"Demented" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... once—he's exceedingly generous,—and perhaps at a pinch he would lend you his passport or hide a fugitive in his cellar; but if you mention such a thing as rifles he will stare at you and think we're both demented." ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... present the words of Draupadi. And he spoke unto Yudhishthira sitting in the midst of the kings, these words,—Draupadi hath asked thee, Whose lord wert thou at the time thou lost me in play? Didst thou lose thyself first or me? Yudhishthira, however sat there like one demented and deprived of reason and gave no answer good ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... woods, We seek, among her garden roods, With bells and cries in vain: the while Lamps, plate, and the decanter smile On the forgotten board. But she, Deaf, blind, and prone on face and knee, Forgets time, family, and feast, And digs like a demented beast. ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some almost as if Judge Priest were aiding and abetting the befogged O'Day in his demented enterprises, his peculiar excursions and his weird purchases. If he did not actually encourage him in these constant exhibitions of witlessness, certainly there were no evidences available to show that he sought to dissuade O'Day from his ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... though quite politely, that he would be put down as "one of those muddle-headed, stupid yokels with little or no mind," who, according to the townsman, "moulder" in country villages "till they become demented." ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... however, did Mr. Houghton take his fiery eyes from Bodine, who, now that he was in the stress of the emergency, maintained his sad composure perfectly. Only a soldier whose nerves had been steeled in battle could have looked upon the half-demented man so quietly, for he presented a terrible spectacle. His white hair was dishevelled, and his eyes had the ferocity of a lioness robbed of her young. Foam gathered at his lips as he ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... moral control. At this stage there is a feeling of abandon leading often to unchaste exposure of the person, wild cries as if demented, and all ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... appeared again the sound of running steps, and presently there broke, equally unannounced, into the presence of his mistress, the coachman, fresh from his stables and none too careful of his garb. Tears ran down his cheeks. He flung out his hands with gestures as of one demented. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... "Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to throw it away when I kept ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... most important that a clear distinction should be preserved between these adult cases and those which date from birth or childhood. The former are labouring under dementia, not amentia. They are demented persons, or, as they are called in our asylums, dements. They are not always, but they are for the most part, harmless lunatics. It is confusing to call them imbeciles, now that this term has become restricted by medical writers to those who are, or once were, feeble-minded children. There ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... he had never ordered the plans and, in fact, had never seen the architect in his life! He alleged that until the suit was brought he had never even heard of him, and that either the architect was demented or a liar, or else some other Cohen had given the order. The architect and his lawyer were thunderstruck, but they had no witnesses to corroborate their contentions, since no one had ever seen Cohen in the other's office. The jury ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... illegitimacy. If a marriage has received the full authorization of the ruler, and there is any issue, the children cannot be educated without the sovereign's wishes being consulted. The parents, in fact, are regarded much as if they were either minors, outlaws, or demented people, unfitted to be entrusted with the control and bringing up of their offspring, for the sovereign is ex officio the guardian of all children who are under age, belonging to the married members of his family, and his rights ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... be accounted, as our Scotch friends say, 'half daft'; and whoever, in the Lower Provinces, about the same time, would have ventured to foretell the composition of their delegations which sat with us under this roof last October, would probably have been considered equally demented. But the thing came about; and if those gentlemen who have had no immediate hand in bringing it about, and, therefore, naturally feel less interest in the project than we who had, will only give us the benefit of the doubt— will only assume that we are not all altogether ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... are very unjust to the King, to say that. He is not unkind. He only had her locked up because he thought her demented. ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... O heaven-demented race of Oedipus, My race, tear-fraught, detested of the gods! Alas, our father's curses now bear fruit. But it beseems not to lament or weep, Lest lamentations sadder still be born. For him, too truly Polyneikes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and squawks from overhead could be heard for miles and chief among the offenders in this respect were the terns whose shrill voices and incessant clatter were like the cries of woe of demented souls. Below, the occasional bellow of a crocodile hidden in the reedy bed of a marsh or the high-pitched wail of the great brown wolf added its note to the clamor of ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... inscription! The meagre but sufficient identification of the deceased; the impudent candor of confession; the brutal anathema; the ludicrous change of sex and sentiment—all marked this record as the work of one who must have been at least as much demented as bereaved. I felt that any further disclosure would be a paltry anti-climax, and with an unconscious regard for dramatic effect turned squarely about and walked away. Nor did I return to that part of the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Two years after the production of "Der Freischuetz" the opera of "Euryanthe" was completed. The libretto was the work of a half demented woman, Helmine von Chezy, but Weber set out to produce the best opera he was capable of, and to this story he has joined some wonderful music. It was his favorite work; he wrote to his beloved wife two hours before the first performance: ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... face had the deriding scorn of a superior being. Lucy lay flat on her back, watching him. Her mind worked swiftly. She would have to fight for her body and her life. Her terror had fled with her horror. She was not now afraid of this demented boy. She meant to fight, calculating like a cunning Indian, wild as a ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... photographer and a Belgian newspaper correspondent, and his intention had been to make sketches on the battlefield. His arrest at Laneffe thwarted this plan. He underwent a terrifying ordeal at the hands of his demented captor, although he was ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... after which I arranged with the Governor to see him Monday, P. M. I saw the letters referred to, which contained the grossest misrepresentations, uttering sentiments I never thought of, or, if I had, should not have expressed there, unless demented. ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... on leaving an inn where he spent his time after becoming well-to-do. His wife, who was a very harsh aunt of Flore's. Lastly the brother and brother-in-law of this girl's guardians, the real father of "La Rabouilleuse," who died in 1799, a demented widower, in the hospital of Bourges. [A ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... was in the saddle and riding, riding hard, did she know a moment's relief. The physical exertion eased the inward tumult, but she would not slacken for an instant. She felt that to do so would be to lose her reason. Beelzebub, galloping after her, thought her demented already. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... then. Besides I was in a hurry. I had just come from my encounter with this demented man. I had noticed the marks on the landing, and the worn edges of the carpet, on my way upstairs. I was in no condition to observe ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented with a passionate ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... wouldn't stop him. And though he sneaks away so silently when he hears anything suspicious, yet when he smells danger he'll go through the forest at a thundering rush, making as much noise as a demented fire-brigade." ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... year the Auld Lichts went demented. The occasion was the Fast Day at Tilliedrum; when its inhabitants, instead of crowding reverently to the kirk, swooped profanely down in their scores and tens of scores on our God-fearing town, intent on making a day of ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... Allah; nor is there any escape from that which He hath predestined!" Then he went up to the roof and found the strips of Ba'albak stuff tied to the crenelles and hanging down to the ground, and thus it was he knew that she had descended thence and had fled forth, as one distracted and demented with desire and passion. Presently, he turned and seeing there two birds, a gor-crow and an owl he justly deemed this an omen of ill; so he groaned and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... "Like demented wolves they are destroying each other—Pray the God of Justice," quoted she from her husband's letter, "that it may only last; in a few months, then, there will be none of them left, and the people, relieved from this rule of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... ripest portions of the fruit mixed with whisky from my pocket- flask, and spread it nicely on the bark. At once they fell on it with splendid appetites, but to my surprise the alcohol produced no effect. I have seen big locusts and other important insects tumbling about and acting generally as if demented after a few sips of rum and sugar, but these wasps, when they had had their full of banana and whisky, buzzed about and came and went and quarrelled with one another just as usual, and when I parted from them there was not one of the company who could be said to be the worse ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... bred up, where such remote precautions are taken against the pursuits of justice? What would my father or Reuben Butler think if I were to tell them there are sic folk in the world? And to abuse the simplicity of this demented creature! Oh, that I were but safe at hame amang mine ain leal and true people! and I'll bless God, while I have breath, that placed me amongst those who live in His fear, and under the shadow of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... came back this morning like a man demented, a-talkin' to himself, and with his eyes starin' so that it was dreadful to look at the poor dear gentleman. Then he walked about the passages a long time, and he wouldn't so much as look at his luncheon, but he went into the museum, and gathered all his jewels ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thy Prophet, hath to-day received His crown. No bloodshed. This poor creature is demented. A miracle alone can restore her reason," and he went toward Faith. "Woman, to thy knees!" he said, but she made a gesture of indignation. He continued to go toward her, then laying his hands lovingly upon her head he looked meaningly into ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... be the final one. And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged her, withered, consumed by a love which she could not content, then demented, perverted to the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... in his mind, he released the hands, picked up the tin and scrambled out of the cave. As he ran to the river heedless of sea elephants or anything else he kept crying out: "Oh, the poor woman. Oh, the poor woman." He seemed like a huge thing demented. The baby sea elephants scuttered out of his way and as he came running back he spilt half the contents of the tin. Then he was down beside her again, dipping his finger in the water and moistening ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... doubt Bob had become demented, but without question obeyed the command. In this position what had previously been the stern of the canoe now became the bow, Shad Trowbridge the bowman ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... you the truth so that you won't idealize me... and the situation. I am enlisted in this fight for life. Where it will lead me I don't know. But I must follow the road I see. You will lose your friends. They will think me a crank, an enemy to society; and they will think you demented. But even for ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... "He was demented on that one subject," confessed Alec, "and the disease kept getting a stronger grip on him until finally—-but hello! here's the hole in the wall we wanted to find, so let's crawl over ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... his disordered brain, swift as lightning flashes. In a moment Canidia was forgotten, and he was Pentheus, struggling with Agave and her demented crew. They were tearing him to pieces, their fingers were at his throat. Then he was in the East, a defenceless traveller in the tropical desert, surrounded by Thugs. He pointed to one particular spot where he saw his insidious ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... not understand his witticisms, and their intelligence did not seem to be awakened until he sputtered obscene words, rough expressions, crippled by his accent. Then all in a chorus began to laugh as if they were demented, falling on the laps of their neighbors, repeating the words which the Baron disfigured purposely in order to make them say filthy things. They vomited at will plenty of them, intoxicated after drinking from the first bottles of wine; and relapsing into their real selves, ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 to have a most beneficial effect upon his partially demented patients. I am also told that this prescription was given to one, Goodwill of Lastingham, who still possesses it. Cropton is only a short distance from the Roman camps that lie all surrounded and overgrown with dense plantations, so that it is impossible for ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... his mind and started in our direction. I was plenty busy taking in slack, so I did not notice Dick. Dick was absolutely demented. His mind automatically reacted in the direction of paddling. He paddled, blindly, frantically. Canada came surging in, his mouth open, his wicked eyes flaming, a tremendous indistinct body lashing foam. Dick glanced once over his shoulder, and ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... indeed a worthy page I would make a song of your enchanted—or demented Dona, and pipe it to you to the tombe of the medicine workers on the roofs," declared the lad in high glee that Don Ruy again spoke with ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... scrambled out, was standing rather dazed, ruefully stanching the cuts on his face. Between them they soon dragged out Mr. Tremaine, half suffocated, and puffing and panting like a demented steam-engine, but by the time he had recovered his breath ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... back in the jungles of the Amazon with a half-demented naturalist who told the lad nothing of his past. The jungle boy was a lover of birds, and hunted animals with a bow and arrow and his trusty machete. He had a primitive education in some things, and his daring adventures will be followed ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... was shivering from cold. I jumped down to recover it and realized it was dawn already. We were bowling along at a fine pace past green trees and undulating veld, and I wondered why the engine should keep on screaming like a thing demented. I knelt on Fred's berth to lean from the window and look ahead. We were going round a slight curve and I could see the track ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... saw that the old gentleman thought he was dealing with a demented man; he saw, too, that the denial ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... know how rapidly a lively, affectionate child will win one's love, and he thought his proud mother grown almost demented; but still, in spite of himself, he more than once raised his hand to lay it on Willie's head, pausing occasionally in his conversation to watch the gambols of the playful child sporting on ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... with his knife, and quickly removed the hide. The people looked upon him with horror; they thought him demented. What was he doing? What was he going ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... did also Catherine and Mary, almost as if they suspected she had gone demented. "Madam," I stammered, scarce thinking I ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... his return to civilization," continues McWhorter, "an Indian woman, supposed to be his wife, passed through the Hacker Creek settlements, inquiring for Peter, and going on toward the East. She appeared to be demented, and sang snatches of savage songs. Peter never knew of her presence, nor would any one inform her of his whereabouts. He was reticent about his life among the Indians, and no details of that feature of his career became ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... giving vent to the suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At times the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the paroxysm past, he sank back again into his old apathetic attitude of watching, the attitude he had so often kept beside ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... terrible and fatal storm which, from the frontier to Sedan, in sweeping away the Empire, threatened to sweep away the country; always wise, circumspect, firm in his hope, loving with fraternal affection his comrade Maurice, the demented child of the people, the holocaust doomed to expiation, weeping tears of blood when inexorable destiny chose himself to hew off this rotten limb, and after all had ended—the continual defeats, the frightful civil war, the lost provinces, the ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... hidden from the inquiries of neighbours. All that, however, would have been intelligible. There is so much honour in having a lord to court one that perhaps it is well to have him seen. But why was the lord walking up and down the street with that demented air? ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... alone, had led such an introspective life, that she had hardly realised and understood all that was going on around her. At the time when the inner vitality of France first asserted itself and then swept away all that hindered its mad progress, she was tied to the invalid chair of her half-demented father; then, after that, the sheltering walls of the Ursuline Convent had hidden from her mental vision the true meaning of the great conflict, between the Old Era and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... filled with cries, and Edward ran out of the house to see what was the matter; but on the spot nobody was game enough to come between the furious man and the fiery girl. The consequence was, her impetuous courage began to flag and her eye to waver; the demented man found this out by some half animal instinct, and instantly caught her by the shoulder and whirled her down on her knees; then raised his staff high to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... elbowed their way down to the water's edge. The relatives of the crew were all there in various stages of despair, but old Paul Stockton seemed like a man demented. He ran up and down the beach, crying and praying. His only son was on the Amy Reade, and he could ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... this time o' year and doin' chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein' about a toss-up," said the man called Sucatash. "I reckon it's a certainty that Pop requires considerable labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won't. If the ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... ants'll eat folks. They re-yards sech reepasts as festivals, an' seasons of reelaxation from the sterner dooties of a ant. I recalls once how we loses Locoed Charlie, which demented party I b'lieve I mentions to you prior. This yere Charlie takes a day off from where he's workin'—at least he calls it labor- -at the stage corrals, an' goes curvin' over to Red Dog. Charlie tanks up on the whiskey of that hamlet, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... in that legislative hall His wisdom still he 'd vented, It never had been known at all That Mowther was demented. ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... courteous and urbane personage of affable exterior. He was further hedged in with a species of outwork of the sentry-box formation, which concealed his lower limbs from view:—a precaution evidently designed to protect him from the fierce onslaught of some demented candidate—who, when suffering from the continuous effect of "examination on the brain," might have been suddenly goaded to frenzy by a string of ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sat in council in the "Herald" office; that is, if staring out of dingy windows in a demented silence may be called sitting in council; that was what Mr. Fisbee and Parker and Ross Schofield were doing. By almost desperate exertions, these three and Bud Tipworthy had managed to place before the public the issues of the paper for the previous week, unaided by their chief, or, rather, aided ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... had been eating just pickles; when he finished his story he ate faster. By now we all knew he was demented. The men tried to coax him to go on with us so that they could turn him over to the authorities, but he said he must be digging. At last it was decided to send some one back for him. Mr. Struble was unwilling to leave him, but the man would not be ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... furniture in Irving's tale, been indulging over night in a very irregular dance, and suddenly stopped in the most complicated part of a confusion worse confounded. Galleries, quaint staircases, and towers with projecting upper stories, as well as eccentric chimneys, demented door-ways, insane weather-vanes, and highly original steeples, form the most common-place materials in building; and it has more than once occurred to me that the architects of this city, even at ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... with one eye shut and the other fixed on the luff of the sail. He was in his element: nothing to do but steer and smoke, warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. A landsman would have been half demented in his condition, many a sailor would have been taciturn and surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately damning his soul and praying to his ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... had to deal with a man demented. The blow he had received had laid open the flesh on his cheek-bone, and blood was flowing from the wound. Never in his life before had he been so humiliated. And by a Frenchman—it roused every instinct of race-hatred in him. Yet he wanted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a shake of the head, "it must be hard to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost demented. It is very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... himself to be the Pope of Rome, with a paper-cap for a tiara, an ell-wand for a crosier, a blanket for a rochet, and bestowing his blessings on the other Maniacs with much force and vehemence; and there, poor demented creature, he died ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... never killed her. Had his love been anything short of the worship it was, he stood in too much awe of her to lift his hand against her, even in his most demented moments." ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... found him, living quietly under an assumed name in a little town outside of Boston—pretending that he hadn't a relative in the world. He told his brother he was just beginning to feel rested. Aunt Bell said he was demented. While he was away she'd been all through psychometry, the planchette, clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology, and Unitarianism. What are ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... was half demented. Now, I seemed to myself not handsome or rich or elegant enough to possess such a woman, now I was filled with vanity at the thought of it; then I began to fear lest Marguerite had no more than a few days' caprice for me, and I said to myself that since we should soon have to part, ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... Thalassa insisted she had played only one game after half-past eight on the night of the murder. If he dared accept such a computation of time an unimagined possibility in the case stood revealed. But—a demented woman. "A parable in the mouth of a fool." Perhaps it was because she was a fool that he had stumbled on this revelation. She lacked the ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... was lost from that moment. She had Len over in a corner again, telling him how easy it was to win, and how this poor demented creature had left all hers there because Judge Ballard probably didn't want to create a scene by making her take it; and mustn't they have a lot of trouble looking after the weak-minded thing all the time! And I could hear ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... became voluble with a thousand memories. Had I been present to listen to him then, I should doubtless have been enabled to add considerably to my stock of early anecdotes. He seemed to have brought away from this visit a peculiarly vivid recollection of "poor crazy Joe Gibson." This demented being was sometimes easily controlled, and willing to be useful; at other times, he was perfectly furious and ungovernable. Few people knew how to manage him; but Isaac's parents acquired great influence over him by their uniform system of forbearance and tenderness; their own good ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... was reported to have received the news of my departure in a way that suggested he had lost control of his senses (raging and storming at my husband like a man demented), having come to the conclusion that I, being in a physical condition peculiar to women, had received a serious shock resulting in a loss of memory, offered five hundred pounds reward for information that would lead to my discovery, which was ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... soul, whose past was a blank, there was nothing for memory or resignation to cling to; nothing before that last journey, as nothing after; unless it be mournful vigils by the side of the brother she nursed—the almost demented brother, whose life was wrecked by his idleness and a great unfortunate passion; who became an incurable opium-eater and drunkard. Then, shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, on a December afternoon, as she sat in the little whitewashed ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... egging them on to do it. You will see otherwise and at other times good men so full of the rage and madness of prejudice and partiality that they will storm at every report of goodness and truth and prosperity in the man, or in the cause, or in the church, or in the party, they are so demented against. Jockey is not the word. There is the last triumph of pure devilry in the way that the prince of the devils turns old Prejudice's very best things—his love of his fathers, his love of the past, his love of order, his love of ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Blind, demented, agonized, the Tailless Tyke thundered about the little room gnashing, snapping, oversetting; men, tables, chairs swirled off their legs as though they had been dolls. He spun round like a monstrous teetotum; he banged his tortured ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... run on, for he was like one demented. But you may suppose I opened my eyes as I heard this brave character ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... blunder: There is no happiness in thunder; For happiness, to nought confined, Is found in the contented mind: Go home again, and be contented, Nor grumble more like one demented." ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... "The enemy did not attack us with any regularity, and made no intrenchments to cover themselves." This last is not exact. Not being wholly demented, they made intrenchments, such as they were,—at least at the advanced battery; [Footnote: Diary of Joseph Sherburn, Captain at the Advanced Battery.] as they would otherwise have been swept out of existence, being under the concentred fire of several French batteries, two of which ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... those greasy nondescript males, who are always to be seen when pigeon shooting or coursing is going on. The greasy being held the rabbit by the ears, and put it temptingly near the dogs. The sprightly terrier went clean demented; the sullen one stood with thoughtful earnestness waiting for a chance to catch the start. When the rabbit was put down it cowered low and seemed trying to shrink into the ground; its ears were pressed hard back, its head was pressed closely to the grass, and it was ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... seed two young gentlemen a scampering along here, and up that there lane. Bees they demented? We didn't like to stop them, though somehow we ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... really stuns one at first. One feels so bewildered that any idea of a picturesque description disappears. The only thing one is aware of is bustle. Bustle on land, where everybody seems to rush as if they were demented—bustle on the water, where one keeps wondering why the ships of all sizes passing at full speed in every direction do not collide every other minute. In complete contrast to our boulevards, Broadway, when you walk along it, does not seem to contain ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... marse—yes, honey, dat my name—Catherine Mortimer. Which Catherine were the name giben me by my sponsibles in baptism; and Mortimer were de name 'ferred upon me in holy matrimony by my late demented 'panion; which he was de coachman to ole Comedy Burghe, as fought de Britishers in the war of eighteen hundred ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... you think she did? She looked at it and him, asked him to wait a bit, whipped out at her back door, luckily met the policeman starting on his rounds, bade him have an eye to the customer in her shop, and came off to show it to me. That young woman is demented enough for anything, and is quite capable of doing it—for some absurd scheme. But do you think it is hers, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and shout and clap your hands, and tell the billows to come on, and in excess of glee greet persons that you never saw before and never will again, and never want to, and act so wildly that others would think you demented but that they also are as fully let loose; so that if there be one imbecile there is a whole ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... for repeating these points of her teaching in my own way, that certain passages of one of my Volumes have been brought into the general accusation which has been made against my religious opinions. The writer has said that I was demented if I believed, and unprincipled if I did not believe, in my own statement, that a lazy, ragged, filthy, story-telling beggar-woman, if chaste, sober, cheerful, and religious, had a prospect of heaven, such as was absolutely closed ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... yet," remarked the captain. "But I cannot understand," he continued, "why that man persists in acting so strangely. He must know by this time that we have seen him and will rescue him, yet he continues to signal with his arms and that red rag as though he were demented. It would not greatly surprise me to find, when we get him on board, that his brain has given way with the horror of solitude, suffering, ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... such strict bondage that it was almost impossible for him to get on in the world or even to give her the comforts she needed. In villages like Riverboro in those early days there was no putting away, even of men or women so demented as to be something of a menace to the peace of the household; but Lois Boynton was so gentle, so fragile, so exquisite a spirit, that she seemed in her sad aloofness simply a thing to be sheltered and shielded somehow in her difficult life journey. Ivory often thought how sorely she needed a daughter ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... year out, he had kept himself by his never-flagging exertions, and with the demented idea that he was mounting upward. And now he stood very near the lowest depth of life—the very bottom. And he was so tired. Why not let himself sink yet a little further; why not let destiny run its course? There would be a seductive ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... year of the great crime, When the false English Nobles and their Jew, By God demented, slew The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong, One said, Take up thy Song, That breathes the mild and almost mythic time Of England's prime! But I, Ah, me, The freedom of the few That, in our free Land, were indeed the free, Can song renew? Ill singing 'tis with ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Mrs. Underwood, wife of the demented governor, who had alluded so truthfully to my lecture, was in the audience, and being gifted with genuine clairvoyant powers, she rose and begged the audience not to disperse, as she could distinctly see me pacing nervously up and down the platform at the Junction ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Mrs. Cross saw a long roller-towel, half a yard of it burnt to tinder; nor could any satisfactory explanation of the accident be drawn from Martha, who laughed, sobbed, and sniggered by turns as if she were demented. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... single moment. He had the appearance of a man half demented by a passion which could find no outlet. Then he left the room, without salute, without a glance to the right or to the left. Out in the hall, a moment later, they heard a harsh voice of command. The hall door was opened and closed behind the sound ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... proceedings against myself; whereupon the Senator declined to make the motion. Hastings then presented to the House of Representatives a petition to be relieved from his allegiance as a citizen of the United States. As illustrative of the demented character of the man's brain, some portions of the petition are given. After setting forth his admission to the Supreme Court of California as an attorney and counsellor-at-law, and his taking the ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... is blameless—I, a hulking, half-demented woman, I am GLAD when you blame me. But don't blame me when I tell you to fight. Don't do that, or you will regret it when you must die. Ah, your father was stiff and proud enough before men of better rank than himself. He ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... but those who have never before heard a note of Wagner can follow as easily as they could a Gluck or Mozart opera. The Pilgrims' Chorus occurs again, and again we have the Venus music, when Tannhaeuser, demented, sees her in the heart of the mountain and ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... Ramsay of Blenheim, that had married the common great-great-grandfather of both the colonel and Patricia—Major Orlando Musgrave, an aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee in the Revolution,—Rudolph Musgrave found, or seemed to find, dear likenesses to that demented seraph who was about to stoop to ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... faster they came, crowding one group behind another, until the ushers were nearly demented. When drove after drove had divided and passed to the right or the left, that is, to the ladies' or gentlemen's dressing-rooms, and the stream began to slacken a little, so that they could distinguish ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... vivacity the remnant of a cigarette and then said: "If you're not too sleepy I want to put you a case." I answered that I'd make every effort to attend, and welcomed the note of interest when he went on: "As I told you a while ago, Lady Coxon, poor dear, is demented." His tone had much behind it—was full of promise. I asked if her ladyship's misfortune were a trait of her malady or only of her character, and he pronounced it a product of both. The case he wanted to put to me was a matter on which it concerned him to have the impression— ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... cigarettes and candy and books. And they all wanted us to hurry back to marry them.... Then—when the months had gone by and the novelty had worn off—when we went against the hell of real war—sick or worn out, sleepless and miserable, crippled or half demented with terror and dread and longing for ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... her oath to her father, and, of course, had never heard of the sad history of this young, sensitive girl placed in one terrible moment between her dead brother and her demented father. He only thought of common, sordid revenge for a sin he had ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... last goad to a maddened man, whose raging invective and brutal violence drove a weeping woman out into the cheerless night. He deemed her the Russian's cherished mistress. With a shudder Alixe Delavigne recalled the white face of the discarded mother, whose babe slumbered in peace, while the half-demented woman fled away to the shelter of the house ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... not strange that my wife thinks me demented," the doctor continued, as if afraid of the silence that answered him. "But it is your business to discriminate, and you should know a sane man when ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... going on for a month now. I am unable to prove her an imposter, even to identify her. I have endeavoured to discuss the situation with a few people, but they only laugh at the strange idea. No one will listen to me seriously. My lawyer actually believes I am demented." ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... their neighbor on the left. They constantly find these two doors, but not a vestige of their own: their door has disappeared—vanished! Who could have taken away their door? Terror seizes them; they ask each other if they have become demented; and dreading the ridicule which would be cast upon honest citizens who could not find their own street-door, they grope about for more than an hour, feeling, poking, inspecting, measuring; but alas! there is no door; there is nothing but a wall, an unknown wall, an implacable wall, a desperate ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... Half demented now, beyond a doubt! A lifetime of disappointments and one invention after another stolen from him by those who knew more of law than of science. And now he held fortune in the secret of his ship—a secret which he swore should never ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... hundred years of hideousness, Constricted brows, and strain, and stress! And still, despite humanity's groan, The torturing, "tall-hat" holds its own! What proof more sure and melancholy Of the dire depths of mortal folly? Mad was the hatter who invented The demon "topper," and demented The race that, spite of pain and jeers, Has borne it—for One ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... linchpins." "Have you young apple-trees?" asks the nursery-man. "We have whiffle-trees." If I had wanted breakfast-caps, shouldn't I have asked for breakfast-caps? Or do the Boston people take their breakfast at one o'clock in the morning? I concluded that the man was demented, and marched out of the shop. When I laid the matter before Halicarnassus, the following ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... rock, As this eternal jaud wears me; I could withstand the single shock, But not the continuity. It's pay me here, an' pay me there, An' pay me, pay me, evermair— I'll gang demented wi' despair— I'm ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... instinctive mimicry and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be no division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human action. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of life, the only one ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... with a shiver, as though for a bride. Catching sight of her reflection in a mirror, she stared aghast, scarcely recognising herself in the wild-eyed, haggard woman who met her gaze. Small wonder that she had deemed him repressive, she told herself, for she looked like a demented creature. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... blow to one of these persons. The aggrieved one was so overwhelmed with sadness and grief from what had happened to him, that he appeared inconsolable. One of our fathers, talking to him in order to console him, found him like one demented, and he seemed to rave. Finally, when it was least expected in the ship, the poor wretch cast himself into the sea. It was noted with wonder that, although he made no movement with his body or tried to swim—which he could have done, as the weather was fair—he ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... consulted, upon the subject of Al-Walahn the well-known Professor of Arabic at Halle, Dr. Thorbeck, who remarks that the word (here as further on) must be an adjective, mad, love-distraught, not a "lakab" or poetical cognomen. He generally finds it written Al-Sh'ir al-Walahn (the love-demented poet) not Al-Walahn al-Sh'ir Walahn the Poet. Note this burst of song after the sweet youth falls in love: it explains the cause of verse-quotation in The Nights, poetry being the natural language of love ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... and peer into the depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown- up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me. The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured beings who spend their days in 'flinging down their golden crowns upon the jasper sea'. Why, I argued, should I not be able to fling down my ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... window with the following label: 'Only L2 2s. Hume's History of England, in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay.' I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman. Alas for poor David! As for me, only one height of renown remains to be attained. I am not yet in Madam Tussaud's wax-works. I live, however, in hope of seeing one day an advertisement ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Inspector, as if he thought me demented; Mr. Gryce, as if he would like to have considered me a ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... of the bitter sense of impotence, started to the old soldier's eyes; and when, at length, one of his messengers came back and told him that the men and women alike seemed quite demented, and all and each refused to come up on the roof, he uttered a wrathful curse and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... some two years we lived on happily till one day it was brought to my knowledge that she was unfaithful to me. I was beside myself with grief and mortification and jealous fury. For some hours I just raged up and down my room like one demented, crying like a child one minute, cursing and meditating revenge the next. I felt that I must have blood at all costs to appease my passion—Teresina's or her lover's, or somebody's. I was to meet Teresina that evening as usual towards nine o'clock, and I thought the intervening ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... the members of his church, a Norwegian, sixty-two years of age, and a widower, had for the last preceding year been considered by most of the residents as demented. The missionary himself had observed his erratic and frequently irrational conduct, and was impressed with the probable truth of the prevailing rumor. One morning, however, as the missionary was seated ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... upon the delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial enjoyment. And afterwards came the Flavians, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... writing again and again; he skipped round the chamber like unto one demented; and when the old housekeeper, who was in a sore ill-temper at being deprived of her accustomed allowance of rest, came in to know his intentions about supper, he bade her go dream of love and give ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... that several, while asleep in their saddles had been pulled off their horses by low branches and severely injured. Yet we had to get through the Nek and get to the plateau before I could allow any rest. I went and had a look at the demented men. They looked as if intoxicated and were very violent. All our men and horses were utterly exhausted, but we pushed on and at last reached the plateau, where, to everybody's great delight, we rested for the whole day. The demented men would not sleep, ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... I smiled, for her mood was far from serious. "But," I quietly pursued, "how much of this old woman's story do you believe? Can not she have been deceived as to what she saw? You say she is more or less demented. Perhaps there never was any old wallet, and possibly ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... the gate mechanically when the doctor had driven out; but when there was nothing more to hold him, he scrambled over the stone wall on the opposite side of the pike and ran for the hills like one demented. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde |
