"Obsession" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... organizers, forgetting that this was a mimic battle, had made it into a real battle, and that there was an imperfect appreciation of what strictly amateur sport is. The desire to win, laudable and essential in itself, may by excessive indulgence become a morbid obsession. Surely, I thought, and still think, the means ought to suit the end! An enthusiast for American organization, I was nevertheless forced to conclude that here organization is being carried too far, outraging the sense of proportion and of general fitness. For me, such organization disclosed even ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... haunted me night and day. Why had he never loved me? Why had I been so much to him, and no more? Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might cherish me as his mind's comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I can't tell you how that question tortured me. It became an obsession. ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... was dragging me down. No wonder Lorna would have none of me! Strange, that I cannot understand my own case as I understand the cases of others. Do what I would, I could not heal myself, the soul of the matter persistently escaped me. I was beginning to be as much the victim of an obsession as any of the poor creatures ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... this fully, it must be known that she had a horror of snakes, so terrible as to amount to an obsession, a mental deformity, due, doubtless, to the fact that her father (Colonel Mortimer Seymour Stukeley) died of snake-bite before her mother's eyes, a few hours before ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... me, my lady, if I am blunt ... the late Count was somewhat of a playboy. No. I will make that stronger. He was a satyr, a lecher; he was a man with a sexual obsession. ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Some accustomed and important exhibit was not in its place. What was it? He clasped his head in his hands and strove to clear his mind for a moment from obsession. It was something historical, something unique, something he had but lately mentioned to Katherine. Something intimately connected with this very room. At last memory responded. He placed a chair between the two suits of armour that stood against the screen and the end ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... larger quantities as the system becomes accustomed to their use; they are almost without exception excreted by the kidneys, thus adding an additional burden to organs already badly overworked. They produce a habit of gaining relief which becomes an obsession and incapable of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... individual and temporary submission, but a woman who is loved surrenders more fully to the very god of love himself, and so she becomes a slave, and is not alone deprived of her personal liberty, but is even infected in her mental processes by this crafty obsession. The fates work for man, and therefore, she averred, woman must be victorious, for those who dare to war against the gods are already assured of victory: this being the law of life, that only the weak shall conquer. The limit of strength is petrifaction ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... precious family heirloom or art object with an encyclopedic knowledge that should have caused his companion to wonder how he knew so much. Several times he slipped in the pronoun I, hoping that this might have some effect in waking Helen from the obsession that any other than he could ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... by an obsession of uncertainty. He found that she had arrived at her rooms in the hospital with the shrivelled old woman and the macaw and ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... there had been much wild talk about internal improvements. The mania which had taken possession of the people in most Western States had affected the grangers of Illinois. It amounted to an obsession. The State was called upon to use its resources and unlimited credit to provide a market for their produce, by supplying transportation facilities for every aspiring community. Elsewhere State credit was building canals and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... 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 ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... 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 creature (so ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... mind is temporarily clouded through infection or suffering, he may be reacting to a delusion, an obsession, a fixed idea of disability, a terrifying fear. Sometimes he persistently refuses food, and gives no reason for it. The unthinking nurse is tried, puzzled, and irritated. In other ways, perhaps, the patient seems quite normal. But, after all, the explanation is very simple. He probably ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... public, which wants a man who has once pleased it, to do the same thing under the fret of whip and spur for ever. When I went to the Island of Jersey, in 1897, it was to shake myself free of what might become a mere obsession. I determined that, as wide as my experiences had been in life, so would my writing be, whether it pleased the public or not. I was determined to fulfil myself; and in doing so to take no instructions except those of my own conscience, impulse, and conviction. Even ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Sar'a" epilepsy, falling sickness, of old always confounded with "possession" (by evil spirits) or "obsession." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that suicide of self-respect which turns men to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... it amused her to think how thoroughly Irene had revised her opinion of the "red-headed bounder." In the still twilight her quiet mind speculated upon many things—the friendship between Archie and Irene, the obsession most people seemed to have to get together in one way or another, Irene's creed of "taking your place in the world,"—possibly even the purpose and meaning of life in general, although Adelle would scarcely recognize her meditations under those ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 face ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... wince whenever it came—never a wait of many minutes. At first she thought he was doing this deliberately either to annoy her or in pursuance of some secret deep design. But she soon saw that he was not aware of his inability to keep off the subject or of his obsession for that phrase representing the thing he was intensely wishing and willing—"chiefly," she thought, "because it is something he cannot have." She was amazed at his display of such a weakness. It gave her the chance to learn an important truth about human ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back to the Manor, while Anne stayed on ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... not engaged to Jack Belllounds, and I'm never going to be. There will be trouble here. I feel it. I see it coming. Dad keeps at me persistently. He grows older. I don't think he's failing, but then there's a loss of memory, and an almost childish obsession in regard to the marriage he has set his heart on. Then his passion for Jack seems greater as he learns little by little that Jack is not all he might be. Wilson, I give you my word; I believe if dad ever really sees Jack as I see him or you see him, then something dreadful will ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... "Fire's an obsession with me, I'm afraid," said the stout woman, with a rumbling giggle. The sound of her mirth was ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... sounded in her ear like a "DON'T! DON'T!" The silence, so gruesome, now that this shrill echo had ceased, was poor preparation for her task. Yet would she have welcomed any sound—the least which could have been heard? No, that were a worse alternative than silence; and, relieved of that momentary obsession consequent upon an undertaking of doubtful outcome, she pushed the ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... experience in rousing men. It was not that she had determined upon marriage as a way out of her present difficulties. At the back of her mind, perhaps, was always the knowledge that she must get a man to work for her; but this never became an obsession. She was simply a growing girl, hungry for experience, and at the outset hampered by circumstance. Unless something happened to her, Sally was doomed to poverty and suffering. Therefore, full of raw confidence, she was determined that she should be the heroine of her own romance. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... past, it occurred to her that he dreaded the possibility of her being pregnant. She took pains to reassure him. It made no difference. She was the sort of woman who was unable to realise that a man might not have her own obsession with sex; her relations with men had been purely on those lines; and she could not understand that they ever had other interests. The thought struck her that Philip was in love with somebody else, and she watched ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... something of their virility and verged upon the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going to the other extreme and refusing ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... of course, and met this man, who was small and old, with an obsession for Emil Drukker. He talked for a long time, and then he handed me the diary and said it explained more vividly than I could ever imagine the impulse which prompted Drukker's recurrent human decapitations. He told ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... means of quenching thirst? Not at all. It might rather be called the art of making thirst inextinguishable. Frank libertinage, does it deaden the sting of the senses? No; it envenoms it, converts natural desire into a morbid obsession and makes it the dominant passion. Let your needs rule you, pamper them—you will see them multiply like insects in the sun. The more you give them, the more they demand. He is senseless who seeks for happiness in material ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... quite familiar to him, so much so that he started in his chair as though about to rise and greet him. The stranger, also, seemed for a second under the same obsession, but only for a second; he made a half pause and then passed on, becoming lost to sight beyond the palm trees at the entrance. Jones leaned back ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... this, he reassured his normal intelligence, because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone, that was, who had a trace of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... too 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 said, "Let him go if he will," and this loss ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and over, in the dark stuffiness of the crowded room. Galusha Bangs, who had been at first much amused, began to be bored. Incidentally he was extremely sorry for Lulie, poor girl, who was compelled to be present at this ridiculous exhibition of her father's obsession. Heavy breathing sounded near at hand, growing steadily heavier until it became a snore. The snore broke off in the middle and with a sharp and most unchurchly ejaculation, as if the snorer had been awakened suddenly and painfully. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... charge brought against us? Like Robison and Barruel, we are accused of raising a false alarm, of creating a bogey, or of being the victims of an obsession. Up to a point this is comprehensible. Whilst on the Continent the importance of secret societies is taken as a matter of course and the libraries of foreign capitals teem with books on the question, people in this country really imagine that secret societies are things of the past—articles ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... and 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, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... enjoyment—and those who knew him 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 appreciated it, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she felt the scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil, dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and it had bad effect upon the other horses. Darkness 