"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carpenters' outfits, clay-modelling tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... man came forward to-day, and said he was the Son of God, and one with God, we should conclude that he was an impostor or a lunatic. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... his seat at this point, his cue in the mad farce having been given, and opened speech with many gestures, whereupon Carroll arose and embraced him warmly. And with this grouping, the vehicle, bearing its lunatic load, sped around the corner and disappeared, while the sole interested witness retired to obscurity, with her reeling ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... easy was it to treat the pretender as a lunatic or as an adventurer, and to set his claims aside forever. Useless were all the letters which the Baron de Richemont, the name that Louis still bore, addressed to his uncle the king, to his sister the Duchess de Angouleme, imploring them ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the noise, both hands clapped over her ears while she laughed at them. "I thought they had turned the house into a lunatic asylum or something." ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... perverse bias or an intent to go wrong. Monstrous and preposterous refer to what is overwhelmingly absurd; as, "O monstrous! eleven buckram men grown out of two," SHAKESPEARE 1 King Henry IV, act ii, sc. 4. The ridiculous or the nonsensical is worthy only to be laughed at. The lunatic's claim to be a king is ridiculous; the Mother Goose ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... believed that Clifford could give the clue to the dead uncle's wealth, of which not more than a half had been mentioned in his will. If Clifford refused to reveal where the missing documents were placed, the judge declared he would have him confined in a public asylum as a lunatic, for there were many witnesses of Clifford's simple ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... my dear chap, that we are dealing with a lunatic and that he remembered only this date ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... own enormities, were given up to his infernal sport. His huntsman, Squarcia Giramo, trained the dogs to their duty by feeding them on human flesh, and the duke watched them tear his victims in pieces with the avidity of a lunatic.[2] In 1412 some Milanese nobles succeeded in murdering him, and threw his mangled corpse into the street. A prostitute is said to have covered it with roses. Filippo Maria meanwhile had married the widow of Facino Cane,[3] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Republican party. In that year there were three candidates in the field for governor, the Republican, whose name I do not recall, the Democratic, Garcelon, for hard money, and the Greenback, Smith, under the lead of Solon Chase, an alleged lunatic in favor of fiat money, the repeal of the resumption law, and the enactment of an eight-hour law. Smith received about 40,000 votes, Garcelon about 28,000, and the Republican candidate about 54,000. Many Republicans either did not vote or voted the Democratic or Greenback ticket. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... not stand it!' said the jolly fellow: 'do you know, the soul of that usurer has migrated into it; he jumps out of the frame, walks about the room; and what my nephew tells of him is simply incomprehensible. I should take him for a lunatic, if I had not undergone a part of it myself. He sold it to some collector of pictures; and he could not stand it either, and got rid of ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a "softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was the work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's demeanour or behaviour to suggest ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... there is such a word as equity, and at the magic of that word she has nearly emerged from her isolation. And, sir, what we see here to-day reminds me that, some thirty years ago, Boston confined one of her citizens in a lunatic asylum, for the offence of being possessed by a too intensified Boston "notion." He had discovered a new and expeditious way of getting to China. "All agree," he said, "that the earth revolves daily on its own axis. If you desire," he therefore ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Gitanos and Gitanas, DANCING ROMALIS. To convey a slight idea of the scene is almost beyond the power of words. In a few minutes the sweetmeats were reduced to a powder, or rather to a mud, the dancers were soiled to the knees with sugar, fruits, and yolks of eggs. Still more terrific became the lunatic merriment. The men sprang high into the air, neighed, brayed, and crowed; whilst the Gitanas snapped their fingers in their own fashion, louder than castanets, distorting their forms into all kinds of obscene attitudes, and uttering words to repeat which ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... he be shooting at us?' his father reassured him; 'shooting at people isn't allowed. It's true there is no knowing what a lunatic ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... or not. 'Accident in the (Paper) Hunting Field: death of a notorious author. We deeply regret to announce the death of the most unpopular man in Samoa, who broke his neck at the descent of Magagi, from the misconduct of his little raving lunatic of an old beast of a pony. It is proposed to commemorate the incident by the erection of a suitable pile. The design (by our local architect, Mr. Walker) is highly artificial, with a rich and voluminous Crockett at each corner, a small but impervious Barrieer at the ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first too stunned and shocked to resist. And for another moment a curious medley of emotions kept her inert in his arms, of which the most coherent was a lunatic notion that she, too, had been wanting just this to happen, just this way, for the longest time. And when at length she remembered and felt her anger mounting and was ready to struggle, he disappointingly set her down ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... time from his own particular knot of friends and enemies, and they jollied him to an extent that, perhaps, reached high-water mark, when Grim found one morning on his table a dozen thoughtful addresses of lunatic asylums, and specimens of the writing of mad people, culled from a popular magazine. But Grim recked not, and persevered. He turned out, as became a budding poet, weird screeds from Ovid, Virgil, and Horace—Bohn's cribs were ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... which the Reformer is alluded to as a "heretic," "lunatic," "wolf," Luther was not willing to waste any time (despite a threatening letter from Alveld); but jotted down some points for John Lonicer,[11] who on June 1st, published a sharp expose[12] of the Leipzig Romanist's ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Idle, casting up his eyes, 'over a lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... and Ruby ascended to the room above, Joe went about the kitchen talking to himself, poking the fire violently, overturning the camp stools, knocking about the crockery on the dresser, and otherwise conducting himself like a lunatic. ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... the she-bear to save her and her young ones from starvation. Or, if the tale was known to him, he probably took it for what it was worth, and never foresaw that the British Government would emulate the action of the self-sacrificing lunatic, and spend precious blood for the sole purpose of nourishing and resuscitating the powers ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Bessie's arm). Careful! Go slow! (Stops; Bessie waits patiently.) Want your poor blind father to break his neck? (Shuffles on.) In a hurry to get home and start that everlasting yarn with your chum the lunatic? ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... asserts the right of disposal of it as he thinks proper. A blind man may have the finest picture that ever was painted; he may call it his, that is to say, nobody else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you mean. No, but he was a lunatic, and would have made away with himself anywhere—Hawes is convinced ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... her paroxysms of grief the President kindly bent over his wife, took her by the arm, and gently led her to the window. With a stately, solemn gesture, he pointed to the lunatic asylum. ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... separate cover his counsel to the Central Board at the insistence of this tedious lunatic. His thesis is, of course, untenable—an affront to ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch
... I am a temperate theologian, And also meek as a metaphysician, Impartial between Tyrian and Trojan, As Eldon on a lunatic commission— In politics my duty is to show John Bull something of the lower world's condition. It makes my blood boil like the springs of Hecla, To see men let these ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... him into the laboratory of natural forces, where he has worked with such signal ability and success. Well, you will desire to know what has become of this man. His mind, it is alleged, gave way; it is said he became insane, and he was certainly sent to a lunatic asylum. In a biographical dictionary of his country it is stated that he died there, but this is incorrect. He recovered; and, I believe, is at this moment a cultivator of vineyards ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Psmith, 'said that the hon. gentleman's remarks would have been nothing short of treason, if they had not been so obviously the mere babblings of an irresponsible lunatic. Cries of "Order, order," and a voice, "Sit ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... never saw either of the lovers in my days. In fact, my being dragged in is a reason for doubting the authenticity; nor can I believe that the long letter in which I am frequently mentioned could be written by the wretched lunatic. It pretends that Miss Ray desired him to give her a particular account of Chatterton. He does give a most ample one; but is there a glimpse of probability that a being so frantic should have gone to Bristol, and sifted Chatterton's sister and others with as much cool curiosity as Mr. Lort ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... off his departure from day to day for six months; and then he only did start because his friend Maret himself put him into his carriage, with post-horses already harnessed to it. . . . When he left this post they found in his cabinet 900 letters which he had not opened. He was an eccentric lunatic, amusing enough sometimes, but a curse to everything which depended on him." (Memoirs of the Duc de Raguse, tome ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... caused the fall of a bridge over the Ouse, but the saint by a miracle saved all their lives. The shrine was destroyed at the Reformation, and the relics buried in the nave, where they were found in the last century. York Minster remained almost unchanged until 1829, when a lunatic named Martin concealed himself one night in the cathedral and set fire to the woodwork of the choir, afterwards escaping through a transept-window. The fire destroyed the timber roofs of the choir and nave and the great organ. Martin was arrested, and confined in an asylum ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... under the iron rule of the Professor Liedenbrock? Was I to believe him in earnest in his intention to penetrate to the centre of this massive globe? Had I been listening to the mad speculations of a lunatic, or to the scientific conclusions of a lofty genius? Where did truth ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... other men, so I myself do muse Why in this sort I wrest invention so, And why these giddy metaphors I use, Leaving the path the greater part do go. I will resolve you. I'm a lunatic; And ever this in madmen you shall find, What they last thought of when the brain grew sick, In most distraction they keep that in mind. Thus talking idly in this bedlam fit, Reason and I, you must conceive, are twain; ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... necessary to the search had, however, been given with sufficient distinctness to serve as a guide in my mother's rather chimerical undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have thought her a candidate for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what she herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful if she knew. I confess to a condition of simple bewilderment, when she was fairly gone, and Clara and I were left alone with Selphar's ghostly eyes forever on us. One night ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... "that's in all the newspapers in the metropolis; I'm seventeen weeks in Jervis-street hospital, and four in the Lunatic, and the devil a better after all; you must be a stranger, I'm thinking, or ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... Sir Thomas shrugged. "For my reward would be to have you think me mad. I prefer to iterate the verdict of all logical people, and formally to register my opinion that Robert Herrick was indisputably a lunatic." ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... considered miraculous. His heaviest cross was, perhaps, the hopeless insanity of his first-born son, who throughout his life had to be confined to a locked and barred room as a hopeless and dangerous lunatic. A visitor in the bishop's palace, it is related, once remarked: "You speak so often about sorrows and trials, Bishop Brorson, but you have your ample income and live comfortably in this fine mansion, so how can you know about these things?" Without ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... smiled up at him. "Come and sit down and tell me: are you a poet, or a lunatic, or a haberdasher, or what kind of a—a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... guardianship of her mother's brother, who took good care both of her and her estates, and the wicked uncle was so overcome with shame, when the story of his crime got about, that he went crazy and ended his days in a lunatic asylum." ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... did not know that the shock to which he had subjected the enfeebled lunatic was precisely what was needed to rouse every effort of nature to effect a cure. He could not measure the influence of the subtle earth-currents that breathed over him. He did not know that there was better ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... she rushed toward us and embraced us both with all the might of a lunatic; wept and gasped, till ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... haggard, swarthy face. It played flittingly around that strange look of ruined human dignity, like a wan beam of late sunset about a crumbling and forgotten temple. He put his hand hurriedly to his forehead, as if he were trying to remember—like a lunatic, who, having heard only the wrangle of fiends in his delirium, suddenly in a conscious moment, perceives the familiar voice of love. But who could this be, to whom mere human sympathy was ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... to me, Amalia. It rests with you, I am confident. Tell her what you please. Say I have threatened you. Say you think I am capable of setting fire to the house. Say I am a fool, a dangerous lunatic escaped from an asylum, but that the embraces of a virgin will restore me to sanity. Yes, tell ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... for an Express lunatic and no communication with the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my relief that the gentleman might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for (some of) whom I have the highest ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... That is the acme of tyranny: to provide a punishment for breach of laws the existence of which were unknown. Now we all know that there is sin against the Holy Ghost which will not be forgiven in this world nor in the world to come. Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven to the lunatic asylum by the thought that they had committed this unpardonable sin. Every educated minister knows that that part of the bible is an interpolation, but they all preach it. What that sin against the Holy Ghost is, is not specified. I say, "Oh, but my good God, tell ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... back through the room which was now in almost lunatic confusion—forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their swift motions making an impression ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... thrust a Spectator into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously with many sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Old lunatic!" said James Poynter, with his fat upper lip curling in disgust, as his eyes lit on the row of glass jars with their ghastly contents. "Once I get my lady home, I don't mean to see much of him. ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... attract their attention. He tapped his forehead with a distressful forefinger, to convey his opinion that the widow Jules Giry was most certainly mad, a piece of pantomime which confirmed M. Richard in his determination to get rid of an inspector who kept a lunatic in his service. Meanwhile, the worthy lady went on about her ghost, now painting ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... knew he meant it. Therefore, in order to save a collision between his father and his friend—a collision the issue of which he dared hardly contemplate, knowing, as he did, the unalterable determination of the one and the lunatic passion of the other—the boy had resolved to fetch the Cup himself, then and there, in the teeth, if needs be, of his father and the Tailless Tyke. And ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... hypothesis I should the more eagerly recoil. If his hopes reposed on any base of fact, if indeed, by some abhorrent miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute, my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and despair, of hate and pity; and with the next morning I was only ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... something that I ought to know,—something that she was made to tell and I to hear,—lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... justice in the fact that this form of insanity is rarely accompanied by such evidences of mania as the uninstructed would demand as necessary to constitute insanity. The perverted state of the affections and the judgment are not necessarily accompanied by the wild ravings and glassy eyes of the lunatic. Emotional insanity of this type is only temporary. It may, also, only affect a few faculties of the mind necessary to the perpetration of the deed, while the mental balance of nine-tenths of the ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... proved conclusively, said a number of Belgrade papers, that Radi['c] was a knave and by the second he had demonstrated that he was an imbecile. And my friend Mr. Leiper of the Morning Post speculated as to whether he was more likely to end his days in a lunatic asylum or a prison. But Radi['c] was caring about none of these things; his birthday happened at about this time and some 30,000 of his adherents came to do him honour at his birthplace, over 500 of them on ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... n. A customer who can be relied upon to always buy the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member the {lunatic fringe}). A 1992 example of a heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, goes out and buys Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... "bobbed" her hair and threw the severed tresses at her husband. After this they separated. Presently the War came, and the admirer, who was really quite a nice person, was killed, and Tourntourq, who was apparently a lunatic, though that is not stated in so many words, was blinded. It seems quite superfluous to add that Tourntourq wins the V.C. and recovers both sight and wife in the last chapter; but there are such good patches in the book that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... took to his heels, saying he'd call later for my answer—whatever he meant by that. He did call by night and stole the box. That's about all I know of him, thus far. But I'd watch out for him, if I were you; if he isn't a raving lunatic, I ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... of control. It shifted to an almost right-angled course. A second swung wildly to the left. A third and fourth and fifth—The sixth of the first line of rockets made a great, sweeping turn and came hurtling back toward the Niccola. It was like a nightmare. Lunatic, erratic lines of sunlit vapor eeled before the background of ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... his career. It must always be borne in mind that he had to color the narrative of his own as well as his people's history to suit the tastes and prejudices of the Roman conqueror. He was born in 37 C.E., the first year of the reign of Gaius Caesar, the lunatic Emperor, who nearly provoked the Jews to the final struggle. Though he is known to history as Josephus Flavius, his proper name was Joseph ben Mattathias, Josephus being the Latinized form of the Hebrew ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... myself a hundred times, Can these ever have been such children as I have seen in the slums? This is little Daisy. Her name is not the only pretty thing about her. She has a sweet face. Daisy doesn't know it; but her mother went mad, and Daisy was born in a lunatic asylum. Notice this young man who seems to take in bigger spoonfuls than all the others. He's got a mouth like a money box—open to take all he can get. But when he first came to "Babies' Castle" he was so weak—starved in truth—that for days he was carried about on a pillow. Another ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of a lunatic asylum, talking in this way. Shall I own to you, my reverend colleague, how this curious self-exposure struck me? As I listened to Romayne, I felt grateful to the famous Council which definitely forbade the priests of the Catholic Church ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... saved my life, but my voyage had been a series of imprudences, committed by a lunatic, and I had not been able ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... that he could go to his work in the Western wilds, content and grateful, and that a long and toilsome life would be illumined by this dear memory. He, too, like Lottie, was on the Mount; but both would soon have to come down to the plain where the "multitude" was, and some of them "lunatic"; and when in the plain they would be very ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... glasses they toasted the bride, they extolled her beauty, they praised his own gallantry, and vaunted his conquest of the demon rum. As the supper progressed Bob simulated a growing intoxication, while the hired servants looked on as if at the antics of a lunatic. He made it amusing, and Lorelei entered into the spirit of the make-believe. But when they were alone and all traces of the feast had disappeared he swooped down out of the clouds and ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... physical torments like the heroes they were. One, in particular, sitting on a box making a cigarette, had a broad smile on his face, though the whole of his elbow was shot completely away. Another came in, helped along by two other men; he was a raving lunatic, his eyes ghastly and horrible to look upon, and he was foaming at the mouth, and ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... to do with either the purse or the letter. Of a truth the man who confided them to me must have been a lunatic." ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... well-paved educational streets, and never see or hear anything of those inhabitants of the intellectual slums. If ever a letter like those which pour in hundreds to the desk of the psychologist were to stray into their mail, they would feel sure that they had to do with a lunatic who belongs in an asylum under a physician's care. They have no idea that not only their furnaceman and washwoman, but also their tailor and their watchmaker, or perhaps the teacher of their children, and, if they examine more carefully, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... circumstances of a private house. Each patient had a separate chamber; and the medical attendance, diet, and arrangements were of a far higher order than poor Patrick could have commanded in lodgings. Above all, the resident surgeon—now a distinguished physician, superintendent of a lunatic asylum—was a man to make a friend of,—a man of cultivated mind, tender heart, and cheerful and gentle manners. Patrick won his heart at once; and every note of Patrick's glowed with affection for Doctor H—. After a few weeks of alternating hope and fear, after a natural series ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... perfect wife you are!" cried he. "I am an old lunatic, I do not deserve to have such ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... tin soldiers. Your vision has been keener. Breed counts for much; but for it to have full value there must be the life as well. All the same, the notion of asking Major Walters to pose to you in a suit of armour is lunatic, and the sooner you finish Mrs. Rushworth and get back to Janot's the better. There is also Blanquette who must be bored to death in the Rue des Saladiers, with no one but Narcisse to bear ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... apostrophized it in terms which Mr. McNab would have regarded as a personal insult, and which the community on the Blue might possibly have resented with a challenge to mortal combat. His next step, had they witnessed it, would certainly have led to the conclusion that he was a dangerous lunatic, and one, at that, whose peculiar madness was of a kind specially objectionable to the residents of Blue Bar. He placed the object toward which his feelings had undergone so sudden a revulsion carefully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the door, greatly to the annoyance of the people, who not only considered me very dirty, but also very rude in not availing myself of their polite invitation! The next morning as I took my cold bath as usual in beautifully clean spring water, I was condemned and pitied as a lunatic! Such are the different ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... stumps, bore him out of the temple, dangling aloft from his jaws. At the back of it he dropped him into the dust hole among the remnants of a library whose age had destroyed its value in the eyes of the chapter. They found him burrowing in it, a lunatic henceforth—whose madness presented the peculiar feature, that in ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... exactly," Jimmy confessed. "About half an hour before I left, a lunatic with perspiration streaming down his face, and no hat, threw himself into my room. 'I'll buy B. & I.'s,' he shouted. 'I'll buy B. ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lunatic who used my press to print Lutheran writings in place of the anti-Lutheran stuff I put into his hands. Moreover, he was dreaming of the Apocalypse and the Millennium. (To Olof.) Have ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... first love—the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world. Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America, and he saw ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D— came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... due time that the hotel was built on Morgan land, and belonged to the Morgans. Nobody outside a madhouse could be found to dispute with Duke Morgan a title to land within ten miles of Morgan's Gap, and none but a lunatic would attempt to run a hotel at Calabasas, anyway. However, a solution of the difficulty was found: Duke's colorable title gave the cue to his retainers in the Gap, and in time they carted away piecemeal most of the main building, ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... sense of everybody? On what else do all laws rest? I'll tell you, Barker, what's better than any further discussion. Let's send in workmen on the spot to pull down Pump Street. And if old Wayne says a word, arrest him as a lunatic. That's all." ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... must be a lunatic!" burst from her mother. "I could not have believed you would be guilty of such supreme, ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... what great folks do? I simply tell you what I hear—it may be so, and it may not. God knows! There is that Pascale Salvini—he has a rival studio—and when that Genoese, Christoforo Colombo, was here and made his stopping-place at Bellini's studio, Pascale told every one that Colombo was a lunatic, and Bellini another, for encouraging him to show his foolish maps and charts. Now, they do say that Colombo has discovered a new world, and Italians are feeling troubled in conscience because they did not fit him out with ships instead of forcing him ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... worrying about real failure. Dissociation, day-dreaming, and mental epilepsy are but few of the many milestones on a road, the end of which is insanity, or complete and permanent dissociation, instead of the partial and fleeting dissociation from which we all suffer. The lunatic never "comes to", but in a world of dreams dissociates himself forever from realities he is not ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... property of a deceased person. A guardian in law is one appointed by a court to take charge of and administer the property of persons who are not of sufficient age or understanding to manage their own affairs. A committee in law is one entrusted with the care of an idiot or a lunatic. Used in this sense, the word is pronounced com-mit-tee. A curator is one appointed to act as guardian of the estate of a person not legally competent (qualified) to manage his property, or of the estate of ...
— Civil Government of Virginia • William F. Fox
... grotesque; it was fantastic, almost laughable,—had it not concerned him! For Rodaine had been his father's enemy, and Mother Howard had told him enough to assure him that Rodaine did not forget. The crazed woman of the graveyards was Squint's lunatic wife, ready to kill, if necessary, for a husband who beat her. And the young Rodaine was his son, blood of his blood; that was enough. It was hours before Fairchild found sleep, and even then it was a ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... screamed at my grandfather. “You old lunatic, I wish to God I had never seen you! No wonder you came back to life! You’re a tricky old devil and ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... however, and I answered, "The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account." Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... years that medical men have recognized the preponderant part played by acquired or inherited syphilis in producing general paralysis, which so largely helps to fill lunatic asylums, and tabes dorsalis which is the most important disease of the spinal cord. Even to-day it can scarcely be said that there is complete agreement as to the supreme importance of the factor of syphilis in these diseases. There can, however, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; The madman. While the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... this familiar of mine—I begin to detest the expression—will accuse me of endeavouring to make a case for myself if I say that I believe my madness to be a disease? I do believe it. I honestly can no more help getting drunk than a lunatic can help screaming and gibbering. It would be different with me, perhaps, were I a contented man, happily married, with children about me, and family cares to distract me. But as I am—a lonely, gloomy being, debarred from ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of the {lunatic fringe}). A 1993 example of a heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, goes out and buys Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... "Let go, you lunatic! You'll kill yourself. Listen! I'm not lying. It's the truth. She's met a man, I tell you. Been meeting him for months, I guess. There! now will ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a great knave. He has set the laws of his country at defiance, and should be punished most severely. And Mountjoy Scarborough has proved himself to be unfit to have any money in his hands. A man so reckless is little better than a lunatic. But compared with Augustus they are both estimable, amiable men. The father has ideas of philanthropy, and Mountjoy is simply mad. But Augustus is as dishonest as either of them, and is odious also all round." Then at length he explained all that he had learned, ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Wildfire been the most raging lunatic, instead of possessing a doubtful, uncertain, and twilight sort of rationality, varying, probably, from the influence of the most trivial causes, Jeanie would hardly have objected to leave a place of captivity, where she had so much to apprehend. She eagerly assured Madge that she had no occasion ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... you lounging there for, you old idiot! You old sky-gazing lunatic! Don't you see that we are going to have an awful blow! Begone with you and see that the cattle are all under shelter! Off, I say, or," he rode toward Bill Ezy, but ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... grab for the servant, who stood with mouth open, uncertain as to whether or not he was dealing with a lunatic. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... done with a lunatic like Koshkarev? In the end, curiosity moved Chichikov to accompany the Commissioner. The Committee for the Reception of Reports and Returns was discovered to have put up its shutters, and to have locked its doors, for the reason that the Director of the Committee ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Dave and the others, Greg included, had taken Alonzo Hibbert's measure or believed they had. Their host, then, was a lunatic. A harmless and very amiable lunatic, to be sure, yet none the less the victim of a ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,—and see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and still escape the lunatic asylum,—provided you do so in the way of pleasantry. In this case, the gravest savant, if he have children, may condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this in his quality of man of science, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... mad,' he said, in a cold voice; 'this is the raving of a lunatic; there is no proof of what you say; it was proved conclusively that myself and Pierre were asleep at our hotel while M. Villiers was with Jarper at ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... ago," said the bandit, "I was taking my walks abroad near Orezza, when a sort of lunatic came up to me, pulling off his cap to me even in the distance, and said: 'Oh, M. le Cure' (they always call me that), 'please excuse me—give me time. I have only been able to get fifty-five francs together! Honour bright, that's all I've ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... acclamations of the devoted thousands which were raised wherever he appeared. Stephen, as he was passing out of the town, observed Mr Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, whom he had often met, standing with a drawn sword in his hand, looking more like a lunatic than a sane ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... tennis all day, while other people chase the balls, or howl in dungeons in the background!' And that is the problem I wish to put before my American millionaire—the problem of what I will call our lunatic- asylum stage of civilization. Mind you, this condition is all very well so long as we can say that the lunatics are incurable—that there is nothing we can do but shut our ears to their howling, and go ahead with our ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... would give worlds to know how aunt Celia ever unbent sufficiently to get engaged. But, as I was saying, Mr. Copley has accomplished something, young as he is. He has built three picturesque suburban churches suitable for weddings, and a state lunatic asylum. ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... creature imperfectly gifted with man's noblest attribute of reason. But, granting this to the full, is it possible to conceive of anything more kindly and gentle in the delineation of partial insanity than the portraits which the French critic finds horrible? Barnaby Rudge's lunatic symptoms are compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage. Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. Dick's ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... back—"well, I should say 't I am goin' alone. 'F you c'u'd see yourself this minute, Mrs. Lathrop; you'd easy understand 't even 'f you wanted to go no one in their senses 'd be able to go with you f'r fear o' bein' took for a lunatic." ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... listened to a minister's confidential gossip about Lord Fisher; nothing in these interesting confidences struck me so much as the self-satisfaction of the little minister in treating the man of destiny as an amusing lunatic. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... Superior had been a man of iron will, who had fought his way through ecclesiastical courts and popular anger, and even family persecution, which had culminated in an effort of his own brother to shut him up as a lunatic. His first disciple and most stanch supporter had been the Rev. Charles Frederic Lamplugh, a fellow of Corpus, newly called to orders after an earlier career which had been devoted to the world, and, according to rumour, nearly wrecked in an ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... is in Kaiserswerth that the Deaconesses are trained for their humanitarian life-work. Of this institution Mr. Stevenson says: "It consists of an Hospital for men, women, and children; a Lunatic Asylum for females; an Orphanage for girls; a Refuge for discharged female convicts; a Magdalen Asylum; a Normal Seminary for governesses; an Infant School; a Chapel; two shops; a publishing office; a museum; ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of our great institootions, sir?" That of course is a question which is put to every Englishman who has visited New York, and the Englishman who intends to say that he has seen New York, should visit many of them. I went to schools, hospitals, lunatic asylums, institutes for deaf and dumb, water- works, historical societies, telegraph offices, and large commercial establishments. I rather think that I did my work in a thorough and conscientious manner, and I owe much ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... into the saddle without a word, and started off at a break-neck pace into the city. George, almost unable to keep up with him, followed instead of leading, rather skeptical in his own mind whether he were not riding after a moon-struck lunatic. Once or twice he shouted out a sharp-toned inquiry as to whether he knew where he was going, and that they were taking the wrong way altogether; to all of which Sir Norman deigned not the slightest reply, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... and the same thing. Thereupon Francesca told Mr. Macdonald a story she heard in Edinburgh, to the effect that when a certain committee or council was quarreling as to which of certain Fifeshire towns should be the seat of a projected lunatic asylum, a new resident arose and suggested that the building of a wall round the kingdom of Fife would solve the difficulty, settle all disputes, and give sufficient room for ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... fitly be regarded as so many travelling lunatic asylums, the inmates of each exhibiting different degrees and forms of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... south of England this is the common attitude. I remember, not long ago, on a holiday, coming to a village which looked rarely prosperous for its county, owing, I was told, to the fact that the county lunatic asylum near by caused money to be spent there. In the next village, which was in a deplorable state, and had no asylum, the people were looking enviously towards this one, and wishing that at least their absentee landlords would come and hunt the neighbourhood, though it appeared that one of ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... her," George broke forth. "I feel as if she might scream in a minute and call everybody in. I've been a lunatic and she has apparently never been kissed before. Tell her—tell her you've ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... authorities, critics, and dealers of his work—these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868. Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic's grave six months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... except that he has a lot of books with him. Widow Shanks, who has the best right to know all about him, has made up her mind that his head has been turned by the troubles of his family, except for his going without dinner, which no lunatic ever does, according to her knowledge. And he seems to have got 'Butter Cheeseman,' as they call him, entirely at his beck and call. He leaves his black horse there every morning, and rides home at night to his ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... days there came a man from the West—a tall, gaunt, grizzly, shaggy-haired, God-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop, stands near the railway station in the town of Harper's Ferry, with ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... a lunatic asylum in London in Pope's day. Notice how Pope mentions, in the same breath, Bedlam and Parnassus, the hill of the Muses which poets might well be supposed ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... purely political, and it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the agency of Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c] was avenged by the lunatic assassination of the brilliant Prince Michael Obrenovi['c] III. It is no exaggeration to say that, from the point of view of the Serbian patriot, the only salvation of his country in 1903 lay in getting rid of the Obrenovi['c] dynasty, which had become pro-Austrian, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... style, the second dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, to which period the church at Braisne also belongs. At Premontre the buildings of the abbey, which was the cradle of the Premonstratensian order, are occupied by a lunatic asylum. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "He is a lunatic who thinks himself judge, public prosecutor, and executioner rolled into one, and, even in the courtyard of his prison, he pronounces sentence of death on the flowers and the pebbles. One is stupefied by the tenacity of his hatred, which fills the book with bloody cries ...—'a cry of destruction,... ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... It would not have surprised him in the least if she had torn handfuls of hair off the King's head. To his amazement she laughed. It was a most unpleasant laugh. But it was not the laugh of a lunatic. It was not ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... nothing either of meanness or cowardice. He shunned to aggravate into frenzy the wrath of the Duke; but he neither deprecated nor seemed to fear it, and continued to look on him with the calm and fixed attention with which a brave man eyes the menacing gestures of a lunatic, whilst conscious that his own steadiness and composure operate as an insensible and powerful check on the rage even ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the lunatic asylum has been received. It is certainly a case of difficulty, but if you cannot remain, I cannot conceive who under my authority can. Remain as long as you safely can and provide as well as you can for the poor ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... certified that Nick Should be confined as lunatic, Fit subject for commission. But who the deuce would like to be The devil's person's committee? So ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... turned to his companion and said, "See! this man was once full of wisdom. He was the guide of my youth. But his reason has departed, and now, poor lunatic, he is wandering over the earth not knowing where he is going. How has the wise man ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... beside the table, and leaning his chin on his hands, began to gaze abstractedly into the candle-flames like some real lunatic. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... raw on the point," said he, taking my arm for a last turn, "and that's the truth. There was a fellow who came out with me, quite a good chap really, and a tremendous pal of mine at Eton, yet he behaved like a lunatic about this very thing. Poor chap, he reads like anything, and I suppose he'd been overdoing it, for he actually asked me to choose between Mrs. Lascelles and himself! What could a fellow do but let the poor ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... such insociable and point device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak doubt fine when he should say doubt, etc. This is abhominable which he would call abominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; Ne intelligis, domine? to make frantic, lunatic. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... at once, while I was fixing a trimmer, a punt came quietly up: as for me, Roger, you know I always wades it through the muddy shallow: well, I listens, and a chap creeps ashore—a mad chap, with never a tile to his head, nor a sole to his feet—and when I sings out to ax him his business, the lunatic sprung at me like a tiger: I didn't wish to hurt a little weak wretch like him, specially being past all sense, poor nat'ral! so I shook him off at once, and held him straight out in this here wice." [Ben's grasp could have cracked ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... like myself has to be. You wouldn't have me go down to posterity as Pelham the Pincher, would you? No! Very well, then. By the time this volume is in the hands of the customers, everybody will, of course, have read Mr. J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large Again." (Those who are chumps enough to miss it deserve no consideration.) Well, both the hero of "The Lunatic" and my "Sam Marlowe" try to get out of a tight corner by hiding in a suit of armour in the hall of a country-house. Looks fishy, yes? And yet ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... three weeks. That would have suited me all right just now, for the prison at Brives is quite new and very comfortable, but that same night Sergeant Doucet shoved another man into the clink with, me at Saint-Jaury, a raving lunatic who started smashing everything up, and tried to tear my eyes out. Naturally, I gave him as good as I got, and the infernal row we made brought in the sergeant. I told him the chap wanted to throttle me, and he was nonplussed, for he couldn't do anything ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... what he had heard from the lawyer. "Divorces in Roman Catholic countries," he said, "are quite impossible. I believe they are never granted, except for State purposes. There may be some new civil law, but I don't think it; and then, if the man was an acknowledged lunatic, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... Finally another Fokker (Immelmann) came to my rescue and the fight started all over again. I attacked along with Immelmann to confuse the Englishman. We succeeded in forcing him to within 100 meters of the ground and were expecting him to land any moment. Still he kept flying back and forth like a lunatic. I, by flying straight at him, wanted to put a stop to this, but just then my engine stopped and I had to land. I saw him disappear over a row of trees, armed myself with a flashlight (I had nothing better) and rode over on a horse. I expected that he had landed, but imagine my surprise! ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... speech, vehement in temper, cursed with a semi-lunatic delight in cruelty, and he tormented his men to the verge of desperation. On this fatal night, Pigot, standing at the break of his quarter-deck, stormed at the men aloft, and swore with many oaths he would ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... People saw Misha's work and ran to report about it to the speculator-owner. At first the speculator flew into a rage, and wanted to send for the police. "What hypocrisy!" he said. But afterward, reflecting, probably, that it would be inconvenient to have a row with that lunatic, and that a scandal might be the result, he betook himself in person to the churchyard, and approaching the toiling Misha, he made a polite obeisance to him. The latter continued to dig, as though he had not noticed ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... about that blue paper,' said Mrs Biddle. 'It looks to me like the work of a lunatic. And saying you were nice and pretty! It's not the work of a ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... indulgently. "They declare that they offered—even begged—to stay behind with him, one of them, at least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him perforce like a child or a lunatic pro tem., and having but little time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow—to save publicity, of course! Mrs. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... adds that, "as much of the wealth of Massachusetts is in stocks, bonds and mortgages this would relieve the rich at the expense of the poor." I could recommend that my correspondent be placed in a well-padded cell in a lunatic asylum and fed on Ladies Home Journal literature. The idea that what he calls "intangible property" should be taxed is quite prevalent among the ignorant and a perfect hobby with the half-educated. No writer distinguished ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Honor; now see here between you and me (I might also add the only two sensible people in Ottawa) what do you think would become of us young enthusiastic fellows if all the 'girls' stood on their high-heeled dignity like you? Why of course the monasteries and lunatic asylums would have more to do, and by and by, the lunatic asylum would have it all; but destiny is not so cruel a tyrant as you, so she makes your haughty kind the exception and not ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... bewilderment at Septimus May's extraordinary opinions, while to the physician this was the chatter of a lunatic. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... wrong tip. There wasn't any knife," replied the Professor with a wink. "You may send me two hundred and fifty copies of the paper. And, by the way, do what you can to get that poor lunatic off easy, and I'll ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not impress me as a proof that he was too deranged to earn his own living, with his healthy frame, if he saw fit. I had observed the mania for titles in other persons (not all Russians, by any means) who would vigorously resent the imputation that they should be in a lunatic asylum. Moreover, this imperial "Prince Romanoff" never forgot his "manners." He invariably rose when his superiors (or his inferiors, perhaps I should say) approached, like any other peasant, and he looked far more crafty ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... know why he is. The Socialist believes that most human affairs should be regulated and managed by the State—the Government—that is to say, the majority. Our own system has many Socialistic features and the trend of republican government is all that way. The Anarchist is the kind of lunatic who believes that all crime is the effect of laws forbidding it—as the pig that breaks into the kitchen garden is created by the dog that chews its ear! The Anarchist favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended, with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a ...
— Options • O. Henry
... little changed. A problem awaiting the scientific accuracy of a Max Muller or a Grimm, and not to be handily tossed into shape by a poetic Faber, or guessed at by a wild-Irish O'Brien or Vallancey, or a lunatic Betham. It is, however, worth noting that over those South Slavonian provinces, via Greece, flowed for many centuries northward a strangely silent stream of Orientalism, but little disturbed by the outer or upper currents of history. He who has dabbled in Servian-Croat-Illyrian—twin ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Mr Briston at Lewisham, who is now a canon or a dean, or something grand that no one ever sees. At present I did not like him. He said, 'No, this lady is nobody's grandmother. May I ask in return how long it is since you escaped from the lunatic asylum, my poor child, and ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... inspiring sight for the officers than Mess Colour-Sergeant J. Collins' cheery smile, as he stirred a cauldron of hot rum punch. Bailleul was only two miles away, and officers and men used often to ride or walk into the town to call on "Tina," buy lace, or have hot baths (a great luxury) at the Lunatic Asylum. Dividing our time between this and cricket, for which there was plenty of room around the huts, we generally managed to pass a very pleasant four ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... impatient gesture. "I want to know what she's going to do. Surely she isn't going to allow herself to be bound by that old lunatic's will, is she?" ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... were also such impatient critics as E.L. Godkin who put so much emphasis on the failures of the reformers as to overshadow their positive achievements. Moreover, there were the well-meaning but impracticable people who constituted what Theodore Roosevelt once called the "lunatic fringe" of reform movements. ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Lieut. D'Hubert. "And went out again? What for? Couldn't he keep quietly indoors! What a lunatic! ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... seem verified—is noised abroad as supernatural, and carefully preserved among 'well-authenticated spiritual manifestations.' If I had escaped injury, the freaks of my sister's delirium would have made no more impression on your mind than the ravings of a lunatic; and, since I was so unfortunate as to be bruised and burned, you must not allow yourself to grow superstitious, and attach undue importance to a circumstance which was entirely accidental, and only startling ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... But endeavor to behave more like a man of the world and less like a dangerous lunatic, or we ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... possessed by the perplexing incidents, there is no need to be in dread of wearisomeness. And this is really the case here: matters are carried so far that one of the two brothers is first arrested for debt, then confined as a lunatic, and the other is forced to take refuge in a sanctuary to save his life. In a subject of this description it is impossible to steer clear of all sorts of low circumstances, abusive language, and blows; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... told his story," said Griggs, "and I don't know, doctor, but it half seems to me as if you believe in the poor old lunatic." ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... floor and was in his seat before the deep boom of his voice had ceased reverberating. Then instantly it seemed that the seventeen hundred delegates had been multiplied by ten, and that every man had become a raving lunatic. This was Bassett's defiance—Bassett, who had gone fishing, but not before planting this mine for the confusion of Thatcher. A hundred men who had already committed themselves to Thatcher sought to rescue their new leader; they rose upon chairs and demanded to be heard. "Stop, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... And the public has taken him, at least partly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainly incomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the public looks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a notion, or ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... great deal than a man like myself, for instance, who, without being bothered with any particular principles of any kind, has what I call a general sense of fitness and propriety, and does his dissipation sensibly and correctly. But to go tearing off like a lunatic after the first petticoat you see fluttering among the bushes in a gentleman's park, and leaving your friend to hold in two thorough-bred peppery devils, that are enough to pull a man's arms off, for above a quarter of an hour, it's too bad a great deal. Why, just ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... may never come to anything. I was dining to-night at a little restaurant on the Felice, a quiet, homelike place, which a good many artists, and especially women, frequent. There is a queer, crazy little American, who thinks herself a painter, and is a harmless lunatic, who is a regular guest at this restaurant. Everybody smiles at her absurdities, but is ready enough to be kind to the poor old creature. To-night, however, I was hardly seated when in came a party of Germans, all in mask and Carnival costume. One of them was arrayed in exact imitation of this ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... is a mad nigger who has escaped from a lunatic asylum!" Skinner exclaimed. "Don't go near him; perhaps he bites, and you might get hydrophobia. How is this, sentry?" he asked, turning to the soldier, who had come up to the door. "How is it you let this mad nigger come ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... measurements; and the edge of her weapon does not swerve by a hair's breadth. Need I give you any further proofs or examine all the other details with you? Surely not. You now possess the key to the riddle; and you know as I do that only a lunatic can behave in this way, stupidly, savagely, mechanically, like a striking clock or the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... There are people in the next room. They may hear you. And I am sure they should do so they would take you for a lunatic." ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... consideration is void. Signatures made with a lead pencil are good in law. A receipt for money paid is not legally conclusive. The acts of one partner bind all the others. Contracts made on Sunday cannot be enforced. A contract made with a minor is void. A contract made with a lunatic is void. Principals are responsible for the acts of their agents. Agents are responsible to their principals for errors. Each individual in a partnership is responsible for the whole amount of the debts of the firm. A note given by a minor is void. Notes bear ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... like a distant sea. Here Wisdom might resort, and here Remorse; Here too the love-lorn man, who, sick in soul, And of this busy human heart aweary, Worships the spirit of unconscious life In tree or wild-flower.—Gentle lunatic! If so he might not wholly cease to be, He would far rather not be that he is; But would be something that he knows not of, In winds or waters, or ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons |
