ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... reception of the sensible world. It could hardly have been so with him but for the concurrence of physical causes with the influences proper to a mere thought. The moralist, indeed, might have noted that a meaner kind of pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secret strength to the intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as the renunciation of all finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or do any limited thing. But besides this it was legible in his own admissions from time to time, that the body, following, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... a changed man, and his life is more or less delusional. In view of this fact, we should endeavor always to so surround him that his environments may not augment the morbid change in him and intensify ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold. A hard husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the baby of the family that her repressed affections outpoured themselves ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... snake— All seek their prey by force or stratagem; But when—their hunger sated—languor creeps Around their frames, they quickly sink to rest. Not so with man—HE never hath enough; He feeds on all alike; and, wild or tame, He's but a cannibal. He burns, destroys, And scatters death to sate his morbid lust For empty fame. But when the love of gain Hath struck its roots in his vile, sordid heart,— Each gen'rous impulse chill'd,—like vampire, now, He sucks the life-blood of his friends or foes Until he viler grows ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... granted that artists are often at a loss for a subject, and that they often choose badly we all know; but a worse than that chosen by Mr G. Scott, we do not remember ever to have met with. It is entitled "Morbid Sympathy," forming two pictures. In the one the murderer is coming from the house where he has just committed the diabolical act; in the other he is visited. The man is an uninteresting villain and his visitors are fools. The object of the painter is doubtless a good one; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... though the rich coin he trace, No current marks his early essays grace; For in each page we find a massy store Of English bullion mix'd with Latian ore: In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin'd, He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;[46] In scientifick phrase affects to smile, Form'd on Brown's turgid Latin-English style:[47] Too oft the abstract decorates his prose,[48] While measur'd ternaries the periods close: But ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... amid the commendable occupations of this world. But this experience, my dear friends, humbling as it is, ought not to make us unbelieving, as if perhaps our consciousness of being a new creature in Christ were a delusion, and what we had regarded as indications of this life were only morbid and overstrained emotions. As the Lord convinced His disciples that He had flesh and bones, so we may all convince ourselves and each other that this is an actual life; but in that case we must believe that, tho in a hidden way and not always present to our consciousness, yet it is always ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... narrow selfish feeling, which, under the blustering pretension of equality, presumes to deny the existence of a very potent social fact; but simply from the sensitiveness of feelings, which, on this subject, were somewhat in danger of becoming morbid, through the agency of the most powerful passion of the human heart—or, that which has well been called the master-passion. Nevertheless, Mr. Hardinge was much too honest a man to deny a truth, and much too sincere to wish even to prevaricate ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... sort of morbid, frustrated gloom, Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald made the necessary notes. He put his notebook in his pocket and backed his car out of the alley. Oddly enough, he thought of a beautifully carved meerschaum pipe he'd found with the ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... loved to sit, His only visitant a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life; And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene,—how lovely 't is Thou seest,—and he would gaze till it became Far lovelier, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... him? Besides, he will accomplish his purpose in some other way of which I shall not know." But this was only the beginning of the battle. Punishment on punishment for an act which seemed right at the time had made her morbid, distrustful of herself. And she could not conquer the dread lest her longing to be free was blinding her, was luring her on to fresh calamities, involving all whom she cared for, all who cared for her. Whichever way she looked she could see only a choice between wrongs. To stay ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea: ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... many things that distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a good moment—I'm sure you were—and I should like an engagement ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... things," said Esther quietly. She did not try to argue with Helen over the subject. They had several times gone over the same ground and each time Esther had realised more deeply and with a growing feeling of pain that Helen had almost a morbid passion for money and the things that money could buy. She was not avaricious. On the contrary, she was remarkably generous and unselfish in the use of her allowance. But there was a deep and far reaching prejudice in the girl's mind for all the brilliant, ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... one to pity herself. She was sane, healthy, and not naturally morbid; but to-night, for some reason, the gray sky, and the gray, sodden earth, and the gray road of the future had got her in their clutches, and she could not get away from them. With straining eyes she ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... of the month I grow morbid and sad; As I gaze on that pile I believe In the saying that never was potent before— "'Tis more ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... Rome to Tibur passes at the end into a sombre imagination of his own grave; and the fine and remarkable poem (beginning with the famous Sunt aliquid Manes) in which the ghost of Cynthia visits him, is full of the same morbid dwelling on the world of shadows, where the "golden girl" awaits her forgetful lover. Atque hoc sollicitum vince sopore caput had become the sum of his prayers. But a little while afterwards the restless brain of the poet found the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Elsie, her illness, and the aspect it had taken. But Helen noticed in all that Dudley Venner said about his daughter a morbid sensitiveness, as it seemed to her, an aversion to saying much about her physical condition or her peculiarities,—a wish to feel and speak as a parent should, and yet a shrinking, as if there were something about Elsie ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the last twenty years, when the phenomena of sweating have been under close and scientific review, that there is no power of self-cure within the area of the evil. We have seen that while the general advance in the standards of work and wages has on the whole been constant, these morbid and diseased patches, which we call the Sweated Trades, have not shared in that improvement, but have remained in a state of chronic depression and degeneration. The same shocking facts, in some cases the same pitiful witnesses, were brought before the Select Committee last year as before Lord ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be a morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... threshold to let a woman pass out. Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer morbid whiteness. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... which succeeded La Tour's release, was passed by Madame d'Aulney, in a state of morbid excitement. She watched alone by the side of her sleeping infant, and even maternal solicitude was, for a time, suspended by the intense interest, which her own perilous adventure, and the safety of La Tour awakened. She felt ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... them as though we knew more about it than themselves. Perhaps we don't, for few criminologists have a soul above murder; and I quite expect to have the privilege of lifting the discussion into our own higher walk. They shall give their morbid minds to the fine art of burgling, for a change; and while we're about it, Bunny, we may as well extract their opinion of our noble selves. As authors, as collaborators, we will sit with the flower of our ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... disordered stomach and aching head were ill able to endure. There was no remedy, however, but patience, and the recollection that he was suffering in the cause of friendship. As the sun rose high, he became worse; his sense of smell appeared to acquire a morbid degree of acuteness, for the mere purpose of inhaling and distinguishing all the various odours with which he was surrounded, from that of pitch to all the complicated smells of the hold. His heart, too, throbbed under the heat, and he felt as if in full progress ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... morbid tendency often found in these cases of bony tumification of the vascular tissue of the mouth; but you must resist it, ma'am, as their life depends upon it." And with that Dr. Peppercorn glared gloomily on the young ducks, who were stealthily poking the ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... has taken her, on the strength of a Cook ticket, I don't quite know; but I may later, because she vows she'll keep me at her side with hooks of steel all through the tour—unless something worse happens to me, or to some of us because of me." "Biddy, dear, don't be morbid. Nothing bad will happen," I ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... PHILEMON is at rest in his grave, as well as MENANDER and SICORAX. The two latter, it is well known, were Tom Warton and Joseph Ritson. "The husband of poor Lavinia" was a most amiable gentleman, but timid to a morbid excess. Without strong powers of intellect, he was tenacious of every thing which he advanced, and yet the farthest possible from dogmatic rudeness. There are cankers that eat into the heart as well as the cheek; and because Mr. Shacklewell (the NICAS of my text) happened to discover a few unimportant ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... agree with many veteran cowboys that the cattle, when lying on the ground asleep, are sometimes troubled with bad dreams which cause such fright on their part that their excitement becomes contagious. Then again the electrical conditions produce a morbid uneasiness among them as well as among men, and there seem to be times when they are simply awaiting a pretext for dashing ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... Balzac's most brilliant effects, has been looked at askance by many of his English readers. At one time he had the audacity to think of calling it La Femme aux Yeux Rouges. To those who consider the story morbid or, one may say, bizarre, one word of justification, hardly of apology, may be offered. It was in the scheme of the Comedie Humaine to survey social life in its entirety by a minute analysis of its most diverse constituents. It ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... artistry so far that you build a fence of nothing but cedar logs touching one another, or that you cover your entire door with a meander of wrought iron which culminates in a small bolt. Enthusiastic followers of the Arts and Crafts movement often go to morbid extremes. Recognition of material and method does not connote a display of method and material out of proportion to the demands of the article to be constructed. As in other forms of culture, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... when she folded innocent Allie Lee to the breast that had always yearned for a child; when Neale in his monstrous stupidity had misunderstood her; when he had struck her before the grinning crowd, and in burning words branded her with the one name unpardonable to her class; when at the climax of a morbid and all-consuming hate, a hate of the ruined woman whose body and mind had absorbed the vile dregs, the dark fire and poison, of lustful men, she had inhumanly given Allie Lee to the man she had believed the wildest, most depraved, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... subjected to the strain of overwrought religious enthusiasm of the more sombre sort that can discern a lurking devil in the dance, or anything but an exhilarating and altogether delightful outward manifestation of an inner sense of harmony, joy and well being. Under the stress of morbid feeling, or the overstrain of religious excitement, coarsely organized natures see or create something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... can form no conception; but its negative delights form a sufficiently attractive picture,—no pain; no thirst; no hunger; no horror of the past; no fear of the future; no failure of mental capacity; no intellectual deficiency; no morbid imaginations; no follies; no stupidities; but above all, no insulted feelings; no wounded affections; no despised love or unrequited regard; no hate, envy, jealousy, or indignation of or at others; no falsehood, dishonesty, dissimulation, hypocrisy, grief or remorse. In a word," said Professor ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... M. Piatt came to his death from a pistol bullet through the brain, fired from a pistol in his own hand, with suicidal intent, while laboring under a fit of temporary insanity, caused by morbid sensitiveness of wasted opportunities and constantly brooding over imaginary troubles and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... deference, reverence, and others, absolutely essential to the highest well-being of a nation; that these elements, however, in the absence of those of an opposite or counteracting nature, had a morbid rather than a healthful action, and kept humanity in darkness and stagnation, being inadequate to all the requirements of social progress; that a new development then began, under the impulse of a new and opposite principle, which evolved ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was walking daily in and out great crowds of men (few of whom had any freedom from the cares of money, and many of whom were even morbid with a worse pest called "politics"), I could not be quit of thinking how we jostle one another. God has made the earth quite large, with a spread of land large enough for all to live on, without fighting. Also a mighty spread of water, laying hands on sand and cliff with a solemn voice ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... opposite effect. At least from this time, the spring of 1513, he was afflicted with infirmities before unknown to him. Instead of his habitual equanimity and cheerfulness, he became impatient, irritable, and frequently a prey to morbid melancholy. He lost all relish for business, and even for amusements, except field sports, to which he devoted the greater part of his time. The fever which consumed him made him impatient of long residence ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... Unfortunately, the man who really knows boys is apt to get so penetrated with the pathos, the unrealised momentousness, the sad shipwrecks of boy life that he is not light-hearted enough to depict the outer side of it all, and a book becomes morbid and sentimental. Then, too, to draw a boy correctly would often be to produce a sense of contrast which would almost give a feeling of hypocrisy, because there are boys—and not unfrequently the most interesting—who, if fairly drawn, would appear frivolous, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... works like "Carmosine" or "Fantasio," in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote "Madame Bovary," I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of nine-fold power nine times heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the middle of the word, the plate ceased its motion, and lay perfectly still. Hugh felt a kind of surprise come upon him, as if he waked from an unpleasant dream, and saw the sun shining. The morbid excitement of his nervous system had suddenly ceased, and a healthful sense of strength and every-day life took ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... the Halle emissaries in Pennsylvania? Dr. Mann declared concerning Muhlenberg and his co-laborers: "Their pietism was truly Lutheran piety, a warm-hearted, devout, practical Lutheranism." (Spaeth, 1, 318.) However, traces of the morbid and infected Lutheranism cultivated by Pietists, were but too apparent also in Muhlenberg and the associates carefully selected for him by Francke and Freylinghausen in Halle. The piety for which they strove so earnestly and zealously was, in more than one respect, neither truly evangelical ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... called and found his patient much improved. "A little rest is all you need to bring you about again," the physician said. "Your unsettled nerves have made you morbid. Don't worry. Everything will be ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... of necessity," she answered. "Perhaps I take rather a morbid view of things, but one of them was the brother of a great friend of mine, and they fear that he has lost his reason. There are peculiar and painful difficulties in connection with this post, Mr. Ducaine, and I think it only fair to give you ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... bondage is to cease throughout the world; but whether it is compatible with a free government, such as we claim our own to be. In other words, is Slavery in the United States to-day on trial? We must all abandon our morbid sensitiveness and come squarely to the consideration of the vital point, to wit, can this great Republic be held together while the 'peculiar system' exists in a part of it? No matter who first posed this ugly query,—Calhoun ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was fast lapsing into one of the moods which my little mother used to call my "morbid streaks" and which she had vainly tried to cure ever since I ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... feeling now? Where that morbid pain at my heart? As I drank it all seemed to pass away. Magical change! What a fool I was! What was there to make such a fuss about? Take life easy. Laugh alike at the good and bad of it. It was all a farce anyway. What would it matter a hundred years from now? Why were we put into ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... forehead, and he signed to her how he wished the bed-clothes to be arranged, for he could no longer speak. Mrs. Collins whispered to Esther that she did not think that the end could be far off, and compelled by a morbid sort of curiosity she took a chair and sat down. Esther wiped away the little drops of sweat as they came upon his forehead; his chest and throat had to be wiped also, for they too were full of sweat. His eyes were fixed on the darkness and he moved his hand restlessly, and ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... these feelings are not infectious, or I certainly would not inflict on thee the description. But do not take this as a general picture of me. It is a morbid occasional state of things; consequent, by reaction, on the exclusiveness of aim with which those things were followed. I learned sooner than I suppose many do, the earnestness, coldness, reality of life; and ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... advice had been taken, she would have remained at the excellent school where I placed her. But our aunt thought best to remove her because she complained, and she has been dawdling about ever since she came. A most ruinous state of things for a morbid, spoilt girl like ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... the current opinion in Shakespeare's time, that in the head of an old toad was to be found a stone, or pearl, to which great virtues were ascribed. This stone has been often sought, but nothing has been found more than accidental or perhaps morbid indurations ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... more than once been censured for saying that the French people have little natural love for scenery, and a stilted, not to say morbid, theory of landscape; but whilst we stay in this inn, from which we might have had such splendid views, we become confirmed in the opinion (formed in the Pyrenees), that the French people do not care, and that they think nothing of defiling Nature's purest ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... share this uncivil apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past life as morbid. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a man to be always searching for and racking his brain about things that either irritate or torment him. The cause of it is an internal morbid depression, combined often with an inward restlessness which is temperamental; when both are developed to their utmost, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to conceive its realities. If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show something of this kind; either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. You will find all its descriptive expressions at once vague and monotonous. Brooks are always "purling;" birds always "warbling;" mountains always "lift their horrid peaks ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... chords—to express ...? No matter! New expressions. As the organ creates the need, they say, so the expression must in the end create the idea: the chief thing is that the expression should be novel. Novelty at all costs! They had a morbid horror of anything that "had been said." The best of them were paralyzed by it all. They seemed always to be keeping a fearful guard on themselves, and crossing out what they had written, wondering: "Good Lord! Where did I read that?" ... There ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... running before a splendid breeze under a crowd of sail, the engines were stopped and the log heaved, which only gave our speed at three miles an hour. One lady passenger had been feeding her mind with stories of steamboat explosions in the States, and spent her time in a morbid state of terror by no means lessened by the close proximity of her state-room to ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... intelligent, dark eyes, a broad, open forehead, a nose somewhat delicately cut, a wide mouth, with thin lips, and teeth of dazzling whiteness. Her whole aspect was that of physical and mental health,—not only removed from morbid sensitiveness, but as far from sentiment even as a breezy spring wind, and yet as prompt to fathom it in others as the wind to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... was under the special sanction of Buonaparte, and there is little doubt was mainly dictated by his morbid jealously of the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... isn't at all bad," said Mr. Atherley. "Anyway, it's better than 'Poor Polly,' which is simply morbid. Let's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... constraint that might occur, as imposing a constraint upon himself, and knowing that any such chain enfeebles and almost annihilates the mental powers. Endued with exquisite sensibility, his wit never gave the smallest wound, even to the grossest ignorance of the world, or the most morbid hypochondriac bashfulness.' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... these objections are founded mainly upon sentiment, and we trust that morbid sentimentality will have no weight in an age which ridicules the horror of the British Commons at the descriptions of the middle passage, and demands calm judgment when the question arises, how to increase the number of representatives and the profits on sugar and cotton,—in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... notes—the Misses Stone were necessarily slightly acquainted with Hester, of whom, however, they never spoke—it would be like throwing a bombshell among these quiet, unalterable proprieties. She came to have a morbid, feverish craving to do it, or to see some other person do it. For instance, if young Lady Maud Devereux would but bid Rose tie her shoe, or even if she would contradict Miss Stone, or Miss Lucilla, or Miss Charlotte, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... some such boy to come to him with his confession of moral worthlessness and vows of unnatural perfection, and was too simple and earnest and good himself to realise that such states of the youthful mind are not unfrequently merely morbid and hysterical, and too often degenerate into Pharisaism, or worse ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... agents than alcohol. A well-cooked, warmed, nutritious meal allays the craving quite as effectually as a dram; but cold, crude, indigestible viands, not only do not afford the required solatium to the rebellious organ, but they aggravate the evil, and add intensity to the morbid avidity for stimulants. It is remarked that certain classes are particularly obnoxious to drunkenness, such as sailors, carriers, coachmen, and other wandering tribes whose ventral insurrections are not periodically quelled by regular and comfortable meals. Country doctors, for the same ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Newgate prior to his departure, with other convicts, to New South Wales, where he died, Dickens went with a former acquaintance of the prisoner to see him. They found him still possessed with a morbid self-esteem and a poor and empty vanity. All other feelings and interests were overwhelmed by an excessive idolatry of self, and he claimed (I now quote his own words to Dickens) a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... was almost holding his breath. He did not possess the same disposition that Josh had, and all this dreadful suffering was apt to fill him with horror. Still, he had a boy's ordinary share of curiosity, and might even be morbid enough to run so as to see an injured man in a railway accident, even if he came ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... particulars, I could not help remark- ing how fortunate it was that the captain had resigned of his own accord, for although he might not be actually in- sane, it was very evident that his brain was in a very morbid condition. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... This morbid life was very different from what she had fancied the rich future would be, as she looked into the grave, the end of her struggle, that September afternoon. But she had grown to demand so much more from him; she had grown ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... culture that keeps him in this self-centered feverish state is pathetically morbid and harmful. It short-circuits the religious life. This is the chief criticism of the devotional type of Christian culture. It seeks to prolong a crisis and often begets insincerity or disgust. The real priest of boyhood will certainly stand near by at this all-important ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... pretty little thing, with appealing blue eyes, fluffy hair, and a helpless, dependent manner. It was the great trial of her life that she was obliged to go to bed more than an hour before the other occupants of No. 4. She had a morbid horror of being alone in the dark—a horror that, through a sensitive dread of being laughed at, she had so far confessed to no one, but which, all the same, was very real and overwhelming. Night after night she would lie with the curtain of her cubicle half-drawn, ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... it concerned someone else, the reason of it all crept into my morbid brain. I was mad; mad from hunger, thirst and terror. Yes, mad, and felt not one whit sorry of it; nay, rejoiced rather, for it meant a freedom of the spirit. So insidiously this knowledge forced itself upon me, it brought no shock, I even dimly ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... is rarely mainly the sufferer's own fault; and the mother will tenderly and lovingly shield her sickly child, and show her the rich compensations which are possible to her in mental and spiritual life, though she should never fall into the morbid error of believing physical weakness to be the most favorable condition ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... it was a right mood of mind I had when I wrote that," she said. "It was morbid. But I couldn't help it.—Yet if one could keep possession of those words you quoted just now, I suppose one never would have morbid ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the natural offspring of your just principles and laudable sympathies; but I am sorry to say that the occasion which led to them proved to be little fitted for the slightest interposition on that subject. A sensibility, morbid in the highest degree, was never more awakened among those who have the largest stake in that species of interest, and the most violent against any governmental movement in relation to it. The excitability at the moment, happened, also, to be not ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... traveling in company to Canterbury. Coleridge, the poet, wrote of Chaucer: "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer; his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, yet how free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping." Chaucer's poetry is above all things fresh. It breathes of the morning of literature. Like Homer he had at his command all the riches of a new language undefiled by usage ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... modern, and is oftener possess'd in spirit with the past and feudal, dressed may-be in late fashions. For novels and plays often the plots and surfaces are contemporary—but the spirit, even the fun, is morbid and effete. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... boyhood; and had it not been for his cousin, May, a creature of whom he had not heard, and of whom no distorted image had therefore haunted his disturbed imagination; had it not been for this beautiful girl, who greeted him with affection which warmed and won his heart, so morbid were his feelings, that he would in all probability have pined away under the roof which he should have looked ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Nan asked him, in a discursiveness he found nevertheless relevant, "here in New England? There isn't a human trait or a morbid outcrop but we've got it. See! Charlotte's at the window. S'pose she'll ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... I thought of such words at all, it was to attribute them to a morbid sensibility. It wasn't until I got their interpretation that they came back to me. It wasn't until I had met some one who knew you before I did, and ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... regular rhythm of the sea was broken by a slight splash out of time. Instantly my morbid ear detected it, and I listened intently. Something was splashing along ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... and surprise, a child was born before the arrival of the doctor summoned on account of her sudden colic and her inability to retain her water. A peculiar feature of this case was the fact that mental disturbance set in immediately afterward, and the mother became morbid and had to be removed to an asylum, but recovered in a few months. Tanner saw a woman of forty-two who had been suffering with abdominal pains. She had been married three years and had never been pregnant. Her catamenia were very scant, but this was attributed to her change of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... officials went too far, your Holiness; but shall we, for the sake of a miserable malefactor who told one story to-day and another to-morrow, drag our public service through courts of law? Pity for such persons is morbid sentimentality, your Holiness, unworthy of a ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... a certain madness in Una's grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader—alarming, it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and that the current rate of saving is beyond that which is industrially sound and requisite. These bubble companies are simply tumours upon the industrial body attesting the sluggish and unwholesome circulation; they are the morbid endeavours of "saving" which is socially unnecessary, and ought never to have taken place, to find investments. When one of these "bubble" companies collapses it is tacitly assumed by unthinking people that those who invested their money in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson |
