"Abnormal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... qualification for certain acts, necessarily results from imbecility, but may also result from other causes, as from insanity or from age, sex, etc.; as, the incapacity of a minor to make a contract. Idiocy or imbecility is weakness of mind, while insanity is disorder or abnormal action of mind. Folly and foolishness denote a want of mental and often of moral balance. Fatuity is sometimes used as equivalent to idiocy, but more frequently signifies conceited and excessive ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... talking to Warren. Warren was shocked at the mere thought of her suspicions, had seen nothing, had suspected nothing, couldn't believe that Rachael could be so foolish! Warren's arms were about her, he was going to take her and the boys away. This was a bad atmosphere for wives, this diseased and abnormal city, Warren said. She was buying steamer coats for Derry ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... do well to take up this matter and discourage people from frequenting the exhibitions of tricksters. There are doubtless many laws in nature yet undiscovered, and a few persons undoubtedly possess abnormal powers. This makes the cultivation of the love of trickery the more dangerous. It prevents the truth from being perceived. It enables charlatans to find dupes, and causes the real magician to be applauded ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... history. He was the only child of a doctor in a Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible. They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common, middle-class, Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however, the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a change of the organism itself, but a change in its descendants. The new formation exists in the parental organism only as a possibility (potential); in the descendants it becomes a reality (actual). Most commonly, monstrosities with very abnormal forms are sterile, but there are instances where they reproduce their kind and become a species.[35] Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who perhaps made the deepest investigations ever conducted into the nature and causes of their production, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... century the attention of the medical profession has been directed to the special and ultimate results of Phthisis, instead of the primary condition of the system causing the formation of tubercles. The new knowledge, derived from the stethoscope, by detecting those abnormal deposits of abortive nutrition, called tubercles, has been received for more than its worth, and has greatly served to keep up the delusion of treating effects instead of causes. The tubercular deposits, revealed by auscultation, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... makes places abnormal and out of character, but in Venice it rather gives one a sense of the true Venice, she that once held the gorgeous East in fee. For the Venice of every day only escapes vulgarity by force of beauty: she lives up to the English and German tripper, borders her great Piazza with photograph ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... it does not horrify. In order that we should experience horror, something more is needed than the excitation of the soul, something more than the spectacle of the dreadful death; there must be a shuddering sense of mystery or a sensation of abnormal terror beyond the limits of nature. A man who dies, even in the most dramatic conditions, does not excite horror; a field of battle is not horrible, blood is not horrible; the vilest ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of the desert must be gifted with keen instincts; or, at all events, with an experience that would enable them to detect the slightest "fault" in the aspect of a landscape, so well known to them,—in short, that they would notice anything that might appear "abnormal" in it. ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... trying to heal the body of an ailment caused by a dislocated member, be it a bone, ligament, or nerve, by which abnormal pressure is maintained upon a blood vessel or a nerve, would be like trying to operate a machine with an important cog out of gear. To cure it involves the reduction of a dislocation; the breaking up of adhesions, and the arousing of the ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... unfortunate that both were in an abnormal mood. They had borne some strain, and the shock of the disaster to the crop had left them with jangled nerves. This clouded Helen's judgment, but reenforced her pride. She had meant well when she tried to help Sadie with Bob, and could ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... Anne. She had difficulty in believing that dear little Mrs. Gardner could ever have taken this abnormal, this monstrous attitude. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... who voted for it. It was an extreme proposition,—a new departure from the long-established usage of the Federal Government, and for that reason, if for no other, personally degrading to the incumbent of the Presidential office. It could only have grown out of the abnormal excitement created by the dissensions between the two great Departments of the Government. The bitterness engendered resembled that which always distinguishes a family quarrel. The measure was resorted to as one of self-defense against the alleged ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the pit and the fire, and examined the naked feet, quite uninjured, of the performers. He publishes an extract to this effect from his diary. The performers, I believe, were Klings. Nothing is said to indicate any condition of trance, or other abnormal state, in ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... college examinations when I was thirteen because I couldn't help it. My chief associates were professors, and I took a tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted I was not abnormal in other ways. When I was sixteen I got tired of being a freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as I'd gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree of Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... about? Some business matter clearly. Marcia knew very well that the family circumstances were abnormal. Mothers in Lady Coryston's position, when their husbands expire, generally retire to a dower-house, on a jointure; leaving their former splendors—the family mansion and the family income—behind them. They step down from their pedestal, and efface themselves; ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... comparatively small degree of angularity may lead to serious loss of function, especially in the lower limb; the joints above and below the fracture are placed at a disadvantage, arthritic changes result from the abnormal strain to which they are subjected, and rarefaction of ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... fact were needed to verify the denouement of "The Pipe," it might be the general statement that lizards are abnormal brutes anyhow. Consider the chameleons of unsettled hue. And what is one to think of an animal which, when captured by the tail, is able to make its escape by willfully shuffling off ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... family. Subsequently they found that conception, thwarted at the time that desire was present, fails to occur when it becomes convenient. In such cases, even although examination of the pelvic organ shows nothing abnormal, all one's endeavours to secure conception frequently go unrewarded. Sometimes such a woman is not only sterile, but nervous, and in generally poor health; but the more common occurrence is that she remains fairly well until ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... risen overnight before the wands of financial magicians whose abilities he despised when he compared them with his own, was too much for timidity. He had been born with a large vanity, and it had been stuffed from his babyhood by all around him until it was become as abnormal as the liver of a Strasburg goose—and as supersensitive. It suffered acutely as these Jacks went climbing up their bean-stalk wealth to heights of magnificence from which the establishments and equipages of the Fanning-Smiths must seem poor to shabbiness. ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... is an unheard-of thing in the country, an abnormal proceeding if ever there was one. Everybody, in the first place, knows everybody else, and creditor and debtor being bound to meet each other daily all their lives long, nobody likes to take this odious course. When a defaulter—to ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... policy but in its origin, in fact a monarchy. No intelligent king has any inducement to choose incompetent men as his officials. His interest would lead him to do exactly the opposite. You will say that an intelligent king is a very rare, even an abnormal thing. I readily agree. Except in a very few instances, which history records with amazement, a king has exactly the same reasons as the people for selecting as his favourites men who will not eclipse nor contradict him, and who consequently seldom turn out to be the best of citizens either ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... is anything beyond—any unexplored regions of the Mind. It laughs at the reports that come from those who have penetrated farther within the recesses of their being, and dismisses the reports as mere "dreams," "fantasies," "illusions," "ecstatic imaginings," "abnormal states," etc., etc. But, nevertheless, there are schools of thought that teach of these higher states, and there are men of all ages and races that have entered them and have reported concerning them. And we feel justified in asking you to take them ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... be regarded somewhat as personal foes, to be combated and overcome by the superior prowess of the physician. It was not until such views were abandoned, and insanity, as well as every other disease, was considered as an abnormal action or condition, that true progress could be expected. One of the results of inquiry into the nature of insanity, starting from this point, has been a growing conviction that it implies defect and imperfection, as well as casual disorder. Attention is now directed less to occasional and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... retentive quality that they possess in the organism of some favored individuals, and this emotional factor becomes a bond of association. Observe that this hypothesis explains also the much more unusual cases of "colored" smell, taste, and pain; that is, an abnormal association between given colors and tastes, smells, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... rocks according to their varieties of form and superposition into stratified and unstratified, schistose and compact, normal and abnormal, we investigate those phenomena of formation and transformation which are still going on before our eyes, we shall find that rocks admit of being arranged according to four ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... rotation slows, the bullet may on impact wobble like a top before it ceases to spin. Probably the power of penetration possessed by a bullet wobbling in this manner would not be very great, but its effect would mainly be altered in the direction of an abnormal increase in the size of the aperture of entry, or possibly in the degree of comminution ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... less advanced as regards abnormal substances; that is to say, those composed of molecules, partly simple and partly complex, and either dissociated or associated. These cases must naturally be governed by very complex laws. Recent researches by MM. Van ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. We have neither ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... meal of sour brown bread and goat-milk cheese; to talk with him desultorily, and study him the while, inasmuch as he wakened an interest in me that was full of speculation. For his was not an imbecility either hereditary or constitutional. From the first there had appeared to me something abnormal in it—a suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in the brain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out. This was not merely conjectural, of course. I had the story of his mental collapse from his mother ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... German dynasties have overstepped their function and abused the power entrusted to them. As long as, in normal times, political activities were confined to the diplomatic arena there was no peril of rousing the masses out of their ignorant indolence; but, when times are abnormal, it is a different and a dangerous thing to march these peoples against their most intimate feelings. When, as the outcome of the present false situation, sooner or later the dynastic power breaks, it will then be for the powers who are now fighting for better principles not to impose their ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... qualifications of a good lawyer, excepting those which give success with juries, particularly in criminal practice: he is represented as ignorant of the law, indolent, and grossly negligent of business,—with nothing, in fact, to give him the least success in the profession but an abnormal and quite unaccountable gift of ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... throw light on the question whether exceptionally bright children are specially likely to be one-sided, nervous, delicate, morally abnormal, socially unadaptable, or otherwise peculiar, the writer has secured rather extensive information regarding 31 children whose mental age was found by intelligence tests to be 25 per cent above the actual age. This degree of intelligence is possessed by about 2 children out of 100, and is nearly ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... be a very skilful fisherman. A kingfisher is a kind of bird. Here again we have an abnormal association of words and as the compound word is the name of a specific sort of bird there is no hyphen. A king-fisher, if it meant anything, would probably mean one who fished for kings, as a pearl-diver is ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... Renaissance is presented with terrible frankness, but with an overwhelming sense for passion, tragedy, and pathos. The most moving pathos permeates some of the plays of John Ford (of the time of Charles I), for example, 'The Broken Heart'; but they are abnormal and unhealthy. Philip Massinger, a pupil and collaborator of Fletcher, was of thoughtful spirit, and apparently a sincere moralist at heart, in spite of much concession in his plays to the contrary demands of the time. His famous comedy, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' a satire ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... meek from the severe scourging of a recent and terrible bereavement; but that anomalous white face and proud, queenly form were unlike all other flesh that his keen eyes had hitherto scanned; and he regarded her as curiously as he would have examined some abnormal-looking specimen of nerves and muscles laid upon the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... villa with its marigold-tinted curtains. He had by no manner of means decided on his course of action. He could not have told you what he was going to say to Maisie. In this as in so many other ways, he believed himself abnormal. No one had ever told him that ninety-nine out of a hundred married men, if they spoke the truth, would have to confess that they had been unaware thirty seconds before they proposed that they were going to do ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... was done very well by Lady Glen,—as many in the political world persisted in calling her even in these days. She had not as yet quite carried out her plan,—the doing of which would have required her to reconcile her husband to some excessive abnormal expenditure, and to have obtained from him a deliberate sanction for appropriation and probable sale of property. She never could find the proper moment for doing this, having, with all her courage,—low down in some corner of her heart,—a ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... by the difference between the weight of the air originally distending these cavities, and that of the fluid which now fills them. This difference is sufficient to cause the body to sink, as a general rule; but is insufficient in the cases of individuals with small bones and an abnormal quantity of flaccid or fatty matter. Such individuals ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wore a very fine black beard; slight baldness added to the height of a forehead naturally large. But what struck the Princess most, although she had little heart to observe the man very closely, was the abnormal size of his head and the number of wrinkles that ran right across his temples, following the line ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... unsanctified heart of the believer cannot be fully satisfied, because of the consciousness of the presence of the carnal nature, more scripturally called "our old man." Just what it is may not perhaps be perfectly understood by the new convert, but that something abnormal exists will soon be discovered, and there will be a longing in the heart for an inward cleansing—a normal desire for the normal experience. On the other hand, when this blessed experience is attained, there ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... an unarmed warrior that went to battle in a frenzy and possessed with preternatural strength. In their fury the berserks would attack indiscriminately friend or foe or even inanimate objects. They were looked upon as abnormal. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... quite unnecessary, and still more undesirable, to recite at length in these lectures the social, medical, and psycho-pathological facts concerning abnormal or perverted sexual processes. Fortunately, the educational ends may be gained by a general review that points out the bearings of the main lines of the sexual problems, the misunderstandings and mistakes that education ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... It is also worthy of notice that in the right hand column of characters (hieroglyphics) over the inverted figure in Plate 58b two numbers, 13 and 12, are found attached to characters which appear to be abnormal forms of month symbols. ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... Paul's case is abnormal or the reverse, it is surely a false inference that, because Christ grew up without the need of conversion, His life affords in this respect a pattern to sinful men. It is just His perfect union with God which differentiates Him entirely from ordinary men; and that which may be necessary ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... day law was an abnormal affair undoubtedly forced through for political purposes, and never should have been passed and should be ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... brother. "It's his eyes," he said. "You see, sir, he has what they call abnormal eyesight. He can see farther and clearer than anybody else. He can see in the dark too, nearly as well as by day. So it wasn't the fault of the lookout that Beany saw it first. He always sees everything before anybody ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... about them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable, if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... things into the account, as good as any, and if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable that Helen's, still it does seem that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... is at the top. Clearly these New Zealand chaffinches were at a loss for a design when fabricating their nest. They had no standard to work by, no nests of their own kind to copy, no older birds to give them any instruction, and the result is the abnormal ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to find me, scorching as he did over the downland turf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby plantations at their narrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodical teachings of the St. John's Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case, Beatrice came galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord Carnaby hard behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and white as death. "And cool as a cucumber, too," said Cothope, turning it over in his mind ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... large outlays of money which should be raised through normal investment channels. But while private capital should finance this expansion program, the Government should recognize its responsibility for sharing part of any special or abnormal risk of loss attached to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... Charlie. "But I guess, from his bad habits, his mind is warped. He is abnormal, and your refusal, coupled with the fact that you are probably going to a team that he has tried his best to make, and can't, simply made him wild. So, if I were you, I should be on ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... elephant tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages. According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade that were abnormal, unthinkable. The note never was of hope, never of cheer, never inspiring. There was always the grievance, the spirit of unrest, of rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate. Of his own land and life he heard nothing, not even when his face ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... Middle Ages was a symbol of what man really was. Chesterton feels that every outside force that came to Everyman had to be abnormal—for instance, 'Death had to be bony'—so he contends in 'Pendennis' that the shapes that intrude on the life of Arthur Pendennis have aggressive and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... impossibly blasphemous if the narrative were the forgery which so much elaborate modern criticism has wholly failed to prove that it is—"forthwith came there out blood and water." Whether the water was due to some abnormal pathological conditions caused by the dreadful complication of the Saviour's sufferings, or whether it rather means that the pericardium had been rent by the spear point, and that those who took down the body observed some drops of its serum mingled with the blood, in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... desired to give up his establishment within a year. He adhered to this rule in all cases that called for the purchase outright of substantial necessities. The bump of calculativeness in Monty Brewster's head was growing to abnormal proportions. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... are preceded by the violent throes of the heart to propel the carbonized blood from the overworked tissues and have them set free at the lungs where the air is rushing in at the normal ratio of four to one. This is not an abnormal action, but is of necessity, or asphyxia would instantly result and the runner would drop. Such sometimes occurs where the runner exerts himself too violently at the very outset; and to do so he is compelled to hold his breath for this undue effort, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... mention of the other man had been a master-stroke of policy—felt almost at his wits' end. Standing by the mantelpiece mechanically filling his pipe, he watched Desmond set out his books and papers on the table near the window, intent on a morning of abnormal industry; and the pathos of it all caught at his heart. For the first time in his controlled and ordered life he felt impelled to carry a situation by storm—the result possibly of playing Providence to Theo for the space ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... meant chiefly the chordae tendineae. The "bone in the heart" of which he speaks was probably the cruciform ossification which is normally found in the ox and the stag below the origin of the aorta. It is found in the horse only in advanced age, or under abnormal conditions. The statement that the heart contains no more than three chambers has always been considered as a very gross blunder on the part of Aristotle. Even Cuvier, who generally lavishes upon the philosopher the most extravagant praise, ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... practical disregard of the whole natural setting. They studied little more than corpses and experimental animals, and many a critic wondered how such a corpse or a frog could ever show any mind, normal or abnormal. To get things balanced again, the vision of man had to expand to take a sane and practical view of all of human life—not only of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... been told, even longer; about the thickness of a goose-quill, hollow, of course, the last inch and a half filled with nectar. Studying this appendage by the light of the principles he had laid down, Darwin ventured on a prophecy which roused special mirth among the unbelievers. Not only the abnormal length of the nectary had to be considered; there was, besides, the fact that all its honey lay at the base, a foot or more from the orifice. Accepting it as a postulate that every detail of the apparatus must be equally essential for the purpose it ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... altogether abnormal, and endeavoured to explain it from the peculiarity of our Lord's humanity. Though He died. He was not, like other men, to see corruption; His body was to escape in a few hours, transfigured and glorious, from the grasp of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... of that in me which I could not resist, several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... was no wonder that Mr Lipscombe, who was a disappointed man, should spend much time in sleeping, and out of sheer imitation he once or twice took to having a nap himself, but twice settled that. He had too much vitality in his composition to sleep at abnormal times. ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... usually endeavors to overcome these difficulties by applying to the scratched area sandarach, resin, alum, paste, or two or three of these together, the effect being to prevent an unusually large flow of ink from the pen and its abnormal absorption by the paper. ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... identified with his object, he can observe its irregularities without being irritated or perturbed. As for that Rhadamanthine criticism which sits aloof from its object, and treats every aberration from a straight line as something abnormal and abominable, he leaves it to the immaculate. In truth, such criticism, with all its pretences to authority, is open to this fatal objection,—it tends to destroy our relish for literature; instead of stimulating the appetite, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... reached, the usual examination took place. Atlantic never could tell the name of the street in which he lived, nor the number of the house. Pacific could, perhaps, but would not; and it must be said, in apology for her abnormal defiance, that her mental operations were somewhat confused, owing to copious indulgence in strong tea, ginger, sugar-cane, and dried fish. She had not been wisely approached in the first place, and she ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ask you, Senor, whether you are aware that the present condition of Cuba is somewhat abnormal, for I feel convinced that a caballero of your intelligence must have long ere this discovered that the island is literally seething with rebellion—to such an extent, indeed, that a rising against ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... about them; and I maintain that a disagreeable child is a sorrowful exception to the rule, and the result of mismanagement and foolish indulgences on the part of parents and teachers. But when this abnormal nuisance is found, a peevish, fretful child—a child who is always wanting to taste, a child who ignores the admirable purposes for which pocket-handkerchiefs were designed, such an enfant terrible as he who told the kindly mother, offering to bring her 'Gustus to join him in his play, that ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... wealth, some of it in the form of little statues of men and women, or perhaps of gods. Yet, oddly enough, he was hunchback with a huge skull, almost a monstrosity indeed. Perhaps his mind partook of the abnormal qualities of his body, since no less than eleven little children had been sacrificed at his obsequies, two of whom, judging from their crooked bones, must have ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... the sense of sight. The cause of such visual disturbance is, I think, generally due to stomach trouble; and, thank God! I have an excellent stomach. Moreover, visual illusions are accompanied with special abnormal conditions which impress the victims of hallucination themselves, and inspire them with a sort of terror. Now, I felt nothing of this kind; the object which I saw, although seemingly impossible in itself, appeared to me under all the natural conditions ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... one of the strangest of psychological phenomena. The baselessness of the reasonings used to bolster up the British clinging to superfluous letters is very ably shown in Professor Matthews' Americanisms and Briticisms. Let me only put in a plea for the retention of such abnormal spellings as serve to distinguish two words of the same sound. For instance, it seems to me useful that we should write "story" for a tale and "storey" for a floor, and in the plural ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... was much more rare than other forms of this abnormal condition. The Abbe d'Asfeld, in his work against the convulsionists, alluding to the state of ecstasy, defines it as a state "in which the soul, carried away by a superior force, and, as it were, out of itself, becomes unconscious of surrounding objects, and occupies itself with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... horror as of something uncanny and abnormal stole over him. Was the man's back curved, or had he by some subtle vision a perception of some terrible spiritual deformity, only symbolized by a curved spine? In a minute he gave an impatient stamp, and tried to shake himself free from the vague ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... any gentleman there could be a doubt. Instead of the existence of a difficulty, there was a flood of light upon his path,—so the reader will think;—a flood so clear that not to see his way was impossible. A man carried away by abnormal appetites, and wickedness, and the devil, may of course commit murder, or forge bills, or become a fraudulent director of a bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... are far less exposed to acute, and especially to inflammatory, affections than rural populations, who live in a free, normal atmosphere; but they suffer the more from chronic affections. And if life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health, how great must be the harmful influence of an abnormal atmosphere in the working-people's quarters, where, as we have seen, everything combines to poison the air. In the country, it may, perhaps, be comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap adjoining one's dwelling, because the air has free ingress from all sides; but in the midst of ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... moved to go on. To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years. But he could not. He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes, precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant. But greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... distressing interference with all Sophy's personal desires and occupations. The servants were, in a measure, compelled to take part in the unnatural quarrel; and before three weeks were over, Sophy's condition was one of such abnormal excitement that she was hardly any longer accountable for her actions. The final blow was struck while she was so little able to bear it. A letter from Archie, posted in Christiania and addressed to his wife, came one morning. As Sophy was never ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... water on the brain), where there is an abnormal secretion of cerebro-spinal fluid acting to increase the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and the character alters ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... magnitude to spend time and resources upon scientific developments, has responded with many improvements which have increased the efficiency of light-production. Some figures of the Census Bureau may be of interest. These are given for 1914 in order that the abnormal conditions due to the recent war may be avoided. The figures pertaining to the manufacture of gas for sale which do not include private plants are as follows for the year 1914 ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Social Relations.—A study of society starts with the obvious fact that human beings live together. The hermit is abnormal. However far back we go in the process of human evolution we find the existence of social relations, and sociability seems a quality ingrained in human nature. Every individual has his own personality that belongs to him apart from every other individual, but the perpetuation and development ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the sleep which follows all abnormal displays of strength, and dimly conscious that she was safe from violence, gradually unbent her fingers. Brigaut's letter fell from them ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... moved him to speak to her, but he conquered the abnormal and incorrect impulse, contenting himself to walk past her with a side-glance, while at the end of the deck-promenade, instead of returning on his footsteps, he even arched his path round to the windy side. After some minutes of ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... fame; and that "movies" were a bore. To the girls he was like a breath from the metropolis itself, that hard, throbbing, restless, glaring, convivial, avid, fascinating city in which is centred everything of wealth and misery, everything intense and abnormal, and everything to satisfy the desires. But the effect upon the girls was different. Imogene, though entertained, continued calm, unimpressed, unenvious; Ruth, however, as she listened and asked questions, the better they became ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... only affected foreign politics, it reacted very strongly on Belgium's internal life. If it crippled her activity with regard to home defence, it developed to an abnormal degree party warfare. It shut the door on international problems and all questions which may be considered as national issues and before which party strife ought to cease in consideration for the common weal. ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... things coastwise, supplemented by the activity of American privateers, induced abnormal conditions of navigation in the western Atlantic. The scanty success of Rodgers, Bainbridge, and the "Chesapeake" have been noted; and it may be observed that there was a great similarity in the directions taken by these and others. The Cape Verdes, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... that doubted, in order that he might learn the omnipresence of the Supreme. A story? facts, not fiction; truth, not imagination; and if you could look back to the time of those struggles, there would seem to you nothing strange or abnormal in the story; for you would see it repeated with less vividness in the smaller struggles where the Sons of the Fire were purging and redeeming the earth, in order that the later human evolution ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... market. The Pit traders have got some crazy war rumour going, and they're as flighty over it as a young ladies' seminary over a great big rat. And even without that, the market is top-heavy. Porteous makes me weary. He and his gang have been bucking it up till we've got an abnormal price. Ninety-four for May wheat! Why, it's ridiculous. Ought to be selling way down in the eighties. The least little jolt would tip her over. Well," he said abruptly, squaring himself at Jadwin, "do we come in? If that same luck of yours is still in working order, here's your chance, J., to ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... clings in my memory. In his long, yellow robe, his masklike, intellectual face bent forward amongst the riot of singular objects upon the table, his great, high brow gleaming in the light of the shaded lamp above him, and with the abnormal eyes, filmed and green, raised to us, he seemed a figure from the realms of delirium. But, most amazing circumstance of all, he and his surroundings tallied, almost identically, with the dream-picture which had come to me as I lay chained ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... fearing scandal, he loved it. He chose his friends partly for their charm, and partly for their bad reputations; and the white flower of a blameless life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him. He believed that Art showed the way to Nature, and worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... an author, and why, more fortunate than Madame de Stael, she kept her freedom and was thus more excusable for her celebrity, would be to satisfy many curiosities and do justice to one of those abnormal beings who rise in humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted by its rarity,—for in twenty centuries we can count, at most, twenty famous women. Therefore, although in these pages she stands as a secondary ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... rejoiced to be relieved of an expensive burden at good rates. Knowing nothing of these facts in natural history, I pondered deeply over the double phenomenon. I said the hens seemed normal only as to appetite; the ducks proved abnormal in this respect. They were always coming up to the back door, clamoring for food—always unappeased. They preferred cake, fresh bread, hot boiled potatoes, doted on tender bits of meat, but would gobble up anything and everything, more voracious and less fastidious than the ordinary hog ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... they were more fully alive. It was unfair to blame them for missing marriage certificates. True, his father had never committed a theft, but there was no necessity for a man to steal if he had an income of six thousand crowns and could please himself. The act would be absurd or abnormal in such ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... "Model Prisons," or rather the assumptions of that Latter-day Pamphlet, Mr. Bayne takes a view of our duty to criminals with which we agree, and he quotes the fact that the majority of those who belong to the criminal class are found to have abnormal brains and often diseased bodies. He also treats just in the way we might expect the dictum that stupidity means badness. The last meaning of that, we almost fear, Mr. Bayne has not quite caught; as John Bunyan meant it, and as Carlyle means it, it is surely true. Again, it seems doubtful ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... red light. It is unsafe. The possible line between safety and danger in the use of alcoholic drink is dangerously unstable. Safety lies back of total abstinence. The normal man has no legitimate use for alcohol as a beverage, and he has no right to render himself abnormal by its use when lives are dependent upon his efficiency. None but normal men should run railway trains. The traveling public has unqualified right to demand and expect none less safe.' This statement deals, not with the moral side, but with the fact that a man ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... indictment. Socrates was accused of perverting the jeunesse doree. At a period when, everywhere, save only in Israel, the abnormal was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly chaste. The perversion of which he was accused was not of that order. It was that of inciting lads to disobey their parents when the latter opposed ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Volition in women: Reason, Intuition; Reverence, Devotion; Passion, Love. The woman should strike a lower key-note, but a sharper sound. Man has vigour of reason, woman quickness of feeling. The woman who possesses masculine force of intellect is abnormal." He did not half comprehend me, I could see, but he agreed with the broad view of the case. "I only knew one woman who was really 'strong-minded', as they call it," he said, "and she was a ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of a highly nervous system, overstrained, diseased. Yes, diseased! If it does not result in the frantic madness of Lamb, or the final imbecility of Southey, it is manifested in various other forms, such as the morbid melancholy of Cowper, the bitter misanthropy of Pope, the abnormal moodiness and misery of Byron, the unsound and dangerous theories of Shelley, and the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... was considered an abnormal delay in the third act of the demonstration. It was known that the Germans were engaged in making elaborate arrangements for this mid-summer push. It was the enemy hope in this great offensive to strike a final effective blow against the hard-pressed Allied line before America's rising power ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... the time when men still imagined that to be a pivotal man in some way enhanced their chances of being demobilised that an abnormal wave of acquisitiveness passed over us. Before it passed, I regret to say, it hovered, chiefly on account of the prospect of a speedy return home and the desire to take back some kind of trophy to satisfy the still small voice of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... if not arising from some abnormal condition of the pelvic organs, can easily be cured by patient taking the proper amount of exercise and good nutritious food, avoiding tea and coffee. An injection every evening of one teaspoonful of Pond's Extract in a cup of hot water, after first cleansing the vagina well ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... in old age. As the years multiply the system absorbs an abnormal and ever increasing amount of calcareous matter. The bones become unduly hard and brittle and are easily broken. Bony matter is liable to be deposited in and about the joints, when they become stiff and painful. It also lodges in the various soft tissues of ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... recognized as the only feasible conventional mode of conveying them. According to the strictest canons of dramatic art, the ideally constructed play should be entirely free from this weakness. Mr. Gillette is credited with having written in "Secret Service" the first aside-less play. But this is abnormal and rather an affectation of technical skill. The aside is an accepted convention. But in ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... for membership in the Imperial Order of Abnormal Proboscidians, of which I am the High Noble Toby and Surreptitious Treasurer. Two months ago I was the only member. One month ago there were two. To-day we number four Emperors of the Abnormal Proboscis in good standing—doubles every four weeks, see? That's ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... sub-currents, (often more significant than the biggest surface ones,) are unerringly indicated. The lush and the weird that have taken such extraordinary possession of Nineteenth century verse-lovers—what mean they? The inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty—the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself—the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like—and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand—what bearings ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Mohammed Husayn Khan who, originally a Bakkal or greengrocer, was made premier of Fath Ali Shah's brilliant court, the last bright flash of Iranian splendour and autocracy. But Iran is a land upon which Nature has inscribed "Resurgam"; and despite her present abnormal position between two vast overshadowing empires—British India and Russia in Asia—she has still a part to play in history. And I may again note that Al-Islam is based upon the fundamental idea of a Republic which is, all (free) men are equal, and the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... peculiar and characteristic phenomenon is the ardent desire of many sexual perverts, especially inverts, to become secretly engaged or married to the abnormal homosexual object of their love. It is needless to say that there can be no question of legal regulation of such pathological marriages. But the law may ignore them when they do no harm to any one, and regard them as private affairs, especially when they prevent much worse ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... wary little creatures, and possess an abnormal sense of smell that makes it absolutely necessary for hunters to move cautiously to leeward the instant they discover them. It is always an easy matter to find a little hill that will partly screen them—the country ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... representation of ordinary life—save as the merest by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in Julie, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their leaders, and so do ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... in an entirely abnormal state, he had a curious certitude of the proper course to adopt. He went up to a policeman ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... State for their means of subsistence. Even if work is offered to them, many of them not be able at once to reassume their habits of daily industry; the Bohemian life which they have led for the last four months, and which they are still leading, is against it. A siege is so abnormal a condition of things, that the State has been obliged to pay them for doing practically nothing, as otherwise they would have fallen into the hands of the anarchists; but this pottering about from day to day with a gun, doing nothing except play at billiards and drink, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... America. Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be multiplied? Do we want the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so much needed for our racial development, to perish in these sordid, abnormal experiences? Or, do we wish to permit woman to find her way to fundamental freedom through safe, unobjectionable, scientific means? We have our choice. Upon our answer to these questions depends in a tremendous degree ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... have written about smell, especially person-smell, will perhaps be regarded as the abnormal sentiment of one who can have no idea of the "world of reality and beauty which the eye perceives." There are people who are colour-blind, people who are tone-deaf. Most people are smell-blind-and-deaf. We should not condemn a musical composition on the testimony of an ear ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... come to accept the Herland life as normal, because it was normal—none of us make any outcry over mere health and peace and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are all so sadly well acclimated, she had ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... soon came to understand was that the whole of psychology is ruled by the most exact and immutable laws, in which there is nothing fortuitous or abnormal, and that the exact course of an emotion can be predicted with perfect certainty if only all the data ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Napoleon's brain was to any great degree abnormal, but I am satisfied that criminal's brains are generally abnormal, for there are many criminals whose heads do not, by their exterior form, indicate their depravity, but wherever I have examined the interior of the skull I have found the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... therefore he placed the ban on bobbed hair. Whichever side we take in this particular case this is true: The business woman should give, like the business man, an impression of dependability, and she cannot do it if her appearance is abnormal, or if her mind is divided between how she is looking ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... we can discover any law which governs this abnormal position of the types —if, for instance, we can predicate that the letter o, when away from its own, will be more frequently found in the box appropriated to letter a than any other; that b has a general tendency ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... closing struggle with Quarrier. Whether the long strain had unnerved him, whether minutely providing against every possible danger he had been over-scrupulous, over-anxious, morbidly exact—or whether a foresight almost abnormal had evoked a sinister possibility—he did not know; but that threat of Mortimer's to involve Plank with Leila in one common ruin, that boast that he was able to do so could not be ignored as a possible weapon if Quarrier should by any ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... hopeful where there was nothing in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the head and but little to the heart. It supplies a kind of abnormal stimulant to the intellect, but usually freezes out the emotions. It is like the arctic regions, where they have six months of light, but no heat, and where consequently there is no growth of any kind. It is broad, but really superficial and shallow. It is ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... of chin. She was plump, graceful, and neat waisted. Her skin was exquisitely white and fine, and a charming colour flushed her cheeks under excitement. Her hair was always untidy, her hairpins displaying abnormal activity in respect of escape and independent action. Her eyes were round and very prominent, suggestive of highly-polished, brown agates. She was not the least shy or averse to attracting attention. She laughed ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... animals, Tilt continues: "I may fairly infer that similar incitements on the mind of females may have a stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation. I have frequently known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type during courtship in women in whom nothing similar had previously occurred, and that this protracted the treatment of chronic ovaritis and of uterine inflammation." Bonnifield, of Cincinnati ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... rest of the hand normal, this Mount well shaped is an excellent sign to have, as it denotes magnetism and attraction of one sex to the other, but if found together with vicious or abnormal signs in the hand, it ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... I was rather grateful that my guests were so abstracted. That reason was Elizabeth. Her behaviour during dinner, to put it mildly, was disturbing and abnormal. Every time she entered the room to change the plates or hand round the dishes she went through remarkable pantomimic gestures behind the unconscious William's back. She drew my attention to him by nods, winks, and significant gestures. Once or twice she was impelled to clap her hand over ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... any other, little Steve Wickes rejoiced in Sam's departure from school. Owing to some mysterious arrangement of Sam's brain cells he seemed to possess an abnormal interest in observing the sufferings of any animal. The squirming of an unfortunate fly upon a pin fascinated him, the sight of a wretched dog driven mad with terror rushing frantically down a street, with a tin can dangling to its tail, convulsed him with shrieking delight. The more highly ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the dull ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the choice could be made in cold blood! So far from that, it had seemed to me that no more dangerous or painful experience could visit a woman's heart. The victory of mind over instinct and of will over desire is the price of a hideous, abnormal struggle opposed to the very law of our nature. A sad victory baptised with tears, a sacred preparation for the noble defeat that is to crown a ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... beat strongly once more; one last awakening of love in her, and hope of happiness, hope of life. It was quite ridiculous, so utterly unlike her tranquil nature! It could never have been but for her abnormal condition, the state of fear and over-excitement which was the precursor ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... in somber minds feed and grow fat upon their own substance, and it was inconceivable that Stelton's genuine though distorted love, an abnormal product of ten long years, should be dismissed ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan |
