"Maniacal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conclude with a few hints to novices. Preserve a cool head and steady eye. Whilst you are playing your shot your captain will be dancing about in the circle at the other end of the ice. You will find it best to disregard his maniacal shoutings and gesticulations. You will probably not understand half of them and will not agree with the other half. If he should break a blood-vessel do not take any notice unless some part of his fallen body is likely to obstruct your stone. In this case you are entitled ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... delusions on these "Vive la Plume!" men, who have been generally observed to possess least intellectual ability in proportion to the excellence they have obtained in their own art. I suspect this maniacal vanity is peculiar to the writing-masters of England; and I can only attribute the immense importance which they have conceived of their art to the perfection to which they have carried the art of short-hand writing; an ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Melista or Greinan, round which the open Atlantic surges, and left there alone, he took to the water and ran ashore; and that when bound hand and foot, and left in a kiln, by a miracle of strength he broke his bonds and escaped. It is thus they are said to have treated him during his fits of maniacal excitement; and there are many still alive who saw it all, and gave a helping hand.... The further story of Wild Murdoch will astonish no one. He murdered his sister, was taken south, and died in an asylum, or, as ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Jennie. "Do you remember that maniacal creature that attacked our motor-car that time we went to Silver Ranch, years and years and years ago? You know, back in the ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near by that clashed out: "Hello! Here's a bit of silence; let's ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... madness, and she took courage at last to rise and leave me lying there—lying there with my face upon the wet sand, and the wet rain beating down upon my head, and the moaning tempest rising over me in the heavens, like the awful eruption of maniacal hatred that was working its ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... suspicion that a European war was brewing, its violent emotion would quickly have reached the House. Paul Visire was not uneasy. The European situation was in his view completely reassuring. He was only irritated by the maniacal silence of his Minister of Foreign Affairs. That gnome went to the Cabinet meetings with a portfolio bigger than himself stuffed full of papers, said nothing, refused to answer all questions, even those asked him by the respected President of the Republic, and, exhausted ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... a place not entirely exempt from prejudices: and one of them is, that any sort of appeal to God Almighty is a sign or else forerunner of maniacal excitement. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... man was speechless. An almost maniacal fear seemed to hold him in its grip. With an impatient oath ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... was a maniacal stampede toward the little house by the railside, where they sell such immense quantities of sponge-cake, which is very sweet and very yellow, but which lies rather more heavily on the stomach than raw turnips, as I ascertained one day from actual experience. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe. During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called Jolllly. "You may fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire said ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners. When I was engaged in a controversy with the CLARION on the matter of free will, that able writer Mr. R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... screamed, pointing to the fire, and he darted to the door, where I caught him. He fought off my grasp with maniacal strength, and succeeded in flinging open the door. Then I forgot this man was more than brother to me, and threw myself upon him as against an enemy, determined to have the mastery. The bleak wind roared ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... gentleman, whom I shall call Pierpoint, was a high-spirited, generous young man as I have ever known. When I say that he was a sportsman, that at one season of the year he did little else than pursue his darling amusement of fox- hunting, for which indeed he had almost a maniacal passion—saying this, I shall already have prejudged him in the opinions of many, who fancy all such persons the slaves of corporeal enjoyments. But, with submission, the truth lies the other way. According to my experience, people of these habits have their ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... that were streaming into the city, without arms and in torn, dust-stained uniforms. It was in vain, however, that he endeavored to slake his thirst for news by questioning them; some answered with vacant, stupid looks that they knew nothing, while others told long rambling stories, with the maniacal gestures and whirling words of one bereft of reason. He therefore mechanically turned his steps again toward the Sous Prefecture as the likeliest quarter in which to look for information. As he was passing along the Place du College two guns, probably all that remained of some battery, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... to a pitch of maniacal rage; the teeth compressed—if they broke the skin it was the end; the first taste of blood would be enough!—and drew away her arm. If she had started then, all the devil in the creature would be loosed, for her terror taught her that. And by some ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... produce notes of a leering, jeering character, growing more horrible with each measure until they burst in a loud guffaw of maniacal laughter. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... laugh and go on again. You understand. But what maniacal frenzy is this which demands a vociferous "passionate love of music" from everyone? Watch the current dish-water fiction. Every character, male and female, is "passionately fond of music." Which means? ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... looked out unwinking, as though his lids had been cut off. He held himself halfway between a reclining and an upright position. No normal person could hold himself that way for long, but the sick boy kept himself motionless with maniacal strength. The flies hung over him like a cloud of black cinders. One of his friends attempted to keep them away with a leafy branch which he had found, Heaven knows where! I could see no other sign of green in the place. As we passed, I noticed the branch sweep back and forth over the sick boy's ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... Maddelena, as she was now—believed her lover dead, for her father had given her good proofs of this, and she believed him; nevertheless she refused to marry another, and seized upon the convent life as a blessed relief from the tyranny of her maniacal father. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... a madman after a crime of this sort? Does he get off with it and wander over Europe as a free man for a year? Granted the resources of maniacal cunning and all the rest of it, was it ever heard that a lunatic went at large as this man did, and laughed at Scotland Yard's attempt to run him down and capture him? Is it reasonable that he runs away with a corpse, disposes of it safely, returns to his ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... crazy, insane, demented, maniacal, raving; indignant, enraged, irate, resentful; rabid; distracted, wild, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... them to stem the tide of panic that was raging, and restore order for at least the few minutes that were needed to get the boats into the water. In vain! the two men were visible for a moment, fighting desperately, side by side; then they went down before that maniacal charge—in which the cuddy passengers had by this time ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... his physical superiority. He has a cypress shingle on either shoulder and is trailing his star-spangled cutaway down the plank turnpike. While a few mugwumps, like Josef Phewlitzer and Apollyon Halicarnassus Below, and tearful Miss Nancys of the Anglo- maniacal school, are protesting that this country wants peace, Congress, that faithful mirror of public opinion, if not always the repository of wisdom, proves that it is eager for war. And just so sure as the Cleveland interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is insisted ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven degrees!" Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat; before he tossed off the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... listlessly moved about the room. Spying in a small mirror his dirty, blood-besmeared face and matted hair, Paul starts backward, grasps the new weapon, stabs at that mirrored reflection, stares about wildly, and with maniacal yell bolts for the ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work. To this fairly numerous class belonged Mr. J. Preston Peters, father of Freddie's Aline. And to this merit—or defect—is to be attributed his almost maniacal devotion to that rather unattractive species of ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... faithful servant or monachal abstinence, wisest of wise men, how would thy sides ache with laughter, how wouldst thou chuckle, if thou couldst come again for a little while to Chinon, and read the idiotic mouthings, and the maniacal babble of the fools who have interpreted, commentated, torn, disgraced, misunderstood, betrayed, defiled, adulterated and meddled with thy peerless book. As many dogs as Panurge found busy with his lady's robe at church, so many two-legged academic ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... believe, who gave the name of Laughing-Thrushes to this group, and this name is applicable enough to this particular bird, the one with which he was most familiar, for it does laugh—albeit, a most maniacal laugh; but the majority of the group have not the shadow of a giggle even in them, and should have been ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every summer from under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... pressed their hands, and whispered and explained that Madame Beauchene, feeling quite exhausted, had withdrawn for a few moments, and that Beauchene and Blaise were making necessary arrangements downstairs. And then, resuming his maniacal perambulations, he pointed towards an adjoining room, the folding doors of which ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... civilization. And it probably was Mozart's main purpose to create and propagate a concept of a great civilization through his music. He wanted to show his fellow Europeans, with their garbage-polluted citystreets, their violent mono-maniacal leaders and their stifling, non-humane bureaucracies, new ideas on how to run their civilizations properly. He wanted them to hear and feel a sense of civilized movement, of the musical expressions of man moving as he would if upholding the highest ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Diregus soon recognized that Ahpilus knew nothing of his own past from a period antedating his exile to the present time. It appears that the nervous shock which accompanied the breaking of his spine had, in some way, dispelled his madness, and also those less maniacal, comparatively mild delusions which for several years had clouded and perverted his otherwise brilliant mind; so that he was again the same loving and lovable Ahpilus of former times; but in all the sixty or seventy years ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... 29, '88. Jesus Christ!—It is perilous to write such a man. You can go crazy on less material than anybody that ever lived. What in hell has produced all these maniacal imaginings? You told me you had hired an attendant for ma. Now hire one instantly, and stop this nonsense of wearing Mollie and yourself out trying to do that nursing yourselves. Hire the attendant, and tell me her cost so that I can instruct Webster & Co. to add it every ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... does not bring us nearer to the demand for a subconscious mental memory. The threshold of excitability changes under most various conditions. Cells which respond easily in certain states may need the strongest stimulation in others. The brain cells which are too easily excited perhaps in maniacal exultation would respond too slowly in a melancholic depression. Hypnotism, too, by closing the opposite channels and opening wide the channels for the suggested discharge, may stir up excitements for which the disposition may have lingered since the days of childhood ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... course of my practice in the German army, many cases, equally remarkable, have occurred. Unquestionably the illusions were maniacal, though the vulgar thought otherwise. They are all reducible to one class, [*] and are not more difficult of explication and cure than most affections ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... the strangers in the camp. But he had waited only until he saw Ray kick the helpless form before him,—that of the god that Fenris, for all the wild had claimed him, still worshipped in his inmost heart. With fiendish, maniacal fury he had sprung ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... mouth with excitement and effort, dashed at me with an uplifted butcher knife as if she would enjoy sending it into me, but I laughed at her and she halted immediately in front of me. She broke into a maniacal laugh then and shouted something to the hidden refugees. We persuaded the old man also to call them, and he stepped out from the cedars which grew on the point and spoke a loud sentence. At last they began to appear silently and one by one. There were ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... against which she had been cowering; she saw the little red gleam through the chinks of the hut; she ran up to it and fell against its wooden walls, which she began to hammer with clenched fists in an almost maniacal frenzy, while ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... increasing vigor, until their united chorus quite baffles description. I have heard Chinese bands, Calliopes, the braying of jackasses, the love songs of Tom cats, operatic screechers, brass band and violin murderers, broken down hand organs and accordeons, Red River carts during the dry season, the maniacal howling of the bulls and bears of Broad Street, and many other noises of like character, but none of them are at all comparable to the voicings of these Hydah dogs, when thoroughly warmed up to their best efforts by a few ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... The maniacal laugh, the crazy words—a moment only, they heard them: and then the door above, which the poor woman, so long bedridden, had contrived in her frenzy of fear to open, closed on the sounds and stifled them. But enough had been heard: enough to convince ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... scream, slip into the sea. At the same instant a pair of giant arms encircled me from behind and lifted me entirely off my feet. Kick and squirm as I would, I could neither turn toward my antagonist nor free myself from his maniacal grasp. Relentlessly he was rushing me toward the side of the vessel and death. There was none to stay him, for each of my companions was more than occupied by from one to three of the enemy. For an instant I was fearful for myself, and then I saw ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... likely to be spread about. Even in these days of advanced medical science, it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a patient is insane or not, and it is quite possible to suffer from very severe fits of depression without being the subject of maniacal melancholia, or from very violent fits of ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... wails—and his own voice—the comically commonplace name, "Mr. Jones," even in the agony of his terror, the humor of the conjuncture glimmered in the boy's crazed intelligence, and he laughed a wild, maniacal laugh. But the laugh died out in a pulseless horror. The sick man uprose on his elbow. Dick, above him on the white-oak trunk, could see his very eyes bloodshot and wandering. He uprose, almost sitting. He passed his hand over his staring ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... as a raw-head and bloody-bones, they were enabled by their stratagems of X. Y. Z. in which ——— was a leading mountebank, their tales of tub-plots, ocean-massacres, bloody-buoys, and pulpit-lyings and slanderings, and maniacal ravings of their Gardiners, their Osgoods, and Parishes, to spread alarm into all but the firmest breasts. Their Attorney General had the impudence to say to a republican member, that deportation must be resorted to, of which, said he, 'you republicans have set the example'; ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Carlotta I wear white duck trousers, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap. I wired for them to my London tailor and they arrived within a week. The first time I appeared in the maniacal costume I slunk from the stony stare of a gendarme, as I was about to ascend the Casino steps, and hid myself among the fishing-boats lower down on the beach. Carlotta, however, was delighted and said that I looked pretty. Now I have grown ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the mind of Hobbs, when, on Mrs Brown's fainting, he heard a yell of triumph, and, on looking up, beheld Master Jacky far up the heights, clearly defined against the bright sky, and celebrating the success of his plot with a maniacal ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Berchthold sprang forward, and while he seized the villain with both arms, Madame Ida Pfeiffer recovered her feet. All this took place in less than a minute. The negro was now roused into a condition of maniacal fury; he gnashed his teeth like a wild beast, and brandished his knife, while uttering fearful threats. The issue of the contest would probably have been disastrous, but for the opportune arrival of assistance. Hearing the tramp of horses' hoofs upon the road, ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism, of the current age. . . . I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States are parts of a melioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... village; and, as the game progressed, night would be made hideous with the beating of drums and the hilarious shouts of the spectators. Feasts were frequent, since any occasion afforded an excuse for one, and all feasts were accompanied by gluttony and uproar. The Dream Feast was a maniacal performance. It was agreed upon in a solemn council of the chiefs and was made the occasion of great licence. The guests would rush about the village feigning madness, scattering fire-brands, shouting, leaping, smiting with impunity any they encountered. ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... office of the Tocsin, quite broken down in health after the long winter tramp. As I knew him, among his few personal friends, Giannoli was loyal and honourable in the extreme, independent and proud. Like many other Anarchists he entertained an almost maniacal prejudice against plots and conspiracies of any kind, maintaining that such organisations were merely police traps and death-gins. "Propaganda by deed"—outrage, in short—they maintained should, and could, be the outcome only of entirely individual activity. Never, indeed, did police or ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... the long black hair which floated over her shoulders. This she was counting one by one, just as the old East India man had counted the silken tress which was sent to him over the sea, and she laughed with maniacal glee as she said the numbering of all her hairs would atone for the sin she had done. At intervals, too, rocking to and fro, she sang of the fearful night when she had thought to steal the auburn locks concealed within the old green trunk; on which the darkness lay so heavy and so black, ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... Elizabeth developed into a headless corpse. Had Elizabeth had a different historical background, she might have been a different Queen; but, as it was, she dealt with it as only a genius could who had followed a maniacal Queen who failed in everything ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... laughing. At least that chuckling murmur was near to a laugh. Yet there was no mirth in it. It had that touch of the maniacal in it which freezes the blood. Silent halted in the midst of his rush, with his hands poised for the next blow. His mouth fell agape with an odd expression of horror as Dan stared up at him. That hideous chuckling continued. ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... still entreated; he occasionally reproached and even bantered the duke in some of his letters to his friends, all of which, doubtless, were opened; but still he entreated, flattered, adored, all to no purpose, for seven long years and upwards. In time he became subject to maniacal illusions; so that if he was not actually mad before, he was now considered so. He was not only visited with sights and sounds, such as many people have experienced whose brains have been over-excited, but he fancied himself haunted by a sprite, and become the sport of "magicians." ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... a vague feeling of danger and rage, having encountered an opposition of so much more alarming a character than he had anticipated, and found his wife not only competent ferre aspectum to endure his maniacal glare and scowl, but serenely to defy his violence and his wrath. He had abundance of matter for thought and perturbation, and felt himself, when the images of Larcom, Larkin, and Jim Dutton crossed the retina of his memory, some thrill of the fear which 'hath torment'—the fear of a terrible ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... rallied, passed a hand across his brow, then rose unsteadily to his feet, looking around the cabin. Habit called for a drink at this juncture and he saw nothing to drink. Anger awoke in him; he grew maniacal, dangerous, and the late ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... impossible. As before, sheets of water—which bore no relation to rain, but seemed rather as though the earth were at the foot of a waterfall from which a river was leaping from on high—were hurled over the land. The shrieking of the wind had a wild and maniacal sound, the sound which Jamaicans have christened "the hell-cackle of a hurricane." This squall lasted longer, five minutes or more, and when it passed, the wind dropped somewhat, but did not ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... psycho-pathological states. "It suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations, and even self-crucifixions, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... a similar condition of maniacal excitement for some time preceding and during a Parliamentary election, but afterwards they usually manifested that modification of insanity which is called melancholia. In fact they alternated between these two forms of the disease. During elections, the highest state of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... general and his staff a group, composed of a bugler, two or three orderlies, and the bearer of the corps standard, all upon maniacal horses, were working like slaves to hold their ground, preserve, their respectful interval, while the shells boomed in the air about them, and caused their chargers to make ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... stay in the room unless she sat up all night with her. So, together they kept watch and ward, and as the night wore on, Mrs. Nutter's slumbers grew more natural and less brief, and her paroxysms of waking terror less maniacal. Still she would waken, with a cry that thrilled them, from some frightful vision, and seem to hear or see nothing aright for a good while after, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... blindfolded. And now comes the tug of war. If it was fast and furious before, it is maniacal madness now. The noise is indescribable, yet it fails to waken two infants, who, with expressions of perfect peace on their innocent faces, repose in two bunks at one side of ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... from before Tarzan's eyes. Things began to take form—he was regaining the perspective of civilized man. His eyes fell upon the figure of the kneeling woman. "Olga," he whispered. She looked up, expecting to see the maniacal light of murder in the eyes above her. Instead ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at a funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling. The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... "suffer nothing to escape you of whatever you find curious or rare." When Atticus informed him that he should send him a fine statue, in which the heads of Mercury and Minerva were united together, Cicero, with the enthusiasm of a maniacal lover of the present day, finds every object which is uncommon the very thing for which he has a proper place. "Your discovery is admirable, and the statue you mention seems to have been made purposely ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... teeth against the bloodless horror of that maniacal voice. It chilled my veins. Again I felt the hair rise on my scalp. Brice bowed quietly; and his eyes, serene and ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with providing for the old age of people who have never been infants. I will not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists have in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to control marriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for this inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with later) all the Eugenists ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... she is yours." For one frightful moment there was no sound; even the men's breathing was hushed, and they sat slack-jawed, stunned, half-minded to believe this some hideous, incredible jest. But the maniacal light in Cortlandt's eyes, and Anthony's chalk-white, frozen countenance soon showed them the truth. Some one gasped, another laughed hysterically, the sound breaking in his throat. Cortlandt turned ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... first glance I saw that I was in the presence of a master. The Thug was tall, active, and slenderly formed; his head was nearly oval; his eye most strongly resembled that of a cobra di capello; its dart was perfectly wild and maniacal, restless, brilliant, metallic, and concentrated." The colonel had a narrow escape from irretrievably affronting this eminent professor of murder, by unguardedly enquiring whether he was in any way cognizant of a trifling robbery by which the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... with an expression of sheer animal ferocity. "Yes," he hissed, "the whole lot. Torturing them, too!"—and fell back into his chair with peal upon peal of maniacal laughter. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... had suffered, and almost maniacal in his eagerness for the coming struggle, the giant's frenzy told Cherry that the fight would be an unrelenting one, and again a vague tremor of regret at having drawn this youth into the affair crept over her and sharpened the growing ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... swings between the dead calm and passionless on the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in its serpentine stillness and ancient unforgotten craft, and its weakness in that absence of ideals and in the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... The strange, infuriated, maniacal manner in which these words were uttered, produced an astonishingly exciting effect among the mob. Several women screamed, and some few fainted. The torch was laid again to the altar of popular feeling, and the fierce flame of superstition ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... struck by the elegant Latinity of an account of his malady, which the sufferer had put into his hands, showed it in all directions), but continued to recur at frequent intervals till the close of his life. His malady was undoubtedly of a maniacal cast, resembling Cowper's, but subdued by superior strength of will—a Bucephalus, which it required all the power of a Johnson to back and bridle. In his early days, he had been piously inclined, but after his ninth year, fell ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... snarly whines of a hunting leopard; the snap of a crocodile's jaws, somewhere down in the nearby river; and, last, but by no means least in ghostliness, the awful rising "Who-oo!" followed by a sudden mad chorus of maniacal laughter, which told that somewhere a gathering of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... glance of inquiry about the table. The laugh was repeated, and the sound was even more wild and maniacal. The little man was shocked at the grin which he noted ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... of policemen suddenly hemmed in the fighting mass. Druce, struggling blindly to make a pathway for himself, suddenly looked up to see Mary Randall standing on a table on the opposite side of the room directing the police. A wave of maniacal anger overwhelmed him. In a flash his hand went to his pocket and reappeared with ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... the guests. Accustomed to play the host in the highest circles, he charmed and dominated all whom he approached; there was something at once winning and authoritative in his address; and his extraordinary coolness gave him yet another distinction in this half-maniacal society. As he went from one to another he kept both his eyes and ears open, and soon began to gain a general idea of the people among whom he found himself. As in all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... united action of sitting, spurred him on to restless desire. It is not only the soldier who has a bizarre love of peril. Many of those who sit at home in apparent calmness of safety seek perils with a maniacal persistence, perils to the intricate scheme of bodily health, perils to the mind. More human mules than the men of the banner and the sword delight in journeying at the extreme edge of the precipice. And Valentine now had to the full this secret hankering after danger. As he knew it, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... pestering flies with an insane disregard for their legs and his convenience. He could not conceive their maniacal desires to cross the streets. Their madness smote him with eternal amazement. He was continually storming at them from his throne. He sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... against whom their animosity was directed. Unlawful and detested words and mysteries were called into action to conjure up demons who should yield their powerful and tremendous assistance. Songs of a wild and maniacal character were chaunted. Noisome scents and the burning of all unhallowed and odious things were resorted to. In later times books and formulas of a terrific character were commonly employed, upon the reading or recital of which the prodigies resorted to began to display ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... storming of a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of the incident which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this madness—the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noon-day, laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse, checking him for a moment to say, "Oh, King, thou art betrayed," and then vanishing no man knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew what—fell in with the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... remonstrated with some women who, as it appeared to him, were needlessly making themselves ridiculous. He was probably right in these instances: the instinct of imitation is so strong among men and women that every genuine outburst of maniacal excitement is sure to be followed by some purely mimetic efforts of a similar demonstration. The novelty of the whole movement was enough to account for the genuine and the sham hysterics. It was an entirely new experience then for English ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... quivering their bodies, advancing again with a springing gait and outspread arms, which they moved as if they wished to force them out of their joints, in all of which actions they held drum-sticks or twigs in their hands, swore with a maniacal voice an oath of their loyalty and devotion to their king, backed by the expression of a hope that he would cut off their heads if they ever turned from his enemies, and then, kneeling before him, they held out their sticks that he might ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... bread.—He signed the letter, blotted it with firm fingers, addressed the envelope, stamped it and dropped it himself into the pillar box at the corner of the street. Then he turned wearily homeward, filled with the strange, almost maniacal satisfaction of the man who has killed ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... moment Hardy gazed into the other's nonchalant mask-like visage, then, with a gesture of maniacal impotence, he raised his clenched fists high ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... room, all the solicitude that had softened the hard lines of the lean jaw. It was hard to believe, after all that he had passed through, and yet he knew that it could not be possible—he knew that that voice could not belong to any man who had been nursing a maniacal vengeance behind a cunningly ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... chattering to herself and menacing Bijou, until suddenly she stopped short and bent over in a listening attitude. A sound had caught her ear. Something had broken the frightful silence besides her rambling maniacal chatter. Some other animate thing was within her hearing. She was breathless for many moments as she glared, eyes and mouth open, in the direction from which the sound had proceeded. She listened devouringly and could now distinctly hear a slow regular breathing, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... has taken from Anstey. Secondly, he does not know to whom Cowper alludes, when he says that there was one who 'built a church to God, and then blasphemed his name:' it was 'Deo erexit Voltaire' to whom that maniacal Calvinist and coddled poet alludes. Thirdly, he misquotes and spoils a passage from Shakspeare, 'to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,' &c.; for lily he puts rose, and bedevils in more words than one ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... convolutions in stupor is probably analogous to the stupidity of a nervous child when terrified or bullied." "Stupor is frequently one of the stages of alternating insanity following the exalted condition. It is more apt to occur in those where the exalted period is acutely maniacal. The stupor is usually melancholic in form." Since he claims that the anergic is a "very curable form of mental disease," while only 50% of the melancholic cases recover, it seems clear that this division is not prognostically ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... had come, the smoke of that mental explosion seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how odious, of how maniacal, it all was swept over him. He had fallen low, but he had never dreamed that he could fall so low ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... although at that moment he had the written one in his pocket. After a moment's struggle to remember what he wished to say, he found himself hopelessly befogged, and abandoned the attempt. Then, to the amazement of all who heard him, he burst out into a loud, strident peal of unmeaning, maniacal laughter—laughter which had no spice of merriment in it, and which was a mere spontaneous effort of nature to relieve the strain upon the shattered nerves. Bench, bar, jury and spectators stared aghast. Such laughter sounded not only incongruous, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of Jane—all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction. It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action. It is difficult to form a cool ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... CASE No. 6120.—M.L. Maniacal attack. Fifteen individual reactions, of which 11 are classed as normal in accordance with the appendix to the ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... Tolstoy's works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... and Alice were married, and on the same day Bumpus and Susan were also united. There was great rejoicing on the occasion; Ole Thorwald and Dick Price distinguished themselves by dancing an impromptu and maniacal pas de ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... position to see a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming away from the ship. He was a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some sort, and his face, in a clear glimpse I caught of it, was distorted by frenzy. His black eyes were maniacal. The line was so accurately flung by the second mate that it fell across the man's shoulders, and for several strokes his arms tangled in it ere he could swim clear. This accomplished, he proceeded to scream some wild harangue and once, as he uptossed his arms for ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... miles off—secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable; that, being known, was not therefore healed. What could be done—who was it that could do it—to check the storm- flight of these maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, from the way in which the coachman's hand was viced between his upper ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... a pretty intolerable character when the maniacal condition came on and you were bossing the universe. Not only ordinary "tact," but a genius for diplomacy must have been needed for avoiding rows with you; but you certainly were wrongly treated ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right, and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broom-stick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Frenchmen, imperial Germans, and double Dutchmen, we are dispersed to preach the Unity, and what we illustrate is the Jewish trinity. A delicious irony! Three-in-one and one-in-three.' He laughed; to Sir Asher his laugh sounded maniacal. The old gentleman was relieved to see his ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... inclined to smile at the outrageous vanity of the man who styled himself the son of Jupiter, and who murdered his best friend for refusing him divine honours? Are we disposed to pity the slave-merchant, who, urged by the maniacal desire for gold, hears unmoved the groans of his fellow-creatures, the execrations of mankind, and that "small still voice," which haunts those who are ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... have an insane desire for matrimony. I believe that the desire, even if it be as general as is here described, is no insanity. But when I see such a woman as Margaret Mackenzie in danger from such a man as Samuel Rubb, junior, I am driven to fear that there may sometimes be a maniacal tendency. But Samuel Rubb was by no means a bad man. He first hankered after the woman's money, but afterwards he had loved the woman; and my female reader, if she agrees with me, will feel that that virtue ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... known to the ancients, being described by Dioscorides and Celsus. Internally, it should only be prescribed by a physician, and is then of special service for relieving irritation of the bladder, and to allay maniacal excitement, as well as to ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... and the roar of the incoming billows of the terrible Missouri, the most tremendous river upon this globe. It enters the Mississippi through a channel half a mile in breadth, rushing down with a sort of maniacal fury, from its sources among the Rocky Mountains at the distance of three thousand and ninety-six miles. Its whole course, from its rise to its entrance into the Gulf of Mexico, is four thousand ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... a sad bon jour look about the thirty-eight cents left in my vest pocket that would make a hired man weep. All day long the heavens wept, and the heavy, sombre clouds went drifting about over head, and the north wind howled in maniacal derision, and the hack drivers danced on the pavements in wild, fierce glee, for they knew too well what the stormy day betokened. The hack was to call for me at eight. At five minutes to eight I went upstairs and ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... had exhausted them all, then, Count of Monte Cristo my pretended benefactor—then, Count of Monte Cristo, the universal guardian, be satisfied, you shall witness the death of your friend;" and Morrel, with a maniacal laugh, again ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Parma, the seventh son, is accounted sound, but Elias's sister, Zita (the twelfth child), developed maniacal tendencies since her marriage to Archduke Karl Francis Joseph, heir-presumptive to the crown ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... more embarrassed than pleased by so savage a defence, and hastened to assure Dennis that he had had nothing to do with it. Addison also gave offence to Pope by his too judicious praise of The Rape of the Lock and the translation of the Iliad. Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which was expressed with the genius of venom in the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal suspicions. At last he returned to France, to end his life, after years of lingering misery, in obscurity ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... man's features were contorted into an arabesque—a pattern of maniacal rage. His face was purple and its hue was deepened because it was set off against the snow which crusted his garments after his descent through the drifts. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead. There was no coherence in the noises he was making in his effort to speak ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... "Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity, which, according to the highest authorities, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... signing him to pull down his coat. But Owgooste gave no heed; his eyes were starting from their sockets, his chin had dropped upon his lace collar, and his head turned vaguely from side to side with a continued and maniacal motion. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... sensuality, which now distinguished his bloodthirsty companions. The very knives he saw used for their meals had served as daggers to despatch the wounded or the helpless prisoner. The eyes, now weak with debauch, had glowed with the maniacal fury of the berserkir in the battlefield. Was this the glory of manhood? Nay, rather of ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake |
