Word: mania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fear. Before the war Hess was a paranoid, hoped to retire to the Bavarian Alps for rest and nerve repair. As the months of captivity passed in Scotland, he developed a persecution mania. "They" were trying to "choke me." Sometimes when he said this his hands would fly to his throat and he would stagger backward, screaming. A psychologist finally learned who "they" were: the people of Europe. Screamed Hess: "Like grass, they grow, higher and higher. They think we are evil and they hate us. The war goes on longer and they get stronger and stronger. From all over...
...Harry Ruby's real passion in life is neither song nor script writing-it is baseball. Ever since a day, 22 years ago, when Ruby stopped in New Rochelle to watch a Westchester League sandlot game, baseball has obsessed him to the point of mania. With doglike devotion, he has followed the White Sox, the Giants, the Cubs, and a half-dozen other U.S. Major League teams in training and on the road. Ruby owns and wears the uniforms of all the teams he fools with. He spends most of his time bench-warming...
...nothing ever comes of it. Either the Neva is frozen, or I meet somebody I know on the way and so am forced to put it off." Problem in Selection. Sonya Shostakovich's maternal solicitude for Mitya, who was a frail youth afflicted with tuber ulosis, bordered on mania. "Suppose the ceiling of our house fell in," she would brood. "Whom should one save? Of course Mitya-for this would be the duty of everyone to society-for the sake of art." Sonya even insisted on dragging her friends and relatives into her all-absorbing responsibilities. "If both Mitya...
...Jekyll-Mr. Hyde contrast between the right-right and left-left pictures. Most subjects violently disliked one, liked the other. Said a schizophrenic murderer, looking at his right-right face: "This man has a psychic trouble, but he is intelligent." Said a woman with a persecution mania, of her own left-left face: "There might be such people, but they must be rare...
...mania was called St. Vitus's dance because a visit to the saint's chapel sometimes worked a cure. The modern medical name for it is tarantism, after the wild Italian folk dance, the tarantella. The Italians have a common belief that the tarantella drives out the poison of a tarantula's bite by causing perspiration, and that the dance was named for the spider. Actually, both dance and spider were named for the city of Taranto, which was hit hard by the dancing mania...