"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... content themselves with severely punishing adultery in woman, even by death, but even simple conversations with a strange man. Jealousy transforms marriage into a hell. It is often exalted in man to the point of a mania for persecution, to which it is analogous. It is also a very common symptom of alcoholism. Then the life of the unfortunate woman who is the object of it becomes a continual martyrdom. Perpetual suspicion accompanied by insults, threats and violent words, and even homicide may ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Laval. The reunion, however, was not productive of happiness, owing to the fever of jealousy in which her elderly husband lived because of the love affair with the King. This jealousy eventually flared into mania when he heard that she had actually visited her former lover in prison after he had been captured at Pavia. Instantly he "shut his young wife up in a darkened and padded cell, and finally had her cut into pieces by two surgeons," so the story goes. Terrified at what he had done ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... example, would appear to us absolutely exaggerated, if the figures in these pictures did not wear pigtails and wigs. Only in this unique age of the Rococo does it seem to us possible that such freaks could have walked the earth in the flesh. And we are not wrong in so thinking; for the mania to be an original type, a virtuoso of personality, in that day turned innumerable persons into genuine caricatures. A certain Count von Hoditz, in the middle of the eighteenth century, founded a so-called "Maria Theresa sheep-farm" (in honor of the Empress) on his estate Roswalde, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... I love you so, Virginia," he hastened to urge in extenuation of his suggested disloyalty. "I cannot see you sacrificed to his horrible mania. You do not realize the imminence of your peril. Tomorrow Number Thirteen was to have come to live beneath the same roof with you. You recall Number One whom the stranger killed as the thing was bearing you away ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... astonishing what a mania for card-playing existed in Corsica at that time—and it is probably the same now. The clubs and cafes were watched by the police, for the young men ruined themselves at a game called bouillotte. In the villages it was the same; the peasants were mad for a game at cards, and when ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... admitted that the Parisians of all classes are behaving themselves well. The rich residents have fled, and left to their poorer neighbours the task of defending their native city. There have been no tumults or disorders, except those caused by the foolish mania of supposing every one who is not known must necessarily be a spy. Political manifestations have taken place before the Hotel de Ville, but the conciliatory policy adopted by the Government has prevented their degenerating into excesses. Public opinion, too, has pronounced against them. From what ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... plottings of the pander Brutus. But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the party asked the meaning of certain tall buildings, he was told that they were pawnbrokers' offices; for the Chinese have a mania for pawning their clothes, or whatever they have, even if not in need of the money, to save the trouble of taking care of the articles. Before the third day of the stay in Canton was over, some of the ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... slight—something a little "off." One glance of that kindly and humorous eye told me such expectation had been nonsense. Odd he might have been—Gadzooks! he looked it—but "queer"? Never. The fact that Miss Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this "sitting and sitting and sitting" himself into any form of mania or madness whatever spoke loudly of her own imagination, indeed! The key to "Simpledoria" was to be sought under some ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... I have the fancy, however, to assure you that what took place that day at the Cafe Grand was not the impulsive act of a man inspired with a homicidal mania, but was the necessary outcome of a long sequence of events. You know the peculiar relations existing between Isobel and myself. I had not the right to approach her, or to assume any overt act of guardianship. Any association with me would at once have imperilled any chance she may have possessed ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents justify the title. Extravagance and the far-fetched were the gauge of wit: Donne, Herbert, and many a man of genius foundered on this rock, as well as Cowley, who acted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... Don't speak of that. I had the whim to make something for somebody—I have an embroidering mania on me sometimes—and there was a chance to dispose of it, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be presumed that the mania is a purely local and temporary disorder of the brain. The incurable cases are usually found in the first class of patients, as we might ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... passions they grow unclerical and do mischief. Now he used, though not getting on with the Curtises, to be most successful with the second-rate people; but he has managed to offend half of them during this unhappy mania, which, of course, they all resent as mercenary, and how he is ever to win them back I don't know. After all, curatocult is a shallow ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The later development of Spirit Faces and Spirit Forms, each of which I have examined thoroughly, and made the results of my observations public, fail to afford any adequate idea of the pitch to which the mania—if mania it be—has attained. To many persons Spiritualism forms the ultimatum, not only in science, but also in religion. Whatever the Spirits tell them they believe and do as devoutly as the Protestant obeys his Bible, the Catholic his Church, or the scientific man ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak. 'This mystery is all wrong,' he observed. 'It is insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night, many hours after the murder ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. Among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. The repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hurt you," she began. "He's perfectly kind and harmless, aside from his mania for dimples. He still smells the piece under the Teacup." Then, all at once, she grew rigid, and her golden eyes began to leap up and ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... with little better success, Mr. Sponge seeming rather to take a pleasure in finding ridiculous likenesses, instead of helping his host out in his conceits. The stick-mania was a failure, as far as Mr. Sponge was concerned. Neither were the peregrinations about the farms, or ter-ri-to-ry, as Jog called his estate, more successful; a man's estate, like his children, being seldom of much interest to ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... and Reality. The First Gray Jacket returns. General Lee re-enters Richmond. Woman, the Comforter. Lincoln's Assassination. Resulting Rigors. Baits for Sociability. How Ladies acted. Lectures by Old Friends. The Emigration Mania. Fortunate Collapse of Agreement. The Negro's Status. To Work, or Starve. Woman's Aid. Dropping ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Juggernaut was considered to be divinely ordained," said Aubrey, "And the wretched and ignorant populace flung themselves under it in the fit of hysterical mania to which they were excited by the priests of the god, and so perished in their thousands. Not THEY were to blame; but the men who invented the imposture and encouraged the slaughter. THEY had an ideal;—the priests had none! But Juggernaut had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reasons perhaps why Alfonso, as he complained, would not believe a word be said); and finally, that, whether the madness was or was not so pretended, it unfortunately became a confirmed though milder form of mania, during a long confinement. Alfonso, too proud to forgive the poet's contempt, continued thus to detain him, partly perhaps because he was not sorry to have a pretext for revenge, partly because he did not know what to do with him, consistently either with his own or the poet's safety. He ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... enough and to spare. But we have not, as far as I know, any version of Catullus which can transport the English reader from the teachings of our century to that preceding the Christian Era. As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and of the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... befallen. Much conversation ensued for days as to the approaching Mayfly carnival. The girls demanded the water to themselves during its period, and as Lamia had landed a small trout that had hooked itself down stream on a submerged olive dun, she was soon as much bitten with the fishing mania as Blind herself. It was comforting to the vicar and cousin to be informed by the girls that they would henceforth accept no services from "hangers-on"—meaning that they would do their own landing and basketing. "We shall see," said cousin to the parson; "meanwhile (after ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... swayed by rage, merely; there would have been something petty in ordinary human resentment at that moment. There was another quality that was devilishly and subtly complex in the sudden mania which obsessed him. He had seen woodsmen leaping and shouting in the ecstasy of drunkenness; liquor seemed to affect the men of the woods in that way—to accentuate their sense of wild liberty. Latisan had been obliged to pitch in and quell riots where woodsmen had heaped their clothes ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... room devoted to children, as distinct from infants, saw one girl of nine with a curious history. This child had been twelve times in the hands of the police before her father brought her to the Army on their suggestion. Her mania was to run away from home, where it does not appear that she was ill-treated, and to sleep in the streets, on one occasion for as long as five nights. This child had a very curious face, and even in ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... prostration of mind and strength, the purse of the Comte de Guiche was getting full again, and when once filled, overflowed into that of De Manicamp, who bought new clothes, dressed himself again, and recommenced the same life he had followed before. The mania of selling his new clothes for a quarter of what they were worth, had rendered our hero sufficiently celebrated in Orleans, a city where, in general, we should be puzzled to say why he came to pass his days of penitence. Provincial debauches, petits-maitres of six hundred livres a ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... or each, or none of these May be the hoarder's principle of action, The fool will call such mania a disease:— What is his own? Go—look at each transaction, Wars, revels, loves—do these bring men more ease Than the mere plodding through each 'vulgar fraction'? Or do they benefit mankind? Lean miser! Let spendthrifts' heirs enquire of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... and repair the fountain. He will place this arm-chair in an arbor near the fountain; the guest who seats himself in it will be caught, and the salamanders may throw the water upon him as long as they please. It is a mania of our master." ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... well-authenticated cases of houses of 'notorious rebels' burned down by the orders of Sir James Macdonell, Colborne's second-in-command. Colborne himself acquired the nickname of 'the old Firebrand'; and, while he cannot be charged with such a mania for incendiarism as some writers have imputed to him, it does not appear that he took any effective measures to stop the arson or ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... during the winter of 1802-3, that Switzerland took arms against the unitarian constitution which had been imposed upon her. Singular mania of the French revolutionists to compel all countries to adopt a political organization similar to that of France! There are, doubtless, principles common to all countries, such as those which secure ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of saying ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to the house, which was in looks like one of Gainsborough's cottages, and ought to have been at least two hundred years old, instead of two. But Downing's advent had already wrought miracles here and there in our land; and a little while before Mr. Remington had been bitten with an architectural mania. So under the transplanted trees, and beneath trailing vines of Virginia creeper and Boursault roses, there peeped the brown gables of a cottage, which arose and stood there as reposeful and weather-stained as if it had been built before the Revolution. Mr. Remington ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and hold up their cloaks or their trains. Thus it came that Mignard, Le Bourdon, and other painters of the aristocracy, used to introduce negro boys into all their large portraits. It was a mode, a mania; but so absurd a fashion soon had to disappear after the mishap of which I am about ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it means that you have a persecution—mania. You imagine that every woman you meet has designs on you. . . . I suppose you think that I came here to make ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... 1780, Griffard was nothing more than a pastry-cook in one of the suburbs of the city, and his knowledge of the science of finance was limited to his dealings with the needy students who ate his wares on credit, and paid for them accordingly. The Mississippi mania whirled him along with it also. In those days every man in Paris meant to be a millionaire. In the streets, alleys, and public squares every one was either buying or selling Mississippi shares. Monsieur Griffard left his pastry-shop in the charge of ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... no less famous than M. de Longuerue for his memory, and he was yet more strongly affected by the mania for books. His appetite for them was so voracious, that he acquired the name of the glutton of literature.[44] Before he died, he had swallowed six large rooms full of books. Whether he had time to digest any of them we do not know, but we are sure that he wished it; for the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... North," said the elder gentleman, a little portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment. "It may be that your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own the existence of some aberration of the intellect—some temporary mania—that might force your best friends ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... for many years great favourites with gardeners, both amateur and professional. About two hundred years ago the mania for these plants amounted almost to a national calamity in Holland, and scores of acres are now entirely devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is living spirit is being driven westward before gross Matter—westward as light tends, as the progress of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... curiosity of outsiders is not encouraged," said Palliser languidly. "And where if a patient dies in a fit of mania there are always respectable witnesses to explain that his case was ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... took possession of the three—Dorothy, Garrison, the driver. The power to think on normal lines was being swept away. Such mania as drives a lawless comet comes inevitably upon all who ride with such space-defying speed. The one idea is more—more speed—more ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... of the features of the shah-mania that British journalism was overrun and surfeited with Persian topics, Persian allusions and fragments of the Persian language and literature. Every pedant of the press displayed an unexpected and astonishing acquaintance with Persian history, Persian geography, Persian manners and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... has also its appointed value;—this cock is worth forty dollars, this four ounces, this one six ounces,—oh, he is a splendid fellow! No periodal and sporadic hen-fever prevails here, but the gallo-mania is the chronic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... technical gentleman of three descents—but the true gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness, generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from his own premises. And this is the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the window, watching the German soldiery cleaning up Morsbronn. For that wonderful Teutonic administrative mania was already manifesting itself while ruined houses still smoked; method replaced chaos, order marched on the heels of the Prussian rear-guard, which enveloped Morsbronn in a whirlwind of Uhlans, and left it a silent, blackened landmark in the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the bungalow mania and build them bijoux maisonettes out of biscuit tins, sacking and what-not, but the majority go to ground. I am one of the majority; I go to ground like a badger, for experience has taught me that a dug-out—cramped, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... the mania which seems to have possessed some men to give away the location of their units in France—the censoring officials declare that the army deserves a great deal of credit for living up to both the letter and the spirit ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... was seized with a mania for collecting: old Haji Wali again gathered bits of quartz, which he once more presented as gold-stone to his friends and acquaintances at Zagazig; and Anton, the dragoman, triumphantly bore away fragments bristling ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... where it had been cut away to admit the stone, as a proof that the stone roof had been an afterthought; and at last turned to me with a look of astonishment. "Mrs. Edgeworth seems to have this taste for mechanics too." He spoke of it as a kind of mania. So I nodded at him very gravely, and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... carried this hostility to the Yankees to the highest pitch, was an attempt made by that all-pervading race to get possession of Communipaw itself. Yes, Sir; during the late mania for land speculation, a daring company of Yankee projectors landed before the village; stopped the honest burghers on the public highway, and endeavored to bargain them out of their hereditary acres; displayed lithographic maps, in which their cabbage-gardens were ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Committee on Public Accounts was further investigated. The Committee had reported that a certain stationery contract for the Air Ministry had been extravagant and improper. The AIR MINISTER at the time was the noble Lord who has lately been so eloquent about "squander-mania," but he has since, in a letter to the Press, declared that he never signed or initialled the order. Lieut.-Colonel ARCHER-SHEE and Mr. ORMSBY-GORE sought the opinion of the Treasury on the transaction, and Mr. BALDWIN replied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... back of all such physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the nervous system ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... her, and the furniture, instead of losing its value in her eyes, became ever more precious. To use things without hurting them or soiling them or scratching the woodwork or clouding the varnish, that was the problem which soon became the mania of the old maid's life. Sylvie had a closet full of bits of wool, wax, varnish, and brushes, which she had learned to use with the dexterity of a cabinet-maker; she had her feather dusters and her dusting-cloths; and she rubbed away without fear of hurting herself,—she was so strong. The glance ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... Cezanne, done in his earliest manner. This he had to sell on account of pressing need. Dark days followed. He moved across the street into smaller quarters. The old crowd began to drift away; some died, some had become famous, and one, Van Gogh, shot himself in an access of mania. This was a shock to his friend. A second followed when Van Gogh's devoted brother went mad. Good Father Tanguy, as he was affectionately called, sickened. He entered a hospital. He suffered from a cancerous trouble of the stomach. One day he said to his wife, who was visiting him: "I am ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... keep the line in order. But the telegraph company had already had occasion several times to reprimand him for neglect, and had again offered the post to Isak. No, it was not the telegraph that was in Brede's mind all the time, but the ore up in the hills; it was his one idea now, a mania. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... a channel by which some portion of it might have been drawn off to the northern coast. But such were not the views entertained by the authorities concerning this matter. They seemed apprehensive of incurring the blame of encouraging the speculating mania which raged so extensively at Sydney, and which has reacted with so pernicious an effect upon the colony.* the expedition accordingly retained its purely military character. However, I may add, that the Bishop of Australia attended to the spiritual wants of the settlement by ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... epidemic, which is, like fashion, a form of social contagion, has a different origin and a different connotation. J. F. C. Hecker, whose study of the Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, published in 1832, was an incident of his investigation of the Black Death, was perhaps the first to give currency to the term.[295] Both the Black Death and the Dancing Mania assumed ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to get the postmaster to accept them as mail. I told him that it was mail and that I had no other place to deposit it. Nevertheless he said he would not have them left at the postoffice and told me do anything I wanted to with them, saying at the time that people all around there had a mania for ordering those books, but never intended to take them when they ordered them. I took the books around to the stage station and discovered four ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... collector, however, that he is by no means the "homo unius libri." There is always something or other turning up for him, so long as he keeps within moderate bounds. If he be rich and ravenous, however, there is nothing for it but duplicating—the most virulent form of book-mania. We have seen that Heber, whose collection, made during his own lifetime, was on the scale of those public libraries which take generations to grow, had, with all his wealth, his liberality, and his persevering energy, to invest himself with duplicates, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... insanity are delirium, mania, hypochondriasis, melancholia, irresponsible impulses, and the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... are a richer girl than I knew," said Emma's worthy husband, coming forward, with his round pleasant face. "I congratulate you; at this particular crisis, when hundreds are being ruined by last year's mania for railway speculation, it is most fortunate to have safe ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the author and his wife are both haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying—not fallow, but unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of life is lost for them. They develop persecution mania, grow very conceited, and finally come to believe that only they of all the men and women alive truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this were the silly muck that most authors write, it would be produced, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher's ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... hearing a new word. He was most anxious to learn English, and he had a mania for spelling. "'Smart!' What is ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... patriotic and half-educated young men and boys, called Soshi. These hot-headed youths took it upon themselves to dictate national policy to cabinet ministers, and to reconstruct society, religion and politics. Something like a mania broke out all over the country which, in certain respects, reminds us of the Children's Crusade, that once afflicted Europe and the children themselves. Even Christianity did not escape the craze for reconstruction. Some of the young believers and pupils of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... their full brilliancy before our "occupation," but I suppose one would have had to crawl on all fours or lose one's head at the nod of Supayalat. She and Thebaw and their parents were very much in-bred, and, though she was otherwise particularly charming, she had a strongly-developed homicidal mania. However, the people wept when they saw their king and queen being so unexpectedly hurried away in a gharry to go "Doon the Water" in Denny's steamer, in November 1885. They had far more fun, they say, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... admitted that it was possible he had really not looked into the purse, and so didn't know what was in it when he hid it under the stone. But they immediately drew the deduction that the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of gain. This fell in with the most recent fashionable theory of temporary insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Moreover Raskolnikov's hypochondriacal condition ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... even reverence, every apparent approach, every pretension, even, to a divine inspiration and guidance in the age in which he lived. "'The greatest blessings which men receive come through the operation of phrensy ([Greek: mania]—inspired exaltation), when phrensy is the gift of God. The prophetess of Delphi, and the priestess of Dodona, many are the benefits which in their phrensies (moments of inspiration) they have bestowed upon Greece; but ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... "Persecutional mania is a dangerous hallucination," stated the sallow man. "Mr. Craig has accomplished certain definite results in the north country. We have used the word Consolidated in our corporation name with full knowledge of what we are after. We assure ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... little quarrels.... The Yellow Peril was a peril after all! They've got thousands of airships. They're all over the world. We bombarded London and Paris, and now the French and English have smashed up Berlin. And now Asia is at us all, and on the top of us all.... It's mania. China on the top. And they don't know where to stop. It's limitless. It's the last confusion. They're bombarding capitals, smashing up dockyards and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... thing else but every other man's intolerance'; and it is with his consent and by his instructions that I go like Ruth, gleaning in the great fields of literature." "Take care you don't find Boaz instead of barley. After all, the universal mania for match-making schemes and manoeuvers which continually stir society from its dregs to the painted foam-bubble dancing on its crested wave, is peculiar to no age or condition, but is an immemorial and hereditary female proclivity; for I defy Paris or London to furnish ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose. We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... sure to result in the deterioration of her offspring and disaster to the race. So, for the sake of the generations unborn, we—that is, the male men of the earth—who still retain our grip on affairs, have about decided to put a stop to this foolish mania among our young women. We will probably pass laws, setting a limit in the several branches of study beyond which girls shall not be allowed to go, either ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... didn't she blow to the various tea and toast coteries, scandal and slang express women—and the various knots of anxious crowds who stood about Bowdoin Square during the Lind mania! Aunt Nabby had had a genuine tete-a-tete with the Nightingale—and, ecod, an invitation to call again! But Jenny Lind, and her cordon of sentinels, secretaries and suckers, were "fly" for the old screech owl, when again and again she beset the clark ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... and beautiful;—richly dressed in white, with flowing locks. She is wan and exhausted.—The dance-mania, as it seizes her, makes her circle slowly and dazedly with a certain pitiful silliness. The nuns and monks accompanying her point in horror. But they, too, dance off with each other, willy-nilly,—like leaves in a tempest. BARBARA is left alone, still circling ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... the doctor, "it's become a habit with him now, or a mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of talking. He ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, even if my better judgment ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... general nervousness. In still other cases, unpleasant delusions and elementary hallucinations precede the stupor, which may follow immediately after this prodromal state or may be again preceded by a short attack of mania with clouded consciousness. In contrast to the genuine catatonia, Raecke's stupor as well as Ganser's twilight state, are characterized by a high grade of impressionability to things in the environment, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... walls, without crying babies and scolding wives clattering around. This heat every summer costs us thousands of dollars in delays, from wear and tear and extra strain—tempers and nerves giving out, men getting frantic and jerking things. I believe it breeds a form of acute mania when it keeps on ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... madnesses most afflict the sanest men. There was a case once—but I will tell you of that later on. You cannot account for the mania, except under a theory directly contradicting the one about the Place wherein marriages are made. Peythroppe was burningly anxious to put a millstone round his neck at the outset of his career and argument had not the least effect on him. He was going to marry Miss Castries, and the business ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... other's absence in uncontrollable agony, the conditions are serious enough for the consultation of a physician. It is an abnormal state of affairs, and if probed thoroughly might be found to be a sort of perversion, a sex mania, needing immediate ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... result of the nineteenth century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a mania with Manson, and as his opportunities had been limited to the peaceful seclusion of brooks, or the calm waters of mill ponds, it is needless to say that he admitted he was fond ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... was an outcast. He told me of his childhood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother's passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean brightness. Everything was always in its place, and no where could you see a speck of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her. I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks like apples, toiling away from morning to night, through the long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father was a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime, silent and upright; in the evening he read the paper aloud, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may develop insanity in the child, while drunkenness in the father may impel epilepsy, or mania, in the son. Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children, and the bad treatment of the wife may produce ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... appreciation, and he can therefore only rejoice in having provided something worthy of it. The manner of their expression, the observations they make, the very wording of their compliments will reveal, quickly enough, whether he has a case of real appreciation before him, or a mere morbid mania to hobnob with celebrities, or at least with people who by nature of their professional work are often compelled against their own desires to hold a more or less exposed position in the public eye. If he deals ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... an early riser, and had once been very fond of hunting. But now for a great portion of the year he applied himself wholly to reading the old books of knighthood, and this with such keen delight that he forgot all about the pleasures of the chase, and neglected all household matters. His mania and folly grew to such a pitch that he sold many acres of his lands to buy books of the exploits and adventures of the knights of old. These he took for true and correct histories, and when his friends the curate of the village, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... This mania for building, which has always directed the government, has unfortunately communicated itself to the colonists, particularly those who inhabit the various towns, and they are at present in the condition ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... were open at that time in Paris, the mania for play was so widely spread that the public gambling-rooms did not suffice for the general ardour, and gambling went on in private houses as much as if there had been no public means for gratifying the passion. At Crawley's ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... same tormenting dream," he thought. "Before it was a vision; now it is a voice. It is generated by solitude and separation. I must resist it I must be strong. It will drive me into an oppression as of madness. Men do not 'see their souls' until they are bordering on madness from religious mania or crime." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... we find Madame D'Orleans in her "Princesse de Paphlagonia"—a romance in which she describes her court, with the little quarrels and other affairs that agitated it—giving the following amusing picture, or rather caricature, of the extent to which Madame de Sable carried her pathological mania, which seems to have been shared by her friend the Countess de Maure (Mademoiselle d'Attichy). In the romance, these two ladies appear under the names of Princesse Parthenie and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... nerve stimulation is of the nature of mania. In proportion to its intensity is the certainty that it will be followed by its subjective reaction, the "Nuit Blanche," the "dark brown taste," by the experience of "the difference in the morning." ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... no hard epithet that Evelyn did not apply to Mr. Basil Bainrothe during her hysterical mania, and before the doctor's arrival; but, on her recovery, she begged me to repeat nothing of the sort, if she had been indiscreet enough to let out her true opinion of him and his measures, in a moment of irrepressible emotion. "For," she pursued, "it is expedient for ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Chinese and Japanese porcelains: this Claes was eager after rare furniture, that one for silver-ware; in fact, each and all had their mania, their passion,—a trait which belongs in a striking degree to the Flemish character. The father of Balthazar, a last relic of the once famous Dutch society, left behind him the finest known collection ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... if you knew how innocent is his pastime!" she exclaimed, laughing. "He collects and studies moths and butterflies. Is there, if you please, a mania more harmless in the world?... And now I must return ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... cannot see any fastenings, or imagine how on earth the owner gets in or out. There's a model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will be nice ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... its natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... succeed; the patients become exceedingly nervous, as it is termed, and are unusually susceptible of ordinary impressions; pain in the head, often of great violence, follows, which, in some cases, is succeeded by delirium, in others, by absolute mania. Nor is this the whole catalogue of ills to which in such cases the unfortunate mother is subjected: the appetite fails, distressing languor is experienced by day, while copious perspirations deluge her by night, and dissipate the last remains of strength—producing a state which may easily ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... "You have a creed-mania, Knowles. You have a confession of faith ready-made for everybody, but yourself. I only meant for you to take care what you do. That woman looks as the Prodigal Son might have done when he began to be in want, and would fain have fed himself with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... formed in a ring about him, half stooped with bended knees, joined in the whistle, and beat time upon their knees and clapped hands, till the figure was gone through, and Joe Cross brought his terpsichorean bit of frantic mania to an end, by bringing his right foot down upon the deck with a tremendous stamp which was followed by a ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... have survived even such horrors as these had it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling. The crafty, unscrupulous managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, and at once multitudes of farmers, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... the tea-pot and the jar of honey, which Marthe had had for breakfast, on the tray; and, with her mania for tidying, obeying some mysterious principle of symmetry, settled her daughter-in-law's things and any piece of furniture in the room that had been moved from its place. This done, with her hands hanging before her, ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... bass voice, which all the world declared to be as fine as Porto's, and who shared the applause of Baroski's school with Mr. Bulger, the dentist of Sackville Street, who neglected his ivory and gold plates for his voice, as every unfortunate individual will do who is bitten by the music mania. Then among the ladies there were a half-score of dubious pale governesses and professionals with turned frocks and lank damp bandeaux of hair under shabby little bonnets; luckless creatures these, who were parting with their poor little store of half-guineas ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cany out his wishes. Tepi also said that once the king knew that Niabon was on board he would use every effort to gain possession of her. Then, too, the firearms we carried were a further incentive to treachery—the king's mania to increase his stock of arms and ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... use of the children under their care in the gratification of their sexual desires. It is an indefinite impulse towards children which is here operative, and sometimes determines the choice of occupation. I have seen cases in which there seemed to be a sort of mania for giving education and instruction, but in which on closer examination it appeared that the interest in the children was a sexual one. Two cases which have been reported to me show that in the case of women also opportunity very easily awakens the sexual impulse; in these cases the giving of ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... irrelevant, for the object to be explained is not really a wheel but a barrel, large or small, containing written prayers, or even a whole library. Those who turn the barrel acquire all the merit arising from repeating the prayers or reading the books. In Tibet this form of devotion is a national mania. People carry small prayer wheels in their hands as they walk and place large ones in rivers to be turned by the current. In China, Japan and Korea we find revolving libraries and occasional praying machines, though not of quite the same form as in Tibet,[1050] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... soundness make them pioneers. It is note-worthy, however, that insanity is as frequent in the Pacific States as in New England, the explanation being that vice and indulgence prevail to an exceptional extent among the population drawn to the Pacific by the mania for gold. The average in Massachusetts, for instance, is 1 to 348; in California 1 to 345. It is also remarkable that the ratio of insanity decreases as we go west and south of New England, as these ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... baneful influences and impulses, formidably stimulating as a powerful drug. There came, amongst other evils, materialism and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them see evil ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... most beautiful, the books themselves being perhaps the largest in Italy, but an endless number of other books which may still be found in Rome and in Venice and many other places, notably in S. Michele and S. Mania at Murano, a monastery of the Camaldoline order. By these works the good father has richly deserved the honours accorded to him many years after he had passed to a better life, his celebration in many Latin verses by D. Paolo Orlandini, a very ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... orators is to me a more fearful thought than that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning. Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town-Crier in bell-metal, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... be said the man was mad—I suppose he was; and so is every body whilst under the influence of an absorbing passion, whether the mania be love, jealousy, fanaticism, or revenge. The following tale will illustrate one phase of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... man nicknamed "Johnny Appleseed." His neighbors called him a "crackpate." He had a mania for planting tree seeds wherever he went. As a rule they were haphazardly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... mind either an imbecile or a paid agent provocateur. The failure of Herwegh's project forced Bakounin to admit later that Marx had been right. Yet, as we know, with Bakounin's advancing years the passion for insurrections became with him almost a mania. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... is an all-pervading mania, and as man is "a bundle of habits," the most moral persons in this country (always excepting one or two ladies who express their opinions strongly against it) see nothing in it to condemn, and are surprised at the effect it produces on a stranger; and, indeed, after a few years' residence here, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... wheel, had settled to his business. Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him; he took startling chances on his curves and turns. Still, he knew the country, it seemed. We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... occasionally gather some interesting and curious hints, as to the cost of books and writing materials in those times. As may be supposed, the monkish librarians often became great bibliophiles, for being in constant communication with choice manuscripts, they soon acquired a great mania for them. Posterity are also particularly indebted to the pens of these book conservators of the middle ages; for some of the best chroniclers and writers of those times were humble ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double- refined,—white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... himself with the companionship of ruffianly prize-fighters, belonging to this or that speculator in the flesh of ferocious savages. He must find some outlet for his energies and interests and is carried away by the fashionable mania, which is corrupting our whole population, especially our young nobles, and which, even at his tender age, fills the thoughts of my son, to the despair of ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... see he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... implicated Zeke as having had a share in the fellow's escape. Old Dick Siddon, Plutina's grandfather, heard. He had hated the "revenuers" always. Since the death of his only son at their hands, his hatred had become a mania. He was a strong man, fierce in anger. When he bade his grandchild dismiss her favored suitor, she feigned obedience. She, and Zeke as well, knew the futility of fighting the old man's prejudices. But, with the optimism of youth, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... snapshots taken during the outing; she copied a joke she had read in the paper that morning and discussed the serial story in the boarding-house magazine which all the boarders were reading; she wrote out the directions for a new crocheted tidy her sister had made—Miss Marshall had a mania for crocheting; and she finally wound up with "all the good will and good wishes that Nora Jane will consent to carry from your ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The "German spy" mania attacked Round Hill after the visit to the boy scouts of Clavering Gould, the war correspondent. He was spending the week-end with "Squire" Harry Van Vorst, and as young Van Vorst, besides being ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... invariable custom, had departed, in spite of the heat, upon one of his long rides immediately after breakfast. His quest for the girl whom he had so fondly loved was becoming almost a mania. ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... he is supposed himself to have done, and to cause the failure of his own scheme? Why should he on such a supposition send energetic messages to Johannesburg forbidding the British to co-operate with the raiders? The whole accusation is so absurd that it is only the mania of party spite or of national hatred which could ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Play were to be brought out at all,—and with that mania for classical subjects which then prevailed, what could be more natural?—how could one object to that which, by the supposition, was involved in it? And what but the most boundless freedoms and audacities, on this very question, could one look for here? ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... agreed to come to a compromise by steering W. by N. one watch and W. by S. the next, and so on until the land was made. After this knotty question was settled an incident almost incredible in its awful gruesomeness took place. Ralph became smitten by a revengeful mania. He went below, took his deceased commander's clothes off, put his body on the table and commenced to lash at it with a piece of rope, exclaiming at every stroke, "You thrashed me, you tiger, when you were living, and I'll thrash you now that you're dead." ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... and his momentary rainbow as he emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider, with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face and form but so true blue in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... inevitable Chinese fire-crackers, without which noisy accessories no Paraguayan holiday would be complete. Throughout South America a passion for fire-crackers and fireworks prevails; and as an example of this mania, M. Forgues relates that when the Argentine troops were on their return to Buenos Ayres after the close of the war, great preparations were made by the authorities to greet them on their arrival at three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... German on a back street here, who owns a bar-room with a hotel attached. He has a mania to run for office; in fact, there's several candidates announced already. Now, the convention don't meet until May, which is in our favor. If my game succeeds, we will be back at work before that time. That will let ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania—all are unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose business is pleasure, she was—as Winifred ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was at the time of life when enterprise was necessary for my existence, and so keenly did I join in the slave-hunting mania that I found it dangerous to land in the town of Rio for fear ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... hobby, then? Your letters have amused us immensely, for each one had a new theory or experiment, and the latest was always the best. I thought Uncle would have died of laughter over the vegetarian mania it was so funny to imagine you living on bread and milk, baked apples, and potatoes roasted in your own fire," continued Rose, changing the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... sake of need. The profit-grabber has grown superfluous just as his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited. They needed courts of justice to condemn; ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... have a ray of light strike him through a rift in the clouds. The next day he was brought into court and fined for "his ungodly conduct." With persons accused of witchcraft the Puritans were still more ruthless. When a mania of persecution swept over Massachusetts in 1692, eighteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death, many suffered imprisonment, and ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... this, for only the day before Eva had announced in melancholy tones that she had spent her last penny, and could buy no more pictures, for which she had developed a mania. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... with dark circles round his eyes, Joseph Godard took little care of his person; his clothes were ill-cut, his trousers bagged, he wore white stockings at all seasons of the year, a hat with a narrow brim and laced shoes. He was always complaining of his digestion. His principal vice was a mania for proposing rural parties during the summer season, excursions to Montmorency, picnics on the grass, and visits to creameries on the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse. For the last six months Dutocq had taken to visiting Mademoiselle Godard from time to time, with certain ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac |
