|
|
|
More "Obsession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... homesick American. He was marooned there in the rain, waiting for the skies to clear, so he could do some mountain climbing; and he was beginning to get moldy from the prevalent damp. By now the study of bathing habits had become an obsession with me; I asked him whether he had encountered any bathtubs about the place. He said a bathtub in those altitudes was as rare as a chamois, and the chamois was entirely extinct; so I might make my own calculations. But he said he could show me something that was even a greater curiosity ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the great music written by men. Almost invariably one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty, produced by thoughts of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the abstract—that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... originals; if I suspect an original for old Simon Deaves in The Deaves Affair, I get no farther than a faint suspicion that ... No, I cannot identify his character. (Not that I want to; I am not a victim of that fatal obsession which fastens itself upon so many readers of fiction—the desire to identify the characters in a story with someone in real life. The idea is ridiculous.) Mr. Footner knows Greenwich Village. He knows outlying stretches in the greater ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... spake no word. In his queer heart intelligence of Dick's fame rankled bitterly, yet not so bitterly as the fact of Jan's return to barracks. His obsession made him certain in his own mind that the redoubtable Sourdough could certainly kill any dog. And so he spake no word while Sourdough ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... resided about a quarter of a mile from the Yanceyville court house, within plain view of it. His house was veritably his castle, where he had fortified himself. He was besieged at home and was under obsession everywhere; yet he seemed to hold ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... The galvanometer needle showed what slight variations in the current there were during the course of the treatment. In the middle of the process, while the patient was conversing with the doctor, she was suddenly "obsessed." Coincidental with this obsession, the galvanometer showed a tremendous and permanent fluctuation, indicating that the resistance of the body to the current had ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... criticisms and praises that the scenery is abstract. Quite the contrary is the case. Indoors looks like indoors. Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs. The actors do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to believe. The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for the most part expressed in the acting and plot. The fair looks like a fair and the library looks like a library. There is nothing experimental about any of the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or over-considered. It seems experimental because it is thrown into ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of Weir of Hermiston, a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge more factories, to make more ploughs, and so on, ad infinitum. Where is the sense of it. Such conduct has well been termed money-madness. It is an obsession, a disease, a form ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... comprehensive record I have divided the various stages of my waterwagoning into these parts: the obsession stage; the caramel stage; the pharisaical stage, and the safe-and-sane stage. I drank my Scotch highball and went over to the club. The crowd was there; I sat down at a table and when somebody asked me what I'd have I took a glass of ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... fixity of his gaze upon the object, whose nature he had so promptly declared: he continued to contemplate it for several minutes, and I guessed what was passing in the mind of the man under the obsession of a fixed idea. This fragment of ice, torn from the southern icebergs, came from those waters wherein his thoughts continually ranged. He wanted to see it more near, perhaps at close quarters, it might be to take away some bits of it. At an order ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... wants to enlist, too, but can't because he is only seventeen. Mrs. Elliott met us as we were walking through the village and could not have looked more horrified if she caught me walking with the Kaiser himself. Mrs. Elliott detests the Methodists and all their works. Father says it is an obsession ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... how some of Efaw Kotee's henchmen could have discovered us, slipped up during the night and overpowered her! What had been a remote possibility yesterday, to-day grew into a certainty. With this obsession torturing me I dashed across the Oasis, finally coming out of the forest ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Great Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... was strong, and was knocking urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart lifted slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was so incomprehensible. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... sheer torture much of the time, and all its objectionable features seemed to centre in the Latin. His hatred of that subject approached an obsession. There was no doubt that Lector Booklund could feel it, and every day he watched Keith with more undisguised hostility. At last he could not speak to the boy without losing his temper, and so for days at a time he would not speak to ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... now wore for him had risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which—if relief was the name—he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... itself a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism) with various Tibetan practices and beliefs. The principal of these are demonophobia and the worship of human beings as incarnate deities. Demonophobia is a compendious expression for an obsession which victimizes Chinese and Hindus to some extent as well as Tibetans, namely, the conviction that they are at all times surrounded by fierce and terrible beings against whom they must protect themselves by all the methods that ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... servant or a nurse-girl, all her vitality had been sapped, all her originally superb energy had dwindled down to nothing; her nerves were worn to a frazzle and she became but a shadow of her former self. And the fear of another pregnancy became an obsession with her. She dreamed of it at night, and it poisoned her waking hours in the day. She felt that she simply could not go through another pregnancy, another childbirth, with its sleepless nights and its weary toilsome days. She asked her doctor who brought her children into ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Catherine of Siena had several unquestionable stupors, which are fairly well described. In fact the mystics in general seem to have had communion with God and the saints most often when they seemed unconscious to bystanders.[2] The obsession with death, which seems so intimate a part of the stupor reaction, is a fundamental theme in poetry, religion and philosophy. The psychology of this interest is, speaking broadly, the psychology of stupor. So, from a general standpoint, our problem is related to ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... pauses as his voice breaks—he struggles a moment and lifts his hand as if to throw off an obsession with a ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... Each fought the obsession in his own way, but it is hard to fight the impalpable, hence their sick fancies grew in spite of themselves. Their minds needed food to prey upon, but found none. Each began to criticize the other silently, to sneer at his weaknesses, to meditate derisively upon his peculiarities. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... the man's face was handsome, but there was an unpleasant shiftiness to his brown eyes; and then, entirely outside of his former reasons for hating him, Billy came to loathe him intuitively, as one who was not to be trusted. Finally his dislike for the man became an obsession. He haunted, when discipline permitted, that part of the vessel where he would be most likely to encounter the object of his wrath, hoping, always hoping, that the "dude" would give him some slight ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... excitement; and if you will let her go in the Hot Springs team she will have something else to think about. If you don't give her a new interest," was the sinister and gloomy prophecy, "stealing puppies will very likely become an obsession ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... with a faint, dry smile. "Still, you see, I couldn't stay away. The thing has become an obsession." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... said Uncle Chris, "came to me this morning, as I read my morning paper while breakfasting. It has grown and developed during the day. At this moment you might almost call it an obsession. I am very fond of America. I spent several happy years there. On that occasion, I set sail for the land of promise, I admit, somewhat reluctantly. Of my own free will I might never have made the expedition. But the general sentiment seemed so strongly in favor of my doing so that I yielded ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... banished my lifelong obsession for the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the monticolous dreams of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... of dazzling revelation till now I have nursed this infinite desire. To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... very things that made him fretful. Chasing without his new airplane—the enchanting machine which he had borne in his mind so many months, as a women bears her child, and which at last he had felt soaring under him—was no pleasure. He missed it so much that the feeling became an obsession, until he made up his mind to leave for Buc before the day was over. Indeed, he would have done so sooner had he not been haunted by the idea that he must first bring down his Boche. But since the Boche did not seem to be willing.... ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment—or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins—can shake off the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... repeat even entire conversations, with pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of dull-glowing resentment. She could, if she chose, easily free her brain from the obsession either by reading or by a sharp jerk of volition; but often she preferred not to do so, saying to herself voluptuously: "No, I will nurse my grievance; I'll nurse it and nurse it and nurse it! It is mine, and it is just, and anybody with any sense at all would ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... nobles led a gay and hard life, voluntarily, costing the State very little, and producing more through its residence and manure than we of today with our tastes, our researches, our cholics and our vapors. . The custom, and it may be said, the obsession of making presents to the seigniors, is well known. I have, in my lifetime, seen this custom everywhere disappear, and rightly so. . . . The seigniors are no longer of any consequence to them; is quite natural that they should be forgotten ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... disdain of the suffragette. What is the matter with her, fundamentally, is simple: she is a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary character. In particular, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one definite privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the modern droit du seigneur. Read ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... he would have been quite content that the latter should go through life as a gentleman of wealth and leisure. But he was wedded to the business to which he had given the best energies of his life, and the idea that Morgan must eventually take his place in it amounted almost to an obsession. A reconciliation always made Morgan happy, for its own sake quite as much as for the belief that his ambition was being recognised. Estrangement and friction were always terrible things to him and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... pure and lovely and of good report. In the hour of strong temptation it is often best, instead of trying to meet the assault directly, to change the immediate environment, or in some other way to concentrate the mind: for example, to sit down and read a clean novel until the stress of the obsession is past. Physical cleanliness, plenty of healthy exercise in the open air (it is unfortunate that the circumstances of many men's lives do not give adequate opportunity for this), temperance in food, and especially—in the light of what has been said above—temperance ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... man, this superstitious nonsense is becoming an obsession to you," it said one fine April morning. "Yes, I mean what I say—an obsession! You must pull yourself together or you'll go stark mad, and then you'll probably go and throw yourself over the Embankment. That legend is all bosh! You're in the twentieth ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... explains almost every inexplicable act in life." He took up a knife and held it level on his palm. "There you have the normal condition, but once one end swings up you get Genius and all the Arts, or madness and crime and the obsession of one idea: one definite, over-mastering idea that drives every ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... small pieces Mr Cupples replied: 'The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration of Mabel's feelings. Marlowe will never know of what he was suspected by that person. Strange! Nearly all of us, I venture to ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... blowing of a horn. He thought of long conversations in which he had taken part quite lately in Moscow—conversations in which it had been maintained that one could live without love, that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes—and so on, in the same style; he remembered them and thought mournfully that if he were asked now what love was, he could not have found ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... bareheaded, probably; the sunshine sifting down through the locust blossoms and touching that thatch of yellow hair, and glinting into those blue eyes. "He would call me 'Mamma'!" Then she hummed to herself, "'O Spring!' Oh, I must have him!" Her hope became such an obsession that its irrationality did not strike her. It was so in her mind that she even spoke of it once to Mrs. Houghton. "I know you know?" she said; "Maurice told me he ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... weeks. His election, and that of his successor, Caraffa, as Paul IV., both pointed to a real intention of reform. Caraffa had all his life been a passionate advocate of moral reform, but even he was swept away by the political conditions and his hatred of Spain, which was an obsession. Professed detestation of Spain was a sure way to his favour, which, his kinsfolk recognising, they won his confidence only to their own ultimate destruction when he discovered that he had been deceived. Half his reign was worse than ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the door of his own lodge was evidence of his obsession, Jack firmly believed and from which he deduced the opinion that as long as his equipment held out he was ready to keep up that hot bombardment under the belief that the enemy were falling like dead leaves in the ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... added at the same time hugely to the price of Vereker's secret, precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... changes in her diet, and attempted, with only partial success, to confine her reading to improving books. A relative had sent Emily the first of the new jig-saw puzzles from New York, and Emily had immediately wired for more. She and Susan spent hours over them; they became in fact an obsession, and Susan began to see jig-saw divisions: in everything her eye rested on; the lawn, the clouds, or ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... He fought against it even. But it grew. And, curiously enough, it was strongest when Father Roland was in the locked room playing softly on the violin. David never mentioned the room. He feigned an indifference to its very existence. And yet in spite of himself the mystery of it became an obsession with him. Something within it seemed to reach out insistently and invite him in, like a spirit chained there by the Missioner himself, crying for freedom. One night they returned to the Chateau through a blizzard from the cabin ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... "Hardly, Walter. If she has any obsession on the subject, it is more likely to lead her to actual fanaticism against all stimulants and narcotics and everything connected with them. No, you might possibly persuade me that two and two equal five—but ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... almost uncanny, in the unbreakable gentleness of that white figure, with the ivory complexion, the scant white hair, the large white collar and broad white shirt-front—there is something which becomes almost an obsession to the observer in watching the figure with its strangely tranquil and gentle expression in the heat and centre of all this ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... she first entered the convent, directly after her father's death, when she felt very lonely—both morally and mentally lonely—and followed by the obsession of that oath. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... prohibition being based on the ground that the herdsmen were really Italian army officers in disguise. In recent years the fear of Italian spies has become with the Austrian military authorities almost an insane obsession. Innocent tourists, engineers, and commercial travellers were arrested by the score on the charge of espionage. The mere fact of being an Italian was in itself ground for suspicion. Compared with the attitude ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... times a day that she had killed poor Papa, was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed, ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... glasses, and even with their aid he could see no movement within the Southern lines. Hours passed and still neither army stirred. McClellan counted his tremendous losses, and he, too, preferred to await attack rather than offer it. His old obsession that his enemy was double his real strength seized him, and he was not willing to risk his army in a ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had passed between the two women in those few moments when Elizabeth had left him and gone back to Martha's room. By some strange miracle, the strong, sweet, understanding woman had simply taken possession of the friendless child. The thought of her sat now in Martha's heart, an obsession, almost a worship. Perhaps that was why the sense of companionship between the two, notwithstanding certain obvious disparities, seemed to ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the San Luis," he said. "There's red down there. Nature's palette is a little short of red in this valley. Too much blue. Even nature sometimes gets a one-color obsession, like the painters. Here she's gone off on blue. It's the most dangerous color. Darwin says it was the last color produced in nature's laboratory. Ordinarily it's the least common in flowers and birds and insects. Hearn—Have you read Lafcadio ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... ask twenty-five francs for a consultation," said Giuditta. "But I am so much obliged to you for coming to free me from this obsession, that I shall ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Lemire and Lechaptois—both peasants. When they think, it's only of their farms and their wives. That other little thin chap is a Parisian bookkeeper. I'd like to bet that he's thinking of his wife, and only of her. He's wondering if she's faithful to him. It's almost become an obsession. I've never known such jealousy, it's fairly ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe that Nietzsche could have been critical at all at first. In Wagner, as was but natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means to the ideal, which was his one obsession. All his hope for the future of Germany and Europe cleaved, as it were, to this highest manifestation of their people's life, and gradually he began to invest his already great friend with all the extra greatness which ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... counsel with himself to build his son a bath and adorn it with various paintings, so he might show it to him and divert him with the sight thereof, to the intent that his body might be solaced thereby and that the obsession of travel might cease from him and he be turned from [his purpose of] removal from his parents. So he addressed himself to the building of the bath and assembling architects and builders and artisans from all the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... time, secured the sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurring to it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known to be forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading their sequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is a sensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary days accumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; the next year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet's meanness ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... Hornigold's feelings. Hornigold could have killed Morgan on numberless occasions, but a consuming desire for a more adequate revenge than mere death had taken hold of him, and he deferred action until he could contrive some means by which to strike him in a way that he conceived would glut his obsession of ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... beside her, he had taken possession of her, and, profiting by her inexperience, had played on her fears and smiled at her dislike. Finally, whether she would or no, he had swept her with him into the Chamber. The rest had been an obsession, a nightmare, from which only the King's voice summoning Tavannes to his side ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... let him see. Poor Bruce! Well, they were linked together. There were Archie, the angel, and Dilly, the pet.... She was twenty-eight and Aylmer forty. He ought not to hold so strong a position in her mind. But he did. Yes, she was in love with him in a way—it was a mania, an obsession. But she would now soon wrestle with it and conquer it. The great charm had been his exclusive devotion—but also his appearance, his figure, his voice. He looked sunburnt and handsome. He was laughing as he talked to the miserable ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... something fine,—had idealized it,—until he'd come to take a kind of religious pride in it. Skinner and his wife had watched their little bank account grow, bit by bit, from ten dollars up. It had become an obsession with them. They had gone without many little things dear to their hearts that it might be fattened. Surely, it was a greedy creature! But, unlike most greedy creatures, it gave them a great deal of comfort. It was a certain solid something, always in the background of ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... keeps good company and good hours. His sons Shem, Ham and Japhet, are great favorites with all of us, and as far as mere respectability goes there is no family in the land that stands higher than his, but the complete obsession of his mind by this International Marine and Zoo Flotation Company of his is entirely beyond my comprehension, and his attempts to explain it to me are futile, because its utter impracticability, and the reasons advanced for its ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... John. Always John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war; he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him, to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait for more volunteers. They could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars, his father ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... me!" the man kept begging his rescuers. And Canby recalled how "Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!" sounded plaintively in his ears for days, bothering him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he felt a spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one. It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... had been proved and his hatred for me being his great obsession, since I had the thing he had wanted but no longer wanted, let that be understood—he saw the misery he had planned for me and my dear wife being brought to a sudden end. He had, by the way, already planned and carried his plan into execution, ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... she suddenly realized her own words—"I mean she makes him think—he thinks she thinks—Oh, I don't know how to 'splain it to you!" And Margaret Hamilton hastily abandoned so complicated a problem. In reality she was meeting it with a wisdom far beyond her years. The boy was in the grip of an obsession. Margaret Hamilton would have been sadly puzzled by the words, but in her wise little head ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have slipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family in America. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the reader that all this insistence upon the supreme necessity for an organized literature springs merely from the obsession of a writer by his own calling, but, indeed, that is not so. We who write are not all so blinded by conceit of ourselves that we do not know something of our absolute personal value. We are lizards in an empty palace, frogs crawling ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a hill, with his faithful motor at his side, was to know that the Huns were at the bottom of it. On one occasion they even beat him in the day's march, but were too kind or too blind to seize their advantage. As usual he was taking his obsession along with him, though, if he had but known, he might have got it to do the work by the simple formality of turning the petrol tap from OFF to ON. His was ever a curious life, from the first moment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... which now began to occupy the thoughts of E. A. Partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... to uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... England the bean is an obsession; it is rapidly becoming a superstition. To the stranger it is an infliction; but, bad as the bean is to the uninitiated, it is a luscious morsel compared with the flavorless cod-fish ball which lodges in the throat and stays there—a second Adam's apple—for ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... flashed backward to those three years when he was an ever-rising obsession—personifying love and completion as he did—before which her proud will fell back again and ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... course. Nelson took station between Sardinia and the African coast, resolved not to move till he "knew something positive." In the absence of information, the safety of Naples, Sicily, and Egypt was perhaps not merely an obsession on his part, but a proper professional concern; but it is strange that no inkling should have reached him from the Admiralty or elsewhere that a western movement from Toulon was the only one Napoleon now had in mind. It was April 18 before he received further news of the enemy, and not ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... conscience-stricken, tortured himself by reading in their brown softness all manner of dreadful anguish. He watched them, unlit by the smile which played upon the lips, looking at him against their will, with a pitiful longing. He exaggerated the pain he saw till it became an obsession, intolerable and ruthless; if Mary desired revenge, she need not have been dissatisfied. But that apparently was the last thing she thought of. He was grateful to hear of her anger with Mrs. Jackson, whose sympathy had expressed itself ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... many men who seem to have been born only with an obsession to die. Possibly there is a beauty, like that of a sunset, in this lingering death in life which seems to fascinate them. Nikhil lives this kind of life, if life it may be called. Years ago, I had a great argument with ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... she had learned to know and dread. She tried to banish it, striving with all her might to put him from her mind, twisting this way and that, writhing on the soft sand as she struggled with the obsession that held her. She saw him all the time plainly, as though he were there before her. Would he pursue her always, phantom-like? Would the recollection of the handsome brown face haunt her for ever with its fierce eyes and cruel mouth? She buried her ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Grandmother Felicite and the good Martine favored. While he had occupied himself with facts, endeavoring to keep from going beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so, through his scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession, an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when she was a child, and still more, later, when she grew up, she went ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... moralised is the true patriotism. When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion—the methodical diabolism—which this obsession has produced in Germany. It has startled us because we thought that the civilised ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... you out," mused Van quietly. "I wish you could win. But you are not merely fighting people. You are fighting an idea. It is only for an idea that men and women martyr themselves. With Cara this idea has become morbid—an obsession. She has inherited it together with an abnormally developed courage, and her conception of courage is to face what she most hates ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... her death, when he had just turned thirty, a fortune was at his disposal. He made an oath of his resolution to pay his debts, marry and settle down and maintain his inheritance unimpaired. This endured for a year before it began to waver; and the wavering was soon followed by headlong obsession which fed on itself. As his passion for gambling grew it seemed to consume the better elements of his nature. Lanstron reasoned with him, then implored, then stormed; and Feller, regularly promising to reform, regularly fell each time into greater excesses. Twice Lanstron saved him from court-martial, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... of mustard, then for beer, without saying a word to Liputin. He was pondering deeply. He was capable of doing two things at once—eating with relish and pondering deeply. Liputin loathed him so intensely at last that he could not tear himself away. It was like a nervous obsession. He counted every morsel of beefsteak that Pyotr Stepanovitch put into his mouth; he loathed him for the way he opened it, for the way he chewed, for the way he smacked his lips over the fat morsels, he loathed the steak itself. At last things began to swim before his eyes; he began to ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... relative of ours," I explained, shortly. "He was born twenty years ago or so—at least we heard that he was; and we haven't heard anything of him since, except by the dream route, which is not entirely convincing. He is Hephzy's pet obsession. Kindly forget ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was true enough, the side I had preached. And was not this side also true in its way? The preacher seemed at first to be referring to my own obsession with the words 'resist not evil,' my following of Tolstoy in my own evangel. He was warm in his commendation. 'And yet,' he said, 'let us remember a just God's resistance to evil. He resists and judges righteously, where we may neither resist nor judge. If we agree not to ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... jewels, veils, silks, furs, embroideries and figured stuffs, wherewith to enhance the comeliness of Melicent. It seemed an all-engulfing madness with this despot daily to aggravate his fierce desire of her, to nurture his obsession, so that he might glory in the consciousness of treading down no ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... neighbors, that only at rare intervals would Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl's thoughts and emotions were the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of her father's past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or callously indifferent. Upon June ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... series of attempts seems to have been made—by some person or persons to the deponent most emphatically unknown—to get my cool, phlegmatic nervous system and brain excited. The two principal means made use of to complete the obsession were, that just mentioned, and the announcement of a succession of 'big things,' as about to occur—the biggest kind of things—those the expectation of which was best calculated to set my brain in a whirl. It will ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... forward as the crowning joy of his existence, to be nothing but a tragedy that would finally wreck his domestic happiness? It could not be. It must not be. He must be patient, and wait. Billy loved him. He was sure she did. By and by this obsession of motherhood, which had her so fast in its grasp, would relax. She would remember that her husband had rights as well as her child. Once again she would give him the companionship, love, and sympathetic interest ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... we continued to press back the enemy. For me the film story of the taking of St. Quentin is an obsession. It holds me as a needle to a magnet. And in this section, at the present, ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Showdown, and directly away from where they were searching the desert for him. And as Pete rode, he thought continually of Boca. Unaware of what had happened—yet he realized that she had been in great danger. This worried him—an uncertainty that became an obsession—until he could no longer master it with reason. He had ridden free from present hazard, unscratched and foot-loose, with many hours of darkness before him in which to evade the posse. He would be a fool to turn back. And ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... This obsession was not without its undertone of disquiet. Foresighted men were apprehensive lest the one-crop system bring distress to the cotton belt as it had to Virginia. As early as 1818 a few newspaper editors[10] began to decry the regime; and one of them in 1821 rejoiced in a widespread prevalence of rot ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... time that I was writing my last article, that the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia (who has a perfect obsession for being in the middle of the picture), was carrying out at the army manoeuvres at Narva, a certain strategic design, long-prepared and tested, by means of which he proposed to fill with amazement and admiration not only the Russian army but the Imperial Court—nay, all Russia, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the crater itself ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the Kuenstlerhaus in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him and ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... thoughts of his jealousy, then all courage fell from her. "Jealous? Great God! No!" She knew it was finished when he had said that and, beneath the weight of his contempt, she crumbled into the dust of pitiful obsession. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I confess I do not ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Bab, although it is early for the burglar obsession. Go on, though. Who is robbing us and why? Because if he finds any Money I'll ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... task to one who feels himself congenial to some Great or Significant Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession with him to communicate to others what he sees in his Idol, his Divinity. Yet it is not Inspiration for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. Some point that has no marked attraction in itself may be ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... of their party was Ella's clamorous selection for the supper; but to Flora the more real thing was the atmosphere of excitement and mystery she had been moving in all the evening. She was pursued by the obsession of something more about to happen—something imminent—though, of course, nothing would; at least, how could anything happen here, to them? And by "them," she meant herself and these people around her so stupidly talking—the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... at least, for me. It became almost an obsession. I could see it as I sat down to my work. And the first thing I knew I was writing Fannie into my play. There was a maid's part in it,—the conventional, table-dusting, note-carrying, tea-serving maid, with not half a dozen ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Terror and the Commune hangs over every serious crisis in French politics. The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated. Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear. Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension. The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the tall woman of the brown cloak, still watching everything with eyes that missed no detail. She annoyed Prescott; she had become an obsession like one of those little puzzles the solution of which is of no importance except when one cannot obtain it. So he lingered in her neighbourhood, taking care that she should not observe him, and he asked two or three persons concerning her identity. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a rule, the mineral trail leads poor men to greater poverty, and sometimes to a grave; but once you have set your feet on it you follow it again. The thing becomes an obsession; you feel forced ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... he was mistaken, he went and sat down in his armchair again and thought of the boy, and he thought of him for hours, and whole days. It was not only a moral, but still more a physical obsession, a nervous longing to kiss him, to hold and fondle him, to take him onto his knees and dance him. He felt the child's little arms round his neck, his little mouth pressing a kiss on his beard, his soft hair tickling his cheeks, and the remembrance of all those childish ways, made him suffer ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... had been a cabinet-maker by trade, but he had money and could gratify his craving for art. The glory of the Milan Cathedral, seen once, became an obsession for him, and he went again and again. At last the idea grew in his mind to express his homage in a perfect copy of the great church which, as he said, "held his heart." There was no train between Milan and Lecco in his day (1840), and he used to walk all ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... attacked the little U-shaped beach that lay between two buttresses of the volcano and sloped sharply down to the sea. Twenty-one men, a lad and a woman, they went at the despoiling of it with a sort of obsession, led, rather than driven, by Lund, who worked among the rest ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... me to be the work of a slightly unbalanced mind. He is not violently insane; probably just has this one particular obsession. His scientific bump certainly shows no sign of weakness. He might even be some new type of kleptomaniac. He steals things, and he has already stolen far more than any man could ever have any need of, and he leaves in its place a 'stock' certificate in his ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... which must gauge itself by external bearings is temporarily adrift and lost. Suicidal thoughts are easily evoked; and at such times the luxury of being odd and hopelessly misunderstood constitutes a chameleon-like morbidity that, with a slight change of light and color, becomes an obsession of conceit. The odd one, the mystery to self and others, is he not the great one that shall occupy the center of the stage in some stupendous drama? A man now prominent in educational circles testifies how that on a drizzly night on the streets of old London ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... the event) by their critics. They were told that they might have opened the Exchange sooner after the actual opening had proved a success, and they were informed in the editorial columns of a prominent journal that their fear of foreign liquidation had been an "obsession" which lacked justification. These critics never were heard from while the event was in doubt, and consequently the Committee did not profit much by their ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... its class, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action. There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely popular recent publication, "En Campagne," by M. Marcel Dupont, which exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own eyes, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... calmness of his wife amazed him. He was not intellectual enough to comprehend fully the deep imaginings of a mighty brain, the obsession ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... reiteration of the phrase, "I'm not an ex-slave" roused my curiosity and drove me to a superficial investigation. Persons who are acquainted with her and her family estimate that Mary Watson is nearer eighty than seventy. She started her story pleasantly enough. But when she got the obsession that she would be put down as an ex-slave, she refused to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Spiritualists. "We are thoroughly convinced of spirit communication and interpositions, spirit guidance and obsession. Our spiritualism has permitted us to converse, face to face, with individuals once mortals, some of whom we well knew, and with others born before the flood." [Footnote: "Plain Talks upon Practical Religion; being Candid ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... shocked when told that because she dreamed she was riding a gray horse in a green meadow that she really has bad (and still is troubled by) incestuous desires for her father, but that is the way to cure her of her neurasthenia or fatigue or obsession of one ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the life-boat because he was a coward, he would have been ashamed of it; and whatever he might have done afterwards, he would never have done that thing again. He would have been sensitive: not saving his own life would have turned into an obsession with him. But there is left, I admit, the murder. And murders always take the public. So I'll give you the murder—though it throws no light on Ferguson, who is the only thing in the whole accursed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... relief, not only in giving her a goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions. It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell of Mary's flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a charwoman opened the door. All Katharine ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of the President's appeal for a Democratic Congress in 1918 which has never been fully told, illustrates the bearing this Lodge obsession had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the Congressional election was approaching ex-Congressman Scott Ferris, then acting as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went to the President and told him that ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood. The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps it was not ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... this desolate child to crave affection, as a necessary, and pitifully she tried to purchase it through almsgiving. In the attempt she could have found no coadjutor more ready than Edward Maudelain. Giving was with these two a sort of obsession, though always he gave in a half scorn of his fellow creatures which was not more than half concealed. This bastard was charitable and pious because he knew his soul, conceived in double sin, to be doubly evil, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... alone, for they could not afford a servant or a nurse-girl, all her vitality had been sapped, all her originally superb energy had dwindled down to nothing; her nerves were worn to a frazzle and she became but a shadow of her former self. And the fear of another pregnancy became an obsession with her. She dreamed of it at night, and it poisoned her waking hours in the day. She felt that she simply could not go through another pregnancy, another childbirth, with its sleepless nights ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... action of that night's events became more and more accelerated, Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal, merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked by nothing—that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was impossible for him to make her hear him, or when she heard to understand what he was saying. Her vision contracted. It was evident that ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... much this obsession," he said rising. "I will not attempt to reason with you again, Helen, but"—he made no effort to lower his voice, "the world—our world will soon know what manner of man James Turnbull was, of ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... not leave an echo behind it, but a sharp edge of emptiness, and very often as one sits beside the fire the memory of that voice suddenly returning gives to the silence about one a personal force, as it were, of obsession and of control. So much happens when even one of all our million voices Comes to ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... the "Thing" became almost like an obsession with them. They must find out definitely what it was that was spoiling all their fun. They began to haunt the river, especially at the foot of the falls, in the hope of seeing something, anything that would put an end to ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... back and realised the trick played on him, he grew pale with anger; he immediately suspected the bookseller; but when his eyes fell on Gustav who was standing in a corner of the room, laughing, his old obsession returned to him: "He's paying me out!" Without a word he seized his property, threw a few coins on the counter and left ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... day, which was occupied with the run down to Pueblo and occasional stops for speeches at way-stations, was uneventful save for the growing obsession of Charlie Moore. He was overflowing with pride and importance. That night, in the presence of five thousand people, he was going to reply to the great Jimmy Grayson, and show to them and to him his errors. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... mere horror that he could not for a moment strain away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain to ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... of the farmer that he was being oppressed threatened to develop into an obsession. His hatred of "money-power," "trusts," "corners," and the "hirelings of Wall Street" found expression in his opposition to the local lawyers and merchants, and, in fact, to the residents of the towns in general. The idea began to grow up ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... and The Laird had spent his week-ends in Seattle twice; otherwise, save for the servants, he was quite alone at The Dreamerie and this did not add to his happiness. Gradually the continued and inexplicable absence of Donald at Sunday service became an obsession with him; he could think of nothing else in his spare moments and even at times when it was imperative he should give all of his attention to important business matters, this eternal, damnable query continued to confront him. It went to bed with him and got up with him and ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... he ever commanded such a craft. Despite his "ticket" there was none so foolish as to trust him with one—a condition of affairs which had tended to sour a disposition not naturally sweet. The yearning to command a steamboat gradually had developed into an obsession. Result—the "fast and commodious S.S. Maggie," as the United States Marshal had had the audacity ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... handled, the cushions his head had rested against. She had indeed mentioned to the housekeeper at Berkeley Square that she wished his lordship's apartments to remain untouched until she herself had looked over them. The obsession which is called Love is an emotion past all explanation. The persons susceptible to its power are as things beneath a spell. They see, hear, and feel that of which the rest of their world is unaware, and will ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... obsession, une idee fixe, is a form of madness," said Quinny, rapidly. "A person in love sees only one face, hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is constantly drumming. Physically such a condition is a narcotic; mentally it is ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... and, as in my father's case, my tastes were so many and so catholic that I could not lose myself in any one of them. They never became more than diversions to me. A hobby is only really amusing when it becomes an obsession. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... more to blame than he for his having left home.[7] The social worker who attempts to deal with the situation the deserter creates should know this attitude in advance and be prepared, through some simple rule-of-thumb psychology, to attack the obsession and bring him, first of all, to see and ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... about the volcano. "You can have no idea what an obsession it is with him. There isn't a square foot of its steaming, treacherous surface that he hasn't been over, mapping new fissures, poking into old lava-beds, delving into the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... secret, precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm for ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... made many metaphorical words from joining together two Latin words and making a new meaning. We speak of a person having an "obsession" about something when he is always thinking of one thing. But the word obsession comes from the Latin word obsidere, "to besiege;" and so in the word obsession the constant thought is pictured ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... That is our curse. Our religion is, unfortunately, an obsession, for any drunken scoundrel can become a "holy man" by simply making such declaration, and ever afterwards "sponging" upon his neighbours. Rasputin was ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... desire for glory. In his conversations, in his correspondence, money was the eternal theme; in his novels it is almost always the hinge on which the interest, whether of character, plot, or passion, depends. Money was his obsession, day and night; and, in his dormant visions, it must have ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... tears, though she did not sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months, her helpless love ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... only on board the schooner, when surrounded by white faces, by unfamiliar sights and sounds, that Karain seemed to forget the strange obsession that wound like a black thread through the gorgeous pomp of his public life. At night we treated him in a free and easy manner, which just stopped short of slapping him on the back, for there are liberties one must not take with a Malay. He said himself that on such occasions ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... are ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit, that forbid you to carry on ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... up the steep ascents at a gallop. He stood amid the gorse at the top and viewed the great girdle of blue encircling sea, and the long string of coast towns lying below him, and far away. Lunch was on the table when he returned. After lunch, harassed by an obsession of architectural plans, he went out to sketch. But it rained, and resisting his mother's invitation to change his clothes, he sat down before the fire, damp without, and feverishly irritable within. He vacillated an hour between his translation ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... fact. She might have reigned in Oxford; she preferred to be a much snubbed dependent of London, and the smart people whose invitations she took such infinite trouble to get. For she was possessed of two daughters, tall and handsome girls, who were an obsession to her, an irritation to other people, and a cause of blushing to themselves. Her instinct for all men of family or title to be found among the undergraduates was amazingly extensive and acute; and she had paid ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... best were wont to say that Sir John practiced few arts so studiously as that of enjoyment—he could not banish the figure of Narcisse from his reverie. A horrible thought assailed him that this obsession might spring from the fact that on this very morning Narcisse might have taken his last brief walk out of the door of La Roquette, and that his disembodied spirit might be hovering around. Admirable as the cookery of the Marchesa had been, and fully as he had ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... time explaining to Moya patiently over and over again that the business of highgrading was justified by the conditions under which the miners lived. There was no sequence to his thoughts. They came in flashes without logical connection. It became, for instance, a firm obsession that the pipe running through the tunnel was a telegraph wire by means of which he could communicate with the outside world if the operator would only stay on duty. But his interest in ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... indeed hold fast; yet Lily was beginning to avoid her also. For she could not go to Gerty's without risk of meeting Selden; and to meet him now would be pure pain. It was pain enough even to think of him, whether she considered him in the distinctness of her waking thoughts, or felt the obsession of his presence through the blur of her tormented nights. That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to Mrs. Hatch's prescription. In the uneasy snatches of her natural dreams he came ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... that preceded it showed that he had lost the ability to see things with a soldier's eye. They declared that he made pictures and presented them to himself as facts; that he thought as an Emperor, not as a Captain. They said that in this very campaign in France, the same imperial obsession had taken such hold upon him that in striving to retain everything from Holland to the end of the Italian peninsula he stood to lose everything. They said that, if he had concentrated all his armies, withdrawn them from outlying dependencies, ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Britain was giving way to a British "Standard Oil" was enough to arm these statesmen against the Huerta policy, and to intensify that profound dislike of Huerta himself that was soon to become almost an obsession. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... had been dead for ten days, since before they left Trinidad. He was aware of the obsession of the Admiral, which made the tragedy ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... light there at Weatherend. The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... sensitive, and passionate. She was adorable. He was too fortunate! Then why did he think of a pale, tired, laughing face, with the hair dragged off the forehead, and Japanese eyes?... What folly! It was a recurring obsession. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... see. Poor Bruce! Well, they were linked together. There were Archie, the angel, and Dilly, the pet.... She was twenty-eight and Aylmer forty. He ought not to hold so strong a position in her mind. But he did. Yes, she was in love with him in a way—it was a mania, an obsession. But she would now soon wrestle with it and conquer it. The great charm had been his exclusive devotion—but also his appearance, his figure, his voice. He looked sunburnt and handsome. He was laughing as he ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... that he was mistaken, he went and sat down in his armchair again and thought of the boy, and he thought of him for hours, and whole days. It was not only a moral, but still more a physical obsession, a nervous longing to kiss him, to hold and fondle him, to take him onto his knees and dance him. He felt the child's little arms round his neck, his little mouth pressing a kiss on his beard, his soft ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... must be pretty lonely all by himself in that big house of his. On top of that he's getting old and isn't in very good health. Explain it any way you like. The simple fact is that within this last year or so, it's gradually gotten to be a kind of obsession with him, an out-and-out, down-and-out monomania, to know that kid—to have her come and spend part of every year with him. That's natural, too, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to me personally, was the honor of American citizenship—an ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy; for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... all these people had been living for months under the obsession of that innocence and in the certainty that an innocent man could never be executed. The news of the execution, which was now inevitable, was driving ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... easy," continued Malcolm Sage. "The outrages were clearly not acts of revenge upon any particular person; for they involved nine different owners. They were obviously the work of someone subject to a mania, or obsession, which gripped him when the moon ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... Fannie's was; at least, for me. It became almost an obsession. I could see it as I sat down to my work. And the first thing I knew I was writing Fannie into my play. There was a maid's part in it,—the conventional, table-dusting, note-carrying, tea-serving maid, with not half a dozen words to speak. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... emotion. He was cured of his fancy, although no effort of will could protect the soreness of the bruise. He had persevered in his course of treatment—congratulating himself, at the end, on his escape from a dangerous obsession. The picture of Sara grew paler and paler before his eyes—indeed, it seemed to fade all too quickly, and, with the perversity of consistent egoism, he felt many twinges of sadness to think that he had forgotten her so soon. His vanity would have preferred a longer combat—for even the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... both these magnets should be equally powerful, the disturbance to both will be great. The longer the personal association is continued the more violent becomes this disturbance, until in highly sensitive natures it develops into an obsession which obscures reason and crushes ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... before they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... whisk her to her room, the man posted back to the music hall in search of Volney Sprague. What he should say to him was not clear, but see him he must. Out of the jumble of his thoughts that idea beset him like an obsession. The audience had begun to trickle into Broadway, and as the stream broadened to fill the doorway he was hard put to it to scan every face, but he persisted till the last loiterer had left. Then an attendant told him that the place had yet another exit upon another ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of the American water-color artists it will be found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake. Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness which is found in the oil pictures of Homer ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... and even with their aid he could see no movement within the Southern lines. Hours passed and still neither army stirred. McClellan counted his tremendous losses, and he, too, preferred to await attack rather than offer it. His old obsession that his enemy was double his real strength seized him, and he was not willing to risk his army in a second rush ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... If she has any obsession on the subject, it is more likely to lead her to actual fanaticism against all stimulants and narcotics and everything connected with them. No, you might possibly persuade me that two and two equal five—but not seventeen. It's not very late. I think we might ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... led a gay and hard life, voluntarily, costing the State very little, and producing more through its residence and manure than we of today with our tastes, our researches, our cholics and our vapors. . The custom, and it may be said, the obsession of making presents to the seigniors, is well known. I have, in my lifetime, seen this custom everywhere disappear, and rightly so. . . . The seigniors are no longer of any consequence to them; is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... seemed to like him. He was polite and educated and a "perfect gentleman," this was the sum of feminine opinion. Captain Sears was inclined to picture him as what he would have called a "sissy," and not much more dangerous than that. The judge's hatred, he came to believe, was an obsession, a sick ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... really began to talk and shew them pictures. They saw the beach and that terrible journey along under the cliffs, cliffs that seemed cut out of night and never ending, the sea, like an obsession, crawling shoreward, and Raft carrying her ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... world an "educational mode," because the time-honored artistic feeling of a people with a very ancient civilization would breathe new life into those moderns who seemed to be suffocating under the obsession of physical hygiene, and to be actuated solely by a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... fifty; but a born insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be said ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... more and more cordially adopted. In a sense this was a perfectly natural and logical programme, and amid the surrounding European conditions excusable—as I shall point out presently. But before long it became a weird enthusiasm, almost an obsession. It was taken up over the land, and repeated in a thousand books and on as many platforms. One of these propagandists was General von Bernhardi, who entered in more detail into the technical and strategical aspects of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... clench her hands and determine more fiercely than ever to banish such memories. But with all her will, hardly for ten minutes at a time could she keep Gritzko from her thoughts. His influence over her was growing into an obsession. ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... becoming an obsession. He tried not to think about it, but that only made him think about it the more; he would think about not thinking about it and about not thinking about that— and all the time he was growing thirstier. He wondered how long one could live without ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... it, the more fiercely the escape notion gripped me. Whitredge's talk had made it perfectly plain that the best I could hope for in a court trial would be a light sentence. As train-time drew near, the obsession pushed reason and all the scruples aside. If I could only persuade Jorkins to let me go to the bank on the ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... but never quite to this extent. The thing has become an obsession with him lately. If you are really going to stay and talk with me, do you mind if we don't discuss my husband? Just now the subject is rather ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... germ of truth in things erroneous in the child's definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... successfully deceived me—by dramatically shooting out his wrist, consulting his watch, instantly stepping out and presently breaking into a run—to induce any gentleman behind him who had reached an age when the fear of missing trains has become an obsession ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... his future course. Nelson took station between Sardinia and the African coast, resolved not to move till he "knew something positive." In the absence of information, the safety of Naples, Sicily, and Egypt was perhaps not merely an obsession on his part, but a proper professional concern; but it is strange that no inkling should have reached him from the Admiralty or elsewhere that a western movement from Toulon was the only one Napoleon now had in mind. It was April 18 before he received ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... woman of the brown cloak, still watching everything with eyes that missed no detail. She annoyed Prescott; she had become an obsession like one of those little puzzles the solution of which is of no importance except when one cannot obtain it. So he lingered in her neighbourhood, taking care that she should not observe him, and he asked two or three persons concerning her identity. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... belief be well-founded it must greatly modify his character as a purely wanton and mischievous criminal, a supreme villain, and lower correspondingly the character of Othello as an honourable and high-minded man. If it be a morbid suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in complete ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... words and cured him of his malady, by methods that will describe the nature of the man's psychic disturbance to any advanced student of occultism. Demoniac possession is not believed in by orthodox Christians of today, but Jesus evidently shared the belief in obsession held by students of Psychism and similar subjects, judging from the words He used in relieving this man from his malady. We advise our students to read the Gospel records in connection with these lessons, in order to follow the subject along the old familiar paths, but with the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... evening, accompanied by terrible clouds of dust and the blowing of a horn. He thought of long conversations in which he had taken part quite lately in Moscow—conversations in which it had been maintained that one could live without love, that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes—and so on, in the same style; he remembered them and thought mournfully that if he were asked now what love was, he could not have ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was upon us with the camp-site Edd knew of still miles to the fore. No grass, no water for the horses! But we had to camp there. All hands set to work. It really was fun—it should have been fine for me—but my gloomy obsession to hurry obscured my mind. I marveled at old Doyle, over seventy, after that long, hard day, quickly and efficiently cooking a good hot supper. Romer had enjoyed the day. He said he was tired, but would like to stay up beside ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... in the obsession of the principal European nations that, in order to be great and successful in the world as it is, they must possess military power available for instant aggression on weak nations, as well as for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... If this be true, and time and again has it been proved, then there is no more fitting dedication to a book dealing with the gridiron heroes of the past than to a man like Johnny Poe. For football is the abandon of body and mind to the obsession of the spirit that knows no obstacle, counts no danger and for the time being is dull and callous to physical pain or exhaustion. It is a something that makes one see visions as Johnny ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... often complicated by the development later on of a sense of shame and unhappiness in the child. There comes a time when the child passionately desires to regain control and is miserable about her failure, until the concentration of her thoughts on the subject becomes a veritable obsession. Every night she goes to bed with this only in her mind. Every night she falls asleep, miserably aware that she will wake to find the bed wetted. The suggestion impressed in the first place on the mind of the tiny child by injudicious management has become fixed by the growing sense of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... fears and impulses (see Chapter XVIII), for it is useless to try to "reason them out", though it is useful for a brief period each day to try deliberately to turn the mind away from the obsession, by singing or whistling, gradually ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Henry, he would make himself go ahead with the freedom scheme; but if he commenced actual proceedings now, by no possibility could she come to Arranstoun—and this idea—to get her to Arranstoun, began to be an obsession. Just in proportion as his nature was wild and rebellious, so the mad longing grew and grew in him to induce her to come ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... stimulants. It would be easy to prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of 'sublunary debate,' but it is sufficient to point out that Mr. Bailey's criticism of Racine affords an excellent example of the fatal effects of this obsession. His pages are full of references to 'infinity' and 'the unseen' and 'eternity' and 'a mystery brooding over a mystery' and 'the key to the secret of life'; and it is only natural that he should find in these watchwords one of those tests of poetic greatness of which he is so fond. The fallaciousness ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... origin, according to Freud, in sexual life. The obsession represents a compensation or substitute for an unbearable sexual idea and takes its place in consciousness. In normal sexual life, no neurosis is possible, say the Freudists. Sex is the strongest impulse, yet subject to the greatest repression, ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... from the effects of fear thus engendered in their minds. In some instances the resultant damage to their mentality is more serious than the venereal disease from which they are suffering: whilst in others an obsession that they are infected, when there is no foundation for the fear, may develop in such a manner as to inflict serious and ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... perhaps still more subtle, is the case of A Winter's Tale, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... drawing-room, their work on their knees, thinking of him. In the excitement of criticism his thoughts wandered to his own work, and the women's eyes filled with reveries, and their hands folded languidly over their knees. He spoke without emphasis, his words seeming to drop from the thick obsession of his dream. At ten the ladies gathered up their work, bade him good-night; and nightly these good-nights grew tenderer, and nightly they went up-stairs more deeply penetrated with a sense of their happiness. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the intensity of her sensitive ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... I sometimes think, mademoiselle, that there is some danger that the preoccupation which women like ourselves naturally feel with the suppression of this cruel trade and the rescue of its victims, may at times lead us into obsession or exaggeration. I try to guard myself against that. Moderation and exactitude ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... were transformed into a hive of preparation for the funeral. All was changed. Mr. Povey kindly slept for three nights on the parlour sofa, in order that Mrs. Baines might have his room. The funeral grew into an obsession, for multitudinous things had to be performed and done sumptuously and in strict accordance with precedent. There were the family mourning, the funeral repast, the choice of the text on the memorial ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... has a desire to seize upon the physical body of another. The purpose is to gratify desires that have outlived the physical body. The dead drunkard is perhaps the commonest example of the obsessing entity, and if the obsession is only partial it may lead to nothing worse than strong and perhaps irresistible impulses toward alcoholic stimulation. Obsession may, of course, occur without the psychic door being opened deliberately. But no obsession is possible, in any case, unless there is something ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... ligaments; weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... attempts seems to have been made—by some person or persons to the deponent most emphatically unknown—to get my cool, phlegmatic nervous system and brain excited. The two principal means made use of to complete the obsession were, that just mentioned, and the announcement of a succession of 'big things,' as about to occur—the biggest kind of things—those the expectation of which was best calculated to set my brain in a whirl. It will be seen, in the sequel, that, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... coyote that caught a fugitive scent of the gray killer, but Breed did not share this dread. He was Flatear's match in size and strength and so was not concerned. Breed could not know that Flatear's hatred had become almost an obsession; that night after night the slayer was craftily trailing him and that killing coyotes was but a side line to lighten the hours of a protracted stalk for Breed himself. Flatear was a veteran warrior and ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... furnace without; had been shut since seven of the morning; and would so remain till after sunset. Yet, the mercury hovered between ninety-seven and a hundred all day, and most of the night. In India the thermometer supersedes the barometer; and in the hot weather it becomes an obsession. There is always a mild satisfaction in knowing ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the dream work has been transferred that bewilderment which its product, the dream, has aroused in us. In truth, the dream work is only the first recognition of a group of psychical processes to which must be referred the origin of hysterical symptoms, the ideas of morbid dread, obsession, and illusion. Condensation, and especially displacement, are never-failing features in these other processes. The regard for appearance remains, on the other hand, peculiar to the dream work. If this explanation brings the dream into line with the formation of psychical disease, it becomes ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... born sixty-two years ago on the Illinois prairie, and he has devoted practically all of his life to the pursuit of wild animals. It has been a pursuit which owed its unflagging energy and indomitable purpose to a singular passion, almost an obsession, to capture alive, not to kill. He has caught and broken the will of every well-known wild beast native to western North America. Killing was repulsive to him. He even disliked the sight of a sporting rifle, though for years necessity compelled him to earn his livelihood by supplying the meat of ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... impulse was to lower the curtain on her side, the side on which the procession was to pass. But, when she heard the drums close at hand, seized with a nervous frenzy at her inability to escape that obsession, or, it may be, infected by the unhealthy curiosity that encompassed her, she raised the curtain with a jerk, and her pale, ardent little face appeared, resting on ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... when she looked at Percy, he seemed supremely ignorant of it all, unconscious of this trap of the existence of which everyone here present was aware, save indeed himself. She would have fought against this weird feeling of obsession, of being a mechanical toy would up to do certain things, but this she could not do; her will appeared paralysed, her tongue ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Perhaps such obsession was natural. How could he foresee the variety of new methods that were so soon to transform book illustration? Anyhow, herein partly lies the explanation of the following notice in a second-hand book ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... suggestion of the hypnotizer, or else the auto-suggestion of the would-be medium himself. A writer on the subject has said of this: "In too many cases, only the power of auto-hypnotism is manifested, and we have obsession, fraud and folly as the result. There is one sure method of detecting the auto-hypnotic trance, and showing the difference between that and the genuine spirit trance. Any competent magnetist or hypnotiser ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... constantly at his best; but he is so often enough to make him, as was said at the beginning, very delectable reading, especially for the second time and later, which will be admitted to be no common praise. When you read him for the first time his bad taste, his obsession with certain subjects, his repetition of the same gibes, and other things which have been duly mentioned, strike and may disgust—will certainly more or less displease anybody but a partisan on the same ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in the still afternoons as she wandered over this vast ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... These were so outside her experience that she found it possible to thrust them almost out of sight by saying they would be "all right" in confident tones to herself. But still she knew they were not right, and at times they became a horrible obsession as of something waiting for her round the corner. She tried to imagine herself "getting something," to project herself as sitting down at a desk and writing, or as returning after her work to some pleasantly equipped and free and independent ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... humiliating direct request for money? She wondered how young wives habitually dealt with this problem, when they happened to marry husbands so negligent, not to say underbred, as to cause them the awkwardness and the shame. There followed several days during which the money idea was an obsession, nagging and grinning at her every instant. The sight of money gave her a peculiar itching sensation. When the little general paid for anything—always drawing out a great sheaf of bank notes in doing it—she flushed hot and cold, her glance fell guiltily and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Obsession—fixed ideas—in the medical sense: half of him, psychologically, was quite conscious that the other half was under their influence. The sound self was observing the unsound self, but apparently with no power over it. Otherwise how was it that he was here again, hiding ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the wrong horse, to our fighting with the "semi-Asiatic barbarian" (as our fathers used to call him) against the nation which has close racial and cultural affinity to our own, just as half a century since the same fatal obsession about the "Balance of Power" led us to fight with the Mohammedan in order to bolster up for half ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... consciousness quickly elsewhere, to prevent an obtrusive reality from dimming this last addition to the picture. The gentle, unmistakable, velvet warble of a bluebird came over the hillside, again and again; and so completely absorbed and lulled was I by the gradual obsession of being in the midst of a northern scene, that the sound caused not the slightest excitement, even internally and mentally. But the sympathetic spirit who was directing this geographic burlesque overplayed, and followed the soft curve of audible wistfulness ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... sofa, dreaming, as she had done all her life; save that the faculty—of setting in motion at will a stream of vivid and connected images—which had always been one of her chief pleasures, was now an obsession and a torment. How often, in her wakeful nights at Rydal, had she lived over again every moment in the walk to Blea Tarn, till at last, gathered once more on George's knees, and nestling to his breast, she ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... word explains almost every inexplicable act in life." He took up a knife and held it level on his palm. "There you have the normal condition, but once one end swings up you get Genius and all the Arts, or madness and crime and the obsession of one idea: one definite, over-mastering idea that drives every ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... not to be explained by the fact of Justin's illness. There was something newly impassioned in the duskiness of her eyes, in the fulness of her red lips, in every sweeping movement of her body, which seemed caused by the obsession of a hidden fiery force that held her apart and afar, goddess-like, even while she spoke of and handled the things of every-day life. She looked at the common-place surroundings, at the children, at Dosia; but she saw only Justin. When ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... joyous covenant of affection than that of Mifflin McGill and ourself in our boyish madness for Tusitala? It is a happy circumstance, we say, for a youth, before the multiplying responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and when this passion can be shared and doubled and knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, insane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously mad friend Mifflin) admirable adventures are sure to follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us later ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill, frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk, bowed forward, with his face ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... loud and screeching, which, ever since it first began to excite his nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the Kuenstlerhaus in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him and led ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the sermon is always tediously dull? Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... all the vital qualities, the centre of life. She connects the nerves in their passage from the brain and the spinal cord through the body with manifestations of life. She has a series of chapters with regard to psychology normal and morbid. She talks about frenzy, insanity, despair, dread, obsession, anger, idiocy, and innocency. She says very strongly in one place that "when headache and migraine and vertigo attack a patient simultaneously they render a man foolish and upset his reason. This makes many people think that he is possessed of a demon, but that is not true." ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... a cabinet-maker by trade, but he had money and could gratify his craving for art. The glory of the Milan Cathedral, seen once, became an obsession for him, and he went again and again. At last the idea grew in his mind to express his homage in a perfect copy of the great church which, as he said, "held his heart." There was no train between Milan and Lecco in his day (1840), and he used to walk all those miles to make drawings of the Cathedral. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... except the love of heaven, of which it was a part. By heaven he meant not only the future state of the soul, but the earth on which he trod, and the only thing likely to become pernicious during the years that followed was his obsession with the one idea and his certainty that he ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and pretences of Darrell and others obliged the clergy to enact the following canon (No. 73): "That no minister or ministers, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast 'out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture, or cozenage, and deposition from the ministry." This penalty at the present day not many of the clergy are in ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... a third possibility. The Monk. Simon tried to shake off that thought. There was no sense in it. Queer how anything like that masquerader's mischief-making could get under a sensible man's skin—dig its way into his brain until it became an obsession! Suppose he had set fire to the tannery—was that any reason to believe he had proceeded to further activities the same night? There was not a shred of proof connecting ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Robert's mind," he added. "You must remember that he was an abnormal type. An ordinary man would not have made such a disclosure on the day of the funeral of the woman who was supposed to be his wife. But all Robert's acts hinged on his one great obsession. He allowed nothing to come between him and his one ambition—not even his wife (let us call her so) and child. But it would come home to him afterwards—I mean the normal point of view—the way the world would regard such a disclosure—and I ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... a welcome task to one who feels himself congenial to some Great or Significant Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession with him to communicate to others what he sees in his Idol, his Divinity. Yet it is not Inspiration for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. Some point that has no marked attraction in itself may be inexpressibly precious to the Author as Material, presenting itself to him with some ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... more bell-like became that sound as he listened to it. It struck a certain note for him. And to that note another added itself, until in the purling rhythm of the river he caught the murmuring monotone of a name Boulain—Boulain—Boulain. The name became an obsession. It meant something. And he knew what it meant—if he could only whip his memory back into harness again. But that was impossible now. When he tried to concentrate his mental faculties, ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... her voice was irrepressible. She had been alone for weeks with the conventional gloom that made an obsession of the shadow of death which enveloped the house. All voices and footsteps had been subdued to harmonize with the grief of the mistress of this mausoleum. Now she heard the sharp tread of this man unafraid, and saw the alert vitality of his confident bearing. It was like a breath of ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... to his lawyer's; and as he walked through the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in an ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... reeked of the very beginnings of finance. It was the haunt of the concession-monger; of the lobbyist; of the men who wanted something. These I had seen before in some American State capitals; the anxious face of the concession-hunter had a family likeness to the man of Lombard Street: the obsession of the gold-seeker was visible on every other ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Eleanor, helplessly. "How you harp on things! We must dress to make other women jealous and to attract men. To be a sensation! Perhaps the word 'immoral' is not what I mean. A woman will be shocking in her obsession to attract, but hardly more than that, if ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed, professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living, the time ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
