"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe that it is a mere matter of numbers, and that if intellect carried the day, and right were not overborne by might, the position of parties would be exactly reversed. The dilemma forced itself strongly on my consciousness for a solution when I attended the annual ball at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum. The prevailing opinion inside the walls was that the majority of madmen lay outside, and that the most hopelessly insane people in all the world were the officers immediately concerned in the management ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... supposed that such a theory is too palpably absurd to be believed by any save the inmates of a lunatic asylum, had not the writer, and hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati, seen a lecturer perform the ordinary experiment of producing colored precipitates by mixing colorless solutions, as a demonstration of the self-acting powers of matter. Common sense, being a gift of God, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... another horror given not long ago, The Soothing System, which Mr Bourchier adapted cleverly from a story by Edgar Poe and produced at the Garrick, showing the terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of which had overpowered their keepers. This was very powerful and horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous tale in the collection of goblin ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... have your excitement in preaching, Mr. O'Callaghan. These card-tables are our pulpits; we have got none other. We haven't children, and we haven't husbands. That is, the most of us. And we should be in a lunatic asylum in six weeks if you took away our cards. Now, will you tell me, Mr. O'Callaghan, what would you expect Miss Ruff to do if you persuaded her to give ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... this havoc, then gives us a cup of illusion which, when we drink, we know not that there is anything the matter with us. We are like a lunatic in a cell, who thinks himself a prince in a palace, and though living on porridge and milk, fancies that he is partaking of all the dainties of a luxurious table. The deceitfulness of sin is not the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cried Dorothy her eyes unusually bright and her cheeks burning, "that we've got smallpox here, or diphtheria, or a lunatic asylum, or anything you like. Tell them there's a big dog in the yard that won't let anybody open the ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... wonder that the dreadful, drunken, reckless, dissipated life she lived did not hurry her to an early grave; it did affect her reason, and for three weeks she was locked up in Lancaster Lunatic Asylum, having really gone mad through drink ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... "I don't know. First I thought there must be a lunatic at large. But that green light! I ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... documents clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," getting wonderfully in everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are waiting get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the parts of this complex, lunatic machine working hysterically toward a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last, the only things that seem to travel slowly in those tearing, vibrating premises, are ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... about tulips," says Mrs. Herrick, contemptuously, "I have always treated it with scorn. Why could not the art idiots have chosen some better flower for their lunatic ravings? What can any one ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... everybody that passed in another boat, and would stand up and rant at them until they considered him insane. We were on very intimate terms, and I was never more pleased than when he made his appearance, as it was invariably the signal for mirth. The first time I certainly considered him to be a lunatic, for playhouse phraseology was quite new to me. "Boat, sir," cried I to him as ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... execution on the enemy ranks as the men came along laden with full packs. A story is told, and is believed to be true, of one machine gunner that, in the course of his morning's work, he slaughtered over 200 German's single handed with his weapon, after which he became a raving lunatic and ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... made of; well, I'm told she supplies her own. But why should I dwell on infelicitous unions of this kind? It was obvious to every rational creature from the first—and to him most concerned—that Mrs. Calfsfoot would fiddle poor C. into a lunatic asylum. And if he be not there yet, depend upon it he's on the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... for the moment inextricably entangled in the bottom of the boat. Emotional Joe cursed and stamped and tore at his hair like a lunatic. Loud laughter broke from Sam and Bela ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... understand about that blue paper,' said Mrs Biddle. 'It looks to me like the work of a lunatic. And saying you were nice and pretty! It's not the work of ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... the protection of the Patriotic Society and the municipal authorities. The charitable institutions consist of the Caza de Beneficiencia, for both sexes, a penitentiary, a Magdalen Asylum, and seven hospitals—one of them contains a lunatic asylum. There are, besides, three theatres, an amphitheatre for bull fights, plaza de toros, and several public promenades, such as the Alameda and the Paseo Nuevo; In Turnbull's "Travels in Cuba," published by Longman & Co., London, 1840, the city is said to ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... whisked him away to a building he did not see from the outside; he was taken up by private elevator to a suite of rooms which might—for all he could tell—have been a suite in a luxury hotel or a lunatic asylum. The walls were translucent, the furniture oddly colored, and so carefully padded that even a homicidal or suicidal person could not have hurt himself or anyone else on it or ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... especially when the company is tolerably large. Look at the roundabout circuits we took; the dreams of a patient in delirium are not more incongruous. Still, just as there is nothing absolutely unconnected in the head either of a man who dreams, or of a lunatic, so all hangs together in conversation; but it would often be extremely hard to find the imperceptible links that have brought so many disparate ideas together. A man lets fall a word which he detaches from what has gone before, and what has followed in his ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Immortales Young Blood The Quality of Courage Campus Sonnets: 1. Before an Examination 2. Talk 3. May Morning 4. Return — 1917 Alexander VI Dines with the Cardinal of Capua The Breaking Point Lonely Burial Dinner in a Quick Lunch Room The Hemp Poor Devil! Ghosts of a Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... was some lunatic who escaped from Stefansfeld or somewhere—Faith, he did well to hang himself. When one is good for nothing, that's the simplest way ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... or opera with Flossy, while Fred would entertain Maud, much to her pleasure, at home. The wife hated to see her husband come home at all, but she went into hysterics when Fred arrived. When Fred and Flossy were away, or absent, goodness knows where, the once happy home was like a lunatic asylum, in which the mania with the inmates was a total disregard of each other, and where language was unknown. The husband and wife drifted further and further apart. They ceased to smile, ceased to know each other, ceased to see each other. They were like ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... told to-day at dinner, Of his own doors being shut against his entrance. Belike his wife, acquainted with his fits, On purpose shut the doors against his way. My way is now to hie home to his house, And tell his wife that, being lunatic, He rush'd into my house and took perforce My ring away: this course I fittest choose, For forty ducats ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... laid bare. Already his mind was rejecting it. The only matter that concerned him was to bring his ship to her destination in a seaman-like manner, and let who would perplex their brains with fantasy. Indeed, he was beginning to regard the Baron as a harmless lunatic, whom Providence had entrusted with the spending of a rich man's money for the special ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... brother, with frock hitched up above his naked ankles and his feet in great sabots, fetch sack after sack of what I supposed to be bran, and carry it away on his shoulders. He passed close to me, and looked at me with an expression which I interpreted to mean: 'You must be a lunatic to stare at me instead of going to bed—you, who have Monseigneur's soft bed, and are at liberty to sleep.' But no word passed between us. At length I did go ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... he is insane," said Napoleon, after a pause. "I want him to be looked upon as a lunatic. I hope that the whole affair will remain a secret, and that the world will hear nothing of it; but if it should be talked about, we must insist that the man ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... when I naturally taxed him with his cowardice and meanness, he did not seem at all penitent, but went on like a lunatic; and although what he said was civil enough, his way of saying it was very impolite and strange; and after we had parted, I heard him give way to fiendish laughter. I could not be mistaken, for the cliffs echoed it in all directions like ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the gravity of his peril. Helpless himself, a man-killing lunatic was about to kill him and to kill him most horribly. Michael, a prisoner in the bush, hanging head-downward in the manzanita from his loins squeezed in the fork, and struggling vainly, could not come ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... story is, a medical student threatened a group of prying boys with a dissected human arm. Soldiers were needed to quell the resulting riot. The reddish brick hospital of today dates from 1877. A chapter in the story of the New York Hospital as an institution concerns the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, for which the land was purchased in 1816, and ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... you. Aubrey bangs me over the head with it. But I'm like the Doctor in the Punch and Judy show—he thinks he's knocked me flat. He hasn't. I've a new argument every time he comes. And as for my daughters, they think me a lunatic—a stingy lunatic besides—because I won't give to their Red Cross shows and bazaars. I've nothing to give. The income tax gentlemen have ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be untenable? The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon's, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... screamed at my grandfather. “You old lunatic, I wish to God I had never seen you! No wonder you came back to life! You’re a tricky old devil and ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... at first. A 'London correspondent' knew for a fact that the book was written by an old lady at a lunatic asylum in her lucid intervals; while a ladies' journal had heard that the author was a common carpenter and entirely self-educated; and there were other similar discoveries. But before they had time to circulate widely, it became somehow common knowledge that ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Nobody but a lunatic would, after Gallipoli experiences, undertake serious land operations in the Alexandretta region with less than six divisions. To ship six divisions absorbs a million tons. There were United States troops at this time ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... and every increase of knowledge was to me a source of delight. In fact, I had now something to live for, before I had not; and I verily believe, that if Jackson had been by any chance removed from me at this particular time, I should soon have become a lunatic, from the sudden drying up of the well which supplied my inordinate ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... is the original, epistle of this famous lunatic to the matron of Bedlam; No other proof is ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... of him. And had I any right to introduce to Hetty Carpenter a guest who came without credentials and talked more or less like a lunatic ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... as social agitators. Their chief notes were the variety of their opinions and the unanimity of their persecution by all other parties. Some of them were men of intelligible social and religious tenets; others furnished the "lunatic fringe" of the reform movement. The proclamation banishing them from England [Sidenote: 1538] on pain of death merely continued the previous practice ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... its mission, until it relieves society from the depredations of these scorpions, by colonizing them where they will expend their poison without dangerous results. If sting they must, let it be among themselves. If I were lunatic enough to desire to vote, I should spend my franchise in favour of a 'Gossip Reservation'—somewhere close to the Great Western Desert, to which the disappointed widows, spiteful old maids, and snarling dyspeptic bachelors of this much-suffering generation should be relegated for domiciliation ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... thought you understood that. That is, if you will have me. Your old friend, the lunatic, you and I will together seek for and find this golden flower. I ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... uneasily and speaking as if humouring a dangerous lunatic. "It is the eye of the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... indignant that such a mad dog as Lord George should not be knocked on the head. Colonel Murray did tell him in the House, that, if any lives were lost, his Lordship should join the number. Nor yet is he so lunatic as to deserve pity. Besides being very debauched, he has more knavery than mission. What will be decided on him, I do not know; every man that heard him can convict him of the worst kind of sedition: but it is dangerous to constitute a rascal a martyr. I trust we ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince Andrew scanned his unfamiliar face, "as to that person, sire..." continued Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself, "the man who advised the Drissa camp—I see no alternative but the lunatic asylum ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... hastily flung off the encircling arm and retired a few paces inland. "'Ave you—ever been—in a lunatic asylum at any time?" he inquired, as soon ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... probably." She smiled up at him. "Come and sit down and tell me: are you a poet, or a lunatic, or a haberdasher, or what kind of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... put together paltry articles for works which I never read. Indeed, if I have not undergone the doom of almost all individuals whose situation becomes suddenly opposed to their feelings and habits, and if I am not yet a lunatic, I must thank the mechanical strength of my nerves. My nerves, however, will not withstand the threatenings of shame which I have always contemplated with terror. Time and fortune have taught me to meet all other evils ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... put it to you, Mr Dean; isn't it about playing the lunatic for him to think of going to the help of Sir James, and the captain, ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... between himself and the defendant. Two of the Judges on Appeal—Lord Penzance and Mr. Justice Keating—agreed with the jury's verdict that Lady Mordaunt was insane, while Chief Baron Kelly differed. The woman in the case was for years afterwards confined in a lunatic asylum, and it has long since been quite well understood that the only basis for scandal was the fact that a Royal visit which had been paid upon one occasion was made under the invariable rule of etiquette, ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... short consultation, he agreed to sign an order declaring that in his opinion Mrs. Lennox was a dangerous lunatic. ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... woman to her wrinkles and makes her happy in her grey hairs. Without it she takes to peroxide, smooths out her wrinkles with cream, and what is even more tragic, developes a tendency to pursue the young men of her children's generation. People call it ridiculous, lunatic,—so it would be, if it were not so nobly, so ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... whenever they cross his path; but to-night the foxes were yapping an answer all around them, and sometimes a few adventurous dogs would scale the mountains silently to sit on the rocks and join in the wild wolf chorus, and not a wolf stirred to molest them. All were more or less lunatic, and knew ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... curious particulars, and then continued: "Well, after I had passed him and his turn-out, I drove straight to the public-house, where I baited my horses, and where I found some of the chaises and drivers who had driven the folks to the lunatic-looking mansion, and were now waiting to take them up again. Whilst my horses were eating their bait, I sat me down, as the weather was warm, at a table outside, and smoked a pipe, and drank some ale in company ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... I don't in the least wish to deny that. I never was more uncomfortable in my life. But what I want to know is, what possible motive he had for doing it. Unless he's an absolute lunatic, and you ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you, and if you were to ask questions, and began to take notes, the good lady would stare at you in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. Everybody is not as patient as Elizabeth," added Irais, anxious to ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... readiest palliation. For in what condition would the reputation of the teacher be left for discretion and wisdom as an intellectual guide, when his first act must be to recant—and to recant what to the whole body of his hearers would wear the character of a lunatic proposition. Such considerations might possibly induce him not to recant. But in that case the consequences are far worse. Having once allowed himself to sanction what his hearers regard as the most monstrous of paradoxes, he has no liberty of retreat open to him. He must stand to the promises ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... him was perhaps the conception of a lunatic. But it was still an idea, and offered ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... said, "If this is a farewell dinner, make it like one. Look at those fellows; they're just like the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Let's go." ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... midst of his forlorn state he heard his companions begin to abuse some one. "What kept you from jumping, you lunatic?" said a scolding voice. The chief engineer left the stern-sheets, and could be heard clambering forward as if with hostile intentions against "the greatest idiot that ever was." The skipper shouted with rasping effort offensive epithets from where he sat at the oar. He lifted ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... courteous, and nothing more. But the gentlemen of different nations are like brothers brought up in different schools. An Englishman who should demand satisfaction by arms, of another Englishman, for a hasty word spoken in jest, would be considered a lunatic in the clubs, and if he carried his warlike intentions into effect with the consent of his adversary, and killed his man, the law would hang him without mercy as a common murderer. On the other hand, a German who should refuse a duel, or not demand one if insulted, would be dismissed from the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... quite ready for a lunatic asylum," said Mrs. Lancaster, who was standing near. "But, whatever his folly may be, I certainly do not agree with you, Mr. Brent, in thinking that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... same expression of something that I ought to know,—something that she was made to tell and I to hear,—lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... on the proprietor and allowed, upon the whole, every grown-up man freely to dispose of his property. The regulation, however, under which he who alienated his hereditary property and deprived his children of it was placed by order of the magistrate under guardianship like a lunatic, was probably as ancient as the period when the arable land was first divided and thereby private property generally acquired greater importance for the commonwealth. In this way the two antagonistic principles—the unlimited ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Belarmine, an individual who gave himself to the she-bear to save her and her young ones from starvation. Or, if the tale was known to him, he probably took it for what it was worth, and never foresaw that the British Government would emulate the action of the self-sacrificing lunatic, and spend precious blood for the sole purpose of nourishing and resuscitating the powers of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... had become raving mad was sent to a lunatic asylum and thence taken away to England. The body of the woman was in the local cemetery; but what had become of the severed hand was not known. The missing limb had never been found. All this was 50 years ago, that is, immediately after the ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... words was startling, for Dave laughed harshly. "'Crazy' is the word," he agreed. "It's a job for a lunatic, and that's me. Yes, I've got bad blood in me, Blaze—bad blood—and I'm taking it back where I got it. But listen!" He turned a sick, colorless face to his friend. "They'll whittle a cross for Longorio if I do get through." He called ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... intensely a New Englander. The somber and narrow man represses one-half of his being and straightway sets up a Mr. Hyde in ambush to make war on his Dr. Jekyl. Our lunatic asylums are full of patients whose repressions have driven them mad. The whole Puritan code is a religion of repression—and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... were really awake. But in actual life there never was any doubt on that score. The great thing was that I should keep all my wits about me. Everything might depend on presence of mind. Perhaps this murderer was mad. If you fix a lunatic with your eye... ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... very cross to her, and it was murmured that 'dear Mrs. Paget had often had to pass through the waters of affliction'. They were very poor, but rigidly genteel, and she was careful, so far as she could, to conceal from the world the caprices of her poor lunatic husband. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and children were tortured, strangled, drowned, or burned on "evidence" that today would be accepted nowhere unless by a court and jury composed of the inmates of a lunatic asylum, if even by them. It is unnecessary to say that the more severe the persecution, the more widespread did witchcraft become. Every person tortured accused others and whole communities went mad with grief and fear and superstition. No amount of human evidence ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... man's book disgraceful; he simply runs his sex-idea to death. Really, we aren't all quite so obsessed as that. I do think he ought to be put in his own lunatic asylum." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... home but could give no good account of herself, or would not. She said that she had followed her lover, married him, and lost him. Nothing would comfort her, nothing could keep her in the house. She was locked in, but made her way out; she was presently sent to the lunatic asylum, but escaped from that. Then she got away for good and all and never came back again. No trace of her body could be found. What are you to make of a thing of the sort? I give it for what it is worth, with this note ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... received amounting to about twelve thousand; and the foundling hospitals alone are capable of receiving upwards of three thousand children annually. Besides the hospitals for the sick, there is also a hospital for poor convalescents at Sta Trinit dei Pellegrini, a lunatic asylum containing about four hundred patients, one for incurables at San Giacomo, a lying-in hospital at San Rocco, and a hospital of education and industry at San Michele. There are also thirteen societies for bestowing dowries on poor young girls on their marriage; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Rachel been saying to the Yankee? Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at the window—supposing always that he had told her what he had seen—and why shouldn't he?—was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and apparitions at the farm had been ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ruler,—in fact every man intrusted with executive power, especially in stormy times,—should be resolute, unflinching, with a will dominating over everything, with courage, pluck, backbone, be he king or prime minister, or the superintendent of a railway, or director of a lunatic asylum, or president of a college. No matter whether the sphere be large or small, the administration of power requires energy, will, promptness of action, without favor and without fear. And if such a person rules well he will be respected; but if he rules unwisely,—if ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... fellow like myself has to be. You wouldn't have me go down to posterity as Pelham the Pincher, would you? No! Very well, then. By the time this volume is in the hands of the customers, everybody will, of course, have read Mr. J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large Again." (Those who are chumps enough to miss it deserve no consideration.) Well, both the hero of "The Lunatic" and my "Sam Marlowe" try to get out of a tight corner by hiding in a suit of ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the widow, and claim his sister, as a poor simple young woman, inveigled away from her natural guardian; and, if this were unsuccessful, as he felt pretty sure it would be, he would take proceedings to prove her a lunatic. If he failed, he might still delay, and finally put off the marriage; and he was sure he could get some attorney to put him in the way of doing it, and to undertake the work for him. His late father's attorney had been a fool, in not breaking the will, or at any rate trying ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... woman, throwing herself about in a dance Lopsided with drink, was shrilling out "Adonis, Woe for Adonis." Then Demostratus shouted, "We must levy hoplites at Zacynthus," And there the woman, up to the ears in wine, Was screaming "Weep for Adonis" on the house-top, The scoundrelly politician, that lunatic ox, Bellowing bad advice through tipsy shrieks: Such are the follies ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... part in the public and prominent life of society, so to speak. It is co-operation that is insisted upon—the ministering influence of the woman with the business tact of the man. In prisons, hospitals, work-houses, and lunatic asylums the influence of well-trained women, to soften rigor, charm routine, beguile poverty, and tranquilize distraction is often wanted; not so much to talk as ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... reply to this? But in every instance, and through every difficulty, our hero kept his promise, until his uncle Sir Theophilus was very undecided, whether he should send him home to be locked up in a Lunatic Asylum, or bring him on in the service to the rank of post-captain. Upon mature consideration, however, as a man in Bedlam is a very useless member of society, and a tee-total non-productive, whereas a captain in the navy is a responsible agent, the Admiral ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... save Natalie Brande—for they will certainly succeed in blowing themselves up, if nobody else—consent to her marrying another man, say that young lunatic Halley, who is always dangling after her when you ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... said Dorothy. "You'd be a reg'lar lunatic to want to leave Bunnybury for a wild life in the forest, and I'm sure any rabbit outside the city would be ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... be content with a few such lyrics, leaving the bulk of Poe's poems to such as may find meaning in their vaporous images. As an example, study these two stanzas from "Ulalume," a work which some may find very poetic and others somewhat lunatic: ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... there were also such impatient critics as E.L. Godkin who put so much emphasis on the failures of the reformers as to overshadow their positive achievements. Moreover, there were the well-meaning but impracticable people who constituted what Theodore Roosevelt once called the "lunatic fringe" of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... a step, old man, unless I go with you," said Cyrus. "Not much! I don't want to patrol the forests like a lunatic for five mortal hours in search of you, and then find you roasting your shins by some other fellow's camp-fire. One little hide-and-seek game of that ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... long-looked for hours of freedom were disfigured by rain and blight. He resented the malice of things. He also resented the invasion of his brickfield by an alien van, a gaudy vehicle, yellow and red, to the exterior of which clinging wicker chairs, brooms, brushes and jute mats gave the impression of a lunatic's idea of decoration. An old horse, hobbled a few feet away, philosophically cropped the abominable grass. On the front of the van a man squatted with food and drink. Paul hated him as a ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping past! Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain. To the door, to the door, with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with its fellows, it raves and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up suddenly; look at the sea,—and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down, turn sky-blue,—a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one were looking into an immeasurable dyeing vat, or as though the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... secretary Bromley, member of Parliament for the university; and the vice-chancellor offered a reward of one hundred pounds to any person who should discover the author. It was either the production of some lunatic, or a weak contrivance to fix an odium ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... lovingly, longingly at that spinning-wheel, and might have bought it for a franc and a half, and would have done so, had I not been encumbered with the hurdy-gurdy. That had brought me into such difficulties that I felt convinced a hurdy-gurdy a spinning-wheel would lodge me in a lunatic asylum. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... praise, the great heart silent that their love would have made beat with ecstasy. Well, such is life. They treated Tasso just about the same who writ "Jerusalem Delivered," they imprisoned him for a lunatic, and now how much store they set ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... action of his own soberer reason. Five minutes' talk sufficed to show that some alien influence had been at work, and that it had not so much subdued his resentment as weakened his will, so that he moved under it in a state of apathy, like a dangerous lunatic who has been drugged. Temporarily, no doubt, however exerted, it worked for the general safety: the question was how long it would last, and by what kind of reaction it was likely to be followed. On these points Selden could gain no light; for he saw that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... no reason whatever he decided that that man had been the assailant. Some white would-be murderers were quickly got together and shot the black man to death. Then it was discovered that he was an escaped lunatic, whose recent history did not square with the theory that he was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... especially the use of overdrawn tea. A gentleman of over twenty years' experience, as governor of a lunatic asylum, assured the writer that next to drink, overdrawn tea was the most responsible agent for insanity. That week he had received a farmer's wife and five strapping sons all stark mad from the poison stewing by so ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... clank. At the same moment, I heard a cry. It was the voice of my Alice. I looked up. At a barred window I saw her face; but it was terribly changed. I dropped from my horse. As soon as I was able to move from the hospital, I went to the place, and found it was a lunatic asylum. I was permitted to see the inmates, but discovered no one resembling her. I do not now believe that she was ever there. But I may be wrong. Nor will I trouble my reader with the theories ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... aversion which each felt for the other—if I should come to you and tell you that I intended asking my uncle to give me his precious ruby for the purpose of passing it on to Mr. Fluette, would n't you think I had become a fit subject for a lunatic asylum?" ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... after they went down to Foxx Travis's—now Fawzi's—office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead of the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick carpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... however, has one excuse, her mind is, as I told you before, unsettled. You should have remembered that, and hesitated to receive as unexceptionable evidence against the honour of your husband, the ravings of a lunatic. I now tell you that this is the last time I shall speak to you upon this subject, and, in the presence of the God who is to judge me, and as I hope for mercy in the day of judgment, I swear that the charge thus brought against me is utterly false, unfounded, and ridiculous; I defy the world ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... thinking the birds were alive, tore it off. So then they tried on those absurd, tiny, high, little things that require at least twenty-five imitation curls to keep them up, and show them off, and in which poor Miss Winter looked like an escaped lunatic. We tried everything in the shop, and at last Mrs. Ogilvie said, 'Perhaps we had better come again, later in the season, when the hats would be smaller, or not so large.'—Do you know Miss Winter? She has rather pretty red hair, and a dazed intellectual expression. She's the ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... Bull Moose Party, attracted the usual group of reformers, and some cranks. Each new party does this. Roosevelt had, many years before, spoken of the "lunatic fringe" which clings to the skirts of every ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... of elegant manners and great command of her native tongue—appeared with a candle, and joined in the melodious confusion. What is the price of these rooms? More jabber, more servants bearing lights. We seemed suddenly to have come into an illumination and a private lunatic asylum. The landlady and her troop grew more and more voluble and excited. Ah, then, if these rooms do not suit the signor and signoras, there are others; and we were whisked off to apartments yet grander, great suites with high, canopied ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... corridor outside hysterical weeping is heard. A Lunatic rushes in, followed by Warders ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... also the convicts were employed in the erection of a new court house (now the public offices), the general hospital, lunatic asylum, pauper hospital, and some other minor public works. They also built the walls of the reclamation works along the sea front, now known as Collyer Quay, and above referred to, and the river wall at Campong ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... pressure thus created almost every public building in the town was requisitioned for hospital purposes; schools and clubs and colleges, the nunnery, the lunatic asylum, and even the stately Parliament Hall with its marble entrance and sumptuous fittings. The presidential chair, behind the presidential desk, still retained its original place on the presidential platform; but,—"how are the mighty fallen!" I saw it occupied ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... mischief, you're worse a great deal than a man like myself, for instance, who, without being bothered with any particular principles of any kind, has what I call a general sense of fitness and propriety, and does his dissipation sensibly and correctly. But to go tearing off like a lunatic after the first petticoat you see fluttering among the bushes in a gentleman's park, and leaving your friend to hold in two thorough-bred peppery devils, that are enough to pull a man's arms off, for above a quarter of an hour, it's too bad a ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the point," said he, taking my arm for a last turn, "and that's the truth. There was a fellow who came out with me, quite a good chap really, and a tremendous pal of mine at Eton, yet he behaved like a lunatic about this very thing. Poor chap, he reads like anything, and I suppose he'd been overdoing it, for he actually asked me to choose between Mrs. Lascelles and himself! What could a fellow do but let the poor old ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... believed that Clifford could give the clue to the dead uncle's wealth, of which not more than a half had been mentioned in his will. If Clifford refused to reveal where the missing documents were placed, the judge declared he would have him confined in a public asylum as a lunatic, for there were many witnesses ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... that from Rudolph Weissmann, after what I've seen to-day, unsettles my reason. Maybe those people really have a message. But, Morton, you really must do something for that girl. Her condition is pitiful. One of the plans of that lunatic Clarke is to issue a challenge to the world of science and to throw that girl into the arena for ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Archbishop imagined that he had discovered between the case of a wrongheaded King and the case of a lunatic King will not bear a moment's examination. It was plain that James was not in that state of mind in which, if he had been a country gentleman or a merchant, any tribunal would have held him incapable of executing a contract or a will. He ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play over again a game won eighty years ago only through circumstances utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta. The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!) has been hideously parodied by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert |
