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More "Maniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crowds of people, dead, living, known or unknown. The malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of apparitions taken by the judgment to be real, are common in madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and only learns later that the person,—dead, or alive ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... woman's proposals. If there was anything like tenderness in her bosom—and no woman was probably ever entirely without that feminine quality—it all disappeared at this plain announcement. Fury, rage, mortified pride, and a volcano of wrath burst out, at one explosion, converting her into a sort of maniac, as it might beat the touch of a magician's wand. Without deigning a reply in words, she made the arches of the forest ring with screams, and then flew forward at her victim, seizing him by the hair, which she appeared resolute ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Louvain, and from Padua: there was a crowd of poets, historians, and men of science; and he declared that another Alexandrian Library might be bought in those seething stalls, if one laid out money like a king, or like a maniac, as others might say. In this German Athens a meeting was arranged between Reuchlin and Erasmus; they were joined at Frankfort by Hermann Busch, who brought with him the manuscript of his 'Triumph'; and perhaps it was not difficult ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... 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 actor on the shoulder, said: "Glad you've come, old fellow. You and I will get along fine. The other dippies here are so dashed dignified. What I say is if a man is mad, he needn't put ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... of it; and it was only when, ten minutes later, I became aware that certain excited townsfolk were scurrying past outside that I roused slowly to the thought that here was something unusual toward. Then, indeed, a sort of insane abandon flashed into life in me, and I leapt to my feet with maniac eyes. Something stirring in King's Cobb! I should have thought nothing less than the last trump could have pricked it out of its accustomed grooves; and that even then it would have slipped back into them with a sluggish sense of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... bilious yellow tint; he could not bear to hear an artist praised, or look with patience at any work of art that bore the impress of genius. On beholding such he would grind his teeth with fury, and the expression of his face became that of a maniac. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... to see the wonders she would work, and to catch her in the act miraculous. But here, unhappily, the Devil, who never sleeps, had laid a snare for this lamb of God, had belched forth this devouring monster of a she-dragon, this mixture of maniac and demoniac, to swallow him up, to overwhelm him in ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... spectators of Alfonso's marriage with his first wife, the Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests! He now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side! No wonder that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim, overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing what he did, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... maniac. I have for some years been the victim of a peculiar insanity, which has greatly distressed several of my friends and relatives. They generally soften it in their talk by the name monomania; but they do not hesitate to aver, when speaking their minds, that it has in truth infected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... on with the birth of Nina, and from that day to her death she was a raving, disgusting maniac, as her mother and grandmother had been before her. This was exceedingly mortifying to the proud Bernards, negroes and all, and the utmost care was taken of Nina, who, nevertheless, was too much like her mother to hope for escape. There was the same peculiar look in ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... imagine, young man, who ought, by the way, to have been born fifty years earlier and married my aunt, that you are the only one who can face and conquer facts, even those advanced by that most accursed of empty-headed bores, the man or the maniac called Euclid." ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... would call him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... soft blue eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy, that little body still shaking with indignation and anger—and it all seemed to him more and more strange, almost impossible. "She is a religious maniac!" he repeated ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... this is illogical—idiotic, in fact. Suppose you had this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house, chasing the helpless women and little children—your own. What would you do with him, supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he is loose in your house-Russia. And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to think ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the egret, the summer duck or the snake-bird, the slender ibis or the stately crane. Even the king of winged creatures, the white-headed eagle, was more than once within range of my gun, screaming his maniac note among the tops ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... woman struck me like a blow in the chest. Many other people had perhaps died in the wood during that disastrous year, but though I do not know why, I was sure, sure, I tell you, that I should see the head of that wretched maniac. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point, Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow—they come back to me in picturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the gray cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the billows of laurel, the song of the brown ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... remembrance of his mother has often, very often mingled in his gayest hours, and dashed them with remorseful bitterness. He owns that often of late years her image, and that of his sister Mary, have risen so mildly, so impressively before him, that he has flown almost like a maniac from the gay and heartless throngs, to solitude and silence, and as the thoughts of home and his infancy, when he first lisped out his boyish prayer by the side of his sister at his mother's knee, came thronging over him, he has sobbed and wept like a child. These feelings returned ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... that their mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... vexed with a devil, whom Jesus cast out by His word.(909) One "possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb;"(910) a youth who had a dumb spirit, that ofttimes "cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him;"(911) the maniac who, tormented by "a spirit of an unclean devil,"(912) disturbed the Sabbath quiet of the synagogue at Capernaum,—all were healed by the compassionate Saviour. In nearly every instance, Christ addressed the demon as an intelligent entity, commanding him to come out of his ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... Within a yard of the peacefully slumbering man he rose up, crouching on his toes and bending stealthily forward to gloat over his victim. Hampton stirred uneasily, possibly feeling the close proximity of that horrible presence. Then the maniac took one more stealthy, slouching step nearer, and flung himself at the exposed throat, uttering a fierce snarl as his fingers clutched the soft flesh. Hampton awoke, gasping and choking, to find those mad eyes glaring into his own, those murderous hands throttling him with ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... principem in civitate locum studiis adsecutus—Labeonem Antistium, iisdem artibus praecellentem ... namque illa aetas duo pacis decora simul tulit; sed Labeo incorrupta libertate ... celebratior" (An. III. 75). Horace, who was a contemporary of Labeo's, says that he was a maniac, or, at any rate—"considered very crazy in the company ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... thing for a man to break his wife's heart by systematic neglect, than to strike her and be sorry for it, such readers give out that you approve of wife-beating, and perhaps write to expostulate with you on your brutality. If you express pleasure that a poor maniac should have succeeded in escaping through the door of death from his haunting demon, they accuse you of advocating suicide. But Mercy was not yet afloat on the sea of essential LIE whereon Christina swung to ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, overturning, crashing—annihilating the weak and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... was heard; the dawn had come, and Polou unlocked the porch-door for Father Augustin just in time to hear the last agonized cry. The maniac turned in the very act of leaping on his victim, and sprang for the two men, who stopped in dumb amazement. Poor old Pierre Polou went down at a blow; but Father Augustin was young and fearless, and he grappled the mad animal with all his strength ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... as they appeared at the door, I joined them; but on striking out a few yards into the moor, we found the maniac already in the custody of two men, who had seized and were dragging her towards her cottage, a miserable hovel, about half a mile away. She never once spoke to us, but continued singing, though in a lower and more subdued tone ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year may be caught burrowing in the ground. For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees as a mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... hands she raised the instrument above her, and with a maniac's force hurled it full at the head ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... beneath their feet had become as precious to them as the solid earth. They would have fought with the fury of madmen to retain their places in that half-swamped shell. They were still capable of experiencing a keener fear than that of the flood. They were as terrified by the presence of this maniac as they would have been on ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin. She had grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her father. It seemed to the old man a long way ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... "I'm no speed maniac," she told Gerald, in response to his query as to whether she cared to ride as fast as a railroad train. "I'm well satisfied at the present pace. I feel that it is as fast as we can go in perfect safety, and I have no desire to ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... was enacted before every eye. With a yell the drunken maniac rushed to the rail. The nigger was at his heels—he was too late. Uttering another and more piercing shriek, the madman was overboard at a bound; one of his bundles preceded him; the other dropped like ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece. It was rather too large for ordinary smoking. But then, of course, one doesn't smoke a pipe like that. There are pipes in my collection which I should as soon think of smoking as I should of eating. Ask a china maniac to let you have afternoon tea out of his Old Chelsea, and you will learn some home truths as to the durability of human friendships. The glory of the pipe, as Tress had suggested, lay in its carving. Not that I claim that it was beautiful, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... prayed, fasted by the corpse, Three mortal days. Upon the third, her eyes, Sunk in their pits, glimmered with wild, strange fire. She started from her place beside the dead, Kissed clay-cold brow, cheeks, lids, and lips once more, And with a maniac's wan, heart-breaking smile, Veiled, hooded, glided through the twilight streets, A sable shadow. From the willow-grove, Close by the Moldau's brink, beyond the bridge, Her trace was lost. 'T was evening and mild May, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... restore him to his senses—assembles his followers and departs for the abode of Layla's family, and presenting himself before the maiden's father, proposes in haughty terms the union of his son with Layla; but the offer is declined, on the ground that Syd Omri's son is a maniac, and he will not give his daughter to a man bereft of his senses; but should he be restored to his right mind he will consent to their union. Indignant at this answer, Syd Omri returns home, and after his friends had in vain tried ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the passage. Presently, drawing out a footrule from his pocket, he actually began to measure it! Miss Du Page saw no more. Hurriedly closing her door, she locked and bolted it, firmly convinced that Gabriel Lane was harboring in the guise of Uncle Sylvester a somnambulist, a maniac, or ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... which he had invited several guests, a gentleman opposite him inadvertently spoke the fatal words, when, without a word of warning, he sprang at him across the table, using the carving-knife with all the fury of the most violent maniac; and yet, under all other conditions, he was ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... are storms within That heave the struggling heart with wilder din, And there is power and love The maniac's rushing frenzy to reprove, And when he takes his seat, Clothed and in calmness, at his Savour's feet, Is not the power as strange, the love as blest, As when He said, "Be still," ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... from Liverpool two maiden ladies in the room next mine made representations to the captain which resulted in my removal to the steerage. They couldn't consent, they said, to listen to the shrieks of the maniac in the adjoining room. ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... a consultation upon this reply, when the governor and physician strenuously argued against any capitulation with a maniac, and proposed that some method might be taken to seize, fetter, and convey him into a dark room, where he might be treated according to the rules of art; but the Capuchin, understanding the circumstances of the case, undertook to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the great ones, pitied the poor maniac, (as they called him,) and sent in quest of him to every direction, lest peradventure, he might be found starving in some cavern, or floating in the sea, or dashed in pieces at the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... sprang toward her, and tried to lift her, but she shrank from him, repelling him with a gesture of disgust, of hatred, of the most profound terror. "Don't touch me!" she screamed, like a maniac. "Don't touch me!" ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... there are people at the back gate already, and the house door won't hold much longer. The smith's battering at it like a maniac ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... connoisseur; but in this fog, where all was gloomy and unreal, where nothing had that matter-of-fact value associated by Forsytes with earth, he was a victim to strange qualms, and as he tried to stare back into the eyes of this maniac, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... even yet would not believe. So great had been their confidence that they had sent out no scouting parties. Only a day or two before they had been enjoying themselves at a great dance. The boy who had come with the news that Santa Anna was at hand must be distraught. Certainly he had looked like a maniac. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... misdeed was a double-edged blade which cut both ways. It will never be known, probably, how near a massacre followed the explosion of indignation at that maniac's murder of the Emancipator. Fortunately for the unsullied robe of Columbia, a hundred advocates of leaving retribution to Heaven echoed ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... understood French? for, unless she did, the stranger's stock of books was exhausted. Maria replied in the affirmative; but forbore to ask any more questions respecting the person to whom they belonged. And Jemima gave her a new subject for contemplation, by describing the person of a lovely maniac, just brought into an adjoining chamber. She was singing the pathetic ballad of old Rob with the most heart-melting falls and pauses. Jemima had half-opened the door, when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood close to it, scarcely daring to respire, lest ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... went down like a stone and Captain Anthony went down with her, the finest man's soul that ever left a sailor's body. I raved like a maniac, like a devil, with a lot of fools crowding round me and asking, "Aren't you ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... this idea of yours, I'll not say ye're insulting her by it, though! that's true too; but I've had the same notion; and now I'll tell ye something. She was not mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order. Was that the act of a maniac? and if she wasn't mad, clean out of her wits, would she have done such a thing as ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... 'int that he occupies a prominent position amongst the hupper circles of Society, and is frequently to be met with in the papers. His faithlessness preyed on my Sister's mind to that degree, that she is now in the Asylum, a nopeless maniac! My honely Brother was withdrawn from 'Arrow, and now 'as the yumiliation of selling penny toys on the kerbstone to his former playfellers. 'Tantee nannymice salestibus hirae,' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting Palfrey; or, the Silken Fetlock.' These works she ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... projected into that narrow, roofed-in space, made of it a chaos of contending demons. All stocks were caught in the upheaval; Melville's plans to limit the explosion were blown skyward, feeble as straws in a cyclone. Amid shrieks and howls and frantic tossings of arms and mad rushes and maniac contortions of faces, National Woolens and all the Dumont stocks bent, broke, went smashing down, down, down, every one struggling ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... The maniac had just discovered that the door was locked, and rushing to the window caught sight of his hostess and desired ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... paralyse the mind with alternations and scenes of horror, carefully concealing the ground of encouragement and hope, till reason is shaken and hurled from its throne, for the sake of gaining a convert, and in making a convert to make a maniac (as doubtless sometimes occurs under this mode of preaching, for we have the proof of it,) involves a fearful responsibility. I have just heard of an interesting girl thus driven to distraction, in the city ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and drawing near him with a desperate and portentous countenance, as if she meant to whisper in his ear, she suddenly plucked St. Louis' dagger from his girdle and struck it into his breast. He caught the hand which grasped the hilt. Her eyes glared with the fury of a maniac, and, with a horrid laugh, she exclaimed: "I have slain thee, insolent triumpher in my love and agonies! Thou shalt not now deride me in the arms of thy minion; for, I know that it is not for the dead Marion you have trampled on my heart ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... emperor, that at the sight of their father-Tsar his subjects at last began to scamper in all directions like a troop of mice at the sight of a cat. For half a decade Russia was thus held in terror, until the rule of the maniac could no longer be endured. At last Panin originates, Pahlen organizes, and Benigsen executes a plan, the accomplishment of which finds Paul on the morrow lying in state with a purple face, and the marks of the shawl which strangled him carefully hid by a high collar. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... counseled him, and out of a comparatively small salary employed the first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... dressing-gown or blue pyjamas or something? But there you are! I defy you to name me a single-barrelled crank. If a man is a religious lunatic, or a vegetarian, he is sure to be touched in some other department as well; he will be an anti-vivisectionist, a nutfooder, costume-maniac, stamp-collector, or a spiritualist into the bargain. Haven't you ever noticed that? And isn't he dirty? Where is the connection between piety and dirt? I suggest they are both relapses into ancestral channels and the one ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... trembling in a transport of maniac fury with which an inexplicable fear ran cross-odds as warp and woof. The other had totally deluded him until the climax brought its accusation, and now the unmasked plotter took refuge in bluster, fencing for time ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to charity, Until I find peace again, My curse upon the fiend or god That will not let me hear A bird in song upon the bough But, hovering about the notes, There chimes the maniac ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... done. His curtain was up, and the moonlight lay on his bed. The mystic influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth which he ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... had wrung Sir Guy's stern heart that night, He stood among his dead; 'Twixt grief and ire, He now a maniac grew. Sleep from him fled; He passed the night with warders round their fire, While every turret-room was all ablaze ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye Storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceas'd, and all seem'd calm and bright; When France her front deep-scarr'd and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... simpler catches were held, and one or two of the harder as well. Given this form on the day of their appearance in public, and Henfrey might be disappointed when he came to watch and smile sarcastically. A batting fiasco is not one half so ridiculous as maniac fielding. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... warned, the rustic crew Abandoned in the fields pick, scythe, and plough, And to the roof of house and temple flew, (For ill secure was elm or willow's bough,) From hence the maniac's horrid rage they view; Who, dealing kick, and bite, and scratch, and blow, Horses and oxen slew, his helpless prey; And well the courser ran who ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... gruffly, "this maniac—he would not remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour ago. But for ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ungodly frank with you. It doesn't make any difference whether he is right or not, but Adrian Brownwell may be fooled into thinking he has reason to be jealous of me." Hendricks was biting his mustache. "He's a raging maniac of jealousy, Jake, but I'm not afraid of him—not for myself. I can get him before he gets me, if it comes to that, but to do it I'll have to sacrifice Molly. And I won't do that. If it comes to her good name or my life—she can have my life." They were ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... "everything seems to show this, that the unfortunate Bakura was a drunkard or a maniac, and, above all, a man of foreign blood. If a genuine Egyptian in his senses were to go without pay for a year, and be clubbed twice as much as this man, would he dare to break into the palace of the nomarch and appeal to thee with such ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... large place, and has quietly settled down into a state of serene prosperity. I have my boots repaired here by an artist who informs me that he studied in the penitentiary; and I visit the lunatic asylum, where I encounter a vivacious maniac who invites me to ride in a chariot drawn by eight ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... witnessed that morning. She remembered being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... is very ill, the worst symptoms have appeared, and she is almost frantic with terror. Last night, at 12 o'clock, I was going the rounds of the sick wards, and found her wringing her hands, and running up and down the cell like a maniac. I tried to quiet and encourage her, but she paid no more attention than if stone deaf; and when I started to leave her, she seized my arm, and begged me to ask you to come and stay with her. She thinks ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... without the stimulant; but facing a harrowing scene like this was impossible. He felt that his appetite was like a savage beast on which he held a weakening and relaxing grasp. With the strange, double consciousness of the opium maniac, he saw his wife in all her deep distress, and he had the remorse of a lost soul in view of her agony; he was almost certain that she knew how he had wronged her and his children, and he had all the shame and self-loathing of a proud, sensitive man; he knew that he was false to the sacred trusts ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... State on the day of his inauguration, and without giving any living creature a hint of his intention, to fly off at a tangent and go to the Indian country and become a missionary to those red devils, and be massacred for his pains—it was the work of a raving maniac. But what drove him mad? Surely it was not his high elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular direction of flying from his honors. No! it is as I have ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... strictest economy. M. de Turenne possessed perhaps a little too much of what his predecessor lacked, but it was exactly this that pleased the Emperor. M. de Turenne was quite a pretty man, thinking perhaps a little too much of himself, a great talker and Anglo-maniac, which led the Emperor to give him the name of my lord Kinsester (who cannot be silent); but he told a story well, and sometimes his Majesty took pleasure in making him ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... seven-eighths of the female patients to have become deranged from love; whilst, with the majority of the males, the hallucination proceeded from disappointments of ambition. Surprised, I could make out no case of a religious maniac; glad, I could discover none ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... as the escape of Raymond de Brocas from the prison, the clouds of doubt and suspicion had closed more and more darkly round the miserable man, who had let himself become the slave of his passions until these had increased to absolute madness. His unbridled fury and fits of maniac rage had estranged from him even the most attached of his old retainers, and in proportion as he felt this with the instinct of cunning and madness, the more did he exact from those about him protestations of zeal ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... thing happened then. The woman screamed and rushed toward the brutish maniac with her fingers splayed. The swaying figure bent, grabbed her about the waist, and lifted her high into the air. I thought for a moment he was about to crush her as he had crushed the man. But I was wrong. She was hurled to the sand, but with ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye never closes, so the hands never rest,—they open and grasp, as if at some palpable object on which they close, vicelike, as a bird's talons on its prey; sometimes they wander over that brow, where the furrows seem torn as the thunder ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: "You raving maniac!" Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from Togiak. Two hundred miles in heavy trails," explained George wearily, as the cries of the maniac ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... answered, with almost a shout. "Good God, no! I think that I am going mad. I know—I know that unless relief soon comes I shall die or become a raving maniac." ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... instant they were in the midst of a fierce fight. The maniac tossed them aside as if they were mere infants, but they returned to the attack. They sought to hold his arms to prevent him from doing any further damage with the hammer. Fortunately for the lads, the man was forced ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... streaming towel, and almost brained myself against—the Mail! which was standing there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put on my bonnet, and came back 'a ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first—but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man—kindling in ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... are running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... grown pale, aye, blanched, and bent more than ever, as if old age had already touched her with its featherless wing. Often did she finger the wedding clothes of her Yann, folding and unfolding them again and again like some maniac, especially one of his blue woolen jerseys, which still had preserved his shape; when she threw it gently on the table, it fell with the shoulders and chest well defined; so she placed it by itself on a shelf of their wardrobe, and left ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... The Trojans and their allies have camped hard by our ships and by the wall; they have lit watchfires throughout their host and deem that nothing can now prevent them from falling on our fleet. Jove, moreover, has sent his lightnings on their right; Hector, in all his glory, rages like a maniac; confident that Jove is with him he fears neither god nor man, but is gone raving mad, and prays for the approach of day. He vows that he will hew the high sterns of our ships in pieces, set fire to their ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... bloodless and compressed; her eyes contracted and glittering with a cold, black, baleful light; her hair unloosed in her agitation, streamed down each side, and fell upon her bosom like the ends of a long black scarf. At times she muttered to herself like any maniac: ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the twelfth of my line to be named Hector," he said presently—and Andrew Daney with difficulty repressed a roar of maniac ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... was evidently that of a man. Even under the circumstances, it could be nothing else, but of a man who had taken leave of his senses. It was the wild cry of a maniac! ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... that it was wise as well as right to be perfectly ingenuous, and resolved that there should be no concealment. His friends stood manfully by him, and his enemies struck at him with such blind fury that their blows injured only themselves. Howe raved like a maniac. "What is to become of the country, plundered by land, plundered by sea? Our rulers have laid hold on our lands, our woods, our mines, our money. And all this is not enough. We cannot send a cargo to the farthest ends of the earth, but they must send a gang of thieves after it." ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this man's voice produced a most singular effect upon Edward. The moment before, his actions had been those of a raving maniac; but, when the words struck his ear, he paused, put his hand to his forehead, seemed to recollect himself, and finally advanced with a firm and steady step. His countenance was dark and angry, but ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as a maniac does. The river was a mile in width and teeming with crocodiles. But the same saving Providence that shields the adventurous child attended him. He clambered up the opposite bank and struck out for Memphis on ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... and ran madly from the room, along the gallery and down the stairs, shouting and raging like a maniac, Cavalcanti following me. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... jerked up my horse beside him, a blood-curdling chorus of strange barking screams, as from the throats of maniac women, rose at the farther side of the ravine, drowning the shouts of our men, the ping-g-g of the whistling bullets, and even the sharp crack of the muskets. It was the Indian war-whoop! A swarm of savages were leaping from the bush in all directions, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Reverently, while Joe Roscorla held me in his arms behind, they took up the corpse of him they had known and loved so well, and carried it up the cliffs to Lantrig. As they lifted the latch and bore the body across the threshold, a yell of maniac laughter echoed through the house ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Only a maniac, he reflected, would wear a hat on a day like the one he was swimming through. But the people who passed him as he trudged onward to no particular destination didn't seem to notice; they gave him a fairly wide berth, and seemed very polite, ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... arose, and going into the head of the boat, took up the baling-dish and again drank deeply of the sea-water. "Ha! ha!" he laughed, tossing his arms wildly in the air, and gazing at Gaff with the glaring eyes of a maniac, "that's the nectar for me. Come, boys, I'll sing you ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... he dashed down the staircase and through the hall, upsetting two or three footmen who were in his way, hurried into the garden, ran across it at full speed, and regaining his room at the hotel, threw himself on the floor, where he rolled like a maniac, uttering cries of rage, and cursing the hour when, trusting to the promises of M. de Villars, he had abandoned the mountains where he was as much a king as Louis XIV at Versailles. The same evening he received orders to leave Paris and rejoin his regiment at Macon. He therefore set out the next ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for there was desperation in Dumiger's eye. He waited a moment, and then with a maniac's strength he flew at the man, but he found a powerful and vigorous antagonist. The stranger, who had appeared half decrepit and aged, rose up in all the strength of youth. In a moment he had grasped Dumiger's arms, very coolly taken out a handkerchief, and in spite of all Dumiger's ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... imitate and reply to the groans, oaths, and ribaldry, which, as soon as the superintendent quitted the hospital, echoed around him. He longed, though he struggled against the impulse, to vie in curses with the reprobate, and in screams with the maniac. But his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, his mouth itself seemed choked with ashes; there came upon him a dimness of sight, a rushing sound in his ears, and the powers of life were ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... trifle bitterly. "Good Lord," said she, "if I had to think of a trousseau for myself, I should be a maniac! The trousseau would at any time have seemed a much more difficult matter ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... window madly. I caught it. It was locked. But I pulled it up like a maniac. The lock, rusty, flew off with a zing! The window crashed up. I tumbled in at ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... illustration of the belief in werewolves. The same mental habits which led men to regard the insane or epileptic person as a changeling, and which allowed them to explain catalepsy as the temporary departure of a witch's soul from its body, would enable them to attribute a wolf's nature to the maniac or idiot with cannibal appetites. And when the myth-forming process had got thus far, it would not stop short of assigning to the unfortunate wretch a tangible lupine body; for all ancient mythology teemed with precedents for ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... woman? and what do you want?" asks the besieged man, as she continues to drag him along with a maniac's strength. ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... the death of Stanley Carew, she fell down like one dead, and presently, being delivered of a son, the infant died after a few hours. Yonder," she looked menacingly towards Fairburn Hall, "the mother lives—a maniac. What else could keep me here in a place that tortures me with memories of my youth, and of loving faces that have crumbled into dust? What else but the hope of one day seeing my little sister yet, and the vengeance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... from Augustus bequeathing the Empire to Tiberius, ablest man to ablest man, and all with senatoral ratification; to the jocular appointment by undisciplined soldiery of a sad old laughingstock to succeed a raging maniac. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you say her ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... had been arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot. But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let him go." ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... character and condition of the people of Gadara for his allowing this destruction of their property. I suppose that although it worked vexation and dismay at first, it prepared the way for some after-reception of the gospel. Now, seeing him who had been a raving maniac, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and hearing what had come to the swine, they were filled with fear, and prayed the healer to ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... have more reason for bewaring of it than myself; indeed, well it would have been had his lordship run away from all the ministers of jealousy—Iago, Cassio, and embroidered handkerchiefs—at the same pace of six miles an hour which kept me ahead of my infuriated pursuers. Ah, that maniac, white as a leper with flakes of cotton, can I ever forget him—him that ran so far in advance of his party? What passion but jealousy could have sustained him in so hot a chase? There were some lovely girls in the fair company that had so condescendingly caressed me; but, doubtless, upon ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of chess at night and make excuses to play it in the day. For a month chess will be even more to me than golf or billiards—games which I adore because I am so bad at them. For a month, starting from yesterday when I was inveigled into a game, you must regard me, please, as a chess maniac. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... and hasten to their homes. The intended bride remained insensible for many hours, and when she revived she was no more herself. The fearful scene had crushed out forever the last spark of reason. She was a maniac. The lord of the castle was left alone with his spectre bride, but not long. Forsaken by every one, he cared not for life, and when death came, which was not long after this occurrence, he welcomed him as his best friend. ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... to see what mischief had been done during the night, aroused him. He glanced upon his enemy, who pale and trembling, stood gazing on the wreck that he had made. Revenge at last was in his hands—not a moment was to be lost—with the yell of a maniac he sprang upon the powerless and conscious-stricken man—seized him in his arms rushed to the river—and ere any could interpose, both had found a grave where but a few minutes before the bodies of Mary and her infant ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... that rum does to make a man feel better. If his wife and children are starving, he feels it not. He feels better. If his affairs are going to ruin, or are already plunged into ruin, he is not sensible to his condition. If his house is on fire, he sings the maniac's song, and regards it ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... MAX. How mere a maniac they supposed the duke; What, he can meditate?—the duke?—can dream That he can lure away full thirty thousand Tried troops and true, all honorable soldiers, More than a thousand noblemen among them, From oaths, from duty, from their honor lure them, And make them all unanimous to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... even to God. You will be mine through all time and all eternity; nothing shall tear you from my arms, not even your own wish, your own prayers. Oh, Amelia! do you see that I am a madman, insane from rapture and despair! Should you not flee from a maniac? Perhaps his arm, imbued with giant strength, seeking to hold you ever to his heart, might crush you. Fly, then; spurn me from you; go to your room; go, and say to this mocking courtier, to whom nothing is holy, not even our love, who is surprised, at nothing—go and say to him: 'Trenck ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... dream of chess at night and make excuses to play it in the day. For a month chess will be even more to me than golf or billiards—games which I adore because I am so bad at them. For a month, starting from yesterday when I was inveigled into a game, you must regard me, please, as a chess maniac. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... a fool! No man with a grain of sense would do such a thing alone—maybe with a crowd of cheering men, but only a maniac could do it alone—Ned was sure ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... stern and decided resolution. Yet, recollecting where he was, it was with some feelings of fear that he saw the dying flame leap up and spread a flash of light on the visage of Eachin, which seemed pale as the grave, while his eye rolled like that of a maniac in his fever fit. The light instantly sunk down and died, and Simon felt a momentary terror lest he should have to dispute for his life with the youth, whom he knew to be capable of violent actions when highly excited, however short a period his nature could support ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... to practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Caesar Borgia is the nec plus ultra of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Caesar Borgia is not a fiend nor a maniac. He can restrain himself whenever circumstances or policy require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just judge. His portraits show no degraded criminal; he is, indeed, a criminal in action, but not necessarily a criminal in constitution, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... an old book under his arm, fumbling a rosary of beads, enlarging his turband, lengthening his sleeves and blackening his eyelids with antimony. Here, however, it would be out of place. Very comical also is the way in which he pretends to cure the maniac by "muttering unknown words, blowing in her face, biting her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... have heard, O auspicious King, that Prince Ali presently asked one of the shopkeepers with whom he had made acquaintance, saying, "O my friend, is this man a maniac that he asketh a sum of thirty thousand Ashrafis for this little pipe of ivory? Surely none save an idiot would give him such a price and waste upon it such a mint of money." Said the shop man, "O my lord, this broker is wiser and warier than all ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... paces before her chair, an elderly man, hurried along by a crowd of people, by whom he was pelted with mud and stones. His meek and unresisting deportment exciting her attention, she inquired what were his offences, and learned with pity and surprise that he was an unfortunate maniac, known only by the appellation of "mad Jemmy." The situation of this miserable being seized her imagination and became the subject of her attention. She would wait whole hours for the appearance of the poor maniac, and, whatever were her occupations, the voice of mad Jemmy was sure ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... gradually drove the pas- sengers nearly all on deck, and the two stern cabins, lighted, as I said, by their windows in the aft-board were the only quarters below that were inhabitable. Of these Mrs. Kear occupied one, and Curtis reserved the other for Ruby, who, a raving maniac, had to be kept rigidly under restraint. I went down occasionally to see him, but invariably found him in a state of abject terror, uttering horrible shrieks, as though possessed with the idea that he was being scorched by the most ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... as they swept over the surface. All around the homeless shores the evergreen trees seemed to hunch their backs and crowd closer together in patient misery. Not a bird had the heart to sing; only the loon—storm-lover—laughed his crazy challenge to the elements, and mocked us with his long-drawn maniac scream. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... upon his couch, and with clenched hands was pounding against the cushions like an angry child. The tumult became general; everyone was shouting. Those who were nearest to this raving young maniac were trying to seize him, but he waved his arms about like the wings of a night bird, and anon he seized a goblet of heavy solid metal and struck out with it to the right and left of him, so that none ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, was it not to protect myself and help others—and was not my motive ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... strictly to "life," never describing with real skill, so as to interest anything which would make life worth living for—except love—which is good to a certain extent, but not absolutely all in all, save to the eroto-maniac. And as most novelists now pretend to instruct and convey ideas, beyond mere story-telling, or even being "interesting," which means the love or detective business, I would suggest to some of these writers that the marvelous latent powers of the human mind, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power of articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... affright ran through the room; people forgot that a maniac stood before them, and only saw the district-attorney, who, like a second Brutus, delivered over his own son to the law. Like the judgment day the words rang through the room, "I move that he be condemned to death." As soon as the echo of the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... gateway, then fixed his gaze on something that stood just above—something which the dusk half concealed, and by so doing made more impressive. It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. Above this hideous effigy was carved the legend: 'MIDDLESEX HOUSE ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... seemed to look upon love as an obligation pertaining to his age and position. The chief young man in Lancia ought to love the richest, most beautiful girl of Lancia. Besides, it seemed as if he also wanted to show the place that he was neither eccentric nor a maniac, as he had heard that he was reported to be. He therefore went in for being a recognised lover; he spent a couple of hours in the morning in the Calle de Altavilla, where his young lady lived, he sat at her ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... the older writings there are instances reported in which the period of abstinence has varied from a short time to endurance beyond the bounds of credulity. Hufeland mentions total abstinence from food for seventeen days, and there is a contemporary case of abstinence for forty days in a maniac who subsisted solely on water and tobacco. Bolsot speaks of abstinence for fourteen months, and Consbruch mentions a girl who fasted eighteen months. Muller mentions an old man of forty-five who lived ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... could no longer see the stars shining; beneath him moved a shrouded form; and sliding with involuntary haste down the steep descent, he stood near the groaning figure; it ceased its lamentations, and began to laugh like a maniac from beneath ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... floor, writhe and twist among each other in contortions indescribable, holding up their ulcerous wounds, tearing their matted hair, weeping tears of blood: some hooting with revengeful cry; some howling with a maniac's fear; some chattering with idiot's stare; some calling upon God; some calling upon fiends; wasting away; thrusting each other back; mocking each other's pains; tearing open each other's ulcers; dropping with the ichor of death! The wider I open the ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... prematurely-aged man, exhausted by debauch, crazed by strong drink, a ferocious maniac, mutilating his subjects, his officers or his ministers, as the whim seized him, cutting the nose and ears off some, and the foot or the hand from others. His own death, not unlooked for, would ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... patience, never tired of recalling the supreme episode of their married life, when, after the birth of their son, she had embraced him with a new affection, spontaneous and sincere. She had been so utterly ill that for a day and a night her life had hung in the balance, while he, like a maniac, had paced the footpath in mist and rain, praying as he had never prayed before for her restoration. It was in Darjeeling where he had gone hurriedly on receipt of a telegram, and never should he forget the anxieties of that journey. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... murders, infanticide, licentiousness of the most debased and debasing character, burying their infirm and aged parents alive, desertion of the sick, revolting cruelties to the unfortunate maniac, cannibalism and drunkenness, form a list of some of the traits in social life among the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... face commenced to assume a ghastly bluish colour; his distended eyes almost started from his head; while his mouth, now wide open, allowed his tongue to loll and roll in a manner vividly reminiscent of a maniac restrained in a strait jacket. The struggles and cries grew fainter until at last his head gave a final jerk to hang limply to one side. He shrieked no more. Insensibility ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... will not touch it. Curse the stuff; it has wrought enough ruin with mine and me. I was just swearing I would never drink again, and I was in earnest. I know I must have appeared to you as some gibbering maniac, but I was fighting my craven appetite for strong drink. Oh how hard the struggle has been; its fierceness is only known to God and myself. It comes upon me when I am least prepared to defend myself, and tortures me with the cruel malignity of a ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... at hand, they yielded to the blind instinct of self-preservation, and rushed pell-mell for the camels. At once these men of a martial tribe, men who had cheerfully faced the far greater danger of the Hadendowa general attack, became untrammeled savages, each striving like a maniac to secure a mount for himself, and careless whether or not his employers and comrades ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... hopes continued not above an hour, when he awoke, with a well-conditioned skin, no extraordinary degree of fever, but with the exact state he was in before, with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise, in imitation of the howling of a dog; in this situation he was this morning at one o'clock, when we came to bed. The Duke of York, who has been twice in my room in the course of the night, immediately from the King's apartment, says there has not been one moment of lucid ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of man ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... motion. The automobile is at present the champion speed-maker, the fastest means of propelling himself man has yet invented. But the aeroplane and the hydroplane are not far behind, and even the electric locomotive has a thrill of promise for the speed maniac.[2] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Duke dies, or becomes a maniac," thought he to himself, "the end as regards us will be the same for Norbert will break off the match to ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... destruction of them by goldbeaters; my search for charters or deeds by their destruction in the shops of glue-makers and tailors. As I advanced the ardour of the pursuit increased, until at last I became a perfect vello-maniac (if I may coin a word), and I gave any price that was asked. Nor do I regret it, for my object was not only to secure good manuscripts for myself, but also to raise the public estimation of them, so that their value might be more generally ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... call him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away his senses, clear ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... match, I held it above my head and peered about me. Its light revealed a small apartment finished in polished wood. Along the angle of the floor was an opening, two or three inches high, into the side walls. And half way up the wall in front of me I saw a face—the face of a maniac it seemed to be—pale and wan, with strange, inhuman eyes. I had scarcely glanced at it when the match dropped from my fingers and fell slowly through the air, going out as it struck the floor. My hands were cold, but so wet with perspiration that they stuck to my clothing when I felt for ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... morbid feeling. He gazed at that pale, thin, irregular, angular little face, those soft blue eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy, that little body still shaking with indignation and anger—and it all seemed to him more and more strange, almost impossible. "She is a religious maniac!" ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... de Paris," but the first madhouse in Christendom was built by the legate Ortiz in Toledo A. D. 1483, and was therefore called Casa del Nuncio. The Damascus "Maristan" was described by every traveller of the last century: and it showed a curious contrast between the treatment of the maniac and the idiot or omadhaun, who is humanely allowed to wander about unharmed, if not held a Saint. When I saw it last (1870) it was all but empty and mostly in ruins. As far as my experience goes, the United States ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... from Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... he is no worse; but as ill-used as ever—mewed up, kept in solitary confinement. They mean to make either an idiot or a maniac of him, and take out a commission of lunacy. Horsfall starves him; you ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and for this reason is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... As the maniac finished the last words, before they could be aware of his intention, he made a spring from the deck over the bulwark, and disappeared under the wave. The boatswain, who had been diverted from his fanatical attempt by the unexpected attack of Price, more than by the remonstrances of his companions, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... I am to-day! You'll think me a maniac," she said. But he only took her hand as if she had been a child and led her out ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... past and the present she might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn't, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot round, or ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that any one deplored the fate of the gloomy old man, who was supposed to be little better than a maniac, would be going altogether too far. Petronella shed a few tears, but they were tears rather of relief than of sorrow; while Sir Richard felt that he could breathe more freely when his contumacious kinsman had ceased to live ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a heap of confused and jointless limbs in the furthest corner of the room, lay the wretch, a raving maniac;—two men keeping their firm gripe on him, which, ever and anon, with the mighty strength of madness, he shook off, to fall back senseless and exhausted; his strained and bloodshot eyes starting from their sockets, the slaver gathering round his lips, his raven hair standing on end, his delicate ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heroes, and his hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king. What the classic ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... for us out of the question. It was quite possible for him to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door. As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac would have been mere folly. There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter. No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that even his rage should be brought to doubt at last ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... failed. Was this person an assassin, who was acquainted with the windings of the grotto, and who would take advantage of the dark to execute his vengeance upon me, who had dared to pursue him to these forlorn retreats? or was he maniac, or walker in his sleep? Whichever supposition were true, it would be rash in me to follow him. Besides, he could not long remain in these darksome recesses, unless some fatal accident ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... excitement. His brain felt like a burning ball, and the palms of his hands were hot with fever. For the spirit of prophecy was upon him once more, and he was bound fast in the golden magic of the stars. Like the morphia maniac who, after valiant fasting, returning to his drug, feels its influence the stronger for his abstinence from it, the Prophet was conscious that the heavens held more power, more meaning for him because, for a while, he had intended to neglect ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... of intoxication becomes an ungovernable maniac, who in the violence of his fury will rush into any excess and commit any crime. At the epoch which our history has now reached, the terrible vice threatened to demoralize the entire country, and to destroy the fruit of all the efforts made to ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... official letter, cast his eyes over it, and then, forgetting his gout, caught hold of Syd's hands and began to caper about the room like a maniac. ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... in a frenzy of profanity. At the same time the subterranean diapason of a demoniac bass viol was heard; it rose to a wail, and rose and rose again till it screamed like a small siren. It was Gipsy's war-cry, and, at the sound of it, Duke became a frothing maniac. He made a convulsive frontal attack upon the hobgoblin—and the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the name of the Archbishop of Dublin, who, while in England, narrowly escaped martyrdom from the hands of a maniac, while celebrating Mass at the tomb of St. Thomas. Four years afterwards, this celebrated ecclesiastic attended at Rome, with Catholicus of Tuam, and the Prelates of Lismore, Limerick, Waterford, and Killaloe, the third general council of Lateran, where they were received with all ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... into his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting Palfrey; or, the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... Tutmosis, "everything seems to show this, that the unfortunate Bakura was a drunkard or a maniac, and, above all, a man of foreign blood. If a genuine Egyptian in his senses were to go without pay for a year, and be clubbed twice as much as this man, would he dare to break into the palace of the nomarch and appeal to thee ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... victims to the tender passion. Whom should I ask to help me in my strait? I could not go round everywhere, asking everybody after two ladies dressed in half-mourning, could I? Not exactly. People might take me for a maniac at large; and, even should I be one, still, I would naturally wish to keep my mental derangement to myself. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... little know him. Jealous and revengeful; ferocious in his revenge—a maniac in his jealousy! Would you be assassinated before my eyes?' Mr. Cymon Tuggs, in a voice broken by emotion, expressed his disinclination to undergo the process of assassination before ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements; conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ghastly fragments of being, as are the dreams of a maniac. Had creative Love stopped there, and then, standing on the height of some fair completed world, had viewed the warring portents, wouldst thou not have said—But these are the works of Evil and Hate? Love did not stop there, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... we could give each other dinners and dine our friends and we could indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence was in the habit of having the Daily Telegraph sent to her every day from London. She was always an Anglo-maniac, was Florence; the Paris edition of the New York Herald was always good enough for me. But when we discovered that the Ashburnhams' copy of the London paper followed them from England, Leonora and Florence decided between them to suppress one subscription one year and the other ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... portentous countenance, as if she meant to whisper in his ear, she suddenly plucked St. Louis' dagger from his girdle and struck it into his breast. He caught the hand which grasped the hilt. Her eyes glared with the fury of a maniac, and, with a horrid laugh, she exclaimed: "I have slain thee, insolent triumpher in my love and agonies! Thou shalt not now deride me in the arms of thy minion; for, I know that it is not for the dead Marion you have trampled on my heart ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... what are the most powerful desires in the particular human mind with which we are dealing. Obviously, the automobile salesman who vividly pictures to the timid person the thrills of speeding around curves would be as far wrong as if he were picturing the sedate, quiet luxury of his car to a speed maniac. What he wants to know and what we all want to know in substance is how to tell, at a glance, which is the timid, sedate person and ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... of this man's voice produced a most singular effect upon Edward. The moment before, his actions had been those of a raving maniac; but, when the words struck his ear, he paused, put his hand to his forehead, seemed to recollect himself, and finally advanced with a firm and steady step. His countenance was dark and angry, ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... turned her heavy eyes With such a piteous glance upon my face; It pierced my heart, and fast the gathering tears Blinded my sight. Alas! poor maniac; For thee no hope shall dawn—no tender thought Wake in thy blighted heart a thrill of joy. The immortal mind is levelled with the dust, Ere the tenacious cords of life give way. Hers was a common tale—she ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... as he said, "A grand height for a woman; but as to this idea of yours, I'll not say ye're insulting her by it, though! that's true too; but I've had the same notion; and now I'll tell ye something. She was not mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order. Was that the act of a maniac? and if she wasn't mad, clean out of her wits, would she have done such a ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... there was nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in the right to ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... adventures, in addition to our arrest near Kreuznach and to our obtaining passes from the maniac commandant, was the adventure of our being lost in the Vosges, and nearly coming to be murdered by some French peasants, who in the night tried to force their way into the village school in which we had barricaded ourselves. Another ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... pressed her hand and passed into the hall, While she stood sobbing in a flood of tears, And he stood choked with anger and amazed. But as I passed the ivied porch he came With bated breath and muttered in my ear— 'Beggar!'—It stung me like a serpent's fang. Pride-pricked and muttering like a maniac, I almost flew the street and hurried home To vent my anger to the silent elms. 'Beggar!'—an hundred times that long, mad night I muttered with hot lips and burning breath; I paced the walk with hurried tread, and raved; I threw myself ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... strings, 8 A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings: They laid him in the ground so cold,[30] Upon his breast the earth is thrown; High is heaped the grassy mould, Oh! he is dead and gone. The winds of the winter blow o'er his cold breast, But pleasant shall be ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... threw the vegetable-marrows over the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt, again! And Augustus Moddle, our own Moddle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately brooded over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, "makes us shudder." A good medical diagnosis. Long ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... on this day, came leaning on his staff and with considerable strain, as far as the street for a little relaxation, he suddenly caught sight, approaching from the off side, of a Taoist priest with a crippled foot; his maniac appearance so repulsive, his shoes of straw, his dress all in tatters, muttering several sentiments ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... were again in the saddle. By a very early start we hoped to escape the burden of excessive hospitality; in other words, to get rid of an escort that was an expensive nuisance. At the next village we were confronted by what appeared to be a shouting, gesticulating maniac. On dismounting, we learned that a harbinger had been sent by the khan, the evening before, to have a guard ready to join us as we passed through. In fact, two armed ferashes were galloping toward us, armed, as we afterward learned, with American rifles, and the usual kamma, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. I was about to continue, when a red brick suddenly landed neatly on my breakfast table, and raised the number of articles on that ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... iisdem artibus praecellentem ... namque illa aetas duo pacis decora simul tulit; sed Labeo incorrupta libertate ... celebratior" (An. III. 75). Horace, who was a contemporary of Labeo's, says that he was a maniac, or, at any rate—"considered very crazy in the company ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... way that valet turned on poor Kennaway (for that was the detective's name) and laid him flat on the grass. Such a snarl of rage I never heard. The man seemed transformed in an instant from a silent, reserved, taciturn servant to a very maniac, fighting with teeth and claw, cursing and swearing horribly, and ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... speak, getting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argument which seemed ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... clever maniac!" Stalky resumed. "We mayn't be aware you were followin' us this afternoon, mayn't we? 'Thought you were stalkin' us, eh? Why, we led you bung into it, of course. Colonel Dabney—don't you think he's a nice man, Foxy?—Colonel Dabney's our pet particular friend. We've been goin' there for ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... We shall not attempt to describe their feelings on finding themselves, at that lone hour of the night, immediately under a spot rendered fearfully memorable by the tragic occurrences of the morning. The terrible pursuit of the fugitive, the execution of the soldier, the curse and prophecy of his maniac wife, and, above all, the forcible abduction and threatened espousal of that unhappy woman by the formidable being who seemed to have identified himself with the evils with which they stood menaced,—all rushed with rapid ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... arm hanging helplessly by your side, and the blood streaming down your face and clothes, and the red light in your eyes—murderous fire, they called it. I heard her ladyship go into hysterics. I saw her laugh and sob like a maniac, and, God help us! that's ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hate the same creature. But when the two feelings are both intense, and meet in an ardent bosom, such a man would do well to spend a day or two upon his knees, praying for grace divine. For he who with all his soul loves and hates one woman is next door to a maniac, and is scarcely safe an hour together from suicide or even from homicide; this truth the newspapers tell us, by examples, every month; but are wonderfully little heeded, because newspapers do not, nor is it their business to, analyze ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... to the evening skies one huge and burning beacon, seen far and wide through the adjacent country; tower after tower crashed down, with blazing roof and rafter. The vanquished, of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighbouring wood. The maniac figure of Ulrica was for a long time visible on the lofty stand she had chosen, tossing her arms abroad with wild exultation. At length, with a terrific crash, the whole turret gave way, and she perished in the flames which had consumed ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... you to inquire, as likewise me to mention—enough to 'int that he occupies a prominent position amongst the hupper circles of Society, and is frequently to be met with in the papers. His faithlessness preyed on my Sister's mind to that degree, that she is now in the Asylum, a nopeless maniac! My honely Brother was withdrawn from 'Arrow, and now 'as the yumiliation of selling penny toys on the kerbstone to his former playfellers. 'Tantee ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... brought to my consideration, and I tell you again men are often in no condition to act wisely or well because the wear and tear of their life is greater after business hours than during them. Business maniac as Madge thinks me to be, little Jack is of more consequence than a transcontinental railway. I must face the music—the discord, rather—of Wall Street to-morrow. There is no use in protesting or coaxing; I must be there; but it's ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... carved by man; and the number of birds kept increasing. One can readily see how even the most skeptical man on the expedition should have felt sure by this time that the man whom he used to consider a mild maniac was in truth a very wise person. And perhaps the crew did feel it; but also they felt angry at those signs that mocked them day after day by never coming true. They grumbled; and the more the signs increased the more they grumbled; till finally one morning Columbus came on deck and found ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... from his pocket, he actually began to measure it! Miss Du Page saw no more. Hurriedly closing her door, she locked and bolted it, firmly convinced that Gabriel Lane was harboring in the guise of Uncle Sylvester a somnambulist, a maniac, or an impostor. ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... as if the young man had been the victim of a homicidal maniac, so brutal had been the way in which he had been assassinated. The head and body were battered and bruised by some heavy stick or poker, almost past human shape, as if the murderer had wished to wreak ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... yards when a yell echoed in the canyon. He turned again and saw Banker leaping and shrieking on the rock, waving hands to the heavens and carrying on like a maniac. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... musingly, "Saul, I am afraid she was only too right there; he disobeyed the commands of his master, and brought down on his head the vengeance of Heaven—he became a maniac, prophesied, and flung weapons ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... save myself from being turned into a gibbering maniac," said the Major, "by making sure that you'll never have the chance of composing music in my house again. Since eight o'clock this morning you've been at it. I could hear you whenever I went, mixing up hymns and waltzes and ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... Rowland's macassar, &c.; and were continuing to do so, when a fierce-looking demagogue, seeing how things were going, and what concessions were being made, roused himself angrily; and, to show us that he at least was no Anglo-maniac, shot at us a look fierce as any bonassus; while he asked, abruptly, what we thought in England of one whom he styled the "Demosthenes of Ireland"—looked at us for an answer. As it would have been unsafe to have answered him ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... on the bed with his head on his arm, or perhaps sitting astride a chair with his hands crossed on the back support, he would smile with childlike innocence and sent his barbs in gayly. And Irwin, murder in his dull brain, would glare at him like a maniac. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... persistent, more dangerous and at the same time more absurd and more logical, more slovenly and more methodical. All these epithets, M. de Lourtier, may be applied to the doings of the lady with the hatchet. The obsession of an idea and the continual repetition of an act are characteristics of the maniac. I do not yet know the idea by which the lady with the hatchet is obsessed but I do know the act that results from it; and it is always the same. The victim is bound with precisely similar ropes. She is killed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... have looked quite so well; but this was an irreparable misfortune. The passport was in the name of Signior Diego, steward of the noble house of Oropesa, who had a commission to bring back to Spain a sort of maniac, a bastard of the said house, whose mania was to believe himself regent of France. This was a precaution taken to meet anything that the Duc d'Orleans might call out from the bottom of the carriage; and, as the passport was according to rule, signed ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Thou art rich, and thou hast much cool store of wine. But the town thirsts, and every beat of our blood Hastens us on to maniac agony. The Assyrians have our wells, and half the tanks Are dry, and the pools shoal with baking mud: The water left to us is pestilent. And therefore have we asked the governors For death: and it is ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the dead man's boat. The two shadows rowed noiselessly together, and as they disappeared in the mist that was now settling on the landscape, an unearthly laugh rang over the lake; then all was still. When Nockawando reached the camp that night he was a raving maniac. The Indians never found the bodies of the pair, but they believed that while water remains in Pontoosuc its surface will be vexed by these journeys ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove 45 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 50 When France her front deep-scarred and gory Concealed with clustering ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the side of Belton's grave and saw the stiffened form of his dearest friend lowered to its last resting place, his grief was of a kind too galling for tears. He laughed a fearful, wicked laugh like unto that of a maniac, and said: "Float on proud flag, while yet you may. Rejoice, oh! ye Anglo-Saxons, yet a little while. Make my father ashamed to own me, his lawful son; call me a bastard child; look upon my pure mother as a harlot; laugh at Viola in the grave of a self-murderer; exhume Belton's body if you ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... delusions were always shaped by the bitterest experiences of his life. Sometimes he fancied that the Americans were pursuing him, or that they were carrying off Ramona, and he was pursuing them. At such times he would run with maniac swiftness for hours, till he fell exhausted on the ground, and slowly regained true consciousness by exhaustion. At other times he believed he owned vast flocks and herds; would enter any enclosure he saw, where there were sheep or cattle, go about among them, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... That do I, If Wentworth comes to rule her. I am sick To think her wretched masters, Hamilton, The muckworm Cottington, the maniac Laud, May yet be longed-for back again. I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace. Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose, that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... too well. She was not only housed with a murderer; she was housed with a maniac. She sensed, also, why he had come to this mountain shack so boldly. In his dementia he knew no better. And she was alone with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... more than wanting," the surgeon said, "you must have been just about crazy. A man's got to be nearly in the state of a maniac before he'll hurl himself against an iron door like that without thinking of the consequences to himself. You were out of your head with pain, Swift, the way it looks to me, you'd never have tried it in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... death as a maniac does. The river was a mile in width and teeming with crocodiles. But the same saving Providence that shields the adventurous child attended him. He clambered up the opposite bank and struck out for Memphis on a ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... a maniac as she poured this wild torrent upon him, and the man saw that she was in no mood to be reasoned with or to consider any subject; that it would be wiser to wait until the fierceness of her ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... features seemed worn thin and arid, as by passage through terrific peril,—as if he had been travelling for many days without sleep and without food, straining forward to a goal of safety, sick both in stomach and heart,—as if he had been rushing, like the maniac of the Gospel, through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. His hair, which should have been black, looked lustreless and bleached, and his skin seemed as if his blood had lost all colour and generosity, as if nothing ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... pleasing hostelries. Turner pursued his reckless career, till his money was gone, and then he returned to his gruesome den and proceeded to turn out artistic prodigies until the fit came upon him once more. Benvenuto Cellini was subject to similar paroxysms, during which he behaved like a maniac. Our own novelist Bulwer Lytton disappeared at times, and plunged into the wildest excesses among wretches whom he would have loathed when he was in his normal state of mind. He used to dress himself as a navvy, or as a sailor, and no one would ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... as a superior being who answered to other laws. He was not wholly surprised, for strange rumours were always blowing over the Alps of lands where men and women had the same amusements and interests, and he had often met that privileged maniac, the lady tourist, on her solitary walks. Lilia took solitary walks too, and only that week a tramp had grabbed at her watch—an episode which is supposed to be indigenous in Italy, though really less frequent there ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... beyond the town, while he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into a tunnel through a spur of the hills. Mary went sideways, like a crab, for the next three quarters of ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... execution. Madame d'Egmont, however, was not so sure that her secret was safe, and she lost not an instant in repairing to the house of M. de Sartines, to obtain from him a against the aspiring shopman, who, seized in the street, was conveyed away, and confined as a maniac in a madhouse, where, but for a circumstance you shall hear, he would doubtless be still. I happened to be with the king when the lieutenant of police arrived upon matters connected with his employment. ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... for hold your breath now, fellows, because to be honest with you there was a terrible tragedy, and after the poor young wife was buried the judge lived as much as ten years in an asylum. He had become a maniac, you see, from jealousy of ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... have been undiplomatic. But I have tried to surprise them into telling me. Unfortunately, these poor people are as cunning as any other kind of maniac, for, of course, it becomes a form of mania. They recognize that confession might lead to a stoppage of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... woman suspended this hideous object to a beam of the shed, then descended rapidly to the courtyard to contemplate it. A burst of sardonic laughter escaped from her lips; she remounted, then descended again like a maniac, and each time uttered new cries and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... he, woman? and what do you want?" asks the besieged man, as she continues to drag him along with a maniac's strength. ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... mad. The awful occurrences of the preceding night had deprived him of his reason, and he was now a raving maniac. ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... conscious that Rutton was standing as if listening, his eyes averted to the windows. But when Amber looked they showed, beneath their half-drawn muslin shades, naught save the grey horizontal rush of snow beyond the panes. And he heard nothing save the endless raving of the maniac wind. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... which Uncle Peter took me that Christmas-eve. As soon as, in despair of choosing well, I had made a desperate plunge at decision, my Uncle Peter, as if to forestall any supervention of repentance, began buying like a maniac, giving me everything that took his fancy or mine, till we and our toys nearly filled the cab which he called to ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... felt at seeing this child of sorrow relieved from her sufferings, and restored to liberty. I had seen this young and comely looking woman, who was endowed with more than common good sense, driven to the depths of despair by the intensity of her sufferings. I had seen her a raving maniac. Now, I saw her 'sitting and clothed in her right mind.' I was a thousand times more than compensated for all the pains I had taken. I had sympathized deeply with her sufferings, and I now partook largely ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... session, and I apprehend, in case of war, their session would have a tendency to become permanent. It is much, therefore, to be desired that war may be avoided, if circumstances will admit. Nor in the present maniac state of Europe, should I estimate the point of honor by the ordinary scale. I believe we shall, on the contrary, have credit with the world, for having made the avoidance of being engaged in the present unexampled war, our first object. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for a son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for a madhouse, talking to iron figures and taking them for real men! What have I done, O heaven, that I ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... things, and the street minstrels sing "He sports in the world. He sports in the soul."[434] He is supposed to dance in the Golden Hall of the temple at Chidambaram and something of the old legends of the Satarudriya hangs about such popular titles as the Deceiver and the Maniac (Kalvar) and the stories of his going about disguised and visiting his worshippers in the form of a mendicant. The idea of sport and playfulness is also prominent in Vishnuism. It is a striking feature in the cultus of both the infant and the youthful Krishna, but I have not ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... heard his boast that he was the reincarnated spirit of Porfias del Norte, whom he would avenge. The man talked like a maniac, for at the last moment he even asserted that he ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... people, dead, living, known or unknown. The malady yielded to leeches. {183} Examples of the first sort of apparitions taken by the judgment to be real, are common in madness, in the intemperate, and in ghost stories. The maniac believes in his visionary attendant or enemy, the drunkard in his rats and snakes, the ghost-seer often supposes that he has actually seen an acquaintance (where no mistaken identity is possible) and only learns later that the person,—dead, or alive ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... mornin' when the Hammer Ponds was froze almost a solid block. I reckon there's been nobody in that place since. The constable might send a man, and scrape it out, and accommodate you there. It's terrible dangerous havin' a maniac at large. Sammy Drewitt made a won'erful great noise, howlin' when the moon was nigh full, and folk as lived near couldn't sleep then. But he never knocked nobody on the head, as I've heard tell. I don't mind givin' you a cup o' tea, and some bread and butter, if you'll be quiet, and not break out ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... to claim his bride, and she was gone,' said Glastonbury; 'his mind sunk under the terrible bereavement. For weeks he was a maniac; and, though Providence spared him again to us, and his mind, thanks to God, is again whole, he is the victim of a profound melancholy, that seems to defy alike medical ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... these records, so eccentric the vagaries of the soul during its nocturnal wanderings, that I was induced to abandon the task, lest some friend hereafter, might examine, the mystic scroll, and conclude that it was written by a maniac. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... place much stock in Professor Cortoran's theory, though I admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to believe that the object of his greatest affection is descended from a gibbering idiot and a raving maniac. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... parallels between the past and the present she might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn't, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... signers we find the name of the Archbishop of Dublin, who, while in England, narrowly escaped martyrdom from the hands of a maniac, while celebrating Mass at the tomb of St. Thomas. Four years afterwards, this celebrated ecclesiastic attended at Rome, with Catholicus of Tuam, and the Prelates of Lismore, Limerick, Waterford, and Killaloe, the third general council of Lateran, where they were received with all honour by Pope ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... instances reported in which the period of abstinence has varied from a short time to endurance beyond the bounds of credulity. Hufeland mentions total abstinence from food for seventeen days, and there is a contemporary case of abstinence for forty days in a maniac who subsisted solely on water and tobacco. Bolsot speaks of abstinence for fourteen months, and Consbruch mentions a girl who fasted eighteen months. Muller mentions an old man of forty-five who lived six ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... peculiar set of the Young Electrician's jaw warned you quite definitely that if you should ever even so much as hint the small, sentimental word "lure" to him he would most certainly "swat" you on first impulse for a maniac, and on second impulse for a liar—smiling at you all the while in the strange little wrinkly ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... no long continuance. I soon perceived that it was impossible for a maniac to be suffered to proceed to so horrid extremities. I perceived in every thing that related to the count, a spirit very different from that of frenzy. It is thus that I have plunged from uncertainty to uncertainty. From adopting a solution wild and ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... old showman once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in The School for Scandal. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all sorts and varieties of parts. Forrest was the first of the prominent actors to break ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that image that no two men are alike. The stars show forth God's handy work, yet 'one star different from another star in glory' (1 Cor 15:41). Uniformity is opposed to every law of nature, for no two leaves upon a majestic tree are alike. Who but an idiot or a maniac would attempt to reduce the mental powers of all men to uniformity? Every church may have its own order of public worship while the Scriptures form the standard of truth and morals. Where differences of opinion occur, as they most certainly will, as to the observance ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... some theory to account for a maniac on a deserted schooner in these desolate seas. No doubt if a solitary man were left in these terrible painted seas he would go insane. Madden regretted that he had not searched the Minnie B more thoroughly when he ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... father, musingly, "Saul, I am afraid she was only too right there; he disobeyed the commands of his master, and brought down on his head the vengeance of Heaven—he became a maniac, prophesied, and flung ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;" that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor old woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed to shrink from her words as from blows;" that ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... simple,'t is rather an Encyclopaedia torn into a million million fragments by kittens and pasted together again by infants, so that all possible things are inextricably interfused, every one with every other; 't is a Bradshaw edited by a maniac, where the trains that start but don't arrive are not even distinguished from the trains that arrive but don't start. Wherever persons are conscious of the infinite complexities of things, they will be found cautious of creed and timid of assertion. You have probably noted that at ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Moore, as we reached the inn and ordered a trap to carry our valuable bargain home in—"I wonder what on earth made Isaacs run off like a maniac." ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings. Madge and Mimsey ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... awful shadow of a great man's death Falls on this land, so sad and dark before— Dark with the famine and the fever breath, And mad dissensions knawing at its core. Oh! let us hush foul discord's maniac roar, And make a mournful truce, however brief, Like hostile armies when the day is o'er! And thus devote the night-time of our grief To tears and prayers for him, the great ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... himself round at that. "Your mother must have given you a strange idea of me!" he said, with a mixture of anger and mortification which it humiliated him to show, even while he could not manage to hide it. "One would have said I was an ogre—a maniac. But she misjudged me all her life—it is useless to expect anything else—of course she would try to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... her nothing; all these books seemed to her to hold a policy of despair that indicated lunacy or suicide as Louis's only possible end. E.F. Benson's "House of Defence" was the most hopeful book she read. In the tormented morphia-maniac she saw Louis vividly. But she knew that he was too innately untrustful, unloving, to be saved by an act of faith. She had put that book down an hour ago, and turned again to the real pessimism of Zola, longing for the cool of the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... me someding to murter him mit!" shrieked Hans, like a maniac. "Gif me a gun! I vill shot him on der spot, or somevere near id! ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... in the East begins chronologically with Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar's wife) sung by Jami (nat. A.H. 8171414); the next in date is Khusraw and Shirin (also by Nizami); Farhad and Shirin; and Layla and Majnun (the Night-black maid and the Maniac-man) are the last. We are obliged to compare the lovers with "Romeo and Juliet," having no corresponding instances in modern days: the classics of Europe supply a host as Hero and Leander, Theagenes and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Vandrift!" the rogue cried. "No, no, sir, you are a madman!" He looked round at the police. "Take care what you do!" he cried. "This is a raving maniac. I had business just now with Sir Charles Vandrift, who quitted the room as these gentlemen entered. This person is mad, and you, monsieur, I doubt not," bowing to me, "you ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... all, and take that maniac with you," he stormed. "Not a word; I don't care if Rose has murdered all Long Island, he's some use now. Clear out and leave this room ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... ire is a great impediment and whose favour is productive of mighty fruits? No one should move his lips, arms and thighs, before the king. A person should speak and spit before the king only mildly. In the presence of even laughable objects, a man should not break out into loud laughter, like a maniac; nor should one show (unreasonable) gravity by containing himself, to the utmost. One should smile modestly, to show his interest (in what is before him). He that is ever mindful of the king's welfare, and is neither exhilarated by reward nor depressed by disgrace, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that time, seemed almost the raving of a mad man. This is the view the chief took of it, and he decided to conciliate the maniac. ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "life," never describing with real skill, so as to interest anything which would make life worth living for—except love—which is good to a certain extent, but not absolutely all in all, save to the eroto-maniac. And as most novelists now pretend to instruct and convey ideas, beyond mere story-telling, or even being "interesting," which means the love or detective business, I would suggest to some of these writers that the marvelous latent powers of the human mind, and also some ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... night.) The Moslem deprecates the deed, Cuts off the head that holds the creed, Then reverently goes to grass, Muttering thanks to Balaam's Ass For faith and learning to refute Idolatry so dissolute! But should a maniac dash past, With straws in beard and hands upcast, To him (through whom, whene'er inclined To preach a bit to Madmankind, The Holy Prophet speaks his mind) Our True Believer lifts his eyes Devoutly and his prayer applies; But next to Solyman the Great Reveres the idiot's ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Jerry began her story, which she told rapidly in German, he became excited at once, and his manner was that of a maniac, as he turned fiercely upon Tom, denouncing him as a coward and a liar, and threatening to turn him out of the house if he dared harbor such a ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and for this reason is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... table, filling the mouth with bread and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman, returning and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac, and for some time secreted herself from all living society. Some remaining instinctive feeling brought her at length to steal a glance from a distance at the maidens while they milked the cows, which being observed, her husband, Ardvoirlich, had her ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... guileless? Could you be the Mentor to this Telemachus? Think of the temptations of a metropolis. Look at the question well, and let me know speedily; for I've got him as far as this place, and he's kicking up an awful row in the hotel-yard, and rattling his chain like a maniac. Let me know by ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... head. Everything was about as far from all right as it well could be. The cook was a violent maniac who required peas to be picked so young that they weren't worth the picking. Tomes and his footman were a band of malicious pirates who took pleasure in cutting for the table the very buds which ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... medico-psychologiques, December, 1876), holds that every kind of mental disease has its own form of imagination that expresses itself in stories, compositions, sketches, decorations, dress, and symbolic attributes. The maniac invents complicated and improbable designs; the persecuted, symbolic designs, strange writings, bordering on the horrible; megalomaniacs look for the effect of everything they say and do; the general paralytic lives in grandeur and attributes ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... sister, for there is certainly a resemblance to himself in it. The picture is set in gold. When Robin first discovered it, the agony of the stricken wretch was most deplorable. He was afraid that the man would remove it, and he screamed and implored like a true maniac. When he found that he might keep it, he evinced the maddest pleasure, and beckoned his keeper to notice and admire it. He pointed to the eyes, and then groaned and wept himself; until Robin was frightened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... cheer of a couple of student-lamps. So it was warm and snug within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within, though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit with Hartford gas. Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... therefore had in old Davidson, the landlord of the Inn, and my companions submitted him to an interrogatory of three long hours' duration. One little anecdote of fresh occurrence struck me as possessing some interest. I will record it. About a month before, a poor maniac presented herself at the gates of Abbotsford. She desired to see Sir Walter. The servant denied her admittance, but such was the earnestness of the poor creature, that auld Saunders, on her pressing application, went and informed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... a father—was he not ashamed of himself to see the results of his own cold-blooded theories? Was this the glory of art? Was this the reward of the sacrifice of a life? That a sensitive girl should be publicly insulted by a tipsy maniac, and jeered at by a brutal crowd? Macleod laid down the letter for a minute or two, and the look on his face was not lovely ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... be mine through all time and all eternity; nothing shall tear you from my arms, not even your own wish, your own prayers. Oh, Amelia! do you see that I am a madman, insane from rapture and despair! Should you not flee from a maniac? Perhaps his arm, imbued with giant strength, seeking to hold you ever to his heart, might crush you. Fly, then; spurn me from you; go to your room; go, and say to this mocking courtier, to whom nothing is holy, not even our love, who is surprised, at nothing—go and say to him: ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... any drab of the streets!" bellowed old Anthony. "He never cared for you. He married you to revenge himself on me. He sent you back here for the same reason. He'll take your child, and break its spirit and ruin its body, for the same reason. The man's a maniac." ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot. But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... I am a maniac. I have for some years been the victim of a peculiar insanity, which has greatly distressed several of my friends and relatives. They generally soften it in their talk by the name monomania; but they do not hesitate to aver, when speaking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... of his heart Crushed also to the sod?" "The nun who saw their lot and part Died maniac, ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... and fashion of Montreal, and since that time Lillian had been the acknowledged belle of the set commonly known as "the upper ten." The letter being written in rather extravagant terms, he imagined it to contain the incoherent ravings of a maniac, and his first impulse was to toss it aside. On the arrival of the English mail, however, he received letters from his friends, couched in terms of the deepest anxiety, urging him to sever all connection with the D'Alton family if ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... looked about him, with a smile so haggard, that the anxious governess unconsciously drew nigher to her pupil, like one who sought, and was willing to yield, protection against the uncertain designs of a maniac. Her visiter, however, remained in a silence so long and deep, that she felt the necessity of removing the awkward embarrassment of their ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... outside got alarmed. Robbie made an attempt to pull up, and then with an odd smile took his whip, gathered up his reins, and lashed the entire four into a gallop. If we had not seen his face we would have thought him a maniac; he kept them well together, and shot down like an arrow, as far as we could see to certain destruction. Right in front at the turn was a stout gate into a field, shut; he drove them straight at that, and through we went, the gate broken into shivers, and we finding ourselves ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who snores, or keeps cats, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... her up, sir! She's in my pantry," continued the butler, ruefully. "We've got her in there because there are bars to the windows—she can't get out of that. A terrible time we had, too, sir—she fought us like—like a maniac, protesting all the time that Mrs. Mallathorpe had given her what she had on her. Of course, sir, we don't know what she may have on her—we simply ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... with his booty, and cheat his son with the rest. On his putting a smooth inquiry to Alfred, his face flushed with shame or anger, and he gave a very short, obscure reply. So he invited the doctor to dinner, and elicited the information that David's life indeed was saved, but he was a maniac; and his sister, a sensible, resolute woman, had signed the certificate, and he was now in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... house, to delay but for a few hours that marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... I had spoken at the Queen's Hall meeting I had been quite self-possessed. I pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. I was about to continue, when a red brick suddenly landed neatly on my breakfast table, and raised the number of articles ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... for barricading and set to work, despite numbed and weary muscles. Walking on the Moon is tiring for muscles acquired on worlds of greater gravity. He was near exhaustion, but the stimulus of fear is strong. He worked like a maniac, hauling materials for blockade, carrying the smaller ingredients and rolling or dragging the heavier. A brief interval of rest brought Darbor to his side. She worked with him and helped with the heavier items. Fortunately, the faint gravity eased ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... wheeled again; he had caught the cavalry, that rode to meet him, unawares. They were not yet certain whether he was friend or foe, and they were milling in a bunch, shouting orders to one another. He, spurring like a maniac, was heading straight for the searching party, who had formed to cut him off. He seemed to have thrown his heart over Alwa's iron gate and to be thundering on hell's own horse ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... make a few remarks founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... not true," thundered Mr. Wilberfloss, hopping to avoid a perambulating cat. "Nothing will convince me of it. Mr. Benjamin White is not a maniac." ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... when again there came that fearful yell, sounding like what I could conceive to be the horrible laughter of a maniac. ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... sight as if the young man had been the victim of a homicidal maniac, so brutal had been the way in which he had been assassinated. The head and body were battered and bruised by some heavy stick or poker, almost past human shape, as if the murderer had wished to wreak some awful vengeance ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... rushed pell-mell for the camels. At once these men of a martial tribe, men who had cheerfully faced the far greater danger of the Hadendowa general attack, became untrammeled savages, each striving like a maniac to secure a mount for himself, and careless whether or not his employers and ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... out of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, overturning, crashing—annihilating ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... hour I had staggered to my feet again, shivering in every limb, my teeth chattering, and there I stood staring with the eyes of a maniac ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am. . . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but, then, I, too, love him in spite ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... surprising it had happened to him. Things like that were bound to happen to him. He had just been lucky that Ed Michaels hadn't called the sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniac before! But still ... it was ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... to do it? Had he deteriorated to such a depth of villainy? Could he let that noblest and finest flower of womanhood marry a—dangerous lunatic, a homicidal maniac who had nearly killed the man who proved to be almost his greatest benefactor? Could he? Would the noble-hearted Decies frankly say that he was normal and had a right to marry? He would not, and no living man was better qualified to give an opinion on ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... which tale he listened, his searching eye fixing its stare plump upon me, from time to time; but when I had done, he rang the bell for his clerk, and I could see that he felt himself in the company of a maniac. So I left him, and breathed the breath of liberty again as I went back to the hotel, and told Roderick of the utter and crushing failure waiting upon the very beginning of the task which Martin Hall had left ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... spite of the pressing need of better transportation for coal, cotton, merchandise, and passengers, the bill failed. Such was the blindness, and ignorance, and prejudice of the House of Commons! Think of calling George Stephenson "an ignoramus, a fool, a maniac," in Parliament, yet ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... have taken me for some other person. I will no longer listen to one who is either a maniac ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... remembered being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... weepest for the Maniac's woe, And thou art fair, and thou, like me, art young; Oh! may thy bosom never, never know The pangs with which my wretched heart is wrung. I had a mother once—a brother too— (Beneath yon yew my father rests his head:) I had a lover once, and kind ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... one another as they sought their houses: "What a powerful witch she must be, to calm down that maniac with one word." While others replied, "But he is possessed with a devil; and she does it because her ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... into the butler's room. The butler seemed at that moment to have been smitten with a fit of apoplexy—we could see him from our dark corner;—he grew purple in the face, gasped once or twice, choked awfully, and then sat up in bed staring like a maniac. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in whose charge she had travelled, with a proper escort, looked upon her as a lovely maniac; and the mixture of pity and admiration wherewith he regarded her, was a strange thing to observe; especially after he had seen our simple house and manners. On the other hand, Lorna considered him a worthy but foolish old gentleman; to whom true happiness meant ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... greater ills." Thus lamenting, the crowned consort of the illustrious (king) began to seek her lord in those woods, inhabited by beasts of prey. And the daughter of Bhima, wailing bitterly, wandered hither and thither like a maniac, exclaiming, "Alas! Alas! Oh king!" And as she was wailing loudly like a female osprey, and grieving and indulging in piteous lamentations unceasingly, she came near a gigantic serpent. And that huge and hungry serpent thereupon suddenly seized Bhima's daughter, who had come near and was moving ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... frowning when he replied: "You don't see the point involved. I can't reward Judson for what you, yourself, admit was a personal service. I have said that no drunkard shall pull a train on this division. Judson is no less a drink-maniac for the fact that he arrested Rufford when everybody ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... supported me, but here it failed. Was this person an assassin, who was acquainted with the windings of the grotto, and who would take advantage of the dark to execute his vengeance upon me, who had dared to pursue him to these forlorn retreats? or was he maniac, or walker in his sleep? Whichever supposition were true, it would be rash in me to follow him. Besides, he could not long remain in these darksome recesses, unless some fatal ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... boatswain, spurning him with his foot. "I have you where I swore I'd bring you. And, remember, 'tis I that laid you low—I—I—" He shrieked like a maniac. "When you suffer in that living death for which they design you, remember with every lingering breath of anguish that it was I who brought you there! You trifled with me—mocked me—betrayed me. You denied my request. I grovelled at your feet and begged you—you spurned me as I do you ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... which this book affords the theme is in the singular collocation of characters,—the hero being wrongfully imprisoned as insane, the heroine's father really made so by medical malpractice, the hero's sister dying of injuries received from another maniac, his uncle being imbecile, and his father and one of his physicians becoming monomaniac. Nicer shades than these allow could not be drawn, and the subject stands in bold relief as a monument ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on. Isabel Sawtelle married a miserable aristocrat, who recently died of delirium tremens. Her father failed, and is now a raving maniac, and wants to bite little children. All her brothers (except one) were sent to the penitentiary for burglary, and her mother peddles clams that are stolen for her by little George, her only son that ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... indeed she will not believe me; and I likewise know that now it must be open war between us. For do not think that I will suffer myself to be thus shamefully beaten out of the field. No, by Lucifer and his Tophet! I will die a foaming maniac, fettered in straw, ere that shall happen! If not by persuasion, she shall be mine by chicanery, or even by force. I will perish, Fairfax, sooner ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... where art thou, dearest?" Thus I cry, while yet afar; Ah! what scent invades my nostrils?— 'Tis the smoke of a cigar! Instantly into the parlour Like a maniac, I haste, And I find a young Life-Guardsman, With his ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... expect a summons to death and public shame, to find—Bunning. Bunning—that soft, blithering, emotional, religious, middle-class maniac—Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most entertainment. The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come up to Saul's ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for a bit ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... on saying to himself: No. Women do not love like that. And yet the bare idea of it turned Stanistreet, the cool, the collected, into a trembling maniac. He could not face the possibility of losing her, of being nothing to her. But for that he might have been content to go on drifting indefinitely, sure of a sort of visionary eternity, taking no count of time. He had been ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... the doctor, while we listened with a breathless interest, "he wasn't exactly a maniac, but I think I can safely ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the cortege of assassins; he is frightened, and hurries on. He soon goes up again, armed with a large hatchet—that found on the second story—and makes the pieces of wood fly about him. He goes about like a maniac, rips up the furniture at hazard; but he pursues a desperate search, the traces of which I have followed, among the debris. Nothing, always nothing! Everything in the room is topsy-turvy; he goes into his cabinet and continues the destruction; the hatchet rises and falls without rest. He ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... on a gray streak of a car, driven by a maniac with a scarf blowing back from a turban over two wildly ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... suffering can wash out sins, I washed out mine. I, who thought I had so many enemies, have no enemy. No one has ever injured me. But if I had the cruellest in the world, I would not condemn him, if he were a morphia maniac, to sudden enforced abstinence and prison life. And I could not die. I am very strong by nature. I could neither die nor live. It was months before I saw light, months of hell, consumed in the flame of hell which is thirst. And slowly the power to live came back to me. I was saved in ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... something of the kind, drew and levelled his revolver, but before he could fire Charlie had caught the uplifted arm, wrested the knife from the man, and thrust him violently back. Thus foiled Jim sprang up again and with a maniac's yell leaped into the sea, and ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... kind words could His mad resolve o'erturn; He plunged into the foaming flood, But never cross'd the burn! And now though ten long years have pass'd Since that wild storm blew by— Oh! still the maniac hears the blast, And still her crazy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... her sufferings, and restored to liberty. I had seen this young and comely looking woman, who was endowed with more than common good sense, driven to the depths of despair by the intensity of her sufferings. I had seen her a raving maniac. Now, I saw her 'sitting and clothed in her right mind.' I was a thousand times more than compensated for all the pains I had taken. I had sympathized deeply with her sufferings, and I now partook largely of ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the Court of Versailles, on the Regency, on the French Revolution, he showed even more virulence than in conducting the impeachment. Indeed, it may be remarked that the very persons who called him a mischievous maniac, for condemning in burning words the Rohilla war and the spoliation of the Begums, exalted him into a prophet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater vehemence, and not with greater reason, against the taking of the Bastile and the insults ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... clinging snow off his clothes. He shook himself like a dog after a plunge into water. In the distance he saw the hotel, with its promise of luxury and forgetfulness. And he cursed Stampa with a bitter fury of emphasis, trying vainly to persuade himself that he had been the victim of a maniac's delusion. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... chemical tubes? Over the top of the flesh-mountain was a big metal object, a shining concave dome with which all the tubes connected; so that a stranger to the procedure could not have felt sure whether the mountain was holding up the dome, or was dangling from it. A piece of symbolism done by a maniac artist, whose meaning no ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... he, on this day, came leaning on his staff and with considerable strain, as far as the street for a little relaxation, he suddenly caught sight, approaching from the off side, of a Taoist priest with a crippled foot; his maniac appearance so repulsive, his shoes of straw, his dress all in tatters, muttering several sentiments ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... his sisters, named Lucy, whom he had most loved when well, had now power to soothe him. He would listen to her voice, and give way to a milder mood when she talked or sang. But this favorite sister married, went to her new home, and the maniac became wilder, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... intentionally. Coutlass sprang from behind him, having crawled out through a shadow, and hit him so hard with a stone on the back of the skull that he loosed off the rifle and pitched head-foremost down among us. The Greek promptly jumped on top of him with a yell like a maniac's, failing to land with both heels on his backbone by nothing but luck. As it was, he lost balance and sat down so hard on Schillingschen's head that there was no need of the energy with which we all followed suit, piling all over him to pin him ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was struggling like a maniac between two officers, who were trying to snap a pair of handcuffs ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... justices in Sussex), I shall never forget the way that valet turned on poor Kennaway (for that was the detective's name) and laid him flat on the grass. Such a snarl of rage I never heard. The man seemed transformed in an instant from a silent, reserved, taciturn servant to a very maniac, fighting with teeth and claw, cursing and swearing horribly, and ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... necessary to search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her good ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... butler and two footmen, who had been alarmed by the cries, rushed into the room. With their aid we had no further difficulty in securing our prisoner, who lay foaming and glaring upon the ground. One glance at his face was enough to prove that he was a dangerous maniac, while the short, heavy hammer which lay beside the bed showed how murderous had ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 'twas very clear we drank only ginger-beer, Faith, there must ha' been some stingo in the ginger." Come back, you maniac. I'm going to take you home, and you're going to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... at me with that expressionless look upon his face which he could summon at will, and which is at the bottom of the superstition about his iron nerve. 'I was worried, and not well. Besides, one doesn't care to be burgled, even by a maniac.' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... with joy. She was free now to give way to her transports without being observed. She traversed her chamber with the excitement of a furious maniac or of a tigress shut up in an iron cage. CERTES, if the knife had been left in her power, she would now have thought, not of killing herself, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... working with it, as a small portion introduced into a scratch acts like morbid matter in dissection wounds. The agony is so great that the person cuts himself, calls for his mother's breast as if he were returned in idea to his childhood again, or flies from human habitations a raging maniac. The effects on the lion are equally terrible. He is heard moaning in distress, and becomes furious, biting the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... you can do no better. But even for their sakes, even for the love of them, my friend, resist their crimes when you can. No man will stand by and see a maniac murder his wife and children. It will be better for the poor maddened wretch himself to prevent him; don't you ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... was present, came forward and endeavoured to prepare her for the awful deed which was about to be done upon her, and for the state into which she was about to enter, when she came to herself it was only to scream like a maniac, to curse the Duke as a butcher and tyrant, and to call upon Magny, her ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a man. Even under the circumstances, it could be nothing else, but of a man who had taken leave of his senses. It was the wild cry of a maniac! ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... his first marriage, Dr. McAlister had bought the place, going far out of the town for the purpose. At that time, he was regarded as little short of a maniac, to prefer land on the ridge to the smooth, conventional little lawns of the middle of the town, where one house was so like another that the inhabitants might have followed the example of the Mad Tea Party and moved up a place, ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... thousands own, Shall thy brows wear the stoic frown? 45 And when her goblet she extends Which maddening myriads press around, What power divine thy soul befriends That thou should'st dash it to the ground?— No, thou shalt drink, and thou shalt know 50 Her transient bliss, her lasting woe, Her maniac joys, that know no measure, And Riot rude and painted Pleasure;— Till (sad reverse!) the Enchantress vile To frowns converts her magic smile; 55 Her train impatient to destroy, Observe her frown with gloomy joy; On thee with harpy fangs they seize The hideous offspring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... strictures were not really important. In marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple of dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and a violence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angry pedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton when examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "never having consulted ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... him how poor a creature he had become. And now, after a night of wakefulness and delirium, Brian, with his brain still wild and disordered, perhaps, had taken the boy out with him on some indefinite excursion—alone—the helpless child in the power of a maniac! ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... have appeared, and she is almost frantic with terror. Last night, at 12 o'clock, I was going the rounds of the sick wards, and found her wringing her hands, and running up and down the cell like a maniac. I tried to quiet and encourage her, but she paid no more attention than if stone deaf; and when I started to leave her, she seized my arm, and begged me to ask you to come and stay with her. She thinks ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and their allies have camped hard by our ships and by the wall; they have lit watchfires throughout their host and deem that nothing can now prevent them from falling on our fleet. Jove, moreover, has sent his lightnings on their right; Hector, in all his glory, rages like a maniac; confident that Jove is with him he fears neither god nor man, but is gone raving mad, and prays for the approach of day. He vows that he will hew the high sterns of our ships in pieces, set fire to their hulls, and make havoc of the Achaeans while ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... view of the maniac coincides with Leigh Hunt's. I agree with them that the character is shocking, but I know that it is but too natural. There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Morton had no difficulty in recognising several of those zealots who had most distinguished themselves by their intemperate opposition to all moderate measures, together with their noted pastor, the fanatical Ephraim Macbriar, and the maniac, Habakkuk Mucklewrath. The Cameronians neither stirred tongue nor hand to welcome their brethren in misfortune, but continued to listen to the low murmured exercise of Macbriar, as he prayed that the Almighty would lift up his hand from his people, and not make an end in the day of his anger. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... while quietly carving the meat at a dinner to which he had invited several guests, a gentleman opposite him inadvertently spoke the fatal words, when, without a word of warning, he sprang at him across the table, using the carving-knife with all the fury of the most violent maniac; and yet, under all other conditions, he ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... rage, allays the grief or rage. He went about with an aspect of calm insouciance, and therefore with a feeling of calm and ease within. Yet he was like one who walks with a madman, knowing that if his own courage should for one instant seem to waver, the maniac will be upon him. In his journey to town he had been alone, and between one station and another he had opened his portmanteau and taken therefrom a small breech-loading revolver and a stiletto. He laid his hand upon these now and again, and ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... with you. It doesn't make any difference whether he is right or not, but Adrian Brownwell may be fooled into thinking he has reason to be jealous of me." Hendricks was biting his mustache. "He's a raging maniac of jealousy, Jake, but I'm not afraid of him—not for myself. I can get him before he gets me, if it comes to that, but to do it I'll have to sacrifice Molly. And I won't do that. If it comes to her good name or my life—she can have ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness; madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... France in paving the way for the revolution. The purest type of Epicureanism may have refined a few of the better sort, but the prevailing influence, doubtless, undermined society. The god of the reason was allied with the god of the sense, and the maniac soul of the lying prophet entered the schools. Education, as directed by them, served only to make youth worldly and frivolous. Teachers sought to amuse and not to instruct, to make royal roads to knowledge, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library you call him mad—a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... snatched up the official letter, cast his eyes over it, and then, forgetting his gout, caught hold of Syd's hands and began to caper about the room like a maniac. ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... he whirled like a maniac upon his little coterie of followers. "Vile traitor!" he shrieked, "I ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... them) to restrain, And give a wicked pleasure to the vain; Thy long, lean frame by fashion to attire, That lads may laugh and wantons may admire; To raise the mirth of boys, and not to see, Unhappy maniac! that they laugh at thee "These boyish follies, which alone the boy Can idly act, or gracefully enjoy, Add new reproaches to thy fallen state, And make men scorn what they would only hate. "What pains, my brother, dost thou take to prove A taste for follies which thou canst not love! ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... what mischief had been done during the night, aroused him. He glanced upon his enemy, who pale and trembling, stood gazing on the wreck that he had made. Revenge at last was in his hands—not a moment was to be lost—with the yell of a maniac he sprang upon the powerless and conscious-stricken man—seized him in his arms rushed to the river—and ere any could interpose, both had found a grave where but a few minutes before the bodies of Mary ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... examining the wall of the passage. Presently, drawing out a footrule from his pocket, he actually began to measure it! Miss Du Page saw no more. Hurriedly closing her door, she locked and bolted it, firmly convinced that Gabriel Lane was harboring in the guise of Uncle Sylvester a somnambulist, a maniac, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... side of Belton's grave and saw the stiffened form of his dearest friend lowered to its last resting place, his grief was of a kind too galling for tears. He laughed a fearful, wicked laugh like unto that of a maniac, and said: "Float on proud flag, while yet you may. Rejoice, oh! ye Anglo-Saxons, yet a little while. Make my father ashamed to own me, his lawful son; call me a bastard child; look upon my pure mother as a harlot; laugh at Viola ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... licentiousness of the most debased and debasing character, burying their infirm and aged parents alive, desertion of the sick, revolting cruelties to the unfortunate maniac, cannibalism and drunkenness, form a list of some of the traits in social life among the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... grates upon the shingly strand, their ears are saluted by a chorus of cries—the alarm signal of seabirds, startled by the intrusion; among them the scream of the harpy eagle, resembling the laugh of a maniac. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... could do anything for him. Then he found he was praying: he heard him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up on the long yellow sand from the wide sea darkening ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... [1] relates the sad story of a farmer of Pavia, who, as a wolf, fell upon many men in the open country and tore them to pieces. After much trouble the maniac was caught, and he then assured his captors that the only difference which existed between himself and a natural wolf, was that in a true wolf the hair grew outward, whilst in him it struck inward. In order to put this assertion to the proof, the magistrates, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... after me to that home in the Rue de Balzac, which is to be the subject of more lawsuits between the man who let it to me and the man who wouldn't let me have possession, than any other house that ever was built. But I have had no letters at all, and have been—ha, ha!—a maniac since last Monday. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... women; you have heard the unprotected and unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... Minion, or I'll give you the Maniac Bride, with my best Ha-ha!' cried Josie, glaring at him like an offended kitten. Being set on her feet, she made a splendid courtesy, and dramatically proclaiming, 'Mrs Woffington's carriage waits,' swept down the steps ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... room for the exhibition of tender, sensitive, apprehensive, scarcely suffering beauty, and set off by contrasts not too strong; so that nothing impedes the mind in, or draws it off from, the contemplation of the madman—here more than madman, the maniac made inspired by the belief of the spectator in denunciations which appear verifying themselves visibly before him. It is this feeling which makes the crazed one grand, heroic, and which constitutes this picture an historical work of a high class. It is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... tired and exhausted, nature would have her due. Joe became merely a driveling maniac, urged along by an insane desire to make progress. At times he would wander round and round, but eventually he would head on straight again. It was late that night that Joe saw far ahead a welcome light. This spurred him on and for about half a mile he almost ran. This spurt ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... several acts of frightfulness on Ben with his crutch, seeming quite active for a cripple. Ben finally got out of range and went and had some stitches took in his own scalp. He swore, by doggie, he was through with that maniac forever! But he wasn't ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... fixed his gaze on something that stood just above—something which the dusk half concealed, and by so doing made more impressive. It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. Above this hideous effigy was carved the legend: 'MIDDLESEX HOUSE ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... smiled, frankly pleased. "Not that I'm a bit of an Anglo-maniac," she hastened to affirm, "but, do you know," she leaned toward Danvers in an amusingly confidential way, "I've always felt mortified over my throaty voice—that is, I ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... grasped in his vise-like hands. His hatless head was thrust far out, as though it strove to get to Beulah Sands ahead of his body. His teeth were set, and as I had jumped into the machine I had noted that his eyes were those of a maniac, who saw sanity just ahead if he could but get to it in time. His ears were deaf not only to the howl of the terrified throng and the curses of the teamsters who frantically pulled their horses to the curb, but to my warnings as well. He swung the machine around ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... gentle voice—"I wonder, Talbot, if you had that look when you placed yourself in front of me and faced their levelled rifles. If so, Talbot, lad, I don't wonder that the soldiers paused; for they say that the calm eye of man can tame the wild beast or the fury of the maniac; and so your eyes tamed the madness of these fierce ruffians. Was your look then, Talbot, as calm and as firm as it ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into a tunnel through a spur of the hills. Mary went sideways, like a crab, for the next three ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the wildness of a maniac. "No, no; as far from him as possible! Oh! not with him! She was to blame in our days of splendour as much as he was; but she could not see it; and I durst not reason with her. Not with him! She would disturb him in ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... February 1829, Jonathan Martin, a brother of the apocalyptic painter, John Martin, and a religious maniac, hid himself during evening service behind the tomb of Archbishop Greenfield in the north transept, and when the church was shut up for the night set fire to the choir. The flames were not extinguished until the stalls, ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... Mrs. Judson was prostrated by sickness soon after her return to Ava. Reason fled away; insanity took the place of calm and deliberate action; and for seventeen days she was a raving maniac. Absent from her husband, and dependent on the cold mercy of heathen women, she was indeed an object of pity. But from the borders of the grave she was raised up when all around thought her beyond the reach of hope. The hand ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... me and, as I followed him with some eagerness, he ran, only to accelerate his speed when he found he was being pursued. I became more and more convinced that he had recognised me, because he always looked back anxiously when he reached a corner; but seeing that I was hunting him like a maniac, he started off again each time with renewed energy. Thus I followed him through a labyrinth of streets, hardly distinguishable in the thick mist, until I eventually lost sight of him altogether, never to see him again. It was near the church ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... every pretension of the afflicted children to preternatural experiences and communications, and every tale of apparitions of departed spirits and the ghosts of murdered men, women, and children, which, engendered in morbid and maniac imaginations, had been employed to fill him and others with horror, inspire revenge, and drive on the general delirium. And it fortified every point by the law and the testimony, by passages and scraps of Scripture, studiously and skilfully culled out, and ingeniously applied. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Furthermore he could perceive no links connecting the three, and no reason why they should have engaged the attention of a common enemy. Such crimes would seem to be purposeless. Assuming that "The Scorpion" was an individual, that individual apparently was a dangerous homicidal maniac. ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how the simple words carried ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... answered fiercely, and ran madly from the room, along the gallery and down the stairs, shouting and raging like a maniac, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... swore, and wept and prayed, With maniac laughter joined; How fearful were these signs displayed By pangs that ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... of Buchan, where the sea has forced its way through the solid rock, leaving an arch of triumph to commemorate the passage, and formed a huge round pot where its waters, in the time of storm, rage and fret and foam like a newly imprisoned maniac—a pot which Dr Johnson proposes to substitute for the Red Sea, in ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... not allude to the amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... to have peace? While on Friday we recorded the pretensions of a maniac to the great throne of France; while on Saturday we were compelled to register the culpable attempts of one whom we regard as a ruffian, murderer, swindler, forger, burglar, and common pickpocket, to gain over the allegiance of Frenchmen—it is to-day our painful duty to announce ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... as though he would raise them no more on earth. But he starts, for he hears a loud shriek, a rushing, and an opening of the crowd: they seem to be awed by something that approaches. It is a woman, whoso violent gestures defy opposition; she looks like a maniac just escaped from her keepers; she has reached Hyppolito; his fettered arms move as if they would receive her, but in vain. She turns to the crowd, and some among them recognise the modest and beautiful daughter of Bardi. She calls out: 'He is innocent ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear, for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful condition, I should have become a maniac. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... few hours that marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the sound of ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... were much alarmed by this unexpected occurrence. They doubted not that the foul fiend was before them, bodily, in the form of this poor maniac. After a short interval of silence, he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... LIZZIE:—I am writing this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn't, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot round, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a gray streak of a car, driven by a maniac with a scarf blowing back from a turban over two ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... trouble from tongues that hardly can frame the words that must tell the dreadful truth. Ivan only understands that something is wrong. His one thought is for Anethe; he flies to Ingebertsen's cottage, she may be there; he rushes in like a maniac, crying, "Anethe, Anethe! Where is Anethe?" and broken-hearted Maren answers her brother, "Anethe is—at home." He does not wait for another word, but seizes the little boat and lands at the same time with John on Smutty-Nose; ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of us, the cynical Greek doctor, the artist-sage and lover of Arab institutions, myself (flint-maniac)—to say nothing of men like Dufresnoy—we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we have a raison d'etre. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how incongruous a figure against that background of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... whose charge she had travelled, with a proper escort, looked upon her as a lovely maniac; and the mixture of pity and admiration wherewith he regarded her, was a strange thing to observe; especially after he had seen our simple house and manners. On the other hand, Lorna considered him a worthy but foolish old gentleman; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... echoing in the courts of heaven. Such spectacles of human perfidy are the real Medusas that Gorgonize trusting, tender, throbbing hearts, and in view of this one I laughed aloud,—laughed so unnaturally that it was no marvel I was called a maniac. At sight of my desperate white face Edith shrieked and fainted, and Maurice blanched and stammered and cowered. Without a word of comment or recrimination I silently passed on to my own room, where Elsie ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... say," said Sloane stolidly, "that 'cause you had some sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last night, you're never coming on ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Miff are eyeing Mr Dombey from a little distance, when the noise of approaching wheels is heard, and Mr Sownds goes out. Mrs Miff, meeting Mr Dombey's eye as it is withdrawn from the presumptuous maniac upstairs, who salutes him with so much urbanity, drops a curtsey, and informs him that she believes his 'good lady' is come. Then there is a crowding and a whispering at the door, and the good lady ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... crony of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year may be caught burrowing in the ground. For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees as a mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his big person a stout trowel, some choice ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... difficulty in recognising several of those zealots who had most distinguished themselves by their intemperate opposition to all moderate measures, together with their noted pastor, the fanatical Ephraim Macbriar, and the maniac, Habakkuk Mucklewrath. The Cameronians neither stirred tongue nor hand to welcome their brethren in misfortune, but continued to listen to the low murmured exercise of Macbriar, as he prayed that the Almighty ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... interfere with the sternness of his determination. He seemed to breathe more freely, and the haggard wanness of his brow, relaxed at least from the workings that, but the moment before, distorted its wonted serenity, with a maniac wildness. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was in unison with our thoughts; and equally so with the laughter that at that moment sounded in our ears—for it was laughter wild and maniac. It was heard in the forest behind us; ringing among the trees, and mingling its shrill unearthly echo with the roaring of the torrent. Both of us were startled at the sound. Though the voice was a woman's, I could see that it had produced ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... glanced at me with that expressionless look upon his face which he could summon at will, and which is at the bottom of the superstition about his iron nerve. 'I was worried, and not well. Besides, one doesn't care to be burgled, even by a maniac.' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... pretty frequently, as a rule. One of the fellows is a perfect maniac. He keeps a suit-case always ready, and the instant he is at liberty, he bolts with it to the station, and changes in the train. No matter who is in the carriage, off he whips his tunic, and performs at least the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... sorrow, may be gathered together and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which if wholly divorced would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... flowing around her, intent on universal conquest, seemed yet more threatening; grandmothers still bore children, daughters suckled already, sons laid hands upon vacant kingdoms. And she remained alone; she had but her unworthy, broken-down, worn-out husband beside her; while Morange, the maniac, incessantly walking to and fro, was like the symbolical spectre of human distress, one whose heart and strength and reason had been carried away in the frightful death of his only daughter. And not a sound came from the cold and empty works; ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... finally realized the gravity of the situation, lost all hope whatever for any restoration and, acting under the advice of the old family physician, had her committed to the State Hospital for the Insane as an incurable narco-maniac. Here she was rudely but promptly deprived of all narcotics, nor by any hook nor crook, cunning though she was, could she secure a quieting, solacing grain. The wise superintendent, believing that ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... gateways, and filed about the field. Susan envied no one to-day, her heart was dancing. There was a racy autumnal tang in the air, laughter and shouting. The "rooters" were already in place, their leader occasionally leaped into the air like a maniac, and conducted a "yell" with a vigor that needed ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... advent of the Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... elderly man, hurried along by a crowd of people, by whom he was pelted with mud and stones. His meek and unresisting deportment exciting her attention, she inquired what were his offences, and learned with pity and surprise that he was an unfortunate maniac, known only by the appellation of "mad Jemmy." The situation of this miserable being seized her imagination and became the subject of her attention. She would wait whole hours for the appearance of the poor maniac, and, whatever were her occupations, the voice of mad ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... sense of disillusion with Nature. It was as though a beautiful, tender, and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity, mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead—dead like those whom we no ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligible mourning; and certainly he does not hear ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... wrestle with dangers dire, Since Colin is gone? Who'll fearlessly brave the maniac wave, Thoughtless of self, human life to save, Unmoved by the storm-fiend's ire? Who, Shadrach-like, will walk through fire, Since Colin is gone? Or hang his life on so frail a breath That there's but a step 'twixt life and death? For Courage is not the heritage Of the ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... out near the door sill. Springing up then I attacked the bars at the window. Hours and hours I labored, impelled to greater effort by the dread of spending another night in that room of murder. I was patient, too, patient with the cunning of a maniac. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... that the rain hit me like a cloudburst. That was over quick, and by the time it had settled to a drizzle I was down in the paymaster's camp. Things were sure in an uproar there. Two men killed, two more crippled, and the paymaster raving like a maniac. I hadn't been far wide of the mark. The men that passed me on the ridge had held up the outfit—and looted fifty thousand ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in his place and leaped a good twenty feet to the ground. When he raised himself the look of a maniac had settled on his face. Tearing his garments from him as he went, he entered a narrow street that made its ascent toward Zion by steps and cobbled slants. Here he came upon great crowds of terror-stricken ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... roofs in sight, from five to ten stories lower than the Corrugated buildin', but no mashie maniac in evidence. And while they're scoutin' around I takes another squint ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... tobacco maniac," growled Trendon, feeling in his breast pocket. "The devil," he cried, bringing forth ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from each number. On the annual motion for renewing the act for suspending the Habeas Corpus bill, there was a stormy debate; but the measure was carried with the usual majorities. An attempt made by a maniac named Hadfield to shoot the king in Drury-lane theatre, led to the insertion of two additional clauses in the insanity bill, by which the privilege of bail to alleged lunatics was abridged, and the personal safety of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of shackles on Karuska and get him ready to travel by plane. He appears to be suffering from mental paralysis, but I don't know how his case will develope. He may go violently insane at any moment and I don't care to be aloft in a plane with an unbound maniac." ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... behind him, having crawled out through a shadow, and hit him so hard with a stone on the back of the skull that he loosed off the rifle and pitched head-foremost down among us. The Greek promptly jumped on top of him with a yell like a maniac's, failing to land with both heels on his backbone by nothing but luck. As it was, he lost balance and sat down so hard on Schillingschen's head that there was no need of the energy with which we all followed suit, piling all over ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... "the American flyers in such cases are already dead, for Moyen will be a maniac in his tortures. Munson, do you hurriedly examine the mother-subs and see if ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... hound!" cried the boatswain, spurning him with his foot. "I have you where I swore I'd bring you. And, remember, 'tis I that laid you low—I—I—" He shrieked like a maniac. "When you suffer in that living death for which they design you, remember with every lingering breath of anguish that it was I who brought you there! You trifled with me—mocked me—betrayed me. You denied my request. I grovelled at your feet and begged you—you spurned ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the region of Middletown, proved a cumbered path. From stone fence to stone fence, in the middle trough of dust, and on the bordering of what had been, that morning, dew-gemmed grass and flower, War the maniac had left marks. Overturned wagons formed barriers around which the column must wind. Some were afire; the smoke of burning straw and clothing and foodstuffs mingling with the yet low-lying powder smoke and with the pall of Valley ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... English," said Brand, regarding the maniac-looking person before him with angry brows. "Will you go indoors, Miss Lind, and leave him to me. I will talk an English to ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... the womanly pride humbled in the dust and wifely honor wounded unto death—these alone are real! With an involuntary cry of rage and shame, a cry that is half a prayer and half a curse—a cry that rings and reverberates through the great sleepy house like a maniac's shriek heard at midnight among the tombs—she flings herself sobbing and moaning upon the marble floor. The drowsy slave starts up as from a dream, quivering in every limb like a coward looking upon his death. He tries ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... dropped from the envelope. I found afterwards that it contained a few words of farewell, dictated by Percy in his dying moments; and this sufficiently accounted for the state of mind into which its perusal plunged the unhappy Theresa. Before night she was a raving maniac, and in this state she was ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... rich, and thou hast much cool store of wine. But the town thirsts, and every beat of our blood Hastens us on to maniac agony. The Assyrians have our wells, and half the tanks Are dry, and the pools shoal with baking mud: The water left to us is pestilent. And therefore have we asked the governors For death: and it ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... rendered so sensitively susceptible of its influences, paralyzed the whole moral constitution of the devoted creature, and realized the poetical creation of despair. I felt inclined to soften the sternness of her grief, by quickening her disbelief of the raving thoughts of a fever-maniac; but I paused as I thought of the probable necessity of her suspicion for her future safety from the schemes of a murderer, whose evil desires might be resuscitated by the return of health. I could do nothing more at that time for the dreadful condition ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... at all afraid of ghosts when I reach my second wind, and I grabbed at this one. It moved backward silently and as I made a quick step toward it that specter let out the most blood-curdling yell I ever heard—the shriek of a maniac. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... she:—I have heard, O auspicious King, that Prince Ali presently asked one of the shopkeepers with whom he had made acquaintance, saying, "O my friend, is this man a maniac that he asketh a sum of thirty thousand Ashrafis for this little pipe of ivory? Surely none save an idiot would give him such a price and waste upon it such a mint of money." Said the shop man, "O my lord, this broker is wiser and warier than ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... type of crime we're working with—the kind we expect future laws to apply to—is strictly limited. It must be a crime of violence against a human being, or a crime of destruction in which there is a grave danger that human lives may be lost. The sex maniac, the firebug, or the goon who gets a thrill out of beating people. Or the reckless driver who has proven that he can't be trusted behind the wheel ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... contained a passage, the publication of which occasioned Gifford the deepest regret. Towards the conclusion of the article these words occurred: The Editor "has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, who, it seems, once published some detached scenes of the 'Broken Heart.'" This referred to Charles Lamb, who likened the "transcendent scene [of the Spartan boy and Calantha] in imagination to Calvary and the Cross." Now Gifford had never heard ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But at last he had prepared sixty ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... night of wakefulness and delirium, Brian, with his brain still wild and disordered, perhaps, had taken the boy out with him on some indefinite excursion—alone—the helpless child in the power of a maniac! ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests! He now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side! No wonder that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim, overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing what he did, he broke forth into the most vehement denunciations ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... filling the mouth with bread and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman, returning and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac, and for some time secreted herself from all living society. Some remaining instinctive feeling brought her at length to steal a glance from a distance at the maidens while they milked the cows, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Telemachus? Think of the temptations of a metropolis. Look at the question well, and let me know speedily; for I've got him as far as this place, and he's kicking up an awful row in the hotel-yard, and rattling his chain like a maniac. Let me know by telegraph ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... remarks founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so little ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Berry, with the laugh of a maniac. "Cast my portion to the dogs." He dabbed his face with a handkerchief. "Never mind. When his hour comes, you'll have to hold him out of the window. I'm not going to stop every time ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... is a semi-maniac, she's not to be encouraged in her destruction of the human race," he argued hotly. Then, as he saw the tightening and the whitening of Brenton's lips, he forgot his argument in swift contrition. "Damn it all, Brenton! I vowed I'd never ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... name was Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... resolution. Yet, recollecting where he was, it was with some feelings of fear that he saw the dying flame leap up and spread a flash of light on the visage of Eachin, which seemed pale as the grave, while his eye rolled like that of a maniac in his fever fit. The light instantly sunk down and died, and Simon felt a momentary terror lest he should have to dispute for his life with the youth, whom he knew to be capable of violent actions when highly excited, however short a period his nature could support the measures ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... over his poisons, so much is he engrossed in the science that it takes with him the post of a besetting. Like a maniac which always speaks of his strange fancies, so this poor savage speaks all day long of his poisons, and studies ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... man, engaged in our county lunatic asylum—among a variety of papers, which I had the option of destroying or preserving, as I thought proper. I can hardly believe that the manuscript is genuine, though it certainly is not in my friend's hand. However, whether it be the genuine production of a maniac, or founded upon the ravings of some unhappy being (which I think more probable), read ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... inside the house of the man who had murdered her brother and sent her sorrowing father, a poor, senseless maniac, tottering to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... o'er his piety by night.) The Moslem deprecates the deed, Cuts off the head that holds the creed, Then reverently goes to grass, Muttering thanks to Balaam's Ass For faith and learning to refute Idolatry so dissolute! But should a maniac dash past, With straws in beard and hands upcast, To him (through whom, whene'er inclined To preach a bit to Madmankind, The Holy Prophet speaks his mind) Our True Believer lifts his eyes Devoutly and his prayer applies; But next to Solyman the Great Reveres ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... gaunt with hunger. Glaring down the darkening glen; But a fiercer Power and stronger Drives him back into his den: For the fiend TORNADO rideth Forth with FEAR, his maniac bride. Who by shipwrecked shores abideth, With the she-wolf by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... beginning of a fierce fight. Any trifling accident attracts a great crowd, which becomes excited at the slightest provocation. It is easy to see from an ordinary walk in this Hongkong street how panic or rage may convert the stolid Chinese into a deadly maniac, who will stop at no outburst of violence, no atrocity, that will serve to wreak his ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... were sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble towards the patch of green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I perceived that usually very dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... consists chiefly in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example. Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... curtain was up, and the moonlight lay on his bed. The mystic influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... some maniac's idea of a joke, you'll have proof very soon that it isn't, because one of the people at your Center is due to leave ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... be retaken at once, Coblich!" cried Prince Peter of Blentz. "He is a dangerous maniac, and we must make this fact plain to the people—this and a thorough description of him. A handsome reward for his safe return to Blentz might not be ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who proceeded to hand out a lady. A person in the room with her, saw her put her hands to her head, and then she rushed from the back door of the house, and did not stop till she reached the woods. When found she was a raving maniac, and is so still. We have been obliged to place her in the county house, where she is confined in the apartment devoted to Lunatics, and is as comfortable as she can be made under the circumstances. The accompanying package I found ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... Why, I've been wrecked in a typhoon in the Gulf of Mexico. And I didn't care! And I've lain for nine days more dead than alive in an Asiatic cholera camp. And I didn't care! And I've been locked into my office three hours with a raving maniac and a dynamite bomb. And I didn't care! And twice in a Pennsylvania mine disaster I've been the first man down the shaft. And I didn't care! And I've been shot, I tell you,—and I've been horse-trampled,—and ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... need give you no uneasiness," pursued Jonathan; "Mrs. Sheppard, as I told you, is in Bedlam, an incurable maniac; while her son is in the New Prison, whence he will only be removed ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... escapes, in the country at least—unless he be a criminal maniac in for a serious offence, and therefore a real danger to society—we all honestly hope that they won't catch him, and we don't hide it. And, if put in a corner, most of us would help them not ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... rope—what not—to bind the raving man. She flew into the next room, quite collected; fetched her handkerchief, snatched off the silken girdle that bound her waist, rushed back and helped the leech to tie the maniac's hands. She understood her friend's least word, or a movement of his finger; and when the slaves whom the nun had fetched came into the room, they found Rustem with his hands firmly bound, and had only to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... other fish to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... the East begins chronologically with Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar's wife) sung by Jami (nat. A.H. 8171414); the next in date is Khusraw and Shirin (also by Nizami); Farhad and Shirin; and Layla and Majnun (the Night-black maid and the Maniac-man) are the last. We are obliged to compare the lovers with "Romeo and Juliet," having no corresponding instances in modern days: the classics of Europe supply a host as Hero and Leander, Theagenes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and skill, by studying his infirmity and managing with due discretion, would have but little trouble with him, and he would readily earn his living. He would be an unsafe man to go at large, as dangerous, if fired with anger, as any raving maniac. He should ever be under firm control somewhere, ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... us, so little did we look for it, that when Kess Denton, the yellow man, stood at the open gate and uttered a loud and piercing yell of defiance, not one among us could lilt a rifle, not one thought of plan or action. There the fellow was, laughing like a maniac. Why he came, whence he came, no man could tell. But he leaped into the seas and the night engulfed him, and only his mocking laugh told us that ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... voice produced a most singular effect upon Edward. The moment before, his actions had been those of a raving maniac; but, when the words struck his ear, he paused, put his hand to his forehead, seemed to recollect himself, and finally advanced with a firm and steady step. His countenance was dark and ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... justify such an extraordinary breach of all the—the decencies. Reasons? the reasons of a maniac. Not to say more, sir. Fraudulent detention—fraudulent, I say, sir! What were your ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... also to gain the approbation of the crowd, and so brings all his powers of persuasion to bear against me. Time and again, while traversing with the greatest difficulty the narrow bazaar in the midst of a surging mob, he faces about and makes the same insane request, shouting like a maniac to make his voice audible above the din of a thousand clamorous appeals to the same purpose. Had I the power to annihilate the whole crazy, maddening multitude with a sweep of the hand, I am afraid they would at this juncture have ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... sports in the soul."[434] He is supposed to dance in the Golden Hall of the temple at Chidambaram and something of the old legends of the Satarudriya hangs about such popular titles as the Deceiver and the Maniac (Kalvar) and the stories of his going about disguised and visiting his worshippers in the form of a mendicant. The idea of sport and playfulness is also prominent in Vishnuism. It is a striking feature in the cultus of both the infant and the youthful Krishna, but I have not found it recorded ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... as a disaster?" asked Kew, with a sigh of relief. "Is she a maniac, or a suffragette, or a Mormon, or just some one who has never ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... noted as a declaimer; his "youth but gave promise of the man," Mr. B., at the present time, standing without a peer in his peculiar line of declamation and oratory. In 1845, he traveled with Professor De Bonneville, giving his wonderful rendition of "The Maniac," so as to attract the attention of ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... tolled twelve very methodically and stopped for an hour's rest. Cateye was still sleeping soundly but for some unaccountable reason he was bothered with bad dreams. It seemed now as if Judd had turned into a raving maniac, had grasped him by the throat and was slowly, cruelly, choking him to death. Try as he might Cateye could not shake that death grip off. Judd was grinning crazily and saying: "That's one of my failin's; I always do grip too hard!" Cateye's breath began to come in short, ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... engaged in their separate duties, a loud exclamation from Basil drew the attention of his brothers. It was a shout of joy, followed by a wild laugh, like the laugh of a maniac! ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... saw it myself." That is a common and envy-compelling remark. It can refer to a battle; to a handing; to a coronation; to the killing of Jumbo by the railway-train; to the arrival of Jenny Lind at the Battery; to the meeting of the President and Prince Henry; to the chase of a murderous maniac; to the disaster in the tunnel; to the explosion in the subway; to a remarkable dog-fight; to a village church struck by lightning. It will be said, more or less causally, by everybody in America who has seen Prince Henry do anything, or try ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... presently passed her two young men carrying a young woman they had just murdered. The hat of one blew off, and fell at Mary's feet. She picked it up, and flew to the inn, told her story, and then, producing the hat, found it was Richard's. Her senses gave way, and she became a confirmed maniac for life.—R. Southey, Mary, the Maid of the Inn (from Dr. Plot's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... children cuddle about His robe in utter contentment; a weary mother with babe at her breast, has brought her sick daughter; husband has carried a crippled wife; a woman 'that was lost' bends at the Saviour's feet in an agony of repentance; an aged, blind man is led by his daughter; a maniac, whose tortured soul looks out of haggard eyes, frames ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... poison to me and cigarettes are worse. The health- board belonged to this republican whiskey ring, and was in conspiracy to make me insane, so they put a quarantine on the jail for three weeks, and I was a lone woman in there, with two cigarette smokers, and a maniac, next to my cell. John, the Trusty, smoked a horrid strong pipe, and he also was next to my cell. Strange to say, when that jail had so many apartments, and so few in them, that four inmates should have been put next to me; but there was "a cause." Mr. Dick Dodd was ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... trusting in them. Among many women is one, the principal figure in that panel, who, having knelt down before the Apostles, and turning her head towards them, stretches her arms in the direction of the maniac and points out his misery; besides which the Apostles, some standing, some seated, and others kneeling, show that they are moved to very great compassion by such misfortune. And, indeed, he made therein figures and heads so fine in their novelty and variety, to say nothing of their ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... their prices should be paid the next day, according to the invoice. I made my obeisance, and was pleased within myself that under this pretext I should have to come again the next day. When I took my leave and came out, I was speaking and uttering words like those of a maniac. In this state I came to the serai, but my senses were not right; all my friends began to ask what was the matter with me; I replied, that from going and returning so far, the heat had ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... revolution. The purest type of Epicureanism may have refined a few of the better sort, but the prevailing influence, doubtless, undermined society. The god of the reason was allied with the god of the sense, and the maniac soul of the lying prophet entered the schools. Education, as directed by them, served only to make youth worldly and frivolous. Teachers sought to amuse and not to instruct, to make royal roads to knowledge, to exalt the omnipotence ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... heard; the dawn had come, and Polou unlocked the porch-door for Father Augustin just in time to hear the last agonized cry. The maniac turned in the very act of leaping on his victim, and sprang for the two men, who stopped in dumb amazement. Poor old Pierre Polou went down at a blow; but Father Augustin was young and fearless, and he grappled the mad animal with all his strength ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... note: original reads 'apportunity'] of ascertaining how far that disease may be removed by moral management alone, which it is believed, will, in many instances, be more effectual in controlling the maniac, than medical treatment especially, in those cases where the disease has proceeded from causes operating directly on ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... revolts at usurpations must abstain from discussing the principles and policies of your Federal government, or receive the kicks of crossroad sputterers and press reporters; must either lie or be silent. They know only how to brawl and scrawl 'hot-head' and 'impolitic maniac.' Why, my free negroes know more than all your bosses. Now, damn it, put that ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up on the long ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Pandemonium reigned on the seats at the goal post end of the course. Shouts of "Carlisle! Carlisle!" rose up through the din of megaphones and screech of whistles from the launches. Paul looked at Walter. The boy had risen, flung his hat up anywhere and was waving his arms like a maniac, screaming out the name of Carlisle, the crack stroke of Burrton. And then, without a second's warning, the big stroke, the hero of the Burrton crew, whose name was on a thousand tongues, suddenly bent forward and collapsed ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... Ortiz in Toledo A. D. 1483, and was therefore called Casa del Nuncio. The Damascus "Maristan" was described by every traveller of the last century: and it showed a curious contrast between the treatment of the maniac and the idiot or omadhaun, who is humanely allowed to wander about unharmed, if not held a Saint. When I saw it last (1870) it was all but empty and mostly in ruins. As far as my experience goes, the United ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... friend o' his. Let me say tae ye if ony ill cames tae her, by the leevin' God above us he wull answer tae me." Hoarse, panting, his face that of a maniac, he stood glaring wild-eyed at the young man before him. To say that Vic was shaken by this sudden and violent onslaught would be much within the truth. Nevertheless he boldly ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... was certainly a fool! No man with a grain of sense would do such a thing alone—maybe with a crowd of cheering men, but only a maniac could do it ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious artist ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Tom said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... spectacle to meet a father's eye! His infant made a vulture's prey, with terror to descry! And know, with agonizing breast, and with a maniac rave, That earthly power could not avail, that innocent ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... me; down near the Queen's arbour two nursemaids were trundling their perambulators; otherwise, there was not a creature anywhere in sight. I was in a thoroughly embittered temper; I paced up and down before my seat like a maniac. How strangely awry things seemed to go! To think that an article in three sections should be downright stranded by the simple fact of my not having a pennyworth of pencil in my pocket. Supposing I were to return to Pyle Street and ask to get my pencil back? There would ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... take that maniac with you," he stormed. "Not a word; I don't care if Rose has murdered all Long Island, he's some use now. Clear out and leave ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... transformed into a maniac. He turned to the old men and shouted in some incomprehensible language. Nat and Madge, Brent and Benson, and two others who wore the uniforms of officers were seized and dragged across the bridge to the landing-stage where the black ship ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... they appeared at the door, I joined them; but on striking out a few yards into the moor, we found the maniac already in the custody of two men, who had seized and were dragging her towards her cottage, a miserable hovel, about half a mile away. She never once spoke to us, but continued singing, though in a lower and more subdued tone of voice than before, a Gaelic song. We reached her hut, and, making ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... virgin loves, Or whatsoever else the heart holds dear; 155 Enow to stir for these; yea, will I say, Contemplating in soberness the approach Of an event so dire, by signs in earth Or heaven made manifest, that I could share That maniac's fond anxiety, and go 160 Upon like errand. Oftentimes at least Me hath such strong enhancement overcome, When I have held a volume in my hand, Poor earthly casket of immortal verse, Shakespeare, or ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... sees Jesus from afar, and, with the disordered haste and preternatural agility which marked all his movements, he runs towards Him. Such is the introduction to the narrative of the cure. It paints for us not merely a maniac, but a demoniac. He is not a man at war with himself, but a man at war with other beings, who have forced themselves into his house of life. At least, so says Mark, and so said Jesus; and if the story before us is true, its subsequent incidents compel the acceptance of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... proved to be most interesting and amusing, anything but eccentric; but I shall never hear the last of my mistake, and to this day he and Jack tease me unmercifully about my "dangerous maniac!" ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... see how a few remain behind in the hope that their mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of the community to do another portion of it to death and to rob ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of his life Landseer became hopelessly insane and, during his periods of violence a dangerous homicidal maniac. Such an affection, however, had my father and mother for the friend of their younger days, that they still had him to stay with us in Kent for long periods. He had necessarily to bring a large retinue with him: his own trained ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... "You maniac!" I hear him mutter: "I expected you were given to such tricks as these. Lucky for you no eyes but mine have seen your abject folly. Come ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... said, in Virginia, two Dutchmen, brothers, George and Jake Fulwiler. They were both well to do in the world, and each owned a grist mill. There was another Dutchman near by, by the name of Henry Snyder. He was a mono-maniac, but a harmless man, occasionally thinking himself to be God. He built a throne, and would often sit upon it, pronouncing judgment upon others, and also upon himself. He would send the culprits to heaven or to hell, as ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... deaf to his voice. The most frantic of them all was not a child but a woman, who half lay on a bench with limbs stiffened out, screaming continuously like a maniac. Evan's voice was powerless against those cries. He was obliged to silence her. She fell over on the bench limply. Evan sprang up ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... wives, a naive virgin, with Max as inaccessible as a star. But after a capital exposition, Sudermann gets us in a terrible state of mind by making the lady with the good reputation go off in a hysterical crisis, and almost confess to her stiff, severe husband—who is a maniac on the subject of his house being above suspicion. The charming, reckless baroness intervenes at the crucial point, becomes a lightning-rod that draws the electric current, and pretends to be the real culprit. Her husband, a sinister baron and ex-lieutenant in the Hussars, is present. A ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... fully ten thousand nau-naus landed upon me. At the second step I was walking in a cloud. By the third step the sun was dimmed in the sky. After that I don't know what happened. When I arrived at my clothes, I was a maniac. And here enters my grand tactical error. There is only one rule of conduct in dealing with nau-naus. Never swat them. Whatever you do, don't swat them. They are so vicious that in the instant of annihilation they eject their last atom of poison into your carcass. You ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... through a slough of thawing snow, teeth chattering, eyes watering and fingers numbed, whilst a wind fit to dethrone all the weather-cocks in Christendom was ploughing up the earth in showers of mud around me, blowing my hat off my head and howling in my ears like a maniac who has broken ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... his remorse for the officer's death, his burning thirst for vengeance, and his own sense of self-abasement—all conspired to add to the fever of his brain; and when Walter and his daughter were admitted to his cell, it was a gibbering maniac that rushed forward to meet them. Walter removed his fainting daughter from the appalling spectacle, and returned with a sickening heart and terrible forebodings. The shades of evening had given place to bright moonlight ere they reached the castle. The driver ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... malady continued to grow worse, until at last he was reduced to utter despair, tortured by sick headaches, and without the strength, as he said, to put one foot before the other, convinced every morning that he would spend the night at the Tulettes, a raving maniac. He grew thin; his face, under its crown of white hair—which he still cared for through a last remnant of vanity—acquired a look of suffering, of tragic beauty. And although he allowed himself to be waited on, he refused roughly ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the wonderful powers of his expressive countenance, the feelings of a father, who in looking over a lofty balcony with his only child in his arms, by accident dropped it. The disaster drove the unhappy parent mad. Garrick had visited him in his cell; where the miserable maniac was accustomed, several times in the course of the day, to exhibit all those looks and attitudes which he had displayed at the balcony[9]. On a sudden he would bend himself forward, as if looking from a window into the street, with his arms folded as if they embraced ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... down the fore-scuttle and yelled like a maniac; the others came up in their night-gear, and in a marvellously short space of time the schooner was hove to and the cook and Joe had tumbled into the boat and were pulling back lustily ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... said, "Not the slightest cloud ever darkened our relations;" nor does he exaggerate his solitude. Being a sane man, he has too much common-sense to assemble all his woes at once. He might have told you that Bridget was a homicidal maniac; what he does tell you is that she was faithful. Another reason of his success is his continual regard for beautiful things and fine actions, as illustrated in the major characteristics of his grandmother and his ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... father, musingly, 'Saul. I am afraid she was only too right there; he disobeyed the commands of his master, and brought down on his head the vengeance of Heaven—he became a maniac, prophesied, and ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... vain the ire That urged thee 'gainst the Bacchic choir The god avenged his votaries well— Stern was the doom that thee befell; And on the Bacchus-hating herd Still rests the curse thy guilt incurr'd. For the same spells that in those days Were wont the Bacchanals to craze— The maniac orgies, the rash vow, Have fall'n on thy disciples now. Though deepest silence dwells alone, Parnassus, on thy double cone; To mystic cry, through fell and brake, No more Cithaeron's echoes wake; No longer glisten, white and fleet, O'er the dark lawns of Taygete, The Spartan virgin's bounding feet: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... man, but a mere stripling who had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father, the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his harem, and in his fury had done his best to slay his own son and heir. Happily he had ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... of his imagination which his work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying to cast ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... thou judgest, Couthon! He is one, Who flies from silent solitary anguish, Seeking forgetful peace amid the jar Of elements. The howl of maniac uproar Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself. A calm is fatal to him—then he feels The dire upboilings of the storm within him. A tiger mad with inward wounds!—I dread The fierce and restless ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... his senses—assembles his followers and departs for the abode of Layla's family, and presenting himself before the maiden's father, proposes in haughty terms the union of his son with Layla; but the offer is declined, on the ground that Syd Omri's son is a maniac, and he will not give his daughter to a man bereft of his senses; but should he be restored to his right mind he will consent to their union. Indignant at this answer, Syd Omri returns home, and after his friends had in vain tried the effect of love-philtres to make Layla's father relent, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... moods, law with him was law, and a legal claim a legal claim. Had he been all his life agent to the Hap House property instead of to that of Castle Richmond, a thought so romantic would never have entered his head. He would have scouted a man as nearly a maniac who should suggest to him that his client ought to surrender an undoubted inheritance of twelve thousand a year on a point of feeling. He would have rejected it as a proposed crime, and talked much of the indefeasible rights of the coming heirs of the new heir. He would have been as ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... Malays seem to be peculiarly liable, during the paroxysms of which those affected by it rush in blind fury among their fellows, slaying right and left. From the terrified appearance of some of the approaching crowd and the maniac shouts in rear, it was evident that a man thus possessed of the spirit of amok was ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the top of the flesh-mountain was a big metal object, a shining concave dome with which all the tubes connected; so that a stranger to the procedure could not have felt sure whether the mountain was holding up the dome, or was dangling from it. A piece of symbolism done by a maniac artist, whose meaning ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... you. I don't mean that he was a raging maniac. Now, you had advised him not to make any new will because you thought he was ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... identity of the 'English Student' was soon discovered, and 'from that moment,' writes Haydon, 'the destiny of my life was changed. My picture was caricatured, my name detested, my peace harassed. I was looked at like a monster, abused like a plague, and avoided like a maniac.' There is probably some characteristic exaggeration in this statement, but considering the power wielded at this time by the Academy and its supporters, Haydon would undoubtedly have done better, from a worldly point of ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... two of the harder as well. Given this form on the day of their appearance in public, and Henfrey might be disappointed when he came to watch and smile sarcastically. A batting fiasco is not one half so ridiculous as maniac fielding. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
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