"High-strung" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anything now, and that's one thing that is the trouble. You know what a proud, high-strung chap he always was. Well, he's up against it, and it has completely ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... deny that he looked it, either. Such a high-strung, jumpy party he is, always glancin' around suspicious. And that wanderin' store eye of his, scoutin' about on its own hook independent of the other, sort of adds to the general sleuthy effect. Kind ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the little ones must stay back at home with ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... old but unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said—some maliciously the rest merely because they believed it. The bride is nineteen and beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud of her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband. For its sake she braved her father's displeasure, endured his reproaches, listened with loyalty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and her clothes tucked up, mopping the floor of the shop; but in the afternoon much more genteelly attired in silks of an ancient fashion. Mr. Brown was a very quiet, inoffensive person, the wife a little high-strung. It is certain that they had occasional domestic bickerings, perhaps about the young man in the knee-breeches; for on one occasion it is alleged that the old matron was overheard to address her spouse, with a slightly Hibernian accentuation,—"Brune, Brune, ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... suspicions that my son was here improperly are anywhere near correct, then you are entitled to my most hearty apology. Fred is a peculiar and high-strung boy, but I believe his impulses are right in the main. I will add that I believe his account of how he came to be in this strange plight. He took the car early this morning. I am just returning from a spin in our larger automobile. I saw my runabout ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... words, "You've been at the tea again, and underfeeding, I expect, as usual. Better see my nerve doctor, and then come with me to the south of France." For this fellow, who knows nothing of disordered liver or high-strung nerves, goes regularly to a great nerve specialist with the periodical belief that his nervous system is ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the Spider slowly, "he sure has the grit; ther ain't nothin' on two legs he's afraid of except—himself, bo. He's too high-strung. Nerves is his trouble, I reckon. Why, Chee! When he's in d' ring he can't be still a minute, can't let himself rest between rounds, see? He kinder beats ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... with the high-strung beings that lived between the pages of my books: men and women who knew no curb, who stopped at nothing, and who paid the price of their passionate mistakes. Old Manuel, standing by the horses, looked strange to me. I spoke to him ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... admirers. But when all this is said, it remains probable that a lowliness in their ideal preserves the villagers from temptation. They do not put woman on a pedestal to be worshipped; they are unacquainted with the finer, more sensitive, more high-strung possibilities of her nature. People who have been affected by long traditions of chivalry, or by the rich influences of art, are in another case; but here amongst the labouring folk a woman is not seen through the medium of any ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... two men. Jim played with the gems, running them through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to the core ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... gained something of indifference! Could his senses, his jangled, shattered nerves, his bruised and bleeding pride, have acquired that callousness of stupidity, how well would it have been with him! But Ivan was Ivan still: high-strung, keenly apperceptive and receptive; his spiritual, like his physical, nerves, alive to every emotion, every pain or pleasure that rose up into his present. Only to a certain natural extent had he changed. The sudden violent revolutions of his wheel of life, had strengthened his character, though ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... third trial.' 'Got what?' I wanted to know. 'Got that solitaire,' he yells. 'And it's a good joke on you, all right, because now you owe her the thousand dollars; and I hate to bother you, but you know how some women are that have a delicate, high-strung organization. She says she won't be able to sleep a wink if you don't bring it up to her so she can have all our little treasure under her pillow; and I think, myself, it's better to have it all settled ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... that he can do a man's work in the world. As it is, we shall have to take him home to live; and you know what New York dust and climate can do to people who have been very, very ill and are still delicate and high-strung." ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... community did not suffer from any want of food or other necessaries, for they found a store of provisions in one of the huts that had evidently been placed there in case of need similar to their own; so, things jogged on evenly enough. Still, all were in a state of high-strung suspense, looking out eagerly from morning till night for the promised vessel that every one expected was coming to ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... diversity of opinion as to the cause; some ascribing it to Poe's dissipated, irregular habits and irritable temper, others to the meagre support of the magazines, still others to Poe's restless disposition and desire to establish a periodical of his own. His uncontrolled and high-strung nature, so sensitive that a single glass of wine or swallow of opium caused temporary insanity, the uncertainty of his means of subsistence, his wife's frail health and her death in 1847, were causes sufficient to render unsteady even a more ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... fighting it," Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of color in her cheeks and the tiny beads of sweat that arose from her continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty- eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... he had been scrutinized by the aid of an electric hand-lamp. The tremulous whisper told him something else—that the speaker suffered from nerves as high-strung as his own. The knowledge gave him inspiration. He cried at a venture, in a guarded voice, "Hands up!"—and struck out smartly with his stick. Its ferrule impinged upon something soft but heavy. Simultaneously he heard a low, frightened cry, the cane was swept aside, a blow ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... more to her daily influence and training. It was the one struggle of the poor woman's life to shield her children from the evil consequences of their father's life. For her son she had special anxiety, knowing his sensitive, high-strung nature, and his tendency to go headlong into evil if his self-respect and self-control were once lost. His passionate love for her had been the boy's best trait, and through this she had controlled him thus far. But she had thought that it might be best for him to be ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... which he himself could not examine, he proceeded to ride towards the ford. The brook was swollen during the night, and the groom could not forbear intimating to his master, that there was considerable danger in attempting to cross it. But Mowbray's mind and feelings were too high-strung to permit him to listen to cautious counsel. He spurred the snorting and reluctant horse into the torrent, though the water, rising high on the upper side, broke both over the pommel and the croupe of his saddle. It was by exertion of great strength and sagacity, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Dogs,—high-strung dogs,—do not like to have tricks played on them; least of all by strangers. Bruce seemed to take the nurse-disguise as a personal affront to himself. Then, too, the man was not of his own army. On the contrary, the scent proclaimed him one of the horde whom Bruce's friends ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... man's while to consider, whether he should bend his efforts in this direction or not. The determination here taken and acted upon will elaborate quite a different character of man one way or the other. The effort made as the Stoics direct, would mean no yielding to excitement, no poetry, no high-strung devotion, no rapture, no ecstasy, no ardour of love, no earnest rhetoric spoken or listened to, no mourning, no rejoicing other than the most conventional, to the persistent smothering of whatever is natural and really felt, no tear of pity freely let flow, no touch of noble ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... preventing the permanent settlement of her sister's husband as minister. She seems to have the idea that all that party are emissaries of Satan. I do not wonder her little girl should be so nervous and excitable, being the child of such a nervous, high-strung woman. But I am going to see them again this afternoon; will you go ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... blame for it. Stephen did really begin it, but I suppose I provoked him by some foolishness of mine. He had a rival or two, you see. I was vain and coquettish and liked to tease him a little. He was a very high-strung, sensitive fellow. Well, we parted in a temper on both sides. But I thought it would all come right; and it would have if Stephen hadn't come back too soon. Anne, my dear, I'm sorry to say" . . . Miss ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... on the High-caste women of India. She should supplement it with one on the High-strung women of Indiana, and thus illustrate the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... Nancy," she mused, "sweet, sensitive, and fine, under such influence! And Joan so high-strung and reckless! It would ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... how a fondness for the Middle Ages, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in his attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have conducted Ruskin and William Morris ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Horn crooned. "You're nothing but a bunch of high-strung sensitiveness, with a golden heart in the middle and a golden coat wrapped all around. Gott-fer-dang, Jerry, you're gold, pure gold, inside and out, and no dog was ever minted like you in all the world. You're heart of gold, you golden dog, and be good to me and love me as I shall always be good ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... the high-strung eloquence with which He had spoken to His enemies that Jesus further showed Peter how inconsistent was his act. It was inconsistent with his Master's dignity; "For," said He, "if I ask My Father, He would presently give Me more than twelve legions ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... which the lynx crouched, stopping every few steps to sniff at the bark or to peer up into the branches. For a moment the big cat held his ground, but the sight of the queer apparition bearing down upon him was too much for his high-strung nerves. With a snarl he scrambled up the tree, where he crouched upon a branch, glaring down at the animated leaf-pile. Kagh shambled around the tree, his nose to the ground as if hunting for something. Then he continued on ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... inmates of the room the boy was known as "Joe" or "Quinn" or "Sonny." To the man with the half-moon shade over his eyes he was "Say" or "That Damned Kid." High-strung, high-pressure editors omit the unnecessary, condensation being ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... never one man that had a clearer conception of the ultimate purposes and results of Christianity; never a man whose life was more unselfish and self-sacrificing. Being of an intensely nervous and high-strung organization, and doing his work in a mixed population that would have taxed the patience of Job in its management, it is no wonder that Bro. White was sometimes misunderstood, and, like all reformers, was made to feel that he was living before ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... I was not to be disturbed. I won't be disturbed." With a gesture plainly indicative of high-strung nerves, she turned to the table and poured herself out ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... still wore that expression of intense and high-strung energy, which showed me that some novel and suggestive circumstance had opened up a stimulating line of thought. See the foxhound with hanging ears and drooping tail as it lolls about the kennels, and compare it with the same hound as, with gleaming eyes and straining ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was dressed all in black, and so was her daughter, whom she led by the hand. Mrs. Gaunt's face was pale, and sad, and stern,—a monument of deep suffering and high-strung resolution. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... were thrown more and more together, the girl lost all her self-control. Swift did not in any sense make love to her, though he gave her the somewhat fanciful name of "Vanessa"; but she, driven on by a high-strung, unbridled temperament, made open love to him. When he was about to return to Ireland, there came one startling moment when Vanessa flung herself into the arms of Swift, and amazed him by pouring out a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... have had such a high-strung, sensitive nervous organization that opposition of any sort has made ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... away; newly furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... this suddenly discovered treasure was to bring was mercifully concealed from him, as also the sombre fact that he would henceforth go lonely all his life, perforce obliged to content himself with the crumbs of another man's feast. For Peter Bellair, high-strung, imaginative, as he will ever be, will worship the strong, kindly, simple man he believes to be his father, but to that dear father's friend he will only yield the careless affection born of gratitude ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... organ peal that soar'd the vocal lift along, As chorus'd to the high-strung harp his words of mightier song, Lest, hapless chance! should rise, above the swelling of the tide, A remnant of the ambitious love that sought a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... seem a propitious moment to "put Mr. Hicks in his place," as Mrs. Stott had phrased it, but Wallie had no desire to nerve himself twice for the same ordeal; therefore, with something of the desperate courage which comes to high-strung persons about to have a tooth extracted, Wallie ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... had been further from his thoughts than Jacques Rollet, when he closed his eyes on the preceding night, nor when he opened them to that sun which was to shine on what he expected to be the happiest day of his life! Where were the high-strung nerves now! The elastic frame! The ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... gray fur—"chaps" this article of dress is called—and in one hand he held a closely plaited, stinging black "quirt." He wore a plaid shirt and cotton handkerchief around his neck. That describes the man who rode Rollo first—and no wonder the spirited, high-strung colt was suspicious of saddles, men, and things. I watched the man as he rode away. His horse was going at a furious gallop, with ears turned back, as if expecting whip or spur any instant, and the man sat far over on one side, that leg quite straight as though he was standing ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... allers bed quite a parcel o' sympathy for Eph," said a short, thickset coasting captain, who sat tilted back in a three-legged chair, smoking lazily. "You see, he wa'n't but about twenty-one or two then, and he was allus a mighty high-strung boy; and then Eliphalet did act putty ha'sh, foreclosin' on Eph's mother, and turnin' her out o' the farm, in winter, when everybody knew she could ha' pulled through by waitin'. Eph sot great store by the old lady, and I expect he was putty ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... the one who had demurred suggested after a quarter of an hour had passed, during which no further sound had come from the bedroom. 'Madge is very high-strung. She may have fainted from the shock. I told you fellows that it was an idiotic ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... clearing his throat fussily, "I fear we must look for the motive in the state of poor Mr. Parrish's nerves. An uncommonly high-strung man he always was, and he smoked those long black strong cigars of his from morning till night. Sir Winterton Maire told him flatly—Mr. Parrish, I recollect, repeated his very words to me after Sir Winterton had examined him—that, if he did not take a complete rest and give up ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... his recent experience with Mary Owens, distrusted his ability to make any woman happy—much less the belle from Louisville, so brilliant, vivacious, well educated and exacting. He seemed to grow morbidly conscious of his shortcomings, and she was high-strung. A misunderstanding arose, and, between such exceptional natures, "the course of true love ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... slightly pressed his arm, and whispered, "You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing." Indeed, it must have formed a vivid contrast to what they were doing and seeing an hour or two earlier the night before, when they were trudging along, with beating hearts and high-strung courage, on the road between Haworth and Keighley, hardly thinking of the thunder-storm that beat about their heads, for the thoughts which filled them of how they would go straight away to London, and prove that they were really two people, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... father was supposed—by his unfortunate wife at least—to have been the scion of a proud and aristocratic family, who had not been too proud, however, to leave her to starve. Altogether, Miss Husted was an exceedingly romantic, high-strung, middle-aged spinster, miles and miles above her station in life, whose heart and purse were open to any foreigner who had discernment enough to see her weakness and tact enough to pander to it by hinting at his noble lineage. This love of things ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... But I always stuck up for her—and I know that she did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was always as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don't believe that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybody else. I don't suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you?" the Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. "When are your high-strung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Paul's were blue. Under stress of excitement, the blood coursed olive in the face of Lloyd, crimson in the face of Paul. But outside this matter of coloring they were as like as two peas. Both were high-strung, prone to excessive tension and endurance, and they lived at ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... or Friday, I think. He'd been laid off for a day or so and I thought he'd gone a bit fine, although he's rather too phlegmatic to suffer much from nerves. Some of the high-strung chaps do go to pieces about this time and you have to nurse them along pretty carefully. But Gilbert! Well, on Saturday—yes, that was the day—he'd been reported perfectly fit by the trainer and just as a matter of form I asked him if he was ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago: the iron invincibility of the elder's sturdy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... can play like a fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories: they can flash little diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate: and why? these come by long, high-strung labor. But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts. Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... the double doors, looks in, and then enters. She is an adorable little human being, pretty, high-strung, temperamental, full of certain feminine fascination that defies analysis, which is partly due to the few faults she possesses. She is, of course, dressed in the conventional wedding-dress, a tulle veil thrown over ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... charm for him; but during this period they must often have tempted him into the elaborate dinners, the late hours, and the high-strung excitement, which made a retreat to the keen air and plain diet of his Sabine home scarcely less necessary for his body's than it was for his spirit's health. For, much as he prized moderation in all things, and extolled "the mirth that ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... were heard. A vigorous girl like Elizabeth Fales would not have submitted easily, they held, to any such assault as was charged. In the course of the trial a very moving description of the sufferings such a high-strung, ardent nature as this girl's must have undergone, because of her hopeless love, was used to show the reasons for suicide. And following the habit of the times, the lawyers turned their work to moral ends by beseeching the parents in the crowded court-room to exercise a greater ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... will open my breast you will find an old man's broken heart, and across the rent your name will be written in the ragged edges. How handsome you are to-night! How fair a lad you were! Such face and form and high-strung soul, the heart of an ancient knight come back to earth, I used to boast! God's grace is wonderful, His ways past finding out. When we seem forsaken, He is but preparing larger blessings on some grander plan whose end we do not see. He is my shepherd; I shall not want. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... letters were not often those which a boy is over-eager to read. It is not all mothers who understand what boys are,—their quick susceptibilities, their precocious manliness, all their mystical ways and oddities. A letter from Mrs. Haughton generally somewhat fretted and irritated Lionel's high-strung nerves, and he had instinctively put off the task of reading the one he held, till satisfied hunger and cool-breathing shadows, and rest from the dusty road, had lent their soothing aid to his ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years, and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and development, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... makes the women intoxicate themselves with fictitious narratives of high courage, daring rescues, and all kinds of melodramatic heroism. Extremely amusing is the scene in which Karen Riis (who loves Hans and is beloved by him) goes rowing with her friends Nora and Lisa, taking with her a stock of high-strung novels, and when a drowning man cries to them for help they row away posthaste, because ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I had inherited a high-strung, passionate temper from my mother, and a strong self-will from my father, which made a combination hard to subdue. In my later days I have come to realize that I must have tantalized and pestered ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... high-strung,—extremely sensitive. Her imagination is quickly aflame. Perhaps, last night, you drove her as far as was safe. You heard for yourself how, in consequence, she suffered. You don't want people to say you have driven her into a ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... parental purpose where those two were concerned, and he began to laugh at the daring presumptions of his own past dreams and to worship now only from afar. But he could not know the effect of that parental purpose on that wilful, high-strung young person, the pique that Gray's frank interest in Mavis brought to life within her, and he was not yet far enough along in the classics to suspect that Marjorie might weary of hearing Aristides called the Just. Nor could he know the spirit of coquetry that lurked deep behind her serious ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... society for the children.' Then many of us are very much afraid of being laughed at. Ridicule, I think, to sensitive people in a generation like ours, is pretty nearly as bad as the old rack and the physical torments of martyrdom. We have all got so nervous and high-strung nowadays, and depend so much upon other people's good opinion, that it is a dreadful thing to be ridiculed. Timid people do not come to the front and say what they believe, and take up unpopular causes, because they cannot bear to be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the concentrated intensity which high-strung nerves could give to a man who is trying to hear the one thing to him worth hearing in the world, I listened. Had a wild beast fixed his claws and teeth into me at the moment I would not have withdrawn ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... too careful," remarked Mrs. White, sententiously. "The world's full of gossiping people, and women are very impressionable, especially such high-strung women as that young widow. A man can't possibly be too careful. Read ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... at that time, Abigail Norman. She was pretty. I swear by all the sacred cats of Egypt, that she was beautiful. She was industrious. The best housekeeper in the state! She was high-strung. I liked her all the more for that. You see a man of imagination is apt to fall in love with a tragedy queen. But this is a ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... revulsion which comes so suddenly upon him, is all told in one brief sentence, which may well be quoted as an apt instance how Shakespeare reaches the heart by a few plain words, when another writer would most likely pummel the ears with a high-strung oration. When it turns out that the Jew's only chance of life stands in the very mercy which he has but a moment before abjured; and when, as the condition of that mercy, he is required to become a Christian, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... roan over critically and shook his head against the riddle; for he had known him to be a quiet, dependable, all-round good horse, with no bad traits and an easy-going disposition that fretted at nothing. A high-strung, nervous beast might, from rough usage and abuse, go "bad"; but the blue roan—they had called him Pardner—had never showed the slightest symptom of nerves. Andy knew horses as he knew himself. That a horse like Pardner should, in two ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... were dispersing, she sat quite still, and closed her eyes. For her soul was too high-strung now to endure the chit-chat she knew would attack her on the road home,—chit-chat that had been welcome enough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... had always been charming; there could be no doubt about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too, but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning, which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... knew well caught him, and he laughed. It was the possession that had held in him in every action which he had so far been in. It lifted his high-strung spirit into an atmosphere where there was no dread and no disgust, only a keen rapture in throwing every atom of soul and body into physical intensity; it was as if he himself were a bright blade, dashing, cutting, killing, a living sword rejoicing to destroy. With ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... off alone in the trolley I thought of how they must have felt in old times a-carryin' the Urim and Thumim. And though I hadn't no idee what them wuz, yet I always felt that the carriers of 'em must have felt solemn and high-strung. Yes, my feelin's wuz such as I felt of the heft and importance of them errents not alone to Serepta Pester, but to the hull race of wimmen that it kep' my mental head rained up so high that I couldn't ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... mind had held its peace, Sabina erred again and praised Miss Ironsyde. In truth, she was not at her best to-night and her excitement acted unfavourably on Raymond. He fought against his own emotions, and listened to her high-strung chatter and plans for the future. A torrent of blame had better suited the contrite mood in which she met him; but she took the blame on her own shoulders, and in her relief ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... read have made her feel that she must and WILL have her romance. If you can make Louise feel that you love her so well as to become her gallant suitor, circumstances may soon give you great advantages. She may be cold and indifferent for a time, but like all passionate high-strung natures, present impulses against may turn just as strongly for you. At least, you have not to contend with that most fatal of all attitudes— indifference. A great change in you will be a flattering tribute to her power to which no girl would be indifferent. I must tell you now once ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... that there was the spot where the gruesome tragedy had been committed. "And to think that the man's own daughter did it," they would generally add. "Beats all how bloodthirsty some folks can get. He must have cut her short on money or something and she was too high-strung ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... feeling of heat. The individual has a high warm color, does not sleep well, becomes or remains thin no matter how much he or she eats, is abnormally susceptible sexually, may suffer from a definite insomnia, is emotional, and perspires freely. Alert, neurotic or high-strung, magnetic, and imaginative are some of the descriptive adjectives applicable. The eyes are bright and prominent, large and beautiful, when they have not reached the stage entitled "pop-eyed." Or they may even become so protuberant and bulging as to develop the expression ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... complications, whose outcome is often for a time in doubt. Yet as the accredited painter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain he contributed an essential element to the development of realistic fiction. No one has rendered so well as he the high-strung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who neither understand themselves nor are wholly comprehensible to others. In 'Monsieur de Camors', crowned by the Academy, he has yielded to the demands of ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... English feeling such as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century. But her hymns, made familiar to readers in this country by Cowper's translations, were received by many with the same welcome as the works of Madame de Bourignon. If there were few who could appreciate the high-strung mystic aspirations after perfect self-renunciation, self-annihilation, and absorption in the abyss of the Divine infinity, the ecstatic joy in self-denial and suffering, whereby the soul might be so refined from selfishness as ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... belonging to this group are, as a rule, old offenders, who have long been hardened to crime, and whose entire life is an uninterrupted chain of conflicts with the law. To this group also belong those high-strung individuals with early antisocial tendencies, who from childhood show a marked degree of egotism and self-love; who are very vindictive and revengeful in their reaction to frictions in social life. Upon falling into the hands of the law, they are incapable of adjustment ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... hysterics, and that usually brings him to heel again. It's a mighty curious thing how a woman who has the appetite and instincts of a turkey—buzzard will often make her husband believe that she's as high-strung ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... cross-roads pastor is for teetotalism. The routine of the farm-hand, while by no means ideal in other respects, keeps him from craving drink as intensely as other toilers do. A day's work in the open air fills his veins at nightfall with an opiate of weariness instead of a high-strung nervousness. The strong men of the community are church elders, not through fanaticism, but by right of leadership. Through their office they are committed to prohibition. So opposition to the temperance movement is scattering. The Anti-Saloon League has organized these leaders ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... a high-strung, plucky young fellow, and was reproved by a Federal officer for continuing to wear brass buttons. Irvin retorted sharply, and was hurried into prison. Fearing that he would be searched and his papers found, he slipped them to a friend, undetected ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Kreutzer, Rode, Fiorillo; and to know Halir as a teacher was to know him at his best; since as a public performer—great violinist as he was—he did not do himself justice, because he was too nervous and high-strung. ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... extravagance they are not only useless to aid the young in their practical difficulties, but become mischievous by the injury they inflict on over-sensitive consciences, fearful of falling short of high-strung ideals. This consideration brings us, indeed, to what is perhaps the chief danger in the introduction of any teaching of sexual hygiene: the fact that our teachers are themselves untaught. Sexual hygiene in the full sense—in so far as it concerns individual action and not the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... she remembers things that happened when she was young is simply wonderful. She knows how girls feel, too, and how they suffer when they are like Dr. Denbigh says I am—very nervous and sensitive and high-strung. But she admitted to me to-day that she had never before really made up her mind whether I am the "sweet, unsophisticated child" she calls me, or what Tom Price says I am, The Eastridge Animated and Undaunted Daily Bugle and Clarion Call. He calls me that because I know so much about what is going ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... have the most brilliant name in war. Therefore, while their careless confidence continues, and they are still thinking, as in my judgment they are now doing, more of retreat than of maintaining their position, while their spirit is slack and not high-strung with expectation, I with the men under my command will, if possible, take them by surprise and fall with a run upon their centre; and do you, Clearidas, afterwards, when you see me already upon them, and, as is likely, dealing terror among them, take with ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... found that automatic responses could be obtained in two sittings from all but a small proportion of the students of both sexes, but that there were two types of individual who showed a special aptitude. One type (probably showing the embryonic form of neurasthenia) was a nervous, high-strung, imaginative type, not easily influenced from without, and not so much suggestible as autosuggestible. The other type, which is significant from our present point of view, is thus described by Miss Stein: "In ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... determined young man, he did not give in. Once he lost a shoe, but a little searching recovered that. On another occasion, a passing dog, seeing things going on in the ditch which in his opinion should not have been going on—he was a high-strung dog, unused to coming upon heads moving along the road without bodies attached—accompanied Percy for over a quarter of a mile, causing him exquisite discomfort by making sudden runs at his face. A well-aimed ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... suddenly occupied by Italian, Polish and Russian laborers,—placed and kept there by a foreign conqueror. Add to the comparison the prouder height of the slaveholder, and the lower depth of his serf. Put this as the case of a people high-strung and sensitive, still fresh from the passion of war, still smarting from defeat. They had fought to exhaustion, and their banner had fallen without disgrace. Now the victors who had won by superiority of force had placed their late bondmen as their rulers. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of the terrible toil worse than either the carpenter or myself, and I was afraid he might break when the fighting strain came. I had yet to learn what magnificent reserves there were in this clean-cut, high-strung young fellow who, when we began, looked as if he had never done a day's real labor in ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... was sensitive and high-strung. Temperamentally he coveted the good opinion of those about him. Moreover, he wanted to deserve it. No man had ever spoken to him in just the tone of this little Irish cowpuncher, who had come out of nowhere into his life ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... high-strung Irish souls there is a bit of the old wife, the foreteller; the gift of prescience; and Kitty possessed this in a mild degree. Something held her here, when for a dozen reasons she should have ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... "Urning" for the male, and "Urningin" for the female, and referred to the condition itself as "Urningtum." He also invented a number of other related terms on the same basis; some of these terms have had a considerable vogue, but they are too fanciful and high-strung to secure general acceptance. If used in other languages than German they certainly should not be used in their Germanized shape, and it is scarcely legitimate to use the term "Urning" in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the nervous strain incident to endeavors to carry on a successful social career, the nerve tension resulting from the unhygienic clothing assumed at this time, the lack of the steadying influence of home responsibilities, and we have ample cause for the nervous, high-strung girl who is becoming so common that we are in danger of regarding ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... other absurdities, accompanying it all with a running comment and imaginative improvisations which had the charm of genius in them, and made us ache with laughter, young and old alike. Such a man, nervous, high-strung, of fine perceptions and sensibilities, must inevitably pass through rapid and extreme alternations of feeling; and, no doubt, an hour after that laughing seance of ours, Mr. Story was plunged deep in melancholy. Yet surely his premonitions of evil were unfulfilled; Story lived long and was ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... A high-strung, ambitious fellow like Carl needed no incentive to make him work hard or to keep him out of mischief, any more than he needed a prize to make him do his best at tennis or keep him from cheating in the score. What an ignoble view of these matters ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... turning to her, gripped her arms with his hands. A great feeling of pity for the high-strung girl welled up in him, and he wished that it were possible to impart some of his own strength to her. 'Elise,' he began hoarsely, his whole being in a cloud of passion through which his brain slashed its lightning shafts ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... of In a Balcony evening comes "intense with yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with "passion," ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... donations, still I allows it's dealin' faro which has sp'iled him; an' as you can't make no gent over new, I quits an' don't buck his notions about dispensin' charity no more. "Thar's times when this yere Cherokee Hall caroms on a gent who's high-strung that a-way, an' won't take no donations; which this yere sport may be plenty needy to the p'int of perishin', too. That's straight; thar's nachers which is that reluctant about aid, they simply dies ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... his record was far from being as satisfactory as Captain Putnam had been led to believe. It was true he was a learned man,—quite the opposite of Josiah Crabtree, who had been wise only in looks,—but it was also true that he was a high-strung, passionate man, given to strange fits of anger, and that he was a miser, never spending a cent that was not absolutely required ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... fambly what I cum fum myse'f, kaze w'en ole Miss marry Marster, my mammy fell ter her, en w'en I got big 'nuff, dey tuck me in de house fer ter wait on de table en do er'n's, en dar I bin twel freedom come out. She 'uz mighty high-strung, ole Miss wuz, yit I sees folks dese days put on mo' a'rs dan w'at ole Miss ever is. I ain't 'sputin' but w'at she hilt 'er head high, en I year my mammy say dat all the Bushrods in Ferginny ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... as a wagon-builder. There were two taverns, denominated respectively, the "Warrenton Inn," and the "Warren Green Hotel." I obtained a room at the former. A young man named Dashiell kept it. He was a fair-complexioned, clever, high-strung Virginian, and managed to obtain a great deal of paper money from both republics. It is an encomium in America, to say that a man "Can keep a hotel," but what shall be said of the man who can keep a hotel in war-time? I observed young Dashiell's movements from day to day, and I am satisfied that ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... silently, and wretched as only a lonely, uncomprehended, and uncomplaining child can be. No one had the faintest conception of what she suffered. Her naughtinesses were remembered against her, but her latent tenderness was never suspected. Once the old Doctor said: "That's a peculiarly sensitive, high-strung, nervous child; you must be gentle with her," and both parents had stared at him. They were matter-of-fact creatures themselves, comparatively speaking, with a notion that such nonsense as nervousness should be shaken ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and shy in the presence of strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies. "Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once wrote to a friend. Her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick to catch its varying aspects of light ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... comprehensive glance, with the profound wisdom of her seventeen summers to help her, she had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Cavendish was a high-strung, nervous, fussy little woman of fifty, with an outward show of good-will and an inward intention to rip everybody up the back who opposed her; proud of her home, of her blood, and of her son, and determined, if she could manage it, to break off his ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... desperate collapse, showed him well enough how she would have met such a proposal. What Miss Birdseye clung to, with benignant perversity, was the idea that, in spite of his exclusion from the house, which was perhaps only the result of a certain high-strung jealousy on Olive's part of her friend's other personal ties, Verena had drawn him in, had made him sympathise with the great reform and desire to work for it. Ransom saw no reason why such an illusion should be dear to Miss Birdseye; his contact with her in the past had been so ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... it's worked on me so, sometimes, thet I've broke out in a col' sweat, an' set up the balance o' the night—an' I ain't to say high-strung, neither. ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... put in madhouses, whereas the society that calls those men crazy is always finding its way there. It takes but little to make a lunatic of poor Lady Smith-Tompkins. Poor thing! you know she is so very "high-strung," such delicate sensibilities! She has an idee fixe—so very sad. Ah yes! that is it. She never had an idea before, and now that she has one she cannot get rid of it, and it will kill ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... in with fanatical devotion. Lenine, in one of his many disputes with Trotzky, called him "a man who blinds himself with revolutionary phrases,"[17] and the description is very apt. He possesses all the usual characteristics of the revolutionary Jewish Socialists of Russia. To a high-strung, passionate, nervous temperament and an exceedingly active imagination he unites a keen intellect which finds its highest satisfaction in theoretical abstractions and subtleties, and which accepts, phrases as ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... him the benefit of another long pause and studied him more closely. He saw that this bereaved husband was of the high-strung, Southern-gentleman type, hot-tempered, impulsive, one of those apt to believe that "shooting" is the remedy for one's personal ills or injuries. The lines of his ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... always the cause of the latter, and for the others ample reason was to be found in what she styled the vain lusts of the world, and in the coldness and irritability of some members of the family. Unrestrained self-indulgence, joined to high-strung and undisciplined tempers, made of what should have been a united, bright, and charming home circle, a place of constant discord, jealousy, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... are disposed to rest and be thankful. They only want to be let alone. They are quiet and reserved, and thank their stars that the worst is over. The nervousness, the high-strung tension of three months ago, is conspicuous by its absence. They feared that the thing would be rushed, and that Mr. Bull would stamp the measure without looking at it, would be glad to get rid of it at any price, would say to Ireland, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... I heard you play the violin at a concert! Oh, if I could tell you the raptures that thrilled my soul at the floods of melody you drew from the insensate strings! Only a poet's spirit, only a high-strung heart could accomplish such strains! I, too, am of a musical spirit; I, too, thrill to the notes of the great masters, if interpreted as they are by you! May I hope that you will not spurn this outburst of a sympathetic nature, and accept this tribute ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... know, going to pin her faith to an actor man, and each of us with our homes, closed against her, as she feels, and you know we did feel so, too, Calvin; and when I put myself in her place and remember the things she heard me say, I don't blame her for refusing our advice and help. She's young and high-strung, and oh, I've made such a mess of it, and,—and,—say something, Calvin Trent!" Miss Lacey made the addition so explosively that the judge jumped. "Say you'll send some of your detectives to keep watch of her—quick—to-morrow—before she has a chance to get away ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... and bees, the cat race is nervous. Their temperaments are high-strung. They would never have become as poised or as placid as—say—super-cows. Yet they would have had less insanity, probably, than we. Monkeys' (and elephants') minds seem precariously balanced, unstable. The great cats are saner. They are intense, they would have needed sanitariums: but ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... this feeling of hot impotence when he retreated from Mary-Clare. For so vital and high-strung a woman, Mary-Clare could at critical moments be absolutely negative, to all appearances. Where another might show weakness or violence, she seemed to close all the windows and doors of her being, leaving her attacker in the ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... minister, points out the attitude of German Labor. "For modern labor the feeling that human life is first of all a matter of eternal life, and only secondarily a matter of this world, has been entirely lost. The high-strung eschatologic mood, or expectation of Jesus, has no sounding board in the masses of the proletariat of to-day. The Christian epoch in history is obviously on its way to extinction. The eschatological mood of Christianity has been ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... heard a great deal, through interviews, character studies, and other press stuff in the photoplay journals and the Sunday newspaper film sections. Now I found him to be a high-strung individual, so extremely nervous that it seemed impossible for him to remain in one position in his chair or for him to keep his hands motionless for a single instant. Although he was of moderate build, with a fair suggestion of flesh, there were yet the marks ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... But the high-strung expectations were not fulfilled. Though many pretended that the music was nobler and more artistic than that of the author's first work, the success was by no means as great as Mascagni's friends anticipated. In Vienna and Berlin it was even received with partial coolness. But lo, the first ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Amanthis," he said to himself. "And she will grow more like her as the years go by, so spirited and high-strung. But they'll have to watch her, or she'll ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... yacht after Peter left. At two o'clock Varney went down to a solitary luncheon. At quarter past, followed by the reproachful gaze of McTosh, he came out again. In the pit of his stomach reposed a great emptiness, but it was not hunger. He felt restless, high-strung, all made of nerves. He wanted to do something of a violent, physical sort, the more grueling the better; and his task was to loll in an easy-chair under a pretty awning ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... sensitive, high-strung girl whom the slightest breath of scandal would fairly kill. I can't let her name be dragged into this mess; I can't answer her note, and send the reply away from under your very nose without a word to you. And ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... feel that the real problem was to get away from these high-strung, squabbling men, to escape from ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... came back the few steps. "Beatriz Weatherbee isn't the kind of woman you think she is. She has faults, of course, but she has tried to make the best of her life. If she made a mistake—or thought she had—no one else knew it. She braved it through. She's been high-strung, too." ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... from high-strung duty, the brave way Of an imperial spirit. So to-day Your People bow—in pride. The sympathy of millions is your own. May Glory long be guardian of your Throne, Love ever at ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... her bed. The alteration in her features, her dreadful paleness, the lurid fire of fever shining in her eyes, the convulsive trembling which ever and anon shook her frame, showed already the fatal effects of this terrible night upon a susceptible and high-strung organization. At sight of Dr. Baleinier, who, with a sign, made Gervaise and her mate leave the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and Mrs. Dixon agreed that he couldn't possibly do a bit of good—announced that I had come through it all like the true Prairie Woman that I was. Then he somewhat pompously and redundantly explained that I was a highly organized individual, "a bit high-strung," as Mrs. Dixon put it. I smiled into the pillow when he turned to my anxious-eyed Dinky-Dunk and condoningly enlarged on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about a woman like me being—well, rather abnormal as to temper and nerves during the last few months. But Dinky-Dunk ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... critical and jealous watchfulness, there was no evading the square, cold, rigid test of skill in argument and truth in principle. The processions and banners, the music and fireworks, of both parties, were stilled and forgotten while the audience listened with high-strung nerves to the intellectual ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... something angrily and went to stand by the window. He wanted a minute to think it out, to understand clearly before the tale went on. He could see just how Anthony had read Cousin Jasper's character, sensitive, high-strung, with strong affections that not even great wrongs could quite break down. But how mistaken the man had been who thought Jasper Peyton was a weak-willed person to be ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... behind the constables, Willy Ray sank exhausted into a chair. The tension of excitement had been too much for his high-strung temperament, and the relapse was ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... to a degree rarely met with in the annals of the art. He is indeed the lyrical composer par excellence of the modern school, and the intensity of his expression finds its equal in literature only in the songs of Heinrich Heine, to whom Chopin has been justly compared. A sensation of such high-strung passion cannot be prolonged. Hence we see that the shorter forms of music, the etude, the nocturne, besides the national dances already alluded to, are chosen by Chopin in preference. Even when he treats the larger ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... in London now! in festal measure Be spent the evening of this festive day! For thee is opening now a high-strung pleasure; Now, even now, in yonder press-yard they Strike from his limbs the fetters loose away! A little while, and he, the brave Duval, Will issue forth, serene, to glad and greet ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... in complete destitution of those country sights and sounds which had made my own youth delightful; acquiring the superficial sharpness of the city child and his slang; suffering at times by the anaemia and listlessness bred of vitiated air; high-strung and sensitive as those must needs be whose nerves are in perpetual agitation; and when, in chance excursions to the country, I compared my children with the children of cottagers and ploughmen, I felt that I had wronged them, I saw my children foredoomed, by an inexorable ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... her dad quietly, "when you're breaking a high-strung colt he sometimes sorta resents his schooling and sulks. Then you've just got to wait till he figures things out for himself a little. If you force him you're liable to spoil him and make him mean. Johnny's like that. He's just a high-strung ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often the subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of his granddaughter for all that. She ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... borders of the United States—almost within arm's reach of the eager, stirring, high-strung men of the new generation, there were tens of thousands of square miles of undeveloped territory—territory that was fabulously rich in ore, in timber, in oil, in fertility. On every side the lands stretched away—Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, Canada—with opportunity that ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that veteran ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... to accompany a spirit of just his high-strung, petulant, and spleenful sort. Beyond doubt he must have suffered keen torments at the disdain with which he was everywhere met in English society, and chiefly among the military officers whom his very conduct, renegade though it was, had in a measure forced to recognize ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... in mind Milton's threefold canon, we must admit that his poetry lacks three great elements of power. He is not Simple, Sensuous, or Passionate. He is too essentially modern to be really simple. He is the product of a high-strung civilization, and all its complicated crosscurrents of thought and feeling stir and perplex his verse. Simplicity of style indeed he constantly aims at, and, by the aid of a fastidious culture, secures. But his simplicity is, to use ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... usual man he had always been—good-natured, taciturn, with kindly feelings for everybody. The other, a beast that began to roar and claw inside him at the thought of being deceived, and which snarled for blood in the presence of betrayal. And Pascualo laughed a shrill high-strung laugh! Pardon! Forgiveness! What a cowardly whimperer that other Rector was! See how the imbecile had sniffled at a lot of humbug memories back there near the tavern of sina Tona! Lanudo! Just the name for a coward like that! Fine sentiments those had been to justify a man without the guts to ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... present of Matt's to George, was a Gordon Setter with a strong admixture of native blood, and was hopeless as a regular team dog because of her high-strung and irritable disposition. Naturally nervous, she had become, with the advent of her first family, so fierce that it was dangerous for any one to approach her except George, and for him she cheerfully left her puppies to be of service in ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... neither spoke. Isabel had sent word "not to wait" for her, an injunction it was as well they obeyed, for she did not come at all. But with the renewal of sustenance furnished to his system, some relaxation must have occurred within the high-strung George. Dinner was not quite finished when, without warning, sleep hit him hard. His burning eyes could no longer restrain the lids above them; his head sagged beyond control; and he got to his feet, and went lurching upstairs, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... I could not disobey the commands of this illustrious lady, the widow of my kindest patron and friend. I went, prepared for tears, for outcries, perhaps for violent resistance, for the ardent and high-strung nature of my beloved Senorita Margarita is well known to me. Figure to yourself, honoured senor, my surprise at finding this charming damsel calm, composed, even smiling. She greeted me with her ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... been toned and tuned up to the highest pitch in his wrestling with Nature, and will have been purged and purified in the white region of the highest mountains. And in this high-strung state he will now see that creation and manifestation of Nature which of all natural objects will best declare her meaning, bring him into closer touch with her very Heart, and stir in him the deepest emotions. Between him ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... has always been high-strung, that one. I remember years ago she'd be going into crying and raving fits. She's got very deep affections, Mrs. Melrose, and when she gets thinking of Theodore, and of Alice's accident, and this and that, she'll go right off the handle. She had ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... very bad way. During the month in prison he had obtained but little exercise. The lack of food and of water, the cold by night and the terrific heat by day, the long stumbling marches in the darkness, the mental effect upon an extremely nervous, high-strung organization of being hunted, and of having to hide from his fellow men, had worn him down to a condition almost ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... the head of the Kumamoto Boys' School during the period of its fierce struggles and final collapse, whom I have already referred to as the Hero-Principal,[AS] is another example of this impractical high-strung visionariness. No sooner had he reached Kumamoto, than there opened before our enchanted eyes the vision of this little insignificant school blooming out into a great university. True, there had been some of this bombast before his arrival; but it took on new and gorgeous form under ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick |
