"Insane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... duel. Canning was wounded by a bullet in the leg, and it prevented Castlereagh from being an unpopular figure. Indeed, he became for a time, in limited circles, popular. Percival was assassinated. Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister for fifteen years, and departed this life insane. Canning was brilliant, witty, and eloquent, and his outlook was large. It was said that he was spoiled by Pitt, and was consumed by vanity, and was broken by Tory calumniation. Political, commercial, or social intrigue success is always followed by the most deadly reaction on those who practise ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the site nor to erect thousands of prefabricated houses. The climate was declared to be unequalled, salubrious, equable, pleasant and bracing. Factories were erected, airports laid out, hospitals, prisons, and insane asylums built. The Imperial and Coachella valleys shipped their products in at low cost, and as a gesture to those who might suffer from homesickness it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... cutting accent of her voice smote him as the edge of a sword. "Drive on, Johnson!" she sharply cried. "These vagabond people must face the General himself." Then came the insane self-sacrifice of his reckless downfall, but he had spared her ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... for the insane of the District of Columbia and of the Army and Navy of the United States has been somewhat retarded by the great demand for materials and labor during the past summer, but full preparation for the reception of patients before the return ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... languages and music in the school; and who very naturally preferred to marry a rich fool, who would pay them for him. I answered her letter, which was addressed to her own mother—then quite ill at home—and I told her precisely what she might expect, if she persisted in her insane folly. As soon as my wife convalesced sufficiently to render my departure advisable, I started to bring my daughter home; but she ran away, a few hours before my arrival, and while, hoping to rescue Ellice, I was in pursuit of the precious pair, my wife relapsed and died—the victim of excitement ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... boisterous, wild; brusque, abrupt, waspish; impetuous; rampant. turbulent; disorderly; blustering, raging &c. v.; troublous[obs3], riotous; tumultuary[obs3], tumultuous; obstreperous, uproarious; extravagant; unmitigated; ravening, inextinguishable, tameless; frenzied &c. (insane) 503. desperate &c. (rash) 863; infuriate, furious, outrageous, frantic, hysteric, in hysterics. fiery, flaming, scorching, hot, red-hot, ebullient. savage, fierce, ferocious, fierce as a tiger. excited &c. v.; unquelled[obs3], unquenched, unextinguished[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... (1759-1823), merchant and philanthropist, was founder of McLean Asylum for Insane at Somerville, Massachusetts. Robert Rantoul (1778-1848), of Scottish parentage, worked hard to ameliorate the criminal legislation of the country, and took part in establishing a charity school at Beverly, Massachusetts, which was said to be the first Sunday ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... put him into the insane hospital, where he now accordingly is, and to-morrow (by which time he may be in a more conversable mood) I mean to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the cry. Duhobret listened eagerly, but none answered. "Will it find a purchaser?" said he despondingly, to himself. Still there was a dead silence. He dared not look up; for it seemed to him that all the people were laughing at the folly of the artist, who could be insane enough to offer so worthless a piece at a ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a student of psychology might have found an analysis of her feelings interesting. She had reached the border-line of monomania, yet he would have been a daring man who would have called her absolutely insane. Except to Foyle she had said nothing of the ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life. The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her; but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When at length he won to peace, after ten years, it was ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... surely enjoy divine help from heaven, can hardly hold their ground against vices and be kept within the bounds of discipline, what can any man do without this help? If divine aid contends against the captivity of the law of the flesh only with fierce struggles (Rom 7, 22-23), how insane is it to dream that, without this divine help, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... proportioned to the degree in which it is supposed to be injurious to English interests. An amount of energy and enthusiasm which if rightly directed would suffice for the political regeneration of Ireland is wasted in the most insane projects of disloyalty; while the diversion of so much public feeling from Parliamentary politics leaves the Parliamentary arena more and more open to corruption, to ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... sceptical with regard to the existence of the werwolf, and refuse to accept, as proof of such existence, the accumulated testimony of centuries, attribute the origin of the belief in the phenomenon merely to an insane delusion, which, by reason of its novelty, gained ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... Mademoiselle," humbly, "that we have taken nothing belonging to you. You have your purse and hat and cloak. The struggle was most unfortunate. But, think, Mademoiselle, think; we thought you to be insane!" ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... expectation of being led out to execution. After Ra-Ruth's removal, Laihova was at first overwhelmed with despair, but when a friendly jailor informed him of her having been spared under the supposition that she was insane, hope revived a little, though he could not help seeing that the prospect ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... George III. had been a prey to blindness, deafness, and insanity, and in 1820 his death came as a welcome event. Had he not been blind, deaf, and insane, in 1775, England might not have lost ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... way. He was utterly without help or the knowledge of possible help in this world or beyond it. He was frantic for a time, seeming even to lose the sense of his own identity, and all New Salem said that he was insane. ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... and set a laudable example of chaste and virtuous conduct, as a prelude to the conversion of the people of this continent. The Africans, viz. the Arabs, Berebbers, Shelluhs, Moors, and Negroes are, generally speaking, shrewd, acute, discerning races of men; and it cannot be supposed by any but insane enthusiasts, that the doctrines of Christ can be propagated in those countries, until an example be set for their imitation better than their own practice, and more conformable to the true Christian doctrine than any that has hitherto ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... tongue. For now should Nature bid all living men Retrace their years, and live them o'er again, Each culling, as his inclination bent, His parents for himself, with mine content, I would not choose whom men endow as great With the insignia and seats of state; And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes, Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise, In thus refusing to assume the care Of irksome state I ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... was standing near Sir. Giddings, remarked, raising his voice to a higher pitch, "Help him out; he needs a little more poison." (Voices, "Ha, ha! Good! Ha, ha!")] I quit this subject in disgust. I find that I have been in a dissecting-room, cutting up a dead dog. I will treat him as an insane man, who was never taught the decencies of life, proprieties of conduct—whose associations show that he never mingled with gentlemen. Let him ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... of Shad. He fell to his knee again, aimed carefully, and again pulled the trigger. This time there was a report, and in an insane frenzy of delight he beheld the carcass of the tantalising creature stretched upon ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... means confined to dark and barbarous ages. Theophrastus pronounced Pericles to be insane in consequence of seeing him with an amulet suspended from his neck. And in the declining era of the Roman Empire, we find this superstitious custom so general that the Emperor Caracalla was induced to make a public ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... he thought with pain, "Is it our fate that of all the millions of creatures on this world, we can establish communication only through the insane? And even then to have only imperfect control of the mind and, worse, to have it become a transmitter ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... found a purchaser; some because they were absolutely needed and the buyer dreaded waiting the next week's rise; the majority to sell again in this insane game of money-making. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... half of the deaths among the young men of that country to tobacco? that the French Polytechnic Institute had to prohibit its use on account of its effects on the mind? that men grow dyspeptic, hypochondriac, insane, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... the ashes from his pipe, and placing it on the mantelpiece, went to bed and soon fell asleep, but Mag, an insane decision taking shape in her brain, lay and brooded and tossed till well on in the morning, when she rose, kindled the fire, "redd up" the house, prepared the breakfast and awoke her husband to partake of the meal ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... seems contrived to go one better in sheer uglitude (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about 'general outlines seen from a good distance,' must have appeared hopelessly insane. The decision of the court is not likely to encourage any further public bequests of this kind. I have cut the British Museum and the National Gallery out of my own will already. And I understand why Mr. MacColl, with his passionate pleading for a living national architecture, for official recognition ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... surround him as carefully as possible. It would be an easy matter to kill him. Like all officials, he is accessible to almost any one with an apparently legitimate object. Two Presidents have been murdered; all are threatened continually by half-insane people called "cranks," and by the professional Socialists, mainly foreigners. Both the President and Vice-President are well-dressed men. President McKinley, when I was granted an audience, wore a long-tailed black "frock coat" and vest, light trousers, and patent leather or ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... her clothing away from her, but she broke down her door at night and fled to the street in her wrapper and flung herself into Miss Patterson's arms. Two men were pursuing her... they tried to carry her off. Miss Patterson called a policeman... but he said the girl was insane. Only by making a disturbance and drawing a crowd was my friend able to save her. And now, we have been the rounds... from the sergeant at the station, and the police captain, to the Chief of Police ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... many kinds of strong and poisonous drinks were made, and untold harm was done by their use. Drunkenness was the most fruitful source of crime and misery; it, more than any other cause, filled the jails, the almshouses and the insane asylums; it kept men in poverty and squalor; it scattered families and changed men, and sometimes women, too, into beasts. No class or profession was free from the evil, for it disqualified the scholar and statesman for their duties ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... grace to detect one of the foremost perils of a busy man in this day of insane hurry. He saw that if we are to feed others we must be fed; and that even public and united exercises of praise and prayer can never supply that food which is dealt out to the believer only in the closet—the shut-in place with its closed door and ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... gave himself up to drink, and sunk, with his whole family, down into want and obscurity with almost unprecedented rapidity. He seemed at once to become strangely indifferent to his wife and children—to lose all regard for their welfare. In fact, he had become, in a degree, insane from the sudden reverses which had overtaken him, combined with the bewildering effects of strong drinks, under whose influence ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... most solemn warnings mercifully given to us by God, whose word is truth itself, how strange it is, nay, how insane, to neglect the Saviour. Our author, in his 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,' gives a solemn account of his own distracted feelings, when he, by Divine warnings, contemplated the probable loss of his never-dying soul; and, believing in the truth of God's revealed will, he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... mother's miserable curiosity. How eager, how restless, how importunate, we all are to hear that new thing that does not at all concern us; or only concerns us to our loss and our shame. And the more forbidden that secret is to us, and the more full of inward evil to us—insane sinners that we are—the more determined we are to get at it. Let any forbidden secret be in the keeping of some one within earshot of us and we will give him no rest till he has shared the evil thing with us. Let any specially ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... absolute truthfulness in human speech. For in these cases it is not from a desire to deceive or mislead the person, that we withhold the truth. We feel sure that the sick person, when he recovers; the insane person when he is restored to reason; the criminal, if he is ever converted to uprightness, will appreciate the kindness of our motive, and thank us for our deed. To the person of sound body, sound mind, ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... born in Bethlehem, and yet he determines to set himself against the carrying out of what he must, in some sense, believe to be God's purpose. 'If this infant is God's Messiah, I will kill Him,' is surely as strange a piece of policy gone mad as ever the world heard of. But it is perhaps not more insane than much of our own action, when we set ourselves against what we know to be God's will, and consciously seek to thwart it. A child trying to stop a train by pushing against the locomotive has as much chance ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... been informed that his mother was intemperate, and had the delirium tremens just previous to his birth. He, also, years before, had at times appeared as though Satan himself possessed him, and was evidently insane, which, passing off, would leave him all right for a season. He has some remembrance of learning to read a little, can count almost one hundred, but has no power to combine numbers otherwise, at least none that I could find after persistent ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... astra" motto had decided the question in the affirmative. They had agreed that lying to a burglar wasn't wrong—it might prevent him from robbing a widow or one's own mother—the same with regard to a murderer, an insane person, or one sick unto death. And one and all had declared with spirit that if they lived in England and a hunting-party should come along with their cruel hounds and ask which way the fox or hare had ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... foolish, almost insane actions of men and women come from sham emotions and the nervous excitement generated by them, or from nervous excitement and the sham ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... is practically universal suffrage. At least it amounts to that. Voters must be registered. They must be British subjects. They must be twenty-one years of age. They must not be insane, idiots or convicts. They must own real property to the value of three hundred dollars in cities, two hundred dollars in towns, one hundred and fifty dollars in the country; or they must have a yearly income of three hundred dollars. A farmer's son has ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... elephant in India so much as kicking, striking or otherwise injuring either human beings or other domestic animals. There have been several instances, however, of persons killed by elephants which were temporarily insane, or "must," and also by others permanently insane. In America several persons have been killed in revenge for ill treatment. In Brooklyn a female elephant once killed a civilian who burned her trunk with a ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... to reaction and in the contrary direction. By the side of that we can put this statement, that a man is worked upon by that which he works. The Negro, as a rule, labors under the belief that he is an object of persecution and proscription, and in turn that insane belief so works upon him that it is useless for anybody to endeavor to make him believe otherwise. There is one thing I must say before I close and that is this, that if the Negro wants to break down the great undercurrent against him in the courts of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... instilled by the bacterial theory of disease is frequently more destructive than the microorganisms themselves. We have had under observation and treatment a number of insane patients whose peculiar delusion or monomania was an exaggerated fear of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... of the Russia (a capital fellow) was at the Reading last night, and Dolby specially charged him with the care of you and yours. We shall be on the borders of Wales, and probably about Hereford, when you arrive. Dolby has insane projects of getting over here to meet you; so amiably hopeful and obviously impracticable, that I encourage him to the utmost. The regular little captain of the Russia, Cook, is just now changed into the Cuba, whence arise disputes of seniority, etc. I wish he had been ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... have been made insane, do you think?" ruminated Craig. "It's possible that he was the victim of somebody, I understand. The insanity might have been real enough ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... Almost insane with horror, Blaine released the disintegrating energy of the weapon he still carried in his free hand. Twice he pressed its release and twice the searing blue flame spurted from the glass tube that was its muzzle. Only a few charges remained now in the marvelous weapon but once more it had ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... lurking at the bottom of his heart, mad as he was, for a blighted and ruined life and love that had been paid with cruel scorn, awoke within the breast of Jervase Helwyse. He shook his finger at the wretched girl, and the chamber echoed, the curtains of the bed were shaken, with his outburst of insane merriment. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... debtors; and altogether debts, distress, baking, and watching his sisters all night, and school keeping all day, were too much for him. The first hint of an examination of his school completed the mischief and he died insane, drowning himself in the canal. It is a sad story, but many of us will remember with affectionate regard the good, kind, quaint, and ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... more dangerously fascinating than etymologies. To the uninitiated the victim seems to have eaten of "insane roots that take the reason prisoner"; while the illuminate too often looks upon the stems and flowers of language, the highest achievements of thought and poesy, as mere handles by which to pull up the grimy tubers that lie at the base of articulate ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... amazing, presumptuous, groundless, and insane demand that one person could make upon another," interposed the commander. "It was ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... prevent his repeating his outrages, seized him, notwithstanding his resistance, and bound him hand and foot, But though apparently disabled from doing any mischief, they did not choose to leave him alone with his mother. Two of them ran for the keeper of the hospital for insane persons, who came presently with chains, handcuffs, a bastinado, and many attendants. When they entered the room, Abou Hassan, who little expected such treatment, struggled to unloose himself; but after his keeper had given him two or three ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... to the influence of Mr. Raymond, soon gave evidence that she was losing, to a certain extent, the characteristics of mind and heart which had made me hopeful of winning her by this deed of blood. This revelation drove me almost insane. Under the terrible restraint forced upon me, I walked my weary round in a state of mind bordering on frenzy. Many and many a time have I stopped in my work, wiped my pen and laid it down with the idea that I could not repress myself another ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... bad. And you're so kind," he meekly subsided. "But you are trying, you know," he added, after a moment, with returning vivacity, "what with the extreme bad taste of your masked ball adventures, and your obstinate determination to publish them, and then your insane obstinacy to make a show of yourself as a colored nurse in this vaudeville—But I forgot, I had sworn to myself not to speak of that again. May I count upon you at least to leave entirely to me the matter of exculpating Antonia to General ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the terrible news from Mexico that the Emperor Maximilian (Archduke of Austria and husband of the Queen's cousin, Princess Charlotte of Belgium) had been shot by his rebel subjects, while his wife was hopelessly insane, rendered it a mercy to all interested in the family that old King Leopold had not lived to see the wreck of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... thread which always winds itself through my thoughts whatsoever they are. I don't find that I can disentangle it. It connects itself with Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter. You would know that without my telling you. If you had ever struggled with an insane passion——" ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... disturbing. Kirk wanted to kick it and cry "Scat!" Hidden in other desolate quarters of the room were similar studies in animal life. These anomalous surroundings by turns depressed him and provoked an insane desire to laugh. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... his earlier days, before he was so entirely possessed of this insane desire for riches, King Midas had shown a great taste for flowers. He had planted a garden, in which grew the biggest and beautifulest and sweetest roses that any mortal ever saw or smelt. These ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... replied. "The silly old josser! pulling me down there amongst the coals and rubbish for an insane idea like that! Why, the flues wouldn't admit the passage of a child; and, even then, there's a bend, an abrupt 'elbow,' that nothing but a cat could crawl up. And that's a man who's an authority on the human brain! I sent the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... keeping a tight hold upon his sleeve. "I will not let you go until I know what you mean to do with yourself; it's no use brandishing that staff." For indeed at that moment Archie had made a sudden - perhaps a warlike - movement. "This has been the most insane affair; you know it has. You know very well that I'm playing the good Samaritan. All I wish is ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... emergencies, which were now becoming chronic, extraordinary taxes were established, the non-payment of which involved the immediate imprisonment of the defaulter; and the debasement of the coinage, and the alienation of certain parts of the kingdom, were authorised in the name of the King, who had been insane for more than fifteen years. The incessant revolts of the bourgeois, the reappearance of the English on the soil of France, the ambitious rivalry of Queen Isabel of Bavaria leagued with the Duke of Burgundy against ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... of sheer intellect—ah! that, as Nietzsche well knew, was the offering that had the most blood in it, the sacrifice that cried the loudest, as he bound it to the horns of the altar. The almost insane howl of suppressed misery which lurks in the scoriating irony of that terrible passage about sprinkling oneself with "holy water" and rendering oneself "stupid," is an indication of what I mean. Truly, as his modern representative does not hesitate ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... twisting reindeer sinews, which she rolled upon her cheek with the palm of her hand, while I was sketching her. It was already dark, and I was obliged to work by candle light, but I succeeded in catching the half-insane, witch-like expression of her face. When I took the candle to examine her features more closely, she cried out, "Look at me, O son of man!" She said that I had great powers, and was capable of doing everything, since ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Shadows immediately began an insane dance all about the room; disappearing, one after the other, through the uncovered window, and gliding darkly away over the face of the white snow; for the window looked at once on a field of snow. In a ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... useless paint-pots of the school; Your phrases reek, but not with Attic scent, Tarquitius' and Selius' and Varro's drool: A witless crew, with learning temulent. And ye begone, ye tinkling cymbals vain, That call the youths to drivelings insane. ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... and outrage becomes at length fatiguing to the coarsest and most callous senses; and the historian, even, who caters professedly for the taste which feeds upon the monstrous and the hyperbolical, is glad at length to escape from the long evolution of his insane atrocities, to the striking and truly scenical catastrophe of retribution which overtook them, and avenged the wrongs of an insulted world. Perhaps history contains no more impressive scenes than those in which the justice of Providence ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... "From the very first, when I was a lonely little nipper at school, I sort of belonged to Jim. And now—well, I just can't realize it, Norah. I can't keep on thinking about him as dead. I know he is, and one minute I'm feeling half-insane about it, and the next I forget, and think I hear him whistling or calling me." He clenched his hands. "It's the minute after that that is the worst ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... would never cross the doors of the house in Bloomsbury whither he was taking her. The empty bed awaiting him was so great a relief that he fell on his knees before it and prayed that the doctors might judge her to be insane, unsafe to be at large. To wake up in the morning alone in his bed, and to be free to go forth to his business without question seemed to him like Heaven. But the pleasures of Heaven last for eternity, and Dick's delight lasted ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... out of order, the hour-hand of her life seemed to be racing the minute-hand, and the minute-hand to be covering the face of the dial in sixty seconds or less, returning incessantly to the same well-known figures, pausing awhile, then jerking away again at an insane rate. From time to time the haze over the mind began to clear; and Asako seemed to look down upon the scene around her from a great height. There was a long room, so long that she could not see the end of it, and rows of narrow beds, and nurses, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Ingersoll smiled tiredly. "Sounds insane, doesn't it? But look at the record. I looked at the record, way back at the end of the war with China. Other men looked at the record, too. We got together, and talked. We knew that the military advantage of a rocket base ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... even if he were insane; although I now see how I have been imposed upon. We allow the friends of any patient to remove him, if they think that they can pay him more attention. He may ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... advanced in companies of quite 150 men in files five deep, and our rifle has a flat trajectory up to 600 yards. Guess the result. We could steady our rifles on the trench and take deliberate aim. The first company were mown down by a volley at 700 yards, and in their insane formation every bullet was almost sure to find two billets. The other companies kept advancing very slowly, using their dead comrades as cover, but they had absolutely no chance.... Yet what a pitiful handful we were against ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... to be bound up closely with the organism and to follow the breed. Such are the so-called instincts, the study of which should be helped out by excursions into the mind-history of animals, of children, and of the insane. Moreover, the measuring and testing of mental functions, and, in particular, of the senses, is now-a-days carried on by means of all sorts of ingenious instruments; and some experience of their use will be all ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... method; he used it to the end of the consolidation of his tyranny. Yet, inasmuch as it passed all limits and prepared his downfall, it may be said to have obtained over his nature the mastery of an insane appetite. While applying the nomenclature of disease to these exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at first at any rate, beyond their control. Moral insanity is often nothing more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion—lust, violence, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... woman's insane, that Ambermere parrot, I mean. Georgie and I were ten minutes late, and she had a jet tiara on, and why did she ask us to dine at a quarter to eight, if she meant a quarter to eight, instead of saying half-past-seven? They were actually going into dinner when we came, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... swallowed a nail 2 1/2 inches long. In a few days the nail was felt in the hernia, but in due time it was passed by the rectum. Blower reports an account of a nail passing safely through the alimentary canal of a baby. Armstrong mentions an insane hair-dresser of twenty-three, in whose stomach after death were found 30 or more spoon handles, 30 ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... white her face looked as the distant lightning flashes revealed it to me; how her hair brushed my cheek as I bent over her. I was using a wad of cotton waste to polish the gun barrel, and I threw it into a corner, having the insane notion that, in some way, the association of ideas came from that bunch of waste. It—the waste—was grimy and anything but fragrant, as different from the dark lock which the wind had blown against ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for he became indifferent to every thing around him, and often wandered as one disordered in his mind. At times, he took lessons from a fencing master, and talked of going to England to fight the murderer of his father. But he who made him had pity on him, and sent death to his relief. He died insane, and in his last moments often called on the name of his father, in terms that brought ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... Tom and Jack, as they admitted to one another afterward, felt an insane desire to attempt to break away from their captors, to rush at them, to attack if need be with their bare hands, and so invite death in its quickest form. They even hoped that they might escape this way rather than live to be taken behind the ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... quarter of London which reminded me more than anything else of some foreign city. He has cleared the furniture from the room, reared a table up on end, and is crouching behind it with a Mauser pistol in his hand and a box of cartridges by his side. My own belief is that he is insane." ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any cause this beautiful equipoise should be disturbed and the mind lose its power to think clearly, or to hold the lower passions in due control? Shall we exceed the truth if we say that the man in whom this takes place is insane just in the degree that he has lost his rational self-control; and that he is restored when he regains ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... frame, and she wept as she had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old passion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother's ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the insane hallucination that he was the greatest poet that ever lived. Often I have seen him drop his hoe in the potato field, and run for the house so that you could hardly see his heels for dust, looking ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... multiplied weapons of destruction has but imitated his example. A world without God, and in which humanity is gradually learning the way to better things, is an inspiration to renewed effort after the right. A world such as this, with God, is enough to drive insane all with intelligence enough to appreciate the situation." (Chapman Cohen: "War, Civilization ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... sub-perichondrial effusion of blood, which may occur either as the result of injury to the auricle, for example in football players, or as a result of trophic changes in the cartilage and perichondrium. The latter form is not uncommon among the insane. A more or less tense fluctuating swelling forms on the anterior surface of the auricle, presenting in some cases a distinctly bluish coloration. Inflammation may ensue, and in some cases suppuration and even necrosis of cartilage ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... sound of this new gospel from his lips fell strangely on their ears. So he goes on from one union meeting to another, and in speech after speech there is the same bitter tone which had been so foreign to him in all his previous utterances. The supporters of the anti-slavery movement he denounces as insane. He reiterates his opposition to slave extension, and in the same breath argues that the Union must be preserved by giving way to the South. The feeling is upon him that the old parties are breaking ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... worked steadily for thirty-three years, with the exception of six weeks, in the winter of 1795-1796, spent within the walls of an asylum. In 1796 Lamb's sister Mary, who was as talented and remarkable as Lamb himself, went violently insane and killed her own mother. For a long time after this appalling tragedy she was in an asylum at Hoxton; then Lamb, in 1797, brought her to his own little house, and for the remainder of his life cared for her with ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... but have heard the lines quoted, by a more recondite reader—who seems to be of a different opinion from the editor of the Quarterly Review, who qualified it in his answer to the Critical Reviewer of his Juvenal, as trash of the worst and most insane description. It is to Mr. Landor, the author of Gebir, so qualified, and of some Latin poems, which vie with Martial or Catullus in obscenity, that the immaculate Mr. Southey addresses ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... more (the closest bit we can, since those of us with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long since done so)—wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, a person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us Deathlanders. They can think of us in ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... constitutes no cut-throat mortgage. It is merely a state of mind which I have somehow blundered into, and with which you have no concern. So I ask nothing of you save to marry me. You may, if you like, look upon me as insane; it is the view toward which I myself incline. However, mine is a domesticated mania and vexes no one save myself; and even I derive no little amusement from its manifestations. Eh, Monsieur Jourdain may laugh at me for a puling lover!" cried John Bulmer; "but, heavens! if only he could see the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart—almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... precisely please any of the gentlemen, and least of all it pleased Walter Lane Harding, who had lately ridden over all that ground quite often enough unless he was to go over it this time in peculiarly pleasant company. He had an insane belief, by this time, that Miss Bell Crawford was "very pleasant company." But there was little else to do, than to obey the decrees of fate; one of the ladies was temporarily an invalid, and the other, for humanity's sake, must play nurse; the gentlemen could have little of their society, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... to the religious services (Episcopal) main Insane asylum, held in a lofty, good-sized hall, third story. Plain boards, whitewash, plenty of cheap chairs, no ornament or color, yet all scrupulously clean and sweet. Some three hundred persons present, mostly patients. Everything, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... endure. Every other noble and unselfish feature of our programme was ignored—a man's duty to his neighbour, to his country, his duty to help, enlighten, encourage and elevate those weaker and less favoured than he; all were trampled out of sight in the insane rush for adeptship. The call for phenomena, phenomena, phenomena, resounded in every quarter, and the Founders were impeded in their real work and teased importunately to intercede with the Mahatmas, against whom the real grievance lay, though their poor ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is insane," said mother, decidedly. Nevertheless, she put out the light, opened the parlor door noiselessly, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... as fanatics, or "fan-a-tics," according to the pronunciation of some of their detractors. They were treated as if partially insane. The writer when a boy attended the trial of a cause between two neighbors in a court of low grade. It was what was called a "cow case," and involved property worth, perhaps, as much as twenty dollars. One of the witnesses on the stand was asked by a lawyer, who wanted to embarrass or ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... not only Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... way into the queer cave, the girl turned, and seeing her, screamed—such a scream as one might expect from the insane. At the same moment the brush was again pushed from the door and there stood the wild man! His white hair and his white beard showed Cora that he was the same person who had so strangely crossed her path in the woods ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... fancied that our minds were very similar) the intolerable desire I had not to be utterly baffled. Now I know that it sometimes contracts from fear and from shuddering, but not apparently from a prolonged state of fear such as the insane suffer... ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there been faintly heard, even where ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... publicly declared that he and ten others were determined to cut him off. A new penknife was found in his pocket, and for this alleged attempt against the life of a member of parliament, Dun was carried before the commons, who voted him insane, and ordered his dismissal. The court of king's bench, however, committed Dun to prison for want of bail and securities, and looking upon facts only in a cursory light, the people believed that the government was determined ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... owed me some civility. Instead of that, she has treated me with nothing but insolence. And why, do you think? It is all because I would not allow her to take that poor, insane young woman ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... have got—say not a word about it to any one, for if you do, you will be the laughing-stock of all Australia. The originality of the act would surprise our good people, and you would be looked upon as fit subjects for an insane asylum." ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... been splendid for Gladys in the worldly sense. But there! it was better, perhaps, not to mix up Stations. Mr. Brill repeated this sentiment over and over again, always using a capital S for station—(as though Vaughan had expressed an insane desire to confuse Victoria with the Great Western). And he remained very ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... like—the kneeling slaves, the harem of beauteous dark-eyed women, the dream-like indolence and ease. That is the life for me. That is whither I and my treasure will go. A plague upon old Miriam, that she clings to these cold forests and the sordid life we live here! But for her insane jealousy and love I would defy Joanna and go. But the pair of them are too much for me. I must find a way of ridding myself of one or both. I will not be bound like ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... triumphal arches, and slaughter houses, and delivered moving speeches on each of these occasions. His fervid activity devoured whole piles of documents; he changed the colours of the postage stamps fourteen times in one week. Nevertheless, he gave vent to outbursts of grief and rage that drove him insane; for whole days his reason abandoned him. If he had been in the employment of a private administration this would have been noticed immediately, but it is much more difficult to discover insanity or frenzy in the conduct of affairs of State. At that moment the government employees were forming ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... and at length the ship struck. Then there followed a dreadful scene of consternation and confusion. Some jumped into the sea in their terror, and were drowned. Some cried and screamed, and acted as if they were insane. Some were calm, and behaved rationally. The sailors opened the hatches and let the passengers come up, and we got into the most sheltered places that we could find about the decks and rigging, and tied ourselves to whatever was nearest at hand. My father opened his ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... see? You have only to marry anybody outside of the higher nobility—and just as a makeshift——" She had drawn closer in the urgency of her desire to help him. An infinite despair and mirth as well was kindled by her nearness. And the man was insane and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... skipper sprang towards her, fearful that some terrible event was about to happen; for Bessie was waving her handkerchief, and dancing about the deck like an insane person. A boat, with two gentlemen in the stern-sheets, was approaching the yacht, and at this Bessie was ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... tendency to drink because they have a strain of feeble-mindedness from birth. Branthwaite, the chief English authority on this question, finds that of the inebriates who come to his notice, putting aside altogether the group of actually insane persons, about sixty-three per cent are mentally defective, and scarcely more than a third of the whole number of average mental capacity. It is evident that these people, even if restored to sobriety, would still retain their more or less inborn defectiveness, and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Gardens were wisely devoted to the breeding and sustenance of the choicest Merino Sheep. The others mainly stand empty, and how to dispose of them is a National perplexity. Some of them may be converted into Hospitals, Insane Retreats, &c., others into Libraries or Galleries of Art and Science; but Versailles is too far from Paris for aught but a Retreat as aforesaid, and has cost so immense a sum that any use which may be made of it will seem wasteful. I presume it could ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... would have intoxicated duller fools than I—'tis ever a comfort to know there are greater fools—broke in melody: "To my own dear love from her ever loyal and devoted knight," and she held her opened hand high. 'Twas my birch-bark message which Father Holland had carried north. I suddenly went insane with a great overcharge of joy, that ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... daily peril of their lives. The acts of Congress lately promulgated, although apparently stringent, are virtually a dead letter, in consequence of the facilities for evasion, and the ingenuity of the offenders. The effort to outrun a rival is attended by an insane excitement, too often participated in by the passengers, who forget for the time that they are in a similar situation to a man sitting on a barrel of gunpowder within a few feet of a raging furnace. I frequently found myself in such a ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... suddenly insane, or were they bewitched by this morose intruder and his insufferably familiar confidant? The man was wounded, it was true; they might have to put him up in common humanity; but here was her austere mother, who wouldn't come in the room when Whisky ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... struggles themselves were useless. I thought of the other man, of the Englishman, of my brother in misery and crime as I walked along the length of the cemetery wall while the wind froze my legs. I kept saying to myself it was not the same thing, and this insane assurance was enough ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... argument for the reason of the insanity of many friars, seems to me completely false. It would be sufficient to compare the friars who are insane with the insane found also among the other Spaniards, in order to declare quite the contrary. Quite different do I believe the origin of the insanity, both of the religious and of the other Spaniards. He who has had anything to do with the Indian will have observed that his ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... watching Bertie. She knew that he had one desire—to escape from this intimacy, this friendship, which had been thrust upon him. He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusk whose shell ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... to England we have visited the Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell, in the neighborhood of London. It is a large building, divided into numerous apartments, with the plainest accommodations, for the insane poor of the county of Middlesex. It is superintended by Dr. Conolly, who is most admirably fitted for the place he fills, by his great humanity, sagacity, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... that, in the circumstances, our unfortunate hero became almost insane? The wedding-day had been fixed before he left Red River; preparations were being made for the great event, and it was pretty well understood that Dan had gone off hunting with the view, chiefly, to be out of people's way till the day should arrive. They ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the "Cyhyraeth," and is never seen, it foretells the death of the insane, or those who have for a long time been ill, by moaning, groaning, and rattling shutters in the immediate ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... measures hitherto practiced. Women, boys under the age of fifteen and old men over the age of sixty are exempt from flogging, while the infliction of this punishment on sick convicts and on the insane is to be postponed for six months. The method of infliction was also improved so that by observing greater humanity, unnecessary pain in carrying out a flogging could be avoided, as far ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... scenes of yesterday in the Dublin police-court will cause an astonished public to put the question, is the government insane? They suppress the processions one day, and on the next proceed with deliberation to destroy all possible effect from such an act by inviting the magistrates' court to be used as a platform from whence a fresh roar of defiance may be uttered. The ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... your emotions have been deceived and bankrupted, your faith will collapse. At least keep, your grip on common-sense. Down in the cowardly soul of every weak woman—perhaps of every woman—is the insane desire to be dominated by a superior brute force. The woman of the lower classes—the peasant of Russia, for example, whose sex impulses are of all races the most violent—refuses with scorn the advances of the man ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... in the treatment of obsessed or insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am inclined to think that the educators of the future must ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various |
