"Insane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I am being held here as an insane patient. I cannot get out. I do not even know whether this letter will reach you. But the chambermaid here has told me she ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... ever hoped for was to get up so I could live long enough to kill him. He gave me that quirt till I was insane with rage; long afterward he told me my eyes turned green. I cursed him. He asked me whether I'd get up. I knew, if I didn't, I'd have to take more. I dragged myself out of the snow again and pitched and struggled after him—to the top ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... cry came an indescribable sound, a mingled sobbing and choking. Out from the shadows staggered a ghastly figure—that of a man whose face appeared to be streaked. His eyes glared at me madly, and he moved the air with his hands like one blind and insane ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... suicide. The man is a fool, my friends, that man is insane, my friends, who would leave this earth, my friends. Here are joys innumerable, such as it hath not entered into the heart of man to understand, my friends. Here are clothes, my friends; here are beds, my friends; here is delicious food, my friends. Our precious bodies ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... destined to cost them dear. The king had ordered the wooden bridge over the Achmoun to be destroyed. In their agitation and haste, the French paid no attention to the order. In vain Bisset, the English knight, protested against such insane ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... public-spirited desire. Having been given by the gods originality—that is, disagreement with others—he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking instance of all, more striking, I think, even than either of these, is the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy of pure art. He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order to make ephemeral anecdotes; ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... brought within the jurisdiction of Congress, and taken from without the control and jurisdiction of the States? I have understood heretofore that it has never been disputed that the duty to provide for the poor, the insane, the blind, and all who are dependent upon society, rests upon the States, and that the power does not belong to the General Government. What has occurred, then, in this war that has changed the relation of the people to the General Government ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... to be noticed that these witnesses were not enthusiasts on other subjects. No one could be the subject of such an overweening enthusiasm as the hypothesis supposes, without betraying it in his conduct, without being overmastered and led by it as an insane man is by his mania. The very opposite of all this was actually the case with the apostles. The Gospels are unpretending, dispassionate narratives, without rhapsody, adulation, or vanity. Their whole conduct disproves ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... ideal commissioner. The native newspaper said so when he first came, having painfully selected the phrase from a "Dictionary Of Polite English for Public Purposes" edited by a College graduate at present in the Andamans. True, later it had called him an "overbearing and insane procrastinator"—"an apostle of absolutism"—and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader,—"laudator temporis acti." But that the was because he ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... to push the grave person that is just before us, from the top of the stairs to the bottom. A thousand absurdities, wild and extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we are only restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may perhaps be made amenable to the criminal laws ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... me call it? A mad, insane, senseless tragedy, with but one issue?—the guillotine for ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... under one roof, meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free, artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every artistic theory possible to the sane and insane mind. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... also, that Lady Desmond had asked for this consent in a manner that was almost humble. She had shown herself most anxious to keep on friendly terms with the rake of Hap House,—rake and roue, gambler and spendthrift, as he was reputed to be,—if only he would abandon his insane claim to the hand of Clara Desmond. But this feeling she had shown when they two were alone together, after Clara had left them. As long as her daughter had been present, Lady Desmond had maintained her tone of indignation and defiance; but, when ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... and he might love her madly, with insane energy, and break his heart with the thought of her beauty and simplicity and truth; but never would he again approach a woman who despised him—looked upon him as ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... that you had threatened this poor young man, and that you left her presence in a temper, is unshaken. By a terrible coincidence, Mr. Bulford was in the street outside your fiancee's door when you left, and maddened by your insane jealousy, ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... insane journey to make, and tried hard to dissuade them. They answered that they could not turn back, so they went down to the sea and launched the boat, which was ready with all her gear in the boat-house. Then they made ready to sail. All those who were standing on the shore thought it impossible ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy. New projects can wait, but the commitments of the Commonwealth must be maintained. We cannot curtail the usual appropriations or the care of mothers with dependent children or the support of the poor, the insane, and the infirm. The Democratic programme of cutting the State tax, by vetoing appropriations of the utmost urgency for improvements and maintenance costs of institutions and asylums of the unfortunates of ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... as men own theirs; that women who were married might be the legal guardians of their children's property and persons as well as the father; that women should be appointed with equal responsibility and authority as assistant physicians in insane asylums, and that the appointment of all the officers in such asylums should be made by the legislature, and not by the governor, as now; that women be appointed on boards of visitors and commissioners to all asylums where women are ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... been insane," said Garvington, fuming. "He disguises himself as a gypsy, and comes to burgle my house, and makes a silly will which ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... much!" cried Michel Ardan's adversary. "I do not know why I should continue so frivolous a discussion! Please yourself about this insane expedition! We need not trouble ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... his side. When the battle was over this Christian brother had not a scratch. Again he was put in a similar position; and again he went through another battle without injury. He was then charged with being insane because he would not fight and placed in an insane asylum and kept there for a period of time, until he was turned out; and then he proceeded with proclaiming the message of the Lord's presence and ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... unpleasant inquirers, those who are either on the verge of insanity or are victims of that singular malady, hypochrondriasis. A patient clearly staggering to and fro on the border line of sanity consults you. Here is a wilful, terrified being, eager to know the truth. "Am I becoming insane? Will I end in an asylum?" How can you answer? You see clearly, are sure the worst is coming. What shall you do with this morbid, scared, obstinate child-man? You put aside his questions, but you have here a person quite or nearly sane to-day, resolute ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... against the new commandant, and the persons acting under his authority and encouragement.[250] Cruelties of the most atrocious description, and a toleration of evils of an appalling kind; but the often insane violence of the men, scarcely admitted of either much caution or delay. It could answer no purpose to collect the awful details. In part, these charges have been disputed; but their substantial truth is, at least, rendered probable, by the accumulation of similar facts ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... vaulted passages were dark, and smelt strongly of iodoform and carbolic. As they passed the section for the insane, they heard a strident, angry voice, but no one was visible. They felt scared, and anxiously hastened towards a dark little window. An old, grey-haired peasant, with a long white beard and wearing a large apron came clattering ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... phase of existence at Florence was the vast increase of insanity. We had many insane men at Andersonville, but the type of the derangement was different, partaking more of what the doctors term melancholia. Prisoners coming in from the front were struck aghast by the horrors they saw everywhere. Men dying of painful and repulsive diseases lined every step of whatever ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... (Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow—the man who killed Vickers, of the Pittsburg Trumpeter"—he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of the siege—"had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken him ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that things looked dark for him on account of the insane prejudice that would be against him for his views on children. She said he couldn't expect anything like a fair trial where these was known even with a jury of his peers; and it was quite true that probably only five or six of the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... her own blood that of God's saints, which she, as well as her tyrant husband, had spilled like water!—Yes, cruel murderess!" he continued, addressing the Countess, "he whom thou hast butchered in thy insane vengeance, sacrificed for many a year the dictates of his own conscience to the interest of thy family, and did not desert it till thy frantic zeal for royalty had well-nigh brought to utter perdition the little community in which he was born. Even in confining ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... aviators dropped it back there on the edge of the basin when they were coming down," Johnny suggested, and laid himself down in the shade of the plane to smoke and dream and gloat. He felt that he would burst into insane and costly whoops if he attempted another minute's repression. And he knew that Tomaso's brother would bleed him of his last dollar if he guessed one half of Johnny's exultation; wherefore the ruse to send Tomaso's brother off ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... his balance, thought Katherine. He must be some revivalist who has gone insane on one point. I suppose I'd better go in. He looks quite capable of wading out here after me if ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... schools of the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg to stand on that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil of philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan Jacobs . . . unless he be insane. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of $100,000 having been made at the last session for the purchase of a suitable site and for the erection, furnishing, and fitting up of an asylum for the insane of the District of Columbia and of the Army and Navy of the United States, the proper measures have been adopted to carry this ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... the mother of Marjorie, and came forth to seek an errant son. It is a mystery how she was able to pick out her own, for by the time she got there his voice was too hoarse to be recognizable. Mr. Schofield's version of things was that Penrod was insane. "He's a stark, raving lunatic!" declared the father, descending to the library from a before-dinner interview with the outlaw, that evening. "I'd send him to military school, but I don't believe they'd take him. Do you know WHY he says ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... witches' craft repel me! I shall recover, dost thou tell me, Through this insane, chaotic play? From an old hag shall I demand assistance? And will her foul mess take away Full thirty years from my existence? Woe's me, canst thou naught better find! Another baffled hope must be lamented: Has Nature, then, and has a noble mind ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... body of workers, we have a separate grade, unconnected with the others,—a sort of invalid corps, the members of which are provided with a light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All our sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and crippled, and even our insane, belong to this invalid corps, and bear its insignia. The strongest often do nearly a man's work, the feeblest, of course, nothing; but none who can do anything are willing quite to give up. In their lucid intervals, even our insane ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... wineglass of salt water, and the natural result has been disaster. I understand some fool urged her to try this as a preventive of mal-de-mer. Her mother thinks it must have been a coarse practical joke, and is going to speak to the Captain about it. I wouldn't be the man who prescribed that insane ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the insane eyes picked up a pen. He turned it about in his fingers. Then, suddenly, but slowly, the fingers began to break it. The wood split under their pressure, and the pieces littered the table. He gazed at them for a moment. Then one hand ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... the necessary five cents to ride in an omnibus! The Isabellas of our day do not build ships for every new Columbus who desires to endow the world with some wonderful treasure trove! And yet this man was not mad; he was one of those who prove how many insane ideas a brain may cherish, without being entitled to a cell in Bedlam ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... singular one, that, however at random the fancies of unhealthy intellects may appear on ordinary subjects, those fancies obtain a greater or less credit when they touch upon supernatural things. Instances of monomaniacs (persons insane on a single subject) who have imagined things quite as marvellous as the most superstitious, but whose illusions have been treated with the greatest ridicule, might be cited almost ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... a D.D., came out, from strong and irresistible conviction, and united with one of the straitest sects of Dissenters—the Plymouth Brethren. The unhappy parent could not brook the insult to his order, and died insane.