"Hysterical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery—and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had her coffee, she burned the scented scrap of machine-embroidered linen, pressing it down between the logs in the ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... chorus of cheers and laughter, and a grand waving of white handkerchiefs, the engine gave a deep, hysterical cough, and hurried ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and Ned were too busy to talk much, as they were aiding in getting some hysterical girls and young women into the two sound craft. And when the last of the picnic party had been taken off, the boat with a hole in it gave a sudden lurch, there was a gurgling, bubbling ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... hysterical cry turned some attention to us. "I shall do nothing of the kind. I demand the ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... novels that people are knocked down successfully and artistically," admitted the other. "In everyday life they resent it. Yes—if you do anything hysterical there will be some sort of a disgraceful noise, I suppose. It's shoot or suit in these unromantic days, Dysart, otherwise the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... often wished to perform, which he did clumsily, going through the lubber's hole, and seated in the maintop with Mr. Duncan's Bible, he remained in quiet meditation and apparent reading and prayer until the tropic day changed to sudden twilight and darkness, and the hysterical crew returned. Then he came ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... Mr. Thrale's illness is very terrible; but when I remember that he seems to have it peculiar to his constitution, that, whatever distemper he has, he always has his head affected, I am less frighted. The seizure was, I think, not apoplectical but hysterical, and, therefore, not dangerous to life. I would have you, however, consult such physicians as you think you can best trust. Broomfield seems to have done well and, by his practice, appears not to suspect ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... pushed his religious enthusiasm to great extremes by everywhere urging upon excitable young men the duty to become preachers like himself. He had introduced a kind of intoning at public meetings. This tended to create nervous irritability and hysterical outbursts of religious emotionalism, and these, Davenport taught his disciples, were the signs of God's approval of them and their devotion to Him. The government, watching these tumultuous meetings, concluded that it was time to show its ancient authority ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... control himself to patience. He felt he must speak to her forthwith, or die. He pushed forward to where they were seated, and sat down beside them. His white face was convulsed with half-hysterical excitement. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... fell, broken only by a few hysterical giggles from the ladies, and by a frivolous American, who cried: "Now for ALSO SCHRIE ZENOPHOBIA!" Krafft stopped playing, but remained sitting at the piano, wiping down the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not unfrequently accounts of an exhibition of this "collective psychology" in the playhouse, even in the London theatres. Some of such accounts are untrustworthy, and due to mere hysterical writing by those who profess to record them. No doubt the curious shyness of the English plays its part: a man will laugh, or clap his hands, or hiss, or "boo" when others are so doing, who from mere mauvaise honte—a convenient ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of the sure and serene master. There are here no echoes of Raff, or Wagner, or Brahms, men that have each influenced mightily the musical thought of to-day. There is the voice of one composer: a virile, tender voice that does not stammer, does not break, does not wax hysterical: the voice of a composer that not only must pour out that which has accumulated within him, but knows all the resources of musical oratory—in a word, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... dishevelled, mud-stained, half-drowned—ah! that memory will torture me if memory at all remains. And yet, fool, maniac, that I was, I could not resist the wild, mad impulse to laugh which shook the rustic spectators, and which in my case was due, I trust, to hysterical but not unmanly emotion. If any woman, any bride, could forgive such an apparent but most unintentional insult, Olive Dunne, I knew, was not that woman. My abject letters of explanation, my appeals for mercy, were returned unopened. Her parents ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... ever since the name "hysteria" was first invented—he has certainly supplied a definite psychic explanation of a psychic malady. He has succeeded in presenting clearly, at the expense of much labor, insight, and sympathy, a dynamic view of the psychic processes involved in the constitution of the hysterical state, and such a view seems to show that the physical symptoms laboriously brought to light by Charcot are largely but epiphenomena and by-products of an emotional process, often of tragic significance to the subject, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... down the broad avenues of the parks the troops patrolled, keeping order. This was difficult at times, for the second hysterical stage had succeeded the paralysis of the first day and people were doing strange things. A man, running half naked, tearing at his clothes, and crying, "The end of all things has come!" was caught by the soldiers and ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... hysterical sobs were coming from the bowed frame—but no tears. At length, still without lifting ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... her niece was intended to annihilate every vestige of frivolity. Her ample bosom struggled in its purple velvet casement. Sadie Burton actually shook in her tiny boots as she pictured her aunt in one of her hysterical outbursts right there in the midst of a host of strangers who seemed to the unsophisticated miss from Omaha to represent the very cream of ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... the woman. This thought stung him like a reproach of cowardice. He had forgotten her! And she was but the instrument in the deed, for he had taught her that this care of a worthless life was sentimental, hysterical. He had urged her to put it away in some easy fashion, to hide it at least, in some sort of an asylum. That she had steadfastly refused to do. Better death outright, she had said. And that which he had feared to undertake, she had done, fearlessly. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... The Metanoia; which painted a sober, reflective turning of the mind, had been so overcharged with the dramatic that sober, reflective people could hardly use the expression any more. Repentance had come to have so strong a gloss of the hysterical as to be almost discredited by men of common sense. It was a relief, therefore, to remember that it implied no more than a turning to God by a process of thought; and that a process of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... making comparisons between European institutions and American institutions that are forever favorable to the American side of the argument. To my way of thinking there is oniy one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely because it is not American. But I must say that in the matter of outer habiliments the American man wins the decision ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative, querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs, of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was very suspicious ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... of his race had ever made before any representative body of Southern men and women, as an obscure but worthy young colored man who had commended himself to a few thinking persons by building up an excellent industrial school for his people. He came off that platform amid scenes of almost hysterical enthusiasm and was thenceforth proclaimed as the leader of his race, the Moses of his people, and one ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... be hysterical, but I couldn't help crying and laughing alternately, especially when the Prince would have taken my hands ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... are just fit to read lectures about ships before some hysterical society; you don't know what you are talking about; leave these things to me, and they'll be properly managed. Ah! Here is the Pathfinder himself, and I may just as well drop him a hint of my benevolent intentions ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... A. Carpenter, of the United States Court of Chicago, takes a more cheerful view. "I can't see anything for Americans to get hysterical about," he says. "They seem to think their little delays and difficulties are more important than all the troubles of Europe. For my part, I should think these people would be glad to settle down in ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... However, it is really no use worrying one's self with the question of 'To be, or not to be.' It drove Hamlet mad, just as the knotty point as to whether Hamlet himself was fat or lean nearly killed our hysterical little boy, Catullus Mendes. It's best to leave eternal subjects ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... bless you! For I love him, my dear Piney! Bless you, for I love him, my dear Piney!" he kept saying over and over, with an hysterical quaver in his voice, his lips pale and moving constantly. "Oh, may God bless you, for I love him, my dear Piney!" It was what Salome Madeira had said to him when he had left her, a white, angelic figure, swaying a little toward him, there in the garden ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... poor girl. But that would be a dear-bought victory. Let her keep what faith in him she can. No; in families, the ones who can control themselves have to give in—to those who can't. If you argue with Christine she simply gives way, and then she gets hysterical, and then she is ill. It's a disease. Mothers know how their children—Christine was marked—marked with trouble! I am thankful she has any mind at all. She needs me more than Paul does. I cannot be parted from my power to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... up," growled Martin, somewhat abashed by the violence of her broken words and gasping sobs. "You're hysterical. You're doing yourself as much harm right now as ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... all the interest of a majority of the young ladies, who had anticipated a horridly delightful duel, at least; but FLORA was slightly hysterical about it, even late in the afternoon, when it was announced that her guardian ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... some one rushing up the stairway: and then Cousin Willie broke into the room, all panting and excited, and his face grey with fright and gasping out, "Hide me, hide me!" He ran from room to room whining and hysterical, and his breath coming in a sort of sob, but he seemed incapable of deciding what to do. I would have hidden him if I could, but at the very next moment I heard the policemen coming in below, and the voice of the landlady. Then they came upstairs, big strong-looking men in blue, any one of whom ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... Pull yourself together. You're getting hysterical," urged Hardwick kindly. Then he turned to MacPherson. As the two men went companionably down the walk and out into the street, the ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... education should inform them better, particularly among the fair sex, cannot be denied; indeed, a conversation seldom passes among them, but some inconsistent dream or other, form a leading feature of their gossip; and doubtless is with them an hysterical symptom. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... parodied by the hysterical maids. Charlotte might afford to laugh, but Marianne's heart was more in the matter, and they struck up such a chorus that Jane broke upon them, declaring that they would frighten Mrs. James Frost out of her senses. When Charlotte told ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can hysterical girls and malicious individuals give false evidence in a court of law touching the feigned crime of witchcraft; no longer can the witch-finder exert his skill; no longer can judges and jury condemn to the flames ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... him half-way. It thrilled with hysterical denial, with suffering, regret, horror. And so commanding was it that he had no power to ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... met his eye. The doctor, Mrs. Travilla, Adelaide, and Chloe, all grouped about the bed, where lay his little daughter, tossing about and raving in the wildest delirium; now shrieking with fear, now laughing an unnatural, hysterical laugh, and so changed that no one could have recognized her; the little face so thin, the beautiful hair of which he had been so proud all gone, the eyes sunken deep in her head, and their soft light changed to the glare of insanity. Could it be Elsie, his own beautiful ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... in search of Mrs. Slade, to ask her to have another room prepared for me. But she was not in the house; and I learned, upon inquiry, that since the murder of young Hammond, she had been suffering from repeated hysterical and fainting fits, and was now, with her daughter, at the house of a relative, whither she had been carried early in ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... confusion. Something or some one (Smith, as I afterwards discovered) was hauling me by main force through the darkness; I fell a considerable distance onto gravel which lacerated my hands and gashed my knees. Then, with the cool night air fanning my brow, I was running, running—my breath coming in hysterical sobs. Beside me fled another figure.... And my definite recollections commence again at that point. For this companion of my flight from the Gables threw himself roughly against ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... glimmer, and there was more talking with nervous laughter than there had been outside. One of the Hounds called out, "I don't want any of you girls to kiss me!" and gave the relief of indignation to the hysterical emotion of the believers; the more serious of the unbelievers found escape in their helpless laughter from their tense expectation of triumph in the failure ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... was tending us said was brought by a messenger. Young Angus glanced at the page and broke out indignantly. 'The thieving old pirate!' he says. 'Last night he thought it would be about eighteen hundred dollars, and that sounded hysterical enough for the few little things we'd scratched or mussed up. I told him he would doubtless feel better this morning, but in any event to send the bill to me and I would ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... forth as fast as the words would come out of Molly's mouth, but before they had all streamed forth, Judith was choking in a hysterical fit, so like a convulsion that Johnnie could only cry, "Aunt! aunt! Mother, look!" And Molly herself was frightened, and began to say, "There! there!" while she helped him to hold her sister, and little Judy flew off, half in terror and half in search of help, crying out that aunt was ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unexpectedly emerged from the forest and stood before her. So great was her own fright that for a few seconds she was completely unnerved, although she uttered no sound. Her face became very white, and her heart beat wildly. Then recognising the intruder as Dane Norwood, she gave a slight hysterical laugh, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... found him." Phyllis's explanation tumbled out in hysterical phrases, the other two adding their own version, and in the midst of it Don ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... kept scrupulous time—deceiving her as to the hour, she missed the last train at the little branch station at Hulworth, and then wondered tearfully, and with an access of nervousness which rendered her almost hysterical, what ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... mamma let me come!" George cried victoriously. "I told you I should!" He was far too agitated to think of shaking hands, and seemed to be in a state of fever. All his gestures were those of a proud, hysterical conqueror, and like a conqueror he gazed down at Edwin and Janet, who stood beneath him with upturned faces. He had absolutely forgotten the existence of his acquaintances in the carriage. "Did you know I've had the influenza? ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... often, for my mother was a hysterical woman in whom the slightest thing would cause the most violent emotions which demanded relief in such lamentations. And yet, frequent as they were, they never failed to arouse in me feelings of shame and rage—shame ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... mouth to avoid crying out. Oh, the horrid, shooting pain in her breast, and the stinging in her eyes! The tree trunks began to waver, and the ground was as cotton-wool beneath her feet. Tears?—absurd! A soldier's daughter send her lover to the front with hysterical sobs? Never! ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... and intermingled voices from above proclaimed the return of Leroux with the doctor. They were talking in an excited key, the voice of Leroux, especially, sounding almost hysterical. They created such a disturbance that they attracted the attention of Mr. John Exel, M. P., occupant of the flat below, who at that very moment had returned from the House and was about to insert the key in the lock of his door. He looked up the stairway, but, all being in darkness, was unable ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... it now, professor," he said warmly. " I congratulate you on your escape, sir." The professor looked at him, helpless to express himself, but the correspondent was at that time suddenly enveloped in the hysterical gratitude of Mrs. Wainwright, who hurled herself upon him with extravagant manifestations. Coleman played his part with skill. To both the professor and Mrs. Wainwright his manner was a combination of modestly filial affection ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... bridge, when a hysterical laugh startled the man, who leaned back on the front seat, with his arms crossed tightly over a heart ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... stairs with the swiftness of avalanches on hearing the news that the bonnets and dresses had been brought for them. Seeing this poor wealth spread out before them, the three women went almost mad with joy. Mimi was seized with a fit of hysterical laughter, and skipped about like a kid, waving a barege scarf. Musette threw her arms around Marcel's neck, with a little green boot in each hand, which she smote together like cymbals. Phemie looked at Schaunard and sobbed. She could only say, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... in the history of man. Unquestionably many of the religions have depended upon hysteria, for it is in this field that "miracle cures" occur. All founders of religions have based part of their claim on the belief of others in their healing power. Nothing is so spectacular as when the hysterical blind see, the hysterical dumb talk, the hysterical cripple throws away his crutches and walks. In every age and in every country, in every faith, there have been the equivalents of Lourdes and St. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in the de-luxe sitting room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... approaching the shore, and in the chair was Jan's master. A basket was held in the old man's lap and on it was fastened a bird cage with a badly frightened canary. Through a break in the basket waved Hippity-Hop's furry paw. Those on the shore scattered as Prince Jan raced among them uttering hysterical yelps until his master stood safely beside him and leaned down catching the dog's long, soft ears and pulling them gently, while he said over and over, "Jan, Prince Jan! I knew you ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... thought Janice, with a sudden hysterical desire to laugh. "I should hate to have the house catch fire and wait my turn to go downstairs ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... to talk to me so! a fiend! Fabian Rockharrt," exclaimed Rose, bursting into hysterical ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... conviction, else it is but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. But public conviction is a very different thing from popular impression, differing by all that separates a rational process, resulting in manly resolve, from a weakly sentiment that finds occasional hysterical utterance. The Monroe Doctrine, as popularly apprehended and indorsed, is a rather nebulous generality, which has condensed about the Isthmus into a faint point of more defined luminosity. To those who will regard, it is the harbinger of the day, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... wild, but if so she managed to maintain an admirable composure when Marion walked up to the door of the cabin. She did not greet her best friend with hysterical rejoicings, probably because she had been told of her best friend's safety soon after dark the night before, and had since found much to resent in Marion's predicament and the worry which she had suffered ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... noble master," said Williams, observing the fixed posture and quenched eye of Evellin. At last he exclaimed—"I am not dead;" and bursting into an hysterical laugh, he swore De Vallance should find he ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... would, my lad," said Lennox, patting the young fellow encouragingly on the shoulder, for he could see that he was suffering from a shock, and, doubtless from abstinence and weakness, was half-hysterical. ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... elbow and the other applies that brass knuckle,—then they gets pinched. I got dressed up in a drug store, got the chauffeur's license number, and goes on down to my office to see this girl. She's hysterical about his family using all their money to put her in jail. I looks at her, and says, 'You won't need their money to get to jail. That old man's dead!' Her eyes was as big as saucers. 'I thought old Daddy Van Cleft was ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... from Leonard. He is just come to the state when it all turns on getting him off to sleep quietly, and not disturbing him, and she is too excited and restless to do anything with her; she has startled him twice already, and then gets upset—tired out, poor thing! and will end in being hysterical if she does not get fed and rested, and then we shall be done for! Now I want you to take charge of her. See, here's her room, and I have ordered up some tea for her. You must get her quieted down, make her have ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a lift of his eyebrows at the sight of the rag doll in Hester's hand. She, on her part, felt a sudden hysterical desire ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and plausible words, her only armor against her enemies. She could not speak. The agony she had endured silently in the dismal lime-walk had grown too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no simulated grief that shook her slender frame and tore at her like some ravenous beast that would have rent her piecemeal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman's feebler ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... on her bed, dressed, doing her best to keep her meaningless, half-hysterical sobs from her ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... forgetting that the object of the war was the redress of the Outlanders' wrongs in the Transvaal, began to bellow for relief even before the Boers had completed the investment of the town. Telegrams couched in extravagant and almost hysterical language and betraying the egotism and the want of self-control of the senders were repeatedly despatched. One of these, in which on October 19 the De Beers directors asked for information as to the plans of the military authorities ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... born dead, one hundred and ninety-five died from convulsions in infancy, twenty-seven died in infancy from other causes, seventy-eight were epileptics, eleven were insane, thirty-nine were paralyzed, forty-five were hysterical, six had St. Vitus's dance, one hundred and five were ordinarily healthy. That variations in the nervous system which produce more or less unusual mental peculiarities and which do not take the form of nervous disease are inherited, the most superficial consideration shows. A child in ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... outcast by society, accursed by the family, victims of the social temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the guardians of the honour of the family—four hundred foolish, lazy, hysterical, barren women. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... endured. And as a matter of fact the escape of a small animal like Murgatroyd was remarkable. He'd escaped the trampling hoofs of at least hundreds of charging animals. Luck must have played a great part in it, but an hysterical agility in dodging must ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... self-control, aided by an occasional glance from her husband, she managed to preserve her calm until he returned from seeing the visitor to her tram. Then her pent-up feelings found vent. Quietly scornful at first, she soon waxed hysterical over his age and figure. Tears followed as she bade him remember what a good wife she had been to him, loudly claiming that any other woman would have poisoned him long ago. Speedily finding that tears were of no avail, and that Mr. Jobling seemed to regard them rather as ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... become accustomed to the daily cataract that poured down upon the soil of Europe. They felt abandoned by the diplomats. Their only friends were busy in the red work of war. One chance alone remained. Soldiers might be deceived by men disguised as comrades. The Secret Service might overlook the hysterical entertainers who fluttered under the mask of charitable workers and skipped across forbidden lines protected by a Cross. This was the only possibility, this the phantom hope that stood trembling on ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I have been away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been neglected. Is there any creature, any large creature, which could climb up the wall to the window? Do you know of anything with ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and godless man;—almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest German music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children. They wish to "cultivate" her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the "weaker sex" STRONG by culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in mid-ocean in his earliest youth and drowned. Victor thought there would be more logic in thus disposing of old people with an established claim for making themselves universally obnoxious. Madame Lebrun grew a trifle hysterical; Robert called his brother some sharp, ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... hysterical. She could have slain him in that instant had she possessed the means to her hand. But her strength was more nearly exhausted than she knew. Her limbs doubled up under her weight, and as she tottered, seeking for support, she realised that she was vanquished ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... those who were present. By midnight, however, the old hall was silent; each of us had repaired to his room, and most, I expect, were quietly asleep, when a terrible scream was heard, after which there were shouts for help and hysterical cries. The sounds seemed to come from the direction of the servants' hall, and, quickly putting on some clothes, I hurried thither. I soon found that the noise had roused the whole household, and so, when I arrived, I ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... clinging to the steps she felt weak and a little hysterical. She wanted to summon her strength, to have her own back from him. After all he had taken the virtue from her, he might have the grace to say thank you, and treat her as if she were ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic Muse herself might well become hysterical. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... silent hatred succeeded. Mrs. Germaine grew sullen, low-spirited, nervous, and hysterical. Among fashionable medical dowagers, she became an interesting personage: but this species of consequence was by no means sufficient to support her self-complacency, and, as she declared, she felt herself incapable of supporting the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... bootjack. Of course a fellow is always sure that these ornamental little wives have no other consolation for themselves or any one else, but in the copious tears that swell up into their pretty eyes, they must sit down and sob to break their dear little hearts with every now and then a hysterical sentence from behind the dainty lawn handkerchief, saying "what will everyone think? What will Lady Featherly say? We wont be asked to any more 'at homes' now, and the ball at 'Rideau' is next week, oh dear—boo—hoo—hoo!" ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... looked up frankly. "I saw no reason for speaking. She accuses herself without a shadow of reason; it's mere hysterical conscientiousness. We have known each other for half a year or so, and I have made love to her, but I never had the least encouragement. I knew all along she didn't care for me. How is she to blame? A girl is under no obligation to speak of all the men who ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... of days he did not enter the room again. On the third, telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical girl, he opened the door and went in. To shame himself, he took his lamp in his hand, and crossing over to the far corner where the skeleton stood, examined it. A set of bones bought for three hundred francs. Was he a child, to be scared by ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... he cried excitedly, and with a hysterical laugh. "The words I use to myself when I think of the mystery which they strove so carefully to conceal from me, but which for all their cunning I have discovered. When first I came here, I saw, either in hell or in heaven, the faces of most of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... through what you got by marrying me—through what you married me for. Where would you be if you hadn't married me? You know very well. You'd still be fighting poverty as a small lawyer in Pulaski, married to Betty Crosby or whatever her name was." And she burst into hysterical tears. At last she was showing me the secrets that had been tearing at her, was showing me her heart where they ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... Mother Juliana's soul—a quality which is also abundantly witnessed by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the subject for the time being, giving rise to the phenomena rather foolishly called double or multiple "personality." This is a ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... redemption in specie was beyond him entirely. He gave it up. The counting of discs was more tangible to his philosophy. His rusty black tile, so wondrously become a cornucopia of wealth, had by that same magic upset the old fellow into a kind of hysterical gaiety, which was most elfish and uncanny. He motioned Driscoll to ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... will please to end our interview at once, sir!—this language, sir, is intolerated, sir!—if you wish to insult me, sir, you can remain!—I consider your insinuations, sir, as unworthy of a gentleman. The viper!" cried Miss Sallianna, becoming hysterical, and addressing her observations to the ceiling; "the viper which I warmed in my bosom, and who ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... nearer came the sound, and the girl stood poised ready to fly when the dark face of Bududreen suddenly emerged into the moonlight beside her. With an hysterical cry of relief the girl ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one word leading to another, had always been her mother's first sign of super-excitement, until it ended in a scream. If he were to scream she would be more terrified than she had ever been in her life. She had never heard a man scream; but then she had never seen a man grow hysterical. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... out to help the two young men from the water. The mamas, hysterical, wept, laughed, and prayed. Ibarra was unharmed. The helmsman had a slight scratch ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a fit, and the worthy host exclaimed: "Oh, mon dieu!" Thereupon the ladies became hysterical, and the commander having ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... frighten you, little miss at the keyboard? Do you fear the grind, the grueling disappoints, the unceasing sacrifices? Then abandon your great career and join the army of useful music workers who are teaching the young people of the land to love music as it should be loved,—not in hysterical outbursts in the concert hall but in the home circle. If you have the unextinguishable fire within your soul, if you have the talent from on high, if you have health, energy, system, vitality, nothing can stop you from becoming great. Advice, interferences, obstacles will ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... thing, among the great and the wealthy, is that pleasant vice, beggary,—which privilege is proudly entitled 'patronage and power.' Are we the things to be gay,—'droll,' as you say? Oh, no, all our spirits are forced, believe me. Miss Cameron, did you ever know that wretched species of hysterical affection called 'forced spirits'? Never, I am sure; your ingenuous smile, your laughing eyes, are the index to a happy ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man to call one day. He was a member of the Boston law firm. Mr. Smith found out that much, but no more. Miss Maggie was almost hysterical after his visit. She talked very fast and laughed a good deal at supper that night; yet her eyes were full of tears nearly all the time, as Mr. Smith did not ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... loss of time that this dilemma entailed grew serious; for Mrs. Peach was now in such a hysterical state that he could not leave her with any good grace or feeling. It was necessary to take her to a refreshment room, lavish restoratives upon her, and altogether to waste nearly half an hour. When she had kept him as long as she chose, she forgave him; and thus ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... without accommodation. "You 're farther off from God than any woman I ever heard of." "Nay, if you believe in a protective tariff, you 're in hell already, though you may not know it." "You had a fine hysterical time last night, didn't you, when Miss B was brought up from the ravine with her dislocated shoulder." To Miss B he said: "I don't pity you. It served you right for being so ignorant as to go there at that hour." Seldom, strange to say, did the recipients ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time Stonehouse appreciated. He recognized it as a symptom of the mal du siecle, a deliberate break with the natural rhythm of life, a desperate ennui, the hysterical pressure upon an aching cancer. Ragtime twitched at the nerves. This thing jostled you, bustled you. It was a shout—a caper—the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of its day, riotous and vulgar. It was the sort of thing coster-women danced to on the pavements ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... year together, they neither take any air, nor use any exercise to remove them. From hence distempers of body and mind; from hence an infinity of irregular desires, unlawful amours, intrigues, vapours, and whimsies, and all the numerous, melancholy croud of deep hysterical symptoms; from hence it comes to pass that the fruit of their bodies lie in them like plants in hot-beds; from hence it proceeds that our British maids, who in the time of our Henrys, were not held marriageable till turned of twenty, are ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... not laugh over such a serious matter," apologized Arline, with a half hysterical chuckle. "But I can't help thinking how surprised you must have been to receive that letter to Stanley, and how wrathful he ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... threw his arm firmly round the shrinking form of Ione. She drew back, gazed earnestly in his face, and then burst into hysterical laughter: ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... hysterical about the laugh which accompanied her mocking farewell, but she was gone the next instant, and the door slammed ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... her, but to ourselves, that we mothers have need to look. We are too often the ones who give way to hysterical tears or to sharp words, or perhaps to unjust criticism, all of which we attribute to nervousness. Our more frank girl, if affected in the same way, would bluntly acknowledge that she was "as cross as a bear." ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... time an interesting interruption occurred. From the underbrush at the foot of the Camel's Back emerged three elderly women, their clothing in tatters, and in the wildest excitement. They insisted that the outlaws were in the cave, and hysterical with fright from their terrible experience, declared that they had been holding the bandits in check and demanded the reward for their capture. They were rational enough in other ways and explained ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the elbow include syphilitic disease in young children, bleeder's joint, hysterical affections, and loose bodies, and do not call for ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... his face white and malignant, and glaring close in mine. He cried in a terrible voice, 'Death!' Out went Madame's candle, and at the same moment, with a scream, I waked in the dark—still fancying myself in the library; and for an hour after I continued in a hysterical state. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... giggling was, indeed, the fore-court of the House of Hades. As I grew more absolutely convinced of this truth, and began dimly to discern a strange world visible in a sallow light, like that of the London streets when a black fog hangs just over the houses, my hysterical chuckling gradually died away. Amusement at the poor follies of mortals was succeeded by an awful and anxious curiosity as to the state of immortality and the life after death. Already it was certain that "the Manes are somewhat," and that annihilation ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... badly crushed hat, and when he turned away Helen laughed, a half-hysterical laugh. His fierce energy had, so to speak, left her breathless; she was shaken by confused emotions. It was for her sake he had plunged into the quarrel, but she felt disturbed by his savageness. For all that, something in her approved, and it was really this that troubled her. Picking ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... the first night at the Lyceum, in 1874, was not of that electrical, almost hysterical splendour which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting—perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... the Communist Socialists, led by John Reed and a few hysterical men and women, who try to bring about a Russian revolution or God knows what other things, they themselves don't know ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... for the train; and they set off. As they crossed the street, Katy was surprised to see that Lilly, who had seemed quite happy only a minute before, had begun to cry. After they reached the car, her tears increased to sobs: she grew almost hysterical. ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... taking the precaution of stuffing his mouth with a towel, he could release this rising gust of almost hysterical laughter. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... too long and indeed only eating when he found it convenient, which ruined the tone of his stomach."[731] These statements explain the reason for the collapse of Pitt's strength late in the year. Hester's concluding remark is somewhat hysterical, but it is nearer the truth than the charge that Pitt was greedy of power. He killed himself by persistent overwork on behalf of a nation which did not understand him, and in the service of a Monarch who refused to allow ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the other hand, they often are useful because of their delicate senses, and it is never necessary to show the correctness of their perception out of hand. Bianchi rightly calls attention to the fact, that hysterics like to write anonymous letters. Writers of these are generally women, and mainly hysterical women; if a man writes them, he is indubitably ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... under the title of religious suggestion two orders of facts completely distinct—superficial and momentary modifications, and constitutional modifications so profound that science cannot explain them. I repeat: to make of an hysterical patient one whose equilibrium is perfect ... is a thing more difficult than the ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... the cab, suspicion more than ever rife in his mind. But as far as he could see—with that confounded sergo staring!—there was nothing else for it. He couldn't stand there in the rain forever, gossiping with a girl half-hysterical—or pretending ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... nowhere great, was widely diffused. The petty masters, however, maintained so little system in the management of their slaves that the public problem of social control was relatively intense. It was a state of affairs conducing to severe legislation, and to hysterical action in emergencies. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... rather a hysterical laugh, it is true, but a laugh nevertheless. It showed that the strain and tension were relaxing to ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... a long hysterical breath and went over to the window. It looked upon a large yard enclosed by the high adobe wall upon which her lovers so often had sat and sung to her. No flowers were in the garden, not even a tree. It was as smooth and clean as the floor of a ballroom. ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... thee. I have looked to that also. Holy One, my heart is very heavy for my many carelessnesses towards thee.' An hysterical catch rose in his throat. 'I have walked thee too far: I have not picked good food always for thee; I have not considered the heat; I have talked to people on the road and left thee alone ... I have—I have ... Hai mai! But I love thee ... and it is ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... of them were shattered. The men and women in all classes of the French people are kind, industrious, very moral and deeply religious. They are not at all like the hysterical neurotic creatures of ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... of the anus as a sexual aim. But it should not be interpreted as espousing a cause when I observe that the basis of this loathing—namely, that this part of the body serves for the excretion and comes in contact with the loathsome excrement—is not more plausible than the basis which hysterical girls have for the disgust which they entertain for the male genital because it ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... through the ribs of two skeletons. Joan shrank back, but the two men tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing between them on the open shore. Bissonnette's eyes were hungry—he knew now the wherefore of the quest. He laughed outright, a silly, loud, hysterical laugh. Tarboe's eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette. On him they stayed a moment. Bissonnette shrank back. Tarboe was feeling for the first time in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hospitals is strong in the negro race. In the first family I ever visited the mother, a colored woman, had been bedridden for thirteen months. According to her own account she had been "conjured," and at first the mention of a hospital made her hysterical. She consented to let a doctor, who was a friend of mine, see her, and he pronounced her disease sciatic rheumatism. He said she could never get well at home with four small, noisy children, and, besides, the walls of her house were damp. After two months of persuading, I ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Carolina, and Captain Lamb, of Pennsylvania, turned simultaneously to the young gentleman who sat between them, and who had been introduced to them by General Belch as Mr. Newt, son of our old Tammany friend Boniface Newt, and said to him, with hysterical fervor, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... fine fellow in his way, I don't deny it, and has the courage of his opinions; but he can't know. Nobody does," said Paul, doggedly. "And now, dear, we'll have supper. You will take a less hysterical view of life and death ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... sucked yer life-blood (seizing her arm) ez it soothed ye; ef this curse that hung over ye dragged ye down day by day, till hating him, loathing him, ye saw yerself day by day becoming more and more like him, till ye knew that his fate was yours, and yours his,—why then, Miss Jovita (rising with an hysterical, drunken laugh), why then, I'd run away with ye myself,—I would, ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... the hysterical woman on the bed was loud and distinct, as she grasped the arm of the terrified little governess, who chanced to be within her reach. "Jeffrey, either leave my house at once, or speak more deferentially of Miss Miller. You will call her by that name, too. It matters not to Mr. Carrollton ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... that which I had heard at "the Revival," but the result was very different; for, instead of the few hysterical women who had distinguished themselves on that occasion, above a hundred persons,, nearly all females, came forward, uttering howlings and groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them. They appeared to drag each other forward, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... even more than she, hated to spend money where a show could not be made with it. But Captain de la Tour was rather insistent and got on her nerves. In an hysterical fit, therefore, she made a clean breast of the story to her husband. When she had described to him as well as she could what was in the letters, and what a Bohemian sort of life she had led in Bel-Abbes, Grant decided that it would be romantic ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... almost ready for a hysterical laugh, yet letting the old man seat himself, and then dropping on her knees before him, for she could hardly stand, "it is worse than that, sir; I know who it was who did ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can only be happy with you, my father!" she cried; but it was of no avail. He, being a father and not a mother, was unable to perceive what was in the girl's heart. He considered it quite natural that she should be a trifle hysterical in anticipating her new life—that strange untraveled country! Ah, is there anything more pathetic, he thought, than a girl's anticipations of wifehood? But he would do his duty, and he fancied that he was doing his duty when he put aside her earnest, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... proceeds to publish its contents, thereby getting its ally into a nice pickle. You will at once observe here three improbabilities: treason, indiscretion, and, finally, England in the act of tripping her ally. These actions would be incompatible, in the first place, with the almost hysterical sense of patriotism of the Japanese; in the second, with their absolute silence and secrecy, and, in the third place, with the behavior of our English cousin since his marriage to ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... Betty Jo was no hysterical weakling to spend the priceless seconds of such a time in senseless ravings. The first-aid training which she had received at school gave her the necessary knowledge which her native strength of character and practical common ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... frantically. "I was outside with Webb. What has happened?—Oh!" He caught sight of Lois in Nicholson's arms, and his cry was high and hysterical, like ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... among the Zulus is, apparently, of a naturally hysterical and nervous constitution. "He hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to him."(1) Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in New Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that he has occasionally put an able-bodied Kaneka to ignominious ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... ethical matters some sects practised the severest code of morals, while others were distinguished by laxity. By some marriage was forbidden; others wanted all the marriage they could get and advocated polygamy. The religious meetings were similar to "revivals," frequently of the most hysterical sort. Claiming that they were mystically united to God, or had direct revelations from him, they rejected the ceremonies and sacraments of historic Christianity, and sometimes substituted for them practices of the most absurd, or most doubtful, character. When ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... girlish figure was lost in the dusk under the trees. Then with a sigh he turned away. At the villa he found his wife. She was seated apart from her maids, and Eloin was talking to her, in tones low and swift. Charlotte only half listened. Her agitation was nearly hysterical. Her eyes gleamed wildly, and sometimes they would close, as though they ached for the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... close to Harold in a state of agitation which was almost hysterical. She buried her face in his shoulder, ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... pieces,—sometimes tightening round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring of iron,—and then her neuralgias, and her backaches, and her fits of depression, in which she thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which men speak slightingly of as hysterical,—convulsions, that is all, only not commonly fatal ones,—so many trials which belong to her fine and mobile structure,—that she is always entitled to pity, when she is placed in conditions which develop ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... aside, and tried to tell her how distressed and helpless she was. And the result was that Mrs. Robbie flew into a passion and railed at her, declaring in the presence of several people that she had sponged upon her and abused her hospitality! And so poor Alice came home, weeping and half hysterical. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... smashed world. On the second day following, he found himself able to light a cigarette; and, glancing about him with faint pluckings of convalescent interest, began to recognize some landmarks. On the third day, he was frankly wondering whether a girl with such overstrained, not to say hysterical ideals of conduct, would, after all, be a very comfortable person to spend one's ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... was brought forward. His weapons were restored to him. With the long strain of fear lifted at last from his mind, it was hard for him to keep down a touch of hysterical joy. But he managed to return Jack's casual greeting with one as ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... It was useless, he was too weak. He lay, breathing heavily. He felt that he should be hysterical with fear but somehow he was not, that barrier ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton |
