"Madhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... my opinion, that the individual is a sufferer for his toils, but then the mass is benefited by his success. It is we who reap, in idle gratification, what the husbandman has sown in the bitterness of labour. Genius did not save Milton from poverty and blindness—nor Tasso from the madhouse—nor Galileo from the inquisition; they were the sufferers, but posterity the gainers. The literary empire reverses the political; it is not the many made for one—it is the one made for many; wisdom and genius must have their martyrs as well ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... warmer feelings still for him!" burst out Mahony. "Sorry for the crazy lunatic who, after all these years, after all I've done for him and the trust I've put in him, suddenly falls to making love to the woman who bears my name? Why, a madhouse is the only place ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Arranmore answered, lightly, "outside the madhouse. For the realization of life comes only hand in hand with insanity. The people who have come nearest to it carry the mark with them all their life. For the fever of knowledge will scorch even those who peer over ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... power to expel demons "In My name," and this power of exorcism was one upon which the early Christians specially prided themselves. It is with unconscious sarcasm that Dean Trench puts the question, If one of the disciples "were to enter a madhouse now, how many of the sufferers there he might recognise as 'possessed'?"[42] One may safely say that he would regard all as under the dominion of evil spirits. No other cause of insanity appears to ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... staying here till 12 o'clock got the watch to light me home, and in a continued discontent to bed. After being in bed, my people come and say there is a great stinke of burning, but no smoake. We called up Sir J. Minnes's and Sir W. Batten's people, and Griffin, and the people at the madhouse, but nothing could be found to give occasion to it. At this trouble we were till past three o'clock, and then the stinke ceasing, I to sleep, and my people to bed, and lay ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Such tales about my own dead mother: why, You would not wonder surely if I knew, By nothing but my own heart's help, he lied, Would you? No reason's wanted in the case. So with you! In they burnt on me, his tales, Much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, Make captive any visitor and scream All sorts of stories of their keeper—he's Both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, Serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; Sane people ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... and not wanting to have them under your roof, doesn't go far in law nor common-sense to send folks to the madhouse," old Lawyer Lang, who was famed for his sharp tongue, was reported to have said. However, Mrs. Martha Loomis was somewhat comforted by her firm belief that either her own name or that of one of her daughters was in that sealed envelope kept by Lawyer Joshua Lang in his strong-box, and by her firm ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of "Alexander the Great," whilst confined in a madhouse, was visited by Sir Roger L'Estrange, of whose political abilities Lee entertained no very high opinion. Upon the knight inquiring whether the poet ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... the date 1695, and the motto "Memento Mori," with the initials N.C., but more interesting than this is one on the same side but at the southern end of the village, and standing back more than the rest. This was used as a madhouse at a time well remembered by some of the villagers. People from Pickering and the surrounding district were sent here for treatment, and I am told that the proprietor possessed a prescription for a very remarkable medicine which was supposed ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... at war for a few acres of snow in Canada,[31] and that they spend over this beautiful war much more than Canada is worth. To tell you exactly, whether there are more people fit to send to a madhouse in one country than the other, is what my imperfect intelligence will not permit. I only know in general that the people we are going to see ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... the child a confidence in him, which the utmost arts of treachery and dissimulation could never have awakened in her breast. She told him all—that they had no friend or relative—that she had fled with the old man, to save him from a madhouse and all the miseries he dreaded—that she was flying now, to save him from himself—and that she sought an asylum in some remote and primitive place, where the temptation before which he fell would never enter, and her late sorrows and distresses ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... to-morrow, well content, after this day's experience, to make it my mistress. The bare possibility of being yoked to such a woman as in fancy I have wooed and won to-day makes me shiver with inexpressible dread. Her obtuseness, combined with her microscopic surveillance, would drive me to the nearest madhouse I could find. The whole business of love-making and marriage involves too much risk to a man who, like myself, must use his wits as a sword to carve his fortunes. I've fought my way up alone so ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... believed me. My husband never believed me. He maintained to the very last that you were his child and mine. I fought like a wild beast for my dead child's rights; but even I was mastered in the end. They threatened me—yes, James Colquhoun, in my husband's name, threatened me—with a madhouse, if I did not put away from me the suspicion that I had conceived. They assured me that Brian was not dead; that it was Vincenza's child that had died; that I was incapable of distinguishing one baby from another—and so ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was a madhouse worse than any carnival Charley had ever seen. He made his way, harness and suitcase on his back, through the station crowds and out into the taxi ramp. A line of the new cabs stood there, and Charley managed to grab one inches ahead of a woman with a small, crying child in tow. He ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... all!" hallooed Conrector Paulmann, in the highest fury. "But am I in a madhouse? Am I mad myself? What crazy stuff am I chattering? Yes, I am mad too! mad too!" And with this, Conrector Paulmann started up, tore the peruke from his head and dashed it against the ceiling of the room, till ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some of these new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may still possess, it has lost at ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... having lost the faculty for even the lowest order of reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells of a madhouse.[3146] From the 19th of August he excites people to attack the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly it is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman. The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New Atalantis'—the 'Cicero' of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... journey—reached my brain and suggested thought. The mise en scene had remained in every detail fixed upon my retina; and how I wondered—'When is he going—how soon? Is he going to carry me away and place me in a madhouse?' ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... is surprised that the feeling in the whole Wupper Valley is becoming more and more discontented, and the military are now hatching new measures of violence in order to be able to master this discontent. One would think that such things came from the madhouse. In reality they represent conditions under martial law, and this case is only ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison. ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in solitary confinement, and that the ex-bishop of Viviers, who was at large under the surveillance of the police, should be arrested and shut up in Charenton as hopelessly mad. His instructions were fully carried out, and the unfortunate bishop shortly afterwards ended his days in the madhouse. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... Generalissimo in the perpetual war against Macy & Gimbel's. From that viewpoint, the sale was excellent business—Latterman had gotten the jump on all the other department stores for the winter fashions and fall sports trade. He had also turned the store into a madhouse at the exact time when Chester Pelton needed to give all his attention to ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... accumulation of horrors,—foul air, insufficient food, and the fearful society with which the walls and chains of their prison compel them to mingle,—is, that a great many of the prisoners have died, some have sought to terminate their woe by suicide, while others have been carried raving to a madhouse. Mr Freeborn assured me that several of his Roman acquaintances had been carried to these places sane men, as well as innocent men, and, after a short confinement, they had been brought out maniacs and madmen. He would have preferred ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... while the other quarter-watches were given liberty, the Neversink presented a sad scene. She was more like a madhouse than a frigate; the gun-deck resounded with frantic fights, shouts, and songs. All visitors from shore were ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of childishness. I would not arrest such tyrants, because I think that even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny turning the state into a madhouse. I would not segregate them, because I respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be tried by his peers. But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... it but a madhouse. The sufferer was consigned to the private asylum of Dr. Cotton, at St. Alban's. An ill-chosen physician Dr. Cotton would have been, if the malady had really had its source in religion; for he was himself a pious man, a writer of hymns, and was in the habit of ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... is not a strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world. A passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should be taken to the madhouse. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... up her bonnet, slipped noiselessly out the back door. With hands clenched tight she forced herself to walk slowly across the foot-bridge, but when the bushes hid her, she broke into a run as though she were crazed and escaping a madhouse. At the foot of the spur she turned swiftly up the mountain and climbed madly, with one hand tight against the little cross at her throat. He was going away and she must tell him—she must tell him—what? Behind her a voice was calling, ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... disguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of taking place on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and was recorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made a crusade against a public evil, as when he assailed the prison system, or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, his case was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fight which commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; but again and again the angry fervour of the advocate led ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... clay, who had clouded her last years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a Prince and called Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... confidential clerk was impervious to surprise or shock. This was fortunate, for otherwise, his employment as practical aide to Average Jones would probably have driven him into a madhouse. He now ran his long, thin, clerkly hands through his ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... party, M'riar," said Mo. He might have said more, but he was brought up short by his pledge to say nothing of the convict's last atrocity. How could he speak the thought in his mind, of the mother of the victim in a madhouse? For that had made part of the tale, as it had reached him through the police-sergeant. So he ended his speech by saying:—"What I do lies at my own door, M'riar. You're out of it. So I shan't say another word of what I will do or won't do. Only I tell you this, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... parents about my sexual condition. It was a frightful blow to them. My father had the circumstances explained to him; he never understood the matter and never discussed it with me. Had I told him earlier I feel quite certain that, with his despotic nature, he would have put me in a madhouse. My mother and sister have treated me very kindly always. My ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "datif," "dativus," appointed not by himself but by the court, lends colour to the statement that he was not his own master at the time; for in later kindred deeds, now at Namur, he appoints his own trustee. I suppose, then, that Tabachetti was shut up in a madhouse at Varallo for a considerable time, during which I can find no trace of him, but that eventually he ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now and don't bite any one. But mad I ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... through everything in a man. It robs him of his intelligence, his honor, his self-respect—it levels him with the brutes—it debases him into idiocy—it lashes him into madness. I tell you I am not accountable for my own actions. The kindest thing you could do for me would be to shut me up in a madhouse. The best thing I could do for myself would be to cut my throat.—Oh, yes! this is a shocking way of talking, isn't it? I ought to struggle against it—as you say. I ought to summon my self-control. ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... was simply a madhouse, a monstrous pandemonium of prostitutes and maniacs. Now, while the choir boys gave themselves to the men, and while the woman who owned the chapel, mounted the altar caught hold of the phallus of the Christ with ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... spiritual. If it makes no impression on a man to know that God will visit his iniquities upon him, he cannot blind himself to the fact that Nature will. Do we not all know what it is to be punished by Nature for disobeying her? We have looked round the wards of a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse, and seen there Nature at work squaring her accounts with sin. And we knew as we looked that if no Judge sat on the throne of heaven at all there was a Judgment there, where an inexorable Nature was crying aloud ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... for letters in the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned atheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half frantic with delusions—as that his father and uncle were plotting to shut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatched from him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh and blood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal disease, he would often make his certainty of early death the pretext for ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... solution of this mystery. But what can we do? The boy believes himself a great criminal. Do you not see at once, that, if we permit him to confess his crime, he will insist upon taking himself out of our keeping,—commit suicide, get himself sent to the madhouse, or anyhow lose our care and our soothing influence? We cannot relieve him until we restore his strength and composure. All we can do now is to watch him, soothe him, and by all means stave off this confession until he is stronger. It would kill him to face a charge ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... suffered death with his dog in Smithfield. The circumstances were as follow: Collins happened to be in church when the priest elevated the host; and Collins, in derision of the sacrifice of the Mass, lifted up his dog above his head. For this crime Collins, who ought to have been sent to a madhouse, or whipped at the cart's tail, was brought before the bishop of London; and although he was really mad, yet such was the force of popish power, such the corruption in church and state, that the poor madman, and his dog, were both carried to the stake in Smithfield, where they were burned ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... open so that the smells can get out, and so long as the winds blow in Green Valley, bringing those smells to me—just so long I'll be afraid—afraid. And Billy, if ever I let go again, it'll be the madhouse for me. I know. I've had a grandfather and ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... half-a-crown in his pocket, and a fixed determination to know the truth, sooner or later, about himself. At the same time he had a great fear of letting any one know the extent of the blanks in his memory. He thought that people might shut him up in a madhouse if he told them that he could not recollect his own name. A certain amount of intellectual force and knowledge remained to him. He could read, and understand what he read. But of his own history he had absolutely no idea; ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... him again. I have a great deal of compassionate admiration for poor Knowles, who, with his undeniable dramatic genius, his bright fancy, and poetical imagination, will, I fear, end his days either in a madhouse or a poorhouse. The characters beside Sir Thomas Clifford and Modus (which you know are taken by Henry Greville and ——) are filled by a pack of young Guardsmen, with whom I dined, in order to make acquaintance, at Lady Francis's t'other ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... protect her helpless brood, my mother saw us carried away from her for hours at a time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes approached her and sometimes receded, as they swept through the black hole in which we found ourselves when the hatches were nailed down. No madhouse, I am sure, could throw more hideous pictures on the screen of life than those which met our childish eyes during the appalling three days of the storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother was not afraid. ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... held their tongues and let me ask them to have the kindness to do me the favor to show me which way was the cathedral, or whether it was the silk handkerchief of the rich Frenchman which the young lady's old sick father required, all would have been well, but instead—a madhouse! ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the constabulary officer said dryly. "The chap who suggested the scheme tried to forget it in drink, was cashiered from the army and died of delirium tremens. As for the husband, he is still living—in a madhouse." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... throat cut, dashing towards me as I lie awake! A recollection of an old story of a kinsman of mine, who, going home one foggy winter night to Hampstead, when London was much smaller and the road lonesome, suddenly encountered such a figure rushing past him, and presently two keepers from a madhouse in pursuit. A very unpleasant creature indeed, to come into my mind unbidden, as ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... cakes and pies and fancy bread, and that stuff with the plums in it; and then to a newsagency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids, and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private madhouse; and then I'd tell the fellow to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man who obeys, or he who sets Heaven at defiance? Once, who could compete with me at school or college? and what might I not have been had you not, when I was struck down by illness, taken advantage of my weakness, and by sending me to a madhouse, confirmed my malady; but fool as you called me, I can see that Heaven's retributive justice has chastised you through life. Me you got into your power on the ground that I was insane, and the mind of the ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the time he died, which I did not hear of till long after it happened. When his health and faculties began to decline, he went to France, and after to Bath, in hope his health might be restored, but without success. I never saw him after his sister removed him from M'Donald's madhouse at Chelsea to Chichester, where he soon sunk into a deplorable state of idiotism, which, when I was told, shocked me exceedingly; and, even now, the remembrance of a man for whom I had a particular friendship, and in whose company I ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... he has made it very disagreeable to me to oppose him, and has even gone so far as to threaten me with imprisonment in a madhouse if I do not yield ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... is a large, melancholy-looking building, half hospital half madhouse, situated a few leagues from Paris. I took a distaste to it on my very first visit. It always struck me as a sort of menagerie, I suppose from the circumstance of there having been pointed out to me, immediately on my entrance, a railed and fenced portion ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... enthusiasm with which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... examinations the campus was utterly quiet. Suddenly bedlam broke loose. Somehow every dormitory that contained freshmen became a madhouse at the same time. Hugh and Carl were in Surrey 19 earnestly studying. Freddy Dickson flung the door open and shouted hysterically, "The general science ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... Christendom was a madhouse. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and heretics ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days, but the world's martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... a poorhouse, a madhouse or a hospital, I don't know. I should like to think it all a feverish dream. I've been ill: I lost my memory and can't believe three months have passed. But where's ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... was at the foot of the throne, the Caliph thus addressed him: "Halechalbe, I have been informed that you have been confined in a madhouse, by a series of the most extraordinary adventures: recover your spirits, and be assured that I am anxious to do justice to all my subjects. But in the relation I demand from you, omit no circumstance, and consider the respect which is due to truth and ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... with Lady Midlothian in putting you into a madhouse, if you did. But I am so glad; I am, indeed. I was afraid to the last,—terribly afraid; you are so hard and so proud. I don't mean hard to me, dear. You have never been half hard enough to me. But you are hard to yourself, and, upon my word, you have been hard ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... much injured. We could not help wondering, if such a commotion were made at such a small accident, what would happen if a cruiser came along and the real alarm were given. The ship would bid fair to become a veritable madhouse—evidently the nerves of all the Germans were very much on edge. The only thing for the prisoners to do was to get out of the way as much as possible, and retire ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... a madhouse. A big Hungarian, crazed by the torment he was enduring, leaped to his feet and made ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... her!'—'God bless me!' he cried again, in a tone of absolute horror. And every now and then, while I spoke, he would ejaculate something; and still as he listened his eyes grew more and more bloodshot with interest and compassion. 'Ah, I see!' he said then; 'you want to send him to a madhouse?—Don't do it,' he continued, in a tone of expostulation, almost entreaty. 'Poor boy! He may get over it. Let his friends look to him. He has a sister, you say?' I quickly reassured him, telling him such was no one's desire, and saying I would ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... thought presented itself to me. This was my mother's hand I saw in the picture. Was it my mother, indeed, who wrought the murder? Was she living or dead? Had my father put upon her some grievous wrong? Had he pretended to get her out of the way? Had he buried her alive, so to speak, in some prison or madhouse? Had she returned in disguise from the asylum or the living grave to avenge herself and murder him? In my present frame of mind, no idea was too wild or too strange for me to entertain. If this strain continued much longer, I should go mad ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... A madhouse I knew to be worse than a prison. I therefore resolved to leave my home before I was prevented ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... agents, and travellers of all kinds, philosophers, pleasure hunters, and invalids, in all sorts of ships, to all sorts of places, but none of them ever saw or heard of my castles, except a young poet, and he died in a madhouse." ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... his son, Frederic William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transacting of business; and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent and population, by means of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the house of correction, in case the things that are done in your house, sir, are done with your knowledge and consent; and in a madhouse if they are done ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... on some of the hungry, ragged horde who infested Cariboo was of a sort to discount fiction. One man took out forty thousand dollars in gold nuggets. A lunatic escaped from a madhouse could not have been more foolish. He came to the best saloon of Barkerville. He called in guests from the highways and byways and treated them to champagne which cost thirty dollars and fifty dollars a bottle. ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... I have not the book; for the man is flown, whither I know not,—to Hades or a madhouse. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age. Montgomery's book [1] I have not much hope from, and the society with the affected name [2] has been laboring at it for these twenty years, and made few converts. I think ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse? ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.... God Almighty have us well in his keeping!" Lamb assumed the tender care of his sister, and his watchfulness ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... read a letter in a newspaper at "Dick's," which he believed had been written to drive him to suicide. He went away and tried to hang himself; the garter breaking, he then resolved to drown himself; but, being hindered by some occurrence, repented for the moment. He was soon after sent to a madhouse in Huntingdon. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... will take cold in the chest," says he, "that's very plain; but long before that can declare itself your honour will be lodged in the madhouse. And what is Madam Aurelia to say, by your leave, to an undressed young gentleman which she declined to say to a dressed one? Let me tell you, young sir," he added with a sneer, "Siena's not the only city in Italy ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... supposed himself to be a wolf, and killed and ate several persons under the influence of the delusion. He was sentenced to death, but the parliament of Paris reversed the sentence, and charitably shut him up in a madhouse. ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... be added that, after the reversal of the sentence, David, the judge who had first condemned Calas, went insane, and died in a madhouse.] ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... de Mauleon, imperturbably—"better fitted to establish a good government in lieu of the bad one he had fought against, and the much worse governments that would seek to turn France into a madhouse, and make the maddest of the inmates the mad doctor!" He turned away, and ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... savage spite upon the bodies of their white victims, submitting them to further mutilation. They chopped off their heads; then, poising these on the points of spears, tossed them to and fro, all the while shouting in savage glee, laughing with a cacchination that resembled the mirth of a madhouse. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... to death. He, however, appealed to the Parliament at Paris; and this decided that as there was more folly in the poor idiot than malice and witchcraft, his sentence of death should be commuted to two years' imprisonment in a madhouse, that he might be instructed in the knowledge of God, whom he had forgotten in his ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... might well do so, for at last I refused to bed with him, and carrying on the breach upon all occasions to extremity, he told me once he thought I was mad, and if I did not alter my conduct, he would put me under cure; that is to say, into a madhouse. I told him he should find I was far enough from mad, and that it was not in his power, or any other villain's, to murder me. I confess at the same time I was heartily frighted at his thoughts of putting me into a madhouse, ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... funeral conclaves, and build monuments to another fellow as high as a church-steeple, and expects me to swallow the dose, but just let me kind o' look about a little, and I'm a fit subject for a madhouse." ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... would delight him as proving that the universal St. Vitus' dance is also nothing but an aberration of the inner consciousness, and that the philosopher is in the right of it as against the general credulity. Is it not even enough simply to shut one's ears in a ballroom, to believe one's self in a madhouse? ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... associates at the same time, without any mention of social capital and without any designation of purpose, would pass for a work of transcendental charlatanism, whose author could readily be sent to a madhouse, provided the magistrates would consent to regard him as only ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... communes; we might have co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enough to feel how ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... constitution, and would, I believe, welcome any public calamity (war with England excepted) which might lessen the confidence of our country in those principles and forms. I have generally considered them rather as subjects for a madhouse. But they are now playing a game of the most mischievous tendency, without perhaps being themselves aware of it. They are endeavoring to convince England, that we suffer more by the embargo than ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... myself that if it was "only" a neurosis it was one with great possibilities. The fact that collapses are frequent among brain-workers was not easily dismissed from my mind. I feared insanity and began to picture how I would disport myself in a madhouse. It seemed that I could not carry out the medical advice to take vigorous exercise, as it gave me palpitation and made me fear that my heart would go out ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... Later—many months later—he died patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things considered, was almost as ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... constituted authorities, the consistories, and even the Aulic Council of the Empire, and he even succeeded in drawing along with him the chief of contemporary rationalists, Semler, who so far forgot himself as to declare that Lessing, for what he had done, deserved to be sent to the madhouse. But with all Goetze's orthodox valour, he was no match for the antagonist whom he had excited to activity. The great critic replied with pamphlet after pamphlet, invincible in logic and erudition, sparkling with wit, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... He is dying for love of her. I believe I say so with truth. Pity and love and remorse and horror of his deed have brought him to the state you saw him in. To be honest with you, he might have got better enough to be tortured for a while in a madhouse, for no jury would have brought him in anything but insane at the time, with the evidence that would have been adduced; but in his anxiety to see me one day—for his friends at that time did not favour my visits, because I encouraged him to surrender—he got out of the house alone to come to me, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... present drama, and had an agreeable party. We are now thinking of making our escape from this hotel, and of taking a horseback journey into Michoacn, which shall occupy a month or six weeks. Meantime I am visiting, with the Seorita ——-, every hospital, jail, college, and madhouse in Mexico! ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... mad for a long time," replied Mrs Forster; "the conduct of my husband and my son has been too much for my nerves; but I don't like the idea of actually going to a madhouse. Could not—" ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... then—once in several days, in a week perhaps. He used to come, like the master of a madhouse visiting his patients, to see that I was comfortable, he said. At first I used to appeal to him to set me free—kneeling at his feet, promising any sacrifice of my fortune for him or for my father, if they would release me. But it ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... mud bread. But when, forgetful of others, I talked aloud to myriads of little folks, unseen 'tis true, but still real to me, they shook their gray heads ominously, and whispering to my mother said, "Mark our words, that girl will one day be crazy. In ten years more she will be an inmate of the madhouse!" ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung; We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue: The broad sun sunk behind it, and it tolled 105 In strong and black relief.—'What we behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,' Said Maddalo, 'and ever at this hour Those who may cross the water, hear that bell Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, 110 To vespers.'—'As much skill as need to pray In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they To their stern ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... just what I mean. You talk to me just as though you and your father had not suppressed my father's will, intending to rob me of my inheritance, and kept my mother in a madhouse for ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... 