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 the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the object of the work, or the spirit in which it is done. We think with respect of the man who makes a fortune, or who fills an official post, the duties of which do nothing in particular for any one. It is a kind of obsession with us practical Westerners; of course a man ought to contribute to the necessary work of the world; but many men spend their lives in work which is not necessary; and, after all, we are sent into the world to ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... shrugged his shoulders and continued a longwinded prayer he had been at for some time. He was wont to say that the only redeeming feature of our captivity was the ample time it gave him for the improvisation of prayers—it was becoming an obsession with him. The Sagoths had begun to take notice of his habit of declaiming throughout entire marches. One of them asked him what he was saying—to whom he was talking. The question gave me an idea, so I answered quickly before Perry could ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 straight ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... desire fails to find its immediate fruition, if it is frustrated, consciousness of it may become exceedingly intense. There is the constant thought of the object, a vivid feeling of tension, of a striving to attain the object. Desire may become an obsession, a torment filling the horizon, and the volition in which it finds its fruition stands forth as a marked relief. This condition of things may be brought about by the inhibition occasioned by the physical impossibility ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... matters comparatively 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 was at ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... The Rev. Thresham Gregg was a notorious and blatant "anti-Popery" preacher of the period whom the wits of Young Ireland frequently made the butt of their jests. Apart from his bigoted sectarian obsession, he was, however, in several respects decidedly nationalistic, and steadily preached support of home trade and manufactures to his audiences. There can be no reasonable doubt that he recognised ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... 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 remain unaware for ever. To the endearing ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... reading and making extracts. I have nothing in my head or on paper except Sahalin. Mental obsession. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... factories and yards, if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hand a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of transportation."[48] "The working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair for a method ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... mind, somehow, that the bright, circular opening above his head—the mouth of the well—was the sun, and that the black disk of the moon was all that was needed to complete the expected phenomenon. The notion soon took complete obsession of his brain, so that he forgot where he was and imagined himself standing on the surface of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... beauty in her youth; was still very comely at 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 of her works and articles, was a lovely woman. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... know. But who could want, as a newspaper story I just read says, to steal the brains of men? What for? It sounds like Barter. I've never heard of anybody else with such an obsession. I'm putting two and two together—and fervently hoping they'll add up to seven instead of four. For if ever in my life I wanted to ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... impulse that set their faces to the southward: "To get forward, to get forward." Answering the resistless influence of their leader, that indomitable man of iron whom no fortune could break nor bend, and who imposed his will upon them as it were a yoke of steel—this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it were only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the heart-breaking, rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind; forward in the face of the blinding snow; forward through ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... 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 with her." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... due consideration, decided that he would speak first to his father—the one doubtful element in the home circle. But habit and the obsession of the moment proved too strong, when his mother came to 'tuck him up,' as she had never failed to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... also unexpected and varied. Often, as in the examples quoted, it comes to us in a dream. Sometimes, it is an auditory or visual hallucination which seizes upon us while awake; sometimes, an indefinable but clear and irresistible presentiment, a shapeless but powerful obsession, an absurd but imperative certainty which rises from the depths of our inner darkness, where perhaps lies hidden the final ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... nineteen thousand men, but it was reduced to not more than ten thousand by the detachment of several thousand to guard Boston and of several thousand more to take part in the struggle in Canada, besides thirty-six hundred sick. The Colonists clung as if by obsession to their project of capturing Quebec. The death of Montgomery and the discomfiture of Benedict Arnold, which really gave a quietus to the success of the expedition, did not suffice to crush it. Only too evident ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... style—was not to be found. The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, and the extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this, it may be asked, was the element of "horror" that I have spoken of as sensible?—what obsession that was not charming could find a place in that splendid light, out of which the long summer squeezes every secret and shadow? I'm afraid I'm driven to plead that these evils were exactly in one's imagination, a ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... she laid as it were violent hands on him, to extract his secrets from him. She MUST know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession in her, to know all he knew. For some time he was silent, hating to answer her. Then, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... looks to 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 own company. He is not ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal back from ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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 restrain ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... That was an obsession with Kelly. He drilled it into me daily. Kelly himself was a settled married man. Of his state we talked often. I asked Kelly the very first day if he ever went to ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... her increased enormously, and he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and wonderful—the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him, filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... accident would never have given him a second thought. But all that day he had been oppressed by a sense of hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had followed him from the moment he had landed in Genoa. He had tried to argue it down, inwardly protesting that such must be merely the obsession of all fugitives. And now, even to find an unknown and innocent-appearing young woman trying to force an entrance into his room aroused all his latent cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ashamed ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... calmness of his wife amazed him. He was not intellectual enough to comprehend fully the deep imaginings of a mighty brain, the obsession work is ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... nature of the poet is a characteristic nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: See A Vision of Poets.] Swinburne [Footnote: See A New Year's Ode.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See Sister Songs.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it has ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... seconded Dick's endeavours to create a friendly impression upon the natives encountered; but in the present case he was utterly opposed to their usual methods, the fact being that the idea of penetrating to the heart of the country inhabited by the mysterious white race had gradually come to be an obsession with him, and he would hear of nothing being done that might by any chance interfere with this project; his conviction being that if they adopted their usual methods they would inevitably be stopped and sent to the rightabout. Had he ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... 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 that ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... shall want to gain?... An hour! You never spoke a truer word: an hour of resistance to the first attack! An hour of delay!... That's what I wanted, that's what I offer to my country. Let every one be doing as I am, to the best of his power, let every one be haunted to fever-point by the obsession of the personal service which it is his duty to render to the country; and, if war breaks out, you shall see how a great nation ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... moments the whole matter was dismissed from his mind, and his thoughts filled with a something that lately had become a sort of obsession to him. It was the safety of his gold-dust that troubled, and as each day passed his apprehensions grew. He felt that trouble was threatening in the air of Suffering Creek, and the thought of how easily he might be taken at a disadvantage worried ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Clifford men, flogged out of crews and stained by the blood of primitive and dull savages—the Cliffords were notorious for their brutal driving—now served only to support Madra's debility and a horde of unscrupulous panderers to her obsession. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... clearly with all the expressions 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 ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... turned their horses about, and started the return journey at a good ground-eating gallop. Mile after mile they canceled, occupied in the thoughts the ride had awakened. She was silent, in the spell of a new obsession wrought by this man with his honest voice and stories of the new, strange land, from which he came. Carter, distressed that possibly he had caused trouble by his senseless prattle, was dutifully bent on getting her back to the castle with the least possible ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... student will find but few such British utterances at the moment, and these few not by men of great weight either in politics or in commerce. The South was labouring under an obsession and prophesied results accordingly. So strong was this obsession that governmental foreign policy neglected all other considerations and the first Commission to Europe had no initial instructions save to demand recognition[662]. The failure of that Commission, the prompt British ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the only weapon for a woman in my position. Without it she's as helpless as though her hands were shackled and left a target for every one who chooses to throw a stone at her. It's an obsession with me. I've sworn to win out here, by myself, single-handed; it's a vow as sacred as an oath to me! It means time, patience, hardships and more hardships; and after this I'm going to suffer because you've shown me what I'm turning my back on. But no ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... 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 ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... I have to teach others the workings of our organism, and what do I know of it myself? Was it the sudden upcropping of some lower stratum in my nature—a brutal primitive instinct suddenly asserting itself? I could almost believe the tales of obsession by evil spirits, so ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... Jeff was going on, "there's this kind of a brute born into the world now, the kind that knows how to make money, and as soon as he's discovered his knack, he's got the mania to make more. It's an obligation, an obsession. Maybe it's only the game. He's in it, just as much as if he'd got a thousand men behind him, all looting territory. It might be for a woman. But it's the game. And it's a queer game. It ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... 