Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end--a life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an
overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime.
He might perhaps have purchased his social peace by abandoning his investigations; but he apparently preferred the latter, as most men would who have once fallen under the
overmastering spell of research.
It is the
overmastering sense of pain that drives them.
High above all his plans for the accumulation of power and wealth, he set before him now a desire which had become the moving impulse of his life - a desire primitive but
overmastering - the desire of a strong man for the woman he loves.
The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and
overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him.
I seemed to feel in him some vehement power that was struggling within him; it gave me the sensation of something very strong,
overmastering, that held him, as it were, against his will.
Rosamond, with an
overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before when she clung to her husband.
He himself was conscious of a sense of nausea, a giddiness which was almost
overmastering.
It was tense and hoarse with an
overmastering rage.
An
overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while
It's harder now to care about things of
overmastering importance-nuclear war, earthquakes, bigoted presidents-when the worst day of your life has come and gone; it takes superhuman effort to write about things other than my mother, and it's easy to care only about things that are immediate and personal.
Woolf commented in her diary that "Orlando [1928] was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed
overmastering, impulse.
