Literary notes about MORBID (AI summary)
In literature, “morbid” is employed to evoke a sense of unhealthy intensity and an obsession with the macabre or pathological. Authors use it to describe both literal and figurative states, from a paralyzing dread of creative expression [1] to characters whose very thoughts are tinged with an unnerving fixation on decay and disorder [2],[3]. It conveys not only physical and mental deterioration—as when dreams appear with a jarring reality [4] or self-esteem becomes painfully distorted [5]—but also serves to color characters and settings with an unsettling atmosphere [6],[7]. Overall, the term enriches narrative tone by imbuing observations of human behavior and societal norms with a layer of existential disquiet.
- But Margaret had an almost morbid horror of “drawing people out,” of “making things go.”
— from Howards End by E. M. Forster - ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it is all so morbid.’
— from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad - I’ve studied all this morbid psychology in my practice.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - It was also observed during those two or three days that he was in a state of morbid self-esteem, and was specially touchy on all points of honour.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - She seems, indeed, to have been partly the victim of Branwell’s morbid imagination, the imagination of an opium-eater and a drunkard.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë - Laura went to bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
