"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walking on the Embankment one day, and she, for such a correct little person, was mad with mirth, when he broke out. "Flossie, you little lunatic! You might be going to marry a stock-broker instead ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D— came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... off on me already, supplemented by the explanation that every extensive Jewish family embraces a genius and a lunatic. He admits that he is the genius. The unfortunate part for me," ended Raphael, laughing, "is, that he ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... greatly to the annoyance of the people, who not only considered me very dirty, but also very rude in not availing myself of their polite invitation! The next morning as I took my cold bath as usual in beautifully clean spring water, I was condemned and pitied as a lunatic! Such are the different ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... to children who venture too far out in the fields and woods were shown in the startling experience Dorothy and Tavia had when Miles Anderson, a cunning lunatic, followed them from place to place, terrifying them with the idea of obtaining from Dorothy some information which would enable him to get control of some money left to a ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... the influence of such a diabolical passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman—a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... felt that something was wrong here. His startled manner seemed to ask: "Am I in a lunatic asylum?" He dropped his head and said ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... What lunatic lune, what vain vision, Thy laureate, Springtide, may move To sing thee,—oh, bitter derision! A season of laughter and love? You make a man mad beyond measure, O Spring, and thy lauders like thee: Thy flowers, thy pastimes ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... also the convicts were employed in the erection of a new court house (now the public offices), the general hospital, lunatic asylum, pauper hospital, and some other minor public works. They also built the walls of the reclamation works along the sea front, now known as Collyer Quay, and above referred to, and the river wall at Campong Malacca. Both these sea and river ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... presently beat a retreat, not feeling quite so well satisfied with himself as usual. His companion did not allude directly to her change of views, but treated her with a sort of pitying condescension, as if she had been a mild lunatic. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... mentioned, which sometimes contains 1000 inmates, there are numerous other charitable institutions, such as the women's hospital, the foundling institution, the admirable Hospicio de San Juan de Dios for men, and the lunatic asylum. Gratuitous instruction is given to a large number of children, and there are several mathematical and commercial academies, maintained by different commercial corporations, a nautical school, a school of design, a theological seminary and a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... out night and day," continued the inspector gloomily. "He's a clever devil whoever he is. It's my opinion the man's a lunatic," he added. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... latter, "you're right, tipsy spirit—you're right!—Nastasia Philipovna," he added, looking at her like some lunatic, harmless generally, but suddenly wound up to a pitch of audacity, "here are eighteen thousand roubles, and—and you shall have more—." Here he threw a packet of bank-notes tied up in white paper, on the table before her, not daring to say all he ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... must be a lunatic!" burst from her mother. "I could not have believed you would be guilty of such ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... is the matter with the fanatic. He is so obsessed by his idea that he cannot relate it to other ideas, and loses all sense of proportion, and often all sense of sanity. I have seen more unrelieved seriousness in a lunatic asylum than anywhere else. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... performer volunteered to entertain a roomful of patients of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and made up a very successful little monologue show, entirely humorous. The audience in the main gave symptoms of being slightly bored, but one highly intelligent maniac saw the whole thing in the proper light, and, clapping the talented ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... been at home and have vaunted the beauty of the old, simple, patriarchal life, and told of how I enjoyed it during my Egyptian explorations, you laughed at me, and as good as called me a lunatic. What ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... hastened boldly forward, caught up the child, and placed it in safety; but, as he had not withdrawn his own foot quickly enough, the wheel of the omnibus had passed over it. He is the son of a captain of artillery. While we were being told this, a woman entered the big hall, like a lunatic, and forced her way through the crowd: she was Robetti's mother, who had been sent for. Another woman hastened towards her, and flung her arms about her neck, with sobs: it was the mother of the baby who had been saved. Both flew into the room, and a desperate cry made itself heard: ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... a fanatic, a lunatic, and has put out monstrous and ridiculous predictions about the destruction of London, causing disorderly crowds to assemble about his church. The thoroughfares are blocked, and people are pushed about and assaulted. Indeed, things have come to such ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... some false cries at first. A 'London correspondent' knew for a fact that the book was written by an old lady at a lunatic asylum in her lucid intervals; while a ladies' journal had heard that the author was a common carpenter and entirely self-educated; and there were other similar discoveries. But before they had time to circulate widely, it became somehow common knowledge that ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... aged—that looked at him from the bright surface, paid what was asked, and did not heed the compassionate glance which the barber and his assistant sent after him. They both thought they had been exercising their skill on a lunatic, for he had made no answer to all their questions, and had said nothing but once in a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even if he be not a recognized lunatic. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... into the matter you thought that if I wasn't quite a lunatic, I was not far short of one ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... say. Now, what in the world is that chap after, with his mission, as he calls it? What does he mean by coming rampaging out south with a hole in the bottom of his brig and the pumps going straight on to keep the water down? Would any one but a lunatic go risking his crew and his vessel ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... such a mad dog as Lord George should not be knocked on the head. Colonel Murray did tell him in the House, that, if any lives were lost, his Lordship should join the number. Nor yet is he so lunatic as to deserve pity. Besides being very debauched, he has more knavery than mission. What will be decided on him, I do not know; every man that heard him can convict him of the worst kind of sedition: but it is dangerous to constitute ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... length and apostrophized it in terms which Mr. McNab would have regarded as a personal insult, and which the community on the Blue might possibly have resented with a challenge to mortal combat. His next step, had they witnessed it, would certainly have led to the conclusion that he was a dangerous lunatic, and one, at that, whose peculiar madness was of a kind specially objectionable to the residents of Blue Bar. He placed the object toward which his feelings had undergone so sudden a revulsion carefully on the ground, and seizing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... curiosity lead him further to inquire into the after-history of this same Georgio Rhodojani, let him go on a fine summer day to the County Lunatic Asylum at Bodmin, and, with permission, enter the grounds set apart for private patients. There he may chance to see a ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the most common causes of insanity, is a fact too well established to need demonstration here. Every lunatic asylum furnishes numerous illustrations of the fact. "Authors are universally agreed, from Galen down to the present day, about the pernicious influence of this enervating indulgence, and its strong propensity to generate the very worst and most formidable kinds of insanity. It ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... there's some crazy yarn about the trees spreading fever, though every educated man knows why these epidemics return occasionally. And I know they say you can tell the noise of them among other trees in a gale, and I dare say you can. But even Cornwall isn't a lunatic asylum, and a tree that dines ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... working them all over with bugs and cobwebs and caterpillars, and little boys in Mother Hubbard dresses! You may well call 'em crazy quilts! I don't believe there was ever anything crazier, unless it was the lunatic ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... talking about. Your letter is an insult to science. These inundations" (this, too, was written before the sky had opened its flood-gates) "are perfectly explicable by the ordinary laws of nature. Your talk of a nebula is so ridiculous that it deserves no reply. If any lunatic accepts your absurd invitation, and goes into your 'ark,' he will find himself in Bedlam, where ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... cast weapons upon kine, Brahmanas, kings, women, friends, one's own mother, one's own preceptor, a weak man, an idiot, a blind man, a sleeping man, a terrified man, one just arisen from sleep, an intoxicated person, a lunatic and one that is heedless. The preceptors of old always inculcated this truth upon men. I have, however, by disregarding the eternal way pointed out by the scriptures, and by essaying to tread in a wrong path, fallen into terrible distress. The wise have called that to be a terrible ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... flung off the encircling arm and retired a few paces inland. "'Ave you—ever been—in a lunatic asylum at any time?" he inquired, as soon ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion, seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display. Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... every-day practice of courts and juries, in both civil and criminal cases, to determine the mental capacity of individuals; as, for example, to determine whether they are of sufficient mental capacity to make reasonable contracts; whether they are lunatic; whether they are compotes mentis, "of sound mind and memory," &. &. And there is obviously no more difficulty in a jury's determining whether an accused person knew the law in a criminal case, than there is in determining any of these other ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... had taken during the few troubled days after the murder of Caius we do not know. Had he taken a leading part—had he been one of those who, like Chaereas, opposed the election of Claudius as being merely the substitution of an imbecile for a lunatic,—or who, like Sabinus, refused to survive the accession of another Caesar,—we should perhaps have heard of it; and we must therefore assume either that he was still absent from Rome in the retirement into which he had been driven by the jealousy of Caius, or that he ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... study, we were thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the drive, freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too ready to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... Negro wandering in a field. For no reason whatever he decided that that man had been the assailant. Some white would-be murderers were quickly got together and shot the black man to death. Then it was discovered that he was an escaped lunatic, whose recent history did not square with the theory that he ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... At least, I seem to myself to see it differently. In the earlier days it seemed quite simply the struggle between a revolutionary and non-revolutionary countries. I now think that that struggle is a foolish, unnecessary, lunatic incident which disguised from us the existence of a far more serious struggle, in which the revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are fighting on the same side. They fight without cooperation, and throw insults and bullets at each other in the middle of the struggle, ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... much surprised at the odd scene that I asked one of the officials what it all meant. He said politely that it was a picnic party from the Pauper Lunatic Asylum at H——. The mystery was explained. I said: "They seem to be enjoying themselves." "Yes, indeed, sir," he said, "they are like children; they look forward to this all the year; there is no greater punishment than to deprive a man of his ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with the shrapnel a bit in front all the way. Then the old 'bus jibbed for a bit. Every time a shell burst near us the lunatics screamed and laughed and clapped their hands, and trod on the wounded, but I got 'er goin' again. I got 'er to Poperinghe. Two soldiers died on the way, and a lunatic had fallen out somewhere, and a baby was born in the 'bus; and me with no ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... Chaplain, who (p. 089) persisted in arresting a certain British officer whenever they happened to meet. He wound up with this cutting comment, "The conduct of this chaplain seems to fit him rather for a lunatic asylum than for the theatre of a great war." Of course explanations were sent back. It was explained to the General that reports had reached us of the presence in our lines of a German spy in British uniform, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... some converts to the principle, that men and women should be coupled in matrimony without distinction of rank. I have lectured on the subject at Mechanics' Institutes, and the mechanics were unanimous in favour of my views. I have preached in workhouses, beershops, and Lunatic Asylums, and I have been received with enthusiasm. I have addressed navvies on the advantages that would accrue to them if they married wealthy ladies of rank, and not a navvy dissented! ALINE Noble fellows! And yet there are those who hold that the uneducated classes are not open to argument! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Huxley was now seventeen; he had already had two years' "practice in pharmacy" as a testimonial put it. After a similar apprenticeship, his brother had made the acquaintance of the director of the Gloucester Lunatic Asylum, and was given by him the post of dispenser or "apothecary," which he filled so satisfactorily as to receive a promise that if he went to London for a couple of years to complete his medical training, a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... effected here in Wittenberg the form of a Christian church. The Word of God is taught as it should be, the Sacraments are administered, and everything is prosperous. This happy condition, secured by many years of arduous labors, some lunatic might spoil in a moment. This happened in the churches of Galatia which Paul had brought into life in spiritual travail. Soon after his departure, however, these Galatian churches were thrown into confusion by ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... trouble," said Katherine, drawing up her knees and clasping her bony hands around them. "Everybody thinks I'm a joke, and that's all. Nobody ever admired me. People think I'm a cross between a lunatic asylum and a circus. I'm so tired of hearing people say, 'What a funny girl that Katherine Adams is! She's a perfect scream!' They never say 'What a nice looking girl,' or 'What a charming girl,' the way they always do about ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... concede any meaning even to the central 'law of thought' itself—the Law of Identity ('A is A')—except as a postulate. Outside of Formal Logic and lunatic asylums no one wishes to assert that 'A is A.' All significant assertion takes the form 'A is B.' But A and B are different, and, indeed, no two 'A's' are ever quite the same. Hence, when we assert either the 'identity' of 'A' in two contexts, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... following a particular occupation. Thus, a person who faints at the sight of blood cannot be a surgeon; another, who is seized with nausea and vomiting when in the presence of insane persons, cannot be a superintendent of a lunatic asylum—not, at least, if he ever expects to see his patients. Idiosyncrasies may, however, be overcome, especially ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... and easy was it to treat the pretender as a lunatic or as an adventurer, and to set his claims aside forever. Useless were all the letters which the Baron de Richemont, the name that Louis still bore, addressed to his uncle the king, to his sister the Duchess de Angouleme, imploring them for an interview. No answer was received. No audience ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their hands, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... they worship him when his ear is dead to their praise, the great heart silent that their love would have made beat with ecstasy. Well, such is life. They treated Tasso just about the same who writ "Jerusalem Delivered," they imprisoned him for a lunatic, and now how much ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated among the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George the First and his prime minister, attributing that royal hog's late escape from a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous soul—for George, he says, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... red-headed lunatic, I'll be bound; open the door to him yersel'!" cried the landlady, remembering one occasion when Euroclydon had entered with such fervour as almost to pancake her bodily ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... position, rocking himself to and fro. One by one the boys stole out, and he was left alone. The end is soon told. Forced to leave Ayrton, he had no means of earning his daily bread; and the weight of this new anxiety hastening the crisis, the handsome proud scholar became an inmate of the Brerely Lunatic Asylum. A few years afterwards, Eric heard that he was dead. Poor broken human heart! may he rest ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... republic would lead to the domination of a member of Napoleon's family, and so it has; though if any one only six months before Louis Napoleon's election had predicted the same thing, he would certainly have been set down as a lunatic. In consequence of this extraordinary foresight of our prophet, people have looked with no little concern to what he says for the future. And alas! they have met with nothing very consolatory. We are, it seems, on the brink of a fearful social ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... annihilate himself, except to smash the failure into which he had shaped his life, to throw it away, before the feet of mockingly laughing gods. This was the great vomiting he had longed for: death, the smashing to bits of the form he hated! Let him be food for fishes, this dog Siddhartha, this lunatic, this depraved and rotten body, this weakened and abused soul! Let him be food for fishes and crocodiles, let him be chopped to bits by ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... view of the ghastly shortcoming of his letter as regards distinctness, and the prosaic misinterpretation it was open to, Wilfrid called his inventive wits to aid, and ran swiftly to the end of the street. He had become—as like unto a lunatic as resemblance can approach identity. Commanding the length of the pavement for an instant, to be sure that no Braintop was in sight, he ran down a lateral street, but the stationer's shop he was in search of beamed nowhere visible for him, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... despised, half-lunatic Nigger, who was not in my reckoning, nor in Swope's, who put the match to the tinder and upset such carefully laid plans. As I feared, the revolt of the crew blazed up immediately. My shipmates were eager, too eager. As it turned out, their precipitancy was to cost them their chance of victory, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... you hardly wring a smile, if you put your body and soul out of joint in a hundred different ways; who examines with a cold considering eye the droll grimaces of my face, and those of my mind, which are droller still. I may torment myself to attain the highest sublime of the lunatic asylum, nothing comes of it. Will he laugh, or will he not? That is what I am obliged to keep saying to myself in the midst of my contortions; and you may judge how damaging this uncertainty is to one's talent. My hypochondriac, with his head buried in a night-cap that ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of her paroxysms of grief the President kindly bent over his wife, took her by the arm, and gently led her to the window. With a stately, solemn gesture, he pointed to the lunatic asylum. ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... a lunatic would know that," I said tartly. "The thing to do is to go home and make an affidavit that we never saw that car, and that the hole in this road is where it was ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... indeed, next to no danger of stepping into the traps in which my feet had been so often caught. I may as well confess it—it was intoxicating liquor, and that mainly, which had led me into my various mad marrying schemes and made me the matrimonial monomaniac and lunatic lover that I was for years. What my folly, my insanity caused me to suffer, these pages have attempted to portray. I had grown older, wiser, and certainly better. I now only devoted myself strictly to my business, and I found profit as well ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... platform translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him. And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... texts and pictures. No work, however menial, is beneath them. I have myself seen one scrubbing the stairs, and in turns they sleep on a hard straw bed on the floor, ready to rise in the night as often as a bell summons them to the aid of a suffering invalid or a refractory lunatic." ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... to secure success, even without an interesting story such as is told here. One may perhaps fairly easily detect its inspiration in certain actual happenings. It is the story of a woman, Lucy Briarwell, clever and gifted with personality, the grass-widow of an apparently incurable lunatic who, living in Bruges, falls under the influence of a Belgian poet-dramatist. Together—for Lucy is shown as his collaborator and source of inspiration—they evolve a wonderful new form of miracle ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... that lent out money gratis; look to him, jailer," (as to lunatic no less than criminal) the enmity, observe, having its symbolism literally carried out by being aimed straight at the heart, and finally foiled by a literal appeal to the great moral law that flesh and blood cannot be weighed, enforced by "Portia"[50] ("Portion"), ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... more eagerly recoil. If his hopes reposed on any base of fact, if indeed, by some abhorrent miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute, my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and despair, of hate and pity; and with the next morning ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... longingly at that spinning-wheel, and might have bought it for a franc and a half, and would have done so, had I not been encumbered with the hurdy-gurdy. That had brought me into such difficulties that I felt convinced a hurdy-gurdy a spinning-wheel would lodge me in a lunatic asylum. So reluctantly ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... large and fairly comfortable, but contained nothing breakable, having been tenanted at one time by a strenuous lunatic, who had considerately died after his immediate family and relations had worn themselves into their several graves, taking care of him. But Eleonora Harrigan knew nothing of the history of the room while she occupied it. So, no ghost disturbed her restless slumberless ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... have been glad enough to stay there all day and make promises to those women; but my time was short, and I had to leave them to Captain Guy. So I did keep a lookout for the Sparhawk, and heard of her from two vessels coming north, and finally fell in with you. And a regular lunatic you were when I took you on board; but that's not to be wondered at; and you seem ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... may as well do a "week-ending," as some people call it, with my anonymous friend as anywhere else. At the same time I knew that the "carriage" might be hired by enemies to convey me to the Pauper Lunatic Asylum or to West Ham, the place where people disappear mysteriously. I might be the victim of a rival's jealousy (and many men, novelists of most horrible imaginings, envied my talents and success), or a Nihilist plot might have ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... A leader of the Orange Party was opposed by a Nationalist, and the proceedings promised to be lively. They promised for a while to be still livelier, owing to the nomination at the last moment of the local lunatic. ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... transportation. Decided symptoms of insanity having exhibited themselves, instead of being sent on board the hulks, in conformity with the act 9th George IV., he was removed from Maidstone gaol to the county lunatic asylum. He remained here four years, and at the expiration of that period, Lord John Russell, in virtue of a power conferred on him as secretary of state by the same act, delivered him up to his friends upon their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... he is insane," said Napoleon, after a pause. "I want him to be looked upon as a lunatic. I hope that the whole affair will remain a secret, and that the world will hear nothing of it; but if it should be talked about, we must insist that ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... with utter amazement at this pantomime, and secretly resolved that her venerable hostess had been a disguised lunatic all this time, and was now busy throwing off the mask. As for Reicht, she was unhappy and cross. She had left her caldron in a precarious state, and made no scruple to say so, and that duties so grave as hers left her no "time to waste a playing the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... against him? 'Here is my last missile,' say you; 'my ammunition is quite exhausted: just wait till I get the last in—it will irritate, it cannot hurt him. There—you see!—he is furious now, and I am quite helpless. One more prod, another kick: now he is a mere lunatic! Stand behind me; I am quite helpless!' Mr. Romaine, I am asking myself as to the background or motive of this singular jest, and whether the name of it should not be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ethics. No doubt this holds good in political practice. If mankind knew the facts, and agreed with the doctors, then the doctors would be in the right; and any person who thought otherwise would be a lunatic. But mankind does not agree, and does not know the facts. All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... of Guldbrand Syssel. Such fishing, shooting, looking through telescopes, and talking of what was to be done on our arrival! Like Antaeus, Sigurdr seemed twice the man he was before, at sight of his native land; and the Doctor grew nearly lunatic when after stalking a solent goose asleep on the water, the bird flew away at the moment the schooner hove ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... calculate, it is denied that I am capable of experiencing love. It is too radiant and glorious a thing for a dull clod like me to know. And because I cannot experience love and be made mad by it, my fitness to describe its phenomena is likewise denied. Only the lover may describe love. And only the lunatic, I suppose, may compose ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so, otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors call hypochondriasis, might ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... a matter of fact, he was almost jubilant. He slapped his knee with resounding force and uttered an ejaculation that caused his wife to stare at him as if the very worst had happened: he was a chuckling lunatic! ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... to make the operation of teaching interesting to the teacher. It struck me very forcibly that a continuance of a few years in the present inane performances called kindergartening would infallibly send to our lunatic asylums a number of women, more or less young, with more or less depleted intellects. The various games and exercises I devised were very interesting, and I am sure I had scholars who never intended ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... lunatic! You'll kill yourself. Listen! I'm not lying. It's the truth. She's met a man, I tell you. Been meeting him for months, I guess. ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... go!" cried Reginald. "You cannot! My father is out of his mind. People don't pay any attention to the ravings of a lunatic." ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... taxes, who discharge all the duties of good citizens, and are perfectly intelligent and capable, are absolutely deprived of political power, and classed with lunatics and felons. The boy will become a man and a voter; the lunatic may emerge from the cloud and resume his rights; the idiot, plastic under the tender hand of modern science, may be moulded into the full citizen; the criminal, whose hand still drips with the blood of his country and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... there was hereditary insanity in the Blake family; indeed, one lady—a notorious gossip, and who was somewhat deaf—was understood to say that she had heard Mrs. Blake was at that moment in a private lunatic asylum. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... after—an invitation for a week-end at her mother's camp in the woods. But he would not go. He sat in the big chair staring at the fire, this small room in the West, and thought about it. No, he could not have gone to her house party—how could he? He had thought, poor lunatic, that there was an unspoken word between them; that she was different to him from what she was to the others. Then she had failed him at the moment of need. He would not be taken back half-way, with the crowd. He could not. So he had civilly ignored ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the publishing of these Colloquies, Southey's wife, who had been, as Southey said, "for forty years the life of his life," had to be placed in a lunatic asylum. She returned to him to die, and then his gentleness became still gentler as his own mind failed. He died in 1843. Three years before his death his friend Wordsworth visited him at Keswick, and was not recognised. But when Southey was told who it was, "then," Wordsworth wrote, "his eyes flashed ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... realise the position of those poor devils I have seen in lunatic asylums and who believed they have committed the unforgivable sin. It came upon me suddenly in Waterloo Place this evening, that I had done so; and I went straight to the Royal Institution to make confession, and if possible get absolution. But ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... once delirious; nor did reason again resume her throne; and it was not till after months of suffering and agony, that she recovered, if that could be called recovery, which gave back a deformed and hapless lunatic, bereft of intellect and of beauty, in place of the once gay and fascinating Rosalie. The dread aberration of intellect was attributed by her medical attendants to the fatal and sudden shock which she had sustained, and to its effect on a mind weakened by previous anxiety and sorrow; while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... perpetrator of the Brighton outrage and the would-be assassin of the President both showed "forethought" and "method." It is a common formula for the expression of doubt as to the irresponsibility of an alleged lunatic, that there is "method in his madness." Nothing can be farther from the truth than the inference to which this observation is intended to point. It is not in the least degree necessary that a madman should be unconscious of the act he performs, or of its nature as a violation of the law of God ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... by rain and blight. He resented the malice of things. He also resented the invasion of his brickfield by an alien van, a gaudy vehicle, yellow and red, to the exterior of which clinging wicker chairs, brooms, brushes and jute mats gave the impression of a lunatic's idea of decoration. An old horse, hobbled a few feet away, philosophically cropped the abominable grass. On the front of the van a man squatted with food and drink. Paul hated him as a trespasser and ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... said, placing a quantity of notes and gold in the landlord's hands. "Some I picked up myself, some I took off a blackguard I knocked over in the passage. Take the lot, and give it back to this semi-lunatic when he suffers his recovery in the morning. Good-night, gentlemen; I wish you the pleasures of the evening." So saying, the man with the tawny beard disappeared, and it was not long before Tresco was left alone with ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... Party, puffed up with the fatal errors which for half a century have been current as to the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play over again a game won eighty years ago only through circumstances utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta. The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!) has been hideously parodied by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... skies went round, and the sea swam round, And we knew not what we sung: Half a hundred lunatic pirates ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... friend as having fallen out of the War Office box of tin soldiers. Your vision has been keener. Breed counts for much; but for it to have full value there must be the life as well. All the same, the notion of asking Major Walters to pose to you in a suit of armour is lunatic, and the sooner you finish Mrs. Rushworth and get back to Janot's the better. There is also Blanquette who must be bored to death in the Rue des Saladiers, with no one but Narcisse ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... affirm persistently a story which science pronounces impossible (like your voyage through space), if he do not fall at once a victim to popular piety, would be consigned to the worse than living death of life-long confinement in a lunatic hospital." ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... two women trustees on the board of every State lunatic hospital, and one woman physician in each. Samuel E. Sewall, Frank B. Sanborn, Mr. Blackwell and Miss Mary A. Brigham had been the speakers at the hearing in behalf of this measure. All the other ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... think of you as a lunatic, or a crank, unnecessarily. Of course there are people in the world who consider everyone a lunatic who holds an opinion differing from ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... necessity, and I saw that the bottom of it was strewn with something white—like very, very tiny scraps of paper. "I think you need not look any further," said I. "Polly, you either are very clever, or else you are a lunatic and a ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Spectator into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously with many sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... worlds to know how aunt Celia ever unbent sufficiently to get engaged. But, as I was saying, Mr. Copley has accomplished something, young as he is. He has built three picturesque suburban churches suitable for weddings, and a state lunatic asylum. ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... bowls provided for the purpose. As the train moves on, we dash through a deep cutting of yellow-coloured sand, and emerge upon a wild and dreary region. On the hills to the right are a gaol, a reformatory, and a lunatic asylum; and on the left is the "Necropolis," where London, in the black and sandy soil, deposits the myriads of its dead. All around, the ground is olive-coloured with unblossomed heath, bright and golden here and there with the flowerets ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... I must nurse, tend, and cultivate seven years. If my neighbours had understood what I was attempting, what do you think they would have said? Cranky and lazy would have become adjectives too mild. Lunatic would have expressed it better. That's close the general opinion, anyway. Because I will not fell my trees, and the woods hide the work I do, it is generally conceded that I spend my time in the sun reading a book. I do, as often as I have an opportunity. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... more probably." She smiled up at him. "Come and sit down and tell me: are you a poet, or a lunatic, or a haberdasher, or what kind ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the agency of Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c] was avenged by the lunatic assassination of the brilliant Prince Michael Obrenovi['c] III. It is no exaggeration to say that, from the point of view of the Serbian patriot, the only salvation of his country in 1903 lay in getting rid of the Obrenovi['c] ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... broken up! what this lawyer and his client say is true: I have been married, and the woman to whom I was married lives! You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder, Wood; but I dare say you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister; some, my cast-off mistress: I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen years ago—Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage who is now, with his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... us, carefully spread and magnified by those agencies which have an interest in preventing, or at least obstructing the righteous punishment of the German criminals in this war. Can it possibly be true? Have the French-Canadians gone crazy, as the Irish did in 1916, under the lunatic incantations of the Sinn-Feiners? Are they also people without a country, playing blindly into the hands of the Prussian gang who have set out to ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... a lunatic asylum in London in Pope's day. Notice how Pope mentions, in the same breath, Bedlam and Parnassus, the hill of the Muses which poets might well ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... conversation. But early in the year 1742, the small remains of his understanding became entirely confused, and the violence of his rage increased absolutely to a degree of madness. In this miserable state he seemed to be appointed the first inhabitant of his own Hospital; especially as from an outrageous lunatic, he sunk afterwards to a quiet speechless ideot; and dragged out the remainder of his life in that helpless situation. He died towards the latter end of October 1745. The manner of his death was easy, without the least pang, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... takes the same fire to cook four potatoes as eight. Your garden must be kept going, and if you do away with one horse, you still require a groom, I suppose, to look after the rest. Don't talk to me of economising; you'd be up to your neck in debt before a year was over—if you weren't in a lunatic asylum with nervous depression, living alone in that hole-in-a-corner old house, with not a soul but servants to speak to from morning till night. You have a nervous temperament, Evelyn. You may not realise it, but I remember as a child how you used to fidget and dash about. Dear ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Mrs. Talboys has lived, you must follow the bent of your own inclination, but I would warn you that such fancies have sometimes conducted people, as apparently sane as yourself, to the life-long imprisonment of a private lunatic-asylum." ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... disclosed to the tyrant, who affects virtue, the wickedness of his favourite, and he found him only so much the more worthy of his friendship and favour. If this be the order and harmony of the moral world, then there is harmony and order in the brain of the poor lunatic, who is suffered to ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... place for any such subtlety, be connected with the other defects of his strangely blended character—his pusillanimity, his lack of passion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that some persons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... intelligence must confidently look for from such a statement. The story-teller who willfully tempts fate by such obvious beginnings, who is to the expectant reader in danger of being robbed or half- murdered, or frightened by an escaped lunatic, or introduced to his lady-love for the first time, deserves to be detected. I am relieved to say that none of these things occurred to me. The road from Wingdam to Slumgullion knew no other banditti than the regularly licensed hotel-keepers; lunatics had not yet reached such depth ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... to you? They have, however, a good deal to do with my argument. Do you think it was wise to neglect the whole of Pendragon for the society of the Bethels—people of whom one is an idler and loafer and the other a lunatic?" Clare was ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... own doors being shut against his entrance. Belike his wife, acquainted with his fits, On purpose shut the doors against his way. My way is now to hie home to his house, And tell his wife that, being lunatic, He rush'd into my house and took perforce My ring away: this course I fittest choose, For forty ducats is ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... know," Prescott confessed, looking puzzled. "We really haven't any right to pounce on the man unless we catch him doing something. Anyone has a right to lead the wild life in the woods, unless he's a criminal or a lunatic." ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... up: as for me, Roger, you know I always wades it through the muddy shallow: well, I listens, and a chap creeps ashore—a mad chap, with never a tile to his head, nor a sole to his feet—and when I sings out to ax him his business, the lunatic sprung at me like a tiger: I didn't wish to hurt a little weak wretch like him, specially being past all sense, poor nat'ral! so I shook him off at once, and held him straight out in this here wice." [Ben's grasp could have cracked ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... human being, out of a lunatic asylum, talking in this way. Shall I own to you, my reverend colleague, how this curious self-exposure struck me? As I listened to Romayne, I felt grateful to the famous Council which definitely forbade the priests of the Catholic Church to marry. We might otherwise have been morally enervated ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... know that the shock to which he had subjected the enfeebled lunatic was precisely what was needed to rouse every effort of nature to effect a cure. He could not measure the influence of the subtle earth-currents that breathed over him. He did not know that there was better medicine in the pure air, in ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... day to day for six months; and then he only did start because his friend Maret himself put him into his carriage, with post-horses already harnessed to it. . . . When he left this post they found in his cabinet 900 letters which he had not opened. He was an eccentric lunatic, amusing enough sometimes, but a curse to everything which depended on him." (Memoirs of the Duc de Raguse, tome ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... kind and perfect wife you are!" cried he. "I am an old lunatic, I do not deserve ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they sang - and sang very ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... occasion Toozle behaved like a canine lunatic, and Alice was beginning to think of exercising a little tender violence in order to restrain his superabundant glee, when another individual appeared on the scene, and for a time, at ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... backwards to you, which is natural enough when you consider that I always sit down to write under the influence of the last impressions which have come upon me. All this talk about the soul and the brain arises simply from the fact that I have been spending the last few weeks with a lunatic. And how it came about I will tell you as clearly as ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... understand it, but I swear by God, I could no longer control myself. Something strange was going on in me. I could not hold myself in. I told my husband that I was ill and came here.... And here I have been walking about dizzily, like a lunatic.... And now I have become a low, filthy ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... had to do with a lunatic. He seated himself with a shrug, content to wait the upshot; and a pause ensued, during which he thought he could distinguish a hurried gabbling as of prayer from behind the arras immediately opposite him. Sometimes there seemed to be but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into a loud laugh. "A pretty savage to look at, anyhow; a well-polished one in the bargain, ho, ho, ho! Well, well, I must make up my mind, I suppose, that my eldest son is a lunatic ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... compos mentis; but that involved my making a fool of myself in public before a jury, and I have too much dignity for that, I can tell you. I told my lawyer that I should prefer a felon's cell to the richly furnished flat of a wealthy lunatic, to which he replied, 'Then all is lost!' And so it was. I read my defence in court. The judge laughed, the jury whispered, and I was convicted instanter of stealing spoons, when murder itself was no further from my thoughts ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... would you, to save Natalie Brande—for they will certainly succeed in blowing themselves up, if nobody else—consent to her marrying another man, say that young lunatic Halley, who is always dangling after her when you ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... these followers, the virilities of whose false art is as that of weeds, who have come almost to our own day and who have succeeded in spoiling the historical aspect of the New Testament for many an imaginative Sunday-school attendant by giving us Bible folk in swarthy undress, in lunatic beards and in unwearable drapings. These terrible persons, descendants of Raphael's art, can ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... high in political circles but called by General Scott "a western ruffian," had assaulted Mr. Kennedy and broken his nose. I knew both Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in after life. He was a gentleman of the old school, beloved and respected by everyone. His death in 1887 was a shocking tragedy. A lunatic with a fancied grievance met him on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, and stabbed him. Mr. Kennedy was a grandson of Andrew Ellicott, who, his descendants claim, conceived the original plans of ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... devotion" to Augusta, and appeared the pink of faithful swains, saw very clearly that Furlong did not like it a bit, and would gladly be off his bargain. Yea, while the people in their sober senses on the same plane with the parties were taken in, the old lunatic, even from the toppling height of her own mad chimney-pot, could look down and see that Furlong would not marry Augusta if he ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... peered over the asylum wall, and saw a man fishing from the bank of the river that ran close by. It was raining hard, which cooled the fevered brow of the lunatic and enabled him to think with great clearness. In consequence, he called ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... the pressure thus created almost every public building in the town was requisitioned for hospital purposes; schools and clubs and colleges, the nunnery, the lunatic asylum, and even the stately Parliament Hall with its marble entrance and sumptuous fittings. The presidential chair, behind the presidential desk, still retained its original place on the presidential platform; but,—"how are the mighty fallen!" ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... think modern civilization will remain incomplete, will not perform its mission, until it relieves society from the depredations of these scorpions, by colonizing them where they will expend their poison without dangerous results. If sting they must, let it be among themselves. If I were lunatic enough to desire to vote, I should spend my franchise in favour of a 'Gossip Reservation'—somewhere close to the Great Western Desert, to which the disappointed widows, spiteful old maids, and snarling dyspeptic bachelors of this much-suffering ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... lunatic asylum is short of your cheerful presence to-day," remarked Jack, "and if you don't clear out quick I shall certainly rush you. In which case, I beg you to observe that I am, even if I say it myself, a pretty stiff tackler, and about three ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover, and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed, had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very inflammable ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the third jounce I noticed the Cut-through just ahead. Billings see it, too, and—would you b'lieve it?—the lunatic stood up, let go of the wheel with one hand, takes off his hat and waves it, and we charge down across them wet tide flats like death on the woolly ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... in either crew tonight? If so, now's his time. For both coxswains have called on their men for the last effort; Miller is whirling the tassel of his right-hand tiller rope round his head, like a wiry little lunatic; from the towing path, from Christchurch meadow, from the row of punts, from the clustered tops of the barges, comes a roar of encouragement and applause, and the band, unable to resist the impulse, breaks with a crash into the "Jolly Young Watermen," playing two ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... reside for a year in his house, and during that time my wife gave her instruction. Unhappily the lady who had made Miss Affleck her protegee, and who happens to be an extremely crotchety and violent-tempered woman, so full of fads and fancies that she is more suited to be in a lunatic asylum than at large—" ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Nancy, or whatever your name is," he roared, "there's a lunatic upstairs, making a tremendous row in the room over mine. If you don't stop him I'll leave the ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the interior or find employment here. Here are barracks for the men, a spacious building for the women and children, a nursery for children of a tender age, Catholic and Protestant chapels, a dispensary, workshops, a lunatic asylum, fever wards, surgical wards, storehouses, residences of the physicians and other persons employed in the care of the place, and out-houses and offices of various kinds. Here, too, rise the stately turrets of the spacious ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... the man would have mastered me and slain me, and then done his butcher's work, for he was the most skilful swordsman I have ever met; but even as he pressed me hard, the half-mad, wasted, wan creature in the corner leapt high in lunatic mirth, shrieking: ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Despreaux; 'distinguish, egad! distinguish! Distinguish whether we are obliged to love God!' And, taking Corbinelli by the arm, he flew off to the other end of the room, coming back again, and rushing about like a lunatic; but he would not go near the father any more, and went off to join the rest of the company. Here endeth the story; the curtain falls." Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... names and appearance of persons and places necessary to the search had, however, been given with sufficient distinctness to serve as a guide in my mother's rather chimerical undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have thought her a candidate for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what she herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful if she knew. I confess to a condition of simple bewilderment, when she was fairly gone, and Clara and I were left alone with Selphar's ghostly eyes forever on us. One night I had to ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... awoke with scattered sensations, all of which collected in revulsion against the song. 'There's a very poor heart in Italy!' he said, while getting his person into decent order; 'it's like the bell in the lunatic's tower between Venice and the Lido: it beats now and then for meals: hangs like a carrion-lump ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and play tennis all day, while other people chase the balls, or howl in dungeons in the background!' And that is the problem I wish to put before my American millionaire—the problem of what I will call our lunatic- asylum stage of civilization. Mind you, this condition is all very well so long as we can say that the lunatics are incurable—that there is nothing we can do but shut our ears to their howling, and go ahead with our tennis. But suppose the idea were to dawn upon us that it ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... world: "Can't you think of any bit of good news—that 'M. Thiers raves about your son's last poem! that 'it is a question among the Academicians between him and Jules Janin'—or that 'the beautiful Duchesse de ———- has been placed in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young Red Republican whose name begins with R.'—can't you think of any bit of similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state of your dear boy's amour propre, compared to which all the drugs in the Pharmacopoeia are ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 'thou liest!'" To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum: "there was a certain town, I know not where, upon which a rain fell of such a nature that all the inhabitants upon whom it fell, lost their reason. All lost their reason except one, who escaped because he was asleep in his house when the rain came. When ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... on the seducer. He set out for London. Mrs Wybrow, agitated more than she had been at any time since her birth, and herself almost deprived of reason by her fears for the safety of Miss Harrington, James Temple, and the furious lunatic himself, wrote immediately to Emma, then resident in Cambridge, explaining the sad condition of her brother, and warning her of his approach—Emma having already (without acquainting Mrs Wybrow with her fallen state) forwarded her address, with a strict injunction to her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... lift the consideration of this whole matter on to broad lines, to view it on the plane of statesmanship. If five years earlier anyone had foretold that in a great war Ireland would send 95,000 volunteer new recruits to fight by the side of England, would he not have been regarded as a lunatic? "The change in Ireland has been so rapid that men are apt to forget its history." That was a true saying; his own success had created difficulties for him. Once more he quoted the example of the other statesman in the Empire whose position had most analogy with his own. "I ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Several bathrooms indeed! He need have no fears of Lady Shuttleworth. "Good luck to you with Lady S.!" he called after him cheerily. Then he went to his wife and bade her see to it that the servant never let Fritzing in again, explaining that he was not only a foreigner but a lunatic, and that the mixture was so bad that it hardly bore ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... her strong, body shook. She gazed at Ralph as one might look at an intimate friend gone suddenly daft. She had heard of people who lost their reason without warning. Was it possible that she was in the room with a lunatic? ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... every woman one kisses. Not the first time she had been kissed, unless all the young men in Brittany were blind or white blooded. All this pretended innocence and simplicity! It was just put on. If not, she must be a lunatic. The proper thing to do was to say good-bye with a laugh and a jest, start up his machine and be off to England—dear old practical, merry England, where he could get ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... constitute almost a routine of manipulation for the manufacture of paradoxes. One such mechanical process is the play with the derivatives of words. Thus he reminds us that the journalist is, in the literal and derivative sense, a journalist, while the missionary is an eternalist. Similarly "lunatic," "evolution," "progress," "reform," are etymologically tortured into the utterance of the most forcible and surprising truths. This curious word-play was a favourite method with Ruskin; and it has the disadvantage in Mr. Chesterton which it had in the earlier critic. It appears too ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... was devising how to march off my lunatic quietly, when the feminine goodnatured heart that is in her began to relent, and she looked up in my face with a smile, and said the poor dears were really exemplary, and if Isabel should walk to the beach and should meet any one there, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sap-head had been commenced on what the Captain of the Sappers called 'a beautiful night,' and what anyone else outside a lunatic asylum would have described with the strongest adjectives available in exactly the opposite sense. A piercing wind was blowing in gusts of driving sleet and rain, it was pitch dark—'black as the inside of a cow,' as the Corporal put it—and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable |
