"Obsessive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... through a window. He is in a veritable panic, and yet presents no other fears; is a reader and thinker, clever at his work (he is a painter), but his fear remains inaccessible and uncontrollable. Often one experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case, the whole life of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... open old people's homes for her sons. She desexes her people with sport and obsessive ideas: were not other countries keeping her in perpetual unrest, she would in a couple of generations be ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... obsessive dread showed plainly on his face and in his movements. Such a fear would have induced most men to abandon any enterprise which was not fraught with compelling necessity; with him insistent curiosity seemed to counterbalance it. The man's ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... a message of any kind from the Subliminal to the Supraliminal. And he went a step farther in his hypothetic interpretation, when he insisted on "symbolism" as one of the ways in which one stratum of our personality will often interpret the influences of another. Obsessive thoughts and delusions, as well as voices, visions, and impulses, thus fall subject to one mode of treatment. To explain them, we must explore the Subliminal; to cure them we must ...
— Memories and Studies • William James |
