"Madness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in giving recklessly, In flinging all your faggots on the blaze, In losing all for love—a crazy joy Long years of suffering cannot quench, I'd have Ruth spared that madness: and kenning she's just myself Born over, how could I sleep with the dread upon me? She'd throw herself away; would burn to waste, Suffering as ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... busy weeks Mrs. Bolton had looked on in almost sullen silence, except when now and then she had broken out into a passionate invective of her nephew's madness. He had never been indifferent to the luxuries and refinements that give a charm to life, and her nature could not comprehend how all these were poisoned at their source for him. He was eager to exchange ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... Daisies are twice mentioned in connection with Ophelia in her madness. "There's a Daisy!" she said, as she distributed her flowers; but she made no comment on the Daisy as she did on her other flowers. And, in the description of her death, the Queen tells ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... that fell deed, madness raged upon the minutes, now that it was done—all still, all calm, all quiet, Terror held the hour-glass of Time. There lay the corpse, motionless, though coiled and cramped in the attitude of struggling ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... hate him! hate him! I wish he were dead in this room, so I could trample on him!" Even in the scorch of that insane moment, Blair Maitland flinched at such a declaration of hate. Hate like that is the left hand of Love. He had sense enough left in his madness to know that, and he could have killed David because he was jealous ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... over for them without horror. That thought has such strange and diabolical depths that in it lies the reason of some of those apostasies which have, at times, amazed the world and horrified it. If guilty, women of that age fall into one of several delirious conditions which often turn, alas! to madness, or end in suicide, or terminate in some with passion greater than ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Cape Horn, he would turn the helm westward, in order to beat the Pacific seas, and so complete the tour of the world. He did nothing of the kind, but continued on his way to the southern regions. Where was he going to? To the pole? It was madness! I began to think that the Captain's temerity justified Ned Land's fears. For some time past the Canadian had not spoken to me of his projects of flight; he was less communicative, almost silent. I could see that this lengthened imprisonment was weighing upon him, and I felt that rage ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Arms were never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be fought against and taken." The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived them of Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that God would be well-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to Titus and performed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam run more plentifully for the Roman general? ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... of incredulous pain. And there was nothing he could do. It seemed unbelievable that such things could be, in a sane world. But then, the world was no longer sane; it had gone mad nearly two years before, and he was only one of the myriad atoms caught into the swirl of its madness. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... help of this journal that we are able to follow the young enthusiast, not only in all the actions of his life, but also in all the thoughts of his mind and all the hesitations of his conscience. In it we find his whole self, simple to naivete, enthusiastic to madness, gentle even to weakness towards others, severe even to asceticism towards himself. One of his great griefs was the expense that his education occasioned to his parents, and every useless and costly pleasure left a remorse in his heart. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... though in a different mood from theirs, he did, until a day when even the most sceptical saw that the brute came to the fray with less of courage, as if there had at last come into his brain the dawning of a fear of that which rid him, and all his madness could not displace from its ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "found it out"; and within a year my incredulity was justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the lot; and my wonder grew at Neave's madness. All over Europe, dealers began to be fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were palmed off on the unsuspecting as fragments ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Bisesa, and the deep, even breathing of the old woman who slept outside the door of the bare little room that Durga Charan allotted to his sister's daughter. Who or what Durga Charan was, Trejago never inquired; and why in the world he was not discovered and knifed never occurred to him till his madness was over, and Bisesa ... But ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Now, then, if the mother in a household, or even if a daughter in a household, is more distinguished for these high qualities, for these grand attainments, than any other member of that family, why, it is nothing but rebellion against God, it is nothing but gibbering madness, that would make any member of that family hesitate to avail himself of the guidance thus offered, of the light of the wisdom which may thus be poured around him. In God's name, give me wisdom, give me genuine power, give me magnanimity!—as to the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his plans and his daring were exclusively his own. He may claim the peculiar praise of having dispelled an illusion which had hitherto cramped the operations of the British navy—a persuasion that it was little short of madness to expose a ship at sea to the fire from a battery on shore. The victories of Blake at Tunis and Santa Cruz served to establish the contrary doctrine; and the seamen learned from his example to despise the danger which had hitherto been deemed ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... both been to the verge of madness, you and I—driven there by our troubles. [Taking her hand.] Let us agree, in so many words, that we ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... 1791 went off in numerous bodies, few of whom ever returned. They too were prepossessed with the possibility of penetrating through the woods to China, and imparted the same idea to all of their countrymen who came after them, engaging them in the same act of folly and madness. It was not then to be wondered at, that Wilson, who lately came in from the woods, should, among other articles of information, mention his finding more than fifty skeletons, which the natives assured him had been white men, who had lost their way and perished. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions—and they say that is always the hall-mark of a libertine—what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... grate acting as a battery of quick-firing guns, and being confronted by his vulgar wife, I felt in her presence an extraordinary sensation of unrest, of emotion, of unsatisfied need. I'll not disgust you with details of the madness and folly that followed that meeting. But it went as far as this: that I actually found myself prowling past the shop at night under a sort of desperate necessity to be near some place where she had been. A hideous ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... went bent double toward Danveld, as if he wished to embrace his knees; and his eyes glittered with madness, and his voice broke alternately with pain, fear, and dread. Danveld, hearing the accusations of treason and deceit in presence of all, commenced to snort, and at length his features worked with rage; ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the madness of the French government and the exasperation of public feeling in a nation like the French, so uniformly proud of military glory, when very shortly after the first arrival of their new monarch, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... on a tree, And wast pierc’d by a fool in his madness; Since each of them plund’ring would be, Send each disappointment ...
— Marsk Stig's Daughters - and other Songs and Ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... my dear fellow. Pray stick to it. But you haven't told me yet how the dizzy culmination of your madness was reached. You say that you proposed ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... of him that when an infant he was committed by Athena in a chest to the care of Agraulos and Herse, under a strict charge not to pry into it; they could not restrain their curiosity, opened the chest, saw the child entwined with serpents, were seized with madness, and threw themselves down from the height of the Acropolis to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Again and again he urged this point. It was affecting to see how confidingly this ill-fated young man, noble in his nature, leaned upon those whom he had learned to trust. It is melancholy to reflect that a temper so kindly should ever have been worked up, and irritated almost to madness, by those intrigues and misrepresentations which eventually, combining with the wreck of his other moral qualities, alienated him from all who really ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... I couldn't be with you five minutes without kissing you. And I oughtn't to—it's madness in me—for I'm desperately poor, darling; I've ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... institutions might rest. That they could have rights was as little conceived as that inanimate sticks and stones could have them; to enfranchise them—to surrender to them the reins of government—such an idea the veriest madness would have started from. Philosophy was blind to it; religion was abhorrent to it; the common people themselves were as far from entertaining it as cattle in the fields are to-day. Christ's sayings—Love one another—Do as ye would be done by —struck at the root of all arbitrary power, and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the divers pleasures which master human beings, I defy any one to name a single one to which Agesilaus was enslaved: Agesilaus, who regarded drunkenness as a thing to hold aloof from like madness, and immoderate eating like the snare of indolence. Even the double portion (1) allotted to him at the banquet was not spent on his own appetite; rather would he make distribution of the whole, retaining neither portion for himself. In his ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... Let the profit be but great. Dance she ne'er so gracefully, Skilfully with nimble feet, Be she sensible, discreet, And fairest of all fair to see: If of her father I have no profit, Much good, I say, may she have of it. Do not you be so lovelorn, For 'tis scarcely to be borne, Love? nay madness, verily. ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... When Amphons of Spain, bewitched by his step-mother into a were-wolf, was at last restored, and stood suddenly naked before her, he was greatly ashamed. The maiden who healed Iwein was tender of his modesty. In his love-madness, the hero wanders for a time naked through the wood; three women find him asleep, and send a waiting-maid to annoint him with salve; when he came to himself, the maiden hid herself. On the whole, however, the ladies were not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... argument at the last, and that Greif's abrupt departure looked very much like a precipitate flight. She knew also that he loved her, and that it would be impossible for him to leave the country without seeing her again. No woman would believe the man she loves capable of that. It was therefore madness to think of intercepting him upon the road, in order to exchange another word. With hands loosely joined together and hanging down, Hilda stood gazing at the vacant gateway. The happiness she had anticipated an hour earlier, when she had descried ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... think of all that before you preach to me. But I do love her; and it is because I love her that I would fain see her removed from the reproaches which her own madness will bring upon her. Let her die;—if it be God's will. I can follow her without one wish for a prolonged life. Then will a noble family be again established, and her sorrowful tale will be told among the Lovels with a tear ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... President, in which the Executive is reminded that it is not often in this world that to one man is given the magnificent opportunity which the madness of a great wrong has placed within his reach,—as indeed in every chapter,—the real crisis in which this country is now involved, and the only means of prompt and effectual extrication, are pointed out with irresistible vehemence ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... cheerful, and sometimes melancholy—Without present enjoyment or future expectation of any thing but increasing misery and debility.