A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Medical tag
Obsession Monomania
Fixed ideas, compulsive pursuit, 19th-century 'monomania'.
Works
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Grasshopper on the Road is an easy-reader book of six short linked stories about a grasshopper who decides one morning to follow a road wherever it leads, and about the creatures he meets on the way, each of whom has made one idea the whole of life. In "The Club," a crowd of beetles welcomes him to their We Love Morning club and chants the praises of dew and sunrise, until Grasshopper admits that he also likes afternoon and night; they throw him out, and he walks on.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher is Charles Babbage's late memoir of invention, public controversy, and scientific administration. It is not a continuous autobiography so much as a set of argued recollections.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A View from the Bridge, Act 1 (two-act version)
Eddie's consultation with Alfieri, in which he insists Rodolpho is 'not right' and Alfieri hints at what Eddie feels.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XI, §12–13
Difference between 'naturals' (intellectual disability) and madmen; delusions such as believing oneself a king or made of glass; partial madness in otherwise sober people.
- Bleak House, Chapters XIV, XXXV and LX
Miss Flite's daily attendance at court, Gridley's collapse, and Richard's wasting under the strain of the suit.
- Characters, The Chatterer
Compulsive, poorly bounded speech becomes a recognizable social burden.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (chess against himself)
He splits into a white self and a black self and is consumed by compulsive play, losing sleep and appetite.
- Chess, Final scene
During the second game against Czentovic, Dr B.'s agitation and confusion return until the narrator stops him.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Later chapters
Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.
- Crime and Punishment, Fever and pursuit
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The dream of the Dionysian rite, described as a bodily and mental experience that crushes Aschenbach's resistance.
- Dracula, Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)
Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. XXV
Discovery of Boldwood's locked closet of gifts, the petition on his mental state, and the reprieve to confinement during Her Majesty's pleasure.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Account of Goriot's history
The narrator traces how Goriot's fatherhood, after his wife's death, developed almost into a mania.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§33-34
His fear, while watching the bell-ringers, that a bell or the steeple itself would fall and kill him.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§132-141
The repeated inner voice urging him to sell Christ, his bodily efforts to resist it, and the moment he believes he consented.
- Grasshopper on the Road, The Sweeper
The housefly sweeps outward from his house to the road and resolves to go on until the entire world is free of dust.
- Great Expectations, Chapter VIII
Satis House and Miss Havisham's stopped clocks and withered bridal dress.
- Humboldt's Gift, Early sections (Charlie's memories)
Humboldt's torrential talk, grand plans and sleepless energy in the 1940s and 1950s.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Orlando Mad
Orlando reads Angelica and Medoro's names in the grotto, wanders all night, lies insensible three days and nights, then strips off his armour and rages through the countryside uprooting trees and attacking shepherds and flocks.
- Letters of Napoleon, Letters to Joséphine, Italian campaign (spring–autumn 1796)
Repeated complaints of sleeplessness, fevered longing and jealousy as he campaigns; Joséphine's illness and delay in joining him.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- Metamorphoses, Book III
Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and wastes away; Echo fades to a voice; Tiresias's change of sex.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 41
The history of Ahab's injury and the growth of his monomania during the long voyage home.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 4
Dream images, sexual arousal and erotic fixation are explained through bodily images and habit.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac
The madman's argument described as a perfect but narrow circle that cannot be broken by reasoning, with examples of the man who thinks himself Christ or the target of a conspiracy.
- Othello, Act 3, Scene 3
Othello complains of a pain upon his forehead and Desdemona offers to bind it with the handkerchief; later Iago calls jealous fancies poisons and says no poppy or mandragora will bring Othello sleep again.
- Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Chapters on street nuisances
Babbage's intense campaign against organ-grinders and urban noise shows the bodily strain of attention in a city environment.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 251a–252b
The lover's symptoms: shuddering, sweating, fever, sleeplessness and obsessive longing as the wings regrow.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', later entries
Water and milk vanish from the carafe; the narrator's reflection fails to appear in the mirror; he reads of an epidemic of madness in São Paulo.
- Selected Short Stories, 'A Piece of String'
Hauchecorne's fixation on clearing his name ends in delirium and death.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Right You Are!, Act I
Signora Frola and Ponza each explain the household arrangement by attributing a fixed delusion to the other.
- Swann's Way, Swann in Love
Swann's jealousy described as a malady so bound up with his life that surgeons would call it past operation; Dr Cottard among the Verdurins.
- Tales (Selection), The Tell-Tale Heart, opening and conclusion
The narrator offers his acute hearing and careful planning as proof that he is not mad, and finally hears a beating he attributes to the dead man's heart.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Hobbit, Chapters 15-16
Thorin, inside the Mountain, will not share the treasure and searches obsessively for the Arkenstone.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. II, Chs. 1–5
Toby's groin wound at Namur, his long recovery, and his turn to the study of fortification to explain where he was hurt.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter 2 and following
Gollum's divided talk between Sméagol and Gollum as he argues with himself over the precious.
- The Meek One, Part One, Ch. 5–6
The wife stands over her husband with a revolver at his temple while he feigns sleep.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, surveillance of Stillman
Quinn maps Stillman's walks into patterns and lets the case consume sleep, home and ordinary social reality.
- The New York Trilogy, Ghosts
Blue's assignment to watch Black becomes a closed circuit of isolation, projection and increasingly paranoid interpretation.
- The New York Trilogy, The Locked Room
The narrator's fixation on Fanshawe turns literary stewardship into rivalry, envy and self-loss.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, school expulsion and surveillance
Miles's unclear misconduct and the governess's scrutiny raise questions about child psychology, projection and moral panic.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, narrator's pursuit
The scholar's fixation on the papers becomes a study in monomania and professional self-excuse.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XI–XV: Saintliness
Extreme asceticism, self-mortification and fasting described and evaluated, including James's judgement on its pathological excesses.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV
Separation intensifies Troilus's despair, appetite loss and fixation on Criseyde's return.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Middle poems
Distance, jealousy and memory turn erotic longing into repetitive thought and emotional dependence.
- We, Records after meeting I-330
D-503 experiences desire, jealousy and dreams as illness or infection of the self.
- White Nights, Second night
The dreamer narrates his withdrawal into fantasy, revealing both self-protection and social deprivation.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology”
“The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons.”
“My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”
“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“These somewhat pathetic evidences of a mind crazed with care and love”
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world”
“Ah, how easy it is to lose one's reason! Some lose theirs by yielding to the sway of the passions;”
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
Frequently cited
“all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad”
Frequently cited
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Frequently cited
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.”
“Swann's love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still reasonable, or indeed possible.”
Frequently cited
“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
“one supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, &c”
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him”
“so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”
“The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness AFTER the deed, I call this”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”
Frequently cited
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”