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. According to custom, Louis ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... laugh," said the Countess gravely, seeing me smile, "for this, you must know, is a mixture of the courts of Italy and Russia among the Alps. It is to my brother a very serious matter. To me it is the Fair of Asnieres and the madhouse at Charenton rolled ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... take care of Gage and see that he was given the best medical aid that money could procure, and, as a result, the fellow was saved from a madhouse, for he finally recovered. He seemed to appreciate the mercy shown him by his enemy, for he wrote a letter to Frank that was filled with entreaties for forgiveness and promised to try to lead a different ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... with the old astronomer, sir?" roared Sir Tiglath. "Am I in a madhouse? Who are all these crazy Janes! ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... has bartered away his soul for the glory of power and knowledge, and, repenting of his bargain, tries again and again to persuade some desperate human to change places with him— penetrates to the refuge of misery, the death chamber, even the madhouse, seeking one in such utter agony as to accept his help, and take ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... tournament, an event not to be easily forgotten in the locality in which it took place. It was subsequently found out, as it ought to have been discovered before, that both Mr. and Mrs. Mumbles had driven themselves mad by novel and romance reading, and they were both obliged to be sent to a madhouse for some time before they could be cured of their egregious folly. But as they were cured, it may be said that the circumstances which I have related were 'all ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... prevail upon me to touch it! But you—you have touched it—and you know the penalty! You raise forces of evil that have lain dormant for ages and dare to wield them. Beware! I know of some whom you have murdered; I cannot know how many you have sent to the madhouse. But I swear that in future your victims shall be few. There is a way to deal ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime. Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 'That's my grievance. I have had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can't stand the suspicion of the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it—and I ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... talking of what I ought never to have heard, and it seemed as if the walls were closing me in so that I could not move to let them know I was there. I said to myself, 'I shall go mad after this,' and I thought of you all coming to see me in the madhouse, your kind face, Morris, coming up distinctly before me, just as it would look at me if I were really crazed. But all this was swept away like a hurricane when I heard the rest, the part about ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... to think that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them across a mile of open country, under a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon forget the picture of ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... require being chained). Al-Makrizi (Khitat) ascribes the invention of "Spitals" to Hippocrates; another historian to an early Pharaoh "Manakiyush;" thus ignoring the Persian Kings, Saint Ephrem (or Ephraim), Syru, etc. In modern parlance "Maristan" is a madhouse where the maniacs are treated with all the horrors which were universal in Europe till within a few years and of which occasional traces occur to this day. In A.D. 1399 Katherine de la Court held a "hospital in the Court called ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... perused innumerable volumes in various languages, and had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seem to have been written in a madhouse, and, though filled with proofs of his immense reading, degrade him to the level of James Naylor and Ludowick Muggleton. He began a dissertation intended to prove that the law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family which was preserved ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the human mind waves many a flower, both black and red, fanned by the foul winds of carnal thought. There grow the brothel, the dive, the gin-shop, the jail. About these hardier stems twine the hospital, the cemetery, the madhouse, the morgue. And Satan, "the man-killer from the beginning," waters their roots and makes fallow the soil with the blood of fools. But of those for whom the gardener waits, there is none whose blood is so life-giving to these noxious plants as ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of the store front. He was so tired that the effort of walking on into that madhouse, where men yelled, grabbed, fought over selections, was too much to face. This was just another part of the never-ending nightmare which had entrapped them ever since they had fled from the bank of the Licking at Cynthiana. Listlessly ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... hard, Frank; of course I'll think over what you say. But really Queensberry ought to be in a madhouse. He's too absurd," and in that spirit he left me, outwardly self-confident. He ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... after a dry summer by which their misery had been greatly increased, to the number of eighteen thousand, and sent one of their class to lay their complaints before the elector, A.D. 1790. The unfortunate messenger was instantly consigned to a madhouse, where he remained until 1809, and the peasantry were dispersed by the military. A similar revolt of the peasantry against the tyrannical nuns of Wormelen, in Westphalia, merely deserves mention as being characteristic ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... no attempt to reach the mountain. Dreamer of great dreams though he was, how like a madhouse nightmare would have seemed to him a true prophecy of mighty engines whose like no human mind had then conceived, running upon roads of steel and asphalt at speeds which no human mind had then imagined, whirling thousands upon thousands of pleasure-seekers from the shores ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... and house and the prospect admirable; the other my Lord Brooke's [Robert Lord Brooke, ob. 1676. Evelyn mentions this garden as Lady Brooke's. Brooke House at Clapton, was lately occupied as a private madhouse.] where the gardens are much better, but the house not so good, nor the prospect good at all. But the gardens are excellent; and here I first saw oranges grow: some green, some half, some a quarter, and some full ripe, on the same tree, and one fruit of the same tree do come ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... indifferent to the opinions of the good, he took no notice of the attacks of the malicious, and allowed them to go on unchecked, even when they proceeded so far as to assign him a place, sometimes in one madhouse, sometimes in another. "If it amuses people to say or to write such stuff concerning me, let them continue so to do as ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... plainly that you speak like a deranged man, Master Gabriel Nietzel," cried the count passionately. "Collect your faculties, man, or I shall immediately have you arrested and sent to a madhouse. I repeat, collect your faculties, and utter not such palpably idle tales. Very likely that I should have taken your wife and child into my keeping. Bethink yourself, Master Gabriel Nietzel, be rational, and remember that you are happily unincumbered ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... guilty," she declared. "His hands may have killed those three women—but he was not guilty. Nor was that poor innocent woman, his mother, who died in the madhouse. They were both clean of sin. It was on his wicked father that the guilt lay. It was Oscar Winslowe who was responsible for the lives that have fallen to his sins. Oscar Winslowe, and ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... whether he had been long in this state. She answered, "He has been as calm as he is at present for about six months. I thank Heaven that he has so far recovered: he was for one whole year quite raving, and chained down in a madhouse. Now he injures no one, but talks of nothing else than kings and queens. He used to be a very good, quiet youth, and helped to maintain me; he wrote a very fine hand; but all at once he became melancholy, was seized with a violent ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... characterized by Mr. Rossetti as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to sadness amid all its splendour by the gloomy presence of the madhouse, ranks among Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the sunset and the island ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and his wrongs, in the prison of his madhouse, know you not that Tasso himself found his solace, his escape, in the recognition of a holy and spiritual Theurgia,—of a magic that could summon the Angel, or the Good Genius, not the Fiend? And do you not remember how he, deeply versed as he was for his age, in the mysteries of the nobler Platonism, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... masculine character; and to give them full and frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would have been to imperil his sanity. If he had gone through the excitement of a Methodist conversion, he would probably have ended his days in a madhouse. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... in this asylum, besides myself. I will tell you their stories when you come here, which I hope will be soon; for the time agreed on draws near, and my patience and self-control are sorely tried, as day after day rolls by, and sees me still in a madhouse." ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... discord was the announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns. It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it may ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... in the human!—a loathsome skeleton as soon as grasped. From the false and disappointing search into which he had been enticed by the demon, he returns to find the innocent wife, whom he had deserted, in a madhouse. False to human duties, his punishment came fast ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and, that they may be governed for their own good, they must not be governed by their own ignorance. There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular government as to abolish all the restraints in a school, or to untie all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is enough. There is not a court in all this country that would believe your wild tale. Try it, and see how quickly they would lock you up in a madhouse." ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... rush to and fro, like maniacs let out of a madhouse. Giving to the dead bodies only a passing glance, then going on in fear of finding others by which they will surely stay; all the time talking, interrogating, wildly gesticulating, now questioning Oris Tucker, now one ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... seemed to cool and the hot air to clean as she sang. She who sang was a girl of five and twenty, whom it had pleased to clothe her ripe womanhood in a boy's habit, that clasped her fine body as close as a second skin, and she might have passed for a man no otherwhere than in a madhouse. She looked very charming in the stained and faded daintiness of her male attire. She wore a green velvet doublet and green woollen hose, with a scarlet girdle and pouch about her waist, and a scarlet ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... it was the dwelling of an Indian woman, who pretended to second sight, and who should have been sent to the State's prison as a felon, or, at the very least, to the madhouse as a lunatic. She was burned out, or perhaps burned herself out, and vanished on the same night that Governor Rothsay disappeared. She was in some way cognizant of a plot against him that would prevent him from ever entering upon the duties of his office. I, in my capacity as magistrate, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... again in any house. What with some running downstairs and calling for their carriages, the band playing, his lordship bawling for his servants—and, upon all this, the sudden arrival of the Captain, who carried a pair of swords in his hand—why, no madhouse could ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... Arthur, slapping his brother on the back. "The best chance of keeping you out of a madhouse! And a very nice woman! You don't expect me to ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... me to persuade Jane to beg pardon," said Mrs. Pullet. "Her temper's beyond everything; it's well if it doesn't carry her off her mind, though there never was any of our family went to a madhouse." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... Bill—"gone home. I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick. I'm sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse." ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... rats do the greatest number of "impossible" things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning until a madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my traps and poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly asking: Are rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer to that was furnished by an old he-one who left his tail in my steel trap, but a little later ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... discoveries. Imagine my disappointment and horror when, upon the conclusion of my narrative, certain papers were signed by my uncle, and, without warning, I found myself arrested and hurried away to dismal and fearful confinement in a madhouse, where I remained for twenty-eight years—long, ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... Self and is, in short, Peer's perfect antithesis. When Peer is an outlaw she forsakes all and follows him to his hut in the forest. Peer deserts her and roams the world, where he finds his theory of Self upset by one adventure after another and at last reduced to absurdity in the madhouse at Cairo. But though his own theory is discredited, he has not yet found the true one. To find this he must be brought face to face in the last scene with his deserted wife. There, for the first time, he asks the question and receives the answer. "Where," he asks, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and finding himself in the palace, with the hand- maids and eunuchs about him, exclaimed, "There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great! Come to my help this night which meseems more unlucky than the former! Verily, I am fearful of the Madhouse and of that which I suffered therein the first time, and I doubt not but the Devil is come to me again, as before. O Allah, my Lord, put thou Satan to shame!" Then he shut his eyes and laid his head in his sleeve, and fell to laughing ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the sunset; there is his fire, his warmed linen, and his shirt-studs; his bath, his choice of a dozen things he will or will not wear; the landlord's or host's menu is up against the looking-glass, and the extremely handsome miniature likeness of his wife, who is in the madhouse, by a celebrated painter, I forget his name. Jorian calls this, new birth—you catch his idea? He throws off the old and is on with the new with a highly hopeful anticipation. His valet is a scoundrel, but never fails in extracting the menu from the cook, wherever he may be, and, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shrieking "Wo, wo, wo! the wrath of God, the wrath of God!" When arrested, they obstinately refused to put on clothing. "We are," they observed, "the naked truth." In a day or two, these furious lunatics, who certainly deserved a madhouse rather than the scaffold, were all executed. The numbers of the sect increased with the martyrdom to which they were exposed, and the disorder spread to every part of the Netherlands. Many were put to death in lingering torments, but ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Lettres Philosophiques," in which it must be confessed there were passages which justified Voltaire's assertion that Maupertius was at one time insane, and was confined for some years in a madhouse at Montpellier. Maupertius proposed in these letters that a Latin city should be built, and this majestic and beautiful tongue brought to life again. He proposed, also, that a hole should be dug to the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... of the Sleeper and the Waker (Nights cccxxx.-ccclxxix.). The History of Warlock and the Cook (ccclxxx.-cd.). The History of the Prisoner in the Bimaristan or Madhouse (cd.-cdxxvii.). The History of Ghanim the Thrall o' Love (cdxxviii.-cdlxxiv.). The History of Zayn al-Asnam and the King of the Jann (cdlxxv.-cdxci.). The History of Alaeddin (cdxcii.-dlxix.), and The History ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... seriously that her father gave him the alternative of matrimony or Siberia. After some hesitation he chose matrimony. Had he foreseen the sequel, he would doubtless have greatly preferred Siberia, for his wife was a virago, and collaborated with his ill-health to guide him to the madhouse. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... scheme, indeed. Hawkins seems to have considered that his duty—which was merely to keep intruders out of the park—was dictated by necessity. He thought that if Lady Coverly's real condition became known she would be removed to a madhouse! He also thought that ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... wife were tried at London in the spring of 1857 for the murder of their two young children. It was sufficiently proved upon that occasion that Mrs. Bacon (who had already been in a madhouse) committed the crime in a fit of insanity. Bacon, however, had endeavoured to manufacture some evidence in order to give countenance to a theory that the murder had been committed by housebreakers during his absence. He thus incurred suspicion, and was placed upon trial with his wife. It also ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... slaves, but they are free! Oh! fools, and slow of heart! As well might a prisoner cover his irons with a cloak, and try to pass as a free man. We can hear the clank of the chains. So is it with the slave of sin. Once I visited a madhouse, and talked with some of the poor patients. Some had one delusion, some another. One thought he was a king, another fancied himself the heir to a fortune. But one thing they all believed, that they ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... the hangar tents now, and trucks will be here in the next hour for baggage and equipment. All the ships are to be on the line, checked and inspected an hour before dawn. The C.O. said to make it snappy. He said a truck would come after your luggage. It's a madhouse over at ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... he was old or sick, or she didn't like him, or she couldn't help it. Violent love comes 'by the visitation of God,' as our juries say; the man or woman must satisfy it or die. A poor young fellow is now in the muristan (the madhouse) of Cairo owing to the beauty and sweet tongue of an English lady whose servant he was. How could he help it? God sent ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... speak the truth; for my wife and myself ate of the fish and flesh which fell from the clouds." The woman, being appealed to, denied the assertion of her husband. The wali, now convinced that the man was crazy, released the woman, and sent her husband to the madhouse, where he remained for some days, till his wife, pitying his condition, contrived to get him set at liberty. She visited her husband, and counselled him, should any one ask him if he had seen it rain fish and flesh, to answer, "No; who ever saw it rain anything ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... Frank, suddenly stopping and planting himself against a tree. "It would be suicide to advance another step. And she is your niece, you say. Pray intercede for me, or in less than a month I shall be making faces through the iron grating of some madhouse." ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... "there," and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind—we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs.[282] It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more "rational" beliefs ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... things; he still had a sense of the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he said, "I call it the late Republican party," it was with a chuckle so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a pretty stiff ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the knight of Malta—Knight of Roads—"Rhodes"—he should have been—we are sorry to state that the career of the Ruffler terminated in a madhouse, and thus the poor knight became in reality a Hospitaller! According to the custom observed in those establishments, the knight was deprived of his luxuriant locks, and the loss of his beard rendered his case incurable; but, in the mean time, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth |
