"Insane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... failure was; he made money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many editions. To earn what was required, however—and in these early years he seems to have made L3000 his minimum of needful return—to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. His mother continued to ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was endeavoring to establish soundly in the Catholic faith gave him certain death-dealing powders in his food, which although they did not deprive him of life rendered him insensible and he became most pitiably insane. Many other religious, whom we shall not mention for various reasons, suffered so much while ministers of those islands, by shipwreck, bad weather, and persecution, that if they did not obtain the crown to which they aspired by death, they were left with their health ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... Mr. Opp sat in the office of the Coreyville Asylum for the Insane and heard the story of his sister's wanderings. Her boat had evidently been washed ashore at a point fifteen miles above the town, for people living along the river had reported a strange little woman, without hat or coat, who came to their doors crying and saying her name was "Oxety," and that ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... supposition, your consequences would be very unlikely to follow. You surely would not suppose that the apostles could believe they saw Jesus when they did not, if they had the use of their reason properly. We must suppose them to have been insane then.—What then would have been the consequences? Would the authority have put these mad-men to death? Would they have been persecuted at all for their misfortune? But these mad-men preached Jesus and the resurrection to the people, and so convinced them of the fact, that multitudes ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... by now grown to accept each new indignity with the same patient philosophy which made the Chevalier and the vicomte objects of admiration among the older redskin stoics. As for D'Herouville, he had lost but little of his fire, and flew into insane passions at times; but he always paid heavily for the injuries which he inflicted upon his tormentors. His wound, however, had entirely healed, and the color on his cheeks was healthful. He would become a formidable antagonist shortly. And there were intervals ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... a foolish project,—a most insane and inexcusable one. It had, however, the spice of romance, and it might afford her some amusement and a little excitement during the coming months of misery. It was suggested by some demon of mischief, and was all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself of this impulse by arguing that the insane sheep-herder was plainly the instrument of fate—she lacked the temerity, after the first flush, to credit it to Providence—lifted up to throw his troubles between ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... centuries have elapsed since the last victim of such delusions, as they were solemnly pronounced by public vote in the reign of the four-hundredth predecessor of the present Campta, was sent as incurable to the dangerous ward of our strictest hospital for the insane." ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Thus it would happen, immediately he began. But, as at the Dean's door in Dean's Yard, so now, he could not begin. He could not utter the necessary words aloud. Spoken aloud, they would sound ridiculous, incredible, insane—and not even Mrs. Challice could reasonably be expected to grasp their import, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... which modern manners forbid in speech or printed page. Angela's pallid cheek flushed crimson at the sight of the vile epithet. Oh, insane lightness of conduct which made such an insult possible! Standing there, confronting the angry husband, with that detestable paper in her hand, she felt a pang of compunction at the thought that she ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole artistic standards. To ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... insane enough to think Lionel in love with her," thought his friend, remembering gay Mrs. Wingfield's gossip, and that her name had been coupled with Trevalyon's; it was only that she was a foolish little woman, and let society see that she had a penchant for ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... theory, the speaker went on decidedly: "Since that child was born she's been all the world to him. When he and Paula were divorced—she was the offender—he fretted himself sick for fear he'd done that precious five-year-old an injury. She didn't get on with her grandmother, she drove governesses insane, for two or three years there was simply no end of trouble. Finally he took her abroad, for the excellent reason that she wanted to go. In Paris they ran into Rachael Fairfax and her mother—let's see, that was seven years ago. Rachael ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... beckon to the city soldiers. At that instant the blood mounted to the insulted father's brain, and the misfortune happened; for as the tailor, with an unexpected gesture of the arm he was flourishing, brushed Herr Ernst's cap, the latter, fairly insane with rage, snatched the pike from one of the men who, obeying Herr Pfinzing's signal, were just approaching the tailor, and with a wild cry struck ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or that deepest degradation of the commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... the deed of attempting to kill Jacob, he would have little chance against that strong and agile man. Such a struggle would only end in his own death, and Benita must then be left alone with Meyer and his insane passions. ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... understood to have contributed:—Sir Francis Bryan, a friend of Wyatt's, one of the principal ornaments of the Court of Henry VIII., and who died, in 1548, Chief Justiciary of Ireland; George Boleyn, Earl of Rochford, the amiable brother of the famous Anne Boleyn, and who fell a victim to the insane jealousy of Henry, being beheaded in 1536; and Lord Thomas Vaux, son of Nicholas Vaux, who died in the latter end of Queen Mary's reign. In the same Miscellany is found 'Phillide and Harpalus,' the 'first true pastoral,' says Warton, 'in the English language,' (see ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... delusions, e. g. those of persecution, to the actual conditions of a given patient's environment? In a few cases it seemed that something like a close correlation did exist between such allopsychic delusions and the conditions which had surrounded the patient—the delusory fears of insane merchants ran on commercial ruin, and certain women dealt in their delusions largely with domestic debacles. But on the whole, we could NOT say that, as the somatic delusions seemed to grow out of and somewhat fairly represent the conditions of the some, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the patience to live? Patience and Angelica! What an impossible association of ideas! Her face relaxed at the humour of it, and it was with a smile that she turned to gather her summer drapery about her, bending sideways to reach back to the train of her dress, as the insane fashion of tight skirts, which were then in vogue, necessitated. In the act, however, she became aware of someone hastening after her, and the next moment a soft white hand grasped her arm and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... once his voice, mad with rage, was heard above the rest, shouting frenziedly a curse which was a horribly grotesque blasphemy upon the name of God. Men who had used that oath in their insane anger had been known to commit ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... These were no doubt the same as the "articles" presented to the king afterwards, on which the Great Charter was based. When John was made to understand what they meant, his hot, ancestral temper swept him away in an insane passion of anger. "Why do they not go on and demand the kingdom itself?" he cried, and added with a furious oath that he would never make himself a slave by ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... be?" she asked herself. "An escaped criminal—a murderer—or a maniac from an insane asylum, I suppose; for who else would wear a clanking chain? and what can he want here but to kill Gracie and me? I suppose he got in the house before they shut the doors for the night, and hid under the ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... Atlantic which cared for mental diseases were the Pennsylvania Hospital, chartered in 1751, a private general hospital which had accommodations for a few mental cases, and the Eastern State Hospital for the insane, at Williamsburg, Virginia, a public institution incorporated in 1768. No other one of the thirteen Colonies had a hospital of any kind, general or special. With a view of remedying this deplorable lack in New York, steps were taken in 1769 to establish an adequate general ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... you the Admiral would say to that? He would say that it was next door to treason to imagine such things, and that if men were to act upon such fancies as these, they would be fit only for hospitals for the insane. Moreover he would say that, even if you had evidence, even if you had something to show that treachery was meant, he would still, in the interest of France, stay ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... before many trees had been cut. It was a strong man's work, and he was a frail boy, but he grew hardier as he lived out of doors. This trail we are on is the path his feet first wore, in those days when he was insane with fear and eaten up with loneliness, but he stuck to his work and won out. I used to come down to the road and creep among the bushes as far as I dared, to watch him pass. He walked mostly, at ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... hostility of democratic America. His policy was modelled upon the worst of the panic-bred measures by means of which Pitt and his colleagues were seeking to suppress "Jacobinism" in England. Such a policy was odious anywhere; in a democracy it was also insane. Further the Aliens Law and the Sedition Law which he induced Congress to pass were in flagrant and obvious violation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution. They were barely through Congress when the storm broke on their authors. Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, saw ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... last years of his life, Swift was hopelessly insane. He died in 1745, leaving his property for an asylum for ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... difficult to understand how his strength supported the fatigue of this double existence; he had barely arrived at puberty, and art had been obliged to assist the retarded development of nature. But he lived only for evil, and the Spirit of Evil supplied the physical vigour which was wanting. An insane love of money (the only passion he knew) brought him by degrees back to his starting-point of crime; he concealed it in hiding-places wrought in the thick walls, in holes dug out by his nails. As soon as ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... minds, as soon as they will bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends, and nature ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... many of our readers may know, is a physician eminent in the speciality of mental disorders. He is at present the head of the Butler Hospital for the Insane in Providence, Rhode Island. The four first chapters of his book, chiefly relating to matters which may be observed outside of a hospital, come under our notice. The fifth and last division, addressed to the limited number of persons who are conscious of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... into the insane hospital, where he now accordingly is, and to-morrow (by which time he may be in a more conversable mood) I mean to pay ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say further on in this book concerning terror: the panic that haunts high places and the spell of many angry men. This horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our modern scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories', and is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable fascination of brutality. For my part I have always ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fat peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... destiny," and a woman who, at the last, "knew that though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies, the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... for a majority of the urchins of this State to petition for schools, how many, think you, would have asked to be transplanted from the street to the school-house? Does the State wait for the criminal to ask for his prison-house? the insane, the idiot, the deaf and dumb for his asylum? Does the Christian, in his love to all mankind, wait for the majority of the benighted heathen to ask him for the gospel? No; unasked and unwelcomed, he crosses the trackless ocean, rolls off the mountain of superstition that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... on a deerskin, and employed herself in twisting reindeer sinews, which she rolled upon her cheek with the palm of her hand, while I was sketching her. It was already dark, and I was obliged to work by candle light, but I succeeded in catching the half-insane, witch-like expression of her face. When I took the candle to examine her features more closely, she cried out, "Look at me, O son of man!" She said that I had great powers, and was capable of doing everything, since I had come so far, and could make an image of ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... is a very good thing in its way—if it only be not another name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from Parthia—which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they were some great ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... broke down her door at night and fled to the street in her wrapper and flung herself into Miss Patterson's arms. Two men were pursuing her... they tried to carry her off. Miss Patterson called a policeman... but he said the girl was insane. Only by making a disturbance and drawing a crowd was my friend able to save her. And now, we have been the rounds... from the sergeant at the station, and the police captain, to the Chief of Police and the Mayor himself; we have ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... satisfaction in scattering things about the room, in wantonly destroying provisions he could not use, and leaving the place in the wildest confusion. The owner, he recollected, was one of those who had refused to drink with him in the dance hall. The insane rage flared out anew. He even thought of burning the shack, but feared that the smoke would betray him before he could get away. "Won't drink with me, eh?" he muttered, and ground his heel into the face of a cheap ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... when they lived in the same house, but he knew him afterwards, and regarded him as a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated. It was certainly the act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of slavery, ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... reasonable nurses. Poor Aunt Pen! perhaps she didn't find us either so bright or so reasonable as she had expected; for we used to think that in her less degree she went on the same principle with the crazy man who declared all the rest of the world except himself insane. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... Brundusium's wall. Nor thou Marvel, if before me no shadow fall, More than that in the sky element One ray obstructs not other. To endure Torments of heat and cold extreme, like frames That virtue hath dispos'd, which how it works Wills not to us should be reveal'd. Insane Who hopes, our reason may that space explore, Which holds three persons in one substance knit. Seek not the wherefore, race of human kind; Could ye have seen the whole, no need had been For Mary to ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... immediately spread through Bologna that the good professor had become insane, which caused very general regret, his friends observing to each other, "It is indeed a bad business; but I suspected yesterday how it was—he could scarcely get a word out as he was delivering his lecture, did you not perceive?" "Yes," said another, "I saw him change colour, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... that the man in whom any grand idea originates is everywhere opposed and thwarted by the limited and common-place views of other men; but that the strength of his enthusiasm enables him to overcome all obstacles. In his own house, and among his acquaintances, Columbus is considered as insane; at court he obtains with difficulty a lukewarm support; in his own vessel a mutiny is on the point of breaking out, when the wished-for land is discovered, and the piece ends with the exclamation of "Land, land!" All this is conceived and planned very skilfully; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... stage without his knowledge. Later that evening we learned that the lady who had cried out had been brought to the theatre by friends who hoped to cheer her up (Heaven save the mark!) and help her to forget her dreadful and recent experience of placing her own mother in an insane asylum. Learned, too, that her very first suspicion of that poor mother's condition had come from finding her one morning sitting up in bed, her arms embracing her knees, while she swayed from side to side unceasingly, muttering low and fast ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... appeared each week in great open meetings in London; and when the newspapers discovered that I was not only not being torn to pieces, but that I was growing better and better liked, then the feeling that patriotism consists of insane lies began to give place to the discovery that the presentation of the truth is not so dangerous as every ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... conditions is common to all the states. The foreigner votes on his first papers in eight states and a five years' residence will usually secure his naturalization and a consequent vote in any state. The criminal, idiot and insane are not denied a vote in several states, and in most a large class of ignorant un-American men with no comprehension of our problems, our history, or ideals, are conspicuous voters on election day. Millions of new voters have entered our country and without ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... situation, than the Dort could bring to bear upon them; that their superior force was thus neutralised, and that no advantage could result from taking such a step. The admiral immediately put Krantz under arrest, and proceeded to put into execution his insane intentions. In this he was, however, prevented by the seamen of the Lion, who neither wished to fire upon their consort, or to be fired at in return. The report of the boat's crew had been circulated through the ship, and the men felt too much ill-will against the admiral, an ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... was intermittent, and each attack was followed by a lucid interval; but finally he lost his wits altogether and came to the insane resolution of turning knight-errant and going out into the world as the redresser of wrongs and the champion of the innocent. His intention once formed, he at once took steps to carry it into effect. From a dark corner of the house he brought out an old suit of armor, which had ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... laughed and then sobered down. "Of course, I know the whole thing would look insane to most people," he said sturdily, "but I've been in business long enough to see sharp gentlemen come to grief in spite of their funny work. I don't believe a man'll come to any more harm by believing people mean well by him than he would by working ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... on, we shall have no Church at all to carry on the work of our Lord on earth. History proves that to take anything away from the faith is to atrophy, to destroy it. The answer to your arguments is to be seen on every side, atheism, hypocrisy, vice, misery, insane and cruel grasping after wealth. There is only one remedy I can see," he added, inflexibly, yet with ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... life Is wasted in this country, set to run A blind, ignorant, unremembered course, Treading with hopeless feet of griev'd waters Unending unblest spaces, the shameful road Of dirt thickening into slime its flow, An insane weather driving. For at the issue, Hovering mightily fledge to beat it on, A climate of demon's wings o'erarches man, The hatred God has sent pursuing him. Fierce hawking spirits wrong him, hungry Cold, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the imputation altogether. You will still bear in mind what I have said before, that I scarcely could have dared to do so under the eye of Baron Parke and in the presence of Mr. Clarkson. To act so, I must have been insane. But to set this matter at rest, I have referred to my address as reported in the "Times"—a journal the fidelity of whose reports was never questioned. You will be amazed to hear that I not only did not do that of which I am accused; but that I did the very ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... her again and again, as though she heard a sound that frightened her. I observe, too, that when any man speaks to her she fixes on him a keen, suspicious look. She does not have it with women. It passes quickly, but it is there. It is precisely the expression of an insane person, or ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... my accusations," I stormed. "I tell you of the most conclusive evidence against yourself, and instead of any attempt to refute it you mildly remark, 'you are insane.' It is you who are insane, Mr. Hall, if you think you can escape arrest and trial for the murder of ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... by vicious principles in its construction; and then its members are in proportion defective. It produces in excessive degree idiots, blind, deformed, neurotic, insane ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Well, my insane inconsistency had its reward. Instead of the comfort, the certain satisfaction, I might have won—could I but have put choking panic down, and stood firm two minutes—here was dead blank, dark doubt, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... baggage-car to share the shame and sorrow of her poodle, or whether a compromise was effected in favor of the "common car," I never ascertained, I trust she was not the lady of Baltimore who last summer went insane and tried to kill herself on account of the death of her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... himself seen flourishing unavenged in his native Wuerttemberg. But, on the other hand, he was never for a moment insensible to the moral hideousness and the tragic folly of Moor's conduct. It was to be sublime, but insane and calamitous nevertheless. One is justified in thinking, therefore, that Goedeke goes too far, or does not express the truth felicitously, when he says that the author of 'The Robbers' 'felt himself one' with his hero.[26] He felt himself one ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... morning!" she said, as he removed his hat. "That insane girl!" she thought. "If he had chanced to be awkward and plain, he would have been just as important to us. His good looks are thrown in, and yet she ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... impossible situation, it becomes at once extravagant and absurd. One would require to be considerably carried away by illusion to be moved by Mr. Wendell's story. The hero is a New-Englander, born of mad parents (they met while both were patients in an insane asylum); and this inherited curse would seem to be enough for any hero to totter under. It becomes unimportant, however, when we discover that he has furthermore been taken possession of at birth by the spirit of a wicked and fascinating ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... of a man came forward into the room, dressed in much better taste than Laurie somehow had expected, and not at all like the type of an insane dissenting minister in broadcloth which he had feared. Instead, it was a big man that he saw, stooping a little, inclined to stoutness, with a full curly beard tinged with grey, rather overhung brows, and a high forehead, from which the same kind of curly greyish hair was beginning to retreat. ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... action—as a weight, chaining the spirit down. Were the mind, in its activity, independent of the body—were the wounded spirit unable to forget its pain—could the guilty conscience sting incessantly—then the chief human industry would come to be the erection of asylums for the insane. But by an unfathomable mystery the tireless regal spirit has been blended with the flesh and blood of its servant, the body. In heaven, where there is neither sin nor pain, even the body becomes spiritual; but on earth, where it so often happens, as in the case of poor Haldane, that to ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains," you say. I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray? Why, the world is a great asylum, And people are all insane, Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as she heard the children's voices, set up a most melancholy whinnying behind the locked stable-door—began to neigh energetically. And Boxer barked, and the hens cackled, and the guinea-fowls cried "Come back, come back!" in their usual insane fashion—indeed, the whole farmyard seemed in such an excited state, that the children got frightened lest Gardener should scold them, and ran away, leaving Bill ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... Glyde, whose eyes were interrogatively fixed on Mrs. Leveret. The fact of being deferred to was so new to the latter that it filled her with an insane temerity. "Why, Xingu, ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... after one of his sprees, when he is always more than half befogged," he said to himself. "Possibly he was passing this way and the insane idea seized him to stop and pretend to buy Terrace Hill. The rascal!" and having thus satisfactorily settled it in his mind, the doctor did look at Anna's carpet, admiring its pattern, and having a kind of pleasant consciousness that everything was in keeping, from the handsome drapery which ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... it—I was too late; little Daisy, my bride, was dead! She had thrown herself down a shaft in a delirium. I would have followed her, but they held me back. I can scarcely realize it, mother," he cried. "The great wonder is that I do not go insane." ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... is living in dread of the visit. Perhaps it is paid already. Let me hear from you without delay; I am impatient for a thousand particulars. Remember how few minutes I was at Randalls, and in how bewildered, how mad a state: and I am not much better yet; still insane either from happiness or misery. When I think of the kindness and favour I have met with, of her excellence and patience, and my uncle's generosity, I am mad with joy: but when I recollect all the uneasiness I occasioned her, and how little ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... take a peep at the follies of the palace of Love, the purblind king; it is a place easy to enter and difficult to escape from, and in it there is a prodigious number of chambers. In the hall opposite to the door was insane Cupid, with his two arrows upon his bow, shooting tormenting poison, which is called bliss. Upon the floor I could see many fair damsels, finely dressed, walking about, and behind them a parcel ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... confidence. The day when the Girondins proposed to 'decree him accused' (decreter d'accusation, as they phrase it) for that February Paragraph, of 'hanging up a Forestaller or two at the door-lintels,' Marat proposes to have them 'decreed insane;' and, descending the Tribune-steps, is heard to articulate these most unsenatorial ejaculations: "Les Cochons, les imbecilles, Pigs, idiots!" Oftentimes he croaks harsh sarcasm, having really a rough rasping tongue, and a very deep fund of contempt for fine outsides; and once or twice, he even ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fault), and the substitution of money-power for their martial one; and by the correspondingly imminent prevalence of mob violence here, as in America; together with the continually increasing chances of insane war, founded on popular passion, whether of pride, fear, or acquisitiveness,—all these dangers being further darkened and degraded by the monstrous forms of vice and selfishness which the appliances of recent wealth, and of vulgar mechanical art, make possible to the million,—will soon bring ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... manage an opera company was a form of disease, finding admirable support for my contention in the confession and conduct of that English manager who got himself into Fleet Prison, and thence philosophically urged not only that it served him right (since no man insane enough to want to be an operatic impresario ought to be allowed at large), but also that a jail was the only proper headquarters for a manager, since there, at least, he was secure from the importunities of singers and dancers. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... at last, and this is her moment. Not a fortnight ago I sat opposite the boy Henriote in a cafe in Soho. My German friend handed him the money to get back to his country and to buy bombs. It's all part of the plot. Austria's insane demands are part of the plot; they are meant to drag Russia in. Russia must protest; she must mobilise. Germany is secretly mobilising at this moment. She will declare war against Russia, strike at France through Belgium. She will appeal ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... screamed, her voice high, flat, quite unhuman; "ah, God in Heaven damn you!" With inarticulate bestial cries she fell upon the man who had killed Billy, and her violet fripperies fluttered, her impotent little hands beat at him, tore at him. She was fearless, shameless, insane. She only knew ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Former Physician, Utica State Hospital and Bloomingdale Hospital for Insane Patients; Former Clinical Assistant to Sir ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... waiting place. "You see," he continued, as the machine throbbed its way northward, "there are several possibilities. One is, that this anonymous person is mad. In that case, we can't take too many precautions. The ingenuity of the insane is proverbial. Then, this may be a vicious vengeance; someone who hates your splendid mother, and would hurt her through you. You can see that if you had believed this detestable story it would have broken her heart. Now such a person, hoping ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... a shout. He turned. An old man in scant clothing, with emaciated face and frenzied gesticulation, was shouting out a strain of fearful denunciation. His wild glance and fierce manner showed that he was partly insane. ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... of Shiraz. A poet composed a panegyric on his wisdom, his valour, and his virtues. As he was taking it to the palace he was met by a friend at the outer gate, who inquired where he was going, and he informed him of his purpose. His friend asked him if he was insane, to offer an ode to a barbarian who hardly understood a word of the Persian language. "All that you say may be very true," said the poor poet, "but I am starving, and have no means of livelihood but by making verses. I must, therefore, proceed." He went and stood before the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... been written, so much that is false, perverted sentimentalism and unmitigated cant about the nocturnes, that the wonder is the real Chopin lover has not rebelled. There are pearls and diamonds in the jewelled collection of nocturnes, many are dolorous, few dramatic, and others are sweetly insane and songful. I yield to none in my admiration for the first one of the two in G minor, for the psychical despair in the C sharp minor nocturne, for that noble drama called the C minor nocturne, for the B major, the Tuberose nocturne; and for the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... later Ruisseau de la Cabaneaux Taupiers. Riviere Chalisour, and finally Riviere des Fous, from the new insane asylum, by the site of which it ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... hand. (Sensation.) Before meddling with ink there were all sorts of things for the Government to forbid. Golf balls, for one. He wished to express his complete dissatisfaction with Mr. RUNCIMAN's insane ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... poor boy," said the doctor, who was bending over him. But Tommy was insane with pain ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Arms were replicas of those of previous years. Usually the little man sat isolated in a far corner, silent and glowering, with Red Wull at his feet. Now and then he burst into a paroxysm of insane giggling, slapping his thigh, and muttering, "Ay, it's likely they'll beat us, Wullie. Yet aiblins there's a wee somethin'—a somethin' we ken and they dinna, Wullie,—eh! Wullie, he! he!" And sometimes he would leap to his feet and address his pot-house audience, appealing to them ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... nurseryman, had proved to have a wife in an insane asylum. That was why Tillie's romance had only paraded itself before ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Wolf had heard of that terrible, insane Apache chief. He could expect about as much mercy from him ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... forbidding appearance of the house. At the foot of the hill was a high iron fence, cutting off what lay behind it from all the rest of the world. For this ugly yellow house enclosed in its walls a goodly sum of hopeless human misery and misfortune. It was an insane asylum. ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... exaggerated stories passing from mouth to mouth. The witnesses of the event had told it over so many time that they had worked it up into a most dramatic scene, and embellished it with whatever could heighten its awfulness. Outsiders had taken up invention also. The Colonel's wife had gone insane, they said. The children had rushed into the parlor and rolled themselves in their father's blood. The hotel clerk said that he noticed there was murder in the woman's eye when he saw her. A person who had met the woman on the stairs felt a creeping sensation. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... let's have some serf bathing." And donning (with a shudder) the rather gruesome padded bathing suits they found in the lockers, they went off for a swim. Others, of a humorous turn, derived a certain rudimentary amusement in studying the garden marked Reserved for Patients with Insane Delusions, where they found a very excellent relief-model of the battleground of the Marne, laid out by a former inmate who had imagined himself to be General Joffre. But most of them stood about ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... sentiment should follow the other! How perfectly natural, that he who can limit his love by state or national lines, should be also capable of confining it to certain varieties of the human complexion! How perfectly natural, that, he who is guilty of the insane and wicked prejudice against his fellow men, because they happen to be born a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand miles from the place of his nativity, should foster the no less insane and wicked prejudice against ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... bounded and spun their kiris in the air, catching them again, and then running on beside the cantering horses of their young masters, while their father ran beside Mr Rogers' big bay. Above all, the dogs showed their delight by barking, yelping, and making insane charges here and there, Rough'un's great delight being to run his head into one or other of the holes made by the burrowing animals of the plains, and then worrying and snapping at nothing until he ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... expectation of food, the certainty that we should find plenty at the Ammonusuc, had nerved us up to the effort to reach it, and now it was gone. It had been there and was gone. We broke down completely and cried and raved. Some became insane. ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... did not understand them, but in place of them the contrary, which was insanity, and this they called wisdom. In fact, I was allowed to hear them laugh at their insanity when they were in a state of wisdom, and at wisdom when they were in an insane state. One who has been of this character in the world, on becoming a spirit after death is usually brought into states of wisdom and insanity by turns, for him to distinguish the one from the other. But although such men see from the wisdom that ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... he exclaimed. "You are wrecking your life for an insane scruple. Child, listen! Tell me nothing whatever! Give yourself to me! No one shall ever take you away again. That I swear. And I will make you so happy, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... immediately began an insane dance all about the room; disappearing, one after the other, through the uncovered window, and gliding darkly away over the face of the white snow; for the window looked at once on a field of snow. ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... struggle between social interests. Philosophy had boasted that it would regulate political economy, and that institutions, laws, and public authorities should only exist as the creatures and servants of instructed reason,—- an insane pride, but a startling homage to all that is most elevated in man, to his intellectual and moral attributes! Reverses and errors were not slow in impressing on the Revolution their rough lessons; but even up to 1815 it had encountered, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "There's the insane asylum always to fall back on. Under date of October first, comes the Latherton Soap Company's impassioned appeal to self-shaving manhood. Great Caesar! No wonder poor Robinson was upset. Listen to this: 'God himself hates you.' After that there's a three-weeks respite, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from a nervous breakdown. From Doria we learned the cause. For the last three months he had been working at insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he began a three-hour spell of work. At night a four hours' spell—from nine to one, if ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... by his victory over the last formidable African invasion of Spain in 1340. The chronicler who records his death prays that "God may be merciful to him, for he was a very great king.'' The mercy was needed. Alphonso XI. never went to the insane lengths of his son Peter the Cruel, but he could be abundantly sultanesque in his methods. He killed for reasons of state without form of trial, while his open neglect of his wife, Maria of Portugal, and his ostentatious ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property, which he may will entirely from her, also the use of her real estate; and in some of the States, married women, insane persons, and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will. So that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, viz.: the right of maintenance. Indeed when she has taken the sacred marriage vow, her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... occasion of this open rivalry, and of a disputed succession, to invade the Empire in the summer of 1610. After his death France dropped for a time out of European complications, and thereby helped to postpone the outbreak of expected war. After the insane and stupid outrage at Prague it became an immediate certainty, and Maximilian of Bavaria, the ablest prince who ever reigned in that country, came to the aid of his cousin the emperor, with his own statesmanship, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... that lead into the worlds without. Is not thy path already strewed with thy victims? Do not their ghastly faces of agony and fear,—the blood-stained suicide, the raving maniac,—rise before thee and warn what is yet left to thee of human sympathy from thy insane ambition?" ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wolf; a great white man-owl fluttered close to the camp and chortled his crazy, half-human "hello, hello, hello;" the trees cracked with the tightening frost, but neither wolf howl nor frost nor the ghostly visitant's insane voice aroused ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... be insane! How could he expect you to sign the application of two men for the same place? Especially, how could he expect you to give him a preference ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... determining to kidnap women if necessary, was astounding to say the least. That dinner in the St. Ives restaurant rose before me, and I heard again Dunny's charge that I was growing stodgy with advancing years. Suppose he should see me now, involved in these insane developments? He might call me various unflattering things, but not stodgy—not with truth. I chuckled half-heartedly, my last chuckle, by the by, for a long time. Unknown to me and unsuspected, the darker, more deadly side of the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... into the bushes at the edge of the path, and he passed with his eyes on the ground, or he must have seen—a blotched, dark-visaged, leering creature, living in an insane world of his own. They waited until he was far out of sight before creeping, all of a tremble, from their shelter, only to hear another footfall unexpectedly near:—the pad, pad, pad of a runner, a tall figure as one saw it through the lights and shadows under the trees, capless and coatless, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... he had never been heard of before. All people who had met Mr. Whyte were worried to death with questions about him, and underwent a species of social martyrdom as to who he was, what he was like, why he was killed, and all the rest of the insane questions which some people will ask. It was talked about everywhere—in fashionable drawing-rooms at five o'clock tea, over thin bread and butter and souchong; at clubs, over brandies and sodas and cigarettes; by working men over their mid-day pint, and by their wives ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... underground." The great sturdy fellow, who bore some resemblance to ruddy-haired Beardy, sufficient in the distance and under the circumstances of his excitement to warrant Abel's misapprehension, stared at the snow prisoner for a few moments as if he believed him to be insane. ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... sagacious, Sertorius in particular, seriously pointed out the danger of too closely connecting themselves with a man whose name would necessarily place him at the head of the movement, and who yet was notoriously incapable of any statesmanlike action and haunted by an insane thirst for revenge; but Cinna disregarded these scruples, and confirmed Marius in the supreme command in Etruria and at sea ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... employed by Blackwood, vol. iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was by Blackwood, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xix. 204. See Blackwood, vol. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the public highways, the protection of life and property, public hospitals, public libraries, residences for the old, the blind, the orphaned and the insane, as well as secure places for the lawless, are built and ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... final solution of the problem. There are, however, so few who feel in this way, and they are so widely scattered, that they can hardly be called a class. The other classes of white people consider them insane and accuse them of advocating social equality. They are given no voice in the government and their wishes are disregarded as readily as those of the Negro. They are sometimes persecuted, ostracised, and harmed in every conceivable ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... responsible for all the consequences which had followed the massacres of Pavonia and Corlaer's Hook. They boldly talked of arresting and deposing him, and of sending him, as a culprit, back to Holland. The Director, panic stricken, endeavored to shift the responsibility of the insane course which had been pursued, upon one Adriansen, an influential burgher, who was the leading man among the ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... this tale it will be remembered Anselmo and Lothario are represented as being two such close friends as the gentlemen who figured in Queen Margaret's tale. Anselmo marries, however, and seized with an insane desire to test the virtue of his wife, Camilla, by exposing her to temptation, urges Lothario to pay court to her. Lothario at first resists these solicitations, pointing out the folly of such an enterprise, but his friend entreats him so pressingly that he finally ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre |