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 ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... massive and gigantic scale; and the melodies on which these works are built up are like rough-hewn blocks of not very good quality, but imposing by reason of their size, and by the obstinate repetition of their rhythmic design, which is maintained as if it were an obsession. This heaping-up of music both crude and learned in style, with harmonies that are sometimes clumsy and sometimes delicate, is worth considering on account of its bulk. The orchestration is heavy and noisy; and the brass dominates and roughly gilds ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week, and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, always walking in his shadow, when he ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... has its characteristic features, each set of laws are framed to cover the phenomena presented by that group. Otherwise there would be no need of these special laws. It is astonishing how paralysing is the effect of the theistic obsession on the minds of even scientific men, since it leads them to ignore what is really a basic consideration ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... that tree, up that hill, down that hole... sitting tranquilly in front of the schoolroom fire he would scent them; always they eluded him, laughed at him, mocked him with their stumpy tails. They were rapidly becoming the obsession of his ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... wondering at the strange contrasts of the Middle Ages. How was it that people who could devise so beautiful a service believed in witchcraft, demoniacal possession and obsession, in the incubus and succubus, and in the Sabbath an in many other horrible absurdities? It seemed astonishing that anybody could even pretend to credit such monstrous tales, but there could be no doubt that the dread of old women who rode on broomsticks and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... suffering 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 ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... 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 ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... escaping at his expense. The right thing would have been to send him back again for her father. But West had become such a horrible obsession with her that the sight of him even at a distance had ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... condemned to death. Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept. Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon's every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had lost ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... go! I've got to go!" He repeated it as one repeats an incantation. "I've got to go!" And he went on methodically assorting and packing. Even at this moment of obsession his ingrained orderliness asserted itself; the things he rejected were laid back in their proper place with, the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... true; gluttony would be his mania, and one every whit as prohibitive to his chances of reaching the spiritual plane, as drink, or sexual passion. Love of eating is, indeed, quite the commonest form of obsession, and one that develops soonest. Nine out of ten children—particularly present-day children, whose doting parents encourage their every desire—are fonder of cramming their bellies than of playing cricket or skipping; games soon weary them, but buns and chocolates never. The truth is, buns ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... he had hit that face. Still, anything was better than to leave him under this gruesome obsession! Then, to his consternation, Derek ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... others faded in smoke, 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
... 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 water. Several ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... 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.... Now he is resolved, and ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his fluency in French, both of which he had learned ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... turn 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 ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the artist that furnishes the imagination with those images which remain substantially the same under forms constantly varying, but absorbing the soul to such a degree that a person is often tempted to look upon their action as the result of obsession. ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... 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 with an actual bluebird ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the reason why Alfred Fluette must needs help himself to Genevieve's patrimony. That rapacious monster, the Wheat Pit, had exhausted all of his legitimate resources, and so mad was his obsession that he scrupled ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... 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 him, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to shatter 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 frosts of ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... 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
... 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
... psychopathic taint. Men visit prostitutes, and become excited at the sight of every woman who is neither too old nor too repulsive. Some individuals of this kind are pursued night and day by erotic images, which may even become an obsession and a veritable torment. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... thought or felt. All she knew was that he 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
... Of the head or mind. Subs. 3. In disposition; as all perturbations, evil affection, &c. Or Habits, as Subs. 4. Dotage Frenzy. Madness. Ecstasy. Lycanthropia. Chorus sancti Viti. Hydrophobia. Possession or obsession of Devils. Melancholy. See ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... recover from the obsession of that continual slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... To him it appeared not unfit shrine for the worship of that same all-pervasive spirit of mystery, not unfit spot for the revelation of that same glad, yet cunningly elusive secret, of which he suffered the so fond obsession. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... this fashion or in that, 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
... 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 ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... endowed with an excellent physical and mental organization had allowed her ability and capacity to become perverted. Orderliness, at first a well planned daily routine, gradually degenerated into an obsession for cleanliness. Each piece of furniture went through its weekly polishing, rugs were swept and dusted, sponged and sunned—even Mary could not do the table-linen to her taste—and Tuesday afternoon through the years went to immaculate ironing. The obsession for cleanliness bred a fear ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the ordinary press criticism of the day: with that sort of thing, he wrote Uhlig, one could not tempt the cat from behind the stove. He knew what criticism should not be, but when he came to what it should be his view was warped by the obsession that pure music had reached its boundaries, and the future of music was involved with the future of the music-drama. When his prejudices were not aroused, he himself was the greatest critic who has lived: his programmes of the Choral and Eroica ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or the religion ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... find them. It was the only idea he had: to find them—to find them—to find them. His other thoughts were without stimulating power—irresolute, vague, uncertain. This one idea grew and grew until it became an obsession. He could no longer bear the sound of music; so it was no sacrifice to him to give up his profession. He hated the very streets he walked in, for had Elene not walked in them? He must find her; he must find his child. He could hear the little girl calling for him, he kept telling himself. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen after you 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
... even if he had wanted to. What reason could he give for such a course? He could not explain that he already had a family—with stepchildren, so to speak, who adored him. And what could he say to his mother's obsession, to which she came back again and again—her longing to see her grandchildren before she died? Madame Dupont waited only long enough for George to stammer out a few protestations, and then in the next breath to take ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... admit. He saw that 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 pretext for "pushing ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... let's turn to a matter on the mind of every American parent tonight: education. We all know the sorry story of the sixties and seventies—soaring spending, plummeting test scores—and that hopeful trend of the eighties, when we replaced an obsession with dollars with a commitment to quality, and test scores started back up. There's a lesson here that we all should write on the blackboard a hundred times: In a child's education, money can never take the place of basics like discipline, hard ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... mind to the present social awakening to the waste, the enormous and stupid waste, of the gifts of women. To one fresh from the consideration of the roots of life as they lie close to the surface of primitive society, this obsession of the recent centuries, that the community can only be served by a gift for architecture, for administration, for healing, when it occurs in the person of a male, is only a trifle less ridiculous than that other ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him—for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Her evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,—the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it smoking ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Sim and his inclinations. His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still held him in the hollow of his hand, and besides these reefs of menace were yet other shoals to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... carcass doth abide a vagabond spirit whose wanderlust has no purely geographical basis. I wander the wide world over, yes! Also, I wander in and out of men's lives, in and out of men's affairs. To wander—'tis my excuse for living. A fascinating obsession, sir!" ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... 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 ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 escape ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... obsession Miss Deane, as Rachel soon discovered, had a clear and well-balanced mind. For, now that she had received her desired assurance from this new quarter, she began to talk of other things. Her boasted "modernism," it is true, had a smack of the stiff, broadcloth savour of the eighties, but ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... discernment enough to address me as 'Mister Freydon.' And, deprecate as I might, the thing had given me a thrill of deep and real satisfaction. Merely recalling the sound of it added to the exaltation of my mood, and to my obsession by the wonder, the romance of the various transitions of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... is impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate; since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the everlasting refrain! Very well then—No! I do not submit to reason, and I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my immortalizing ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... old emotion securing a new outlet, and tenfold magnified in force, through modern conditions in commercial and industrial life. Is it not plain that in America it has assumed the form of an obsession, biting us high and low, until we reek of it? It is likewise clear that it is a menace to any abiding peace and welfare; that it is still growing and leaving a bitter harvest of ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... my obsession, in what Jacob Boehme calls 'the shudder of divine excitement,' that I was talking to one of the uninitiated. I suppose you think by pyrotechny I mean the old-fashioned methods of set pieces, ghastly portraits in fire, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... challenging, and that all tendencies point to our backing again 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 a century ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... alienist, a good friend of his, with whom he had discussed the sanity of a man whose crime had shocked the country. He knew that the words were true. Once possessed by an idea the madman will not forget it. It becomes an obsession with him—a part of his existence. In his warped brain a suspicion never dies. A fear will smolder everlastingly. A hatred ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... into his bosom, and his eyes stared upward as though in search of heaven. And with that she started to weep again. Then they both embraced, and their teeth chattered they knew not why, as the same imbecile obsession over-mastered them. They had already passed a similar night, but on this occasion the thing was utterly idiotic, as Nana declared when she ceased to be frightened. She suspected something, and this caused ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... amidst this chaos of excitements. As Mrs. Royston returned in a state of absolute exaltation to the fireside, "Lillian," said Mrs. Marable coldly, "the officers of the law are the proper parties for you to appeal to, if you are going to pursue this obsession. Why should you call up that—man? Why don't you call the sheriff ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 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, and therefore doubly in need of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... seemed so easy now to understand 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 at its extreme ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... dreadful figure in eagle's plumes and bear-skins. To affect the imagination of the people when he was going to visit the sick, he had been accustomed to walk upon his two hands and one foot, with the other foot moving up and down in the air. He believed that sickness was caused by obsession, or the influence of some evil spirit, and he endeavored, by howlings, jumpings, and rattling of snake-skins, to drive this imaginary spirit away. But he did not begin his incantations here; he looked upon Benjamin with staring ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Anson did not join the game, and both Moze and Shady evinced little of that whole-hearted obsession which usually attended their gambling. Anson lay at length, his head in a saddle, scowling at the little shelter where the captive girl kept herself out of sight. At times a faint song or laugh, very unnatural, was wafted across the space. Wilson plodded at the ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... Maximum Max, on the other hand, would treat his lascivious topics with peculiar earnestness, and even with something like sadness, as though he dwelt on them in spite of himself, under the stress of an obsession ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... 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, in that little corner ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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, ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... however, I would like to know his name. To find out what that mysterious 'M. J.' stands for has got to be pretty nearly an obsession with me. I am about ready to pick his pocket or rifle his trunk in search of some lurking 'Martin' or 'John' that will set me at peace. As it is, I confess that I have ogled his incoming mail and his outgoing baggage shamelessly, only to be slapped ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... about 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 drive ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... making for Honey and the bank account, the self-denial of it, had exalted his shabbiness into 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
... 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 had ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been deterred by ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... tender abstraction of Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... to find one line of observation. Whatever anybody told you, was reversed entirely by the next man. The throat-distorting obligation to study Arabic called for rather intimate association with educated Arabs, whose main obsession was fear of the Zionist Jews. The things they said against the Jews turned me pro-Zionist. So I cautiously made the acquaintance of some gentlemen with gold-rimmed spectacles, and the things they said about the Arabs set me to sympathizing with ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the same they guard in force and perplex with their shadows the only way ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... 14), not of earth like man, propagating his kind, ruled by mighty kings, the last being Jan bin Jan, missionarised by Prophets and subject to death and Judgment. From the same root are "Junun" madness (i.e., possession or obsession by the Jinn) and "Majnun"a madman. According to R. Jeremiah bin Eliazar in Psalm xii. 5, Adam was excommunicated for one hundred and thirty years, during which he begat children in his own image (Gen. v. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 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. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... telephoned on that unfortunate night had she or Helen ever mentioned Jim. The mother, expecting his obsession to wear itself out, had been only too glad ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers |
