"Overwrought" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dreary deserts that glistened under the blinding glare of the sun that poured its heat upon them steadily all the year; strange, grotesque rocks and peaks that assumed all sorts of fantastic shapes to the overwrought fancy; in many places no water, no verdure, and scarcely a thing in motion; the crocodile and the bird lazily seeking their necessary food and stirring only as compelled; unbounded expanse in the wide star-lit heavens; unbroken quiet on the lonely mountains—a ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... hands, and was trying to draw him back once more into its web. Visions rose before him of shrieking showmen's booths, blinking with tawdry yellow eyes. Emmie's hoarse laugh grated on his ears; he was overwrought and wanted to shout, to shriek, to give some vent to his feelings. But he seemed chained to the long bench, and his tongue was tied so that he could only mouth out silly platitudes about the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... But the maid's statement occupied all my mind. "Madame n'est pas heureuse." It had a dreadful precision . . . "Not happy . . ." This unhappiness had almost a concrete form—something resembling a horrid bat. I was tired, excited, and generally overwrought. My head felt empty. What were the appearances of unhappiness? I was still naive enough to associate them with tears, lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial distortion, all very dreadful to behold. I didn't know ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... returned only a dull stare. It was evident that this man of stone was as clay in the hands of Phil Abingdon. He deprecated the strain which she was imposing upon her nervous system, already overwrought to the danger point, but he was helpless for all his dour obstinacy. Harley, looking down at the girl's profile, read a new meaning into the firm line of her chin. He was conscious of an insane desire to put his arms around ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the game, he fought down the temptation to warn Joan. Had he known anything, not too serious, to Tudor's detriment, he would have been unable to utter it; but the worst of it was that he knew nothing at all against the man. That was the confounded part of it, and sometimes he was so baffled and overwrought by his feelings that he assumed a super-judicial calm and assured himself that his dislike of Tudor was a matter of unsubstantial prejudice ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... hours Dick would come and say good-bye? and here Nan broke down, and had such a fit of crying as she had not had since her father died,—nervous, uncontrollable tears, that it was useless to stem in her tired, overwrought state. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Shakspere," said the tanner, hoarsely, "I ha' come about a matter." There he stopped, not knowing what to say, for he was overwrought. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... cried the Professor, unable to restrain his impatience longer, bis overwrought nerves ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... during several months of the year, between the middle of May and the middle of September, for certain forms of dyspepsy, lesions of the nervous system affecting the mind, or that form of general innervation which results from an overwrought brain, and diseases of repletion. But Norway is little frequented, because it is not fashionable, although it would be difficult to point out a more appropriate occasional residence for the numerous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein, neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am, without alighting or being weary, eight or ten ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke, Slattin's man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police, my friend, ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... juncture so critical in the life of a young inexperienced woman as that when she begins to form an attachment for one of the opposite sex—at a moment when she needs the very best advice accompanied with a considerate regard for her overwrought feelings—the very best course she can take is to confide the secret of her heart to that truest and most loving of friends—her mother. Fortunate is the daughter who has not been deprived of that wisest and tenderest of counsellors—whose experience of life, whose prudence ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... the silence fell, deepened, grew ominous. None breathed, and the overwrought nerves of the court reached the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... old in understanding, although he was young in years; and he knew it was wiser sometimes to give in to the whims of a tired, overwrought brain. He knew without being told—for Margaret MacLean would never have told—how tired and hopelessly heart-sick and mind-sick she was to-night. What he did not know, however, was how pitifully lonely and starved her life had always ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... saw my father's body just as it lay at the close of the death-agony, can even now be revived by the sight of a disordered bed; such is the force of early impressions, especially when they are received by a nervous system that has been overwrought by ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... that strange, strange fever-sleep! In which all my limbs grew stiff As if fettered, yet each sense, Overwrought, waked horribly! ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... ardent as my admiration of Wordsworth's poetry is, I confess that I have not succeeded in imbibing so much of his philosophy as to feel as he would doubtless have felt in a similar situation. Both mine and my companion's overwrought limbs, however, derived no slight advantage from the halt, and well it was that they did so, for the task which awaited them on the morrow was a hard one. After repeated consultations with the burgomaster, which ended ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... we know that they are often fused. For a time after Liszt had parted from the Countess, fortune smiled. Then came various loans to friends, managerial experiments, the backing of an ill-starred opera, and a season of overwrought nerves. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Corner—curious thing, isn't it? that she came into it—were scrambling up a hill higher and higher, with that flood pouring after us. Sort of splashing into a foam of faces and helmets and bayonets—and clutching hands—and red stuff.... Well, Mr. Britling, I admit I'm a little bit overwrought about it, but I can assure you you don't begin to realise in England what it is you've ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... 1889 was a great refreshment bodily, mental, and spiritual, to the overwrought labourer. The voyage itself, enforcing rest from all ordinary avocations, by removing Mr. Gilmour from the depressing surroundings amid which he had spent so much of the last three years, began the restorative process. He was beginning to feel in himself ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... live in superlatives. You don't know what happiness or unhappiness means. You were badly overwrought then, so you cried and ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the true meaning of the phrase about the horns of a dilemma. The horns of this dilemma occupied his attention until the end of the dinner. He shifted uneasily from one to the other and back again. He rose from the table in a thoroughly overwrought condition of mind. And then, somehow, in the course of the evening, he found himself alone in the hall, not a dozen feet from the unlocked ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... way to the emotion that overwhelmed her, for she was wearied by the journey, excited over the new and strange scenes of the past few days, and overwrought with her fears. Lord Shrope bent a look of compassion upon ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... more of sorrow than of anger, "I will not fight thee. Proclaim me what thou wilt. I fear neither thy sword nor thee. Go hence, unhappy boy; when this chafed mood is past, thou wilt repent this rashness, and perchance find it harder to forgive thyself than I shall to forgive thee. Go; thou art overwrought. We are not ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... each of whom were so strong and so individual, that she could not know what he would say. Closing her eyes she waited. When the two men joined her Theo was—laughing. And to her overwrought nerves the sound ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Knight of the Holy Ghost in retirement;—these were some of the company among whom Duchess Molly was paraded by her discerning lord, to carry her smiles of welcome and her pretty ways. Grifone, grave, attentive, in black, was there, be sure, waiting his turn. It came, and with it Molly, blushing and overwrought, new from the very kindly salutations of the Greek. To Grifone she proffered a greeting which was no less kind because her heart was troubled. Her well of trust in mankind was not yet dry. Grifone took her hand and bent over it; it was as much as he did to brush it with his lips. Molly wondered ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... The theatre has always been the home of music, and this music must be appropriate; must, or should, express or supplement what happens on the stage; should furnish rest and balm for minds overwrought with tragic deeds. To produce a great play, and put it worthily upon the stage, involves most arts, many sciences and nearly all that is artistic, poetic and dramatic in the mind ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Shemuel trembled from head to foot. Hannah's cheek was drawn and white. She seemed overwrought beyond endurance. There followed a silence only less terrible than ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... or she couldn't have said the things she did—you remember?—at Ford Lankester's funeral. But she had been overwrought then, and that clear note had been wrung from her by the poignancy of the situation. She never gave us anything like ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... description; and the intervening period, when it was actually going forward, is filled up by the recital of sublime lyric poetry, at once causing the stop of time to be forgotten, affording a brief respite to the overwrought feelings, and yet keeping up the enthusiastic and elevated state of mind in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Barbara," he said in a caressing tone. "You are overwrought. I will hear the rest another time—when you feel stronger and send for me. I am going to say good-night now, so that you may rest. But before I go I want to say that nothing you have told me can make the least difference in my feelings, or my desires, or ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... The overwrought politeness is made very ridiculous upon the stage, and Richardson is undoubtedly hard reading for the general consumer of novels. It is true, also, that fine morals do not always go with fine manners, and that Lovelace ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... he had gone through and was going through smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this ragged beachcomber, in dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest such a thing as peace and content to him and his overwrought, exhausted soul? The captain did not reason this; it was the unconscious process of emotion that caused ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... me as you scoffed at and struck me. I sat up all night with that youth wrestling for his soul; and in the morning not only was he a Christian, but his hair was as white as snow. (Lentulus falls in a dead faint). There, there: take him away. The spirit has overwrought him, poor lad. Carry him gently to his house; and ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... the processes connected with the culture of the grape, had a flavor of poetry about them. The toil that produces those kindly gifts of nature which are not the substance of life, but its luxury, is unlike other toil. We are inclined to fancy that it does not bend the sturdy frame and stiffen the overwrought muscles, like the labor that is devoted in sad, hard earnest to raise grain for sour bread. Certainly, the sunburnt young men and dark-cheeked, laughing girls, who weeded the rich acres of Monte Beni, might well enough ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shall commandeer it unbeknownst, and secondly, so that he shall be ready to go in directly his predecessor is out. There is an ill-concealed restiveness about his movements, as he watches the batsmen getting set, that betrays an overwrought spirit. Then of a sudden one of them plays a ball on to his pad. ''s that?' asks the bowler, with an overdone carelessness. 'Clean out. Now I'm in,' and already he is rushing up the middle of the pitch to take possession. When he gets to the wicket a short argument ensues. ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... off wild beasts, or scare any other unknown enemies. On a shelving rock, against which the waves gently broke, we had our first meal, one never to be forgotten by me, for the many mixed feelings with which it was partaken. All hearts were too full to say much. The overwrought mind of the captain showed itself in his profound silence, while slowly and at intervals a single large tear rolled down his cheeks. Madame swallowed as many tears as tea. Schillie gulped down her food in convulsive starts while she spoke only in short sentences ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... passionate, thoroughly aroused woman be his cold, self-contained daughter? He could not understand, as so many cannot, that such natures when aroused are tenfold more intense than those whom little things excite. A long and peculiar train of circumstances, a morbid and overwrought physical condition, led to this outburst from Christine, which was as much a cause of surprise to herself afterward as to her father. He judged correctly that a great deal had occurred between Dennis and herself of which he had no knowledge, and again ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... dear. I want to explain why I asked you to come to me at this late hour—never dreaming my message would find you so overwrought.... You quite see how needless it was to permit yourself to be upset by such ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... succeed to brilliant pictures, decoration to decoration, but there is an utter want of essential unity. Absorbed in the sensuous gorgeousness of highly colored details, if they can but glue together startling and overwrought images, they are satisfied, even while neglecting the principal idea. They seize everything by the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I'm unable to say. I lost track of the passing hours. Time was in abeyance on the ship's clocks. As happens in the polar regions, it seemed that night and day no longer followed their normal sequence. I felt myself being drawn into that strange domain where the overwrought imagination of Edgar Allan Poe was at home. Like his fabled Arthur Gordon Pym, I expected any moment to see that "shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men," thrown across the cataract that protects the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... sometimes took money or begged it in order to read masses for poor souls. In one village he said he had come to reconnoiter for a site to build a hospital. Some cloister brothers in one place took him for a swindler and decided he was overwrought religiously, and that he really thought he was what he wished to become. He was studied at length in prison where he had one attack of maniacal behavior and tried to hang himself. The physician there thought him a simulator. He was ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... first to recover, and kneeling by the panting, overwrought horse he passed his hand gently over the tangled mane and down the foam-flecked face. The red eye rolled up at him; but it was wonder not hatred, a prayer and not a threat, which he could read in it. As he stroked the reeking muzzle, the horse whinnied gently and thrust his nose ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... at her side, touched her flute, which was still suspended from her belt by the golden chain. She raised it to her lips, but only a faint inharmonious note came from it. The music seemed gone from the flute, as hope was gone from her heart. To her overwrought nerves, it was the last omen of all. The flute dropped from her fingers; she covered her face with her hands, and the hot tears ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... that have reduced us from the most flourishing empire in the world, to be one of the most compact and unenviable powers on the globe! Oh, wonderful rights! that are likely to take from us all that yet remains!" This picture of the nation's misery, however, was greatly overwrought. England was not yet reduced to the abject state in which Burke would have had the house believe she was in. Her empire on the seas was not yet lost, nor was she shorn of her rank among the nations. Provinces, islands, men, money, and trade had been lost in the struggle, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... sight of the familiar handwriting, that at first she could not open it. When at last she read the prophetic message, she almost blotted out the writing with her tears, moaning, "He's dead, he's dead!" In her morbid, overwrought condition, the foreboding that had been in the mind of the writer was conveyed to hers; and she practically gave up hope for anything better than the discovery and return of his remains. Her father, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... won another case. Pauline was free. Snow outside and rows of lighted windows. She was overwrought. Let her weep for a spell. Snow outside. Three weeks and one day. Everybody seemed happy with the verdict. People were good at heart. A triumph for decency cheered them. People were not revengeful at heart, only ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... had lifted her unconscious form from beside the chair of Harris. Her words, "I know now! Joe—Joe Hammond!" were yet whispering through his senses. Did those words mean anything? or was the child simply overwrought by that tragedy told in the letters? He did not imagine she would comprehend all the sadness of it until she had fallen ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... not come a minute too soon; for Freddy, his sensitive organization completely overwrought by the events of the morning and his narrow escape from death, had fallen fainting to the ground; his hands still clenched in the folds of little Louie's jacket. Will instantly raised him, when he saw that all danger was ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks. Part Second - Being the Second Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... annual show Of oars with oars contending, sails with sails, Upon Windander's spacious breast, it chanced That—after I had left a flower-decked room (Whose in-door pastime, lighted up, survived To a late hour), and spirits overwrought Were making night do penance for a day Spent in a round of strenuous idleness— My homeward course led up a long ascent, Where the road's watery surface, to the top Of that sharp rising, glittered to the moon And bore the semblance of another stream Stealing with ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... warning, familiar to the busy men of our time—the warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive work. With a prosperous career before him, he had been compelled (at only thirty-one years of age) to ask a colleague to take charge of his practice, and to give the brain which he had cruelly wearied a rest of some months to come. On the ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... The overwrought man threw himself face down on the table in front of his grim accuser, like a child's broken doll, and wept with great sobs that shook his frame as the wind ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... dog. Shoot Chance? Not so long as he could keep between the dog and the cowboy's gun. The puncher, half in jest, reached for his holster. Sundown's overwrought nerves gave way. He dropped to his knees and lifted his long arms imploringly. "Don't! Don't!" he wailed. "He ain't dead! Don't shoot ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... begin our story on the morning of July 1, 1776, in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. For nearly three hours the Lee Resolution has been the subject of furious debate. The members are all excited, anxious, overwrought. The debate has become bitter, for some of the members are unalterably opposed to independence. It is about noon when Dr. Franklin rises ...
— Caesar Rodney's Ride • Henry Fisk Carlton
... myself, and his subsequent commerce with her was achieved by his own personal force. You may say that she had been prepared to see him by belief and desire, by belief and desire acting upon a mind greatly distressed and probably overwrought. You may say that she saw what she ardently desired to see. It is quite true, I cannot deny it; but I point to his previous manifestations, and ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... While darkened all the air; but from his side Full pleasantly the stranger took a sword, Its carven hilt one royal emerald, Its blade both sides with legends overwrought, Some from the Koran, some from Solomon, All by the cunning Eastern maker burned Into the azure steel-his sword he took, And held it, belt, and scabbard too, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... said Elsie, "in the distance, but of course I had no idea who it was. How very kind you have been to me!" and again the tears were trembling in the nervous eyes of the poor, overwrought girl. ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... of the picture. See! I am on board, and I am driving her at one hundred and ten miles." And he followed with his pointer the swift course of the vessel, as it shot down the screen like a great comet, leaving a long tail of smoke behind it. To the overwrought nerves of the audience, the buzz and splutter of the moving-picture machine seemed to increase in volume, and thus lend a semblance of reality to the monster as it ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... fights—the kind that worked the heart and lungs to bursting, that took the elastic out of the arteries and made hard knots of muscle out of Youth's sleek suppleness, that wore out nerve and stamina and made brain and bones weary from excess of effort and endurance overwrought. Yes, he had done better than all of them. There were none of his old fighting partners left. He was the last of the old guard. He had seen them all finished, and he had had a hand ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... masons reminded him that it was the custom to deliver up a prisoner to the people at the time of the Passover. At the time of the Passover, he repeated.... At last, realising what had happened, his face became overwrought; his eyes and mouth testified to the grief he was suffering; and he pressed his spurs to his horse's side, and would have been away beyond call if two of his workmen had not seized the bridle and almost forced the horse on his haunches. Loose my bridle, Joseph cried, astonished and beside himself. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... plainly overwrought hour he should allow himself a moment of forgetfulness drew him ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... again!' I exclaimed, overwrought by the intensity of my emotions. 'Can't you see how serious it is, child? You might die ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... monotonous life without affection is good for some, and detestable for others. Young people are often more sensitive than one supposes, and by shutting them up thus too soon, far from those they love, we may develop to an exaggerated extent a sensitiveness which is overwrought and may become sickly ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... necessary to remind Captain Wren that an officer in close arrest had no right to be away from his quarters. Late in the evening, it seems, Dr. Graham had represented to the post commander that the captain was in so nervous and overwrought a condition, and so distressed, that as a physician he recommended his patient be allowed the limits of the space adjoining his quarters in which to walk off his superabundant excitement. Graham had long been the ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... during which Billie allowed her gaze to travel casually about the room. Sam occupied the intermission by staring furtively at her profile. He was by now in a thoroughly overwrought condition, and the thumping of his heart sounded to him as if workmen were mending the street outside. How beautiful she looked, with that red hair peeping out beneath ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... prevent my Lord Bruncker's dining here I walked as if upon business with him, it being frost and dry, as far as Paul's, and so back again through the City by Guildhall, observing the ruines thereabouts, till I did truly lose myself, and so home to dinner. I do truly find that I have overwrought my eyes, so that now they are become weak and apt to be tired, and all excess of light makes them sore, so that now to the candlelight I am forced to sit by, adding, the snow upon the ground all day, my eyes are very bad, and will be worse if not helped, so my Lord ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... conspirators, the long period of suspense with Toussac's dreadful thumb upon my chin, and finally the moving scenes which I had witnessed—the killing of the hound, the capture of Lesage, and the arrival of the soldiers—I could not wonder that my nerves were overwrought, and that I surprised myself in little convulsive gestures, like those of ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... He does not know you. What has he to do with you? This is overwrought nerves. You ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... came, however—and it was the second day out—when they were among the missing. For two days and two nights, while the good ship floundered on the tempestuous bosom of the overwrought ocean, they were gone from human ken. On the afternoon of the third day, the sea being calmer now, but still sufficiently rough to satisfy the most exacting, a few hardy and convalescent souls sat in a shawl-wrapped row on the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch. Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to see a big hand grasp him by the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... feeling that if he opened the next thought in his mind, an undertaker would rise out of the ground with a coffin. This astonishing man, coming upon his overwrought state, made him feel hysterical. He turned to Effie and gave her both his hands. "The doctor's taking you, Effie. It's been dreadful for you. It's all over now. Try to leave it out of your mind for ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... men rode away, leaving a perfectly furious one standing in the road shaking his fists after them. And he was the more angry because he felt that he had been hastier with the constable than even his overwrought state of mind warranted. Then, as he reflected on the graveyard matter, his curiosity began to get the better of his wrath, and to the surprise of his Vienna antagonist he abandoned the field without another ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... almost unconsciously, and with a feeling of rapidly-increasing weakness. She approached the bell to ring for her maid, which she was able to do with difficulty; and having done so, she attempted to reach the sofa; but exhausted and overwrought nature gave way, and she fell just sufficiently near it to have her fall broken and her head supported by it, as she lay there apparently lifeless. In this state Alley Mahon found her; but instead of ringing an alarm, or attempting to collect a crowd of the servants ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... there was a momentary silence between them. Then the emotion astir within her swept all before it. Turning suddenly, she flung both arms round his neck and hid her face upon his shoulder, her breath coming in short, dry sobs, like the breath of an overwrought child. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... him to calm his overwrought nerves, and the sun was already high when at last he fell into a heavy, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... men stopped short as a slight sound in the passage caught their attention. A silence fell upon them that they could not break, and they stood dumbfounded, nervous and overwrought. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... and woke with fewer fears on me, for I was overwrought yesterday after all the terrible waiting on the cliff and what went before. It was Sunday, moreover, and the early services in the new church helped mightily to set a new face on things. So when I had seen to the ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... was awful good chocolate. Oh, Dolly, our cake was so beautiful!" And Dotty's overwrought nerves gave way and she ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... So perplexed, bewildered, overwrought did he become with all these thoughts that he forced himself to make some excuse and stay away from Christine. When at last he went again, it was late in the evening and his time, he knew, would be short. It was three days now since he had been, and his blood flowed quick with impatience. ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... these things," he said soothingly—"You are evidently overwrought with study and excessive zeal. Much that you say may be true; nevertheless the Church—OUR Church—stands firm among overwhelming contradictions,—and we, its ministers, do what we can. I myself am disposed to think that the multitude of the saved is greater than ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... got to do this by myself, talk to Joe and simply make him believe me!" But as soon as she came to the details of what she should say to her husband, his face as she had seen it last—worn and nervous, overwrought—kept rising up before her. Could she convince him! "It's my last chance!" If only she knew how to go about it! She wanted to be heroic and face this crisis all alone—but she had been alone so much. Tonight it seemed to Ethel as though she had struggled alone for years. Was ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... varied with loud cries and groans. "Abide with me" is a beautiful hymn, but really its beauties began to pall when it had been sung through from beginning to end nine times running. Neither my nephew nor I could get any sleep that first night owing to the blatant devotional exercises of the overwrought negroes. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... be really happy again, she was resolved neither to mope nor to be a burden on any one. Mr. Mills, the executor of Mr. Cherrington's estate, who believed himself to be a judge of human nature withal, had observed that she seemed a little overwrought, as though she had lived on her nerves; but, on the other hand, he had been impressed by her direct, business-like manner, which argued that she was very much in earnest. Besides, she was vouched for by ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... overwrought, I was giving out, and I suddenly felt a queer giddiness coming over me; and if it had not been for her, I should have fallen and maybe fainted, and she saw it, and got me to a couch from which she had started when I turned the key, and was holding a ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... excited and overwrought; she could not meet any of the crowd, and took refuge in one of the deserted wings, until, as she hoped, every one had dispersed. As she was quietly leaving the wings she was met, much to her annoyance, by the manager. He was a coarse, ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... Thence, I could see the lights from the windows, and at times hear the sound of voices. There, I could stand in the starlight and look up to the heavens. I had been there before, but never in such a heartsick and forlorn condition. I was too overwrought to think, yet had to do something to ease the tension. I moved around and looked toward Jakie's grave, then returned to the side of the tree-trunk which had escaped the ravages of fire, and ran my finger up and down, feeling the holes which ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... amazement. As the spell of her influence seemed to calm the overwrought mind of the girl there succeeded a hardness in her tone that was wholly out of keeping with her youth. There was something that breathed of a past where there should have been nothing but the thought of ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... Witzel. "Don't do that! Whatever you do, don't do that!" And suddenly, like a nervous dyspeptic suddenly overwrought, Mr. Witzel broke down and, falling on the cot, began to sob. Philo Gubb looked at him a moment with amazement. Then he dug a pair of handcuffs out of his trunk and, walking to where Mr. Witzel lay, prodded him in the back with the muzzle of the pistol. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... said next was so uncomplimentary to the gallant Captain Scott that that overwrought individual seized the sporting editor by the shoulder, and shoved him into the hands of two ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought: Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... ceased to struggle; while, as I lowered my head from the painful position into which I had strained it, I felt relieved to know that the poor, overwrought companion of my adventure could forget his sorrows for ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Thy record is not clean, If but tradition wears a truthful garb. Plug hats and coats of a latest Tammany style And "pleasure saturnine" did figure cut When first thy mouth did voice the burning thoughts That trickled from a brain much overwrought By meditation on conditions here Which bore so heavy on ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... a finger over the blurred glass and sought to look out. The train seemed to be plunging into strange and grisly horrors. Overwrought as she was a flood of tears came to her eyes and seemed to bring her greater calm, so that at last she fell into a deeper sleep, heavy, visionless, no longer attended ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... these sturdy mothers in Israel, who so willingly give their lives that others may live, often find vent for overwrought feelings by scolding; and I, for one, cheerfully grant them the privilege. Washington's mother scolded and grumbled to the day of her death. She also sought solace by smoking a pipe. And this reminds me that ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... could hear a rustling in the women's end of the dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to an outing-shirt, open at the throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted: "Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the artery in his neck, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... to his former health, terms which we are to understand the virtuous witness refused. It is pleasant to know that Master Enger was "distrustfull of the truth" of this tale. One fears that these spectres were not the products of overwrought imagination, as were many others, but were merely fabrics of elaborate fiction.[29] In any case they were not the groundwork of the proof. In the Fairfax prosecutions at York in 1622 the charges against the six women accused rested entirely ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... with that young man; well, Fluff will amuse him—dear little thing, Fluff—most entertaining. Has a way of soothing a man's nerves, which few women possess. You, my dear, have often a most irritating way with you; not that I complain—we all have our faults. You inherit this intense overwrought sort of manner from ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... does injustice to these marauders of the sea, who put in a plea of extenuation. The disparity of their virtues and their crimes is overwrought in the use of poetic license. Before the period of the conquest of Guadeloupe by the English, the French Government in force on that island had granted permits to numerous privateersmen to prey upon the commerce of the enemy, as our own Government had done in two ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... "You are overtired and overwrought by the heat, and the excitement of the sermon has been too much for you. But you will be all right again ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... kilometres!" suddenly shouted the overwrought professor, losing control of himself. "I won't be talked to this way, do you hear? I won't! How can a man think? I'm a member of the faculty of the Imperial University. I've ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the doctor. He felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, asked questions, and shook his head. Overwrought nerves the whole of it. Her mind must have been over-excited for some time, and this was the result. No danger was to be apprehended; careful nursing would restore her in a week or two, combined with perfect quiet. Then a change of air and scene would be beneficial—say ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... a long, sighing breath as he disappeared, and turning clasped Faith close with a sob of overwrought feeling. The sisters could not talk much over the hideous tale. The night was shutting down wild and stormy, and the labored motion of the good steamship already showed that she was meeting heavier seas than they had yet encountered. Yet, singularly, neither felt seasick, as yet. The ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... we were in perplexed consideration as to where to go and what to do, that the magazine article appeared—devoted to houseboating. It was a most fetching production with a picture that appealed to every overwrought nerve. There was a charming bit of water with trees hanging over; a sky all soft and blue (you knew it was soft and blue just as you knew that the air was soft and cool; just as you knew that a drowsy peace and quiet was brooding ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... to his room. He was thankful, as he thought that sleep would bring tranquillity and relief to Margaret's overwrought brain. He went to bed and fell asleep, for he was exhausted by the fatigue of the day and the anxiety of the night. Poor Clement fell asleep, and dreamt that he met Margaret Wilmot by moonlight in the park ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... at all events, brother," replied Eric, laughing in his old fashion at the possibility of such a thing. The lad was quite overwrought with emotion at parting with the old skipper as well as his late companions in the ship; and, tears and mirth being closely allied, he would have felt inclined to laugh at anything then—just because he ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... child there, my dear," urged the man; "you are overwrought, excited, nervous. The ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... on the very day after her husband's departure she had gone quietly on deck while the rest of the company were at supper and never was seen again; nor till the sea gives up its dead shall any know the story of that poor overwrought soul's last ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... pedantry, M. De Banville, in the scene of the banquet, makes the cup-bearer go round dealing out a little wine, with which libation is made, and then the feast goes on in proper Homeric fashion. These overwrought details are forgotten in the parting scenes, where Deidamie takes what she knows to be her last farewell of Achilles, and girds him ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... cold and clear, but the words were scarcely uttered when he fell to his knees again, with a subdued cry of overwrought feeling. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... smiled grimly; this bargaining and trafficking with such a man, in a place so foul! It seemed grotesque, incongruous; and yet was, withal, so momentous. He knew just what Rogers should say; what he would force him to do! In his overwrought state he overlooked one or two points that would not have escaped him at another time: a certain craftiness, or low cunning that played occasionally on ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... was a little late, so that Seth's shoulder might be properly dressed. And when at last the family sat down to it, it threatened to be more than usually silent. All were weary, and the women overwrought. Ma was the only one who made any attempt to rouse the drooping spirits about her. The men knew that they were confronted with no ordinary Indian rising. There was something far more ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... had formerly been clearly outlined were now dim, obscured. The yawning chasm was not the same. It circled wider, redder, deeper. It was a weird, ghastly mouth of hell. Gale stood fascinated, unable to tell how much he saw was real, how much exaggeration of overwrought emotions. There was no beauty here, but an unparalleled grandeur, a sublime scene of devastation and desolation which might have had its counterpart upon the burned-out moon. The mood that gripped Gale now added to its somber portent ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... formality the dulness of a species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable. Even the iron was ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... person!" she laughed, patting his hands affectionately. "But then, of course, you are a little overwrought. I am very real, I can assure you. I have been in Chicago, playing, but there hasn't been a night when I haven't thought of the times when we used to talk together in the darkness, when you let me into ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to Bellingham's "frightful agitation" as he sat on the bench, and all this dreadful work was going on; and I return to it, to describe it as far as words can convey an idea of the shocking spectacle. I could only imagine something like it in the overwrought painting of a powerful romance-writer, but never before could conceive the physical suffering of a strong muscular man, under the tortures of a distracted mind. Whilst his language was cool, the agonies which shook his frame were actually terrible. His ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... lain there a long time. At last he sat up, rose, began to walk around the pool. He went around it thrice. Then again he sat down, his arms upon his knees, watching the dusk water. He did not go nor sit like one overwrought or frenzied or despairing. His great frame, his bearing, the air of him, had quietude, but not listlessness; there seemed at once calm and intensity as of a still center that had flung off the storm. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... brakemen generally Americans rather near the soil; or was with the engineers and firemen in their cabs, or on the running-boards of boxcars with trainmen. Without knowing it, I acquired the ability of getting the other fellow's point of view, and, when I got old enough not to be overwrought by sympathy that was inclined to be too partisan, I found an immense intellectual enjoyment in watching the interplay between temperament and environment. I think this answers your question. I have retained a gossip's ability ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... overwrought, Mademoiselle Stephanie," he said. "I was not sure of your intentions. But I see that the ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... conversation the Emperor, moreover, appeared overwrought, and irritable. As the years begin to weigh upon William II. the family traditions, the retrograde feelings of the Court, and, above all, the impatience of the soldiers, are gaining more ascendency over his mind. Perhaps he may feel I know not what kind of jealousy of the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... the thoughts and reflections which passed through his mind during that delirium of more than two hours. He even remembered the senseless bray of laughter which, to the sympathetic mind, is not the least impressive feature of that iniquitous trial. His overwrought nerves being temporarily relieved by the cachinnation, he regained for a few minutes some measure of composure and sanity. With the return of reason came a returning sense of injustice and oppression. He made a brief but ineffectual ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... from her for the pleasure of looking at her again, of realizing that my overwrought senses were not cheating me. Yes, there she was, in all the luster of that magnetic beauty I cannot think of even now without an up-blazing of the fire which is to the heart what the sun is to the eyes of a blind man dreaming of sight. There she was on my side of the chasm ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... he meant. Hours must pass before he could dig into that pie. I dropped the subject, and we sat for a pretty good time in silence. Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution. I averted my gaze tactfully, but I could hear him kicking chairs and things. It was ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... the sea was blowing fresh and free over the village, and beyond it to the little churchyard, the God's acre of Northbourne. Kneeling beside one of the grassy mounds therein was Theo Carnegy, tears rolling down her earnest face. The girl was overwrought by home-worries, for Theo was none of the crying sort, as a rule. But there are times in the lives of each of us when all things seem too difficult for our feeble hands to smooth out; the knots, the difficulties, become hopelessly entangled; we sit down dismayed ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... along the walks in a state of complete discomfort, in one of those attacks of religious spleen which determine, while they last during years, the "taedium vitae" of the cloisters. He had a horror of any life but this, and the soul overwrought by prayers was failing in a body insufficiently rested and ill-nourished; it had no further desire, asked only to be let alone, to sleep, to fall into one of those states of torpor in which everything becomes ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... girl, after an instant of staring, broke into a little fit of nervous, overwrought laughter, and covered ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... vividly remember, was the Colonel's composure throughout all this debate. Vehement he was—because he could not describe even a butterfly without vividness which easily passed into vehemence- -but he was in no sense mentally overwrought; nor did he continually return to one subject like a man with an obsession. His humor flashed out, even at his own expense, but he had throughout the underlying gravity of one who knows that he is about to make a very important decision. I mention these facts because at the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... time for angry words," said the Pastor Arentz, pushing his way through the group of bewildered men and overwrought women. "He can scarcely be dead; let me look at him, I am something of a doctor," and he knelt by the senseless and bleeding Adrian to ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... number. As I opened the first of them the singing upstairs ceased. For a moment there was something almost oppressive in the sudden change from noise to silence. I suppose my nerves must have been overwrought. The next sound in the house—nothing more remarkable than the creaking of a man's boots descending the stairs—made me shudder all over. The man was no doubt the singing-master, going away after giving his lesson. I heard the house door close on him, and started ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... several years past he has been insensible to the art for which he once lived. He spends days and days sitting in front of a piece of outstretched primed canvas, with his eyes fixed upon it in a stare; that he calls painting. Into what an overwrought condition the description of such a picture brings him, you have just seen for yourself. Besides this he is haunted by another unhappy thought, which makes my life to be a sad and agitated one; but I regard it as a fatality ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Overwrought and frightened, these dreadful pictures of robbers and pistols had a reality for her which was too much to bear. Mary the courageous, the high-spirited, who scorned tears and laughed at weakness, was now crying ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... on the outer door made no impression upon him, but a second, louder, more insistent one brought a, "Why in thunder don't you come in, and stop your infernal racket?" from his overwrought nerves. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... "you are excited and overwrought. Zara meant no slight to you in leaving the room before your song was finished. I am quite sure of that. She is kindness itself—her nature is all sweetness and gentleness. She ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was one of the most successful writers of this school of exaggerated romance. Her novels, with their azure-eyed heroines, haunted castles, trapdoors, bandits, abductions, rescues in the nick of time, and a general medley of overwrought joys and horrors,[219] were immensely popular, not only with the crowd of novel readers, but also with men of unquestioned literary genius, like ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... laborers from starving. Into the city flows much of the best blood of the country, which seeks opportunity for achievement. The great city is inevitable so long as great society insists on gigantic production and as great consumption, but the city idea is overwrought beyond its natural condition. If some power could equalize the transportation question, so that a factory might be built in a smaller town, where raw material could be furnished as cheaply as in the large city, and the distribution of goods be as convenient, there is no reason why the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... crouched up against the cliff in this little alcove that Wendot found Gertrude; cowering, white-faced, against the hard rock, faint from want of food, terrified at the loneliness and at her own fears for the safety of her companions, and so overwrought by the tension of nerve she had undergone, that when Wendot did stand beside her she could only cling to him sobbing passionately, and it was long before he could even induce her to let him go, or to attempt to eat the contents of a small package he had had the forethought ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... conversation would have been evident to the most casual observer from the manner in which Mike stumped off, swinging his cricket-bag as if it were a weapon of offence. There are many kinds of walk. Mike's was the walk of the Overwrought Soul. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... from all quarters, and was eager to hawk about with the solemn air of a preacher to every body: he accordingly betook himself, as a last refuge, to Catholicism, and drew after him, as a companion to his own views, a man of very fair but falsely overwrought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... suffered much, and was still overwrought and nerve-strung: for some reason she could not afterwards have explained, she felt spiteful and uncontrolled, goaded into stupid fury by the look of insolence and of triumph with which Candeille ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... us for one instant suspected, but we felt some degree of uncertainty about the others. Whether or no there had been some amount of unclean work going on, it was anyway quite certain that a great part of Giannoli's suspicions were the outcome of his overwrought ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... me to submit the ensuing imitation of Macaulay—the most easily parodied of all prose writers—to the judgment of my readers. It was written by the late Abraham Hayward. Macaulay is contrasting, in his customary vein of overwrought and over-coloured detail, the evils of arbitrary government with those of a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... before they died, and to seek and enjoy a taste of that oblivion which was soon to fall upon them with an impenetrable shroud. All but Ellen were soon asleep; but she, the most wearied of all, could not close her eyes and admit rest to her overwrought frame. There was a burning thirst in her throat, which the small portion of water she and the rest had shared—being all that remained for them—had failed to slake. She had not complained of it; but she rejoiced when she heard them asleep, that she could rise and move ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... "You are overwrought," he said—"Your own theories of health and vitality are not infallible! You must be taken care of. You think ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli |
