"Obsessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be thrown into confusion, its exquisite balance disturbed, its functioning confounded. Thirst, near-exhaustion, severe bodily distress and, on top of all, blood-lust anger made Alan Howard over into another man. He was possessed, obsessed. As the night wore on endlessly he created for himself visions; he came a thousand times upon the Indian; he sank his fingers and thumbs into a corded throat; he beat with his fists at the pulp of a face. He grew accustomed ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... happiness. Yet, what she aroused in him was that part of his nature to which he himself was a stranger—a restless, sensuous side which her very isolation and exposure to danger seemed to excite the more until desire to control her, to drive others away, to subdue, master, mould her, make her his own, obsessed him. And he had tried it and failed; and had drawn aside, fiercely, still watching ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... by the idea that spotless cleanliness is the matter of prime importance to be observed. The discomfort of children, husband, mother herself are nothing as compared with keeping the house in perfect order. Any woman so obsessed should be sent for a short time to an insane asylum, for she certainly has so reversed the proper order of values as to be so far insane. She has "cluttered up" her mind with a wrong idea, an idea which dirties, muddies, soils her mind far worse ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Kaiser to be sincere, sir, but obsessed with the war spirit, and that because of it he is full of arrogance and conceit; many believe him mad—that he suffers from a kind of megalomania. Evidently he, like the rest of the war party in Germany, believes ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... Captain Roots; apparently obsessed by the same vision and spirit, Mr. Willis O. Tyler, eminent Los Angeles race representative, attorney and Harvard graduate, also makes a plea for justice for Negro troops in the regular army, also for Negro officers, ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... author has said that all rulers become obsessed with the passion of rule. They lose their balance, clearness of sight, judgment, and only desire to rule, rule, rule! He was able to quote many examples. I thought of him and his theory when following, as closely as one is able to do six thousand miles away, the recent course of events ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... truth is, that the Republican leaders, obsessed with a determination to win the presidential election, have attempted to satisfy too many divergent views. Inconsistencies, inevitable under the circumstances, rise to haunt them on every hand, ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... younger generation? I'm not sure—although I prefer the happy medium myself—that they are not wiser than their grandmothers and their maiden aunts. On the principle that confession is good for the soul, I don't believe that women will be so obsessed by—well, let us say, sex, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... had sent too many to Molokai to hang back himself. We argued for Japan. But he wouldn't hear of it. 'I've got to take my medicine, fellows,' was all he would say, and he said it over and over. He was obsessed ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... as a political philosophy and as an institution for Great Britain was, by 1864, rapidly coming to the front in politics. This was very largely a result of the American Civil War. Roebuck, after the failure of his effort for mediation in 1863, was obsessed with a fear of the tendency in England. "I have great faith in my countrymen," he wrote, "but the experience of America frightens me. I am not ashamed to use the word frightened. During my whole life I have looked to ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... man, if ever there was one. When less than fourteen years of age, he left school and started to earn his own living. He never afterward returned to school. In adolescence, his eager mind was obsessed by the glamor of the sea, so he began life as a sailor. After a few years came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. This was the first step in his subsequently life-long career as an independent ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... it seemed as if his physical beauty acted upon her with some irresistible magnetism, flowing round her and over her and through her, till she was enveloped and obsessed by him. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... ignorant of the requirements of work. They are frequently narrow in their training and experience, and therefore do not understand much about practical life, practical work, and practical requirements. Many teachers, even college professors, seem to be obsessed with the idea that a student who learns a subject easily will be successful in making a practical application of it. Not long ago a student in engineering in one of our most prominent universities came to us for consultation. He told us that his professors all agreed that he ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the impression that the Yugoslav-Italian War could now no longer be avoided. But they did not realize how great a self-control the Yugoslavs possess. It may be, as a commentator put it in the Nation,[69] that Italy "is practically at war with Yugoslavia," for she is obsessed by the "Pan-Slav menace"; but if they insist on the arbitrament of arms they will have to wait until the Yugoslavs have time to deal with them.... The Free State of Rieka owes its existence to a Treaty ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... words in wrong senses, as "The book greatly intrigued me," "Leave me take this," "He was obsessed with the idea," or "He ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of low birth, a crime in the eyes of nobles and courtiers who for nearly half a century had seen the prestige of the Chancery enhanced by the lordly airs and whims of Kaunitz. Fear of courtly intrigues ever obsessed the mind of Thugut; and thus, whenever the horizon darkened, this coast-hugging pilot at once made for the nearest haven. In particular, as the recovery of Belgium in the year 1793 brought no financial gain, but unending ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... motionless while she tugged and jerked at his ankles. After an interminable time the other strap yielded and, throwing the hobbles aside, Alice sprang erect, grasped the reins and started for the open, her throbbing brain obsessed by one idea, to ride, ride, ride! Stumbling, tripping in her frantic haste she made her way through the scrub, the buckskin following close upon her heels. Only a few yards more and the open country stretched before her, ridge after rocky ridge as far as the eye could see. Redoubling ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... shelter, their chief article of barter. Bereft of these and deprived at the same time of the supreme joy of existence, the chase, bitten with cold, starved with hunger, fearful of the future, they offered fertile soil for the seeds of rebellion. A government more than usually obsessed with stupidity, as all governments become at times, remained indifferent to appeals, deaf to remonstrances, blind to danger signals, till through the remote and isolated settlements of the vast west and among the tribes ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... and his lordship was beginning to correct his first impressions of her and to discover the charm of that frank, straightforward attitude of comradeship which made her treat every man as a brother. Considering how his mind was obsessed with the business of his mission, it is not wonderful that he should have come to talk to her of Captain Blood. Indeed, there was a circumstance that ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... the pending amendments were caught in the toils of the "wet and dry" issue. The "wets" obsessed by the idea that woman suffrage is "next door to prohibition" used their entire machinery to defeat the amendments, while the "drys" regarded the amendments as distinctly separate questions. These conditions may be regarded as the inevitable hazards ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... youth, on looking down from a height upon the city with its smiling environs, he had felt obsessed by gloomy thoughts. In the sunshine-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in a superior and omnipotent being watching and directing their ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the meeting place between God and Man. How and where can these two incommensurates find a meeting place? What is Incarnation? The greatness and the littleness of Man obsessed Chesterton as it did Pascal; it is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and I cannot deny that my joy was tainted with selfishness. For, waking in that impenetrable darkness, and yet obsessed with the dream I had dreamed, I had known what fear meant, at the realization that alone, chained, I must face the dreadful Chinese doctor in the flesh. Smith ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... are the two forms of immobility, the two schemes of analysis, by which we must not let ourselves be obsessed. I do not say that there is no place to give them, even in the internal world. But the more deeply we enter into the heart of psychological life, the less they ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... essence of manliness. But he was man enough to abstain from so doing—for here such conduct would be regarded as boorish. It was harder for him to suppress his past; it was so inseparable from Father Lasse that he was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so soon ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and, without knowing it, they did. He was left brooding, pained, bewildered. The explanation was simply this: he had failed to perceive that the grandiose idea of the ninefold organ fund had seized, fired, and obsessed the imaginations of the Wesleyan community, and that under the unwonted poetic stimulus they were capable of acting quite ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... had an inspiration. It was hopeless she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his idee fixe, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, while she was humouring him, it suddenly occurred ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... like a man with whom the subject under discussion was the one subject in the world that interested him. One would have said that he had nothing else in his mind but the lust for strange places to conquer. He appeared to be obsessed by his life of travel, to be able to think of nothing else, even during this short interval in his years of adventure, and in this stay-at-home English company whose thoughts were mostly bound up in ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... curiosity had led her to overdo persuasion. That cooing interpolation of "your sincere friend"—too strongly honeyed—suddenly recalled the Prophet to the fact that Lady Enid was not, and could never be, his confidante in the matter that obsessed him. He therefore sat down, but with an abrupt air of indefinite social liveliness, and exclaimed, not unlike Mr. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... great problem is that of maladjustment in thought. Protestantism is still suffering from the effects of extreme individualism in religious belief. Strong leaders, obsessed with some one variation in interpretation of the Scriptures, have pulled off from the main body of the church and have started independent organizations committed to the development of the particular interpretation they have made. When once these organizations have been ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... The blood that flowed! It was a job to dress; I hobbled bravely down the road And reached a C.C.S.; Nor was I so obsessed with gloom At leaving thus the field of doom As one might easily assume From stories in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... departure he had seldom had the courage to dine at home. The large dining room with the big table set for himself alone only served to remind him the more keenly of his loss. Especially empty and cheerless they looked that day and his mind was obsessed by thoughts of the absent one when suddenly the loud ringing of the telephone bell had aroused his reveries. He picked up the receiver thinking it was Hadley calling him or possibly someone in his office, when to his amazement he heard the voice of ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... that of some mournful spirit in the dusk. The sense of confidence inspired by the voice of her brother forsook her as quickly as it had come, and once more shame and fear overwhelmed her. She was obsessed by the thought that she had no right to happiness, nor yet to live. She spent whole days in the garden, book in hand, unable to look her mother in the face. A thousand times she said to herself that her mother's anguish ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... again to Carse and begged him to abandon his studies in these new murders, but, as before, his response was cold and discouraging. There was a wild and almost fanatical tone in his letter which was indicative of his obsessed mind, and an ugly premonition occurred to me that this would be the breaking-point of ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... believe that we have made such a mistake. I don't think that honestly and deliberately you prefer an exotic, useless, purposeless, parasitic existence to the normal, wholesome life we happily planned. But you are obsessed, intoxicated—I can't put it any better—and nothing but a shock will sober you. If I'm wrong, if love and Bill's companionship can't lure you away from these other things—why, I suppose you will consider it an ended chapter. In that case you will not suffer. The situation ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... about this time that I began to gather the true source and import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of such writers as de Maupassant, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... words were going over in my head without conveying the slightest meaning, and that the other part of my mind was absorbed with thoughts of Miss Sharp—. If I only dared to be natural with her we surely could be friends, but I am always obsessed with the fear that she will leave me if I transgress in the slightest beyond the line she has marked between us—. I see that she is determined to remain only the secretary, and I realize that it is her breeding which makes her act as she does—. If she were ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... circles of St. Petersburg became obsessed with the idea of picking out special groups from among the Jewish population, distinguished by financial or educational qualifications, for the purpose of bestowing upon them certain rights and privileges. It was the old coin—Nicholas' idea of the "assortment" of the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... for her, making her lie down beneath it, and then he removed his Dyak war-coat and threw it over her, but it was hours before her exhausted body overpowered her nervous fright and won a fitful and restless slumber. Several times Virginia became obsessed with the idea that Bulan had left her alone there in the jungle, but when she called his name he answered from close ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tell, he was obsessed with his thoughts and feelings against the man James. With every passing day his resentment against him piled up, till now he could think of nothing much else but a possible way to dislodge him from the pinnacle of his local notoriety, and ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... hero and in which girls he knew and those he imagined were the heroines, but at the same time, standing aloof as it were, another part of him seemed to watch his own reactions until "I nearly went crazy." He became obsessed by a feeling of unreality and adopted a Berkleyan philosophy of idealism: nothing seemed to exist except his own consciousness, and that seemed of doubtful existence. He took long walks by himself, read philosophy and science with avidity, yet turned by preference to these dreams ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... yet, we perceive them in one another, and that their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected?" [Footnote: Time and Free Will, p. 100 (Fr. p. 76).] Such a duration is Real Time. Unfortunately, we, obsessed by the idea of space, introduce it unwittingly and set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them alongside one another; in a word, we project them into space and we express duree in terms of extensity ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... before a battle; had known officers and soldiers to utter them—brave men, too, yet obsessed by the conviction of their approaching death. Sometimes they die; sometimes escape, and the premonition ends forever. But until the moment of peril is passed, or they fall as they had foretold, no argument will move them, no assurance cheer them. But our corps had been in many battles during the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... It is a novelty and an enormous relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not seemed possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so much about that God and so little of any other. With that release their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... up with much difficulty and assuming a drunken dignity he started to go away; but as if he were unable to free his intoxicated mind from the one idea that obsessed it, he turned and changed his ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... constitution like that of Canada or Australia. Ireland, in fact, so runs the pleasing delusion, is to be set up as an experimental Quebec, and the other provinces will follow suit shortly. Not all Home Rulers, indeed, are obsessed by this confusion. Mr. Childers, for instance, makes short work of what he calls the "federal chimera," dismissing the idea as "wholly impracticable," and pointing out that Home Rule must be "not ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... international co-operation is not by any means always with similar and racially allied nations. Republican France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of autocratic Russia. Australia, that much more than any other country has been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese. And as to the ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation, there are fighting together on the soil of France as I write, Flemish, Walloons, and negroes from Senegal, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... shuffling of his slippered feet became audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desert station on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paid scant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed with the idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He bought supplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody mentioned a specific event in which a blueskin ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... she longed to be able to do something that would show him how strongly she was his partisan, to insult Canon Ronder in the market-place, to turn her back when he spoke to her—and, at the same time, intermingled with this hot championship was irritation that her father should allow himself to be obsessed by this. He who was so far ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... multiple personality; case after case where apparitions played a vital part in the plot which was brought to me to investigate. I'll tell you this, Captain: I, personally, never saw an apparition, never was obsessed by premonitions, never received any communications from the outer void. But I have had to do with those who undoubtedly did. Therefore I listen with all seriousness and respect to what ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... his efforts, he was unable to move. He himself was fastened by invisible bonds. And, trembling, obsessed by a monstrous vision, he watched the dismal preparations, the cutting of the condemned men's hair ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that Marlowe—obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness—had taken a leaf, the guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at the time, in all his broodings on the matter ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... At the club? Place Vendome? To hear still more talk of this death that obsessed him! He preferred to go somewhere by chance, walking straight before him, like all those who are a prey to some fixed idea which they hope to conjure away by rapid movement. The evening was warm, the air full of sweet scents. He walked ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... gentlemen; who in their turns, although separately, had never failed to be genially appreciative. The flavor of war, which filled the air as a restless spirit since diplomatic relations with Germany had come to an end—the numb fear with which he had been obsessed but a moment ago—were completely relegated to the limbo of forgetfulness as he now issued forth in search of praise ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... a moment or two, and then suddenly, obsessed with a strange fear, strode across the room and ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the verge of insanity by the terror of discovery, was now obsessed with the one idea of escape from Mr. Beverley. He no longer felt safe on the island. Any moment he dreaded to meet faces that would betray recognition of his past. The calm and content of his visit were utterly shattered, and a sudden violent ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... I took whatever she offered; doubtless I drank it, but I don't remember. Nor do I remember what she said at first, for somehow I began thinking about my lions, and the thought obsessed me even while striving to listen to her, even in the tingling maze of other thoughts which kept me dumb under the exquisite spell of this intimacy ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... he relished it more than anything he had ever tasted. This beef was her own handiwork. Thus it was because she had made it so.... He warily refrained from complimenting her, but the idea of a second helping obsessed him. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... said. "I never thought he really meant anything by what he said, but that remark's been running through my head. It seems to me that everyone right through has been obsessed by the idea of the tree, and now that it's disappeared we're at a loose end. Everybody, from your father and Bradby down to Bryce and ourselves, has taken it for granted that a tree's vital ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man's wisdom and strength in the living of our ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the least of all, had prevented him, up to this day, from entering what he thought must surely be paradise; and now he took the risk and slipped in, not only stricken with curiosity, but obsessed with a desire to tell a wonderful tale to his patient wife and four sons, who, because they were his sons, were doomed to remain of the lowest servile caste; as would be their sons far, oh! far beyond ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... individuals as John Standard reporting the weight of various parts of the hen's egg, e.g., the shell, the yolk, the white, reveal the wing of embryological investigation that was increasingly obsessed with quantification and the physicochemical analysis of the embryo and its vital functions. In this they were following the injunction of Boyle, who used the developing embryo as a vehicle in an attack upon the idea that mixed ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... spent in solitude and unusual circumstances, Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to him like ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... about; at night he turned into a music hall, but variety turns did not interest him; he could not raise a laugh and returned to the hotel by ten o'clock. Jane's face haunted him; no woman had ever so obsessed him. It made him angry that he, Carl Meason, should be caught in the toils, discover that a woman ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... Bakuma was obsessed by terror inspired by the fact that Bakahenzie had discovered her presence; the inherent awe of the witch-doctor which had been temporarily allayed by the presence of the white, was revived, as well as the inevitability ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... certain that up to a point in the evolution of Self most people find life quite exciting and thrilling. But when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb—something has been lost. From this numbed condition ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... it all was that the Abati became obsessed with the saying of the Fung scouts to the shepherds, which, after all, was but a repetition of that of their envoys delivered to the Council a little while before: that they should hasten to destroy the idol Harmac, lest he should move himself to Mur. How an idol ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... had taken place in the nursery among Aunt Beattie's bricks, by which Robin was still obsessed. Dion had sat on the floor and built towers with his boy, and had wondered, as he handled the bricks in the shining of the nursery fire, whether he would come back to help Robin with his building later on. He was going out to ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Road. That he has killed a number of people in Albania you may well suppose. Whole villages have been wiped out to provide him with a little excitement. The man was a Nero without any of Nero's amiable weaknesses. He was obsessed with the idea that he himself was in danger of assassination, and saw an enemy even in his trusty servant. Undoubtedly the chauffeur Poropulos was in touch with several Continental government circles. You understand," said the Minister in conclusion, "that I ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... exaggerations must be sloughed off. I think a little of the sepia, for instance, that was in the brush of Paul must be washed away. Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... that if only I had had a photograph of my father, and could have shown it to Mr. Rawlence, the position would have been quite different! I suppose I must have been a rather fatuous youth. Also, I was obsessed to the point of mania by the determination not to become a veritable 'inmate' of St. Peter's, like my fellows there, however long I might be condemned to live in ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... order to catch the faintest sound of life within. But she could only hear the crude, sharp ticking of the cheap clock which, as she knew, Aguilar had supplied to Jane Foley. The vision of Jane lying unconscious or dead obsessed her. Then she thrust it away and laughed at it. Assuredly Aguilar and Jane must have received some alarm as to a reappearance of the police; they must have fled while there had yet been time. Where could they have gone? Of course, through the ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Madison approaching, stern, terrible, exacting some awful penalty, like an implacable judge. She had a premonition of an approaching catastrophe, a feeling, vague but nevertheless palpable, that something was going to happen. The idea obsessed her, haunted her; she could not shake it off. She became nervous of her own shadow. Gradually, too, she grew to dislike Brockton. Instead of feeling gratitude for all the luxuries he gave her, she blamed him for having made her what ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... new-comers, staring, open-eyed, at nearly six hundred boys, big and small, assembled together in the Speech-room. So engrossed was he that he scarcely heard the Head Master's opening prayers. John was obsessed, inebriated, with the number of Harrovians, each of whom had once felt strange and shy like himself. From his place close to the great organ, he could look up and up, seeing row after row of faces, knowing that amongst them sat his ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... spectacle affects the mind of the person who is looking at it. It is seldom made use of for a background. Mere description occupied a very small place in Tolstoi's method. The intense fidelity to detail in the portrayal of character, whether obsessed by a mighty passion, or playing with a trivial caprice, is the chief glory of his work. This is why, after the reading of Tolstoi, so many other "realistic" novels seem utterly untrue ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... it all, her natural generosity survived. Royally courageous, loyal and straightforward; to her personal enemies almost magnanimous; to the poor and afflicted pitiful; loving her country passionately: she was blind to the forces at work in the world, obsessed with the idea of one supreme duty, and she set herself, as she deemed, to do battle with Antichrist by the only methods she knew, though they were alien to her natural disposition, facing hatred and obloquy. She whose ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... others came, bringing a dumb friend whose affliction seems to have been primarily due to the malignant influence of an evil spirit rather than to any organic defect. Jesus rebuked the wicked spirit—cast out the demon that had obsessed the afflicted one and held him in the tyranny of speechlessness. The man's tongue was loosened, he was freed from the evil incubus, and was ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Chicago in June, the most imposing candidate was the brilliant leader of the New York Republicans, Seward. But no man in the country had more bitter enemies. Horace Greeley whose paper The Tribune was by far the most influential Republican organ, went to Chicago obsessed by one purpose: because of irreconcilable personal quarrels he would have revenge upon Seward. Others who did not hate Seward were afraid of what Greeley symbolized. And all of them knew that whatever else happened, the West must ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Leger he passed his days in reading and re-reading the two thousand letters the dead Comtesse had written to him, sprinkling their perfumed pages with his tears. And when he was not thus burying himself in the past, he was a prey to the terrors that had obsessed his childhood—the fear of death and ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the conference related to ore deposits and not to the dangers of the traffic, the men were so obsessed with the latter fact, that it crept out in their talk in spite of the Admiral's obvious displeasure at such confession of fear. I particularly marked the outspoken frankness of one, Captain Grauble, whose vessel was the next one scheduled to depart ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... attitude which we put on at moments of great physical effort. Their faces were distorted with a sort of grimace. They were haunted by the memory of the explosion as well as obsessed by what was going to happen. The flame of the candle cast shadows ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... just once, early in the fight, to take the ground he had taken once before; that she was irresponsible, obsessed. There was a fracture somewhere, as James Randolph's jargon had it, in her unconscious mind. She didn't let him go far with that. He saw her blaze up in a splendid burst of wrath, as she had blazed once—oh, an eternity ago, at a street-car conductor. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... surveyed the quiet building. It occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of the Benton family, and of Miss Emily. The church had been the realest thing in their lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parish house. When Carlo Benton died (however did such an ungodly name come to belong to a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done without fresh mourning ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dawn the camp would be on its way to its objective, the hills beyond the outline of the lost "City of the Horizon." Abdul, the visionary and the pious Moslem, was as keen about reaching Akhnaton's treasure as Pizarro was obsessed with the reports of the wealth ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... to cover the retreat. But it was an unequal struggle, the heavier and more rapid fire of the English doing fearful execution on decks crowded with men-at-arms. Such artillery combat was hitherto unheard of. Though warned of the new northern methods, the Spanish were obsessed by tradition; they were prepared for grappling and boarding, and could they have closed, their numbers and discipline would have told. Both sides suffered from short ammunition; but the Armada, with no fresh supplies, was undoubtedly in the worse case. "They fighting ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... sickening fear that the strange confidence that obsessed the Worcester players had been ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... gaudy and noisy thing. He had thought that his attitude had been nicely adjusted, but now he saw that there were still heights to be reached—perhaps in this welcome that he was giving to Dune's success he might attain his position. . . . Not, in any way, a bad fellow, this Cardillac—but obsessed by a self-conscious conviction that the world was looking at him; the world never looks for more than an instant at self-consciousness, but it dearly loves self-forgetfulness, for that implies a ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... conduct became even stranger in fact he was as a man obsessed. He rarely spoke to us, but spent his whole time with the Bushmen, wandering away into the mountains and the thick jungle bordering the river, refusing our company, and no longer even carrying a rifle in a country at that time teeming with wild animals. ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... acknowledged the courtesy, but Barbara rudely failed to notice it as she was so obsessed with the desire to complain about the railroad, the natives of Oak Creek, the trails to Pebbly Pit, and ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wrap himself in what Saint-Simon has called a "terrible majesty." He was obsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity—of kingship. I cannot believe that he conceived himself human. He appears to have held that being king was very like being God, and he duped the world by ceremonials of etiquette that were very ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... which he afterwards had to undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva. He began the score of Siegfried towards the end of 1856, while the thought of Tristan was stirring within him. In Tristan he wished to depict love as "a dreadful anguish"; and this idea obsessed him so completely that he could not finish Siegfried. He seemed to be consumed by a burning fever; and, abandoning Siegfried in the middle of the second act, he threw himself madly into Tristan. "I want to gratify my desire for love," he says, "until it is completely ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... resolves itself into a simple form. It illustrates the clash between the emotional and the intellectual characters, the man of heart and the man of brain. The man of heart, Antonio, is obsessed by a tenderness for his friend. The man of brain is obsessed by a lust to uphold intellect in a thoughtless world that makes intellect bitter in every age. Shylock is a man of intellect, born into a despised race. It is his tragedy that the generous Gentiles about ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... purchase was abolished in the army, when the deceased wife's sister bill was passed, when the Parliament act became law; and it will positively sound again when the mediaeval Chinese traditions of the Diplomatic Service are cast aside. There are many important people alive today who are so obsessed by those traditions as to believe religiously that if the British people, and by consequence the German Government, were made aware of the peace terms, the German Army would in some mysterious way be strengthened and encouraged, and our own ultimate success imperiled. Such is the power of the dead ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and injustice of it all. The baby at La Panne—why should it go through life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer—why should he have died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who sat all day by the phonograph, listening ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... come'—such mysteries it almost absolutely ignored. Even Death seemed to lie a little beyond its vision. What a difference, in this respect, between the literature of Louis XIV and the literature of Elizabeth! The latter is obsessed by the smell of mortality; its imagination, penetrating to the depths and the heights, shows us mankind adrift amid eternities, and the whole universe the doubtful shadow of a dream. In the former, these magnificent obscurities ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... followed Graylock, night after night, slyly, stealthily, shirking after him through busy avenues at midday, lurking by shadowy houses at midnight, burning to see what expression this man wore, what was imprinted on his features;—obsessed by a desire to learn what he might ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... feeling; she had not expected Elisabeth to be of the fearful type of woman. Women of splendid physique and abounding vitality are rarely obsessed by craven apprehensions. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... elevator doors. It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... white?" She was in need of all her vanity just then. The mirror had shown her a face pale and luminous, not less beautiful—she knew that—but far older than the face whose memory Jacques carried with him into prison. She was obsessed by the fear that ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... at the bank of the river again. They were in the heart of the willow glade, still shorn of its summer beauty. The man was standing, large, dominating before her, but obsessed by every unmanly fear. The girl was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, whose screen of tilted roots set up a barrier which shut her from the view of the frowning glances of the aged Fort above them, and whose winter-starved branches formed a breakwater ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... had been obsessed with one ambition, and that was to win Joyce for his wife, in spite of the fact that he was fifteen years her senior and held ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... of your slaves, caged in your furnished rooms, Ushered to meals when reft of appetite— Though hungry, bound to wait a stated hour— Your dearest contemplation broken off By the appointed summons to your bath; Racked with more thought for those whom you may flog Than for those dear; obsessed by your possessions With a dull round of stale anxieties;— Soon maintenance grows the extreme reach of hope For those held in respect, as in a vice, By citizens of whom they are the pick. Of men the least bond is the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... to some extent corrected, or, here and there cancelled) by passages in Burn in Exile (vol. i.) and in Ryecroft. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of Veranilda, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen—after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... His feeling was deeper, and accompanied by a far more involved philosophy of self-recognition. At the same time, while acutely conscious of his absolute need of Susan Brundon, he was at a loss to discover its essence, shape. Before he had known her he had been obsessed by a distaste for his existence; he had desperately wanted something without definition ... And Susan was that desire, delicate, clear-eyed Susan. Yet, still, the heart ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer |
