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More "Demented" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... studying the arrival of trains list at Paddington in order to ascertain from which platform the 1.20 p.m. started; she had assumed the slightly demented appearance that so many take when they enter a railway station. Turning from the poster distractedly, she clutched at the arm of a sailor, and was putting to him agitated inquiries concerning the Great Western service when Gertie Higham interposed, ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge

... for an instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... across 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 ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... and 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 home—then, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... from the archdeacon's hand upon the table, and the start he made was so great as to make his wife jump up from her chair. Not accept the deanship! If it really ended in this, there would be no longer any doubt that his father-in-law was demented. The question now was whether a clergyman with low rank and preferment amounting to less than L200 a year should accept high rank, L1,200 a year, and one of the most desirable positions which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... to scurry wildly in Scraggy's head. Everett's threat to kill her had not penetrated the demented brain, and his rough handling had been her only fright. She could think of nothing but that Lem was waiting for them at ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White

... for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened, grown-up eyes—exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of the contrast—"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man's ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... light-headed I think—we saw a camp of the insane in the woods—a fresh relay from Mulhaus. We talked with their guards—being in Landwehr uniform it was easy. The insane were clothed like miners. Late that night we exchanged clothes with two poor, demented creatures who retained sufficient reason, however, to realise that our uniforms meant freedom.... They crept away into the forest. We remained.... And marched at dawn—straight into the jaws of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... for his forlorn condition and apparently crazed intellect touched her womanly heart. She was a widow, and rather poor; consequently she had seen trouble enough to enable her to feel for the unfortunate. She imagined that the demented boy had wandered away from his friends or keepers; so she tried to find out whence he had come, in order that she might take measures to return him; but all her references to neighbouring towns and villages, and all her inquiries ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... man must surely be demented!" thought the old farmer. "I wonder what he will do next? He will be calling the land water, and the water land; and be speaking of light where there is darkness, and of darkness where it is light." However, he kept his ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... and steeking his nieves, he would seem to threaten him wi' a leatherin'. A'thegither he was desperate impudent, and eneuch to try the patience of a saunt, no to spak o' a het-bluided Heelandman. It was gude for sair een to see how Donald behavit on this occasion. He raged like ane demented, misca'ing the monkey beyond measure, and swearing as mony Gaelic aiths as micht hae sair'd an ordinar man for a twalmonth. During this time, I never sterr'd a foot, but keepit keeking frae the back shop upon a' that was ganging on. I was highly delighted; and jealousing that Nosey was ower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various

... across the hedge and dropped through a mat of brambles, dragging my rug after me. The fall landed me on all-fours upon the sunken high road, along which I ran as one demented—stark naked, too—a small Jack of Bedlam under the broadening eye of day; ran past Miss Belcher's entrance gate with its sentinel masses of tall laurels, and had reached the bend of the road opening the low cottage into view, when a sudden ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... been 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 out of him and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... the matter with you?" drawled her mother, looking through the open door-way of her adjacent room. "You act as if you were demented." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... that the plans were inferior, defective, or worthless. Not at all! Mr. Cohen swore that 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 disagreed and the architect in some ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train

... who mourned the unhappy fate of the poor village maiden, the grief of her lover, George Merrideth, had been observed to be the wildest. For some days, he had wandered about like one demented; and all who witnessed, respected and commiserated his anguish. Latterly, however, he had disappeared entirely from the public view; and it was hinted by some, that his mind had been seriously affected by the occurrence. One morning, Mr. Manners was suddenly sent for to attend at his deathbed. When ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... 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 ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... Paris, Vienna, London. His immorality was notorious,—he was not faithful in love, and his children were sent to a foundling asylum. He was poverty-stricken, dishonest, discontented, and, in his last years, demented. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... I made no attempt to master these sensations. It occurred to me that fear is merely a physical reaction that cannot be avoided. If a man reacts so violently that he is overcome and rushes about as though he were demented, it is no more his fault than if he shivers with cold. A man can stop shivering by an effort of the will, but only to a certain extent. And no effort of the will can prevent him from feeling cold. In the same way, no effort of the will can prevent him from feeling ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... could. The latter uttered a sharp command which brought the crew to their feet in an instant, and, in an incredibly short space of time, the proa came around, and, scarcely losing any headway, moved back toward the spot where the demented man had sprung into the sea, which was now a ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... be," he cried. "He is some puir demented creature fitter for Bedlam than anywhere else; and we will see that he be sent thither; but molest him not till we hae spoken wi' him, and certified his condition more fully. Quit not the position ye ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... fell purpose was working in my mind, but a certain high tragedy in my aspect warned him to silence; so he only dogged me around the corners of the house, eyed me askance from the wood-shed, and peeped through the crevices of the demented little barn. But his vigilance bore no fruit. I but walked moodily "with folded arms and fixed eyes," or struck out new paths at random, so long as there were any vestiges of his creation extant. His time and patience being at length exhausted, he went into the field to immolate himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... gallant seaman and accomplished gentleman reduced to such a pass, and to think that imagination and delusion can cow a mind to which real danger was but the salt of life. Was ever a man in such a position as I, between a demented captain and a ghost-seeing mate? I sometimes think I am the only really sane man aboard the vessel—except perhaps the second engineer, who is a kind of ruminant, and would care nothing for all the fiends in ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the center of the room, and formed an oasis of roses and lilies upon a desert of shabby green drugget. Knitted curtains shaded the windows, in which hung wire baskets of horrible-looking plants of the cactus species, that grew downward, like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... and brangled his head, assevered that he was transported and in an ecstasy. Catullus after the same manner maketh mention, in his Berecynthia and Atys, of the place wherein the Menades, Bacchical women, she-priests of the Lyaean god, and demented prophetesses, carrying ivy boughs in their hands, did shake their heads. As in the like case, amongst the Galli, the gelded priests of Cybele were wont to do in the celebrating of their festivals. Whence, too, according to the sense of the ancient theologues, she herself has her ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... a sledge.' Shure, we thought it was demented he was, but he was the only cool man, an' orders were orders. Dooley, he found one, an' then the captain went to the rails an' gave it a swing, an' struck the bolts crosswise like, so that the heads flew off, like they was shootin' stars. Then ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... this uncommon 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

... The cult of the Demon is no more insane than that of God. One is rotten and the other resplendent, that is all. By your reckoning all people who worship any god whatever would be demented. No. The affiliates of Satanism are mystics of a vile order, but they are mystics. Now, it is highly probable that their exaltations into the extra-terrestrial of Evil coincide with the rages of their frenzied senses, for lechery is the wet nurse of Demonism. Medicine classes, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... card-houses worse than you? Then, too, the blood that's spilt by fond desires, The swords that men will use to poke their fires! When Marius killed his mistress t'other day And broke his neck, was he demented, say? Or would you call him criminal instead, And stigmatize his heart to save his head, Following the common fallacy, which founds A different ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... demented laugh of the drowning sailor, and then the two disappeared—down, down into the ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... 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 ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... down to their sockets. The sister lay back stone-dead in her chair, while the two brothers sat on each side of her laughing, shouting, and singing, the senses stricken clean out of them. All three of them, the dead woman and the two demented men, retained upon their faces an expression of the utmost horror—a convulsion of terror which was dreadful to look upon. There was no sign of the presence of anyone in the house, except Mrs. Porter, the old cook and housekeeper, ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle

... bloody cutting themselves with Knives, as the Priests of Baal did, could not be a GOD, a good and beneficent Being, but must be a cruel, voracious and devouring Devil, whose End was not the Good, but the Destruction of his Creatures: But to such a Height was the blind demented World arriv'd to at that Time, that in these sordid and corrupt Ways, they went on worshiping dumb Idols, and offering human Sacrifices to them, and in a Word, committing all the most horrid and absurd Abominations that they were capable of, or that the Devil ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... the latter, in 1805, from a fall received 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

... in this darker dream demented to have wrestled with its pleasure and its pain: it is something to have sinned, and have repented: it is something to ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... delight, an instant later, and then began jumping straight up and down like one demented. Anderson Crow stopped so abruptly that his knees were stiff for weeks. Jackie Blake's wild dream had come true. The huge automobile had struck the washout, and it was now lying at the base of the bluff, smashed to pieces on the rocks! By the dim ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... 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

... young gentlemen a scampering along here, and up that there lane. Bees they demented? We didn't like to stop them, though somehow we thought ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... end ta By this time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry, unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious a company. And Betty—home—love—peace—how all the tribe of them suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called myself, to be thinking your half-hearted wooing of the woman had left ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... in the West Indies is up, and he and his family return to Ireland. Denham's ship visits Kilfinnan Bay, and he walks on shore, where it is possible he may have been recognised by O'Rourke and by a demented woman, who is not as mad ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston

... cried Rosamond Lee. "Tell me the story of this demented girl over again in all its details. I was not paying attention before. I did not half ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey

... elegant Mrs. Jenkins. "We have linchpins." "Have you young apple trees?" asks the nursery-man. "We have whiffletrees." 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 ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... 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 ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... 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 ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... shower of vitriol poured on a green wound, are these distilled, dire drops of apprehension. Sir, are you guilty that you thus stand dumb? What have you done injurious towards my ward, that you so linger upon the street, and to my queries but gaze like one demented? Sir, I charge you, tell me without more reserve or hesitation, lest at last I listen to you with less of fear than of anger. You ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... sir,' said the General, turning to his Aid, 'Demented! Demented! Might be a dangerous man in camp; must be attended to,' continued the General; striking, as he spoke, vigorous blows across his saddle-bow, with his gauntlet; Tom all the while waiting for a bite, with the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong

... a still more maddening, "Yes, darling, I quite understand!"—which she knew perfectly well to be an untruth. Really, these good people seemed to think that she was demented, and did not know what she was saying. As a matter of fact, it was exactly the other way about; but she was too tired to argue. And then one day came a sleep when she neither dreamt nor slipped nor fell, but opened her eyes refreshed and cheerful, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... same polite tourist paid a visit to the island to see how the poor demented young man was being looked after, and on these occasions he would take Jock out for quite a long walk, and afterwards assure the family that their guest's health was benefiting greatly. But this gentleman had not visited the island ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston

... "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, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... 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

... same drug, or other diabolical method, had been used upon us both, and that I, the stronger of the two, had recovered, while she still remained in that half demented state? ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux

... her shoulders, like a cloak. She drew it, indeed, about her with trembling fingers as if her senses craved the comfort though her detestation of the man who gave it was great. But in truth she was demented now, forgetting even the bleeding lover. She gave little paces on the sand, with one of her shoes gone from her feet, and wrung ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... him this minute. That man's near demented mad at the thought of you marryin'. 'Be the hokey O!' he says whenever I go a-near him, an' then he starts laughin' an' tellin' me it's the great news altogether. 'I wish,' says he, 'the oul' lad was alive. He'd ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... exceptional case of temper, which I mention only to show to what extremities a violent burst of rage may carry a sane individual. We often hear of an uncontrollable temper, but I believe that every man can, if he likes, govern his rage, unless, of course, he is demented. If the vast majority of so-called vicious horses could write the story of their lives, what terrible tales of suffering and injustice they would relate! A horse, unlike a dog, bears punishment in silence, and any ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... from under her window, we could follow her footmarks easily across the lawn to the edge of the mere, where they vanished close to the gravel path which leads out of the grounds. The lake there is eight feet deep, and you can imagine our feelings when we saw that the trail of the poor demented girl came to an end at the edge ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... an inspiration. It was hopeless, she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his idee fixe, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... said, shrugging my shoulders, "I take that for granted." I began to think that the traveller was demented. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... 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, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... 'Kalifahs' at Simon's Bay. These are festivals in which Mussulman fanatics run knives into their flesh, go into convulsions, &c, to the sound of music, like the Arab described by Houdin. Of course the poor blacks go quite demented. ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... 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 loyalty, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... for Civilization cries out against your savage enactments! Look at the bulwarks of defence which Asylums and Hospitals lift against the operation of your merciless decree. The maimed, the feeble, the demented, become the wards of religion and charity; the Unfittest of humanity are carefully preserved, and the race is retarded it its development. Civilized legislation and philanthropy are directly opposed to your 'Survival of the Fittest;' and since I am not a tattooed princess of the South Pacific, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... of the Moorooroo plain The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, To the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Tupcombe thought his employer demented, so utterly helpless was his appearance just then, and he went out reluctantly. No sooner was he gone than the Squire, with great difficulty, stretched himself over to a cabinet by the bedside, unlocked it, and ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... of a young, half-demented lama, who was most profuse in salutations, and who remained open-mouthed, gazing at us for a considerable time. He was polite and attentive in helping to dry our things in the morning, and, whenever we asked for anything, he ran ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... something somewhere, I don't care if dinner is ready, and Brother's "safe old Secesh" downstairs! Lydia has another boy! Letter has just come, and I am demented about my new ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... be sanctified) having become demented was taken to the hospital and visited by acquaintances. He asked who they were, and they replied: "Thy friends," whereon he took up a stone and assaulted them. They all began to run away, but he exclaimed:—"O pretenders, return. Friends do not flee from friends, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... 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 of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... the pleasure both are mine, Mr. Renault," he said, which was stilted enough to be civil. "The business, sir, is this: Sir Henry Clinton received me like a gentleman, but as soon as Sir Peter had retired he listened to me as though I were demented when I exposed my plan to burn New York and take the field. I say he used me with scant civility, and bowed me out, like the ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... gave way—except in rare conditions—to a feeling of lofty indifference. He still wrote his impudent and careless letters, which did him considerable harm; he published particularly clever, slightly demented essays in the few journals with whose editors he didn't happen to be quarreling with; he founded both clubs which then expelled him, and periodicals in which he was attacked. Everywhere, and in other ways, he continued to make himself impossible ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... would not be caught. Never before or since have I seen anything like so passionate a revulsion from the depths of despair to exultant, triumphant, uncontrollable joy. He flashed and darted hither and thither as if fairly demented, screaming and shouting, swirling round and round in giddy loops and circles like a leaf in a whirlwind, lying down, and rolling over and over, sidewise and heels over head, and pouring forth a tumultuous flood of ...
— Stickeen • John Muir

... him as though he was demented. "A hundred thousand," one said. "There are not that many literate persons on ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... 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

... as I finished my walk home, whether there could not be some connection between the stroke of Providence which had driven three Cabinet Ministers demented and that gentler touch which had restored Miss Claudia Barriton to good sense and a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... congratulate him, but I found him with not a drop of blood in his face, with dazed eyes, and unable to recognise anyone. He just escaped brain fever. Instead of weeping for joy, the man has nearly died of sorrow. I fetched the doctor, but Koslov sent him away, and walked up and down the room like one demented. Now he is sleeping, so we will not disturb him. I will go, and you must stay, and see that he does not do himself some injury in a fit of melancholy. He listens to no one, and I have been tempted to smack him." Mark spit with vexation. "You can't depend ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... to see my mother, and she was as respectful and kind as though she were her own daughter. Mother has been almost demented ever since father died—she's an old woman. She sits and bows from her chair to everyone she sees. If you left her alone and didn't feed her for three days, I don't believe she would notice it. Well, I took her hand, and I said, 'Give your blessing to this lady, mother, she's going to be ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... 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 ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth

... him to do. He drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. About this time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... talked. She gave us her maternal views, and incidentally betrayed infamies of her own career. I am a man of the world, but I shuddered at that woman. The suitor who could have risked making her child his wife would have been demented, or sublime. And while she maundered on, gulping from her glass, and chuckling at her jests, the ghastliness of it was that, in the gutter face before us, I could trace a likeness to Jeanne; I think Georges ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... thing," said Corentin. "Let us carry him into his own room. His daughter is half demented, and she will go quite mad when she sees that he is dead; she will fancy ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... 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, opening the gates ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... was led to believe that Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic temper; some have said that he is garrulous; that he is demented; that he is utterly changed from the David Livingstone whom people knew as the reverend missionary; that he takes no notes or observations but such as those which no other person could read but himself, and it was reported, before I proceeded to Africa, that he was ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... lamented, thought the Christian world demented, Yet still he felt a rev'rence as he read the Bible o'er, And he thought the modern preacher, though a poor stick for a teacher, Or a broken reed, like Beecher, ought to have his claims looked o'er, And the "tyranny of science" was indeed, he felt quite sure, Our ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... 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 or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... write every day, and at first he did so, but before long many weeks passed without his coming, and the postman came up less often to the Claverias, and at last did not come at all—it was ended, the young lieutenant found other amusements in Madrid. Your poor niece was like one demented; the colour in her face faded, she was no longer like the beautiful ripe apricot, with the soft skin that made you long to bite it. She wept like a Magdalen in every corner—and one day the foolish girl fled—and up ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Miss St. John saw him tearing like one demented along the top walk of the captain's garden, and watched for his return. He came far sooner than ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... almost threatening, he is seized with a revulsion once more against the task imposed on him. He springs from his high seat and stands among them begging that rather they will kill him. "Already I feel the night of death closing around me, and must I be forced back into life? You demented! Who shall compel me to live? Death alone it is in your power to give!" He tears open his garment and offers his breast. "Forward, heroes! Slay the sinner with his affliction! The Grail perchance will glow for you ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... matter as that no death had ever occurred in a house that he had sold? If I knew my English vocabulary at all, the tone in which he said the youngest sister "fell ill" meant that she had gone out of her mind. That might explain his change of countenance, and it was just possible that her demented influence still hung about Holmescroft; but the rest was ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... money had come to him as the very irony of Fate. It could not give him the one thing he wished, and he had no other use for it. His dream was over. He felt like an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life. He looked at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... from nowhere to nowhere, of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said, "I know, I know"; of Jews running down the street shouting in Yiddish, "Don't do it, don't do it," and being cut down by demented peasants—she called them "cattle"—whilst she looked on interested and even amused; of tutors and governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him. And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,—demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... set myself to tell her of Arthur's double dealing about the estate, and of how he had made Hugh's father believe he was minded to consider the ways of Friends, and at last of how he had borrowed money and had set poor Hugh's half-demented father against him. I did not spare her or him, and the half of what I said I have not set down. The Arnold business I did return to, seeing that it struck her, or seemed to, less than it did me; for to my mind it was ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... next Monday evening, 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

... said Doyle, "but he hasn't. The tunes he whistles round the house would drive you demented if so be that you listened to them; but I needn't tell you I ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... closed and struggled. For half a minute Dick, shaking free of the embrace—and this only by striking him on the jaw and half stunning him as they rose on the crest of a swell—was able to grip him by the collar and drag him within reach of the life-belt. But here the demented man managed to wreathe his legs and arms in another and more terrible hold. The pair of them were now cursing horribly, cursing whenever a wave left choking them, and allowed them to cough and sputter for breath. They fought as two men whose lives had pent up an unmitigable hate for this moment. ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... for a 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 ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Grimshaw is rich and proud and pitiless. Everybody is afraid of him. But Roving Kate is not afraid. Indeed, he seems to be more afraid of her. Wherever he is, she is there. She is wild and bony and ragged. She is, or pretends to be, half demented. She tells fortunes with strange antics and gesticulations, scrawling her prognostications upon stray slips of paper. But Benjamin Grimshaw is the main object of her attention. She hates him, and hates him all the more terribly because she once ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... broke into the room, tragedy in the shape of a man demented. For fifteen years Bellamy had known Arthur Dorward, but this man was surely a stranger! He was hatless, dishevelled, wild. A dull streak of color had mounted almost to his forehead, his ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... those years. Teresina loved me in return, and for 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

... of the heroes of the Mahabharata,[89] and the various fairy lovers of Europe who lured men to eternal imprisonment inside mountains, or vanished for ever when they were completely under their influence, leaving them demented. The elfin Lilu similarly wooed young women, like the Germanic Laurin of the "Wonderful Rose Garden",[90] who carried away the fair lady Kunhild to his underground dwelling amidst the Tyrolese mountains, or left them haunting the place of their meetings, searching for ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... soldier at the final downfall, swept along in the 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 thousands of millions of francs to pay—taking ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model from which the genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet, not so painfully either when second thoughts wisely came. 'Ah! who was I, [he says] that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... contain more gold, either in the form of rough nuggets, just as they had been taken from the mine, or dust which had evidently been washed out of the sand of some river. The sight came near to driving them demented, for there were tons of the precious metal; far more of it indeed than they could possibly hope to ever carry away. But even this was not all; for at the far end of the chamber they came upon three great bronze coffers of elaborate ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... tell, gambling had lost all fascination for me from that moment. The world, in which I had moved like one demented, suddenly seemed stripped of all interest or attraction. My rage for gambling had already made me quite indifferent to the usual student's vanities, and when I was freed from this passion also, I suddenly found myself face to face with an ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large. The ultimate destiny of these poor wretches should be a penal settlement where they could be confined during ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... country the Nepaulese ambassador arrives, returning from Pekin with large escort and bound for Lhassa: the ambassador half demented: and Meares, who speaks many languages, is begged by ambassador and escort to accompany the party. He is obliged to miss ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... 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 her say if one person could do it ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... things many of the learned are more demented than the simple, for the reason that they are in a negative state, which they confirm by means of the knowledges [scientifica] which they have continually and in abundance before their sight ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg

... Plooie! What was you doing in the war?" his jaw would drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... little Swiss girl whom some reckless people brought home and then turned adrift. It will be a real kindness to help her home, and you shall pick her up when you come up to me on your way, and see my child! Oh, didn't I tell you? We had a housemaid once who was demented enough to marry a scamp of a stoker on one of the Thames steamers. He deserted her, and I found her living, or rather dying, in an awful place at Rotherhithe, surrounded by tipsy women, raging in opposite corners. I got her into a decent room, but too late to save her life—and a good thing ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded as demented. One can only understand such a judgment as an isolated fact. But in England this monstrous stupidity is the rule. Sir A. de Rutzen was not satisfied with ordering the books to be burnt and fining the bookseller; he went on to justify ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... 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 persuaded. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... $1,500.00—does not seem to be regarded. Negroes are 25 per cent. higher now with cotton at ten and one half cents than they were two or three years ago when it was worth fifteen and sixteen cents. Men are demented upon the subject. A reverse will ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... friends, and such great and 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 the frenzy ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... on a table near by—one of those shiny metal bells with a button on the top which you press down sharply to induce the thing to ring. Eliot thumped it, and continued thumping till a half-demented waiter came flying towards him ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... the strife that was to come, and wellnigh heard the thunder of the captains and the shouting, while her eye was always eagerly pointed to that pearly streak which was to herald the one long, cool, calm, bright day of humanity. No wonder Dulcie was as demented as Will, and thought it would be a very little matter though the milk-porridge were sour on the morrow, or if the carrier did not come with the price in his pocket for these sweet pots, and bowls, and pipkins: she believed her poor babies were well at rest from the impending dust, and din, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... first clause of our illustrated lecture. Without his pockets John would be a cipher, and a decimal cipher at that. If some men were not all pocket they would never be Johns, for no Jill would be so demented as to "come tumbling after" them. I have seen a pocket marry off a hump-back, a twisted foot and sixty winters' fall of snow upon the head, while a pocketless Adonis sighed in vain for Beauty's glance. A full pocket balances an ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... the membranes of the brain, and by compressing a certain part of the brain they produce their special symptoms such as headache, vomiting, inflammation of the nerves of the eye, double vision, blindness, the memory impaired, dullness and apathy, an irritable temper, and sometimes become demented. There is often vertigo or a sense of giddiness. There may be convulsions, and paralysis of some muscles. A general tuberculosis tendency or history of syphilis will help to make the diagnosis. In children it is more likely to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... again she remembered how once she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead, had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one demented over her desertion outside McNeight's public, when what should come familiarly round the corner but Thady himself, who had stopped behind, foregoing his assisted passage, because the divil a fut of him would stir out of it so long as there might ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... which the future critics of English literature will award him. But in this age of critical hysteria it is not enough to yield a man the palm for his own qualities. With regard to Stevenson our professional guides have gone fairly demented, and it is worth while to make an effort to give him the place he has honestly earned, before the inevitable reaction sets in, and unmerited laudations have brought about an unmerited neglect. His life was arduous. His ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... who observed my reckless charge, without being in the secret of my object, I must have appeared demented. Fortunately, the interesting barouche had passed before the catastrophe, and covered as I was with dust, and my hat blocked, you may be sure I did not care to present myself before the object of my ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... the cool of the night I felt little the worse for my climb, and was all eagerness for dawn to break that I might see what manner of country I was in, for I had been half demented when my terrible ride from the pursuing sandstorm had brought me ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... be wondered that she did shriek. Turning toward the spot at which the villain pointed, the Protector saw the half-demented Baronet standing in the door-way. He had opened the closet, and come forth during the momentary absence of his attendant, and now stood moping and bowing to the assembly in a way that would have moved the pity of a ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... irritated and evidently astonished Haviland, who, in his obtuseness, even now, could not perceive what objection his daughter could have to a match esteemed by him so advantageous. "What can this mean? Why, the girl must be demented! You to decide on the time! Why, reasonable time is all that was meant by that, if it is not ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... shadows seem to rise Of these dark buildings, pointed to the skies, Immense entanglement in shroud of gloom! The stars which gleamed in the empyrean dome, Under the thousand arches in heaven's space Shone as through meshes of the blackest lace. Cities of hell, with foul desires demented, And monstrous pleasures, hour by hour invented! Each roof and home some monstrous mystery bore! Which through the world spread like a twofold sore! Yet all things slept, and scarce some pale late light Flitted along the streets through the still night, Lamps of debauch, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... he stooped and picked up his coat from the sand and placed it without resistance on her shoulders, like a cloak. She drew it, indeed, about her with trembling fingers as if her senses craved the comfort though her detestation of the man who gave it was great. But in truth she was demented now, forgetting even the bleeding lover. She gave little paces on the sand, with one of her shoes gone from her feet, and wrung her ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... will properly love AND marry and then rightly generate, carry, nurse and educate their children, will they in deed and in truth carry out the holy and happy purpose of their Creator. See those miserable and depraved scape-goats of humanity, the demented simpletons, the half-crazy, unbalanced multitudes which infest our earth, and fill our prisons with criminals and our poor-houses with paupers. Oh! the boundless capabilities and perfections of ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... till it looks like pure white lather and eat it with sugar. The grounds about our house are very neat and we shall have oceans of flowers of all sorts; several kinds are in full bloom now. The wild flowers are so profuse, so beautiful and so various that A. and I are almost demented on the subject. From the windows I see first the wide, gravelled walk which runs round the house; then a little bit of a green lawn in which there is a little bit of a pond and a tiny jet d'eau which ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... day! I, 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 ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... forgot my sufferings the moment I looked at him. Wild and haggard, he stared at me with bloodshot eyes like a man demented. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... to make preparations. Eric wishes to marry her, and pleads his cause; she asks him what his griefs are compared with those of the doomed man whose picture hangs on the wall. He (rightly) thinks her semi-demented, and tells a dream he had: of the Dutchman entering, of Senta at once giving herself to him, and then sailing away. His story has a result precisely contrary to what he intended and hoped: her ecstasy becomes ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... take the number of the coach; but, in trying to do so, we found it fastened on, and I thought the hackneyman would have gone by himself with laughter. Andrew, who had not observed what we were doing, when he saw us trying to take off the number, went like one demented, and paid the man, I cannot tell what, to get us out, and into the house, for fear ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... 'up' or did I say 'down'?" moaned the half-demented Zoie, while long whistles and short whistles, appealing whistles and impatient whistles followed ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo

... cure. Investigation has in the past been directed to the physical side of the disease, and many of the insane hospitals are examples of physical comfort and perfect physical attention, but they are also living examples of the fact that to house, feed and clothe the demented does not necessarily mean a cure, and a call ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.

... under cover in some solitary place, to let the darkness swallow her up, so that she might give way to her grief and be just a poor, weak woman. So, with a dull and aching heart, she wandered, bareheaded, bare-necked, half-demented, and wholly oblivious to her surroundings, without sense of her incongruous attire or of the water that squeezed up through the soggy moss at her tread and soaked her frail slippers. On she stumbled blindly through the murk like some fair ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... 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

... the lawn to the edge of the mere, where they vanished close to the gravel path which leads out of the grounds. The lake there is eight feet deep, and you can imagine our feelings when we saw that the trail of the poor demented girl came to an end at the edge ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... there. And they'd eaten every chicken, and every egg in the yard. My lovely boxes were all knocked over, and the nests torn to bits, and there wasn't so much as an eggshell left. The poor old hens were just demented—they were going round and round the yard, clucking and calling, and altogether like mad things. And in the middle of it all, fat and happy and ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... charmed the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is more important, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... write something somewhere, I don't care if dinner is ready, and Brother's "safe old Secesh" downstairs! Lydia has another boy! Letter has just come, and I am demented about my new godchild! There ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... Then, at last, his brother 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

... hung from the wrist; and he stared as upon one loosed from hell to speak of horrors. But it did not seem to the laird that, although turned straight towards him, his eyes rested on him; they did not appear to be focused for him, but for something beyond him. It was like the stare of one demented, and it invaded—possessed the laird. A physical terror seized him. He felt his gaze returning that of the man before him, like to like, as from a mirror. He felt the skin of his head contracting; his hair was about to stand on end! The spell ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... into a seat, staring like one demented, now at door and windows, now from one man to the other, now to the floor, while Kincaid sternly said, "Colonel Greenleaf, the reverence due from any soldier to any lady—" and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... to him to do. He drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. About this time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went a ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... 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 out of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... been in the playroom, but when they looked out into the corridor again, to their horror they found it blazing, the flames leaping towards them with astonishing bounds, carried along by the evening breeze that had sprung up. The sight seemed to drive Mrs. Maynard demented. With a shriek she darted away, sped along the burning passage, and before the boy and girl could realize the situation, she had dashed down the blazing staircase. The sound of a crash and a fearful scream reached their ears, telling their own tale. The girl clung to George, ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead

... unhealthy-looking grass covered, as far as the eye could reach, the blackish surface of the marsh. I noticed in the distance, through the deepening twilight, and behind a cloud of rain, two or three horsemen running at full speed, and as if demented, through these boundless spaces; they disappeared at intervals in the depressions of the meadows, and suddenly came to sight again, still galloping with the same frenzy. I could not imagine toward what imaginary goal these equestrian phantoms were thus madly rushing. I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... 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 thought ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... he hasn't. The tunes he whistles round the house would drive you demented if so be that you listened to them; but I needn't tell ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... what my mistress hated, as was the use with the liege vassals of the house of Glenallan; for though, my Lord, I married under my degree, yet an ancestor of yours never went to the field of battle, but an ancestor of the frail, demented, auld, useless wretch wha now speaks with you, carried his shield before him. But that was not a'," continued the beldam, her earthly and evil passions rekindling as she became heated in her narration"that was not a'; I hated ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... surely be demented!" thought the old farmer. "I wonder what he will do next? He will be calling the land water, and the water land; and be speaking of light where there is darkness, and of darkness when it is light." However, he kept ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... who are not yet baptized, in whom the devil's power is not yet extinct, since it thrives in them through the presence of original sin. But as to baptized persons who are vexed in body by unclean spirits, the same reason holds good of them as of others who are demented. Hence Cassian says (Collat. vii): "We do not remember the most Holy Communion to have ever been denied by our elders to them who ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... bed now, like a sensible old chap," said Horace, soothingly, anxious to prevent this poor demented Asiatic from falling into the hands of the police. "Plenty of time to go and ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey

... was intoxicated, but a good look showed me better than that. So I hustled the poor thing into my car and brought her here. All the way she kept crying over and over: 'Look, don't you see it? She's afire! Her lips shine—they shine, they shine.' I think the girl is demented and has had ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... otherwise? Who should know more about her than myself? I have asked some of our old acquaintances if they ever heard of her since her marriage. They shake their heads and look at me as though they thought me demented. Laura Wykoff, you know, married some years ago. I called upon her. She knew little or nothing; but said, she had heard that her husband who had become dissipated had left her and gone off to Baltimore. She thought it highly ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... he stood within sound of the great Fall and read from the forty-seventh chapter of the Prophet Ezekiel. Romeo Desnoyers, thin, keen, professional looking; Poussette and his wife, the latter an anaemic, slightly demented person who spoke no English; Mr. Patrick Maccartie, foreman of the mill, who likewise was ignorant of English, despite his name, and the Methodist contingent from Beaulac were planted along the front seats at markedly wide intervals, for Poussette had erected his church on a most generous ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... petitioned that they might not be contaminated with the odious thing. In spite of remonstrances, and at a vast cost, railways were made; and we should like to know where opponents are now to be found. Demented land-proprietors are come to their senses; and even recalcitrant Oxford is glad of a line ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various

... afire with the bitterness of repentance, with passionate self-accusation. Murder had been done through her. Murder! The horror of it all had driven her well-nigh demented when she gazed from the distance while the two men disposed of Arden Laval's body under the snow. The dogs? They had been left where they fell. The living had been cut loose from their trappings to roam the forests at their will, while the dead had remained to satisfy the fierce hunger ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... lawyer walked slowly home with his hands clasped behind his back he pondered upon the seeming mockery and injustice of the law that forced a lonely, half-demented old fellow with the fixed delusion that he was a financier behind prison bars and left free the sharp slick crook who had no bowels or mercies and would snatch away the widow's mite and leave her and her consumptive ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... feast had been shortened by the ill-concealed hatred of each brother for the other. At the second, brooding care found unwonted lodging in the charming personality of Sylvia Manning—care, almost foreboding, heightened by the demented mutterings of her "aunt." At the third, with the detectives, sat responsibility; but light-heartedly withal, since these seasoned man-hunters could cast off their day's work ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... climax came. "The crust of the earth rose and sank like the sea in a storm." Rocks were rent, mountains fell, buildings and their contents were shattered, trees swayed like reeds, animals were scared, and ran about demented; men thought the judgment had come. The earth opened in thousands of places, the roads in Hilo cracked open, horses and their riders, and people afoot, were thrown violently to the ground; "it seemed as if the rocky ribs of the mountains, and the granite walls and pillars ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... be demented! What have the moods to do in that sentence? Perhaps you are expecting a visit from the man in the moon, and that makes you talk such nonsense. The grammar says—"We should distinguish the numbers and the persons." ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... punishment for his presumption, if it hath not quite demented him," said the parson. "These persons are like those addressed by St Chrysostom, fitly called the golden-mouthed, who said, 'Miserable wretches that ye be! ye cannot expel a flea, much less a devil!' It will be well ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... Charmides shook and brangled his head, assevered that he was transported and in an ecstasy. Catullus after the same manner maketh mention, in his Berecynthia and Atys, of the place wherein the Menades, Bacchical women, she-priests of the Lyaean god, and demented prophetesses, carrying ivy boughs in their hands, did shake their heads. As in the like case, amongst the Galli, the gelded priests of Cybele were wont to do in the celebrating of their festivals. Whence, too, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long; They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... him and he was gone. Mariana had never heard him in such demented haste since the days when one squad of the boys besieged another in the schoolhouse, and Eben Hanscom was deputed to run for reinforcements of those that went home at noon. But she settled down there by the fire and held herself quiet until he should ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... tone was meant rather for Theydon than for the half-demented girl, who was stumbling anywhere but in the right direction until Theydon caught her arm and led her to the lift. She contrived to remain outwardly calm until she reached the seclusion of the sitting room, when she broke into a flood ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... evidently wished to see her father's face as it had really become; for it represented the King, not in the gold-laced uniform, not in the trim wig not in the jauntily tied queue of his official portraits and statues, but as he was: in confinement, wretched and demented; in a slouching gown, with a face sad beyond expression; his long, white hair falling about it and over it; of all portraits in the world, save that, at Florence, of Charles V in his old age, the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... monstrosity that in some way resembled a human. Every reptile, every insect, every queer, misshapen animal not only looked human in some shocking manner, but also seemed to possess human characteristics. It seemed as though some demented creator with a perverted sense of humor had attempted to mock man by calling forth monsters in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... high rank gave a 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various

... since Marguerite had seen the vessel disappear; and four terrible days she had spent, roaming like one demented over her island prison. All day she heard the voices of the demons calling from every cliff and cave, and at night they beat upon the walls of her cabin, and seemed to keep up a fierce, demoniacal laughter over the graves on the hillside. Had it not been ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis

... something, amid all the extravagant demeanor of Legrand—some air of forethought, or of deliberation, which impressed me. I dug eagerly, and now and then caught myself actually looking, with something that very much resembled expectation, for the fancied treasure, the vision of which had demented my unfortunate companion. At a period when such vagaries of thought most fully possessed me, and when we had been at work perhaps an hour and a half, we were again interrupted by the violent howlings ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... that although such knowledge is given to the inferior parts of man, it requires to be interpreted by the superior. Reason, and not enthusiasm, is the true guide of man; he is only inspired when he is demented by some distemper or possession. The ancient saying, that 'only a man in his senses can judge of his own actions,' is approved by modern philosophy too. The same irony which appears in Plato's remark, that 'the men of old time must surely have known ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... even a little farther 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 ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... Ferdinand II.; or even with that under the Regent Murray of Scotland, when churches and abbeys were ruthlessly destroyed. Contrast her Archbishop of Canterbury with the religious dictator of Scotland. She kindled no auto-da-fe, like the Spaniards; she incited no wholesale massacre, like the demented fury of France; she had a loving care of her subjects that no religious bigotry could suppress. She did not seek to exterminate Catholics or Puritans, but simply to build up the Church of England as the shield and defence and enlargement ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... that a fell purpose was working in my mind, but a certain high tragedy in my aspect warned him to silence; so he only dogged me around the corners of the house, eyed me askance from the wood-shed, and peeped through the crevices of the demented little barn. But his vigilance bore no fruit. I but walked moodily "with folded arms and fixed eyes," or struck out new paths at random, so long as there were any vestiges of his creation extant. His time and patience being at length exhausted, he went into the field to immolate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... this with an ambiguous smile in which were equally mingled his contempt for useless idealism and his respect for the artist—a respect similar to the veneration that the Arabs feel for the demented, believing their insanity to be ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... sir. There's the string broken, and there's the glass yonder. I—I can forgive a certain amount of irritability in a sick man; but this is impish mischief, sir—the action of a demented boy. How dare you, sir? What the dickens ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... she paused, the younger, slimmer figure turned in her direction and uttered a cry, a cry almost of terror. Was she demented? Had her longing, her aching longing for a sight of him called up this vision of Stafford? Unless she were out of her mind, the victim of a strange hallucination, it was he himself who stood there, his face, pale and haggard, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... near her. The sight of the river close by was 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 ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... to the insane, people slightly demented and raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while there were also those utter wrecks which sat in heaps on the floor, mumbling and muttering unintelligible words, the whole current of their thoughts hopelessly muddled, turning around upon ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... took the hint and his departure, running along the passage and stumbling down the stairway like a man demented. When he got down into the courtyard he shook his fist at my window and swore he would have the law of us; but I never saw the little man again, although Paddy and Jem were destined to meet him once more, as I ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... irrefragable proof, he replied. I don't care, was the response. It is in writing, Sir, said he. I won't look at it, Sir. What, said he, don't you want to see it if it is in writing & genuine? An emphatic No, Sir, closed the conversation. The Dr. raised his eyes and hands as if he thought me demented, & making a low bow & ejaculating a long Hah-hah retreated for the door. The story about the Dr. got out and, partly by mine & I believe in part also by his means, & alarmed all the story tellers who heard of it. A few repetitions of ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... one demented. It was of a peculiar reddish-brown, with a strange little kink and curl in it. Where had I seen such hair before? Somewhere. I remembered perfectly how the whole bright head looked with the firelight playing over it. Oh, no, ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green

... indifference. It was not the mode at this epoch to seem anything but bored at all the circumstances of public and private life in Rome, at the simple occurrences of daily routine or at the dangers which threatened every man through the crazy whims of a demented despot. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... go," harped Gerilleau. "He died in the execution of his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered!... But the poor fellow was—what is it?—demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison swelled ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... wicked thing to do. But she was nearly demented with trouble. And she did it. She managed to get away, too, in spite of her lovely face. An old negro woman helped her. And she came to England and went to a cousin of hers who had been good to her, whom she knew she could trust—just a plain, square-jawed Englishman, Big Bear, like you in some ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... 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? ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... threatened, but the officials were like men possessed. Half of them had disappeared in the rush to the City, for it had leaked out, in spite of the Government's precautions, that Paul's House, known once as St. Paul's Cathedral, was to be the scene of Felsenburgh's reception. The others seemed demented; one man on the platform had dropped dead from nervous exhaustion, but no one appeared to care; and the body lay huddled beneath a seat. Again and again Percy had been swept away by a rush, as he struggled from platform to platform in his search for a car that would ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... political debate Throughout the isle was storming, And Rads attacked the throne and state, And Tories the reforming, To calm the furious rage of each, And right the land demented, Heaven sent us Jolly Jack, to teach The way to ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... across the sand there floated up a silvery haze, like a veil of spangled tissue—exquisite for a ball robe, she said long after!—and in this haze she saw again the phantom Arab galloping upon his horse. But now he was clear in the moon. Furiously he rode, like a thing demented in a dream, and as he rode he looked back over his shoulder, as if he feared pursuit. Mademoiselle could see his fierce eyes, like the eyes of a desert eagle that stares unwinking at the glaring African ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... your Maker,—and, the last not the least, your intellect." It was 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 to an accomplished ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... wondering, as I finished my walk home, whether there could not be some connection between the stroke of Providence which had driven three Cabinet Ministers demented and that gentler touch which had restored Miss Claudia Barriton to good ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... like a wind-gust, and earthquakes 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

... then!" exclaimed Harold, in great agitation; "and my sister, whom these monks have demented, leagues herself with the King against the law of the wide welkin and the grand religion of the human heart. Oh!" continued the Earl, kindling into an enthusiasm, rare to his even moods, but wrung as much from his broad sense as from ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... out a whole set of croquet balls. This shows that her mind is affected. You pick up the croquet ball, and find it hot and feverish, so you throw it into the shade of the woodshed. Anon, you find your demented hen in the loft of the barn hovering over a door knob and trying by patience and industry ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a book-seller's 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 of a new group of figures—Mr. Macaulay, in ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... superstitious, and some nights ago she thought the devil had come for Carol, and she has never been the same since. She crouches about like a creature demented. Sometimes I fancy she must ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham

... softly up behind him and shouted: "Hey, Plooie! What was you doing in the war?" his jaw would drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of exercise, first ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his shoulder-blades when the ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... how in its Town Hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model from which the genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet, not so painfully either when second thoughts wisely came. 'Ah! who was I, [he says] that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... eyes never attempted to avoid the girl's direct gaze, nor did he flinch as the accusation fell from her lips. Never was he more alert, never more gently disposed towards this half-demented creature than at that moment. He recognized the hand that had been at work, and he laid no blame upon her. His feelings were of sorrow—sorrow for the woman he loved, and sorrow for himself. But his thoughts were chiefly ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... 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 ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... returned to his own ship in a state of such mingled astonishment and elation that his people were at first inclined to think he had suddenly gone demented. However, the order which he gave them to secure the towing hawser in such a manner as would enable the ship to withstand a heavy strain was intelligible enough; it told them that, with the assistance of their strange rescuers, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... literary uses began. He was unquestionably a victim of the disease about which he wrote so roguishly and withal so charmingly. But though it was in his blood, it never blinded his sense of literary values or restrained his sallies at the expense of his demented fellows. He had too keen a sense of the ridiculous to go clean daft on the subject. He yielded to the fascinating pursuit of rare and curious editions, of old prints of celebrities, and of personal belongings of distinguished ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, To ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... about like one demented. "Our own government is ten times worse than the one we are fighting against, and every one of us was a fool for ever putting on a gray jacket. Why didn't they tell us all this in the first place, so that we might know what there was before ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon

... awoke me. My blanket had fallen to the floor and I 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 Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... was possessed by a much stubborner spirit than this interesting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented—the only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject of dirt, mad to wash things, especially ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... startled senses comes the immediate suggestion, "Is the giver of the feast demented, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various

... when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles in the town and it made a most alarming slaughter among the little people. There was a funeral almost daily, and the mothers of the town were nearly demented with fright. My mother was greatly troubled. She worried over Pamela and Henry and me, and took constant and extraordinary pains to keep us from coming into contact with the contagion. But upon reflection I believed that ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... because I hate the family! Was your poor father demented in his last moments, when he trusted you ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... do believe you are becoming demented! Here is poor Lady Linton almost heart-broken over her brother's mesalliance, his mother lies at death's door on account of the excitement caused by it, while you, who ought to be the most interested party of all, are about to turn traitress and go over to the enemy just because ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... 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

... obeyed and beloved, nobody, would find fault with his arrangements. After everybody had heard who the general was (Coronado), he made Don Pedro de Tovar ensign general, a young gentleman who was the son of Don Fernando de Tovar, the guardian and high steward of the Queen Dona Juana, our demented mistress—may she be ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... older sons, with a red handkerchief bound around his neck, to hide some sore, followed her like one demented, dashing aside his tears with the back of his hand. She advanced along the strand, beating her knees, directing her steps toward the sheet. And as she called upon her dead, there issued from her mouth sounds scarcely human, but rather like the howling of some savage ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... so sure: 'Tis certain we have much that's quite as bad, Whose hardy writers have not to endure The hangman's fondling. It is said they're mad: Though lately Mr. Brooks (I mean the poet) Looked well, and if demented didn't ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... attack of the fear-demented man, but she was powerless to prevent it. The mucker saw it too, and grinned—he hoped that it would be a good fight; there was nothing that he enjoyed more. He was sorry that he could not take a hand in it, but the wheel demanded ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Evelyn Ramsay, born a 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 ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... has attacked the Navy in this unwarranted fashion. The Navy has existed and will always exist as the first barrier of American defense. I ask you, gentlemen, to ignore this request as you would ignore the statements of any person ... er, slightly demented. I should like to offer a recommendation that the general's sanity be investigated, and an inquiry be made as to the mental health of anyone else ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison

... sonorously in profanity, waving his hands and swaying his body. He recalled every oath in his extensive camp vocabulary. The expression on his face was sober, and Victor had a suspicion that this exhibition was not all play. The savages regarded the vicomte as one suddenly gone demented, till it dawned upon one of them that the white man was committing a sacrilege, mocking the reverend medicine man. He rose up behind the vicomte, reached over and struck him roughly on the mouth. The vicomte wheeled like a flash. The Indian folded his ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... I gave little heed to his odd ways an' wanderin' mode o' life; for he was very kind to mysel' an' a younger brither an' we thought muckle o' him; but when we had grown up to manhood my father tell'd us what had changed Davy Stuart from a usefu' an' active man to the puir demented body he then was. He was born in a small parish in the south of Scotland, o' respectable honest parents, who spared nae pains as he grew up to instruct him in his duty to baith God an' man. At quite ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... society life, and, accompanied by an elderly confidant, disguises herself as a peasant girl, and visits the infernal regions of the slums, partly to learn how the other half lives, and partly to learn the fate of some former servants. After interviewing don Pedro Infinito, a half-demented astrologer and employment agent, who furnishes the best scene and the most interesting character in the play, they inspect a rag-picking factory. Celia buys it and promises to establish profit-sharing and old-age ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... daft together," muttered Margery, with uplifted hands, as she hurried away. "It was a very good discourse, no doubt, but to think of folk strippin' themselves like that—a pun'-note, forsooth, near the half of the week's work; the man's gone clean demented." ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae

... ancient wildness, all that has been done by church and school through centuries of cultivation is for the moment destroyed, and the decent gentleman or devout saint becomes a howling, bloodthirsty, demented savage. It is not long since we all were cavemen and followed game for food as truly as wildcat or wolf, and the long repression of civilization seems to make the rebound to savage love of blood all the more violent. This frenzy, fortunately, does not last long in ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... know nothing of the world. Do you suppose I'm quite demented? Ask a gentleman for his estate, or watch, because I know something to his disadvantage! Why, ha, ha! dear Radie, every man who has ever been on terms of intimacy with another must know things to his disadvantage, but no one thinks of telling them. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... melancholy, frequently lamenting that he had left his savage family. "Some time after 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 known to ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... gray, the color of volcanic rock, bubbling with imprisoned gases at the instant of hardening. It stretched out and down, that gently rolling plain, for a thousand yards or more, then ended in a welter of nightmare forms done in stone. It was like the work of some demented sculptor's ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... his tragic investigation as the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true significance. He had said to himself, "Let the spirit die that the body may live." He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the maze—all these things revolted that part of his nature which was, perhaps, unchangeable. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... we have seen in Pi-Bast. Mentezufis and I were witnesses of drinking feasts, at which the half-demented heir blasphemed against the ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... showed what treasures lay hidden in that stupendous opera, which, however, would never find comprehension so long as the musician persisted in trying to explain it in his present demented state. His wife and the Count were equally divided between the music and their surprise at this hundred-voiced instrument, inside which a stranger might have fancied an invisible chorus of girls were hidden, so closely did some of the tones resemble the human voice; ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... natural," 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 never ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... encountered. Shortly after crossing the branch, he met a young negro with a cartload of tubs and buckets and piggins, and asked him if he had seen on the road a young white woman with dark eyes and hair, apparently sick or demented. The young man answered in the negative, and Tryon pushed ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... mourned the unhappy fate of the poor village maiden, the grief of her lover, George Merrideth, had been observed to be the wildest. For some days, he had wandered about like one demented; and all who witnessed, respected and commiserated his anguish. Latterly, however, he had disappeared entirely from the public view; and it was hinted by some, that his mind had been seriously affected by the occurrence. One morning, Mr. Manners was suddenly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... were all demented. I did indeed. I still think it a pity that he should take an American. I think that Miss Spalding is very nice, but there are English girls quite as nice-looking as her." After that there was not another word said by Lady Rowley ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... was surprised at the question, for she had not thought of Walter as being demented. She could not see why the pastor wished to discontinue the lesson, for they had only begun; but, ever ready to agree with her husband, she answered, ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter

... 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









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