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More "Maniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... part of the day in the trip, and had time permitted, we would gladly have broken the journey at one of the quaint towns along the way. At many points of vantage we stopped to contemplate the beauty of the scene—one would have to be a speed maniac indeed to "scorch" over ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... was cut in the rock. He was soon so low down that he could no longer see the stars shining; beneath him moved a shrouded form; and sliding with involuntary haste down the steep descent, he stood near the groaning figure; it ceased its lamentations, and began to laugh like a maniac from beneath its long, ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... more to be observed. The lake no longer glittered under the silvery beam. Both Ostuta and Monopostiac had resumed the sombre aspect that usually distinguished them, with that mournful tranquillity that habitually reigned over the spot—interrupted only by the cry of the coyote, or the shrill maniac scream of the eagle preparing to descend to the banquet of ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of man and its ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... suitcase down on my foot and throws his arms around the wife's neck. He had on a cap which could of been used as a checker board when you got tired of wearin' it, a suit of clothes that must of been made by a maniac tailor and the yellowest tan shoes I ever seen in my life. If he had been three inches taller and an ounce thinner, you could of put a tent around him and got a dime admission. On his upper lip, which was of a retirin' disposition, ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... remainder of the day above meteors; if yours—why, you at most admire my fingers. No doubt you are a connoisseur of fingers and such-like trifles; but, then, a woman does not wish to be admired by a connoisseur so much as she hungers to be adored by a maniac. And accordingly, I prefer my ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... thou judgest, Couthon! He is one, Who flies from silent solitary anguish, Seeking forgetful peace amid the jar Of elements. The howl of maniac uproar Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself. A calm is fatal to him—then he feels The dire upboilings of the storm within him. A tiger mad with inward wounds!—I dread The fierce and restless turbulence ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... remembrance of his mother has often, very often mingled in his gayest hours, and dashed them with remorseful bitterness. He owns that often of late years her image, and that of his sister Mary, have risen so mildly, so impressively before him, that he has flown almost like a maniac from the gay and heartless throngs, to solitude and silence, and as the thoughts of home and his infancy, when he first lisped out his boyish prayer by the side of his sister at his mother's knee, came thronging over him, he has sobbed and wept like a child. These feelings ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king. What the classic ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the Quarterly began in 1811, when in a review of Weber's edition of Ford Lamb was described as a "poor maniac." It was renewed in 1814, when his article on Wordsworth's Excursion was mutilated. It broke out again in 1822, as Lamb says here, when a reviewer of Reid's treatise on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections (supposed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... at all afraid of ghosts when I reach my second wind, and I grabbed at this one. It moved backward silently and as I made a quick step toward it that specter let out the most blood-curdling yell I ever heard—the shriek of a maniac. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... assented Vixen, with a remorseful sigh; "I fear I'm bringing her sandy hairs with sorrow to the grave. That hair of hers never could be gray, you know, it's too self-opinionated in its sandiness. Now come along, Rorie, do. Titmouse will be stamping about his box like a maniac if he doesn't get ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... you crazy? Are you a raving maniac? I never did anything like that. Toot Wambush was writing about Hettie Fergusson. She is his sweetheart; she helped him hide the barrel of whiskey in the kitchen. Oh, Mr. Westerfelt, was that what you've been thinking all ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... horrors which follow when victory, brutality, and licentiousness are linked together. Every evil passion was allowed to revel with impunity, and revenge, lust, and avarice,—each had its hundreds of victims in unhappy Semlin. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out. Peter the Hermit had blown the popular fury into a flame, but to cool it again was beyond his power. His followers rioted unrestrained, until the fear of retaliation ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... sunset song of the birches, "A white melody in the silence, "I have seen a quarrel of the pines. "At nightfall "The little grasses have rushed by me "With the wind men. "These things have I lived," quoth the maniac, "Possessing only eyes and ears. "But you— "You don green spectacles before ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... paternal grandfather, Robert Scott, who rented the farm of Sandyknowe, in the vicinity of Smailholm Tower, in Roxburghshire. Shortly after his arrival at Sandyknowe, he narrowly escaped destruction through the frantic desperation of a maniac attendant; but he had afterwards to congratulate himself on being enabled to form an early acquaintance with rural scenes. No advantage accruing to his lameness, he was, in his fourth year, removed to Bath, where he remained twelve months, without experiencing benefit ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... from Liverpool two maiden ladies in the room next mine made representations to the captain which resulted in my removal to the steerage. They couldn't consent, they said, to listen to the shrieks of the maniac in the ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... visage, like the hag Remorse That gloateth over on a nameless deed Of darkness and of dole unhistoried. And were there that might hear him, they would hear The murmur of a prayer in deep fear, Through unbarr'd lips, escaping by the half, And all but smother'd by a maniac laugh, That follow'd it, so sudden and so shrill, That swarms of sea-birds, wandering at will Upon the wave, rose startled, and away Went flocking, like a silver shower of spray! And aye he called ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness; madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... was certainly a fool! No man with a grain of sense would do such a thing alone—maybe with a crowd of cheering men, but only a maniac could do it alone—Ned ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... was nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... sisters, named Lucy, whom he had most loved when well, had now power to soothe him. He would listen to her voice, and give way to a milder mood when she talked or sang. But this favorite sister married, went to her new home, and the maniac became ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see him, and they went on making a clatter with their forks, and a murmur with their conversation. But the man's face was the face of a maniac. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... this day, came leaning on his staff and with considerable strain, as far as the street for a little relaxation, he suddenly caught sight, approaching from the off side, of a Taoist priest with a crippled foot; his maniac appearance so repulsive, his shoes of straw, his dress all in tatters, muttering ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... could not stop to give more than a passing glance to all this. He was terribly wrought up at finding himself in such a strait, and paced the room from end to end, like a veritable maniac, while he tried to think of some way ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... upon him, but Donaldson managed to secure a good grip and dragged the fellow to the ground. The latter was up in a minute and faced him with that gleam of devilish hatred that marks the foiled maniac. The girl started to separate the two men, but it was unnecessary; she saw the murder fade from her companion's face before the calm untroubled gaze of the other. She saw his strained body relax, she ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her father and her brother, out of the world—maniac, spy, and traitor. Instead of according him such 'poetic justice,' the Poet gives Hamlet the only true success of doing his duty to the end—for it was as much his duty not to act before, as it was his duty to act at last—then sends him after his Ophelia—into ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... he writes from Valladolid, "more a Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... necessary to search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her good ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... a tobacco maniac," growled Trendon, feeling in his breast pocket. "The devil," he cried, bringing ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, was it not to protect myself and help others—and was not my motive and ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... hot dust of the road that rose like smoke under their shifting feet. The soldiers had the fighting, plunging prisoner; between their bodies, and past those of the men and women who had run out with them, his young, black-avised face surged and raged in an agony of resistance, lifting itself in a maniac effort to be free, then dragged and beaten down. An old woman tottered on the fringes of the struggle, crying feebly; others, young and old, wept or screamed; a soldier, bitten in the hand, cried an oath and gave way. The prisoner tore ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... and, as they appeared at the door, I joined them; but on striking out a few yards into the moor, we found the maniac already in the custody of two men, who had seized and were dragging her towards her cottage, a miserable hovel, about half a mile away. She never once spoke to us, but continued singing, though in a lower and more subdued tone of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Ortiz in Toledo A. D. 1483, and was therefore called Casa del Nuncio. The Damascus "Maristan" was described by every traveller of the last century: and it showed a curious contrast between the treatment of the maniac and the idiot or omadhaun, who is humanely allowed to wander about unharmed, if not held a Saint. When I saw it last (1870) it was all but empty and mostly in ruins. As far as my experience goes, the United States is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... magazine, containing a mixture of debased Cabalism and vulgar blasphemies, interspersed with panegyrics on haschish—for Crowley combined with sexual perversion an addiction to drugs—which might appear to express only the ravings of a maniac. But eccentricity has often provided the best cloak for dark designs, and the outbreak of war proved that there was a method in the madness of the man whom the authorities persisted in regarding merely as an irresponsible degenerate of a non-political kind. To quote the press report of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... sends his money abroad at all, he goes wild altogether. He rushes at obscure transactions, and lends to Peru, or Guatemala, or Tierra del Fuego, or some shaky place he knows nothing about. The insular maniac overlooks the continent of Europe, instead of studying it, and seeking what countries there are safe and others risky. Now, why overlook Prussia? It is a country much better governed than England, especially as regards great ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Albanian. Sultan Mahomet, the 'Grand Seignior' of the whole Turkish Empire, was no strong, powerful man, but a mere stripling who had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father, the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his harem, and in his fury had done his best to slay his own son and heir. Happily ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... fell—and villagers relate No more of Mary's hour, But how she rose with deadly might, And, with a maniac's power, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... it was so—the misdeed was a double-edged blade which cut both ways. It will never be known, probably, how near a massacre followed the explosion of indignation at that maniac's murder of the Emancipator. Fortunately for the unsullied robe of Columbia, a hundred advocates of leaving retribution to Heaven ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... when every freeman should be awake and look to his arms.... Surely, if the danger is groundless, there can be no harm in endeavoring to ascertain its groundlessness. If you were told your house was on fire you would hardly think of calling the man a maniac for informing you of it, even if he should use a tone of voice and gestures somewhat earnest and impassioned. The course of some of our journals on the subject of Popery has led to the belief that they are covertly under the control of the Jesuits. And let me say, sir, that the modes of control in ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to understand. She laid her head back in ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... and Winslow—within the limits and boundaries of the lazaretto of San Antonio, until their neutrality shall be established, and pending the further pleasure of the Council. And it is further decreed and declared that one Capitano Bunker, formerly of the Excelsior, but now a maniac and lunatic—being irresponsible and visited of God, shall be exempted from the ordinances of this decree until his reason shall be restored; and during that interval subjected to the ordinary remedial ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... crime we're working with—the kind we expect future laws to apply to—is strictly limited. It must be a crime of violence against a human being, or a crime of destruction in which there is a grave danger that human lives may be lost. The sex maniac, the firebug, or the goon who gets a thrill out of beating people. Or the reckless driver who has proven that he can't be trusted behind ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... or becomes a maniac," thought he to himself, "the end as regards us will be the same for Norbert will break off ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... continued to rage, and the loud peals of thunder and sharp flashes of lightening, together with the shrieks and moans of the maniac in the adjoining room, made the night a fearful one. The long hours wore slowly away, but neither Jerome nor his wife could sleep, and they arose at an early hour in the morning, ordered breakfast, and resolved ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... get it well betrothed, The law would call him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away his senses, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... close to a dead, human body. Immediately the recollection of the mad woman struck me like a blow in the chest. Many other people had perhaps died in the wood during that disastrous year, but though I do not know why, I was sure, sure, I tell you, that I should see the head of that wretched maniac. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... One horse, rejoicing in the title of "Jean l'Hereux," seemed specially selected for this mode of treatment. He was a brute of surpassing obstinacy, but, as he bore the name of his former owner, a French semi-clerical maniac who had fled from Canada and joined the Blackfeet, and who was regarded by the Crees as one of their direst foes, I rather think that the youthful Battenotte took out on the horse some of the grudges that he owed to the man. Be that ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... pendulums with bits of thread and little balls of clay. He had delineated a segment of a circle on the wall with chalk, and marked their different vibrations by intersecting it with cross lines. A decent-looking man came up, and smiling at the maniac, turned to Harley, and told him that gentleman had once been a very celebrated mathematician. "He fell a sacrifice," said he, "to the theory of comets; for having, with infinite labour, formed a table on the conjectures of Sir Isaac Newton, he was disappointed in the return of one of those luminaries, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... or even love could supply. All that money can do to lessen her misery, is done. The house in which she lives is surrounded by soft lawns and secluded groves. It has been prepared altogether for the wealthy, and is furnished with every luxury which it may be within the power of a maniac to enjoy. This lady has her own woman to attend her; and the woman, though stout and masterful, is gentle in language and kind in treatment. "An eye for an eye, ma'am. Oh, certainly. That is the law. An eye for an eye, no doubt." This formula she will repeat a dozen times ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's content, and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... enemy kept up an incessant rifle and machine-gun fire on our position, the bullets were snapping around our heads like a bunch of fire-crackers and the mud was flying everywhere, but that little seventeen-year-old "kid" kept feeding in belts and all the while whooping and laughing like a maniac. It certainly cheered me up to have him there. The whole thing was over in about twenty minutes but, during that short time, we had learned something which can be learned in no other way—that it is possible for thousands of ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... ignorant folk who came to visit his temple of science, and to inspect its curiosities, felt themselves insulted—not always without reason. He kept a tame maniac in the house, named Lep, and he used to regard the sayings of this personage as oracular, presaging future events, and far better worth listening to than ordinary conversation. Consequently he used to have him at his banquets and feed him himself; and whenever ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... to charity, Until I find peace again, My curse upon the fiend or god That will not let me hear A bird in song upon the bough But, hovering about the notes, There chimes the maniac beating ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... not deficient in courage, but he did not at all relish the idea of tackling single-handed a powerfully built maniac—for such he took the spy to be. He wisely awaited the approach of the Oxford's sea-boat, which, manned by four rowers who were encouraged by Midshipman Setley, was being urged rapidly towards ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... a rosary of beads, enlarging his turband, lengthening his sleeves and blackening his eyelids with antimony. Here, however, it would be out of place. Very comical also is the way in which he pretends to cure the maniac by "muttering unknown words, blowing in her face, biting her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... screamed. "Is this, the way you play upon people: bringing me from my home to console a maniac, and, instead of that, you are only what you always were, a spendthrift and a scamp? Finely they will ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Gordon off and flung him upon the heather, where Jock Forrest set his foot upon him, and turned the light of the lantern upon the fierce face of a maniac, foam-flecked and blood- streaked. Jock still growled and gnashed his teeth, and struggled in sullen fury to get at his fallen foe. With his hat Ralph brought water from a deep moss-hole and dashed it upon the face of Winsome. In a little while, she began to sob in a heartbroken ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... much use in thinking. The old Boldero was settling by the head and the pumps couldn't hold up the inflood. In fifteen minutes I knew that it was all up with us—or all down, rather—and I ordered the boats over and began to run about like a maniac, looking for Ivy and calling to her. And why do you suppose I couldn't find her? She was hiding—hiding ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the official letter, cast his eyes over it, and then, forgetting his gout, caught hold of Syd's hands and began to caper about the room like a maniac. ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... your breath now, fellows, because to be honest with you there was a terrible tragedy, and after the poor young wife was buried the judge lived as much as ten years in an asylum. He had become a maniac, you see, from jealousy of his ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... want to make a maniac of her. I am serious in this; you must not allude in the remotest way to the cause of her illness when you visit her, or you may regret ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... deadly pale; her lips bloodless and compressed; her eyes contracted and glittering with a cold, black, baleful light; her hair unloosed in her agitation, streamed down each side, and fell upon her bosom like the ends of a long black scarf. At times she muttered to herself like any maniac: ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... introduced as a disaster?" asked Kew, with a sigh of relief. "Is she a maniac, or a suffragette, or a Mormon, or just some one who has never read any of ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... Who knows? But as Simon slipped back he sprang forward, something shining in his hand, and flung himself desperately against the door ere it could be closed. The moment's delay he caused was our chance, and rushing forward we too added our weight to that of the maniac. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... of Tigellinus; from a beggar he became rich; it was possible for him to live out his days in peace, have a splendid funeral, and a tomb: but, no! All at once he preferred to lose everything and destroy himself; he must, in truth, be a maniac." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish husband and his shrewish wife—"when four eyes ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... sometimes. Charley is very noisy, and so is Meg Druce, when not overpowered by shyness. She will not exchange a sentence with any of the elders, but in the general laugh she chuckles and shrieks like a young Cochin-Chinese chicken learning to crow; and I hear her squealing like a maniac while she is shrimping with the younger ones and Charley. I must except those two young ladies from the unconscious competition, for one has no manners at all, and the other affects those of a man; but as to the rest, they are all as nice as possible, and ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on like this for three minutes, stopping to laugh like a maniac about every three words, before I can get a word in to tell him that I'm a delicate, high-strung organization myself, if you come right down to it, and I can't stand there in my nightgown listening to a string of nonsense. He chokes and says: 'What nonsense?' ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... speed maniac, and does a carom skid into a cross street that showed he didn't need any ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... his role of good Catholic, perceived at once that the Merchant's Story of these new Arabian Nights was characterised by extreme frankness, was devoid of a sinister motive, and was not the narrative of a maniac. A physician, he adds sententiously, is not to be deceived. He determined thereupon that he himself would descend into the abyss, taking with him a mental reservation in all he said and did as a kind of discharge in full. The Church and humanity required it. Behold him then presently at Naples, making ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... do no better. But even for their sakes, even for the love of them, my friend, resist their crimes when you can. No man will stand by and see a maniac murder his wife and children. It will be better for the poor maddened wretch himself to prevent him; don't you think ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... the name of the Archbishop of Dublin, who, while in England, narrowly escaped martyrdom from the hands of a maniac, while celebrating Mass at the tomb of St. Thomas. Four years afterwards, this celebrated ecclesiastic attended at Rome, with Catholicus of Tuam, and the Prelates of Lismore, Limerick, Waterford, and Killaloe, the third ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... became an unendurable burden without the stimulant; but facing a harrowing scene like this was impossible. He felt that his appetite was like a savage beast on which he held a weakening and relaxing grasp. With the strange, double consciousness of the opium maniac, he saw his wife in all her deep distress, and he had the remorse of a lost soul in view of her agony; he was almost certain that she knew how he had wronged her and his children, and he had all the shame and self-loathing of a proud, sensitive man; he knew that he was false to the sacred trusts ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... ceased, she turned her heavy eyes With such a piteous glance upon my face; It pierced my heart, and fast the gathering tears Blinded my sight. Alas! poor maniac; For thee no hope shall dawn—no tender thought Wake in thy blighted heart a thrill of joy. The immortal mind is levelled with the dust, Ere the tenacious cords of life give way. Hers was a common tale—she ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the gleam of madness; but I remained silent and awaited further developments. But my scrutiny, stolen as it was, had been detected, and he replied at once to the expression of my face: "No, sir; I am neither drunk nor a maniac; I am in deep earnest in all that I say; and I am fully prepared, by actual experiment, to demonstrate beyond all doubt the truth of all ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... "You maniac!" I hear him mutter: "I expected you were given to such tricks as these. Lucky for you no eyes but mine have seen your abject folly. Come ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... friend, Sir Alexander Boswell, in a duel; on other occasions this institution had brought discomfort into his life, and though he was ready to fight General Gourgaud with Napoleon's pistols, he cannot have approved of the practices of the MacTurks and Bingo Binkses. A maniac, as his correspondence shows, challenged Sir Walter, insisting that he was pointed at and ridiculed in the character of MacTurk. (Abbotsford MSS.) It is interesting to have the picture of contemporary manners from ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the story. Jones was a madman, a homicidal maniac of the worst type. Always a madman, the homicidal element of his disease was recurrent and ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... poor bruised bosom, the womanly pride humbled in the dust and wifely honor wounded unto death—these alone are real! With an involuntary cry of rage and shame, a cry that is half a prayer and half a curse—a cry that rings and reverberates through the great sleepy house like a maniac's shriek heard at midnight among the tombs—she flings herself sobbing and moaning upon the marble floor. The drowsy slave starts up as from a dream, quivering in every limb like a coward looking upon his death. He tries to raise the groveling victim of his unbridled lust, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... proposals. If there was anything like tenderness in her bosom—and no woman was probably ever entirely without that feminine quality—it all disappeared at this plain announcement. Fury, rage, mortified pride, and a volcano of wrath burst out, at one explosion, converting her into a sort of maniac, as it might beat the touch of a magician's wand. Without deigning a reply in words, she made the arches of the forest ring with screams, and then flew forward at her victim, seizing him by the hair, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... was, besides, a prematurely-aged man, exhausted by debauch, crazed by strong drink, a ferocious maniac, mutilating his subjects, his officers or his ministers, as the whim seized him, cutting the nose and ears off some, and the foot or the hand from others. His own death, not unlooked for, would ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... gaze upon him and saw that he was deadly pale, and that the perspiration stood out in great drops upon his forehead. The explanation was plain enough—he took me for a maniac. I would have protested and moved the previous question, but taking a small phial from his pocket he broke off the head and threw the contents in my face. Ten seconds later I was totally oblivious, and upon recovering found myself ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... clever maniac!" Stalky resumed. "We mayn't be aware you were followin' us this afternoon, mayn't we? 'Thought you were stalkin' us, eh? Why, we led you bung into it, of course. Colonel Dabney—don't you think he's a nice man, Foxy?—Colonel ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... who exercised the strictest economy. M. de Turenne possessed perhaps a little too much of what his predecessor lacked, but it was exactly this that pleased the Emperor. M. de Turenne was quite a pretty man, thinking perhaps a little too much of himself, a great talker and Anglo-maniac, which led the Emperor to give him the name of my lord Kinsester (who cannot be silent); but he told a story well, and sometimes his Majesty took pleasure in making him relate ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... me are become REALITIES, and your Catherine is in the midst of those circumstances to which we may, without exaggeration, give the epithet "horrible." I write, as I firmly believe, from the mansion of a maniac! On a visit to my Aunt Ingram, and carried by her to Thornfield, the seat of her wealthy neighbour, Mr. Rochester, how shall your Catherine's trembling pen unfold the mysteries by which she finds herself surrounded! No sooner had I entered this battlemented mansion ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... hand, whiter than Alpine snow! I gazed at it wildly—the gleam of the jewels down there hurt my eyes—the shine of the silver crucifix clasped in those little waxen fingers dazzled my brain-and with a frantic cry of unreasoning terror, I rushed up the steps with a maniac speed—opened the iron gate through which SHE would pass no more, and stood at liberty in the free air, face to face with a wind as tempestuous as my own passions. With what furious haste I shut the entrance to the vault! with what fierce precaution I locked and doubled-locked it! Nay, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... most vindictive looks: he thrust out his tongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with inconceivable strength, and became an object of terror to all by-standers. To the lividness of a corpse he united the desperate force of a maniac; they hardly were able to fasten him, so as to guard themselves from his attacks; when in the space of two hours death relieved the poor wretch from his struggles, and the spectators from their apprehensions. The poison of the rattlesnake is not mortal in so short a space, and hence ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... most commendable men within those dreary walls. As for Hall, he was taken to the dungeon and securely chained by the feet to a ring in the center of the stone floor. There is no doubt whatever that the man was a raving maniac. He howled night and day so that he could be heard everywhere in the prison—"Murder, murder! they are murdering me in this black hole; why don't they take me out and ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... and acquaintances they sometimes get glimpses of their prodigal relative, who has settled down into a confirmed gambling maniac, living on such salvage of income as obliging moneylenders have left ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... languages independently of the bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... him with any of the uniforms, and the man, put into a soiled canvas suit, had been permanently assigned to stable duty. The third of this interesting trio was something of an idiot, hailing from the Polish districts. He grinned like a maniac, and he was entirely unfit for drill or any other kind of service that required even the faintest degree of intelligence; but, having been laborer with a Polish peasant, he knew how to handle horses and to clean the stable. He addressed, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... air The maniac bells of War. There will be little of sleeping to-night; There will be wailing and weeping to-night; Death's red sickle is reaping ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... thing he was already certain; he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide and the second was a mindless maniac on the Earthbound cruiser but it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it. Or else they ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... he is a maniac," answered Herhor, "but he is very dangerous in every case. Already Assyria has reminded us twice of the last treaty, and is beginning, I hear, to be alarmed at the arming ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... dexterity the old woman suspended this hideous object to a beam of the shed, then descended rapidly to the courtyard to contemplate it. A burst of sardonic laughter escaped from her lips; she remounted, then descended again like a maniac, and each time uttered new cries and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... blue-red lightning; his ears were aching from the thunder's shock. Once he stood still, unable to suffer longer—for his nerves were paralyzed with fear, and at that pause a fork of vivid flame darted from the blackness and ran like the finger of a maniac down the side of a tall tree. The stroke was so near that the boy did not heed the crash that followed immediately; he saw the wood and earth fly and he shuddered as he looked. That was the bolt that ended the life of Jim the negro, but ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... place, and has quietly settled down into a state of serene prosperity. I have my boots repaired here by an artist who informs me that he studied in the penitentiary; and I visit the lunatic asylum, where I encounter a vivacious maniac who invites me to ride in a chariot drawn by eight lions and ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... too rich to be a spoliator, too frivolous to be a fanatic by principle, the Revolution turned his brain in the same manner as a rapidly flowing river carries with it the eye that in vain strives to gaze fixedly on it. His life seemed that of a maniac; he loved the Revolution when in motion because it was akin to madness. When yet very young he had sullied his name, ruined his fortune, and forfeited his honours by debauchery, women, and gaming. At the Palais Royal and the neighbouring quartiers, the scene of every disorder, he possessed the infamous ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Alhambra, and struck silence and awe into the crowd of courtly sycophants. Muley Abul Hassan alone was unmoved: he eyed the hoary anchorite with scorn as he stood dauntless before him, and treated his predictions as the ravings of a maniac. The santon rushed from the royal presence, and, descending into the city, hurried through its streets and squares with frantic gesticulations. His voice was heard in every part in awful denunciation: "The ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... "every book about drink," depressing. It told her nothing; all these books seemed to her to hold a policy of despair that indicated lunacy or suicide as Louis's only possible end. E.F. Benson's "House of Defence" was the most hopeful book she read. In the tormented morphia-maniac she saw Louis vividly. But she knew that he was too innately untrustful, unloving, to be saved by an act of faith. She had put that book down an hour ago, and turned again to the real pessimism of Zola, longing for the cool of ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... up Sarah was an old German artist, painter and musician both, of rare genius, but a maniac, as they called him. At all events, he was a good, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... mountains and valley farms, rather than a built-up industrial district. Local police and wild-game protection officers are concerned; all the farmers excited, and going armed. The theory is that it's either a wildcat of some sort, or a maniac armed with a cutlass. Either theory would conform, more or less, to the nature of its depredations. Nobody ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... said to one another as they sought their houses: "What a powerful witch she must be, to calm down that maniac with one word." While others replied, "But he is possessed with a devil; and she does it because her ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... man was crazy, or at least a monomaniac, and, though he seemed harmless enough, it was of course possible that he might be dangerous. He was almost sorry that he had sought shelter here. Better have encountered the storm in its full fury than place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided at any rate to remain a while longer. He knew that it would not be well to dispute the old man, and ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There was a moment's pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself, in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the Alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and for this reason is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... thing to be ignorant—so vile that, for the sake of his secret hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent! Surely they shall not thus find the way of understanding! Surely there is a maniac thirst for knowledge, as a maniac thirst for wine or for blood! He who loves knowledge the most genuinely, will with the most patience wait for it until it can be ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... privilege of fighting in anger. He went without a word toward this hopeless encounter, as a drunkard to his bottle. First Perion killed Ruggiero of the Lamberti and after that Perion raged as a wolf harrying sheep. Six other stalwart men he cut down, like a dumb maniac among tapestries. His horse was slain and lay blocking the road, making a barrier behind which Perion fought. Then Perion encountered Giacomo di Forio, and while the two contended Gulio the Red very warily cast his sword ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Buttons, "we had better leave. The Sorrentonians will be around here soon to see the maniac. They will find out all about him, and make us acquainted with ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... article on "Imagination in Insanity" (Annales medico-psychologiques, December, 1876), holds that every kind of mental disease has its own form of imagination that expresses itself in stories, compositions, sketches, decorations, dress, and symbolic attributes. The maniac invents complicated and improbable designs; the persecuted, symbolic designs, strange writings, bordering on the horrible; megalomaniacs look for the effect of everything they say and do; the general paralytic lives in grandeur ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... to Judge Merlin's, because, he said, that ancient man was so well stricken with years as to be falling into his dotage; to old Katie's, because most decidedly he declared she was totally unreliable, being half monkey, half maniac, and whole knave; to Jim's, because he averred him to be wholly under the influence of others; to Sally's, for the same reason. It would be monstrous, he said, to send a nobleman and a lady to trial upon such evidence as had been given in by such witnesses ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... terrors begin. All the dark corners are peopled, now, with those spectres which form the cortege of assassins; he is frightened, and hurries on. He soon goes up again, armed with a large hatchet—that found on the second story—and makes the pieces of wood fly about him. He goes about like a maniac, rips up the furniture at hazard; but he pursues a desperate search, the traces of which I have followed, among the debris. Nothing, always nothing! Everything in the room is topsy-turvy; he goes into his cabinet and continues ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... as she stood disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs, instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac, which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin, with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an original character of verisimilitude ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... he evidently did not try to overtake her— only to keep her in sight. The maniac did not choose her course, but ran straight before her, leaping over fallen trees and obstructions with a degree of agility and power that seemed marvellous. Sometimes she shrieked as she ran, sometimes she ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... continued, 'I thought that this beloved cross and these sacred relics would ever get into other hands—would ever touch other flesh—than mine, I should die a maniac, Hal, and my spirit would never be released from the chains of earth.' It was the superstitious tone of his talk that irritated and hardened me. He saw it, and a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... better index of the convulsion within than were his broken, incoherent, half-inarticulate words, assumed at last an appearance so wild, so hideous, so truly terrific, that Roland was seized with horror, deeming himself confronted with a raging maniac. He raised his hand to remove that of Nathan, which still clutched his arm, and clutched it with painful force; but while in the act, the fingers relaxed of themselves, and Nathan dropped suddenly to the earth, as if struck down by a thunderbolt, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... on with the birth of Nina, and from that day to her death she was a raving, disgusting maniac, as her mother and grandmother had been before her. This was exceedingly mortifying to the proud Bernards, negroes and all, and the utmost care was taken of Nina, who, nevertheless, was too much like her mother to hope for escape. There was the same peculiar look in the eye—the ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... there are people at the back gate already, and the house door won't hold much longer. The smith's battering at it like a maniac ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... "Principles of Selection," and "What of To-morrow?" but candour compels the admission that she was a somewhat reckless driver. Perhaps it was due to some atavistic tendency. One of her ancestors may have been a Roman charioteer or a coach-racing maniac of the Regency days. At any rate, after a hard morning's work on her new book she felt that her mind needed cooling, and found that the rush of air against her face effected this satisfactorily. The greater the ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... nothing, what is?" They were growing incoherent. "What d'you mean, screeching like a maniac? Like a wild woman? The neighbors'll think I've killed you. What d'you ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... with the raging turmoil of water, and a second time he felt the same firm yet smooth surface. His dormant faculties awoke. It was sand. With frenzied desperation, buoyed now by the inspiring hope of safety, he fought his way onwards like a maniac. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... knew he must keep the impounded hand back from the knife sheath or he was done. Thus close, he could make no escape. He fought fast and furiously, striving to throw, to bend, to beat back the body of a man almost as strong as himself, and now a maniac in ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... father, with natural impatience, ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for a son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for a madhouse, talking to iron figures and taking them for real men! What have I done, O heaven, that I should be ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... an old book under his arm, fumbling a rosary of beads, enlarging his turband, lengthening his sleeves and blackening his eyelids with antimony. Here, however, it would be out of place. Very comical also is the way in which he pretends to cure the maniac by "muttering unknown words, blowing in her face, biting ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the wildness of a maniac. "No, no; as far from him as possible! Oh! not with him! She was to blame in our days of splendour as much as he was; but she could not see it; and I durst not reason with her. Not with him! She would ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... some maniac's idea of a joke, you'll have proof very soon that it isn't, because one of the people at your Center is due to leave ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... behind them. Young Holliday was dancing about, waving a bottle and yelling like a maniac, "Go it, Bertie! Give it ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... Mahomet, the 'Grand Seignior' of the whole Turkish Empire, was no strong, powerful man, but a mere stripling who had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father, the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his harem, and in his fury had done his best ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot. But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let him go." ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... type of crime we're working with—the kind we expect future laws to apply to—is strictly limited. It must be a crime of violence against a human being, or a crime of destruction in which there is a grave danger that human lives may be lost. The sex maniac, the firebug, or the goon who gets a thrill out of beating people. Or the reckless driver who has proven that he can't be trusted behind ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... indignities. And then that cruel old pagan of a father—was he not ashamed of himself to see the results of his own cold-blooded theories? Was this the glory of art? Was this the reward of the sacrifice of a life? That a sensitive girl should be publicly insulted by a tipsy maniac, and jeered at by a brutal crowd? Macleod laid down the letter for a minute or two, and the look on his face ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... fiercely, and ran madly from the room, along the gallery and down the stairs, shouting and raging like a maniac, Cavalcanti following me. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Are you a raving maniac? I never did anything like that. Toot Wambush was writing about Hettie Fergusson. She is his sweetheart; she helped him hide the barrel of whiskey in the kitchen. Oh, Mr. Westerfelt, was that what you've been thinking all ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... her death groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash of lightning, that glanced over the adjoining ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... up, sir! She's in my pantry," continued the butler, ruefully. "We've got her in there because there are bars to the windows—she can't get out of that. A terrible time we had, too, sir—she fought us like—like a maniac, protesting all the time that Mrs. Mallathorpe had given her what she had on her. Of course, sir, we don't know what she may have on her—we simply obeyed ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then fell ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... by one of those sudden and inexplicable revulsions which occasionally restore to sense and intellect the maniac of years standing, that I was no sooner left alone in my chamber than I became perfectly sober. The fumes of the wine—and I had drunk deeply—were dissipated at once; my head, which but a moment before was half wild with excitement, was ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... nightmare; and when he was exhausted he lay down, trying to sleep, but finding instead, for the first time in his life, that his brain was too much for him. In the cell next to him was a drunken wife-beater and in the one beyond a yelling maniac. At midnight they opened the station house to the homeless wanderers who were crowded about the door, shivering in the winter blast, and they thronged into the corridor outside of the cells. Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... roots which had grown in the earth; also a piece of wood that had been rudely carved by man; and the number of birds kept increasing. One can readily see how even the most skeptical man on the expedition should have felt sure by this time that the man whom he used to consider a mild maniac was in truth a very wise person. And perhaps the crew did feel it; but also they felt angry at those signs that mocked them day after day by never coming true. They grumbled; and the more the signs increased the more they grumbled; till finally one ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... put into his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... upon every thought and action, was lifted and fell away a heavy oppression gone. Bennett and Arcane caught us in their arms and embraced us with all their strength, and Mrs. Bennett when she came fell down on her knees and clung to me like a maniac in the great emotion that came to her, and not a word was spoken. If they had been strong enough they would have carried us to camp upon their shoulders. As it was they stopped two or three times, and turned as if to speak, but there was too much feeling for words, convulsive ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... for his safety, begged him to consider "the fact that any assassin or maniac seeking his life, could enter his presence without the interference of a single armed man to hold him back. The entrance doors, and all doors on the official side of the building, were open at all hours of the day and very late into the evening; ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans and projects before her. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... grown pale, aye, blanched, and bent more than ever, as if old age had already touched her with its featherless wing. Often did she finger the wedding clothes of her Yann, folding and unfolding them again and again like some maniac, especially one of his blue woolen jerseys, which still had preserved his shape; when she threw it gently on the table, it fell with the shoulders and chest well defined; so she placed it by itself on a shelf of ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... life Landseer became hopelessly insane and, during his periods of violence a dangerous homicidal maniac. Such an affection, however, had my father and mother for the friend of their younger days, that they still had him to stay with us in Kent for long periods. He had necessarily to bring a large retinue with him: his own trained mental attendant; Dr. Tuke, a very celebrated ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Duke dies, or becomes a maniac," thought he to himself, "the end as regards us will be the same for Norbert will break off the match to ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... the cloud, though the latter be near Jove's throne, so the frenzied father, regardless, nay, forgetful, of the place, the time, the occasion, of himself and natural ties, assailed the scared Narcisse, clutching him by the throat with the strength of a maniac, and pushing him backwards against the balustrade, and holding him there transfixed, while, with eyes seething with wrath beneath the blanched, and big, umbrageous brows, and showing like a sudden opening of the infernal pit, he cried: "Demon, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... Over the top of the flesh-mountain was a big metal object, a shining concave dome with which all the tubes connected; so that a stranger to the procedure could not have felt sure whether the mountain was holding up the dome, or was dangling from it. A piece of symbolism done by a maniac artist, whose meaning no one ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... my horse beside him, a blood-curdling chorus of strange barking screams, as from the throats of maniac women, rose at the farther side of the ravine, drowning the shouts of our men, the ping-g-g of the whistling bullets, and even the sharp crack of the muskets. It was the Indian war-whoop! A swarm of savages were leaping ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... do not place much stock in Professor Cortoran's theory, though I admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to believe that the object of his greatest affection is descended from a gibbering idiot and a raving maniac. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... two scruples (40 grains) of solid opium at a dose, and twenty grains four hours afterwards; which restored the patient. Dr. Brandreth gave 400 drops of laudanum to a maniac in the greatest possible furor, and in a few hours he became calm and rational. Med. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... day. For a month chess will be even more to me than golf or billiards—games which I adore because I am so bad at them. For a month, starting from yesterday when I was inveigled into a game, you must regard me, please, as a chess maniac. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... I told him drily. "A man who isn't a hopeless maniac depressive can't consciously create a test for himself that he knows he will fail. You proved you could stay alone on an island, buster. You didn't prove you could stay alone in a spaceship out in the middle ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... they sometimes get glimpses of their prodigal relative, who has settled down into a confirmed gambling maniac, living on such salvage of income as obliging moneylenders have ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... howl like that of a miserable maniac he leapt upon me, tripped and threw me flat upon the flags. I remember the stunning shock of my fall, but remember no more. I learned afterwards that he had pitched me out on to the stairs, and that I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... agitated as yet to realize that such a charge made under such circumstances could not well prove less than convincing. As he began to collect himself he saw his plight more clearly. His first thought had been that Cortlandt was insane, but the man's actions were not those of a maniac. No! He actually believed and—and these fellows believed also. No doubt they would continue to think him guilty in spite of all that he could do or say; for after this shocking denunciation it ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... edited the Wheeling Intelligencer. His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday Review and the Commercial Advertiser. The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying. The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... bosom—and no woman was probably ever entirely without that feminine quality—it all disappeared at this plain announcement. Fury, rage, mortified pride, and a volcano of wrath burst out, at one explosion, converting her into a sort of maniac, as it might beat the touch of a magician's wand. Without deigning a reply in words, she made the arches of the forest ring with screams, and then flew forward at her victim, seizing him by the hair, which she appeared resolute to draw out by the roots. It was some time before her grasp could ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... in time become more humanized: every month would contribute to make them some little wiser, and, consequently, more manageable; for a child of nine or ten as frantic and ungovernable as these at six and seven would be a maniac. ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... encounter a succession of visions—without reality, but possessed of its power! What if they should be such whose terror would compel him to disclose what most he desired to keep covered? How fearful to be no more his own master, but at the beck and call of a disordered brain, a maniac king in a cosmos acosmos! Better it had been Dawtie, and she had seen in his hands Benvenuto Cellini's chalice made for Pope Clement the Seventh to drink therefrom the holy wine—worth thousands of pounds! ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so little accustomed. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... heart and brain, Sorrow, pestilence, and pain, Moans of anguish, maniac laughter, All the evils that hereafter Shall afflict and vex mankind, All into the air have risen From the chambers of their prison; Only Hope ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... iisdem artibus praecellentem ... namque illa aetas duo pacis decora simul tulit; sed Labeo incorrupta libertate ... celebratior" (An. III. 75). Horace, who was a contemporary of Labeo's, says that he was a maniac, or, at any rate—"considered very crazy in ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... hall, While she stood sobbing in a flood of tears, And he stood choked with anger and amazed. But as I passed the ivied porch he came With bated breath and muttered in my ear— 'Beggar!'—It stung me like a serpent's fang. Pride-pricked and muttering like a maniac, I almost flew the street and hurried home To vent my anger to the silent elms. 'Beggar!'—an hundred times that long, mad night I muttered with hot lips and burning breath; I paced the walk with hurried tread, and raved; I threw myself beneath the willow-tree, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... disturbed, especially by her, who was practically responsible for all his trouble. Then she insisted on knowing whether he was conscious and whether he had asked for a priest, and when informed that Father Foley had already arrived, it required the strength of four men to hold her. She raved like a maniac, and her screams appalled the garrison. But screams and struggles were all in vain. "Pills the Less" sent for his senior, and "Pills the Pitiless" more than ever deserved his name. He sent for a straitjacket, ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... escort travelled, and of a good many things more about it that nobody guessed at. As for Moran, we could see him fix his eyes upon the sergeant who was driving, and look at him as if he could look right through him. He never took his eyes off him the whole time, but glared at him like a maniac; if some of his people hadn't given him a shove as they passed he would soon have attracted people's attention. But the crowd was too busy looking at the well-conditioned prancing horses and the neatly got ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... piteous to see how in these intervals his delusions were always shaped by the bitterest experiences of his life. Sometimes he fancied that the Americans were pursuing him, or that they were carrying off Ramona, and he was pursuing them. At such times he would run with maniac swiftness for hours, till he fell exhausted on the ground, and slowly regained true consciousness by exhaustion. At other times he believed he owned vast flocks and herds; would enter any enclosure he saw, where there ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... puerperal mania. "What can be more lamentable," asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of unions between persons ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... my sword, when I had said these words, and, fortifying my strength with a heavy meal, so that weakness would not cause me to lose the battle, I presently sallied forth into the public streets and rushed through all the arcades, like a maniac. But while, with my face savagely convulsed in a frown, I was meditating nothing but bloodshed and slaughter, and was continually clapping my hand to the hilt of my sword, which I had consecrated to this, I was observed by a soldier, that is, he either was a real ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... bull falls to the sand and is dead, and the man is unhurt. It is brave. It is magnificent! Ah!—I could love the toreador. But the man of the prize-fight—he is the brute, the human beast, the savage primitive, the maniac that receives many blows in his stupid face and rejoices. Come to Quito and I will show you the brave sport of men, the toreador ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... great to be borne. What should I do: run to the nearest town or village, and request the assistance of my fellow-men? No! that I was ashamed to do; notwithstanding the horror was upon me, I was ashamed to do that. I knew they would consider me a maniac, if I went screaming amongst them; and I did not wish to be considered a maniac. Moreover, I knew that I was not a maniac, for I possessed all my reasoning powers, only the horror was upon me—the screaming horror! But how were indifferent people to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... of the great Revolution was raging around him, that a physician, learned, ardent, and bold, but scarcely known beyond the little circle of his friends and patients, conceived and executed the idea, then no less wonderful than that of propelling a ship by steam, of striking off the chains of the maniac and opening the door of his cell. Within a few days, says the record, fifty-three persons were restored to light and comparative liberty. In that experiment at the Bicetre, whose triumphant success won the admiration even of those ferocious demagogues who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in Saint Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... seconds that I sat helplessly staring at the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... hour, Mr. William Brougham, who was retained by the promoters to conduct their case, frankly told him that if he did not moderate his views, and bring his engine within a reasonable speed, he would "inevitably damn the whole thing, and be himself regarded as a maniac ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... round, and stalking rapidly off to the stable like a pair of insane compasses, while the senior clerk returned to the bedroom, where he found Mr. Kennedy still raving, Peter Mactavish still aghast and deadly pale, and Harry Somerville staring like a maniac at his young friend, as if he expected every moment to see him explode, although, to all appearance, he was sleeping soundly, and comfortably too, notwithstanding the noise that was going on around him. Suddenly Harry's eye rested on the label of the half-empty ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... Maniac with his Collar to the bad was found wandering hither and thither with $90 in his Left Hand. The Tout had to shake him a couple of times before he came to. The Tout had some Goods of a very superior Quality. ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... just as near a maniac as a man can be and still go about his business. There'll be a lot of trouble come from this. Hadn't you better advise your folks to call it off? They haven't the least idea, I imagine, what a proposition ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... a few remain behind in the hope that their mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of the community to do another portion of it to death and to rob ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... streaming towel, and almost brained myself against—the Mail! which was standing there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put on my bonnet, and came back 'a sadder and ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... disagreement what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... take that maniac with you," he stormed. "Not a word; I don't care if Rose has murdered all Long Island, he's some use now. Clear out and leave this room ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... beside him, to see if he could do anything for him. Then he found he was praying: he heard him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up on the long ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how the simple words carried ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the skin, and having his body most hideously marked, ran about the town like a maniac with a spear in his hand, calling loudly on Dju dju, and uttering a wild, frantic cry at every corner. It appears that one of his father's wives had been strongly suspected of adulterous intercourse with a free man residing in the town, and that this strange ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... stationed at Fort Chippewyan, Athabasca. He was informed that a man had gone violently insane at Hay River, 350 miles from his post. He proceeded there with dog train, accompanied by the interpreter only and brought the unfortunate man, who was a raving maniac, back to Fort Chippewyan, and thence escorted him to Fort Saskatchewan, travelling a distance of 1,300 miles with dogs and occupying forty-four days on the journey. This is not an isolated instance. It represents the work of Inspector ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... This appears not to be so. All the miserable depression of spirits, all the incapacity to banish distressing fears and suspicions, which paved the way to real insanity, exist in even intensified degree when insanity has actually been reached. The poor maniac fancies he is surrounded by burning fires, that he is encircled by writhing snakes, that he is in hell, tormented by devils; and we must remember that the misery caused by firmly believing a thing which does not exist, is precisely the same as that ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... place that always makes one think about things, and secondly one always finds out in the long run. At last Aunt Dora was so terribly afraid of Uncle that she always kept the door of her bedroom locked. It must be awful to have a husband who is a raging maniac. Father once said to Dora: your Aunt Dora is enough to drive one mad with her whims and fancies. Of course he didn't mean that literally, but I must watch carefully to find out what Aunt really does to annoy anyone so ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... haunted cottage itself. There lay Grace Davoren, after having given birth to a child; there she lay—the victim of the seducer, on the very eve of dissolution, and beside her, sitting on the bed, the unfortunate Nannie Morrissy, now a confirmed and dying maniac. ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... told the story of Frank's sickness and death,—of the noble conduct of his little sister, who, when there was no other alternative, went cheerfully to the poor-house, winning by her gentle ways the love of those unused to love, and taming the wild mood of a maniac until she was harmless as a child. As he proceeded with his story, George became each moment more and more interested, and when at last there was a pause, he asked, "And is Mary in the ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... that a chimney had gone on fire in some part of London; that it was being looked after, and that he and his comrades were to stop where they were and pay no attention to it, even although some one should rush into the office like a maniac shouting that there was a fire in that particular place. This use of the telegraph in thus stopping the men of the Brigade from going out in force to trifling fires, is of the greatest service, because it not only prevents them from being harassed, the engines from being horsed, and steam ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... my sickly gaze upon him and saw that he was deadly pale, and that the perspiration stood out in great drops upon his forehead. The explanation was plain enough—he took me for a maniac. I would have protested and moved the previous question, but taking a small phial from his pocket he broke off the head and threw the contents in my face. Ten seconds later I was totally oblivious, and upon recovering found myself in this place, where such ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... she came to Crompton Place, and they guessed her mother was one, and nobody knew anything about her anyway. There was a fierce fight in which Dora came off victorious, with a scratch or two on her face and a torn dress. That afternoon the Colonel was confronted by what seemed a little maniac, demanding to know if her mother was black, and if she had lived only with negroes until she ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... You'll think me a maniac," she said. But he only took her hand as if she had been a child and led ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... that blessed hope," said Mrs. Fabens, with a flush of lofty feeling lighting all her features—"but for that blessed hope, I should be a maniac, I know I ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... large rocks. These streams were different also in character. The larger was placid, and even sullen in its course, wheeling in deep eddies, or sleeping in dark blue pools; but the motions of the lesser brook were rapid and furious, issuing from between precipices, like a maniac from his confinement, all ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... letter moves the princess. At the grave of her unhappy lover, she recalls the words of an old friend of her father's: "Perhaps he was an abnormal man or a maniac.... Perhaps,—who knows?—your life was illumined by a love of which women often dream, a kind of love that one ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... has cut in on one of those animated Automobile Conversations, while the salaried Maniac from France is hitting up 42 miles an Hour, will tell you that the hind end of a Motor Vehicle is no good Trysting Place for an ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... showed him the struggle which was going on. There was no time to note details. Some maniac was assaulting his Tom. He sprang at the man, seized him round the waist, dragged him to the ground, and seated himself upon him. "Now tie his hands," he said complacently, as he balanced himself upon ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of no long continuance. I soon perceived that it was impossible for a maniac to be suffered to proceed to so horrid extremities. I perceived in every thing that related to the count, a spirit very different from that of frenzy. It is thus that I have plunged from uncertainty to uncertainty. From adopting a solution ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye Storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceas'd, and all seem'd calm and bright; ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... "no, my mother,—not even for thee!" And, dashing the money to the ground, he fled, like a maniac, from the house. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that strange madness, to which the Malays seem to be peculiarly liable, during the paroxysms of which those affected by it rush in blind fury among their fellows, slaying right and left. From the terrified appearance of some of the approaching crowd and the maniac shouts in rear, it was evident that a man thus possessed of the spirit of amok was venting his ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... out, his threat was unnecessary, for Henry and his men were close at hand; and before the natives could make up their minds what to do, the whole band came pouring over the hill, with Jo Bumpus far ahead of the rest, leaping and howling like a maniac with excitement. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... wrapping a handkerchief around his wrist. "Now let's see about getting out of here. These little rats all seem to be asleep, and Lord knows where that maniac Krassnov is. Perhaps we can make it. At any rate, we'll give them a ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... humour had passed from the situation. The man was a lunatic, a religious maniac. Again he addressed Barney Bill. "As I can't convince Mr. Finn of the absurdity of his request, I must ask you to ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... to hunch their backs and crowd closer together in patient misery. Not a bird had the heart to sing; only the loon—storm-lover—laughed his crazy challenge to the elements, and mocked us with his long-drawn maniac scream. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... slaves Manacling of slaves Maniac woman Man sold by a Presbyterian elder Man-stealing paid for Marriage unknown among slaves Martyr for Christ Maryland Journal Maryville Intelligencer Massacre at Antioch " " Thessalonica " " Vicksburg Masters grant no redress to slaves McIntosh, burning ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... that he occupies a prominent position amongst the hupper circles of Society, and is frequently to be met with in the papers. His faithlessness preyed on my Sister's mind to that degree, that she is now in the Asylum, a nopeless maniac! My honely Brother was withdrawn from 'Arrow, and now 'as the yumiliation of selling penny toys on the kerbstone to his former playfellers. 'Tantee nannymice salestibus ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... smiled, frankly pleased. "Not that I'm a bit of an Anglo-maniac," she hastened to affirm, "but, do you know," she leaned toward Danvers in an amusingly confidential way, "I've always felt mortified over my throaty voice—that is, I ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... by the side of Belton's grave and saw the stiffened form of his dearest friend lowered to its last resting place, his grief was of a kind too galling for tears. He laughed a fearful, wicked laugh like unto that of a maniac, and said: "Float on proud flag, while yet you may. Rejoice, oh! ye Anglo-Saxons, yet a little while. Make my father ashamed to own me, his lawful son; call me a bastard child; look upon my pure mother as a harlot; laugh at Viola in the grave of a self-murderer; exhume ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... from his bended knees, By the pale spectre pushed, And, wild as one whom demons seize, Up the hall-staircase rushed; Entered his chamber—near the bed Sheathed steel and fire-arms hung— Impelled by maniac purpose dread He ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognised well that purple face,—those ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... were rummaged, Roland's house was surrounded, while Duport, seized in a neighboring department, is deposed in the slaughterhouse. The latter is saved with the utmost difficulty; many a blow is necessary before he can be wrested from the maniac who had seized him. With a surgeon like Marat, and medics like the four or five hundred leaders of the Commune and of the sections, it is not essential to guide the knife; it is a foregone conclusion that the amputation will be extensive. Their names speak for themselves: in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... came to this country, among strangers, to an humble home, where she suffered many privations, which she bore with woman's fortitude. But when her husband became an inebriate, and treated her with moroseness and brutality, reason forsook its throne, and she became a maniac. Hannah Pease was an intimate friend of hers, who seems to be ever in her mind, perhaps because she used her influence to prevent ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... a month ago, See me a maniac, rushing forth to find A wife who loved me not; my heart all swollen With rage against the man to whom I owed Exposure of her falsehood; ah, how blind! To chase a form from which the soul had fled! If I grew ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... given up to all the horrors which follow when victory, brutality, and licentiousness are linked together. Every evil passion was allowed to revel with impunity, and revenge, lust, and avarice,—each had its hundreds of victims in unhappy Semlin. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out. Peter the Hermit had blown the popular fury into a flame, but to cool it again was beyond his power. His followers rioted unrestrained, until the fear of retaliation warned ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... death groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... his terrors begin. All the dark corners are peopled, now, with those spectres which form the cortege of assassins; he is frightened, and hurries on. He soon goes up again, armed with a large hatchet—that found on the second story—and makes the pieces of wood fly about him. He goes about like a maniac, rips up the furniture at hazard; but he pursues a desperate search, the traces of which I have followed, among the debris. Nothing, always nothing! Everything in the room is topsy-turvy; he goes into his cabinet and continues the destruction; the hatchet rises and falls without ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... peculiarly liable, during the paroxysms of which those affected by it rush in blind fury among their fellows, slaying right and left. From the terrified appearance of some of the approaching crowd and the maniac shouts in rear, it was evident that a man thus possessed of the spirit of amok was ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... princes of the blood; the rights thereto were maintained in the case of the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, for their lives, by the bounty of the Regent, "which did not prevent the Duchess of Maine from uttering loud shrieks, like a maniac," says St. Simon, "or the Duchess of Orleans from weeping night and day, and refusing for two months to see anybody." Of the thirty-nine members of the nobility who had signed the petition to Parliament, six were detained in prison for a month, after which the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... While maniac Winter rages o'er The hills whence classic Yarrow flows, Rousing the turbid torrent's roar, Or sweeping, wild, a waste ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... were thus engaged that Brady's attention was attracted by the dismal flapping of huge wings. He glanced up, expecting to see one of the great flying reptiles of a bygone age, his rifle ready in his hand. Brady was a brave man. He had groped his way up narrow tenement stairs and taken an armed maniac from a dark room without turning a hair; but now as he looked up, he went white ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you say ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... man, who ought, by the way, to have been born fifty years earlier and married my aunt, that you are the only one who can face and conquer facts, even those advanced by that most accursed of empty-headed bores, the man or the maniac called Euclid." ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... followed, which seemed to rend his stricken frame, as a fierce wind rips through the palm-leaf sail of a native fishing-smack. In a day or two he became wildly delirious, and Talib then witnessed a terrible sight. A raving maniac in a well-ordered asylum, where padded walls and careful tendance do much to save the poor disordered soul from tearing its way through the frail casing of diseased flesh and bone, is a sight to shudder at, not to see! ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... sprang forward, something shining in his hand, and flung himself desperately against the door ere it could be closed. The moment's delay he caused was our chance, and rushing forward we too added our weight to that of the maniac. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... all afraid of ghosts when I reach my second wind, and I grabbed at this one. It moved backward silently and as I made a quick step toward it that specter let out the most blood-curdling yell I ever heard—the shriek of a maniac. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... such a wild, fantastical manner, that the greatest part of the company mistook him for some savage monster or maniac, and consulted their safety by starting up from table, and drawing their swords. The Englishman, seeing such a martial apparatus produced against him, recoiled two or three steps, saying, "Waunds! a believe the people are all bewitched. What, do they take me for a beast of prey? is there nobody ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... picked up—I mean I have been picked up on the road by a gentle maniac, whose name is not Kearney. He is well armed and quotes Dickens. With care, acquiescence in his views on all subjects, and general submission to his commands, he may be placated. Doubtless the spectacle of your helpless family, the contemplation of your daughter's beauty and innocence, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... of my position was very great. Must I kill the man? must I die myself in this miserable and senseless manner? I tried to shout, "Drag this maniac off me." ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... not ashamed of himself to see the results of his own cold-blooded theories? Was this the glory of art? Was this the reward of the sacrifice of a life? That a sensitive girl should be publicly insulted by a tipsy maniac, and jeered at by a brutal crowd? Macleod laid down the letter for a minute or two, and the look on his face was ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... comparatively small salary employed the first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... wall like a maniac. She shrieked without cessation. One scream stopped suddenly in the middle—Ralph had struck her on the forehead. For the rest of the shearing session she lay over ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... other side of her sat the priest, whose name was Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling suns. ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... them, and accuse them of all that it may please any maniac or liar to invent about them. Yet you demand of the Jews that they should help you, when you stand in need of help. You, Jew-haters, serve somebody or something, but truly it is not God, it is not the cause of goodness that you are serving. In your blindness you harm, above all, yourself and our ...
— The Shield • Various
... so?" demanded Agnes, to whom Neale had once confessed that he was born in the state of Maine. "Then I suppose we ought to call you a 'Maniac,' eh?" ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... and portentous countenance, as if she meant to whisper in his ear, she suddenly plucked St. Louis' dagger from his girdle and struck it into his breast. He caught the hand which grasped the hilt. Her eyes glared with the fury of a maniac, and, with a horrid laugh, she exclaimed: "I have slain thee, insolent triumpher in my love and agonies! Thou shalt not now deride me in the arms of thy minion; for, I know that it is not for the dead Marion you have trampled on my heart ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... didn't oughter - And we Anglo-Saxons know a trick worth two of that, I think! Then came rather risky dances (under certain circumstances) Which would shock that worthy gentleman, the Licenser of Plays, Corybantian maniAC kick - Dionysiac or Bacchic - And the Dithyrambic revels ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... crazy, or at least a monomaniac, and, though he seemed harmless enough, it was of course possible that he might be dangerous. He was almost sorry that he had sought shelter here. Better have encountered the storm in its full fury than place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided at any rate to remain a while longer. He knew that it would not be well to dispute the old man, and resolved to ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... time. It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life. Since then news had come to him from home—stray gleams from the Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... body crouched low over the steering-wheel, which he grasped in his vise-like hands. His hatless head was thrust far out, as though it strove to get to Beulah Sands ahead of his body. His teeth were set, and as I had jumped into the machine I had noted that his eyes were those of a maniac, who saw sanity just ahead if he could but get to it in time. His ears were deaf not only to the howl of the terrified throng and the curses of the teamsters who frantically pulled their horses to the curb, but ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... habit is not uniform. There were intervals when his plodding and tame spirit gave place to the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not sought by him; but he could not withstand entreaty, and a potion that produced no effect upon others changed him into a maniac. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... one another as they sought their houses: "What a powerful witch she must be, to calm down that maniac with one word." While others replied, "But he is possessed with a devil; and she does it because her ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... mind with alternations and scenes of horror, carefully concealing the ground of encouragement and hope, till reason is shaken and hurled from its throne, for the sake of gaining a convert, and in making a convert to make a maniac (as doubtless sometimes occurs under this mode of preaching, for we have the proof of it,) involves a fearful responsibility. I have just heard of an interesting girl thus driven to distraction, in the city of New York, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... if granted, how could it avail me in the end? Those words—"He will make you dead!" rang in my ears, and seemed written on the wall. They confronted me everywhere. It was so easy to do this—so easy to repeat what the papers had already told the world—so easy to confine me in a maniac's cell under an assumed name, and by the aid of my own gold, and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... I am a maniac. I have for some years been the victim of a peculiar insanity, which has greatly distressed several of my friends and relatives. They generally soften it in their talk by the name monomania; but they do not hesitate to aver, when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... observed, "and tell her that a foreign beauty has come over, who's a splendid hand at poetry. 'You, who have poetry on the brain,' (say to her), 'are invited to come and see her,' and then lay hold of this verse-maniac of ours and bring ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the catalogue of the transition school occurs the name of one who, like Gray, was a recluse, but with a better reason and a sadder one. He was a gentle hypochondriac, and, at intervals, a maniac, who literally turned to poetry, like Saul to the harper, for relief from his sufferings. William Cowper, the eldest son of the Rector of Berkhampsted in Hertfordshire, was born on the 15th of November, 1731. He was a delicate and sensitive child, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... dying women; you have heard the unprotected and unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... by the wretched tenure of the will of any seceding State? No line but one of blood, of military despotisms, and perpetual war, can ever separate this great valley. The idea is sacrilege. It is the raving of a maniac. Separation is death. Disunion is suicide. If the South presents the issue that the Union or slavery must perish, the result is not doubtful. Slavery will die. It will meet a traitor's doom, wherever it selects a traitor's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on this day, came leaning on his staff and with considerable strain, as far as the street for a little relaxation, he suddenly caught sight, approaching from the off side, of a Taoist priest with a crippled foot; his maniac appearance so repulsive, his shoes of straw, his dress all in tatters, muttering ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... a long, harsh laugh, the laugh of a maniac, or of a man possessed, whilst one long thin finger pointed tremblingly to the card still held by Richard Lambert, and then to its counterpart in the midst of the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... at that moment that Scout Harris really recovered his voice. He recovered it in the moment of having an "inspiration." He jumped upon a barrel, released his teeth from the apple into which he had plunged them, and dancing like a maniac, sang at ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... our own day with those gifts of the early Church; but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a somewhat analogous relation—in a closer one certainly—than more ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, appear like maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same spiritual level. Now these are perfectly compatible with mis-use, abuse, and moral disorder. The most gifted of our countrymen has left this behind him as his epitaph, "The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind." The most ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... noblewoman writhing like a maniac in the dust was so pitiful and touching that it melted Barbara's heart, and induced her to promise to use the first favourable opportunity to intercede with the Emperor in behalf of her son and his child, a little girl of six. From that time she awaited at every new interview the opportune ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... around the homeless shores the evergreen trees seemed to hunch their backs and crowd closer together in patient misery. Not a bird had the heart to sing; only the loon—storm-lover—laughed his crazy challenge to the elements, and mocked us with his long-drawn maniac scream. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... Telemachus? Think of the temptations of a metropolis. Look at the question well, and let me know speedily; for I've got him as far as this place, and he's kicking up an awful row in the hotel-yard, and rattling his chain like a maniac. Let me know by ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Wurzburg are at a loss to find motives for some of the murders she committed, and try to get out of the difficulty by declaring that she must have been a homicidal maniac. That is not my explanation. I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature—only a woman, Julie!—armed with the means of secretly dealing ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... hastened to the door to summon help. "Remove this man!" he commanded, pointing out the prostrate form of Jose to the two Swiss guards who had responded to his call. "Confine him! He is violent—a raging maniac!" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust, in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... of their money, we'll throw overboard our Mozart and Beethoven, our Kant and Schopenhauer, our Schiller and Goethe, our Rembrandts, Leonardos, Michael Angelos, in short, all our wealth of art and intellect? What is a miserable cur of an American millionaire, a dollar maniac, as compared with all those great men? Let him come and ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?" ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... trembling in a transport of maniac fury with which an inexplicable fear ran cross-odds as warp and woof. The other had totally deluded him until the climax brought its accusation, and now the unmasked plotter took refuge in bluster, fencing ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Vengeance, as a mission for me, as a task for my hands in particular, is no longer possible; the thunder-bolts of retribution have been long since launched by other hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do—I must—I shall perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or two upon what she was—and how far ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... ordered to take the prisoner as gently as possible, and, using no unnecessary force, to lay him upon the cot and there hold him down. It proved about as much as four men could do, the writhings and upheavings of the infuriated man developing the strength of a maniac, until it culminated in sheer exhaustion. When the unhappy task was done Mr. Davis, after lying still for awhile, raised himself and sat on ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... more—ay!—twenty years, and five over—and most of the time in Hell! Ah—run away, if you like—run away from your own son!" He released her arm; but though the terror had come back twofold, she would not run; for the most terrible maniac is pitiful as well as terrible, and her pity for him put her thoughts on calming and conciliating him. He went on, his speech breaking through something that choked it back and made it half a cry in the end. "Fourteen years of quod—fourteen years of prison-food—fourteen ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... than the star that beams When the soft morning carol flows: Now mournful as the maniac's dreams, When ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... maniac McAllen made a more desirable jailer than a secret association engaged in keeping dangerous scientific developments under cover could be considered an open question. The most hopeful thought was that Dr. McAllen was indulging an unsuspected and ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... to account for a maniac on a deserted schooner in these desolate seas. No doubt if a solitary man were left in these terrible painted seas he would go insane. Madden regretted that he had not searched the Minnie B more thoroughly ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... Secret Service Men Had Completely Disappeared. Another Had Been Found a Screaming, Homicidal Maniac, Whose Fingers Writhed Like Snakes. So Bell, of the Secret "Trade," Plunges into South America After The Master—the Mighty, Unknown Octopus of Power Whose Diabolical Poison Threatens a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... it, but not intentionally. Coutlass sprang from behind him, having crawled out through a shadow, and hit him so hard with a stone on the back of the skull that he loosed off the rifle and pitched head-foremost down among us. The Greek promptly jumped on top of him with a yell like a maniac's, failing to land with both heels on his backbone by nothing but luck. As it was, he lost balance and sat down so hard on Schillingschen's head that there was no need of the energy with which we all followed suit, piling all over him to pin him down like hounds that have ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, overturning, crashing—annihilating ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... her sandy hairs with sorrow to the grave. That hair of hers never could be gray, you know, it's too self-opinionated in its sandiness. Now come along, Rorie, do. Titmouse will be stamping about his box like a maniac if ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by O'Sullivan when that maniac aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay's sea-boots; then O'Sullivan, because he interfered with Charles Davis' sleep, brained by that worthy with a steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we began the passage of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... grinding me with iron heel, into the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear, for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful condition, I should have become a maniac. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... was inside the house of the man who had murdered her brother and sent her sorrowing father, a poor, senseless maniac, tottering ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of American progressiveness—this worst type of monomaniac (man-o-maniac, one might more appropriately term her) is driving men to drink. The mother-in-law is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, compared to the mannish woman; the female book-agent takes on new lustre and even the poetess is a desirable companion beside her. The mannish ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... woman suspended this hideous object to a beam of the shed, then descended rapidly to the courtyard to contemplate it. A burst of sardonic laughter escaped from her lips; she remounted, then descended again like a maniac, and each time uttered new cries and new ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... passing words. And in the library, Gregorio's stony features were bent all day over papers and documents and books of accounts, seeking refuge from sure ruin, while now and then his face was twisted into a curiously vacant grimace, and his maniac laugh cracked and reverberated through the lonely, vaulted chamber. He often sat there by himself until late into the night, for the end of the year was at hand, with all the destruction that a date can mean when ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... unless she did, the stranger's stock of books was exhausted. Maria replied in the affirmative; but forbore to ask any more questions respecting the person to whom they belonged. And Jemima gave her a new subject for contemplation, by describing the person of a lovely maniac, just brought into an adjoining chamber. She was singing the pathetic ballad of old Rob with the most heart-melting falls and pauses. Jemima had half-opened the door, when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... pike, in the region of Middletown, proved a cumbered path. From stone fence to stone fence, in the middle trough of dust, and on the bordering of what had been, that morning, dew-gemmed grass and flower, War the maniac had left marks. Overturned wagons formed barriers around which the column must wind. Some were afire; the smoke of burning straw and clothing and foodstuffs mingling with the yet low-lying powder smoke and with the pall of Valley dust. Horses lay stark across the way, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... day, according to the invoice. I made my obeisance, and was pleased within myself that under this pretext I should have to come again the next day. When I took my leave and came out, I was speaking and uttering words like those of a maniac. In this state I came to the serai, but my senses were not right; all my friends began to ask what was the matter with me; I replied, that from going and returning so far, the heat ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... their brothers when they fall victims to the tender passion. Whom should I ask to help me in my strait? I could not go round everywhere, asking everybody after two ladies dressed in half-mourning, could I? Not exactly. People might take me for a maniac at large; and, even should I be one, still, I would naturally wish to keep my mental derangement to ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... she might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she wasn't, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot round, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... apes became a roaring, snarling pack of angry beasts. Bertha Kircher held her breath. What maniac was this who dared approach these frightful creatures in their own haunts, alone against fifty? She saw the brown-skinned figure bathed in moonlight walk straight toward the snarling pack. She saw ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... no uneasiness," pursued Jonathan; "Mrs. Sheppard, as I told you, is in Bedlam, an incurable maniac; while her son is in the New Prison, whence he will only be removed to ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... my piece at the blue heron or the egret, the summer duck or the snake-bird, the slender ibis or the stately crane. Even the king of winged creatures, the white-headed eagle, was more than once within range of my gun, screaming his maniac note among the tops of the ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... never cared for you. He married you to revenge himself on me. He sent you back here for the same reason. He'll take your child, and break its spirit and ruin its body, for the same reason. The man's a maniac." ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... into his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... nameless deed Of darkness and of dole unhistoried. And were there that might hear him, they would hear The murmur of a prayer in deep fear, Through unbarr'd lips, escaping by the half, And all but smother'd by a maniac laugh, That follow'd it, so sudden and so shrill, That swarms of sea-birds, wandering at will Upon the wave, rose startled, and away Went flocking, like a silver shower of spray! And aye he called for water, ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... wonder and pity than disgust; nay, there is even room for the exhibition of tender, sensitive, apprehensive, scarcely suffering beauty, and set off by contrasts not too strong; so that nothing impedes the mind in, or draws it off from, the contemplation of the madman—here more than madman, the maniac made inspired by the belief of the spectator in denunciations which appear verifying themselves visibly before him. It is this feeling which makes the crazed one grand, heroic, and which constitutes this picture an historical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... mention—enough to 'int that he occupies a prominent position amongst the hupper circles of Society, and is frequently to be met with in the papers. His faithlessness preyed on my Sister's mind to that degree, that she is now in the Asylum, a nopeless maniac! My honely Brother was withdrawn from 'Arrow, and now 'as the yumiliation of selling penny toys on the kerbstone to his former playfellers. 'Tantee nannymice salestibus hirae,' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... fiercely with his knife. The friends of both parties started at once to their feet, to interpose and tear them apart; but before they could reach them, one of the combatants dropped bleeding and dying on the floor, and the other fled like a maniac ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... murter him mit!" shrieked Hans, like a maniac. "Gif me a gun! I vill shot him on der spot, or somevere near id! Gif ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... him, and answered his ring herself, her hands grasping his almost fiercely and dragging him up the stairs to her own room, where, more like a maniac than Katy Cameron, she confronted ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... Turenne, who exercised the strictest economy. M. de Turenne possessed perhaps a little too much of what his predecessor lacked, but it was exactly this that pleased the Emperor. M. de Turenne was quite a pretty man, thinking perhaps a little too much of himself, a great talker and Anglo-maniac, which led the Emperor to give him the name of my lord Kinsester (who cannot be silent); but he told a story well, and sometimes his Majesty took pleasure in making him ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a maniac maid, And her name was Hope, she said: But she looked more like Despair, And she ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... the matrimonial plunge again. Chesterton seems to think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who snores, or keeps cats, or reads ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... in his place and leaped a good twenty feet to the ground. When he raised himself the look of a maniac had settled on his face. Tearing his garments from him as he went, he entered a narrow street that made its ascent toward Zion by steps and cobbled slants. Here he came upon great crowds of terror-stricken citizens who had rushed together ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her good that ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... smoky kerosene lamp. Both took a rapid survey of the place. Conceivably it might have been the scene of scientific experiments, but its aspect surely belied such a supposition. The average imagination would instantly pronounce it the abode of a maniac, or the lair of an alchemist. Again, that it might be the laboratory of an extremely slovenly veterinary was suggested by the several filthy cages to be seen resting against the wall. All of these were unoccupied except one in a dark ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... known, or even dimly suspected, the horrible fact with which Sir John Burney's words had made her acquainted; namely, that Mr. Sleuth was victim of no temporary aberration, but that he was, and had been for years, a madman, a homicidal maniac. ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Adela Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: 'You raving maniac!' Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... certainly a fool! No man with a grain of sense would do such a thing alone—maybe with a crowd of cheering men, but only a maniac could do it alone—Ned was ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... were engaged in their separate duties, a loud exclamation from Basil drew the attention of his brothers. It was a shout of joy, followed by a wild laugh, like the laugh of a maniac! ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... courtyard. The vanquished, of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighboring wood. The victors, assembling in large bands, gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, upon the flames, in which their own ranks and arms glanced dusky red. The maniac figure of the Saxon Ulrica was for a long time visible on the lofty stand she had chosen, tossing her arms abroad with wild exultation, as if she reigned empress of the conflagration which she had raised. At length, with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... for bewaring of it than myself; indeed, well it would have been had his lordship run away from all the ministers of jealousy—Iago, Cassio, and embroidered handkerchiefs—at the same pace of six miles an hour which kept me ahead of my infuriated pursuers. Ah, that maniac, white as a leper with flakes of cotton, can I ever forget him—him that ran so far in advance of his party? What passion but jealousy could have sustained him in so hot a chase? There were some lovely girls in the fair company that had so condescendingly caressed me; ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was strangely lit with the leaping ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... a sight; it was fearfully contorted; it was the countenance of a maniac. His words were loud and uncannily distinct, and the sound of them had brought a breathless hush over the place. At the moment of Doret's entrance the occupants of the saloon seemed petrified; they stood rooted in their tracks as if the anger in ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's content, and seemed for a moment to contradict our ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... one of those sudden and inexplicable revulsions which occasionally restore to sense and intellect the maniac of years standing, that I was no sooner left alone in my chamber than I became perfectly sober. The fumes of the wine—and I had drunk deeply—were dissipated at once; my head, which but a moment before was half wild with excitement, was now cool, calm, and collected; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... way into the field. The police could not stop them, but were driven in with a rush; and in the centre of this rush Tilda caught sight of Gavel again. His back was turned to her. He was struggling for admission, and like a maniac. Glasson she could ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and their allies have camped hard by our ships and by the wall; they have lit watchfires throughout their host and deem that nothing can now prevent them from falling on our fleet. Jove, moreover, has sent his lightnings on their right; Hector, in all his glory, rages like a maniac; confident that Jove is with him he fears neither god nor man, but is gone raving mad, and prays for the approach of day. He vows that he will hew the high sterns of our ships in pieces, set fire to their hulls, and make havoc of the Achaeans ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... misdeed was a double-edged blade which cut both ways. It will never be known, probably, how near a massacre followed the explosion of indignation at that maniac's murder of the Emancipator. Fortunately for the unsullied robe of Columbia, a hundred advocates of leaving retribution to Heaven echoed Garfield's ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... of affright ran through the room; people forgot that a maniac stood before them, and only saw the district-attorney, who, like a second Brutus, delivered over his own son to the law. Like the judgment day the words rang through the room, "I move that he be condemned ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... Speed; "but I'll bet you four dollars and a half that they'll prove you a raving maniac before they are through with you. They'll show very likely that you tried to poison yourself two or three times; bring on a dozen of your friends to prove that they knew all ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... question. It was quite possible for him to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door. As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac would have been mere folly. There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter. No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that even his rage should be brought to doubt ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Rose"; and so, of course, as the Primrose. A second after I saw the same suggestion in the combination of "rose" and "bury." If I had pursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a raving maniac by this time. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... cast down, as though he would raise them no more on earth. But he starts, for he hears a loud shriek, a rushing, and an opening of the crowd: they seem to be awed by something that approaches. It is a woman, whoso violent gestures defy opposition; she looks like a maniac just escaped from her keepers; she has reached Hyppolito; his fettered arms move as if they would receive her, but in vain. She turns to the crowd, and some among them recognise the modest and beautiful daughter ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... thrust out his tongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with inconceivable strength, and became an object of terror to all by-standers. To the lividness of a corpse he united the desperate force of a maniac; they hardly were able to fasten him, so as to guard themselves from his attacks; when in the space of two hours death relieved the poor wretch from his struggles, and the spectators from their apprehensions. The ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... at that. "Your mother must have given you a strange idea of me!" he said, with a mixture of anger and mortification which it humiliated him to show, even while he could not manage to hide it. "One would have said I was an ogre—a maniac. But she misjudged me all her life—it is useless to expect anything else—of course she would try to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... common impulse, we rushed pell mell out of doors and towards the "big" house. But before we could even reach it, we stopped short as if rooted into the ground, for there upon the front porch, with his face uplifted towards the starry firmament above him, stood Foreman McDonald, tearing like a raving maniac at the hairs of his head, while through the quietude of the night reverberated his heart-rending shrieks: "Oh God! Give me back my baby! Bring back my darling Helen! Merciful Father, do not punish ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... delirium of pain and pleasure, at the sight of his own blood. His sharpened eyesight sees Jesus from afar, and, with the disordered haste and preternatural agility which marked all his movements, he runs towards Him. Such is the introduction to the narrative of the cure. It paints for us not merely a maniac, but a demoniac. He is not a man at war with himself, but a man at war with other beings, who have forced themselves into his house of life. At least, so says Mark, and so said Jesus; and if the story before us is true, its subsequent incidents compel the acceptance of that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... frequently, as a rule. One of the fellows is a perfect maniac. He keeps a suit-case always ready, and the instant he is at liberty, he bolts with it to the station, and changes in the train. No matter who is in the carriage, off he whips his tunic, and performs at least the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... contortions of face, lips, legs and shoulders for three mortal hours, and while there was a constant shifting of scenes, citizens, soldiers, Jews and battering rams, yells, groans and cheers, it looked as if the audience, including King Henry, was doing the most of the acting, and all the cheering! A maniac would be thoroughly at home in ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... people's shall my power be shown. Then to another land, when all things here Are well, must I fare onward, making clear My godhead's might. But should this Theban town Essay with wrath and battle to drag down My maids, lo, in their path myself shall be, And maniac armies battled after me! For this I veil my godhead with the wan Form of the things that ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... she raised the instrument above her, and with a maniac's force hurled it full at ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... although the fine lad was a classifying maniac, he was no naturalist, and I doubt that he could tell a bonito from a tuna. In short, he was the exact opposite of the Canadian, who knew nothing about classification but could instantly put a ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth which he ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... touch the trembling strings, 8 A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings: They laid him in the ground so cold,[30] Upon his breast the earth is thrown; High is heaped the grassy mould, Oh! he is dead and gone. The winds of the winter blow o'er his cold breast, But ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... crashed against his shoulder. But before the other could gain his coveted throat-grip, Bruce was up again. Like a furry whirlwind he was at the police-dog, fighting more like a wolf than a civilized collie—tearing into his opponent with a maniac rage, snapping, slashing; his glittering white fangs driving at a dozen vulnerable points in ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... promise of the man," Mr. B., at the present time, standing without a peer in his peculiar line of declamation and oratory. In 1845, he traveled with Professor De Bonneville, giving his wonderful rendition of "The Maniac," so as to attract the attention of ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... je t'en prie! This maniac wishes now to discuss the possibility of a somersault in the air. I ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... to the spy. Now a shot rang out down the lane on his side. It was followed by a piercing shriek, and this by another shot. In between the shots, the serjeant wheeled round, and raced off down the lane for dear life, spurring and flogging like a maniac. It was useless to follow. My rein hand had lost its grip, my arm felt aflame, and blood was already dripping fast from my ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... illumines—that it shone and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity.—The grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent intermediate lour of grave-like stillness, begins to gleam fitfully with lightning like a maniac's eye; ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... see if he could do anything for him. Then he found he was praying: he heard him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up on the long yellow sand from the wide sea darkening out ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... begins chronologically with Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar's wife) sung by Jami (nat. A.H. 8171414); the next in date is Khusraw and Shirin (also by Nizami); Farhad and Shirin; and Layla and Majnun (the Night-black maid and the Maniac-man) are the last. We are obliged to compare the lovers with "Romeo and Juliet," having no corresponding instances in modern days: the classics of Europe supply a host as Hero and Leander, Theagenes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... despair came over me, when I thought it might have been her death groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash of lightning, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... for there was desperation in Dumiger's eye. He waited a moment, and then with a maniac's strength he flew at the man, but he found a powerful and vigorous antagonist. The stranger, who had appeared half decrepit and aged, rose up in all the strength of youth. In a moment he had grasped Dumiger's arms, very coolly taken out ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... twelfth of my line to be named Hector," he said presently—and Andrew Daney with difficulty repressed a roar of maniac laughter. Instead he ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... my place," she observed, "and tell her that a foreign beauty has come over, who's a splendid hand at poetry. 'You, who have poetry on the brain,' (say to her), 'are invited to come and see her,' and then lay hold of this verse-maniac of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... hurried them both off, one after the other. I, having heard from Trevanion, and knowing he could not have been ill when the servant left him, set off, as was natural in so old a friend of the family, saved her from the freaks of a maniac,—who, getting more and more flighty, was beginning to play the Jack o' Lantern, and leading her, Heaven knows where, over the country,—and then wrote to Lady Ellinor to come to her. It is but a hearty laugh at our expense, and Mrs. Grundy is content. If you don't want her ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in a state of intoxication becomes an ungovernable maniac, who in the violence of his fury will rush into any excess and commit any crime. At the epoch which our history has now reached, the terrible vice threatened to demoralize the entire country, and to destroy the fruit of all the efforts ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... object, a shining concave dome with which all the tubes connected; so that a stranger to the procedure could not have felt sure whether the mountain was holding up the dome, or was dangling from it. A piece of symbolism done by a maniac artist, whose meaning no ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... urging on his horse towards the tree under which the seeming figure stood. As he did so, the threatening gestures became more vehement, and, as he continued to advance, a loud, unearthly shriek rang through the forest, and the unhappy maniac, for such without doubt he was, fled away into its depths, his cries echoing amidst the trees till they grew faint in the distance. This incident did not contribute to make the prospect of camping out ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Lukes', and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... was at that moment the face of a maniac. He literally hurled his fury at the money-lender, who was ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... name in English, and which I can only liken to the wiggling of a green thing under leafy covert. The coiling and circling and winding of the dancers became bewildering, and in the centre, laughing, shouting, tossing up his arms and gesticulating like a maniac, was the white man with the pointed beard. Then the performers broke from their places and gave themselves with utter abandon to the wild impulses of wild natures in a wild world; and there was such a scene ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... fool thou hast made of thyself, good comrade! ... By my soul, how shall thy condition be explained to these open-mouthed starers below! See how they gape upon thee! ... thou art most assuredly a noticeable spectacle! ... and yon maniac Prophet doth evidently judge thee as one of his craft, a fellow professional howler of marvels, else he would scarcely deign to fix his eyes so obstinately on thy countenance! Nay, verily thou dost outrival him in the strangeness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... no kick coming! Why, I've been wrecked in a typhoon in the Gulf of Mexico. And I didn't care! And I've lain for nine days more dead than alive in an Asiatic cholera camp. And I didn't care! And I've been locked into my office three hours with a raving maniac and a dynamite bomb. And I didn't care! And twice in a Pennsylvania mine disaster I've been the first man down the shaft. And I didn't care! And I've been shot, I tell you,—and I've been horse-trampled,—and I've been wolf-bitten. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... wife, the Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests! He now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side! No wonder that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim, overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing what he did, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... unprotected and unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power of articulation; you have seen what ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... first seemed to soften his heart, the effect a few hours later was very different. He often came to the judgment seat, having kept the court waiting long, and yet having but half slept off his debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac. When he was in this state, his boon companions of the preceding night, if they were wise, kept out of his way: for the recollection of the familiarity to which he had admitted them inflamed his malignity; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... won for Burrton. Pandemonium reigned on the seats at the goal post end of the course. Shouts of "Carlisle! Carlisle!" rose up through the din of megaphones and screech of whistles from the launches. Paul looked at Walter. The boy had risen, flung his hat up anywhere and was waving his arms like a maniac, screaming out the name of Carlisle, the crack stroke of Burrton. And then, without a second's warning, the big stroke, the hero of the Burrton crew, whose name was on a thousand tongues, suddenly bent forward and collapsed over his oar. The oar itself crashed into the ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... of ghosts when I reach my second wind, and I grabbed at this one. It moved backward silently and as I made a quick step toward it that specter let out the most blood-curdling yell I ever heard—the shriek of a maniac. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... been expected. All the simpler catches were held, and one or two of the harder as well. Given this form on the day of their appearance in public, and Henfrey might be disappointed when he came to watch and smile sarcastically. A batting fiasco is not one half so ridiculous as maniac fielding. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the side of Belton's grave and saw the stiffened form of his dearest friend lowered to its last resting place, his grief was of a kind too galling for tears. He laughed a fearful, wicked laugh like unto that of a maniac, and said: "Float on proud flag, while yet you may. Rejoice, oh! ye Anglo-Saxons, yet a little while. Make my father ashamed to own me, his lawful son; call me a bastard child; look upon my pure mother as a harlot; laugh ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... crowded out of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, overturning, crashing—annihilating ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... confidence that they had sent out no scouting parties. Only a day or two before they had been enjoying themselves at a great dance. The boy who had come with the news that Santa Anna was at hand must be distraught. Certainly he had looked like a maniac. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bread and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman, returning and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac, and for some time secreted herself from all living society. Some remaining instinctive feeling brought her at length to steal a glance from a distance at the maidens while they milked the cows, which being observed, her husband, Ardvoirlich, had her conveyed back to her ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... true. But he could gather no information as to the whereabouts of Senorita Isolda from the now frenzied ravings of her brother; and it was only with the utmost difficulty that he at length drew from Don Hermoso the dreadful tidings that his daughter, who had been brought on board the ship a raving maniac, had that very morning contrived to elude the guard, and, rushing on deck, had thrown herself overboard ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... and more logical, more slovenly and more methodical. All these epithets, M. de Lourtier, may be applied to the doings of the lady with the hatchet. The obsession of an idea and the continual repetition of an act are characteristics of the maniac. I do not yet know the idea by which the lady with the hatchet is obsessed but I do know the act that results from it; and it is always the same. The victim is bound with precisely similar ropes. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... the silvery beam. Both Ostuta and Monopostiac had resumed the sombre aspect that usually distinguished them, with that mournful tranquillity that habitually reigned over the spot—interrupted only by the cry of the coyote, or the shrill maniac scream of the eagle preparing to descend to the banquet of ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... the rogue cried. "No, no, sir, you are a madman!" He looked round at the police. "Take care what you do!" he cried. "This is a raving maniac. I had business just now with Sir Charles Vandrift, who quitted the room as these gentlemen entered. This person is mad, and you, monsieur, I doubt not," bowing to me, "you are, of course, ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... The law would call him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... a clever man, but added, pitifully, "I only wish he would agree to my going suddenly; I should not die a bit sooner for his giving me over." It is evident the physician had not the shrewdest insight, or he would have granted this heady maniac his way. "Ah!" would exclaim the constantly departing patient, "all one's nourishment goes for nothing if once sudden death has got insidiously into the system!" More famous were Johnson with his inevitable dried orange-peel, and Byron with his salts. Goethe, too, after renouncing his Lotte, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... a desperate half-hour of cross-examination, Jeffreys coming down with a question at the slightest symptom of drowsiness, and Percy, with all the cunning of a "somno-maniac," taking time to think before each answer, and even shirking a syllable here or there in ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... Boy stripped to the skin, and having his body most hideously marked, ran about the town like a maniac with a spear in his hand, calling loudly on Dju dju, and uttering a wild, frantic cry at every corner. It appears that one of his father's wives had been strongly suspected of adulterous intercourse ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... a roaring, snarling pack of angry beasts. Bertha Kircher held her breath. What maniac was this who dared approach these frightful creatures in their own haunts, alone against fifty? She saw the brown-skinned figure bathed in moonlight walk straight toward the snarling pack. She saw ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to me, for the first time, seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a maniac! ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... evidently that of a man. Even under the circumstances, it could be nothing else, but of a man who had taken leave of his senses. It was the wild cry of a maniac! ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... presenting characteristic symptoms, with progressive course and fatal termination usually within three years." There are three stages:—1. The period of incubation (the prodromal stage). 2. A stage of pronounced mono-maniac activity with symptoms of paralysis. 3. Stage of extreme enfeeblement with diminution and final loss of power. These stages run into each other. First stage in a typical case:—There are tremblings and slight trouble in speech and expression ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Leaving the room was for us out of the question. It was quite possible for him to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door. As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac would have been mere folly. There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter. No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that even his rage should be brought ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... against the traditional custom which, spurning the insane as demon-haunted outcasts, had condemned these unfortunates to dungeons, chains, and the lash. Hitherto few people had thought it other than the natural course of events that the "maniac" should be thrust into a dungeon, and perhaps chained to the wall with the aid of an iron band riveted permanently about his neck or waist. Many an unfortunate, thus manacled, was held to the narrow limits of his chain for years together in a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... as near a maniac as a man can be and still go about his business. There'll be a lot of trouble come from this. Hadn't you better advise your folks to call it off? They haven't the least idea, I imagine, what a ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... morning. She remembered being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... echoing in the courts of heaven. Such spectacles of human perfidy are the real Medusas that Gorgonize trusting, tender, throbbing hearts, and in view of this one I laughed aloud,—laughed so unnaturally that it was no marvel I was called a maniac. At sight of my desperate white face Edith shrieked and fainted, and Maurice blanched and stammered and cowered. Without a word of comment or recrimination I silently passed on to my own room, where Elsie was waiting to clothe me in my travelling-suit. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and cast what seemed a pall upon every thought and action, was lifted and fell away a heavy oppression gone. Bennett and Arcane caught us in their arms and embraced us with all their strength, and Mrs. Bennett when she came fell down on her knees and clung to me like a maniac in the great emotion that came to her, and not a word was spoken. If they had been strong enough they would have carried us to camp upon their shoulders. As it was they stopped two or three times, and turned as if to speak, but there was too much feeling for words, convulsive weeping ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... your feeling about Mrs. F—— in every particular; I think her the funniest and the kindest old maniac I am acquainted with, and my intercourse with her is according to that opinion. Good-bye, my dearest Harriet; God bless you. I wish I was where I could see green fields. I am in miserable spirits, and would give "my kingdom ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... children would in time become more humanized: every month would contribute to make them some little wiser, and, consequently, more manageable; for a child of nine or ten as frantic and ungovernable as these at six and seven would be a maniac. ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... LIZZIE:—I am writing this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, was it not to protect myself and help others—and was not my motive ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... happened; for hold your breath now, fellows, because to be honest with you there was a terrible tragedy, and after the poor young wife was buried the judge lived as much as ten years in an asylum. He had become a maniac, you see, from jealousy of ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... a big, powerful man and he may have struck without intention to kill; but this mess means more than a blow with a fist. I think that he was a homicidal maniac and probably plotted the job beforehand with a madman's limited cunning; and if that is so, there's pretty sure to be news waiting for us at Princetown. Before dark we ought to know where are both the dead and the living man. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps—an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a Fury ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... live wires; two husbands, two wives, a naive virgin, with Max as inaccessible as a star. But after a capital exposition, Sudermann gets us in a terrible state of mind by making the lady with the good reputation go off in a hysterical crisis, and almost confess to her stiff, severe husband—who is a maniac on the subject of his house being above suspicion. The charming, reckless baroness intervenes at the crucial point, becomes a lightning-rod that draws the electric current, and pretends to be the real culprit. Her husband, a sinister ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and human victims; and in one of these cases, that of Jacques Roulet, tried before the Parliament of Paris in 1598, the body of a newly slain child, half mangled, and with all the marks of having been gnawed by canine teeth, was found close to the place where the maniac was arrested. It is worthy of remark that both lycanthropists and witches ascribed the power of disembodying themselves to the use of ointments. Antiquity furnishes no parallel to the horrors of these malignant and homicidal manias. Their analogues may be found in the fabled styes ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... admittance to the hostile camp. She wins her reward, but Araquil, who is brought in from a battle mortally wounded, knowing the price at which it was won, thrusts her from him, and she sinks a gibbering maniac upon his corpse. There is little in Massenet's score but firing of cannons and beating of drums. The musical interest centres in a charming duet in the opening scene, and a delicious instrumental nocturne. The action of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... at the Queen's Hall meeting I had been quite self-possessed. I pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. I was about to continue, when a red brick suddenly landed neatly on my breakfast table, ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... strange were these records, so eccentric the vagaries of the soul during its nocturnal wanderings, that I was induced to abandon the task, lest some friend hereafter, might examine, the mystic scroll, and conclude that it was written by a maniac. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... That do I, If Wentworth comes to rule her. I am sick To think her wretched masters, Hamilton, The muckworm Cottington, the maniac Laud, May yet be longed-for back again. I say, I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... hundred miles in heavy trails," explained George wearily, as the cries of the maniac ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... as though a beautiful, tender, and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity, mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead—dead like those whom we ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with that maniac's bullet in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... sent to them from St. John's, he had soon begun to talk to the crew, and there seemed to be but one way of preventing him from making known what had been done by the expedition before its promoters were ready for the disclosure, and this was to declare him a maniac, whose utterances were of no value whatever. He was put into close confinement, and it was freely reported that he had gone crazy while in the arctic regions, and that his mind had been filled with all sorts of insane notions regarding ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... would have been undiplomatic. But I have tried to surprise them into telling me. Unfortunately, these poor people are as cunning as any other kind of maniac, for, of course, it becomes a form of mania. They recognize that confession might lead to a stoppage of supplies—the eventuality they ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... he was sent to reside with his paternal grandfather, Robert Scott, who rented the farm of Sandyknowe, in the vicinity of Smailholm Tower, in Roxburghshire. Shortly after his arrival at Sandyknowe, he narrowly escaped destruction through the frantic desperation of a maniac attendant; but he had afterwards to congratulate himself on being enabled to form an early acquaintance with rural scenes. No advantage accruing to his lameness, he was, in his fourth year, removed to Bath, where he remained twelve months, without experiencing benefit from the mineral ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... theory to account for a maniac on a deserted schooner in these desolate seas. No doubt if a solitary man were left in these terrible painted seas he would go insane. Madden regretted that he had not searched the Minnie B more thoroughly ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting Palfrey; ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... came forward again, and recited a poem called "The Maniac," each stanza ending with the line: "I am not mad, ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... As the maniac finished the last words, before they could be aware of his intention, he made a spring from the deck over the bulwark, and disappeared under the wave. The boatswain, who had been diverted from his fanatical attempt by the unexpected attack of Price, more than by the remonstrances ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... other fish to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you say ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief to his mind). From his point of view, which would be that of the average householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, and not that of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does not lie that way. It would be like living ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... suspicion had closed more and more darkly round the miserable man, who had let himself become the slave of his passions until these had increased to absolute madness. His unbridled fury and fits of maniac rage had estranged from him even the most attached of his old retainers, and in proportion as he felt this with the instinct of cunning and madness, the more did he exact from those about him protestations of zeal and faithfulness, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... her clothes disordered and tom, blood on her bosom, and foam on her mouth, with her long dark hair loose and dishevelled, and covering the upper part of her deadly pale face, through which her wild sparkling black eyes, protruding from their sockets, glanced and glared with the fire of a maniac's, while her blue lips kept gibbering an incoherent prayer one moment, and the next imploring mercy, as if she had still been in the hands of those who knew not the name; and anon, a low hysterical laugh made our very blood freeze in our bosoms, which soon ended in a long dismal yell, as ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... many moods. Sometimes, as on that day at the telephone, the unexpected leaps up from its hiding-place and strikes stunning blows, right and left, like Orestes among the steers in Tauris, or a maniac let loose among sane men; but sometimes Fate lurks in her lair, silently poring over the tablets of the future, and she notes all we say, scrawling 'Folly' against our wisest speeches, and stamping 'So be it' under the carelessly ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Adela Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: "You raving maniac!" Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more curious to note that nineteenth-century New England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties, suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... down like a stone and Captain Anthony went down with her, the finest man's soul that ever left a sailor's body. I raved like a maniac, like a devil, with a lot of fools crowding round me and asking, "Aren't you ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... alternations and scenes of horror, carefully concealing the ground of encouragement and hope, till reason is shaken and hurled from its throne, for the sake of gaining a convert, and in making a convert to make a maniac (as doubtless sometimes occurs under this mode of preaching, for we have the proof of it,) involves a fearful responsibility. I have just heard of an interesting girl thus driven to distraction, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... of Big and Little Bonsa and all the people. His eye fell upon the Mungana, who had also been destined to play a prominent part in that ceremony. At once he saw that there was something wrong with the man. A curious change had come over his emaciated face. It was working like that of a maniac. Foam appeared upon his dyed lips, his haunted eyes rolled, his thin hands gripped the side of the canoe and he began to sing, or rather howl like a dog baying at the stars. Jeekie hit him on the head and bade him be silent, but he took no notice, even when he hit him again more heavily. ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... from her swoon, and her confessor, who was present, came forward and endeavoured to prepare her for the awful deed which was about to be done upon her, and for the state into which she was about to enter, when she came to herself it was only to scream like a maniac, to curse the Duke as a butcher and tyrant, and to call upon Magny, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of that everyday world of which he was so hardy a connoisseur; but in this fog, where all was gloomy and unreal, where nothing had that matter-of-fact value associated by Forsytes with earth, he was a victim to strange qualms, and as he tried to stare back into the eyes of this maniac, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... when exhaustion and numbness had rendered the poor maniac unconscious, that the sailors were able to pull him on board ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Stephens be fearless enough to claim that this custom also was taught the natives by the degraded whites? Apart from the diabolical cruelty to a woman of which no white man except a maniac would ever be individually guilty—whereas this is a tribal custom—note the unutterable masculine selfishness of this "jealousy," which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity, per se, punishes by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not only ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... by Yorke and Dailey, but nothing happened; the dynamite simply went to the bottom, the force of the shock not being sufficient to explode it. When Jerry comprehended what had happened, however, he was changed instantly from a mild, gentle-appearing old man into a raging maniac. He ran forward, his face terrible to see, and leaping into the crowd of Kanakas began striking right and left in ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... to write something in the way of the physiology of the Russian novel, its origin among us, and the natural course of its development. While he was talking I could not get rid of the feeling that I had a maniac before me, but a literary maniac who put literature far above everything in life. I so rarely see genuine literary people at home in Moscow that a conversation with Boborykin seemed like heavenly manna, though I don't believe in the physiology ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... rend his stricken frame, as a fierce wind rips through the palm-leaf sail of a native fishing-smack. In a day or two he became wildly delirious, and Talib then witnessed a terrible sight. A raving maniac in a well-ordered asylum, where padded walls and careful tendance do much to save the poor disordered soul from tearing its way through the frail casing of diseased flesh and bone, is a sight to shudder at, not to see! ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... remember, that showed his poise and courage as nothing else could. He was Sheriff of Somerset County, N.J., and we lived in the court house, attached to which was the County Jail. During my father's absence one day a prisoner got playing the maniac, dashing things to pieces, vociferating horribly, and flourishing a knife with which he had threatened to carve any one who came near the wicket of his prison, Constables were called in to quell this real or dramatised maniac, but they fell back in terror from the door of ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... man," she exclaimed, with tears, "what have you done? Look at the condition of your only child, whom you have murdered. She is now a maniac." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... persisted, "all British prejudices will be against you. Here is a father, the fools will say, trying to protect his young son. If he has made a mistake, it is only through excess of laudable zeal; you would have to prove yourself a religious maniac in order to have any chance against him ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... strove to utter, hastened to the door to summon help. "Remove this man!" he commanded, pointing out the prostrate form of Jose to the two Swiss guards who had responded to his call. "Confine him! He is violent—a raging maniac!" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Jane's eloquence, but Robert and Cyril held him, one by each leg, and no proper explanation was possible. The lady rode hastily away, and electrified her relatives at dinner by telling them of her escape from a family of dangerous lunatics. 'The little girl's eyes were simply those of a maniac. I can't think how she came to be at large,' ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... though from the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he first loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there is in these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love—a passion which deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore, that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greater excesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men. Yet some of ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... "Oak, you're a maniac! Why, by this time, it's all over Ceres that the boss' daughter is missing! Shalimar Ravenhurst will have your hide ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... butler's room. The butler seemed at that moment to have been smitten with a fit of apoplexy—we could see him from our dark corner;—he grew purple in the face, gasped once or twice, choked awfully, and then sat up in bed staring like a maniac. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... and ran madly from the room, along the gallery and down the stairs, shouting and raging like a maniac, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... for his allowing this destruction of their property. I suppose that although it worked vexation and dismay at first, it prepared the way for some after-reception of the gospel. Now, seeing him who had been a raving maniac, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and hearing what had come to the swine, they were filled with fear, and prayed the healer to depart ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... civitate locum studiis adsecutus—Labeonem Antistium, iisdem artibus praecellentem ... namque illa aetas duo pacis decora simul tulit; sed Labeo incorrupta libertate ... celebratior" (An. III. 75). Horace, who was a contemporary of Labeo's, says that he was a maniac, or, at any rate—"considered very crazy in the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... after his first marriage, Dr. McAlister had bought the place, going far out of the town for the purpose. At that time, he was regarded as little short of a maniac, to prefer land on the ridge to the smooth, conventional little lawns of the middle of the town, where one house was so like another that the inhabitants might have followed the example of the Mad Tea Party and moved up a place, without suffering any inconvenience from the change. It ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... misfortunes, in all their variety, Need not be told in a holyday song. The troubles of Wall-street, I'm sure that you all meet, And they're not at all sweet—but look at their pranks: Usurious cravings, and discounts and shavings, With maniac ravings ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... satyr, the affectionate glow of the domestic habitue, the rare exalted passion of the lover, the cold, clear attraction of the intellectual platonist, the will to possession of the sex-maniac, the will to voluptuous cruelty of the sex-pervert, the maternal instinct, the race-instinct, the instinct towards fetish-worship, the instinct towards art, towards nature, towards the ultimate mystery—all ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of a great man's death Falls on this land, so sad and dark before— Dark with the famine and the fever breath, And mad dissensions knawing at its core. Oh! let us hush foul discord's maniac roar, And make a mournful truce, however brief, Like hostile armies when the day is o'er! And thus devote the night-time of our grief To tears and prayers for him, ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... of him by early sorrows; and now, especially, the dark side of everything seemed to be presented to him. What if she died, just when he knew the treasure, the untold treasure he possessed in her love! What if (worse than death) she remained a poor gibbering maniac all her life long (and mad people do live to be old sometimes, even under all the pressure of their burden), terror-distracted as she was now, and no ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... how can we even keep company with Khalid, who has become such a maniac on flounces? And was this fantastic, phantasmagoric rhapsody all inspired by Najma's simple remark on his hair? Fruitful is ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... those ecclesiastical leeches there was a Shylock cry of incest, incest, incest! And those terrible words came greeting the ears of Charles Blount, making his home like a charnel-house, and they nearly sent his beautiful Eliza to a maniac's grave. Still she lingered on. Denied the power of a wife, she would not relinquish her duties as a mother to her sister's babes. There was a calm heroism here which few can imitate. The passions of Blount could not brook further insults. The last kick ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... met with misfortune. My life was my own to make or mar after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also to help me, as your brother, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... last, and caused Sister Ursula to disregard the pains of going through the window. Her one desire now was to reach that haven, to jump, dive, leap-frog through it if necessary, and shut out the unfortunate maniac. It was a short race, but swift, and Saint Ursula took care of the bottle. A long course of afternoon calls, with refreshments at clubs in the intervals, is not such good training as the care of the sick in all ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... preserve. It is full of jest and wit, though I believe if he had guessed the near approach of death he would not have been so cheerful, for the prospect of imminent destruction can only enliven the heart of a maniac. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I tell you. I don't mean that he was a raging maniac. Now, you had advised him not to make any new will because you thought he was not in a ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... soul, in frightful physical pain, with a price upon his head and the curse of a world upon his name, until he died a dog's death in a burning barn; the wife was to pass the rest of her days in melancholy and madness; and one of the lovers was to slay the other, and end his life a raving maniac. ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... shrieks. The frightful sounds came to Grace's ears as she tore across the field in the direction of Oakdale. Terror lent wings to her feet. Every second was precious. She did not know how long the door would stand against the frantic assaults of the maniac. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent; my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke on Aunt ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a bored look; his very manner of carrying the magazine under his arm said that he had selected it in a last hopeless effort against the monotony of Pedro. Such a trick of fate, to take a man of important affairs, and immure him at the mercy of a maniac in a God-forsaken coal-town! What did people do in such a hole? Pay a nickel to look at moving pictures ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... farther he diverged from his own King. In a letter from Athens, dated 24 May, occurs the following passage: "Venizelos becomes every day more and more of a red republican. How that man has duped everybody! We all thought him a genius, and he simply is an ambitious maniac." ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... could give each other dinners and dine our friends and we could indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence was in the habit of having the Daily Telegraph sent to her every day from London. She was always an Anglo-maniac, was Florence; the Paris edition of the New York Herald was always good enough for me. But when we discovered that the Ashburnhams' copy of the London paper followed them from England, Leonora and Florence decided between them ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... hospitable lot," he said, moving off toward the driveway. "You can tell the old maniac he'll hear ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... did not come to much. As for the few who did happen to know all the words of a song, they either had no voices or were not inclined to sing. The most successful contribution was that of the religious maniac, who sang several hymns, the choruses being joined in by everybody, both ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... and Duncannon have had a main hand in all this business, and that they urged on Littleton to do what he did. The House was adjourned till Monday, to afford time for the new arrangement. Brougham spoke like a maniac last night, and his statements were at direct variance with Althorp's, the latter declaring that they were all out and the former that they were all still in office, and that Grey and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... bed, instinctively following the patch of yellow sunlight as it gilded the gloom, he felt that the maniac next door had the better part. Of what use was reason when it ceased to function except ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... was so—the misdeed was a double-edged blade which cut both ways. It will never be known, probably, how near a massacre followed the explosion of indignation at that maniac's murder of the Emancipator. Fortunately for the unsullied robe of Columbia, a hundred advocates of leaving retribution to ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... several concertinas in different parts of the hall, as well as upstairs, was heard, "It's a long way to Tipperary." Tommy began to behave like a maniac. He rushed about more wildly than before. He stopped his ears. He tried to hide. Then he began ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... invoice. I made my obeisance, and was pleased within myself that under this pretext I should have to come again the next day. When I took my leave and came out, I was speaking and uttering words like those of a maniac. In this state I came to the serai, but my senses were not right; all my friends began to ask what was the matter with me; I replied, that from going and returning so far, the heat had ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... brooding over the sad tale which he had told in such an absurd and jesting manner. It was evident from the account he had given of Brian's attempt at suicide, that the hapless hunter was not wholly answerable for his conduct—that he was a harmless maniac. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... or I'll give you the Maniac Bride, with my best Ha-ha!' cried Josie, glaring at him like an offended kitten. Being set on her feet, she made a splendid courtesy, and dramatically proclaiming, 'Mrs Woffington's carriage waits,' swept ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... asparagus at every meal," she said, and then again came peal after peal—each a quite distinct sound. It was dreadful to hear, and Miss Carew and the servant were terrified. It was the laughter, not of a maniac, not of pure unreasoning hysteria, not quite of a lost soul. It suggested these elements, perhaps, but it was chiefly a nervous convulsion at an overpowering perception of the irony in ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... he fell to counting his gold; and for a long, long time he counted, until his hands shook, and his eyes gleamed as if he were mad. When he had counted all, he jumped from his seat, shouting like a maniac, 'Sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars!' Again and again he shouted ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... creature that sat there. Then came the dead man's boat. The two shadows rowed noiselessly together, and as they disappeared in the mist that was now settling on the landscape, an unearthly laugh rang over the lake; then all was still. When Nockawando reached the camp that night he was a raving maniac. The Indians never found the bodies of the pair, but they believed that while water remains in Pontoosuc its surface will be vexed by ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... of the popular belief, however wild and monstrous; every pretension of the afflicted children to preternatural experiences and communications, and every tale of apparitions of departed spirits and the ghosts of murdered men, women, and children, which, engendered in morbid and maniac imaginations, had been employed to fill him and others with horror, inspire revenge, and drive on the general delirium. And it fortified every point by the law and the testimony, by passages and scraps of Scripture, studiously and skilfully culled out, and ingeniously applied. It gave ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... laugh, the laugh of a maniac, or of a man possessed, whilst one long thin finger pointed tremblingly to the card still held by Richard Lambert, and then to its counterpart in the midst of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... been endeavoring to calm myself while this woman of spectral face and form stared at me with her maniac eye across the counter. I had succeeded. At any rate, this was a tangible horror, and could be grappled with; it was not beyond human reach, a shadowy retribution from the invisible world. To face the circumstances, however repulsive, is less depressing than to await in suspense the coming of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
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