"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew, was a prey to every morbid desire, rushed to sensual excess and then crept back miserably to search for some spiritual flagellation. Above all, it was restless, as some one presses round a dark room searching for the lock of the door, restless and lonely, cowardly and selfish, but searching ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Mr. Walton, I TRUST I am above any morbid necessity for sympathy. But, as you say, amongst the poor of your flock,—it IS very desirable that a clergyman should be ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... said Phineas, assuming an indignant tone, "the honourable gentlemen from whom those questions have come, and therefore I have the less compunction in telling them that it is no part of my duty on this occasion to gratify a morbid and an indecent curiosity." Then there was a cry of "Order," and an appeal to the Speaker. Certain gentlemen wished to know whether indecent was parliamentary. The Speaker, with some hesitation, expressed his opinion that the word, as then used, was not open ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... not answer when she was spoken to, and when the question was repeated, she awoke with a little start. Dinner was eaten in morbid silence, with painful and fitful efforts to appear interested in each other. Walking to the theatre, they once took the wrong turning and had to ask the way. At the stage door they smiled painfully, nodded, glad to part. Hubert went up to Montague Ford's room. He found the comedian on a ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... weighed on Dinah's soul, and she accepted the clatter of fame as a substitute for her disappointed ambitions. Poetry and dreams of celebrity, which had lulled her grief since her meeting with Anna Grossetete, no longer sufficed to exhaust the activity of her morbid heart. The Abbe Duret, who had talked of the world when the voice of religion was impotent, who understood Dinah, and promised her a happy future by assuring her that God would compensate her for her sufferings bravely endured,—this good old man ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... fighting his battle with the morbid energy of a man already ill. To the very end he had held his position, resisting even that last tender appeal Hilda had made to him, but the strain upon his nerves had been too great. He was strong, indeed, but ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... all, men who were undisguised in the exhibition of vulgar curiosity. What amount of excitement would it take to make a genuine Turk open the eyes of astonishment? or, should he even be betrayed into an unguarded Mashhallah! has the power of morbid attraction been discovered which may draw him from his seat and lead him to any effort of inquiry? When, then, I saw these people flocking together on their jetty to meet us, I at once recognised them as mongrel and degenerated. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... it was! Through the intensest heat of his passion the sting touched him. Some instinct made her glance up at him, with a keen insight, seeing the morbid gloom that was the man's sin, in his face. She lifted her head from his breast, and when he stooped to touch her lips, shook herself free, laughing carelessly. Alas, Stephen Holmes! you will have little time for morbid questionings in those ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... than the fairest blonde, and her eyebrows and lashes very dark. Be very careful you do not say anything that would let her know you think her not nice looking. She broods over her appearance in such a morbid manner. It is a weak point with her, so be careful not to sting her sensitiveness in ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... worth painting with care. I should particularly insist at present on this careful choice of subject, because the Pre-Raphaelites, taken as a body, have been culpably negligent in this respect, not in humble honor of Nature, but in morbid indulgence of their own impressions. They happen to find their fancies caught by a bit of an oak hedge, or the weeds at the sides of a duck pond, because, perhaps, they remind them of a stanza of Tennyson; and forthwith they sit down ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... evidence can be trusted, holders of the rod are occasionally much agitated even when they are only in search of wells. The story gave rise to a prolonged controversy, and the case remains a judicial puzzle, but little elucidated by the confession of the hunchback, who may have been insane, or morbid, or vexed by constant questioning till he was weary of his life. He was only nineteen ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... among themselves, and derided the Christ, pledging Him in their cups of sour wine in tragic mockery. Looking at the title affixed above the Sufferer's head, they bellowed forth the devil-inspired challenge: "If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself." The morbid multitude, and the passers-by "railed on him, wagging their heads, and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself, and come down from the cross." But worst of all, the chief ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... rotting beams and the dismal aspect of the furniture, some of which had actually fallen to pieces, as though further stability had been incompatible with the long absence of human life. The place seemed almost too desolate for a ghost other than a very morbid spirit in search of penance. In the centre of the room lay in hopeless confusion a pile of all sorts and varieties of garments, many of them of most antiquated description. Plumed hats and velvet knee-breeches of the cavalier period, Jersey jackets and tea-gowns, with Watteau plaits, such as were ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... be said that, as a rule, they had, until recently, no special liking for the tempo rubato. Dr. Hanslick, the eminent Viennese critic, referred to it thirty years ago, as "a morbid unsteadiness of tempo." Mendelssohn, who always liked a "nice, swift tempo," repeatedly expressed his aversion to Chopin's rubato. Nevertheless, traces of it may be found in the rhythms of the classical school. Although Mozart's tempo in general was as strict and uniform as that of ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... expression of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the modern spirit. The book perfectly renders the disillusion, languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred scepticism. It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... wrote of Chaucer: "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer; his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, yet how free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping." Chaucer's poetry is above all things fresh. It breathes of the morning of literature. Like Homer he had at his command all the riches of a new language undefiled by usage from ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... some such stuff, we cannot but infer, that it is not the vices or absurdities of what is ignorantly called fashionable life that creates this never-ceasing demand for trash and nonsense, but rather a morbid appetite for vapidity and small-talk, a lady's-maid's curiosity of the secrets of her betters, a servile love of imitating what is unworthy imitation, and of following that which is not worth following, simply because it is supposed that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... reflections finding that consolation which should have been, but was not, provided by maternal love. As she grew older, and grew stronger both in mind and body, she grew bolder; aspiration gave way to self-satisfied conviction. Morbid self-reproach was replaced by an extravagant self-consciousness, and thenceforth she went on her solitary way, acting up always to a high standard of moral rectitude, but putting aside the faiths and hopes and judgments of the many as baubles beneath the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... memories and ideal convictions, a strange awe had come over her. Her mind was not apt to be assailed by sickly fancies; she had the vivid intellect and the healthy human passion, which are too keenly alive to the constant relations of things to have any morbid craving after the exceptional. Still the images of the vision she despised jarred and distressed her like painful and cruel cries. And it was the first time she had witnessed the struggle with approaching death: her young life had been sombre, but ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Incontinence is a term applied only by analogy in the case of the latter; its proper concern—as with the moral vice, which we call intemperance—is with the former. It implies, however, violent desire, which intemperance does not. We have examples of such desires in a morbid or diseased form, species of mania; but here again the term incontinence is only applied by analogy. Its legitimate application, in short, is restricted to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... stout frame. He had led a vagabond life, and had come to Washington after the inauguration of General Garfield, seeking appointment to a foreign consulate, and when he found himself disappointed, his morbid imagination sought revenge. Attorney-General MacVeagh, who was then bent on making political mischief by the Star-route prosecutions, made himself ridiculous when General Garfield died by asserting that the United ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... outrage on the Queen proved to be the morbid egotism of an ill-conditioned, ignorant, half-crazy lad; showing that one more danger exists for sovereigns—a peril born entirely of their high and solitary rank with its fascination for ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... cold, as also to the various dangers dependent upon the chase of wild animals. Those diseases resulting from specific causes, either natural to the race or artificially produced by the animal itself in a state of morbid derangement, are most frequent and fatal, as witnessed in distemper, rabies, mange, &c. The intimate connexion existing between the diseases of our canine friends and those of the human race, as also the strong ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... The morbid affection of the stomach began now to be more and more distressing; and he tried various applications, which he had formerly been loud in condemning, such as a few drops of rum upon a piece of sugar, naphtha, [Footnote: For Kant's ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to secure the end, the destruction of faith in immortality, so that man, having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improve and enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneous theology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it to brighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates an earnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the whispered sounds in the stillness, the half-seen forms in the dark, acted on him like some morbid stimulant. He left the path along the water and stole under the trees, along the deep shadow of little plantations, where the boughs of chestnut trees hung their great leaves low, and there was blacker refuge, shaping his course in circles which had for their object a stealthy inspection ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of insanity was brought on by Cowper's morbid interest in religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable names, are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the "aristocratic"—along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (—one resigns one's "body" to them; one wants only one's "soul"...). And Christian is all hatred of the intellect, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... her mother. It was plain that her indignation was very genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly focused upon the facts as any one could wish—more so, by a long way, than Aunt Celia's mind, which seemed to be timidly circling, with a morbid pleasure, in these unpleasant shades. She and her mother together would take the situation in hand, visit Cyril, and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... has been called a "morbid secretion," and its extinction has been foretold, but history, the only unerring guide, teaches us that it will increase in amount and improve in quality. Man cannot exist without emotion, and as we have seen various forms and subjects of humour successively arising, so we may be sure in future ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sensibilities, the most refined and gentle qualities. Advancing age, a great and sorrowful loss, that of an only son by sudden death, induced him to withdraw from the society that had always welcomed his presence, but in his seclusion he did not grow misanthropical or morbid. His faith in God and men seemed to grow stronger and greater the nearer he approached the end, and in dying he was close to both. His nature was most generous and affectionate; and age, which so often dulls and hardens the finest characters, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... time for you to indulge in that morbid talk of yours to-day, Maggie, darling. Let us consider what's best ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... he muttered, rising and pacing restlessly up and down. "I wonder what it can be? I threw that man off the scent last night, but if he suspects me, there will be no difficulty in his finding out where I live. Bah! What nonsense I am talking. I am the victim of my own morbid imagination. There is nothing to connect me with the crime, so I need not be afraid of my shadow. I've a good mind to leave town for a time, but if I am suspected that would excite suspicion. Oh, Madge! my darling," ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... intensely individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason. Moreover it was slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God. How much more truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul, turned inward, could see the divine light, just ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the month I grow morbid and sad; As I gaze on that pile I believe In the saying that never was potent before— "'Tis more blessed ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... queerest things happen," Nan asked him, in a discursiveness he found nevertheless relevant, "here in New England? There isn't a human trait or a morbid outcrop but we've got it. See! Charlotte's at the window. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... me to expect in him, and with which I had become familiar in my acquaintance with men of wide authority and outstanding ability. What disturbed me was that his blindness, his ill health, and his suffering had united to these traits an intense excitability and a morbid nervousness. ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... briefly, so briefly that it is doubtful whether her listeners would have understood it, if they had heard it then for the first time. They had not heard it all, only bits here and there of it, but enough to enable them to understand something of the morbid fear and the sense of utter desolation from which she had suffered, when she first came among them. Her voice grew firm as she went on, and she spoke clearly and strongly, so that many words were not needed. She hesitated a little, when she came to the time when she had asked John Beaton to befriend ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... indigestion, a change in the weather or fatigue will cause them; a dose of medicine or a night's repose will cure them. The brain becomes indisposed with the rest of the body, but to allow such morbid fancies ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... only an equivalent for the decision by battle which has been avoided, but even a higher art. In this way, in the present age, it came very near to this, that a battle in the economy of War was looked upon as an evil, rendered necessary through some error committed, a morbid paroxysm to which a regular prudent system of War would never lead: only those Generals were to deserve laurels who knew how to carry on War without spilling blood, and the theory of War—a real business for Brahmins—was to be specially ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... he would listen with morbid curiosity to the babble of the idiot Feklusha. At home he read in the most desultory way. He deemed the secrets of Eastern magic, Russian tales and folk-lore, skimmed Ossian, Tasso, Homer, or wandered with Cook in ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... morbid as you like"—her old friend had shrewdly turned on her—"is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... dimness had a little subsided, he beheld that heroic lady for the first time whom he had often compared, in no very moderate terms, to Jezebel, and many other names equally appropriate. A very different person she appeared from what his heated and morbid fancy had suggested. Indeed, if she had been the personification of all evil, with a demon's foot and a fiend's visage, he had been less surprised than to find her with the outward form and attributes ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... to avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in comparison with ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... they are glad enough to accept the order to rise and go about when the doctor issues a mandate which has become pleasantly welcome and eagerly looked for. I do not think it easy to make a mistake in this matter unless the woman takes with morbid delight to the system of enforced rest, and unless the doctor is a person of feeble will. I have never met myself with any serious trouble about getting out of bed any woman for whom I thought rest needful, but it has happened to others, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... this was but a morbid fancy of mine. If I could have known the true motive of the glance I should have interpreted what appeared like unutterable sadness as ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... tribes who eat their slain, Fly that grim gang, the Inquisitors of Spain, Boast not thy deeds in Moloch's shrines of old, Leave Barbary's pirates to their blood-bought gold, Let Holland steal her victims, force them o'er To toils and death on Java's morbid shore; Some cloak, some color all these crimes may plead; Tis avarice, passion, blind religion's deed; But Britons here, in this fraternal broil, Grave, cool, deliberate in thy service toil. Far from the nation's ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... in her own heart, doubts you as she now doubts Letty, you must understand why. What she did shows her courage, her sweetness, her nobility. What she may believe—or think she believes—is born only of morbid nerves, overworked body, and a crippled power of reasoning. Her furlough is on the way; I did myself the honour to solicit it, and to interest Miss Dix in her behalf. It is high time; the child cannot stand much more. . . . After a good rest in the North, if she desires to return, there ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... moment yesterday evening when I had some such wild idea. I had grown morbid by being alone all day and brooding over a resemblance which I have not been able to prevent affecting me disagreeably at intervals. This resemblance does not exist for you, and you have not been subtile enough to put yourself in my place. However, all that is ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting them to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... transactions in and out of the courts of that great city bore the mark of dishonour, he was known to have made money during the ten years of his career as a member of the bar. Possibly he kept his office shabby and unclean that it might be in touch with the transactions which had their morbid birth inside the grimy walls. There was no spot or corner in the two small rooms that comprised his "chambers" to which he could point with pride. The floors were littered with papers; the walls were greasy ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... daring conception, ideal in the highest sense of the word, is based on the purest truth, and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life. Its color is absolutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... direct our attention to the curative method which nature itself would pursue, were art not to intervene. "The curative power of nature is no peculiar power; it is the result of a series of happy adjustments, by means of which the morbid perturbation itself sets in motion the springs which may either destroy the evil or paralyze its action. It is, in fact, nothing but the original power which formed the body and preserves its life in contact with the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... themselves for the worthlessness of their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... literature—and he did not like to have his books thumbed by other people. Human nature, in its countless aspects, was all about him, he said, every mask crying to him to take it off. Unhappily, it was but the morbid anatomy of human nature he cared to study. For all his abuse of it, he did not yet recognize it as morbid, but took it as normal, and the best to be had. No doubt, he therein judged and condemned himself, but that he never thought of—nor, perceived, would it have ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... growled, but not ill-naturedly, "it's a morbid curiosity that brings you here. Better drop it, girl; it won't do you any good in the eyes ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my dressing-gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all the frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the character of our reticent people. There was still no sound. I went along the hall and up the stairs to Ev'leen Ann room, and I opened the door without knocking. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Duncan, "I don't want to set up an asylum! What's the good of books on insanity and morbid fears ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... "You're morbid to-night, Armstrong," he returned slowly. "In the morning the sun will shine and the world will look very different. As for my leaving—you'll find another man who'll make a lot better mate than I am. I'm not a good fellow in ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... just as ideal in his passion for ill as he had before been in his belief of good. Apemantus was satisfied with the mischief existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. One of the most decisive intimations of Timon's morbid jealousy of appearances is in his answer to Apemantus, who ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... along the Batignolles. It seemed to them that his half face was sneering in the mist. Then the band passed up to the warmer lights of the Clichy Quarter, where they drank and argued art far into the night They one and all hated Wagner, adoring Chopin's morbid music. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... ideas; we had but to speak the thought that was in us, and to live fearlessly and joyously in the hour that was before us. Frank speaking, absolute candour, that would once have wounded, now only cheered and stimulated; the spirit of entire helpfulness drives out all morbid self-consciousness. Differences no longer embitter when courtesy and faith ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was one story he had to hear every day. It was the one relating to what he had missed—the sight of Rojas pursued and plunged to his doom. The thing had a morbid fascination for the sick ranger. He reveled in it. He tortured Mercedes. His gentleness and consideration, heretofore so marked, were in abeyance to some sinister, ghastly joy. But to humor him Mercedes racked her soul with the sensations she had suffered ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... persons. Money was to be bestowed upon them with the utmost secrecy; and the way which Michelangelo proposed, was to dower a daughter or to pay for her entrance into a convent. It has been suggested that this method of seeking to benefit the deserving poor denoted a morbid tendency in Michelangelo's nature; but any one who is acquainted with Italian customs in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance must be aware that nothing was commoner than to dower poor girls or to establish ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... eight arrobas, of the best kind that exists, which is the gray [el gris]." Retana and Pastells regard Combes's ambar as meaning amber, the vegetable fossil; but it is possible that all these writers mean rather ambergris, which is supposed to be a morbid secretion of the sperm whale, and has been used as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... unreadable. Only its human interest gives value to the first part; from the second part human interest is totally absent. The unhappy creature, besotted with intellectual pride, was already insane, inhuman; and this morbid condition had been aggravated by years of brooding rancour before he wrote this miserable indictment of men who had done ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... not without considerable debate, and the finally reluctant sanction of the king.[40] The next morning (16th February) saw us descending the heights of Fuga, and in a few hours' walk we left the cool congenial air incidental to 4000 or 5000 feet, for the hot, damp, morbid, close atmosphere of the jungle plains below, in which, as Miss Nightingale would say, you could palpably smell a fever. Then following the old route, we came down to the Pangani; and in three days' travelling along it, as Captain Burton, being no sportsman, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... by the house, she heard a voice talking to Joel,—the huckster-girl. What a weak, cheery sound it was in the cold and fog! It touched her curiously: broke through her morbid thought as anything true and healthy would have done. "Poor Lois!" she thought, with an eager pity, forgetting her own intolerable future for the moment, as she gathered up some breakfast and went with it down the lane. Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... of the Academy Regulations which the then superintendent, Captain Louis Goldsborough, (afterwards Admiral), had sent my father. The two had been acquaintances in Paris, in the twenties of the century and of their own ages. I have always had a morbid fondness for registers and time-tables, and over them have wasted precious hours; but on this occasion the practice saved me a year. I discovered that, contrary to the established rule at the Military Academy, an appointee to the Naval might enter any class ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that perennial flow of satisfaction, coarse but plenteous and substantial, of which happiness ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... most modified and mitigated form, exposes those who are in communion with Rome. I am unwilling to dwell on this point longer, or to paint in deeper or more vivid colours the scenes which I have witnessed, than the necessity of the case requires. But it would have been the fruit of a morbid delicacy rather than of brotherly love, had I disguised, in this part of my address, the full extent of the awful dread with which I contemplate any approximation to prayers, of whatever kind, uttered by the lips or mentally conceived, ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... cure occasioned by spissitude in the effused fluids, by want of proper communication from cell to cell, or is the disease rather caused by a morbid growth of the solids, than by an ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... Disease.—The diagnosis is to be made not only from other affections of the joint, but also from morbid conditions in the vicinity of the hip, as in any of these the patient may seek advice on account of pain and a limp in walking. The patient should be stripped, and if able to walk, his gait should be observed. He is then examined lying ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not last long. No doubt some one has given me poison; I cannot get rid of the thought." It is now known that this suspicion was only the result of his morbid thoughts; but when it was publicly uttered, most unjust accusations were made against his rival, Salieri, embittering the old composer's life until its close. As the work progressed, his gloom increased. "The day before his death," Nohl says, "he desired the score to be brought to him in bed, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... acquired so much velocity, I should think would not be an unpleasant lounge for the fastidious ennuye of France or England. The beauty and coolness of the morning, the lovely sky, and the cheerfulness of the slaves, whom our morbid philanthropists wish to render happy, by making discontented, would altogether amply repay the trouble and expense of a voyage, to those who have leisure or money enough to enable them to visit the ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... naturally of a morbid temperament, and the violence of my emotion gradually exhausted itself. It was a hearty, honest, natural discharge of griefs which had been slowly accumulating, and gave me wonderful relief. I rose from the grave as if I had been ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... odd and ridiculous. He rushes into polygamous Mormonism, or buffoon revivalism, or shallow-minded atheism; nay, he will even become an anarchist, because a few men have too much money and too little soul. What we need is neither the absence of individuality nor a morbid individuality, but high ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... to bed and propped the pillows up for a back-rest, ready to quarrel with him if it might bring some little pleasure into his morbid existence. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... peasant girl. Elsa Kapus had no thought of self-analysis; complicated sex and soul problems did not exist for her; she would never have dreamed of searching the deep-down emotions of her heart and of dragging them out for her mind to scrutinize. The morbid modern craze for intricate and composite emotions was not likely to reach an out-of-the-way Hungarian village that slept peacefully on the banks of the sluggish Maros, cradled in the immensity of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... false," continued Mrs. Haughton, with morbid curiosity, watching the beautiful, expressive face of her rival—"which I don't believe, how ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... anything in the way of this union? Is there a morbid growth—a cause of irritation and disease tending to dissolution? Then, it must be removed. Is ambitious and reckless demagoguism to be apprehended? Then educate the people and diffuse science. But is there not still a worse devil to be cast out? Where slavery is, you cannot educate the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of being for a while your true self,—a self worth something apart from its existence as a citizen, is apparent in the Roman of Cicero's day, and still more in the hard-working functionary of the Empire. Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards at Capreae,—a melancholy recluse worn ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... have not yet reached a distinctly morbid state. This dissociation may be slight, and of little consequence; and may even be completely "healed" without the knowledge of the patient; without his knowledge that anything strange has taken place at all—just as tubercular lesions of the lungs may be healed without ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... advise you not. There is nothing in the whole field of commerce more surprising than the fluctuations of the leather market. Its sensitiveness may be described as morbid." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mortification of the flesh; the febrile irritation of the frame operating in conjunction with the depression of the spirits occasioned by abstinence, will so far answer the objects of the rite, as to engender some religious excitement, but this is of a morbid and gloomy character, and it seems to be certain, that along with the increase of sanctity, there comes a fiercer desire for the perpetration of dark crimes. The number of murders committed during Lent is greater, I am ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... growth during which absolutely nothing can be predicted of their behavior. At such times honest boys have given way to lying and theft, gentle boys have developed an unexpected savagery, ordinary boys—"the small apple-eating urchins whom we know"—have fallen into morbid brooding upon unhealthy subjects. In the immense majority of cases the crisis is soon over and the boy is himself again; but while it lasts, the disease will draw its sustenance from all manner of things—things, it may be, in themselves quite innocent. I avoid particularizing for ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... all about me in the moonlight and amongst the tangled greenery. I dared not move; I scarcely breathed; the very weeds with their pale, dusky leaves were like things that had a ghostly life. And while I was in this morbid condition of mind, with that irrational fear momentarily increasing on me, I saw at a distance of about thirty yards a dark object, which seemed to move, fluttering in an uncertain way towards me. I gazed intently on it, but it was motionless ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... Hal. "Infinitely more dangerous, in the morbid way in which you look at life. What have these sickly fancies to do with the career that opens to every brave man ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... have made no impression on a nature either more sturdily philosophic, or more unimaginative than Sylvia's (Judith, for instance, was not in the least affected by the experience), but it came to be a morbid obsession of this strong, healthy, active-minded young creature. It tinged with bitterness and blackness what should have been the crystal-clear cup holding her youth and intelligence and health. She fancied that every one despised her. She imagined that people who were in reality quite unaware ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the Common; I showed him our Wimbledon sun-dews; in a word, I felt that I had discovered a richer gold mine than the richest in the world, a new friend. Had I then known him as well as I afterwards did, I should have been aware that he had a strong dash of the sensitive, not to say the morbid, in his nature. He had a habit of submitting almost every incident of his life to such an analysis as that I ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the pleasure of meeting you; and since then ... No, I shan't flatter you by saying how many successes I have seen recorded to your credit in the past two years. Do you know that I have a natural predilection for such things? It may be morbid of me—is it?—but I have the strongest kind of a leaning toward the tales of Gaboriau; and I have always wanted to know a really great detective—like Lecocq, or Dupin. And that day at Ascot when Mr. Narkom told me that he would introduce me to the famous 'Man of the Forty Faces'... ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Head bends completely down and turns with a curve, as it were, under the base of the Mount of Luna (5-5, Plate II.), the tendency is to extreme morbid imaginings and such extreme sensitiveness, that people on whose hands it is found generally separate themselves from the rest of their fellows, and either retire from the world altogether and live a solitary life ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... any of those things. Come, dear, let's just talk it over sensibly, as we might talk over any other of the great crises of life. You've been brooding over it and let yourself drift into a morbid view of it. You know you have a little tendency to do that about everything that goes wrong, and you promised me that you would fight ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, namely, between 83 and 85 per cent; and that dates possess precisely the same nutritious substances as rice does, with the single difference that the starch is already converted ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... dwelling, back across the rooftops of New Chicagee. Ordinarily, Littlejohn avoided looking down. He dreaded heights, and the immensity of the city itself was somehow appalling. But now he gazed upon the capital and center of civilization with a certain morbid affection. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... "When will the morning come?" Is not thy youth 250 A vain and feverish dream of sensualism? Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease? Are not thy views of unregretted death Drear, comfortless, and horrible? Thy mind, Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame, 255 Incapable of judgement, hope, or love? And dost thou wish the errors to survive That bar thee from all sympathies of good, After the miserable interest Thou hold'st in their protraction? When the grave 260 Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself, Dost thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... better to be alone when he is in this mood," she would say sometimes. Her tact and cleverness in managing him were wonderful; she never seemed to watch him, she never let him feel that his morbid fits were noticed and humored, but all the same she knew when to leave him alone, and when to talk to him; she could be his bright companion, or sit silently beside him for hours. On Sunday mornings Mr. Lucas always accompanied us to church, and in the afternoon he sat ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... studied and wrote with feverish intensity, and avoided people. But with the spring of 1863, says Mr. Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had shunned all invitations into society, but ... it suddenly occurred to him that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy," and thereupon he entered into the social, literary, musical, and artistic life ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... came out of sheer morbid curiosity, in order that they might boast that they were present when this remarkable case was heard. There were others who came, inwardly quaking at the revelations which were promised or hinted at in the daily Press, for the influence ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... with the doctor on this point; whereupon he cited those visions and dreams, which, according to the light of science as it now shines, demonstrate that Bunyan's digestion must have been morbid. And, forthwith, he overwhelmed me with learned instances from Galen and Hippocrates, from Spurzheim and Binns, from Locke and Beattie, from Malebranche and Bertholini, from Darwin and Descartes, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... superstitions which are connected with dreams, are sometimes favored by, and perhaps dependent upon a certain morbid condition or irritability of the nervous system, which suggests the dread of some impending calamity, a painful and indefinite sense of apprehension for which no ostensible reason can be assigned. Strange as it might appear, the influence of our dreams ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... help. She cannot bear it that this disaster has come, through her. It has made her morbid. She says things about herself, that make me tremble. Has she ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... a part of the body near the tail, by a kind of distillation. Physic, taken immediately after the poison, may cure, but not always; if deferred two or three days, the man must die: the poison is slow, wastes the flesh, and produces a sallow, morbid appearance. It causes great pain in the stomach, destroys the appetite, produces a consumption, and kills in a longer or shorter time, according to the strength of constitution. Some who have taken remedies, soon after the poison, live 8 or 10 years; otherwise ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... be rich, no man could be poor, in Peru; but all might enjoy, and did enjoy, a competence. Ambition, avarice, the love of change, the morbid spirit of discontent, those passions which most agitate the minds of men, found no place in the bosom of the Peruvian. The very condition of his being seemed to be at war with change. He moved on in the same unbroken ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... becoming an especial proficient in color and composition. One of his most widely-known works is "The Last Days of Pompeii," which created great enthusiasm a quarter of a century ago. This, however, was painted during his career of dissipation, and its vivid coloring seemed to have been drawn from a soul morbid with secret woes and craving ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... habit to read to them, hoping to give their imaginations a little exercise before they went to bed. He was startled to find that Grimm and Hans Andersen, which he had considered as authentic classics for childhood, were full of very strong stuff—morbid sentiment, bloodshed, horror, and all manner of painful circumstance. Reading the tales aloud, he edited as he went along; but he was subject to that curious weakness that afflicts some people: reading ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... for him at the other tables, and, as was the custom of the widow under such circumstances, he was intruded upon the society of this morbid duet, after the manner ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... fascination of their own. I have even known them prolonged to gratify a morbid thirst for excitement; but I think Miss Bruce was chiefly anxious to be released from her precarious position, and to get rid of her visitor as soon as she could. Even her resolute nerves were beginning to give ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... peaceable and friendly attitude towards European nations, particularly Italy and Austria. It is not too much to hope that the conciliatory yet dignified tone and temper of the message in this regard may do something as a conspicuous example, to abate the war frenzy, and cool the morbid passion for "gunpowder and glory," which has been such a disturbing and dangerous element in European statesmanship and diplomacy for many years past, and is perhaps more menacing to the quiet of the world ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... and the sutler's shop. Their very comforts were noxious. The warm, close barracks in which they spent perhaps twenty hours out of the twenty-four, would enervate even a man trained to sedentary habits; and the abundant rations of hot food, consumed with the morbid appetite of men who had no other amusement, rendered them heavy and listless. In our regiment, at least, it was absolutely necessary to cut down the rations of certain articles, as for instance of coffee, and to prevent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... atmosphere, and the work of passing up the dead bodies began. I stood to windward, as near the hatchway as I could get without being sickened by the still pestilential effluvium that even now arose from the hold, and watched the operation, not from any feeling of morbid curiosity, but in order that I might become aware, by the evidence of my own eyesight, of some of the blacker horrors of this most foul and accursed trade, and the sights that I then witnessed literally beggar description. The unhappy wretches ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Deffand, who said: "Il n'y a qu'un seul malheur, celui d'etre ne." Nevertheless, the avowed joyousness bred by the laughing tides and purple skies of Greece is certainly more conducive to human happiness, though at times even Greeks, such as Theognis and Palladas, lapsed into a morbid pessimism comparable to that of Tolstoy. Metrodorus, however, more fully represented the true Greek spirit when he sang, "All things are good in life" ([Greek: panta gar esthla bio]). The Roman pagan, Juvenal, gave a fairly ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... with an unfortunate accident," said the doctor, with mock seriousness, which was taken up by the Scotsman, who remarked in his best drawl—"May his soul ken rest!" and they all shouted with infamous laughter, but I listened with a morbid interest when the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... see vol. i.; morbid courtship of, by Lincoln; marries Lincoln; her married life with Lincoln; involves Lincoln in quarrel ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... the Russian people eastward to Kazan and Siberia expressed by details of the morbid character of Ivan the Terrible and by his ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... God that I may not willingly yield to these gloomy unloving feelings. As often as I look out of myself upon Him, His love and goodness, then I catch a bright gleam. I think that you will not suspect me of being in a morbid state of mind. You will say, "Poor old fellow! he was seedy and depressed when he wrote all that." And that's true, but not the whole truth. I have much need of your prayers, indeed, for grace and strength to correct faults of which I am ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they dropp'd "By stroke unlook'd for. When myself, to Jove "Wish'd sacrifice to offer up; for me, "My country, and my sons,—the victim loud "Dire lowings utter'd, and without a blow "Fell sudden,—scarce with blood the wounding knife "Was stain'd. The morbid inwards mock'd our wish, "To learn the truth, and pleasure of the gods: "The deep-fixt plague had to the bowels pierc'd. "Before the sacred portals have I seen, "The corses spread; before the altars too, "As death would come in his most hideous form. "Some with the cord ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... way to the skies; the domestic afflictions, tugging at his heart-strings even in his hours of genial intercourse, and converting his very smiles into spasms; the anxious days and sleepless nights preying upon his delicate organization, producing that morbid sensitiveness and nervous irritability which at times overlaid the real sweetness and amenity of his nature, and obscured the unbounded generosity of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... take possession of the mines of Almaden, although the government, who were bent on his ruin, had done all in their power to prevent him from following up his successes by denying him the slightest supplies and reinforcements. The fruits of victory thus wrested from him, his hopes blighted, a morbid melancholy seized upon the Irishman; he resigned his command, and in less than ten months from the period when I saw him at Santander, afforded his dastardly and malignant enemies a triumph which satisfied even them, by cutting his own throat with ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... in towns by an increase in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On that I say nothing. I only say this—that I think the present crisis in the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... what men call a smart-looking chap: fair, with bright blue eyes, and the most mischievous smile in London. He was unusually rapid in thought, speech and movement, without being restless, and his presence was an excellent cure for slackness, languor, strenuousness or a morbid sense of duty. ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... to this remark was a ringing laugh, in which the others, in the inevitable reaction from the morbid gloom, joined with a heartiness that was most annoying ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... first person fixed on as the mysterious author of what was seen, was Tituba, a female slave in the family, and she was harassed by her master into a confession of unlawful practices and spells. The girls then fixed on Sarah Good, a female known to be the victim of a morbid melancholy, and Osborne, a poor man that had for a considerable time been bed-rid, as persons whose spectres had perpetually haunted and tormented them: and Good was twelve months after hanged on ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... again (in spite of Mazzini and Kossuth) to regard the French as having the initiative of revolutions. I have resolved to give up all extra and needless effort of the brain, until I can really get rid of certain morbid symptoms, quite chronic, which distress me, so that my projected ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... well-fought battle is the highest form of exciting amusement. All the world is interested in warfare among human beings, and there are men who delight in fighting battles in order that their own and public interest may be gratified. It may suggest a morbid or bloodthirsty spirit, this love of warfare, but no spectacle is finer, more magnificent, than a hard-fought game in which human lives are staked against a strip of ground—a position. It is not hard to understand why ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... the way to speak out would be cleared in advance; and as for the man of the name of Davenant—probably Tom Davenant's adopted son, who was said to have pulled off some good things a few years ago—there would be, in humbling himself before one so successful, a morbid joy of the kind the devotee may get in being crushed by ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... Well for us it is That when our nature, hurt, falls, shrieking, down, The Great Physician's hand may raise it up And bind the wound. But what mad folly 'twere Did we, like peevish child, beat down the hand, And tear afresh the wound. And this we do When of our morbid selves we idols make, And cry "No sorrow like to mine." O rather should we turn our tenderer hearts— Made gentler by our griefs—to gentle cares For weak Humanity, and, knowing what woe Our sinful nature brings upon itself, With God-like pity love ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... neglect, and too often trained even from tender age to vice and violence. He sought to bring these extremes of European society into harmonious relation with each other,—to raise the one from hereditary dependence and degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts he was eminently successful,—in the latter, more so, in my judgment, than any educator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... I have often thought of it, and of course such a thing might happen at any time; but you forget that while we are out on the broad and boundless ocean we enjoy ourselves. We are free. People with morbid curiosity cannot come and call on us. We cannot get the daily newspapers, and we do not have to meet low, vulgar people who pay their ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Burstead to whom Stephen was referring, and he too, as he listened, was suddenly filled with a sense of glory and exultation. Here after all was a way out of all trouble, all this half-seen, half-imagined terror of the past weeks. Here too was an end to all Stephen's morbid condition, sitting alone by himself, drinking, seeing no one—now that he'd got Burstead between the eyes life would be a vigorous, decent thing ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... and anxiety for the tranquillity of General Butzou, whose age, infirmities and sufferings threatened a speedy termination of his life, determined the count to sacrifice all false delicacy and morbid feelings, and to hazard another attempt at acquiring the means of affording those comforts to the sick veteran which his condition demanded. Happen how it would, he resolved that Butzou should never know the complete wreck of his ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... her, and, while lightly grasping her fingers, was gazing up into her face with a pleading glance. AEnone's first impulse was to respond with eager warmth to that humble appeal for protection and friendship; and had it not been for the morbid fear she felt lest her husband, who stood looking on, might chide such familiarity, or at the least might cast ridicule upon the feeling which prompted it, she would have raised the captive girl and folded her in her arms. As it was, the impulse was too spontaneous and sudden to be entirely resisted, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... question, at first whispered in the gossip in Furmville, had crept into the newspaper dispatches. The result was a morbid curiosity generally, and, in the minds of many, a belief that Braceway would fasten the crime on Morley. There were, however, a few who took the position that Morley, even if he had not committed the ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... things that distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... another; and before another sun rose he had passed from among the living. I obtained permission to go in once more and look upon him as he lay shrouded for the grave. I was then a child of ten years, but even at that early age I had not that morbid terror of looking upon death, so common among children. With my own hands, I folded back the napkin which covered his face, and gazed upon his aged, but now serene countenance. There was nothing in his appearance to inspire terror, and for a moment I placed ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... little, her sleepy, languorous eyes drooping under her heavy hair, which a jewelled ribbon hardly holds up. Something in this "primitive" art has been lost when we come to Angelico, some almost morbid loveliness that you may find even yet in the air about Perugia and Siena, in the delicate flowers there, the honeysuckle which the country people call le manine della Madonnina—the little hands of the Virgin, and even in the people sometimes, in their soft gestures ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... She cultivated with almost morbid care this severity of dress and surroundings. There were moments when she could hardly tolerate the pale autumnal beauty which her glass reflected, when even this phantom of youth and radiance became a stumbling-block to her spiritual pride. She ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... lust, venereal appetite, sexual appetite, carnal appetite, lasciviousness, venery, concupiscence, salacity, salaciousness, aphrodisia; satyriasis (immoderate); nymphomania (morbid in women); (of animals) oestrus, rut, heat, oestruation. Antonym: anaphrodisia. Associated Words: aphrodisiac, antaphrodisiac, anaphrodisiac, aphrodisiacal, amative, amativeness, amorous, amorousness, amatory, antiorgastic, philter, oestrual, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the north-east had kept us up for three days. It came to us over fields of long-unburied dead. It explained our morbid craving for tobacco—and Nap, during the night, ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... in extreme youth, and finished in middle age, and is a most remarkable example of a young man's devotion to one absorbing object. The opening chapters were written amid the bright dreams of youth, and in the happiest circumstances; the closing ones were composed amid the dark clouds of a morbid melancholy, and during an imprisonment tyrannical in all its features. Placed side by side with Homer and Virgil, it may be said with Voltaire that Tasso was more fortunate than either of these immortals in the choice of his subject. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... or humoured, as in The Brute—that monstrous personification of the treacherous sea's victim. Like all true artists, Conrad never preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read. We recognise his emotional calibre, which is of a dramatic intensity, though never over-emphasising the morbid. Of his intellectual grasp there is no question. He possesses pathos, passion, sincerity, and humour. Wide knowledge of mankind and nature he has, and in the field of moral power we need but ask if he is a Yes-Sayer ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... from the interest that swayed them all. He had loitered at first, dallying with a temptation to slip silently from the party and retrace his way to the tables and ascertain, perchance, if some vestige of that mystic scripture might not reveal itself to him anew, or if it had been only some morbid fancy, some futile influence of solitude, some fevered condition of the blood or the brain, that had traced on the stone those gracious words, the mere echo of which—his stuttered, vague recollections—had roused the camp-meeting to fervid enthusiasms undreamed of before. And ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to question her own motives; what if she should lose belief in her own spiritual integrity; learn in time to look in on herself with a spirit of morbid analysis instead of living out her ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... stand with him the chances of the hunting-field. And such is the inconsistency of human nature, that they are performed by persons who would shudder at the sight of the bleeding flank of the race-horse, or who would lay down with disgust, and some expression of maudlin, morbid humanity, the truly interesting narrative of that most intrepid and enduring of all gallopers, Sir Francis Head. But compare the cases. In the case of the race-horse, his skin is wounded to urge him to his utmost ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?" cried Rosamund, in despair. "Must I confess we had got so morbid as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we didn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves? We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... eye of the Turk; then little by little, the sting of the master's whip falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound at once plaintive and menacing, danced, their dance, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... no great success with him. "She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her—for my play. Then I fancy" (here he chuckled again) "she consoled herself with some one else." Love seemed to mean for her only a sort of morbid imagination. This, however, was only one side of her nature. His little model had had a great deal of heart and of womanly understanding; and thanks to the spontaneous power she could gain over him, every woman might, if she wished it, guide some man towards the good. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... sighing, of their infirmities, which they thought incomprehensible, attributing them to the ignorance of the doctors. It was really the morbid wasting away that suddenly attacks people of the abundant, food-yielding countries. Their life was one continual stream of liquid sugar.... And yet Ferragut could easily guess the disobedience of the two old folks to the discipline of diet, their childish deceptions, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions. A member, one of those afflicted with the morbid rage of debate, of an ardent mind, prompt imagination, and copious flow of words, who heard with impatience any logic which was not his own, sitting near me on some occasion of a trifling but wordy debate, asked me how I could sit in silence, hearing so much false reasoning, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... air,—although, within, my fire crackles and leaps with steady cheer, and the red rose on my window is warm and sanguine with bloom,—yet this whole air is full of tiny sparks of chill to my sensitive and morbid nature; it is at once electric and cold, the very atmosphere of spirits.—What a shadow passed that pane! Roger, was it you?—The storm bursts, in one fierce rush of sleet and roaring wind; the little spaniel crouched at my feet whimpers and nestles closer; the house is silent,—silent as my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... it, not as an art or science, but as a magazine of form and feeling. This kind of knowledge is purely good, a direct antidote to every evil to be apprehended, and food absolutely necessary to preserve the mind of a child like yours from morbid appetites. Next to these objects comes such knowledge as, while it is chiefly interesting for its own sake, admits the fellowship of another sort of pleasure, that of complacence from the conscious exertion of the faculties and love of praise. The accomplishments ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimicking the stock phrases of the Latter-Day Pamphlets. Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison |
