"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has been no instrument of vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. The objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves. But perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that admired ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... not five paces from me when I fired at him. He appears to be an intelligent looking European—and not much more than a lad. There is nothing of the imbecile or degenerate in his features or expression, as is usually true in similar cases, where some lunatic escapes into the woods and by living in filth and nakedness wins the title of wild man among the peasants of the neighborhood. No, this fellow is of different stuff—and so infinitely more to be feared. As much as I should like a shot at him I hope he stays away. Should he ever ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... days this same state of things continued. When I was tired of pacing the lanes of the city, I wandered into the woods, and when I became restless there, I returned to the lanes of the city like a lunatic. I thought not of nourishment during the day, or sleep at night; like a washerman's dog, that belongs neither to the house nor the ghat [159] The existence of man depends on eating and drinking; he is the worm of the grain. Not the least strength remained in my body. Becoming feeble, I went and ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... hung up the eleven officers. His opponent was so much alarmed that he did not dare to attack him, but lay wait for him in the trenches, at the mouth of the cannon. Our daring friend was not quite such a lunatic as to go and meet him. He required greater success, more decisive battles, and more guns. He started against the small towns which the Government had built along the Jaik. The Roskolniks received the pseudo-Czar with wild ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... though the logical connection is not obvious, with teetotalism and similar fads. All these fads were peculiarly rampant in the United States in the period immediately preceding the war, when half the States went "dry," and some cities passed what seems to us quite lunatic laws—prohibiting cigarette-smoking and creating a special female police force of "flirt-catchers." The whole thing is part, one may suppose, of the deliquescence of the Puritan tradition in morals, and will probably not endure. So far ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... said Foma, with a wave of the hand. "Well then. Now I like the following: I'll return to town and will see to it that you are declared insane, and put into a lunatic asylum." ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... we'll want to go back. The whole world is crazy, but ashamed to acknowledge it. We are not. Pascal said men are so mad that he who would not be is a madman of a new kind. To escape ineffable dulness is the privilege of the lunatic; the lunatic, who is the true aristocrat of nature—the unique man in a tower of ivory, the elect, who, in samite robes, traverses moody gardens. Really, I shudder at the idea of ever living again in yonder stewpot ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... safety; but, as he had not withdrawn his own foot quickly enough, the wheel of the omnibus had passed over it. He is the son of a captain of artillery. While we were being told this, a woman entered the big hall, like a lunatic, and forced her way through the crowd: she was Robetti's mother, who had been sent for. Another woman hastened towards her, and flung her arms about her neck, with sobs: it was the mother of the baby who had been saved. Both flew into the room, and a desperate cry ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... Charles Lamb. Is this matter too horrible for the stage? One may compare it with another horror given not long ago, The Soothing System, which Mr Bourchier adapted cleverly from a story by Edgar Poe and produced at the Garrick, showing the terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of which had overpowered their keepers. This was very powerful and horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous tale in the collection of goblin ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of England. All the plain and simple fashions of their forefathers they are either about to abandon, or have already done so. Look at the most part of their chapels, no longer modest brick edifices, situated in quiet and retired streets, but lunatic- looking erections, in what the simpletons call the modern Gothic taste, of Portland stone, with a cross upon the top, and the site generally the most conspicuous that can be found; and look at the manner in which they educate their children, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... partly on the level plain above. The town is roughly but substantially built, with broad streets and large squares. It is the seat of a bishopric, with an episcopal seminary, and has many churches. Its public buildings are inconspicuous; they include a theatre, military barracks, hospitals, a lunatic asylum and a secondary school. There are several small manufactures, including cotton-weaving, and diamond-cutting is carried on. The surrounding region, lying on the eastern slopes of one of the lateral ranges of the Serra do Espinhaco, is rough and barren, but rich in minerals, principally ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the throne, seven candlesticks, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches, seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce, be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why, then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of fact? If the rest is symbolism, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a shell burst near us the lunatics screamed and laughed and clapped their hands, and trod on the wounded, but I got 'er goin' again. I got 'er to Poperinghe. Two soldiers died on the way, and a lunatic had fallen out somewhere, and a baby was born in the 'bus; and me with no ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... harm anybody," Reitzei said, regarding the man as if he were a strange animal. "I would not shut up a dog in a lunatic asylum; I would rather put a bullet through his head. And this fellow—if we could humbug him a little, and get him to his work again—I know a man in Wardour Street who would do that for me—and see what effect the amassing of a little ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... in a wet mackintosh with a thunderstorm pouring down your neck and into your ears, and a woman, possessed by all the devils, driving furiously to an express train that she can never catch. In that lunatic escape from Coton Manor she had not looked back once; she left Durant to contemplate a certain absurd little figure that stood under an immense Doris portico, regarding ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... there came a man from the West—a tall, gaunt, grizzly, shaggy-haired, God-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop, stands near ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... kitchen table, and defend himself to the last gasp with a carving-knife. Exors says that the law is bad, and you can't touch him. As for Barnes, he has gone out of what little wits he ever had with the fright of it, and people seem to think that you couldn't touch a lunatic." ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... and whose liberty constitute the greatest danger to the State, are the intermittent inhabitants of our lunatic asylums, ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... are a lunatic" cried the man, "give me an answer straight out—yes or no. Will you be my wife? Speak out and dont go jibbering on in that sentimental fashion; say yes and you will live in luxury and riches for the rest of your life, say no and you go home poor and degraded. Now give ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... continued: "Well, after I had passed him and his turn-out, I drove straight to the public-house, where I baited my horses, and where I found some of the chaises and drivers who had driven the folks to the lunatic-looking mansion, and were now waiting to take them up again. Whilst my horses were eating their bait, I sat me down, as the weather was warm, at a table outside, and smoked a pipe, and drank some ale, in company with the coachman of the old gentleman who had ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... abruptly, "are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... or west of Goyaz, than the man in the moon. Naturally I did not exert myself to enlighten them unduly, for there lay my great and only hold over them. I had fully realized that I was travelling with an itinerant lunatic asylum, and I treated my men accordingly. No matter what they did or said, I always managed to have things my own way. Never by violence, or by a persuasive flow of language—the means used by the average mortal. No, indeed; but by mere gentleness and kindness; very often by ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... overwork had turned Belton's brain, and he was subsequently sent to a Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the rest of his life. But there were moments when he was comparatively sane, and in these interims he confessed everything. Anderson had told him that he was going to hoax the Dean, and filled with indignation at the idea of such a trick being played on a College official—for ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... day driving the plough for him when a young horse, not half broken in, was the second in the team. I used my utmost endeavours but could not manage him, and the lunatic my master, who was as strong as he was ferocious, caught up a stone and aimed it at the colt (at least so from his manner at the moment I supposed) but struck me with it, and knocked me down immediately in the furrow, where the plough was ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... now convinced that his fare was a lunatic, could think of naught better than to use soothing tones and to reply promptly, however absurd her questions. "I' faith," he said, in a mild voice, "I' faith, mistress, her Gracious Majesty is of ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... lucent depths go back a million miles or so; and my spirit followed on wings. Gone were at once my fine-spun theories and my forebodings of the night. Life was clean and clear and simple. Jim Starr had probably some personal enemy. Old Man Hooper was undoubtedly a mean old lunatic, and dangerous; very likely he would attempt to do me harm, as he said, if I bothered him again, but as for following me to the ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... which gave her face that airy, cloud-like setting that photographers of the baser sort so passionately admire. The place was as windy as Troy; from far on the ringing plains the breeze raced and fell upon this veil, ceaselessly kicking it here and there, in a way that would have driven a strong man lunatic in seven minutes. Sharlee, though a slim girl and no stronger than another, remained entirely unconscious of the behavior of the veil; long familiarity had bred contempt for its boisterous play; and, with her eyes a thousand ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... as has been already mentioned; besides Seth and Sailor Bill, whom Seth stoutly declared his intention, with Mr Rawlings' consent, of taking with him, declining the skipper's proposal of giving him up to the British Consul when they arrived at Boston, so that he might be sent home to England as a lunatic sailor at the ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... the Doctor. "You've disabled this poor fellow of yours, and made him—on that point—a lunatic for life; and now you want to disable me. But, for once, I'll do it. To save appearance, if you'll give me a bed, I'll come over after my ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... the mantelpiece since '67.' 'How does he know?' 'Mildred, go and speak to him again.' 'Colonel, what are you going to do?' 'Oh, dry up, and give the poor devil a chance to pull himself together.' 'It isn't possible anyhow. The man's a lunatic.' ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... I've seen him—the 'po' white' chap that lives with the old lunatic that's always ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Immediately after his brother's funeral, Gabriel Le Noir gave out that Madame Eugene had lost her reason through excessive grief, soon after which he took her with him to the North, and, upon his return alone, reported that he had left her in a celebrated lunatic asylum. The story was probable enough, and received universal belief. Only now I do not credit it, and do not know whether the widow be living or dead; or, if living, whether she be mad or sane; if dead, whether she came to her end by fair ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... abstracted that it was Arthur's turn to ask if she were offended. She had made herself believe she was, for notwithstanding Nina's assertion that "Arthur was good," she thought it a sin and a shame for him to keep any thing but a raving lunatic hidden away up stairs; and after a moment's hesitation she answered, "Yes, I am offended, and I don't mean to come ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... consequences of your selfish tyranny and weakness. I don't come to annoy you, but I come to warn you, and to tell you, that I know your daughter better than you do yourself. This marriage must not go on; or, if it does, send without delay to a lunatic asylum for a keeper for that only daughter. I know her well, and I tell you that that's what ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... hardly wring a smile, if you put your body and soul out of joint in a hundred different ways; who examines with a cold considering eye the droll grimaces of my face, and those of my mind, which are droller still. I may torment myself to attain the highest sublime of the lunatic asylum, nothing comes of it. Will he laugh, or will he not? That is what I am obliged to keep saying to myself in the midst of my contortions; and you may judge how damaging this uncertainty is to one's talent. My hypochondriac, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... have to consider very gravely that the "go" and "energy" of a man have no ascertainable relation to many other extremely important considerations. Your energetic person may be moral or immoral, an unqualified egotist or as public spirited as an ant, sane, or a raving lunatic. Your phlegmatic person may ripen resolves and bring out truths, with the incomparable clearness of a long-exposed, slowly developed, slowly printed photograph. A man who would exchange the slow gigantic toil of that sluggish and deliberate person, Charles Darwin, for ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... stumps, bore him out of the temple, dangling aloft from his jaws. At the back of it he dropped him into the dust hole among the remnants of a library whose age had destroyed its value in the eyes of the chapter. They found him burrowing in it, a lunatic henceforth—whose madness presented the peculiar feature, that in ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round in the doorway, 'if you can tell me at any time, how under the sun a man who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... other hand, it was rather sadly plain that the place was both a burden and a bore; in fact he vowed it was the dampest and the dullest old ruin under the sun, and that he would sell it to-morrow if he could find a lunatic to buy. His want of sentiment struck me as his one deplorable trait. Yet even this displayed his characteristic merit of frankness. Nor was it at all unpleasant to hear his merry, boyish laughter ringing round ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... my bed and amused myself with jumping on to it, holding my feet together. Each time I missed I laughed like a lunatic. I then drank my chocolate, and nearly choked myself ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... no service at S. Athanasius that morning, and the Rev. Thomas Todd was later on conveyed, still shouting fragments of circus dialogue, to the County Lunatic Asylum. The curate's mind had temporarily given way beneath the strain of the position in which he had found himself placed, and of the horrible future that lay before him, and his insanity had taken the form of an imaginary return ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... taken; but I saw no mode of escape, and was fearful of disturbing my poor friend's equanimity by a refusal. Could I have depended, indeed, upon Jupiter's aid, I would have had no hesitation in attempting to get the lunatic home by force; but I was too well assured of the old negro's disposition, to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... out of a lunatic asylum, talking in this way. Shall I own to you, my reverend colleague, how this curious self-exposure struck me? As I listened to Romayne, I felt grateful to the famous Council which definitely forbade the priests of the Catholic Church to marry. We ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... would first go down to the widow, and claim his sister, as a poor simple young woman, inveigled away from her natural guardian; and, if this were unsuccessful, as he felt pretty sure it would be, he would take proceedings to prove her a lunatic. If he failed, he might still delay, and finally put off the marriage; and he was sure he could get some attorney to put him in the way of doing it, and to undertake the work for him. His late father's attorney had been a fool, in not breaking the will, or at any rate trying it, and he ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... camp—the Drissa camp," said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince Andrew scanned his unfamiliar face, "as to that person, sire..." continued Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself, "the man who advised the Drissa camp—I see no alternative but the lunatic asylum or ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of fact, if indeed, by some abhorrent miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute, my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and despair, of hate and pity; and with the next morning I was only to comprehend more fully ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... of practising economy are very simple. Spend less than you earn. That is the first rule. A portion should always be set apart for the future. The person who spends more than he earns, is a fool. The civil law regards the spendthrift as akin to the lunatic, and frequently takes from him the management of his ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Gazette asking whether there is anything in the idea that a large number of used penny postage stamps will enable a person to be received into a charitable institution. We have always understood that the collector of one million of these stamps is admitted into a lunatic asylum without having to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... up with less force through the chimney: working quietly. Away, away, on our iron steed through Ealing and Hanwell—across the viaduct over the River Brent, which runs to Brentford—past the pretty church and the dull lunatic asylum, and so on to Slough, which is passed in twenty-three minutes after quitting Paddington. Then we reach Taplow, and have just fifty-five miles to do within the hour. "Crimea" rushes across the Thames below Maidenhead, with a parting roar, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... as has been shown, it never rises to absolute certainty. Nevertheless inferences from experience are trustworthy and entirely sufficient for practical life, and the aim of the above skeptical deliverances was not to shake belief—only a fool or a lunatic can doubt in earnest the immutability of nature—but only to make it clear that it is mere belief, and not, as hitherto held, demonstrative or factual knowledge. Our doubt is intended to define the boundary ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... itself into a frenzy, and, forgetting caution, had crazily exposed itself. Its owner was probably some poor lunatic, subject to fits of madness. But Helwyse was full of scorn and anger, born of that bitterest disappointment which admits not even the poor consolation of having worthily aspired. He had been duped,—and by the cobwebs of a madman's brain! He broke into ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... corporation lawyer. That is, for him human beings had ceased to exist, and of course human rights, also; the world as viewed from the standpoint of law contained only corporations, only interests. Thus, a man like Victor Dorn was in his view the modern form of the devil—was a combination of knave and lunatic who had no right to live except in the restraint of an ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... hand to her eye, which is looking inflamed; she is blind; a well-educated, delicate, gentle-woman. I take more than usual interest in her for that reason. I often sit beside her and she tells me of her mother, and wants me to go home with her to number one. She does not seem a lunatic, and she is neglected. I tied her eye up with my own handkerchief, and a wet rag on it. I did not mean to offend, I had done so before and it was not observed. Mrs. Mills came along just as I had done ...
— Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum • Mary Huestis Pengilly
... whole baby unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,—and see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and still escape the lunatic asylum,—provided you do so in the way of pleasantry. In this case, the gravest savant, if he have children, may condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this in his quality of man of science, and no less seriously than he would investigate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D— came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... begged—to stay behind with him, one of them, at least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him perforce like a child or a lunatic pro tem., and having but little time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow—to save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... New York State Lunatic Asylum there is a wild-eyed man whose name and birth-place are alike unknown. His reason has been unseated by some sudden shock, the doctors say, though of what nature they are unable to determine. "It is the most delicate machine which is most readily put ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nearly as prevalent as mal de mer amongst these Americans who are rushing over for a few weeks' repose. They work at such a fearful rate, slaves to that insatiable god the almighty dollar, that eventually they either have to fly to a lunatic asylum or an Atlantic liner. After a day or two on the latter the calm and repose and the vast sea around them prove too much of an antidote; the overtaxed brain gives way, and overboard they go. An Englishman is too fond of exercise to allow high pressure to get the better of him in this way, and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light of her flickering flamewise. There ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... last missile," say you; "my ammunition is quite exhausted: just wait till I get the last in— it will irritate, it cannot hurt him. There—you see!—he is furious now, and I am quite helpless. One more prod, another kick: now he is a mere lunatic! Stand behind me; I am quite helpless!" Mr. Romaine, I am asking myself as to the background or motive of this singular jest, and whether the name of it should ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a noble negro and his love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover, and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed, had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very inflammable disposition, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... provoke him to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man in this way to Tashkend—that is, they pretended to transfer to the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third him they convicted of insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... and more rounded, because the man knew he was speaking of his best work. Maisie looked at the blur, and a lunatic desire to laugh caught her by the throat. But for Dick's sake—whatever this mad blankness might mean—she must make no sign. Her voice choked with hard-held tears as she answered, still gazing at the wreck—'Oh, ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... may give some idea of the state of Mr Easy's household upon our hero's arrival. The poor lunatic, for such we must call him, was at the mercy of his servants, who robbed, laughed at, and neglected him. The waste and expense were enormous. Our hero, who found how matters stood, went to bed, and lay the best part of the night revolving what to do. He determined ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... men returned with the lunatic he was quiet and obedient, except when they tried to substitute proper clothing for his bearskin. Against this he fought with all his strength, striking, scratching, and kicking with hands and feet, snapping and biting viciously, and all the time either roaring with fury, or, when they succeeded ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... advanced. Quite certainly the first time that I ever fell into the hands of a moustached Doctor was in 1877. Everyone condemned the hirsute appendage as highly unprofessional, and when, soon after, the poor man found his way into a Lunatic Asylum, the neighbouring Doctors of the older school said that they were not surprised; that "there was a bad family history"; and that he himself had shown marked signs of eccentricity. That meant ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... burst upon me that he took me for a lunatic. I buried my head in the covers and rocked back and forth between tears ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... refuse, and a lot more vultures too gorged to fly—the usual Arab scheme of sanitation. I asked one of my bodyguard to shoot the camel and he obliged me, with the air of a keeper making concessions to a lunatic. Nobody took any notice of ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... day-dreaming, and mental epilepsy are but few of the many milestones on a road, the end of which is insanity, or complete and permanent dissociation, instead of the partial and fleeting dissociation from which we all suffer. The lunatic never "comes to", but in a world of dreams dissociates himself forever from realities he is not ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... shop a fellow sauntered by. He wore a hat—like a cowboy, and otherwise looked queer. Well, when the plumber sighted him he rushed to the 'phone and called up the only officer in Dalton—Tavia's father, and told him the lunatic was just sauntering down the road. But from last accounts he was still sauntering—the ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... I really suspected that he was that horrid person—the long, lank one, you know—come back again. I'm glad it wasn't; but he may turn up yet, just as he did before. Why doesn't he stay with his own people, and not wander about like a lunatic? They ought to take care of him, anyway. Ugh! I can't bear to think of that dreadful man. It makes ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... to get into communication with London and this was established without delay. Nothing had been heard of Odette Rider, and the only news of importance was that the ex-convict, Sam Stay, had escaped from the county lunatic asylum to which he had ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... left to him to buffet him,[787] that he might learn not to blaspheme.[788] We believe that he still lives, and up to this time is expiating the great sin which he sinned against the saint; but they say that at certain times he is a lunatic. Further, the aforesaid possessions, since he could no longer hold them by reason of his helplessness and uselessness, returned in peace to the place to which they had belonged. Nor did Malachy refuse them, when the prospect of peace was held out at ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... figure was dominant; his presence alone seemed to dispel that unreal army of ghosts and fancies which a few moments before had seemed to Wrayson to be making his room like the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. His tone, too, had just enough sympathy to make its cheerfulness reassuring. Wrayson began to feel glimmerings of ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... more probably." She smiled up at him. "Come and sit down and tell me: are you a poet, or a lunatic, or a haberdasher, or what kind of a—a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... nigger cousin over to Selwoode to spy for you! You're a damn cad, you know, Bob," he pensively observed. "Now most people think that when you carry on like a lunatic you're simply acting on impulse. I don't. I believe you plan it out a week ahead. I sometimes think you are the most adroit and unblushing looker-out for number one I ever knew; and I can't for the life of me understand why I don't ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... becomes deranged, his next heir does not at once enter on his property "as if he were naturally as well as civilly dead." And if, as in such cases is notoriously the practice, the Court of Chancery appoints a guardian of the lunatic's property, analogy would seem to require that the Houses of Parliament, as the only body which can possibly claim authority in such a matter, should exercise a similar power in providing for the proper management of the government to that which the law court would exercise in providing for the ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to know,—something that she was made to tell and I to hear,—lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... am not saving but making. Please sit down in this chair by the table, while I behave like the man in the lunatic asylum who thought he was a steam engine. I'm afraid I might get off the track and run over you. If you just stay still in one spot I'll get through. I can't go over you, I can't go around you and ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... another to you. Aubrey bangs me over the head with it. But I'm like the Doctor in the Punch and Judy show—he thinks he's knocked me flat. He hasn't. I've a new argument every time he comes. And as for my daughters, they think me a lunatic—a stingy lunatic besides—because I won't give to their Red Cross shows and bazaars. I've nothing to give. The income tax gentlemen have taken ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to kill all of us. And Owen deserves a sound thrashing for having anything to do with such a murderous lunatic." ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... to save Natalie Brande—for they will certainly succeed in blowing themselves up, if nobody else—consent to her marrying another man, say that young lunatic Halley, who is always dangling after her ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Philadelphia lawyer. Spinning along the lane to Killaloe, with Mr. Beesley, of Leeds, and Mr. Abraham Keeley, of Mallow, balanced on opposite sides of a jaunting car, we came on a semi-savage specimen of the genuine Irish sort. Semi-savage! he was seven-eighths savage, and semi-lunatic, just clever enough to mind the cows and goats which, with a donkey or two, grazed by the way-side. He might be five-and-twenty, and looked strong and lusty. His naked feet were black with the dirt of his childhood, and not only black, but shining and gleaming in the sun. His tattered ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... site of a large lunatic asylum. In it is St. Paul's Church, built in 1860, and well known for its evangelical services. There is nothing remarkable in its architecture save that the chancel is at the west end. The pulpit is of carved stone with inlaid ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... of War, that shows a land brain-sick. When nations gain the pitch where rhetoric Seems reason they are ripe for cannon's food. Dark looms the issue though the cause be good, But with the doubt 'tis our old devil's trick. O now the down-slope of the lunatic Illumine lest we redden of that brood. For not since man in his first view of thee Ascended to the heavens giving sign Within him of deep sky and sounded sea, Did he unforfeiting thy laws transgress; In peril of his blood his ears incline To drums ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... render confinement necessary, are first, if the lunatic is liable to injure others, which must be judged of by the outrage he has already committed. 2dly. If he is likely to injure himself; this also must be judged of by the despondency of his mind, if such exists. 3dly. If he cannot take care of his affairs. Where none ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... untenable? The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon's, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... hand, proclaims that the popular heart is engraved all over with the inspiring name of Smith, and that it is impossible to find any trace of feeling for Jones, except, possibly, in the case of one delegate, who is probably an idiot or a lunatic. This is gravely served up as news, and the papers pay for it. They even hire men to write this, and pay them for it. How Ude and Careme would have disdained this kind of cookery! It is questionable whether hanging is not a better ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... appeared in the dining room. But he said not a word; perhaps he concluded it must be soldier or no dinner. I have been told several nice things he said about that distracting dinner before leaving the garrison. But it all matters little to me now, since it was not found necessary to take me to a lunatic asylum! ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... heavy table in the centre of the room. The head developed spasms of agility; there were clangings and rippings, then the foremost section of the long, black snake detached itself, bounded into the air, and, after turning a number of somersaults, became, severally, a torn stocking, excelsior, and a lunatic cat. The ears of this cat were laid back flat upon its head and its speed was excessive upon a fairly circular track it laid out for itself in the library. Flying round this orbit, it perceived the open doorway; passed through it, thence to the kitchen, ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the missing girl was found. Then, as hope began to whisper that possibly she was not dead, the papers far and near contained advertisements for her, and by the side of that appeared another for a lunatic girl, who had escaped ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... yet time to mend matters, how imprudent you are. Why, what do you know of the man who has been your Columbus in this sea of wonders? Are you sure that he is not a sharper, or an impostor, or a lunatic?" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... vices. Statistics of the period show that neither in the States nor in Canada, amidst all the surrounding newness, had there arisen any new social condition peculiar to this continent which remedied to any extent the evils rampant in old countries. Lunatic asylums, in ghastly sarcasm on a self-styled intellectual age, reared their colossal facades and enclosed their thousands of human wrecks. Huge prisons had to be built in every large town. Hospitals were frequently crowded with victims of foul diseases. Great cities abounded with ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... the rick was as high as Mont Blanc, and that even on a placid summer day no one but a lunatic would want to scale it. Then she screamed, and ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... I always wades it through the muddy shallow: well, I listens, and a chap creeps ashore—a mad chap, with never a tile to his head, nor a sole to his feet—and when I sings out to ax him his business, the lunatic sprung at me like a tiger: I didn't wish to hurt a little weak wretch like him, specially being past all sense, poor nat'ral! so I shook him off at once, and held him straight out in this here wice." [Ben's grasp ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that fatal word "Religion" the gentleman started as though he had been stung by a snake, felt that this mild-looking man was a dangerous lunatic and tried to move away. It was the lady with him, so far as I can discover, who ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... to, so accursed a spot as Calabasas. But old Duke Morgan announced in due time that the hotel was built on Morgan land, and belonged to the Morgans. Nobody outside a madhouse could be found to dispute with Duke Morgan a title to land within ten miles of Morgan's Gap, and none but a lunatic would attempt to run a hotel at Calabasas, anyway. However, a solution of the difficulty was found: Duke's colorable title gave the cue to his retainers in the Gap, and in time they carted away piecemeal most of the main building, ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... man expecting a covey to be flushed, waiting for the poor devil to come so near the Dead Line as to afford an excuse for killing him. Two sane prisoners, comprehending the situation, rushed up to the lunatic, at the risk of their own lives, caught him by the arms, and drew him back ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... title-page was written in an old hand the native of the "patient extraordinary" and author James Carkasse, and that of the "doctor" Thomas Allen. A little reading convinced me that the writer was a very fit subject for a lunatic asylum; but at page 5, I met with an allusion to the celebrated Mr. Pepys, which I will ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... incomplete, will not perform its mission, until it relieves society from the depredations of these scorpions, by colonizing them where they will expend their poison without dangerous results. If sting they must, let it be among themselves. If I were lunatic enough to desire to vote, I should spend my franchise in favour of a 'Gossip Reservation'—somewhere close to the Great Western Desert, to which the disappointed widows, spiteful old maids, and snarling ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... said he at last, evidently very angry indeed. "It strikes me that you are having a game with me. You had better go away quietly or I shall be obliged to take you in charge as a lunatic." ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... peered over the asylum wall, and saw a man fishing from the bank of the river that ran close by. It was raining hard, which cooled the fevered brow of the lunatic and enabled him to think with great clearness. In consequence, he called ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... such a mad dog as Lord George should not be knocked on the head. Colonel Murray did tell him in the House, that, if any lives were lost, his Lordship should join the number. Nor yet is he so lunatic as to deserve pity. Besides being very debauched, he has more knavery than mission. What will be decided on him, I do not know; every man that heard him can convict him of the worst kind of sedition: but it is ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... old candlesticks. The old man led the way for Popinot and his registrar, and pulled forward two chairs, as though he were master of the place; M. d'Espard left it to him. After the preliminary civilities, during which the judge watched the supposed lunatic, the Marquis naturally asked what was the object of this visit. On this Popinot glanced significantly at the ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... exhibited in a good light. Into one of these the large box was carried, and most carefully opened. The two clerks who were helping Dennis laughed at his eager interest, and called him under their breath a "green 'un." Mr. Schwartz looked upon him as a mild sort of lunatic. But Mr. Ludolph, who stood near, to see if the picture was safe and right, watched him with some curiosity. His manner was certainly very different from Pat Murphy's at such a time, and his interest both amused and pleased ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... knew he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a "softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was the work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's demeanour or behaviour ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... and fear compelled me into courage. For throughout this long interview more and more I felt an extremely unpleasant conviction. That stranger might not be a downright madman, nor even what is called a lunatic; but still it was clear that upon certain points—the laws of this country, for instance, and the value of rank and station—his opinions were so outrageous that his reason must be affected. And, even without such proofs as these, his eyes and his manner were quite enough. Therefore ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Regiments. If five years ago any one had predicted that in a great war in which the Empire was engaged 95,000 recruits would have been raised from Ireland and that there would be 151,143 Irishmen with the colours, would he not have been looked upon as a lunatic?" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something of the nature of deformity or disease, and had more than once expressed his wonder that Toggenburg and all the minnesingers and troubadours had not been put into a lunatic asylum. 'If a woman takes your fancy,' he used to say, 'try and gain your end; but if you can't—well, turn your back on her—there are lots of good fish in the sea.' Madame Odintsov had taken his fancy; the rumours about her, the freedom and independence of her ideas, her unmistakable liking ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... singular beauty of certain dramatic and lyrical passages, we are inclined to ask—Is this, indeed, a conjuror's house at Constantinople, or one of Browning's "mad-house cells?" and from what delusions are the harmless, and the apparently dangerous, lunatic suffering? The lover here is typified in the artist; but the artist may be as haughtily isolated from true human love as the man of science, and the fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... act of beneficence, he grew so alarmed and uneasy, he could restrain himself no longer. He spoke to her with warmth, he represented her conduct as highly dangerous in its consequence; he said she would but court impostors from every corner of the kingdom, called Albany a lunatic, whom she should rather avoid than obey; and insinuated that if a report was spread of her proceedings, a charity so prodigal, would excite such alarm, that no man would think even her large and splendid fortune, would ensure him ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... denied remembering, although she had a good recollection for the external facts throughout the psychosis. Her insight was superficially good, but she was reluctant to discuss her psychosis, in fact claimed that she had been made more of a lunatic by coming to the hospital than ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... go without your hat, man, for the people in the street will take you for a lunatic. May a friend see this letter that has driven ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... winds. But now they worship him when his ear is dead to their praise, the great heart silent that their love would have made beat with ecstasy. Well, such is life. They treated Tasso just about the same who writ "Jerusalem Delivered," they imprisoned him for a lunatic, and now how much store they ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... is sick, Almost to be lunatic: AEsculapius! come and bring Means for her recovering; And a gallant cock shall be Offer'd up ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... word out, however, the lunatic herself appeared, looking, I thought, absolutely full of beans. She ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... to posterity as Pelham the Pincher, would you? No! Very well, then. By the time this volume is in the hands of the customers, everybody will, of course, have read Mr. J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large Again." (Those who are chumps enough to miss it deserve no consideration.) Well, both the hero of "The Lunatic" and my "Sam Marlowe" try to get out of a tight corner by hiding in a suit of armour in the hall ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... vehement thunder he accompanied by correspondent energy of gesticulation; distorting his visage, and casting about his arms with the action of an infuriated maniac. The place was thrown into alarm, and business was suspended. Dashall now addressing himself to the presumed lunatic, begged him to compose himself, and endeavour briefly to state what had happened, that if he had sustained an injury, redress ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... while he incidentally goes near to spoiling the performance of the "crew of patches" at the nuptials of Theseus by preventing due rehearsal of their interlude. It is perhaps a permissible fancy to convert Theseus' words "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," to illustrate the triple appeal made by the three ingredients the grotesque, the sentimental, and the fantastic. Each part, of course, is coloured by the poet's genius, and the whole is devoted to the comic aspect of love, its eternal youth ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... very first, the first moment I laid eye on you. I was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has passed since then I have only grown the madder. I am maddest, now, dear. I am almost a lunatic, my head is so turned ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... opinions of the vulgar, and in many of their ordinary forms of expression. Thus it is generally believed throughout all Asia, that the moon has an influence on the brain; and when a man is of insane mind, we call him a lunatic. One of the curses of the common people is, 'May the moon eat up your brains;' and in China they say of a man who has done any act of egregious folly, 'He was gathering ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... overheard this afternoon, unless she explains all to Dalrymple and lets him decide as to what ... but no, she will just tell him it is impossible for her to marry him, ten to one if he knew all he would laugh at her fears, and marrying her, would in a few years have to consign his wife to a lunatic asylum; it will be the right thing not to let him have a chance of marrying her; and coming to this conclusion, she tries to forget the man she loves, and her heart is filled with compassion for her mother, and then she remembers ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... are broken. I have not the spirit to run any more risks, even if I could arrange with my creditors," replied Deering, sadly. "Another such month as I have passed, and I should have been in a lunatic asylum." ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... Everybody waited, waited, in confidence and with tranquil smiles. Also it is misleading to say that civil life was in abeyance. For the elemental basis of its prosperity and its amenities continued just as though the lunatic bullies of Potsdam had never dictated to Vienna the ultimatum for Serbia. The earth was yielding, fabulously. It was yielding up to within a mile and a half of the German wire entanglements. The peasants would not neglect the earth. Officers ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... not his enemies allow him to be fully equal to the great station he now adorns? But then it must be granted, that he is wholly ignorant in the speculative as well as practical part of polygamy: he knows not how to metamorphose a sober man into a lunatic:[13] he is no freethinker in religion, nor has courage to be patron of an atheistical book,[14] while he is guardian of the Qu[een]'s conscience. Though after all, to speak my private opinion, I cannot think these such mighty objections to his ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... of the horse first?" asked Billie, not at all anxious to be wandering around with an armed lunatic. "He may die." ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it? You'd lock up a man as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... air, the sea, were full of invisible forms. With more faith than even by paganism itself was the supernatural power of the images of the gods accepted, only it was imputed to the influence of devils. The lunatic was troubled by a like possession. If a spring discharged its waters with a periodical gushing of carbonic acid gas, it was agitated by an angel; if an unfortunate descended into a pit and was suffocated by the mephitic air, it was by some daemon who was secreted; if the miner's torch ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... other such illustrations given. They were, I discovered, by no means imaginary cases, projected into our minds by a kind of mental suggestion, but actual things happening upon earth. We saw many strange scenes of tragedy, we had a glimpse of lunatic asylums and hospitals, of murder even, and of evil passions of anger and lust. We saw scenes of grief and terror; and, stranger still, we saw many things that were being enacted not on the earth, but upon other planets, where the forms and appearances ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... right of disposal of it as he thinks proper. A blind man may have the finest picture that ever was painted; he may call it his, that is to say, nobody else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most truly possess it? The ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "if yer think so! When you gave me the money for herrings as yer didn't want, I thought you was training for a lunatic 'sylum. Now I thinks all the people round here are fit company for yer. But what'll I do with the herrings, if yer don't want 'em and ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... then, include all those who can with due regard to just principles be entirely excluded; and these are the idiot, who never reaches maturity; the lunatic, who, becoming diseased, loses the mental and moral characteristics of maturity; and the criminal, who is coming more and more to be looked upon as partaking of the character of the idiot and the lunatic. I venture to think, then, that the real issue is narrowing itself ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet |
