Sentence examples for a compulsion of from inspiring English sources

He sometimes addressed an imaginary bird on his shoulder, and he was widely known as Tappy because of his superstitious habit, perhaps a compulsion, of tapping people and things a given number of times on given days.

Again the art he really cared about seemed out of reach or only peripherally in his life — mainly through his habit, which had the character of a compulsion, of drawing wild, sensuous semiabstract designs on stray scraps of paper: telephone notes, shopping lists, card-game score sheets.

James turned to fashion, he explained to a correspondent, "out of a compulsion to be involved in a business of which my father disapproved".

People speculate, as they will, that Zwirner's ambition arises out of a compulsion to surpass his father.

All this was something of a compulsion for him.

Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums.

The book is a great example of how a compulsion for obsession can make for obsessively interesting art.

There's a compulsion to look but most of the things on it irritate me, that's the problem".

But when you've been on the receiving end of gaslighting, a compulsion for accuracy can be a survival mechanism.

He seems driven by a compulsion to overcome the ignorance of his countrymen, which he says he shared.

When I visited three years ago, I thought that its problem was a compulsion to repeat the mistakes of American cities.