"Berserker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Berserker rage took possession of Beethoven on receipt of this letter which he appeased characteristically by writing all sorts of sarcastic comments over the sheet, and by inventing compound invectives to suit the case. He heavily criss-crossed the whole letter, and across it in heavy lines ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... "crank-eyed." When pressed for an explanation Mr. Mellaire had said that he was the sort of man who flew into blind rages, and that one never could tell what little thing would produce such a rage. As near as I could grasp it, Ditman Olansen was a Berserker type. Yet, as I watched him pulling in good time at the oar, his large, pale-blue eyes seemed almost bovine—the last man in the world, in my judgment, to ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... saw visions and he knew how to make them realities; he was a God-intoxicated prophet and a cool calculator and hard worker for results. His faith was as simple and passionate as his dogmatic distinctions were often sophistical and arid. He could attack his foes with berserker fury, and he could be as gentle with a child as only a woman can. His hymns soar to heaven and his coarse jests trail in the mire. He was touched with profound melancholy and yet he had a wholesome, ready laugh. His words are now brutal invectives ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... on his feet a few yards from Urgante, the flag bearer. With a berserker yell, he rushed. Taken by surprise, the assailed one still had time to lift the heavy staff. As quickly, the American lowered his head and dove. It may not have been magnificent; it certainly was not war by the rules; but it ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... stared at him, gulping, his eyes fairly protruding from his face, his breath hissing between his gritted teeth. The wild berserker blood was surging hot through ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The years deal kindly with good men, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... great, strong, badly-dressed, badly-appointed servitor, who seemed almost at the same time utterly reckless of, and nervously alive to, the opinion of all around him, with his bursts of womanly tenderness and Berserker rage, alternating like storms and sunshine of a July day on a high moorland, his keen sense of humor and appreciation of all the good things of life, the use and enjoyment of which he was so steadily denying himself from high ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... you, good people, and you, mine host in particular, that I am in a murderous mood," said Don Carlos gaily. "Miss Rostrevor has driven me insane, and I may go Berserker at any moment." ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... stop and leaping from it, stood before her in the sunlight, radiating, as it seemed, more sunlight still. With his clipped, blond moustache and his straw-coloured hair—as yet but slightly grey at the temples—he looked a veritable conquering berserker in his huge coat of golden fur. Never had he appeared ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him. Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar, leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... an answering shout, and Kolgrim, with the Berserker fury on him, was among the wild crowd from out of the darkness, and his great sword was cutting a ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... of Tyrfing is told in the saga. Svafrlami is killed, with the magic weapon itself, by the viking Arngrim, who thus gains possession of it; when he is slain in his turn, it descends to Angantyr, the eldest of his twelve berserk sons. For a while no one can withstand them, but the doom overtakes them at last in the battle of Samsey against the Swedes Arrow-Odd and Hjalmar. In berserk-rage, the twelve brothers attack the Swedish ships, and slay every man except the two leaders who have landed on the island. The battle ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... off here, not because he had not more to say, but for the reason that the stout young man, now in quite a Berserk frame of mind, made a sudden spring at the cab door and clutched the handle, which he was about to wrench when George acted with all the promptitude and decision which had marked his behaviour ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... had stood behind the King motionless as a statue advanced towards the door. He was one of a peculiar class of men who formed part of the bodyguard of the King. On his head there was a plain steel helmet, but he wore no "serk", or shirt of mail (hence the name of berserk, or bare of serk), and he was, like the rest of his comrades, noted for being capable of working himself up into such a fury of madness while in action, that few people of ordinary powers could stand before his terrible onset. He was called Hake, the berserk of Hadeland, and was comparatively ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... and fight the constituency again, under my real name of Kegworthy, provided, of course, the local people are willing to adopt me—on the understanding, however, that the party support me, or, at least, don't put forward another candidate. I'm not going to turn berserk." ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Davidson. Some yards beyond Fay's couch, Kester was holding a gun on Daisy, without digging it into her, while the single strange man holding Daisy herself was doing so quite decorously—a circumstance which afforded Gusterson minor relief, since it made him feel less guilty about not going berserk. ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... "Pshaws" and long "Tut-tuts" Proceeded from that concourse dense, And "Nuts," they wailed, "we want more nuts— More nuts at less expense!" Till Mr. Ambrose Kilo came And hushed the berserk banqueters to shame. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while the chairman, standing up and waving both his arms, seemed to be conducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk mood.) "Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity—the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which would ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... performed his civic and religious duties punctiliously, if gayly; who was honest to the fraction of a penny; and who would have been the most popular and admired youth in the valley among the maidens of the valley had it not been for their constant, uneasy fear that he might suddenly turn Berserk. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... married him when the Guards came home; and he will breed prize pigs; and sit at the board of guardians; and take in the Times; clothed, and in his right mind; for the old Berserk spirit is gone out of him; and he is become respectable, in a respectable age, and is nevertheless just as brave a fellow ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... looking very fierce and determined. The Berserk blood of the MacGinnises is up. He's going to do or die. I'm afraid this means an all-night sitting ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... handsome appearance. His father was Helge Hvasse (the Sharp); and his mother was Aslaug, a daughter of Sigurd the worm-eyed, who again was a son of Ragnar Lodbrok. It is told of Sigurd that when he was only twelve years old he killed in single combat the berserk Hildebrand, and eleven others of his comrades; and many are the deeds of manhood told of him in a long saga about his feats. Sigurd had two children, one of whom was a daughter, called Ragnhild, then twenty years of age, and an excellent brisk ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... gleaming faintly. Little shimmering sparkles ran over the hulls. They were going to ray again. Hilary went berserk, screamed strange oaths, fired again and again. Grim fired, more slowly. Two of the enemy ships left the formation, plunged headlong. But the shimmering grew brighter. In seconds the terrible bolts would be loosed. It was the end. The ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... like a man in a cataleptic trance. He had neither moved nor spoken. But now he suddenly woke at a bound into strenuous and heroic energy. It may have been the mania of fear, or it may have been the blood of some Berserk ancestor which stirred suddenly in his veins; but he broke into a wild shout, and, catching up a stick, he struck right and left among the Arabs with a fury which was more savage than their own. One who helped to draw up this narrative has left it upon record that, of all the pictures which ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle |
