"Madhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... actors in the present drama, and had an agreeable party. We are now thinking of making our escape from this hotel, and of taking a horseback journey into Michoacn, which shall occupy a month or six weeks. Meantime I am visiting, with the Seorita ——-, every hospital, jail, college, and madhouse in Mexico! ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... seems no excuse for detailing the next three hours. From three o'clock until sunset the mirages slowly fade away into the many-tinted veils of evening. I know that because I've seen it; but never would I know it whilst an inmate of a gasoline madhouse. We carried our own egg-shaped aura constantly with us, on the invisible walls of which the subtle and austere influences of the desert beat in vain. That aura was composed of speed, bumps, dust, profane noise, and an extreme ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... centuries Christendom was a madhouse. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and heretics were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... and babel I shall never listen to again in any house. What with some running downstairs and calling for their carriages, the band playing, his lordship bawling for his servants—and, upon all this, the sudden arrival of the Captain, who carried a pair of swords in his hand—why, no madhouse could have ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... warmed linen, and his shirt-studs; his bath, his choice of a dozen things he will or will not wear; the landlord's or host's menu is up against the looking-glass, and the extremely handsome miniature likeness of his wife, who is in the madhouse, by a celebrated painter, I forget his name. Jorian calls this, new birth—you catch his idea? He throws off the old and is on with the new with a highly hopeful anticipation. His valet is a scoundrel, but never fails in extracting the menu from the cook, wherever ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ready for a journey—reached my brain and suggested thought. The mise en scene had remained in every detail fixed upon my retina; and how I wondered—'When is he going—how soon? Is he going to carry me away and place me in a madhouse?' ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... he sent them all to the loco patch instanter. They began to plunge and turn and back and snarl. Before you could say 'Craps! you lose,' them shave-tails was giving the grandest exhibition of animal idiocy in the Territory, barring the teamster. He follered their trail to the madhouse, yanking the mouths out of them, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind—we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs.[282] It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... waistcoats, and their boots, in which one could arrange one's cravat? They lived strange lives, these men, and they died strange deaths—some by their own hands, some as beggars, some in a debtor's gaol, some, like the most brilliant of them all, in a madhouse in a foreign land. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... characterized by Mr. Rossetti as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to sadness amid all its splendour by the gloomy presence of the madhouse, ranks among Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the sunset and the island ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... at a premium in that gruesome madhouse. Close beside the fellow on the rocking stone there hung two ropes from rings in the roof. There were iron hooks on their lower ends, and these were passed through the back muscles of another naked man, who kept himself swinging by touching the floor with one toe. The ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... enough," the constabulary officer said dryly. "The chap who suggested the scheme tried to forget it in drink, was cashiered from the army and died of delirium tremens. As for the husband, he is still living—in a madhouse." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Mysterious people are curled up and sleeping in the porches. A patrol of soldiers passes, and hails you. There is a light yet in one mosque, where some devotees are at prayers all night; and you hear the queerest nasal music proceeding from those pious believers. As you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow still talking to the moon—no sleep for him. He howls and sings there all the night—quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity with his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the bars and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... contemplating guarantee and competition between associates at the same time, without any mention of social capital and without any designation of purpose, would pass for a work of transcendental charlatanism, whose author could readily be sent to a madhouse, provided the magistrates would consent to regard him as only ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... secret was safe, and she lost not an instant in repairing to the house of M. de Sartines, to obtain from him a against the aspiring shopman, who, seized in the street, was conveyed away, and confined as a maniac in a madhouse, where, but for a circumstance you shall hear, he would doubtless be still. I happened to be with the king when the lieutenant of police arrived upon matters connected with his employment. According to custom, Louis inquired whether he had anything very amusing to communicate ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... older. The features were drawn and haggard, and his dark hair was plentifully streaked with gray. He looked like a man who had lived two lives in one. To-night his face frightened him. His eyes had a fixed stare like those of a man he had once seen in a madhouse. He wondered if men looked like that when they were about to be executed. Was not his own hour close at hand? He wondered why the clock was so noisy; it seemed to him that the ticks were louder than usual. He started suddenly and looked around fearfully. He thought he had heard a sound outside. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... of the store front. He was so tired that the effort of walking on into that madhouse, where men yelled, grabbed, fought over selections, was too much to face. This was just another part of the never-ending nightmare which had entrapped them ever since they had fled from the bank of the Licking at Cynthiana. Listlessly he watched one trooper snatch a ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... about my sexual condition. It was a frightful blow to them. My father had the circumstances explained to him; he never understood the matter and never discussed it with me. Had I told him earlier I feel quite certain that, with his despotic nature, he would have put me in a madhouse. My mother and sister have treated me very kindly always. My brother has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a lie, O my mad mother, do do not die, Whose eyes turn all ways but within, Whose sin is innocence of sin, Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon, Can see the motes upon the moon, You shall your lover still pursue. To what last madhouse shelters you I will uphold you, even I. You that are ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... me—to his cost!— Such tales about my own dead mother: why, You would not wonder surely if I knew, By nothing but my own heart's help, he lied, Would you? No reason's wanted in the case. So with you! In they burnt on me, his tales, Much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, Make captive any visitor and scream All sorts of stories of their keeper—he's Both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, Serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; Sane people soon see through the gibberish! I just made out, you somehow lived somewhere A life of shame—I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... second, beginning 'A king lived long ago', was to be published, with alterations and additions, as one of 'Pippa's' songs. 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation' were reprinted together in 'Bells and Pomegranates' under the heading of 'Madhouse Cells'. The fifth consisted of the Lines beginning 'Still ailing, Wind? wilt be appeased or no?' afterwards introduced into the sixth section of 'James Lee's Wife'. The sonnet is not very striking, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... urges himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Gimbel's. From that viewpoint, the sale was excellent business—Latterman had gotten the jump on all the other department stores for the winter fashions and fall sports trade. He had also turned the store into a madhouse at the exact time when Chester Pelton needed to give all his ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... mile off at the other end of the village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting on the doorstep of number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of nursery rhymes, and trying to plat their toes into door-mats, and are taken up and carried away screaming, to end their lives in the madhouse ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... when he talked about "those people" dying. Europe was a madhouse. In selfdefense all strangers were instantly put to death and in retaliation the invading throngs spared no native. Peasants feared to stay their ground in terror of the oncoming Orientals and equally dared not move westward where certain killing awaited them at the hands of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... all, all!" hallooed Conrector Paulmann, in the highest fury. "But am I in a madhouse? Am I mad myself? What crazy stuff am I chattering? Yes, I am mad too! mad too!" And with this, Conrector Paulmann started up, tore the peruke from his head and dashed it against the ceiling of the room, till the battered locks whizzed, and, tangled into utter disorder, rained down the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.... God Almighty have us well in his keeping!" Lamb assumed the tender care of his sister, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... to the station was a crisp little affair. Fogerty and myself rose at five and went forth to the shuttle. The subway was a madhouse. We shuttled ourselves to death. At 5.30 we were at the Times Square end of the shuttle, at 5.45 we were at Williams, at 6 o'clock we had somehow managed to get ourselves on the east side end of the shuttle, five minutes ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... Wanderer, half man, half devil, who has bartered away his soul for the glory of power and knowledge, and, repenting of his bargain, tries again and again to persuade some desperate human to change places with him— penetrates to the refuge of misery, the death chamber, even the madhouse, seeking one in such utter agony as to accept his help, and take his ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... death with his dog in Smithfield. The circumstances were as follow: Collins happened to be in church when the priest elevated the host; and Collins, in derision of the sacrifice of the Mass, lifted up his dog above his head. For this crime Collins, who ought to have been sent to a madhouse, or whipped at the cart's tail, was brought before the bishop of London; and although he was really mad, yet such was the force of popish power, such the corruption in church and state, that the poor madman, and his dog, were both carried to the stake in Smithfield, where they were burned to ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... It may be added that, after the reversal of the sentence, David, the judge who had first condemned Calas, went insane, and died in a madhouse.] ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... living ever since as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire,—till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket." This is quite as much as anybody ought to want to know previous to the unravelling of the tragedy of the Jones's. But such stories as those I have to tell cannot ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... play the part, and I shall be glad enough to do it with him again. I have a great deal of compassionate admiration for poor Knowles, who, with his undeniable dramatic genius, his bright fancy, and poetical imagination, will, I fear, end his days either in a madhouse or a poorhouse. The characters beside Sir Thomas Clifford and Modus (which you know are taken by Henry Greville and ——) are filled by a pack of young Guardsmen, with whom I dined, in order to make acquaintance, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... know that God will visit his iniquities upon him, he cannot blind himself to the fact that Nature will. Do we not all know what it is to be punished by Nature for disobeying her? We have looked round the wards of a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse, and seen there Nature at work squaring her accounts with sin. And we knew as we looked that if no Judge sat on the throne of heaven at all there was a Judgment there, where an inexorable Nature was crying ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... full and frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would have been to imperil his sanity. If he had gone through the excitement of a Methodist conversion, he would probably have ended his days in a madhouse. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... to be a wolf, and killed and ate several persons under the influence of the delusion. He was sentenced to death, but the parliament of Paris reversed the sentence, and charitably shut him up in a madhouse. ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... no attempt to reach the mountain. Dreamer of great dreams though he was, how like a madhouse nightmare would have seemed to him a true prophecy of mighty engines whose like no human mind had then conceived, running upon roads of steel and asphalt at speeds which no human mind had then imagined, whirling thousands upon thousands of pleasure-seekers ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... became so frantic, that, to save him from the madhouse, Emilia wrote a letter, at his dictation, to young Brown, peremptorily breaking off all relations; and he, a sensitive, romantic man, was heartbroken, and left the village. He only sent a farewell to his friends the day before he was to sail from New Bedford on a whaling ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... The man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows better.... ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Self and is, in short, Peer's perfect antithesis. When Peer is an outlaw she forsakes all and follows him to his hut in the forest. Peer deserts her and roams the world, where he finds his theory of Self upset by one adventure after another and at last reduced to absurdity in the madhouse at Cairo. But though his own theory is discredited, he has not yet found the true one. To find this he must be brought face to face in the last scene with his deserted wife. There, for the first time, he asks the question and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been as pure as a child's. The vices of passion and avarice have not touched me. I have borne a sorrow in my heart which shrunk instinctively from sin. During these years I have been poor, very poor." The man paused. "There is a link lost somewhere in my life—was I an age in a madhouse? Let it go. I have loved my fellow-man; I have lingered at the hammock of a sick mess-mate, and closed his eyes kindly when he died; I have spoken words of cheer when my heart was bitterness. I do not say this boastfully, for God's eyes are upon us all. I have done these ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... it, but then you haven't gone through the experience I've had of her. I can tell you, it was something to remember. Of course, I got off scot free myself—as you can see. She did her best to break up my pluck for me tho'. She jolly near drove as fine a fellow as ever lived into a madhouse. What do you say ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... madhouse," Handley complained. "How we're going to get any of these students to keep their minds on ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... said the bewildered Willems. "I haven't touched her. Is this a madhouse?" He moved towards the stairs, and Leonard dropped the bar with a clang and made for the gate of the compound. Willems turned back ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... imitation reflected his face in theirs. It was true that there was another side to this truly patriarchal picture. In a city of the Far West, wrote an eloquent paragraph writer, a pale face, once divinely beautiful, was often seen at the barred window of a madhouse, and eyes that had once looked too tenderly into those of the Nickelville Solomon stared wildly at the palm-trees in the asylum grounds. This paragraph ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... reformer, a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much may ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... but they are free! Oh! fools, and slow of heart! As well might a prisoner cover his irons with a cloak, and try to pass as a free man. We can hear the clank of the chains. So is it with the slave of sin. Once I visited a madhouse, and talked with some of the poor patients. Some had one delusion, some another. One thought he was a king, another fancied himself the heir to a fortune. But one thing they all believed, that they were in their ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... two—the man who obeys, or he who sets Heaven at defiance? Once, who could compete with me at school or college? and what might I not have been had you not, when I was struck down by illness, taken advantage of my weakness, and by sending me to a madhouse, confirmed my malady; but fool as you called me, I can see that Heaven's retributive justice has chastised you through life. Me you got into your power on the ground that I was insane, and the mind of the daughter, in whom you took such pride, often totters on its throne; her son was carried ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... believed had been written to drive him to suicide. He went away and tried to hang himself; the garter breaking, he then resolved to drown himself; but, being hindered by some occurrence, repented for the moment. He was soon after sent to a madhouse in Huntingdon. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and clowns, with faces painted ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... he drew up his coat collar. "A madhouse is the place for the man who wants to live ou'doors in the winter time; the poor-farm is too ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rats do the greatest number of "impossible" things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning until a madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my traps and poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly asking: Are rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer to that was furnished by an old he-one who left ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... when the hero of it was well known to be fully qualified for one of the deepest dungeons of a madhouse. I hope, for the sake of society, and the repose of the world, that the rest of Madame R——'s admirers have not united to their passion the bewildered imagination, which fatally distinguished, and finally closed the career of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... life if you can—I have no objection—go and take it; only just observe this, that if you miss your aim, or he, being the stronger man, strike you down, you will be locked up in a madhouse for the next year or two at least; and that is not the place in which I should like to pass the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of ships is a madhouse the first day at sea, but the Golden Bough—God! she was madhouse and purgatory rolled into one! My own agility and knowledge saved me from ill usage for the moment, since the mates had plenty of ignorant, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days, but the world's martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age—that he has ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... were soon arranged, and Traverse prepared to accompany his new friend to his "beautiful retreat," the private madhouse. But Traverse wrote to his mother and to Clara in Virginia, and also to Herbert Greyson in Mexico, to apprise ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... carried away from her for hours at a time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes approached her and sometimes receded, as they swept through the black hole in which we found ourselves when the hatches were nailed down. No madhouse, I am sure, could throw more hideous pictures on the screen of life than those which met our childish eyes during the appalling three days of the storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother was not afraid. She was desperately ill, but ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... that if it was "only" a neurosis it was one with great possibilities. The fact that collapses are frequent among brain-workers was not easily dismissed from my mind. I feared insanity and began to picture how I would disport myself in a madhouse. It seemed that I could not carry out the medical advice to take vigorous exercise, as it gave me palpitation and made me fear that my heart would go out ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... its confluence with the Butezon, long leagues remote from railroads and the world they stitch together—that world of unrest, uncertainty and intrigue which in those days seemed no better than a madhouse. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... this mighty discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... rector of the Jesuits retired indignantly, and 'Pe e Lozano, retroussant sa robe le poursuivit en criant a pleine te^te, et s'exprimant en des termes peu seans a sa profession.'* By this time Asuncion must have been like a madhouse, for no one seems to have been astonished, or even to have thought his conduct singular. The Bishop, always ready to take the worst advice, got ready for his task, and on Easter Eve embarked upon the river, leaving his Vicar-General under ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... to be a madhouse," returned the porter in the same strain. "Now that the madmen are gone, a mole lives here. I kept the door open for the lunatics, and they all got out. I keep it shut for the mole, when he does ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... East it took me a little while to get used to it," she confessed. "The Wichita I left was a quiet town; the one I came home to was a madhouse. At first the excitement frightened me, for I felt as if I were being run over, tossed aside. But now that I've fallen in with the chase, why—I think it ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation* Novelists; but ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world. A passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should be taken to the madhouse. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... other party, M'riar," said Mo. He might have said more, but he was brought up short by his pledge to say nothing of the convict's last atrocity. How could he speak the thought in his mind, of the mother of the victim in a madhouse? For that had made part of the tale, as it had reached him through the police-sergeant. So he ended his speech by saying:—"What I do lies at my own door, M'riar. You're out of it. So I shan't say another word of what I will do or won't do. Only I tell ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... my dear lady, this is a delusion; you really must not give way to this kind of thing," murmured the doctor, rather complacently. He had a son-in-law who kept a private madhouse at Wimbledon, and began to think Mrs. Granger was drifting that way. It was sad, of course, a sweet young woman like that; but patients are patients, and Daniel Granger's wife would ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... musicale. She had thought a great deal about him and particularly about his problem. She felt a great desire to know everything—all the details of the unfortunate circumstance that had driven his wife into a madhouse, and yet whenever her mother broached the subject Claire changed the topic with curious panic. She seemed to dread the hard, almost triumphant manner that her mother assumed in tracking misfortune to its lair and ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... hundred excuses; perhaps her husband had slave girls, perhaps he was old or sick, or she didn't like him, or she couldn't help it. Violent love comes 'by the visitation of God,' as our juries say; the man or woman must satisfy it or die. A poor young fellow is now in the muristan (the madhouse) of Cairo owing to the beauty and sweet tongue of an English lady whose servant he was. How could he help it? God ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... home. I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick. I'm sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse." ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... is surprised that the feeling in the whole Wupper Valley is becoming more and more discontented, and the military are now hatching new measures of violence in order to be able to master this discontent. One would think that such things came from the madhouse. In reality they represent conditions under martial law, and this case is ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... first examinations the campus was utterly quiet. Suddenly bedlam broke loose. Somehow every dormitory that contained freshmen became a madhouse at the same time. Hugh and Carl were in Surrey 19 earnestly studying. Freddy Dickson flung the door open and shouted hysterically, "The general science ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... works of man, or that part of them which is supposed to aim at beauty, we are in a state of aesthetic anarchy, because there is a whole vast conspiracy, itself unconscious for the most part, to persuade us that we like what no human being out of a madhouse could like. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... has made it very disagreeable to me to oppose him, and has even gone so far as to threaten me with imprisonment in a madhouse if I do not yield to ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... Leonie Hetth that Jan Cuxson was straight and thoroughbred, and that his love was pure, else might it have gone badly with her, bringing her perchance to the door of the madhouse; for there is but a hair's breadth between those who are wakened roughly from the sleep in which they walk, and act, and speak, and those ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... neglected, and starved for months at a time; sometimes confined to a hospital, sometimes living like a hunted animal. God alone knows all the misery which she endured, and yet she lives. She was shut up in a madhouse in a little German town, while her relations, believing her to be dead, were dividing her ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... where the garden is good, and house and the prospect admirable; the other my Lord Brooke's [Robert Lord Brooke, ob. 1676. Evelyn mentions this garden as Lady Brooke's. Brooke House at Clapton, was lately occupied as a private madhouse.] where the gardens are much better, but the house not so good, nor the prospect good at all. But the gardens are excellent; and here I first saw oranges grow: some green, some half, some a quarter, and some full ripe, on the same tree, and one ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... it was a lunatic asylum. The general was no other than the famous Dr. Andrew Moorville, that had the great madhouse at Bangor, and who was in the habit of giving his patients every now and then a kind of country party; it being one remarkable feature of their malady that when one takes to his peculiar flight, whatever it be, the others ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... official records of the tribunals, it would be almost impossible to believe that mankind could ever have been so maddened and deluded. To use the words of the learned and indefatigable Horst,[35] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be at every body's call to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning, blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse the limbs of man. This belief, so insulting to the majesty and beneficence ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Schandau, is the Sonnenstein: Sonnenstein too was a Fortress in those days of Friedrich, but not impregnable, if judged worth taking. The Austrians took it, a year or two hence; Friedrich retook it, dismantled it: 'the Sonnenstein is now a Madhouse,' say ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... as the doors swing open so that the smells can get out, and so long as the winds blow in Green Valley, bringing those smells to me—just so long I'll be afraid—afraid. And Billy, if ever I let go again, it'll be the madhouse for me. I know. I've had a grandfather and two uncles ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... folly," said Martin. "You know that these two nations are at war for a few acres of snow in Canada,[31] and that they spend over this beautiful war much more than Canada is worth. To tell you exactly, whether there are more people fit to send to a madhouse in one country than the other, is what my imperfect intelligence will not permit. I only know in general that the people we are going ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... wearing boy's clothes. Now, I'm sure that it was upon that occasion that I went suddenly mad with trouble, and all the rest is a lunatic's fancy! This fine old country seat of which I vainly think myself the mistress, is just the pauper madhouse to which the magistrates have sent me. This fine old military officer whom I call uncle is the head doctor. The servants who come at ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... housekeeper. This woman's name was Blount; and while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman. The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New Atalantis'—the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the patient cannot be called insane, he can only be termed delirious. If every one, who possesses mistaken ideas, or who puts false estimates on things, was liable to confinement, I know not who of my readers might not tremble at the sight of a madhouse! ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... diseases, of hereditary insanity, of congenital epilepsy, of a hundred terrible maladies, which from birth have lurked in the child, biding the opportunity of attack, suddenly spring from their lairs, and hurry her to the grave or the madhouse. If we ask why so many fair girls of eighteen or twenty are followed by weeping friends to an early tomb, the answer is, chiefly from diseases which had their origin at ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... he names two who to the best of his belief have lost their wits, a third who is incorrigibly lazy, and a fourth who is eccentric; adding that he is tolerably well satisfied with the rest, except M. de la Ronde. "You see, Monseigneur, that I am as much in need of a madhouse as of barracks; and what is worse, I am afraid that the mauvais esprit of this country will drive me crazy too."[101] "You write to me," he continues, "that you are informed that M. Labat has killed some cattle belonging to the ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... said the same thing. 'Now do you please to pay me Mr. Hunter?' said I. 'Pay you!' said Hunter; 'pay you! Yes, here's the pay;' and thereupon he held out his thumb, twirling it round till it just touched my nose. I can't tell you what I felt that moment; a kind of madhouse thrill came upon me, and all I know is, that I bent back as far as I could, then lunging out, struck him under the ear, sending him reeling two or three yards, when he fell on the floor. I wish you had but seen how my company looked ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... all of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse? ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... was not guilty," she declared. "His hands may have killed those three women—but he was not guilty. Nor was that poor innocent woman, his mother, who died in the madhouse. They were both clean of sin. It was on his wicked father that the guilt lay. It was Oscar Winslowe who was responsible for the lives that have fallen to his sins. Oscar Winslowe, and no ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... tournament, an event not to be easily forgotten in the locality in which it took place. It was subsequently found out, as it ought to have been discovered before, that both Mr. and Mrs. Mumbles had driven themselves mad by novel and romance reading, and they were both obliged to be sent to a madhouse for some time before they could be cured of their egregious folly. But as they were cured, it may be said that the circumstances which I have related ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... savage arbitrary power, let him inherit the empire of the world, remove all restraints on his will, and allow him to riot in the mad caprices of sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... relative from being dragged before a criminal tribunal, on so horrible and degrading a charge. They applied, therefore, to the Regent, to intervene his power; to treat the Count as having acted under an access of his mental malady; and to shut him up in a madhouse. The Regent was deaf to their solicitations. He replied, coldly, that if the Count was a madman, one could not get rid too quickly of madmen who were furious in their insanity. The crime was too public and atrocious to be hushed up or slurred over; ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... ministers imprisoned in the Bastille twelve Breton gentlemen, whose crime was that they importunately presented a petition from the nobles of their province. The apartments which they were to occupy were filled with other prisoners, so room was made by removing these unhappy occupants to the madhouse at Charenton, whence they were released only in the following year by order of a committee of the National Assembly.[Footnote: Barere, i. 281. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Bastille was that no one really knew what ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the house of correction, in case the things that are done in your house, sir, are done with your knowledge and consent; and in a madhouse if they are done without ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... languages, and had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seem to have been written in a madhouse, and, though filled with proofs of his immense reading, degrade him to the level of James Naylor and Ludowick Muggleton. He began a dissertation intended to prove that the law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family which was preserved in the ark. He published a treatise in which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a madhouse worse than any carnival Charley had ever seen. He made his way, harness and suitcase on his back, through the station crowds and out into the taxi ramp. A line of the new cabs stood there, and Charley managed to grab one inches ahead of a woman with a small, crying ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... the Port at Antwerp; then the Jungfrau, or serving wench that waited upon us, who had for name Babette; and lastly his Mamma, whom, ten minutes afterwards, he began to load with Abuse, declaring that she wished to have her Barty shut up in a madhouse, in order that she might enjoy his Lands and Revenues. And then he fell to computing the cost of the supper, swearing that it would Ruin him, and making his old complaints about those eternal wax candles. Then, espying me out, he asks who I am, challenges me to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... explain no more. Later—many months later—he died patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things considered, was almost as ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss —— sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and useful book might be made out of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their glory. [W. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... indeed. Hawkins seems to have considered that his duty—which was merely to keep intruders out of the park—was dictated by necessity. He thought that if Lady Coverly's real condition became known she would be removed to a madhouse! He also thought that a nurse was ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... ask you to put yourself in my place. Even if were a man sick for adventures, how could I listen seriously to such an insane proposition as this? What do I know about you, or your past record? You may be a practical joker, or you may have come out of a madhouse—I know nothing about it. If you claim to be an exceptional man, and want my cooperation, you must offer me ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... your mother wanted him because I didn't want him, the governess wanted him because he reads his Bible, and old Margret because she had known his grandmother from childhood. That's why he was taken, and if he hadn't been taken, I'd be in a madhouse by now or lying in my grave. However, here is the housekeeping money and your pin money. You may give ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... with me. It is true I was only a madhouse warder, and they probably did not consider it necessary to do so; but I question very much whether Simon Hart, the engineer, would have received any more courtesy ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... the Countess gravely, seeing me smile, "for this, you must know, is a mixture of the courts of Italy and Russia among the Alps. It is to my brother a very serious matter. To me it is the Fair of Asnieres and the madhouse ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... succeeded by his son, Frederic William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transacting of business; and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent and population, by means of a strong military organization. Strict ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... told by another patient that he was an impostor; the first maniac lodged a complaint against the second for calling St. Paul an impostor, which, he argued, with much appearance of sanity, ought not to be permitted in a well regulated madhouse. Nothing could persuade him that he had missed the question, which was whether he was St. Paul. The same thing takes place in the world at large. And especially must be noted the refusal to permit to the profane the millionth part of the licence assumed by the sacred. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... who was at large under the surveillance of the police, should be arrested and shut up in Charenton as hopelessly mad. His instructions were fully carried out, and the unfortunate bishop shortly afterwards ended his days in the madhouse. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... in a man. It robs him of his intelligence, his honor, his self-respect—it levels him with the brutes—it debases him into idiocy—it lashes him into madness. I tell you I am not accountable for my own actions. The kindest thing you could do for me would be to shut me up in a madhouse. The best thing I could do for myself would be to cut my throat.—Oh, yes! this is a shocking way of talking, isn't it? I ought to struggle against it—as you say. I ought to summon my self-control. Ha! ha! ha! Here is a clever woman—here is an experienced woman. And ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... his wife were tried at London in the spring of 1857 for the murder of their two young children. It was sufficiently proved upon that occasion that Mrs. Bacon (who had already been in a madhouse) committed the crime in a fit of insanity. Bacon, however, had endeavoured to manufacture some evidence in order to give countenance to a theory that the murder had been committed by housebreakers during his absence. He thus incurred ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... clothes in a little bag that I could carry with me, and I kept my mind on the watch. My father's silence—his letting drop that subject of the Count's offer—made me feel sure that there was a plan against me. I felt as if it had been a plan to take me to a madhouse. I once saw a picture of a madhouse, that I could never forget; it seemed to me very much like some of the life I had seen—the people strutting, quarreling, leering—the faces with cunning and malice in them. It was my will to keep myself from wickedness; ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... cried his father, with natural impatience, ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for a son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for a madhouse, talking to iron figures and taking them for real men! What have I done, O heaven, that ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... "I suspect he is more of a madman than we knew. I wonder if a soul can be mad.—Yes; the devil must be mad with self-worship! Hell is the great madhouse ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... they send him to the gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal. (All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him out ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... letters in the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned atheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half frantic with delusions—as that his father and uncle were plotting to shut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatched from him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh and blood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal disease, he would often make his certainty of early death the ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with which the walls and chains of their prison compel them to mingle,—is, that a great many of the prisoners have died, some have sought to terminate their woe by suicide, while others have been carried raving to a madhouse. Mr Freeborn assured me that several of his Roman acquaintances had been carried to these places sane men, as well as innocent men, and, after a short confinement, they had been brought out maniacs and madmen. He would ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... sir, are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited: the world, in the eye of a philosopher, may be said to be a large madhouse." "It is true," answered Harley, "the passions of men are temporary madnesses; and sometimes very ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of Malta—Knight of Roads—"Rhodes"—he should have been—we are sorry to state that the career of the Ruffler terminated in a madhouse, and thus the poor knight became in reality a Hospitaller! According to the custom observed in those establishments, the knight was deprived of his luxuriant locks, and the loss of his beard rendered his case ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... movement sincerely enough; now he's sponging on a half-starved sister for endless brandies and sodas. Lord Amber went into wild society in a sort of chivalry; now he's paying blackmail to the lowest vultures in London. Captain Barillon was the great gentleman-apache before your time; he died in a madhouse, screaming with fear of the "narks" and receivers that had betrayed him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton |
