"This is an ignorant determined man, who has long had one
fixed idea. More than that, he seems to me (I may misjudge him) to be a man of a desperate and fierce character."
Smith who, however, was simple enough in his way, with that terrible simplicity of the
fixed idea, for which there is also another name men pronounce with dread and aversion.
It is one of Harris's
fixed ideas that he CAN sing a comic song; the
fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris's friends who have heard him try, is that he CAN'T and never will be able to, and that he ought not to be allowed to try.
Three hours later, pursued even in his dreams by a
fixed idea, the poor fellow awoke, and struggled against the stupefying influence of the narcotic.
It was governed too much by a
fixed idea. Every nook and cranny of her brain was filled with the thought that this man, with whom she had lived without distaste for seven years, had taken the "poor boy" away from her in order to kill him - the man to whom she had grown accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she had trusted, took the boy away to kill him!
Ned Land did not answer; his compressed lips and frowning brow showed with him the violent possession this
fixed idea had taken of his mind.
Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some
fixed idea which I cannot make out.
de Richelieu, of whom we were speaking just now, was very much to blame in the
fixed idea he had of governing France alone, unaided.
No one in London knew positively of the nature of the armoured Martians, and there was still a
fixed idea that these monsters must be sluggish: "crawling," "creeping painfully" --such expressions occurred in almost all the earlier reports.
I suppose you know that the world is selfish, I mean the majority of the people in it, often unconsciously I must admit, and especially people with a mission, with a
fixed idea, with some fantastic object in view, or even with only some fantastic illusion.
Possessed in his jealousy by the
fixed idea that Wrayburn was in the secret, if it were not altogether of his contriving, Bradley was as confident of getting the better of him at last by sullenly sticking to him, as he would have been--and often had been--of mastering any piece of study in the way of his vocation, by the like slow persistent process.
As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by the movable window, I could see that she was amused by my infatuation, the way my interest in the papers had become a
fixed idea. "One would think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the universe," she said; and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern's letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the greater boon.