—If these symptoms are inconsiderately suffered to continue, they soon terminate in palsy, hip, madness, epilepsy, apoplexy, or in some mortal disease, as the ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... system for the nomination of candidates. This we believe to be of the very first importance. Whether the system is right in itself we do not stop to inquire; contenting ourselves with trying to show that, while our opponents use it, it is madness in us not to defend ourselves with it. Experience has shown that we cannot successfully defend ourselves without it. For examples, look at the elections of last year. Our candidate for governor, with the approbation of a large portion of the party, took the field ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Miss Gabriel had not lived all her life in Garland Town without learning the subtle aromas of the wind, to distinguish those that were harmless or beneficent from those that warned, those that threatened, those that were morose, savage, malignant, those that piped a note of madness and meant a hurricane. Nor did the fog in itself appear to her very formidable. To be sure, she had never known a thicker one; but the Lord Proprietor (saving his presence) had probably exaggerated its terror. He was—let this excuse be made for him—a ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... not lift her voice, but the word arrested him. "Do you want to die?" The word die pierced the mist of his madness. "What do you think ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... times, whose fruit, when eaten by some, produces unrest, discontent, rebellion against God, unsatisfied desires, a revelation of unrealized miseries, the mere contemplation of which is enough to drive to madness and moral death. Yet of all the other trees of life's garden may woman eat,—those trees that grow in the boundless field which modern knowledge and enterprise have revealed to woman, and which, if she confine herself thereto, will make her a blessing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... said that "there is a pleasure in being mad that none but madmen know;" but this only applies to that species of madness which is produced by an excess of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... madness, man," retorted Armand. "Would you have the child perish for the sake of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... mostly for Michael—there's something rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... soon the vessel was set fast in the ice and was lifted satisfactorily on to its surface without the smallest leak. So far everything had gone as Nansen anticipated, and the experienced Polar voyagers who had declared that the whole scheme was madness had to acknowledge that they were not so clever as ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... lost his balance, and with a faint cry fell from the parapet far down to the water below. Each of the gentlemen at once sprang upon the stone work and looked over where the boy had fallen, but it would have been madness for any one, however good a swimmer; and as they realized this and their helpless situation, they stood for a ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... must be which hinges upon the problem of hereditary insanity. Every other human infirmity may be rounded off, merged into a lofty ideal of acceptance, renunciation, and expiation. But under no imaginable conditions can madness be regarded as something from which the heart and soul of man does not shudderingly recoil. Accordingly, a heroine who is haunted, beset, and finally driven crazy by the dread of the fatal inheritance being in her blood seems set apart from the fluctuations ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... keep this up! It was next door to madness, Frank concluded. He was determined to have nothing more to do with it, but give over the idea of fulfilling the ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... the genius of the past. By the way, are you not charmed at the Emperor's marriage? To restore to princes honest love and healthy preference, instead of the conventional intermarriages which have brought epilepsy and idiotism and madness into half the royal families of Christendom! And then the beauty of that speech, with its fine appeals to the best sympathies of our common nature! I am proud of him. What a sad, sad catastrophe was that of young Pierce! I won't call his father ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... her! Ay—Be not surprised—Even to madness and marriage!—No matter for what I have beforetime said, or what I have thought, my mind is changed. I have discovered perfection which I did not imagine could exist. I renounce my former opinions; which applied to the sex in general were orthodox, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... of the Revolution with such deplorable and tragic results for the Gobelins. In the madness of the time the workers here were not exempt from the terrible call of Robespierre. The almoner of the factory was arrested, and at the end of two months not even a record existed of his execution, which ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are more often inclined to be extravagant, and sometimes carry their inclination to a length that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it—- if possible during their husband's life, but, at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them over his earnings for purposes ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself: 'I am going off my head.' A man whose brain does not work at all times, but only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought of madness. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... He is mad from the beginning, but his madness is in abeyance. Look at the style of his ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... away to his room. He wished to be alone. He wanted to think; to decide whether it would be best for him to stay at the fort, or ride away in the darkness and never return. With the friendly touch of Betty's hand the madness with which he had been battling for weeks rushed over him stronger than ever. The thrill of that soft little palm remained with him, and he pressed the hand it had touched to ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... constantly. According to the record taken from the journals of the House by Mr. Thornton, which have been verified in Springfield, Mr. Lincoln was in his seat in the House on that 'fatal first of January' when he is asserted to have been groping in the shadow of madness, and he was also ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... with Nathan to us - Has Recha then made such a slight impression, Or made so deep a one? I penetrate you. Think you that on a limed twig the poor bird Can flutter cheerfully, or hop at ease With its wing pinioned? Come, come, in one word Acknowledge to me plainly that you love her, Love her to madness, and I'll ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... expected, Braddock was very soon on the worst possible terms with the whole of the colonial authorities, and the delays caused by the indecision or obstinacy of the colonial assemblies chafed him to madness. At last, however, his force was assembled at Wills Creek. The two English regiments had been raised, by enlistment in Virginia, to 700 men each. There were nine Virginian companies of fifty men, and the thirty sailors lent by Commodore Keppel. General Braddock had three aides-de-camp—Captain ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... and when she thinks each artful Glance has caught me, that now's the time to Conquer, and to Laugh, and with malicious Cunning mentions Marriage, I'll start, and change, and beg her not to name it, for 'tis a Thought that rouses Madness in me, 'till out of Spight and Spleen, and Woman's Curiosity, the Knot's abruptly ty'd, to prove my feign'd ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... forgot his old caution and the fears that gave birth to it, forgot everything in these moments but Meleese and his own great happiness. For he was happy, happier than he had ever been in his life, happier than he had ever expected to be. He was conscious of no madness in this strange, new joy that swept through his being like a fire; he did not stop to weigh with himself the unreasoning impulses that filled him. He had held Meleese in his arms, he had told her of his love, ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... whistled ominously; a weird, senseless sound that smote the ear with madness. The white of the snow and the dull gray of the rocks were totally unrelieved by any touch of green or play of water; a spot lonely as the human soul and ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... dog's tooth. 70 It seems his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing: And thereof comes it that his head is light. Thou say'st his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings: Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred; 75 And what's a fever but a fit of madness? Thou say'st his sports were hinder'd by thy brawls: Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue But moody and dull melancholy, Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair; 80 And at her heels a huge infectious troop Of pale distemperatures and foes to life? In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... ribs the whalebone stung, A madness it did seem! And soon it rose on every tongue That Jack Macpherson rode among The ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... making him waste away until he died. They averred that mandragora, torn from beneath the gallows by the teeth of a dog, who invariably died therefrom, enabled them to pervert the understanding; to turn men into beasts, to give women over to idiotcy and madness. Still more dreadful was the furious frenzy caused by the Thorn-apple, or Datura, which made men dance themselves to death, and go through a thousand shameful antics, without their own knowledge ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of a tottering reason was fast leaving the poor, aching head she was too young to realise. Madness was a word that had only a vague meaning for her. Though she did not understand her father at the present moment, though she was half afraid of him, she would have rejected with scorn and horror any ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... being was in a turmoil. She drew nearer to the papers upon the table. She was now within a yard of Prince Shan himself. He made no effort to intercept her, no movement of any sort to stop her. Only his eyes never left her face, and she felt a madness which seemed to be choking the life out of her, a pounding of her heart against her ribs, a strange and wonderful joy, a joy in which there was no fear, a joy of new things and new hopes. With the papers for which she had come only a few yards away, she forgot them. She turned her head slowly. ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rich,' mused Eugen, as his ideas dwelt on Theodore Racksole's reputed wealth. 'But have you thought of this,' he asked, and his mild eyes glowed again in a sort of madness. 'Have you thought that I am unmarried, and might die at any moment, and then the throne will descend to ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... that the sharp chastisement I have received from the best natured and most bountiful master in the world, and whose kindness alone made my condition these many years supportable, hath enough mortified me as to this world; and that I have not the presumption or the madness to imagine or desire ever to be admitted to any employment or trust again. But I do most humbly beseech your Majesty, by the memory of your father, who recommended me to you with some testimony, and by your own gracious reflection upon some one service I may have performed in my life, ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... observe, that no sanguinary measures were thought of; on the contrary, they proposed good treatment to myself and the free people; but how far that intention would have been observed by a set of men of their description, when in a state of drunken madness, may ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... good-byes here, as they were in sight of the old Gouverneur mansion. And no one guessed then that a tragedy of love and desperation to madness was soon to follow, and that in the dreary old house "Frank Forrester" was to lie, slain by his own hand, that he waved so jauntily to them as he ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... by under his madness, and showed him plainly that to jump off would be instant death. Then the thought of his mother came again, and the girl's words, "I am ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... conditions inherited from a not far-distant, barbarous past. It possesses the genius of organization and work, and is able to lend great service to humanity. . . . But first it is necessary to give it a douche—the douche of downfall. The Germans are mad with pride and their madness threatens the security of the world. When those who have poisoned them with the illusion of universal hegemony have disappeared, when misfortune has freshened their imagination and transformed them into a community of humans, neither superior nor inferior to the rest of mankind, they will become ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... unspeakable barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent men—men who in their simplicity or ignorance are positively unable to even dimly comprehend why they are being lashed into a blind fury and goaded to the madness of steeping their hands in each other's blood—what barbarity, what savagery to invoke as the minister, as the vindicator of justice! Let us keep our eyes steadily fixed on this central, essential wickedness of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... muddle of hope and madness, It's the tangle of good and badness, It's the lunacy linked with sanity, Makes up and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... she had been merely amused and flattered by the boy's crudely expressed preference; even now she knew that for a Monroe girl, at twenty-one, to waste a thought on a Hawkes boy of nineteen was utter madness. But a week or two ago, walking home from church with her mother and herself on Sunday night, Joe had detained her for a moment under the dooryard trees—had kissed her. Sally was like a young tiger, tamed, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... persuasion coaxed his very soul, urging him ever forwards, upwards, on towards the higher icy slopes. Judgment and reason left their throne, it seemed, completely, as in the madness of intoxication. The girl, slim and seductive, kept always just ahead, so that he never quite came up with her. He saw the white enchantment of her face and figure, something that streamed about her neck ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... heave—it would have been madness, cumbered and crowded together as we were; and in those brief moments of agony it seemed to me that I was Tom's murderer, for, but on account of my wild thirst for coming abroad, he might have been ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... laws and justice springs (Tremendous oath! inviolate to kings); By this I swear:—when bleeding Greece again Shall call Achilles, she shall call in vain. When, flush'd with slaughter, Hector comes to spread The purpled shore with mountains of the dead, Then shall thou mourn the affront thy madness gave, Forced to deplore when impotent to save: Then rage in bitterness of soul to know This act has made the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... but that he should be called Ananias; and he was accordingly christened Ananias that morning in the meeting-house at Salem. As long as the old man lived, he called him by that dreadful name; but when a final attack of the trembling madness had borne him away from earth, the widow called the boy Andrew again, whenever she felt careless about her spiritual condition, and the youth behaved himself, but used the name of Sapphira's husband ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... for full speed again and the terror-stricken Frenchmen saw the monster, just visible on the surface of the water, flying towards them in the midst of a cloud of spray. A sheep might as well have tried to escape from a tiger. Many of the crew flung themselves overboard in the madness of despair. There was a shock and a grinding crash, and the ram bored its way twenty feet into the unarmoured quarter. Then the Ithuriel's screws dragged her free, and the Davout followed her sisters to ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... anchors, and pieces of ordnance, in transporting produce, the Spaniards wasted the natives as if they were wind-and water-power which Nature would supply without limit. How can this ferocity be accounted for? It consulted neither interest nor personal safety. They raged like men stung to madness by poisonous clouds of insects; the future received no consideration; plans for improving the methods of cultivating different crops, or for introducing new staples, could not be carried out. Once having tasted native blood, like their own ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... and full of hope and life, men from whom Canada had so much to expect, men whose lives were so precious to dear ones far away, were now up in that poisoned atmosphere and under the hideous hail of bullets and shells. The thought almost drove a chaplain to madness. One felt so powerless and longed to be up and doing. Not once or twice in the Great War, have I longed to be a combatant officer with enemy scalps to my credit. Our men had been absolutely guiltless of war ambitions. It was not their fault that they were over ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... is the viper that attacks one's heel! First these "defenseless" creatures goad one to madness, then they appeal to our noblesse oblige. The enmity between the Tisch and I ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... pleasant story to tell," Captain Danton went on, in a subdued voice; "the story of a young man's folly, and madness, and guilt; but it must be told. The man you saw last night is barely twenty-three years of age, but all the promise of his life is gone; from henceforth he can be nothing more than a hunted outcast, with the stain of murder on ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... laugh. It was sufficiently ridiculous to be compelled, as it were, to treat a paid servant as an equal, but it savored of madness to find him verging on the perilous borderland of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... Union, multiply the facilities for social intercourse and the mutual exchange of products, especially railroads, wherever there is sufficient promise of a need; and our country, thus knit together and united, has nothing to fear from the madness of local factions. Permeate the body politic in all its members by the nerves, veins, and arteries of a vital circulation, and it becomes an organized unity which is not susceptible of division into ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dinner, sir?" John Thomas rubs the sweat from his forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of eating Christmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment wins, and I sit down with ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... own. Extravagance, folly, imprudence, were the best terms there. One whom he had released from gaol, carved madness with a flint stone. There was but one would have painted his true name, but his tears defaced it—a humble dependent, who had been faithful to him, but whom he regarded not, being accustomed to ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... cause of madness, not by cause of evil intent. For all purpose of excuse it was madness, if only pretended madness; it was there of another necessity, and excused offence like real madness. What he said was true, not merely expedient, to the end he meant it ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would seem, the revelations of the Arabian astrologists. A strange and yet sublime medley, which it is much easier to stigmatize as lunatic than to analyze and comprehend. But Lady Hester Stanhope was no lunatic. Madness, which reveals itself only too clearly in the victim's eyes, was not to be detected in her frank, direct look—madness, which invariably betrays itself in conversation, which it involuntarily interrupts by sudden, irregular, and eccentric outbreaks, was nowhere discernible ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... argument applies to all the compliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, witchcraft, &c. By the way, in this last word, 'witchcraft,' and the too memorable histories connected with it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. As it illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the biliolaters, let ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... by putting to death several great boyars of the family of Rurik, while their wives and children were driven naked into the forests, where they died under the scourge. Novgorod had been ruined by his grandfather. He marched against it, in a freak of madness, gathered a throng of the helpless people within a great enclosure, and butchered them with his own hand. When worn out with these labors of death, he turned on them his guard, his slaves, and his dogs, while for a month afterwards hundreds of them ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... death of a person who just continues to dance after the death of his lover is announced (for this is all his merit) to the pangs of Mount Calvary; and not choosing to attribute it to folly, because I reserved that charge for Weber, I unhappily in the present case ascribed it to madness, for which I pray God to forgive me, since the blow has fallen heavily when I really thought it would not be felt. I considered Lamb as a thoughtless scribbler, who, in circumstances of ease, amused himself by writing ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... bewildered. I thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment's folly...a flash of madness...as such things are. We've ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Klopton brewing strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy, and that smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and closing it, and then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity and the madness of the whole thing. And while I laughed my very soul was sick, for the girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all the loyalty that answers between men for honor that I would have to put ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... into dominoes! To-morrow, every wall in Nemours and Fontainebleau and Rouvre shall blaze with the letters, 'Minoret is a thief!' Yes, I'll burst him like a gun—There! we're allies now by the imprudence of that outbreak! If you choose I'll beg Mademoiselle Mirouet's pardon and tell her I curse the madness which impelled me to injure her. It may do her good; the abbe and the justice are both there; but Monsieur Bongrand must promise on his honor not to injure my career. I ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... afternoon, doing the famous walk from Triberg to Hornberg, he had a long and friendly talk with a German reservist in the latter's native tongue, about the relations of Germany and England. Both agreed that war between the two nations would be madness, and both dismissed it as to the last degree improbable, but the German said significantly that he feared the Crown Prince was a menace ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... acquiescence of a man subject to domination from his birth up, those four words covered in Hughs such a whirlpool of surging sensation, such ferocity of bitterness, and madness, and defiance, that no outpouring could have appreciably relieved its course. The same four words summed up in Mrs. Hughs so strange a mingling of fear, commiseration, loyalty, shame, and trembling curiosity at the new factor ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... made him loathe his reputed brother and turn from him in disgust. He said that the note that had reached him was all part of Purvis's horrible sensationalism and his lies, and that no earthly notice should be taken of it; also, that it would be sheer madness to risk his own life and his friends' for this contemptible fellow. Jane, on the other side—possibly an angel, but to the ordinary mind merely a very handsome English girl—stood there saying nothing, ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... was allowed to drop by those present, but not before they had stung poor Barton almost to madness. ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... themselves particularly to the favour of the missionaries. Accordingly, during divine service, many of them behaved in a manner, otherwise unaccountable, and precisely similar to their behaviour as heathens. They pretended to be wrought up to madness by the preaching which they heard. They rolled their eyes; foamed at the mouth; fell down in fits; and so were carried home. Yet, strange to relate, all this was deemed the evidence of the power of the Most High; and, as such, ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Cures, to offer the kingdom to him. The ambassadors were politely received by the good man, but he assured them that he did not wish to change his condition; that every alteration in life is dangerous to a man; that madness only could induce one who needed nothing to quit the life to which he was accustomed; that he, a man of peace, was not fitted to direct a people whose progress had been gained by war; and that he feared ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman |