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... insane? At least I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent tale of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... suit instituted by one intoxicated, or insane, or stricken with disease,[85] or given up to vice,[86] or a minor, or one under the influence of fear, &c.,[87] or one having ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... Yet how many hundreds were daily falling at that time in warfare—how many thousands and tens of thousands were yet to fall, to gratify the insane ambition of a single man, permitted to be the fearful scourge that he was to the human race? We said as little about our expedition as we could, for the emigrants, as soon as they heard of so many of their countrymen being in the neighbourhood, were eager to set ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... said: "I don't understand what the man can be thinking about to talk such vulgar nonsense. He ought to be sent to Stockton Insane Asylum." ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... engraver, Pavel, liable to attacks of insanity, and a one-armed peasant woman, Melikitrisa, who performed the duties of cook. Both of them mixed the medicines and dried and infused herbs; they, too, controlled the patients when they were delirious. The insane engraver was sullen in appearance and sparing of words; at night he would sing a song about 'lovely Venus,' and would besiege every one he met with a request for permission to marry a girl called Malanya, who had long been dead. The one-armed peasant woman used to beat him and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... to do as I require, or are you insane enough to refuse?—in which case I shall summon assistance, and there will quickly be an end of it. Pray do not imagine that you can trick me into supposing that you do not grasp the situation. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... his pipe to his pocket. "I ask you to put yourself in my place. Even if were a man sick for adventures, how could I listen seriously to such an insane proposition as this? What do I know about you, or your past record? You may be a practical joker, or you may have come out of a madhouse—I know nothing about it. If you claim to be an exceptional man, and want my cooperation, you ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... approached for subscriptions; but his response was generally evasive, or the amount offered so minute that he felt compelled to explain it by expressing his apprehensions about new taxation and the insane extravagance ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... except the aves she repeated and the number of times she came to confession. But when we came to look over her personal effects in the drawers and boxes of the shop, there could be no doubt but that she had been thoroughly though harmlessly insane. We found I should think about one hundred and fifty boxes: from tiny little ones of pasteboard to large square ones of deal, full of rows and rows of white quilled ribbon, similar to the piece I had seen her working at on that last night of her life on earth. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the light if not too much interfered with. By his influence the darker shapes of repression were banished from the education of the young; the insane were treated with a consideration before unknown; the criminal was regarded as a brother who deserved our gentlest consideration and patience; the time-honored and ineffective processes of violence and coercion fell into abeyance, and a rational moderation and enlightenment appeared ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... an exquisite invitation. This indeed was a very woman, he thought, a striking contrast to the small and wistful Doreen. With sudden intuition he realised he had but to open his arms and she would enter—willingly, anxiously. An insane desire possessed him to do this thing. She was adorable, desirable, magnificent, and he was certain beyond doubt she loved him. With a catch of the breath he raised his hands and in so doing his glance fell upon the sleeve of the coat he wore. The cloth was of blue ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... you've taken, they pronounce insane! Wilt go a little further on this road?... Your reputation. How you shrink! Too much to pay? Child, I do only take you, at ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... this long, half-insane harangue, Suzanne had sat quite silent, making no reply at all, not even seeming to hear the demon, for such he was, whose wicked talk defiled her ears. But when he asked her whether she had nothing to say to him before he went, still looking not at him, ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... It gave us all the sympathy it could, for it shed warm rays upon us as it silently moved on its way like a great eye from Heaven, looking but unable to help. We should have gone mad with another day like this, and there were times when we came perilously close to being insane. Something had to be done. I got up from the sledge, cast my harness adrift, and said, "I am going to look for a way out; we can't go on." My companions at first persuaded me not to go, but I pointed out that we could not continue in our exhausted condition. If ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... notional fool, Carl jerked the candlestick from the fire and beat out the flames. The heavy top snapped off in his hands. The falling wood disclosed a hollow receptacle below the branches . . . a charred paper. Well, there was always some insane whim of Norman Westfall's coming to light somewhere and this doubtless ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... on carnage, to love blood (at least for the moment) with a deep, eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions. They will not let their mind alone; they force it toward some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... was, where he came from, and what his object in hiding here might be, it were better that his presence be made known to the authorities. Somewhere or other they must be looking for him, since even the helpless inmates of public institutions for the insane are objects of concern; and one of them at large will create a reign of terror in a ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... question on which we so often hear an innocent British boast—the fact that our statesmen are privately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit on opposite sides of the House. Here, again, it is as well to have no illusions. Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity or insane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve and to love him from twelve to three. If our social relations are more peaceful than those of France or America or the England of a hundred ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... been rather a "hang-on" ever since I wrote last, nothing settled and nothing to do. No one ever seems at their best in Petrograd. It is a cross place and a common place. I never understood Tolstoi till I came here. On all sides one sees the same insane love of ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... presume I will have to make a clean breast of it. Toglet is more or less insane. His folks do not care to place him in an asylum, and so I offered to take care of him for a while. It was his sudden fit of insanity that caused ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... fiercely "this wicked move" of men who "have tried to make Ireland the cat's-paw of Germany." "Germany plotted it, Germany organized it, Germany paid for it." The men who were Germany's agents "remained in the safe remoteness of American cities," while "misguided and insane young men in Ireland had risked, and some of them had lost, their lives in an insane anti-patriotic movement." It was anti-patriotic, he urged, because Ireland held to the choice she had made, to the opinion which thousands of Irish soldiers had ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... pitch that my reason can scarcely (p. 298) endure." A few days later he had the pleasure of hearing one of the members say, in a speech, that there was an opinion among many that Mr. Adams was insane and did not know what he said. While a fight was going on such incidents only fired his blood, but afterwards the reminiscence ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... stood by the window with Holroyd's letter in his hand, he felt an insane temptation for a moment to destroy or retain it. Time was everything just then, and even without the fragment he had been able to read, he could, from his knowledge of the writer, conclude with tolerable certainty ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... God!" she groaned. The other self in her, the poor dying woman in her, arose on her deathbed and screamed to her, screamed insane things. If a certain voice is too long ignored, its ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day) heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by explaining to my husband, and ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... your orgies of brutality." People in Germany are beginning to think that William reminds them a little too much of the incoherencies of his great-uncle, Frederick William, who was undoubtedly clever in all sorts of ways, but who died insane. ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... Liar! [He only looks at her, with his face hard and set; she is insane with jealousy for the moment.] You sent ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... "delightful. I begin to be glad that it happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did make me wonder, but I hardly ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... at general headquarters were turned low. Even now, after having heard proofs of the innocence of the accused soldier, Gray knew that it was useless to appeal to the colonel. He could not understand, however, the feverish, almost insane, impatience of the lad for immediate release. Another day ought not to make so great a difference. What could be the reason—if it were not that, though innocent of the robbery of the storehouse, or of complicity in the sale of stolen goods, some other crime lay at his ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... were already presenting themselves, Miss Warrington came in. I must confess that, as I looked at the irritating female whose misplaced affections were already harassing me, I felt slightly confused. Since I had first learned of her insane infatuation I had studiously avoided being left alone with her for one instant. At the moment, however, there was no possibility of escape, as she stood between me and the door, thus effectively barring my exit. I could only confront her uneasily, trying to avoid her direct gaze and, as I did so, ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... open. With a motion that was almost insane, he clapped his hands over his ears, and ran blindly down the dusty path until he was tired, then dropped ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... date. Swift's pamphlet is close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobody need read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of the Peace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the most insane of English wars.[1] There is not a sentence in it which does not belong exclusively to the matter in hand: not a line of that general wisdom which is for all time. In the Present Discontents the method is just the opposite of this. The details are slurred, and they ...
— Burke • John Morley
... rewarded. How vice would be rebuked. But wisdom does not run with social rank, nor with commercial rating. Some of us who are poor are exceedingly foolish, and some of those who are rich have a world of judgment. And Violet Hogan,—poor and mad with a mother love that was as insane as an animal's when she saw her children hungry and needy, knew before she knew anything else that she must live with them by day. So she went out at night—went out into the streets—not of South Harvey—but over into the streets of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... used anything in my life that benefited me so much. They are wonderful medicines. I cannot say enough in their praise. I know I should have been insane if ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... passed. He was limp. Morally as well as physically his nerve was gone. He thought of the Apostle who fought with beasts at Ephesus, and envied him his combatants. His fretful impatience with those who differed from him theologically rose to a tide of insane hatred, and he lost himself in a passion against his deacons as bitter as that which they had shown ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... this distance of time, D,Eon's book seems to us the mere ravings of insane vanity; the puns poor, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... kneeling in the confessional, was whispering in my ears; because I felt her breath upon my cheeks and in every trembling nerve of my being. And one day, overcome by his glowing passion, the monk so far forgot his sworn duty as to confess his immodest and insane love for ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... seedy black. His head seemed altogether too large for his body; and his almost livid complexion, hollow cheeks, and gleaming eyes, told a story of constant and consuming thought. The strange, fixed glitter of his eyes was unpleasant to behold. Marcus had noticed the same thing in insane persons. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... other's stiff, open lips, and insane with rage, head down, he threw himself forward. Roger met the rush with a straight left, which cut through an eyebrow like a knife, and went home with a crack on a high cheek bone; but no blow could stop the rush of rage and in another moment ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... lucre and pale melancholy!— In the flames of the pyre these, alas! will be vain, Mix your sage ruminations with glimpses of folly,— 'Tis delightful at times to be somewhat insane. ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... was insane with grief. She wrung her hands and wept till it was pitiful to see her. But she did not know what to do, and at last comforted herself a little by gazing at Siminok. After some time the latter took out the prince's handkerchief, looked at it, and saw three ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... for sixty thousand men at once; and said two hundred thousand would be needed later on. "Good God!" said Cameron, "where are they to come from?" Come they had to, as Sherman foresaw. Cameron made trouble at Washington by calling Sherman's words "insane"; and Sherman's "insanity" became a stumbling-block that took ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... years ago a reform movement was afoot in the world in the interests of the insane. As was fitting, the movement showed itself first in America, where these unfortunates were humanely cared for at a time when their treatment elsewhere was worse than brutal; but England and France quickly fell into line. The leader on this side of the water was the famous Philadelphian, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... caused him to perish under the lash, in spite of his tears and prayers. My sister-in-law felt such grief that she lost her reason, and these three poor wretches became beasts rather than human beings, and wandered insane along the shores of Cos, howling like wolves and foaming at the mouth, and hooted at by the children, who threw shells and stones at them. They died, and my father buried them with his own hands. A little ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... Mrs. Dr. dear. Do you think I had a good excuse, when a Hun and a pacifist made such an insulting remark to me? 'Go,' I thundered, and I just caught up that iron pot. I could see that he thought I had suddenly gone insane, and I suppose he considered an iron pot full of boiling dye was a dangerous weapon in the hands of a lunatic. At any rate he went, and stood not upon the order of his going, as you saw for yourself. And I do not think we will see him back here proposing to us again in a hurry. No, I think ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Here is the way he speaks of it in his Reply (vol. II, ch. 84, p. 163): 'It is a puzzling question whether bodies have some natural property of doing harm or good to man's soul. If one answers yes, one plunges into an insane labyrinth: for, as man's soul is an immaterial substance, one will be bound to say that the local movement of certain bodies is an efficient cause of the thoughts in a mind, a statement contrary to the most obvious notions that philosophy imparts to us. If one answers no, one will be ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... than the market-town from one year's end to the other. Above all classes they are attached to their homes, and slow to go away even temporarily. To such a length is this feeling carried that men have been known to go partially insane for a while at the prospect of having to quit a farm through a landlord's decease, even though no appreciable ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... of natural selection, must also, in the long run, have an adverse effect upon the race." Too bad that Christian charity takes care of the feeble, endangering evolution, and the doctrine that the weak have no rights that the strong are bound to respect! We are not surprised that Nietzsche, whose insane philosophy that might is right, helped to bring on the world war, died in an ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... continuous. In his madness, if such we may call this inhumanity, there was method; he used it to the end of the consolidation of his tyranny. Yet, inasmuch as it passed all limits and prepared his downfall, it may be said to have obtained over his nature the mastery of an insane appetite. While applying the nomenclature of disease to these exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at first at any rate, beyond their control. Moral insanity is often nothing more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion—lust, violence, cruelty, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... clubbed his rifle, and advanced towards the party in what seemed a paroxysm of insane fury, brandishing the weapon and rolling his eyes with a ferocity that could have only arisen from his being in that happy frame of mind which is properly termed ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were a public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul between his experience and his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers a quarter of England. As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... doubts and divisions provoked by the overriding logic of Sieyes disappeared. Moderate and Revolutionist felt the same resentment, and had the same sense of being opposed by a power that was insane. There were some, and Sieyes among them, who proposed that they should adjourn to Paris. But a home was found in the empty Tennis Court hard by. There, with a view to baffle dangerous designs, and also to retrieve his own waning influence, Mounier assumed the lead. He moved that ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and that another partner is watching like an eagle for an opportunity to swoop down and settle his talons. Then, again, I understand from a reliable source that Mr. Denton's wife is fast going insane from worry, and that his scapegrace son is growing gray-headed over the outlook for his fortune. Again, Mr. Denton himself, who has wrought all these changes, is being looked upon by wise men as a driveling idiot, or, what is about as bad, a religious ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... Anatomical Temperaments. Chemical Temperaments. Choice of Professions and Trades. Matrimony. Part II. Professional Interviews. Physiognomy of Matrimony. Some People You Meet. Study in Ancient Skulls. A Phrenological Study. Was Hawes Insane? How Living Heads and Dead Skulls are Measured. Crime and its Causes. A Murderers Mentality. Phrenology in Politics. Definitions of the Faculties of Intelligence. The Phrenological Examination. Examples of Phrenometrical Measurements. Examinations ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... spent in watching, nights spent crouched and waiting had brought him to the high pitch of desperation, that would stop at nothing which seemed to his crazed brain necessary to save his life and his freedom. Even the disdainful Murphy would have known the man was insane; but Murphy was sitting warm and snug beside a small table with a glass ready to his right hand, and Murphy was not worrying about Mike's sanity, but about the next card that would fall before him. Murphy thought how lucky he was to be in Quincy during this storm, instead ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... crazed by hunger and fatigue. But the expectation of food, the certainty that we should find plenty at the Ammonusuc, had nerved us up to the effort to reach it, and now it was gone. It had been there and was gone. We broke down completely and cried and raved. Some became insane. ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... complain of neglect on the part of a community which, detached as it is from the parental care of the States of Virginia and Maryland, can only expect aid from Congress as its local legislature. Amongst the subjects which claim your attention is the prompt organization of an asylum for the insane who may be found from time to time sojourning within the District. Such course is also demanded by considerations which apply to branches of the public service. For the necessities in this behalf I invite your particular attention to the report ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... love with, you know; but, angels and ministers of grace! such a spectre! I asked myself, is it necromancy, or is it delirium tremens that has reduced him to this? And said he, with that odious smile, that made me fancy myself half insane— ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... devoted to the breeding and sustenance of the choicest Merino Sheep. The others mainly stand empty, and how to dispose of them is a National perplexity. Some of them may be converted into Hospitals, Insane Retreats, &c., others into Libraries or Galleries of Art and Science; but Versailles is too far from Paris for aught but a Retreat as aforesaid, and has cost so immense a sum that any use which may be made of it will seem ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Hall, stands an inn known far and wide by the appellation of the Great White Horse, rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some rampacious animal with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, which is elevated above the principal door. The Great White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or a county-paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig—for its enormous size. Never was such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Hurlers; while the student of folklore will not fail to be attracted by the sacred wells of St. Keyne and St. Cleer. The latter was used formerly as a Bowssening Pool, and held in great repute for its efficacy in restoring the insane to "mens sana in corpore sano". Not far away is the interesting church of St. Neots', with a quantity of very ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... Castlereagh, with whom George Canning once actually fought a duel; but the two men made up their quarrel, and Canning afterwards succeeded his former foe at the Foreign Office. Castlereagh was unfortunate in his end and unpopular during his life. He committed suicide while temporarily insane, and his burial here was the {114} occasion of a great outburst of feeling, when the indignant mob outside hammered on the doors of the church while the funeral service proceeded inside. The huge monument, which fills ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... her talent and all her success the end of Madame O'Connell's life was sad beyond expression. Her health suffered, her reason tottered and faded out, yet life remained and she was for years in an asylum for the insane. Everything that had surrounded her in her Paris home was sold at auction. No time was given and no attempt was made to bring her friends together. No one who had known or loved her was there to shed ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... stopped the engine, he went down on his hands and knees in the road to peer up at the gear-box, then without restoring the spark, he tried to wind up the engine again. He spun the little handle with an insane violence, faster and faster for—as it seemed to the doctor—the better part of a minute. Beads of perspiration appeared upon his brow and ran together; he bared his teeth in a snarl; his hat slipped over one eye. He groaned with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Courage—the godlike quality that dreads not; the unanalyzable thing in man that makes him execute his conception—no matter how insane or absurd it may appear to others—if it appears rational to him, and then stride ahead to his next great ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... closely superintended and gradually disappeared. It is true enough that even under the Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the gambling spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary dealings, are not met with again. The Roman Forum ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more the home of much happy and useful country life. The passionate and reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from the one poet to the other, we feel that we ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... Massachusetts. We have a board, called the board of lunacy and charity, which controls the large charities for which Massachusetts is famous and in many of which she was the first among civilized communities, for the care of the pauper and the insane and the criminal woman, and the friendless and the poor child. It is one of the most important things, except the education of youth, which ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... with the written paper, which had been considered by the persons to whom she had intrusted it, as the distracted dictates of an insane mind; but proved to William, beyond a doubt, that she was perfectly ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... assistance to Belgium, and that the recent utterances of the principal organ of the Conservative party, the Standard, and of the writers in the National Review, that intervention in support of Belgium 'would be not only insane but impossible,' showed that the public opinion of Great Britain was no longer unanimous as it had been in 1870-71. [Footnote: The questions connected with the Belgian and Luxemburg guarantees are very fully discussed in a recent work, England's Guarantee to Belgium and Luxemburg, by C. P. Sanger ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... her head. She sat upon the floor, on a deerskin, and employed herself in twisting reindeer sinews, which she rolled upon her cheek with the palm of her hand, while I was sketching her. It was already dark, and I was obliged to work by candle light, but I succeeded in catching the half-insane, witch-like expression of her face. When I took the candle to examine her features more closely, she cried out, "Look at me, O son of man!" She said that I had great powers, and was capable of doing everything, since I had come ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... like stepping from a dark dream into the center of an aquamarine nightmare. And in the instant following his partial digestion of the viridescent scheme he was possessed with the notion that the occupant of such a chamber of horror must certainly be insane. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war was certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably far less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling confusion ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... born. We watch him to see if he washes, undresses and dresses, and eats properly. We ask him to add two and two, and to divide six by three, and then we solemnly give our verdict that he is either sane or insane. ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... and idiotic—that children of seven or eight years old have usually a larger amount of reason than he. The president went on to say that Lycanthropy and Kuanthropy were mere hallucinations, and that the change of shape existed only in the disorganized brain of the insane, consequently it was not a crime which could be punished. The tender age of the boy must be taken into consideration, and the utter neglect of his education and moral development. The court sentenced Grenier to ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... so astonished at the manner in which our lives had been attempted, that if we had not been able to show our wounds we should never have been believed. The fellow was at first thought to have been drunk or insane, and it was not till later that we learned the real motives of his conduct. He had some time previously been punished by his master for an offence, and on meeting us in the wood, he no doubt thought that ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the exodus took place the strong, the intelligent, and the cunning, together with their offspring, crossed the waters of the Channel or the North Sea to the continent, leaving in unhappy England only the helpless inmates of asylums for the feebleminded and insane. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... disfranchisement. Yet not one of these conditions is common to all the states. The foreigner votes on his first papers in eight states and a five years' residence will usually secure his naturalization and a consequent vote in any state. The criminal, idiot and insane are not denied a vote in several states, and in most a large class of ignorant un-American men with no comprehension of our problems, our history, or ideals, are conspicuous voters on election day. Millions ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... prompted. A very devil of passion beating in his breast urged him to show her her place, deal with her as he would like to do and as she deserved—throw her down and drag her by the hair until she crawled forward and clasped his knees in subjection. But the look in her eyes cooled this half-insane, whiskey-inspired desire. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... palace, was it also in the plot? Gwynplaine suffered a partial unconsciousness. Suppressed emotions threatened to strangle him. He was weighed down by an overwhelming force. His will became powerless. How could he resist? He was incoherent and entranced. This time he felt he was becoming irremediably insane. His dark, headlong fall over the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... under the displeasure of a gloomy and infuriated tyrant, with unlimited means of executing the bloodiest suggestions of his vengeance. Then, in what way had the guardians of the jails come to be connected with any even imaginary offence? Supposing the Landgrave insane, his agents were not so; Colonel von Aremberg was a man of shrewd and penetrating understanding; and this officer had clearly spoken in the tone of one who, whilst announcing the sentence of another, sympathizes entirely with the justice and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of her mate's approach, Lady had ceased wailing. Lad could hear her terrified whimpers as she danced frantically about on the red-hot boards. And the knowledge of her torture drove him momentarily insane. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... thick, his side ached, but he seemed beyond the power of these things now. Over the fences he went, leaving shreds of clothing blowing in the gale, and tearing his flesh on stone walls. In the madness of despair, and in the insane resolve that despair begets, he ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... nobility, but a man in the highest degree wild and fanatical. He was also a member of parliament, and opposed the views of the most enlightened statesmen of his time, and with an extravagance which led to the belief that he was insane. He calumniated the king, defied the parliament, and boasted of the number of his adherents. He pretended that he had, in Scotland, one hundred and sixty thousand men at his command, who would cut off the king's head, if he did not keep his coronation oath. The enthusiasm ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... ridiculous, and to old regards impracticable, not being able to counterfeit pleasure, or to discharge discontent, nothing being sincere or right, or balanced in their minds, it is more than a chance, that, in the delirium of the last stage of their distempered power, they make an insane political testament, by which they throw all their remaining weight and consequence into the scale of their declared enemies, and the avowed authors ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... had sent her a note to that effect, which Zoe had turned over to me. Once he had accosted Zoe as she was coming from Reverdy's to join me at the courthouse preparatory to starting home. Reverdy thought that the fellow was eaten up with insane jealousy and had brought himself to the belief that I had taken Zoe from him, if he could be said ever to have had a right ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... astonishments. I caught her, and laid her gently on the floor. Meanwhile Deschamps (the dying Deschamps!) stood on the edge of the upper floor, stamping and shouting in a high fever of foiled revenge. She was mad. When I say that she was mad, I mean that she was merely and simply insane. I could perceive it instantly, and I foresaw that we should have ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... Bruce directed should be kept safe in the citadel; but to Mobray he gave his liberty, and ordered every means to facilitate the commodious journey of that brave knight whom he had requested to convey the insane Lady Strathearn to the protection of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... "Clearly state my desire that my daughter Violet share equally with her sisters." Of course this was utterly out of the question. At that time we had no intention of informing any one of our psychic experience, and if we had, Mr. James Smith would have thought us insane or impertinent to come to him with so ridiculous a story, the truth of which we ourselves strongly doubted. Pages were, however, written concerning the matter in so earnest and pleading a manner that I came to feel conscience-stricken at refusing to do what ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... said, it follows that the death penalty as a punishment even for the worst crimes is morally untenable; for either the culprit is really irredeemable, that is to say, he is an irresponsible moral idiot, in which case an asylum for the insane is the proper place for him; or he is not irredeemable, in which case the chance of reformation should not be taken from him by cutting off his life. The death penalty is the last lingering vestige of the Lex Talionis, of the law which attempts to equalize the penalty with the crime, ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... execution, and he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... a very marvellous development; an enthusiasm which had grown deeper and wilder until it swept along as an insane abandon, bearing in its current the last vestiges of conservatism and caution. For at last the old-timers, long alluded to as the "dead ones," had come in. For years they had held back, scoffing, predicting disaster; and while they held back venturesome youths had become millionaires. ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... nothing to conceal, my liege," she said, "and my answer shall be as plain and direct as the question you have asked. If I could have been moved to an act of ignominious, insane, and ungrateful folly, it could only arise from my being blinded by that passion, which I believe is pleaded as an excuse for folly and for crime much more often than it has a real existence. I must, in short, have been in love, as it is called—and that might have been—with my equal, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... a society was calculated to create considerable of a sensation in the village, and to provoke many remarks for and against. The principle of total abstinence was so novel to many, that they thought its advocates must be almost insane. Even some temperance men and women, who had defended the cause on the old ground, concluded that there was more zeal than knowledge in taking such a step. In the grog-shops the subject was discussed ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... course, and that is insanity. In fact, every instance of complete intoxication is a case of temporary insanity, that is, of mental unsoundness with loss of self-control. Permanent insanity may be one of the last results of intemperance. Alcoholism sends to our insane asylums a large proportion of their inmates, as ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... fear of him, though his face was rather terrible. "I meant to destroy it from the first," she said coldly, "but I was afraid to. I took it back with me to London. One day I read in a paper that your wife was supposed to have burned it while she was insane. She was insane, was she not? Ah, well, that is not my affair; but I burned it ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... JOURNAL with deep interest and think it a valuable periodical. One or two mistakes I noticed; one writer says that President Lincoln thought that "the war should be over in ninety days." It was Seward, not Lincoln that cherished this almost insane idea.—Please do not set me down as a carping critic when I say that I am very sorry that the long article on "Slavery in Kentucky" was printed without comment or correction. To speak of Henry Clay as an anti-slavery man ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... consolations he was addressing to his mother and sister, took them both by the hand and for a minute or two gazed from one to the other without speaking. His mother was alarmed by his expression. It revealed an emotion agonisingly poignant, and at the same time something immovable, almost insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... reads to us your nice paper, and we like it very much. Will you tell us something more about the Freeville Junior Republic, and what did they do with the insane Empress, Carlotta ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... upside down. She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they—were in Italy! In these weeks the Law he had served so faithfully, looked on so reverently as the guardian of all property, seemed to him quite pitiful. What could be more insane than to tell a man that he owned his wife, and punish him when someone unlawfully took her away from him? Did the Law not know that a man's name was to him the apple of his eye, that it was far harder to be regarded as cuckold than as seducer? He actually envied ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Windsor Theater's reputation. Being a comparative stranger in the metropolis, he was unaware that its nickname in theatrical circles was "The Mugs' Graveyard"—a title which had been bestowed upon it not without reason. Built originally by a slightly insane old gentleman, whose principal delusion was that the public was pining for a constant supply of the Higher Drama, and more especially those specimens of the Higher Drama which flowed practically without cessation from the restless pen of the insane ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... like children who, having bawled till they get a toy, begin to cry to have it taken away from them. Fortunately the heart and strength of the nation, its rural population, is sound and practical, else we might prove ourselves to be insane ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... believe I love another? What you are saying is monstrous. Is that what you think of me? And you say you love me! I pity you, because you are insane." ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... suspicion that our choice of a drama of the sixteenth century, one of Lope de Vega's, I think, was scarcely a wise one for beginners. He refers to this venture of ours in a letter to Sidney Colvin as "the play which the sister and I are just beating our way through with two bad dictionaries and an insane grammar." Nevertheless, we made some headway, and I remember that he marvelled greatly at the far-fetched, high-flown similes and figures of speech indulged in by the writers of the "Golden Age" of Spain. In spite of his confessed dislike for the cold-blooded study of ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the work which these men had to do. Wasson believed in telling lies; to save life, to protect innocence, or even to prevent people from obtaining information which they had no right to. He considered it justifiable not only to deceive insane people, but also those demented creatures who do more mischief than lunatics because ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... knees in the rock still testify to the credulous. The other spring is at another village called St. Fillans, nearly thirty miles to the westward, just outside the limits of our map, on the road to Tyndrum. In this Holy Pool, as it is called, insane folk were dipped with certain ceremonies, and then left bound all night in the open air. If they were found loose the next morning, they were supposed to have been cured. This treatment was practised as late as 1790, according ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... shall hear all. There is no vile deception—the deception, such as it is, has been by his own desire. Your father lives, but he is hopelessly insane." ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... still, brooding look, and knew that the thought of his fall and the loss of his home was exceedingly bitter to him. Doubtless my mother noticed it, too, and shed a few compassionate tears for the poor man, once more homeless on the great plain. But he could not be kept after that insane outbreak. To strike their children was to my parents a crime; it changed their nature and degraded them, and Mr. Trigg could ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... a narrow-headed individual remarked that he had heard that the widow was getting nothing out of it, but that Courtot and his crowd had cheated her, they hooted and jeered at him until he withdrew wondering at their insane attitude. It was generally taken for granted that Sanchia Murray knew what she was about. If she chose to hunt in couple with Jim ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... bordering upon war now exists. Whether the Empress Dowager is at the head of this movement it seems impossible to decide. The conservative element of the Chinese is certainly in sympathy with the Boxers in their effort to exterminate the "foreign devils." What the outcome of this insane uprising and mad onslaught involving substantial war against the civilized nations of the world will be, no prophet of modern times can foretell. Many of us wait with anxious and sorrowful hearts for messages which we hope ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various |
