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Lunatic   Listen
noun
Lunatic  n.  A person affected by lunacy; an insane person, esp. one who has lucid intervals; a madman; a person of unsound mind. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books



... went round, and the sea swam round, And we knew not what we sung: Half a hundred lunatic pirates When ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... A leader of the Orange Party was opposed by a Nationalist, and the proceedings promised to be lively. They promised for a while to be still livelier, owing to the nomination at the last moment of the local lunatic. ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome

... 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 mentally strong enough ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... and bring out the girl. Arrest the gipsy; and you men here get into this crowd and quiet it down. Make those girls shut up. Why, what the devil, I say! one would think a lunatic asylum loose. You've got the girl, Jose?" he calls across as the corporal brings Carmen out. "Bring her over," and Zuniga starts across to meet them, clattering on the cobblestones with his ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... followed, and then a scene of confusion such as had never before been witnessed outside of a lunatic asylum. Tener, who was the treasurer of the party, grabbed his money-bags and locked himself in his stateroom. Ed Hanlon rushed into the cabin with his trousers in one hand and his valise in the other, and they say that I filled my mouth with Mrs. ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... lane, what had Rachel been saying to the Yankee? Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at the window—supposing always that he had told her what he had seen—and why shouldn't he?—was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and apparitions at the ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Texas I had a niece living whose father was an inmate of a lunatic asylum. She exerted as wide an influence in the State of Texas as any woman there. I allude to Miss Mollie Moore, who was the ward of Mr. Gushing. I give this illustration as a reason why Southern women are taking part in this movement, ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... part of the Athenian lovers certainly has a good deal that, viewed by itself, would scarce do credit even to such a boyhood as Shakespeare's must have been. On the other hand, there is a large philosophy in Theseus' discourse of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," a manly judgment in his reasons for preferring the "tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe," and a bracing freshness in the short dialogue of the chase, all ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... lunatic on board who keeps asking us to let his wife come in. The train is crawling ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... a 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.) ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... be an out and out lunatic," the Enemy had said. Britt looked quickly at Miss Pelham and Mr. Bowles. The former took down the statement in shorthand and Bowles was afterward required to sign "his deposition." Such a statement as that, coming from the source it did, ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... "It's that lunatic, McFudd. He's been to the circus and thinks he's Martello," cried Fred, pointing to the prostrate Irishman with the sponge which he had been ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... would certainly be well received—Marlborough House in London; that he was sure the Prince of Wales would welcome him heartily. At last, means having been obtained from his friends, I sought to forward him from St. Petersburg; but, as no steamers thence would take a lunatic, I sent my private secretary with him to Helsingfors, and thence secured his ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... started after him at an express-train rate. There was some very fine running indeed. Culkins was brought to a sudden stop against a tall board fence, but he sprang back and cleared it like an English hunter, and tore like a lunatic for the city. Half an hour later the party might have been seen, if it hadn't been so pesky dark, groping blindly around the office in which Culkins had ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne

... he; "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 you'd ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever

... young Bob Norton, whose father represented York, in that body, was given a place in the General Land Office, while Richard De Baptist, of Mecklenburg county, was given a desk in the 2nd Auditor's office. A white physician, Dr. David F. May, of Petersburg, was made Superintendent of the Central Lunatic Asylum, for colored people, his two assistants being colored physicians, Dr. J.C. Ferguson, of Richmond, and Dr. R.F. Tancil, of Alexandria. A number of colored men were put on as guards at the State Penitentiary. Capt. R.A. Paul, of Richmond, was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... so great that it 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 ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... disgorge. It was at any rate a comfort that the beautiful lady was not seeing anything of this. And he could explain afterwards to his friends that the Englishman was clearly a lunatic, deserving pity rather than punishment. He made some sound of protest, but attempted no delay in refunding the money Benham had prepaid. Outside sounded the wheels of the returning carriage. They stopped. Amanda appeared in the doorway ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... bound to it. It's up to me to help mend the poor darn fools who haven't sense but to squander the good life Providence handed them. But you—you with your great pile, Pap, here, would love to dip his claws into, there's no call for you acting like some gold-crazed lunatic. Get out, man. Get right out and breathe the wholesome air Providence meant for you. Oh, I guess you'll say it's all on the long trail in the northland. There isn't a ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... the least. Well! that awful woman woke me out of my sleep to put them by. She stood over me, and made me fold the clothes up, and shake out the stockings, and put the shoes under a chair, and all the time that fiendish dog was snapping at my heels. Oh, it's intolerable! I'll be in a lunatic asylum if this goes on ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade

... does not know. As to the noises they made, men and boys anywhere are given to help on their work with sounds of some sort, but I could not have believed in anything approaching to these, out of a lunatic asylum, unless I had ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... civilization that has ever come to me. Some people wear white and play 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 tennis. But suppose the idea were to dawn ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... on crystal towers, before he was hustled into a closed surface car. It whisked him away to a building he did not see from the outside; he was taken up by private elevator to a suite of rooms which might—for all he could tell—have been a suite in a luxury hotel or a lunatic asylum. The walls were translucent, the furniture oddly colored, and so carefully padded that even a homicidal or suicidal person could not have hurt himself or anyone else on it ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... they virtually were—could hardly refrain from laughing when they saw Lesley's horrified face as the cab drove up to the block of buildings in which the club was situated. "But this is a prison—a workhouse—a lunatic asylum!" she exclaimed. "People do not live here—do ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... fellows submit to every kind of monopoly, except of woman; and to pretend an exclusive right to her is, in their opinion, only worthy of a barbarian. But the most forward and tormenting of them all is my quondam friend, the Count; who is half a lunatic, but of so diverting a kind that, ere a man has time to be angry, he either cuts a caper, utters an absurdity, or acts some mad antic or other, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... wisdom: 'Lor', 'e's only a gentleman, he don't know nothing!' On my second attempt, not seeing well where I was going, I stumbled into an apple-stall; and immediately I, heir to a throne and engaged in a charitable action, found myself regarded as a criminal lunatic by people quite obviously my superiors in all honest ways of earning a living. A small boy took pity on me and offered to carry it on his back—any distance for a penny. That taught me; I gave him the penny and put ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so, otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors call hypochondriasis, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... related some curious particulars, and then continued: "Well, after I had passed him and his turn-out, I drove straight to the public-house, where I baited my horses, and where I found some of the chaises and drivers who had driven the folks to the lunatic-looking mansion, and were now waiting to take them up again. Whilst my horses were eating their bait, I sat me down, as the weather was warm, at a table outside, and smoked a pipe, and drank some ale in company with the coachman of the old gentleman who had gone to the house ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... England. All the plain and simple fashions of their forefathers they are either about to abandon, or have already done so. Look at the most part of their chapels, no longer modest brick edifices, situated in quiet and retired streets, but lunatic- looking erections, in what the simpletons call the modern Gothic taste, of Portland stone, with a cross upon the top, and the site generally the most conspicuous that can be found; and look at the manner in which they educate their children, I mean those that are wealthy. They do ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... up! what this lawyer and his client say is true: I have been married, and the woman to whom I was married lives! You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder, Wood; but I dare say you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister; some, my cast-off mistress: I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen years ago—Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage who is now, with his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... hours fallen about a foot, in honour of the occasion, and it was a tremendous night, blowing a gale of wind and raining a little deluge. The luggage (pretty heavy, as you may suppose), in a cart drawn by two horses, stuck fast in a rut in our field, and couldn't be moved. Our man, made a lunatic by the extremity of the occasion, ran down to the town to get two more horses to help it out, when he returned with those horses and carter B, the most beaming of men; carter A, who had been soaking all ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... vacquero, who is even now at the padre's house, raving as a lunatic, stricken as a madman with terror! He has seen ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... court-house, York; post and telegraphic offices at Guildford, York; and Northam Bonded Store, Government offices, and police-station, Roebourne. Considerable additions have been made, which add to the convenience and capabilities of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, and alterations and adaptations and additions have been made to several other buildings; for instance, at Albany a resident magistrate's house and also a convenient prison have been formed at no great outlay. ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest

... different from these precepts. For the wretched Mary there may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane. Her fixed idea, that if she killed Protestants enough Heaven would give her a son, was the conviction of a lunatic. Her own husband fled from her, and left her with no earthly consolation save the stake. But Pole was sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself. The true story of Mary's reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it. The tale ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... Merrick which read: "Taken altogether, John, you're the craziest bunch of irresponsibles outside an asylum. No wonder you kept this folly a secret from me until you had accomplished your nefarious designs. The Millville Daily Tribune is a corker and no mistake, for our Patsy's at the head of your lunatic gang. I'll go farther, and say the paper's a wonder. I believe it is the first daily newspaper published in a town of six inhabitants, that has ever carried the Associated Press dispatches, But, allow me to ask, why? The lonely inhabitants of the desert of Chazy ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... attention to the man. So exhausted was she that she leaned helplessly against the fence. The man ran forward, shrieking like a lunatic. ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens

... "I don't know what lunatic asylum is short of your cheerful presence to-day," remarked Jack, "and if you don't clear out quick I shall certainly rush you. In which case, I beg you to observe that I am, even if I say it myself, a pretty stiff tackler, and about three ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... Nancy, or whatever your name is," he roared, "there's a lunatic upstairs, making a tremendous row in the room over mine. If you don't stop him I'll leave ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic, extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with eager senses the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... torches, blood in their eyes, fiery rum in their veins, demoniac rage in their hearts, and the instincts of hell in their natures. A mob has no mind, only passions. It were as idle to attempt to make it listen to reason, as to argue with a lunatic in the height of his frenzy. A mob is not only a creature of passions, but of the worst passions. Every man has in him more or less of the demoniac element, which, commonly, he is constrained by the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... in water and sent back for his bag and made a great show of rubbing on ointment. In a minute Ismail, looking almost like a young man without his great beard, was dancing like a lunatic with both fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps had ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... There is a laborious lunatic who makes ice at the fair of the American Institute, with the thermometer at 80 deg. or so in the shade. (Note to Editor.—I don't know the man from ADAM, and have received no consideration from him whatever for this allusion,) ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various

... follows an annual curve,[163] and though our knowledge of this curve, being founded on the date of admissions to asylums, cannot be said to be quite precise, it fairly corresponds to the outbreaks of acute insanity. The curve presented in Chart 4 shows the admissions to the London County Council Lunatic Asylums during the years 1893 to 1897 inclusive; I have arranged it in two-month periods, to neutralize unimportant oscillations. In order to show that this curve is not due to local or accidental circumstances, we may turn to France and take a special and chronic form ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the driver has pulled the lever back and the steam goes up with less force through the chimney: working quietly. Away, away, on our iron steed through Ealing and Hanwell—across the viaduct over the River Brent, which runs to Brentford—past the pretty church and the dull lunatic asylum, and so on to Slough, which is passed in twenty-three minutes after quitting Paddington. Then we reach Taplow, and have just fifty-five miles to do within the hour. "Crimea" rushes across the Thames below ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... universities. They seemed to him to be unpractical creatures. He had, indeed, himself founded a university before he left America and handsomely endowed several professorial chairs. But he did so in the spirit which led Dean Swift to found a lunatic asylum. He wanted to provide a kind of hospital for a class of men who ought, for the sake of society, to be secluded, lest their theories should come inconveniently athwart the plans of those who are engaged in the real ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... was a lunatic," continued the Home Secretary, "a vicious, evil man who loved cruelty for cruelty's sake. We have in this diary alone sufficient evidence to convict him of three separate murders, one of which was ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... for him human beings had ceased to exist, and of course human rights, also; the world as viewed from the standpoint of law contained only corporations, only interests. Thus, a man like Victor Dorn was in his view the modern form of the devil—was a combination of knave and lunatic who had no right to live except in the restraint of an asylum or ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... his distance prudently. He was saying to himself: "Look out! Some lunatic. An accident ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a lost child and as a lunatic; and when Salters saw that Penn liked the boy, he relaxed, too. Salters was not an amiable person (He esteemed it his business to keep the boys in order); and the first time Harvey, in fear and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck (Dan was ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... conqueror of worlds, architect of castles, lunatic, and saint. Spent early days only in living. In young manhood he met Her. From that moment all other hers he had known became lemons. L. was an expert prevaricator. Polished shoes, dressed neatly, shaved every day, and never ate onions. Spent evenings at Her house. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... nothing to do with the piece, but pretty to see little PALLADINO in short white skirts, dancing merrily in a forest glade, among the happy peasantry, to whom comes Ophelia, mad as several hatters, and after a lunatic scene, charming, both musically and dramatically, throws herself into the water, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various

... there he was in the middle of them, and you know their eyes are fastened in their heads by a string, and they can throw them out of their heads and draw them back again; and, at a signal, they all threw their eyes at him. He was so horrified that night, that he got insane and had to be sent to a lunatic asylum." ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... miserable, for, as Bob kindly told him afterwards, he looked just like an escaped lunatic, who had jumped out of a strait waistcoat into a middy's uniform. He felt as if the men were smiling in derision at his aspect, especially Tom Fillot and Dance, who were grinning, while Soup and Taters displayed nearly every one ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn

... vices. Statistics of the period show that neither in the States nor in Canada, amidst all the surrounding newness, had there arisen any new social condition peculiar to this continent which remedied to any extent the evils rampant in old countries. Lunatic asylums, in ghastly sarcasm on a self-styled intellectual age, reared their colossal facades and enclosed their thousands of human wrecks. Huge prisons had to be built in every large town. Hospitals were frequently crowded with victims of foul diseases. Great ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... at Brives, where I know the sentence for stealing domestic animals is 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 ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... came to herself with a chuckle. "My gracious, Patricia Kendall, what are you thinking of!" she exclaimed in growing amazement. "Are you mad enough to imagine I'm going to behave like a lunatic, just because I'm taking a new name to myself? Do behave or I'll never speak ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther

... 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 ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills

... by some inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst the victims of the lunatic asylum. The suicide is the prophet of his own doom; the presentiment of death by drowning has but too often ended in a watery grave. Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... citizen of the world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few bad habits—such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours madness?—which would be quite to your credit,—for gadzooks, I like a lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more occult, and ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... shake to its collar and lapels. Then he turned to my wife and said: "Madam, let us two dance a Virginia reel while your husband and that other one take the poker and tongs and beat out the music on the shovel. We might as well be durned fools one way as another, and all go to the lunatic asylum together." ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton

... theory, and nothing could exceed the severity with which the editors of the papers politically opposed to the administration censured it for the extravagance and all-round idiocy of the whole "Aluminum Bubble Scheme," as they termed it. Dr. Jones was voted a lunatic, and the balance of the party was commiserated in the "Ahs!" and "Dear me's!" and "Poor things!" ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... that bottle, were you?" said Horace, blandly. "How singular!" He began to realise that he had to deal with an Oriental lunatic, and must humour him to some extent. Fortunately he did not seem at all dangerous, though undeniably eccentric-looking. His hair fell in disorderly profusion from under his high turban about his cheeks, which were of a uniform ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey

... vanity and hurts no one, but a mad city may ruin thousands by suddenly imagining itself a gold mine. Melbourne a few years ago imagined it suddenly became the hub of the universe. The world and his wife had but one burning desire—that was to live in Melbourne. Some lunatic started this ridiculous idea, and the boom spread like lightning. Melbourne was by this magic boom turned into an Aladdin cave. No prairie fire ever started with such suddenness, with such fury, burning up, as it leapt and galloped along, all the reasoning powers and common ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... Brown. "I don't want a crook; that wouldn't be any novelty to THIS crowd," he says. "What I'm after is an odd stick; a feller with pigeons in his loft. Not a lunatic, but jest a queer genius—little queerer than you ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln

... any 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 gratitude ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... The town was noted for a modern church, called the Evangelistria, which, though built during the revolution, was the most showy edifice in Greece. It was the annual resort of hundreds of pilgrims, chiefly the lame, sick, and lunatic, who were brought there to be cured. It was the centre of modern Grecian superstition; as Delos, in full view of the church, had been in ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... he is," said Bakkus. "Much reading in military text-books has made him mad. A considerably less interesting fellow than Andrew, who, after all, has a modicum of brains, one Don Quixote, achieved immortality by proceeding along the same lunatic lines." ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... brakes might fitly be regarded as so many travelling lunatic asylums, the inmates of each exhibiting different degrees and forms ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... next to no danger of stepping into the traps in which my feet had been so often caught. I may as well confess it—it was intoxicating liquor, and that mainly, which had led me into my various mad marrying schemes and made me the matrimonial monomaniac and lunatic lover that I was for years. What my folly, my insanity caused me to suffer, these pages have attempted to portray. I had grown older, wiser, and certainly better. I now only devoted myself strictly to my business, ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott

... to make such appropriations. She then went to the Legislatures of the States, with the result that is so well known. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and North Carolina founded lunatic asylums, and the work was begun which is culminating in the separation of the insane from the criminal, the women from the men, in every town and county of the land. The right of petition is not only as open to women as to men, but because of the non-partisan ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... passed away since we related Amine's sufferings and cruel death; and now once more we bring Philip Vanderdecken on the scene. And during this time, where has he been? A lunatic—at one time frantic, chained, coerced with blows; at others, mild and peaceable. Reason occasionally appeared to burst out again, as the sun on a cloudy day, and then it was again obscured. For many years there was one who watched him carefully, and lived in hope to witness his return ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat

... Minor Order was styled by his contemporaries), that a man's neck is subject to the power of the Bull, his arms to that of the Twins, and his head or brains to that of the Ram: When "the Moon" then, "is in the Ram," a lunatic is surely doubly mad, suffering, as he does, from the combined influences of the Moon, (especially when full), and of the Ram, —particularly at the beginning of April, the first day of which is amusingly consecrated to fools, and has been so worshippingly set apart in consequence of the belief that ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... down, and taking an open telegram from his pocket, read it through several times, his nostrils quivering, his mouth dimpling in an uncontrollable and enchanting smile. Then again, as if impelled by some superior force, he turned to her and said: "I am not a lunatic, madame. I am Victor Joyselle. I have played—my very best this afternoon, and my son, mon bebe—is engaged to the ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... of representing a conceivable point of view. But when a man begins by stating that he belongs to the Democrats and then claims as his own the views of his political opponents, winding up by demanding the sympathy and support of a third party, the obvious conclusion is that he is either a lunatic, a charlatan, or both. A man cannot serve God and Mammon, neither can any man serve both the Irish ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... execution, his wife and daughter, with her governess, were permitted to visit him. Very adroitly he escaped in his wife's clothes, she remaining in his place. Irritated by this escape, the Government held his wife a prisoner until she became a confirmed lunatic.] ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... by the Assyrians in 721 B.C., were to a great extent absorbed by other peoples in that part of Asia. Some of them probably were still in Palestine when Christ appeared. This wild notion, called a theory, scarcely deserves so much attention. It is a lunatic fancy, possible only to men of a certain class, which in our ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... environment in relation to prison reform—that no permanent good could result from social legislation until society recognised and dealt with the root of the social evil, the land question. "In a lunatic asylum," he said, "it is the custom to test the sanity of patients by giving them a ladle with which to empty a tub of water standing under a running tap. 'How do you decide?' the warder was asked. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... "He knew what he was about. B. & H. is climbing right up to the top. Hanged if I don't put in another hundred!" and he ran down and out into the street like a young lunatic. In five minutes he had put up another hundred dollars with Broker Tabor for Halsey & Company to buy more B. & H. stock on margin. The stock was bought immediately at 54 ...
— Halsey & Co. - or, The Young Bankers and Speculators • H. K. Shackleford

... said Dorothy. "You'd be a reg'lar lunatic to want to leave Bunnybury for a wild life in the forest, and I'm sure any rabbit outside the city would be glad to take ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... justices of the peace. In the act of 1888 they are enumerated in sixteen distinct categories, of which the most important are the raising, expending, and borrowing of money; the care of county property, buildings, bridges, lunatic asylums, reformatory and industrial schools; the appointment of inferior administrative officials; the granting of certain licenses other than for the sale of liquor;[265] the care of main highways and the protection of streams ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... with wonderful gesticulations—namely, with clapping of fingers, with hands outstretched and then suddenly drawn back, with gnashing of teeth, by raging, by spitting, by scratching their heads, by gnawing their nails, by stamping with their feet, they rage like madmen, and omit no kind of lunatic behaviour by means of which they may arouse the hatred and anger of both prince and people ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... melancholy insanity. Friend Hopper had an interview with her soon after she was conveyed to Sing Sing, and found her in a state of deep dejection. She afterward became completely deranged, and was removed to the Lunatic Asylum at Bloomingdale. He and his wife visited her there, and found her in a state of temporary rationality. Her manners were quiet and pleasing, and she appeared exceedingly gratified to see them. The superintendent granted permission to take her with them in a walk through the grounds, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child

... indecent," said the concierge, "and isn't he in a state! His fair ones do treat him well! One of these fine mornings I shall have to take him to a lunatic asylum in ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... with a suggestion of awe in her voice. "If it isn't a ghost—and I don't believe in such things—it must be somebody escaped from a lunatic asylum." ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis

... overwork had turned Belton's brain, and he was subsequently sent to a Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the rest of his life. But there were moments when he was comparatively sane, and in these interims he confessed everything. Anderson had told him that he was going to hoax the Dean, and filled ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... news. The weather is most exquisite, and in the foliage near the house a nightingale is building and shouting incessantly. About twelve miles from me there is the village of Pokrovskoe-Meshtcherskoe; the old manor house there is now the lunatic asylum of the province. The Zemsky doctors from the whole Moscow province met there on the fourth of May, to the number of about seventy-five; I was there too. There are a great many patients but all that is interesting material for alienists and not ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... been very kind in calling and taking notice since I have been laid up, and one good turn deserves another. I shall attend church in future, though the doctrine's so shocking that if folks pondered it the lunatic asylums wouldn't hold 'em all. I'll never believe as the Lord meant us to be threatened with judgment to come, and hell, and all that, till one's afraid to lie down in one's bed. He'd not have let there be an end of us if we didn't get so ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... tale of violence and wrong, of lawless passions, of terrible excesses, to which madness might be at once the consummation and the curse. This man had taken a fancy to Cesarini; and, in some hours Cesarini had shunned him less than others,—for they could alike rail against all living things. The lunatic approached Cesarini with an air ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of it later. He made the sketch, saying: 'If I attempted to represent truly what we see before us, the painting would be rejected by the good people at home as absurdly unreal, or as the work of a hopeless lunatic.' There was such a high wind that our small tents had a narrow escape of being blown away. That night the water was frozen in our jugs, and it was ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... franc and a half, and would have done so, had I not been encumbered with the hurdy-gurdy. That had brought me into such difficulties that I felt convinced a hurdy-gurdy a spinning-wheel would lodge me in a lunatic asylum. So reluctantly I ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... the moon particularly bright that night; in fact she might almost have been regarded as a lunatic; so steadily did she gaze at the moon, and smile to herself without any apparent motive. There was reason for her joy, however, for she had come to know, in some mysterious way, that Frank Willders loved her; and she had known, for a long ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... youth, was in the habit of wearing a black ribbon on his wrist, in order to remind him that, being liable to outbreaks of insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of affection: he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum. These two little facts suggest the reflection that a very few persons have done from a sense of duty what the rest of mankind ought to have done under like circumstances, if they had allowed themselves to think of all the misery which they were about to bring ...
— The Republic • Plato

... 'Tis no good turning fifty men into this jakes of a hole till we know whether it will be needful; but all points to somewhere else. A terrible strange job—so strange, in fact, that we shall probably find a criminal lunatic at the bottom of it. Everything looks pretty clear, but it ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... knowledge we have to-day we should call that man a lunatic who tried to bind medical science by the teachings of that age, and maintained that when a man was sick he had a devil, and that if he got worse he had a whole flock of them. Yet Christ thought that. We should ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... and children were tortured, strangled, drowned, or burned on "evidence" that today would be accepted nowhere unless by a court and jury composed of the inmates of a lunatic asylum, if even by them. It is unnecessary to say that the more severe the persecution, the more widespread did witchcraft become. Every person tortured accused others and whole communities went mad with grief and fear and superstition. No amount of human ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... 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

... only on holidays and then laughed at! They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it? You'd lock up a man as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... had heard of them, so it was decided out of hand that they were immoral aliens fit only to be thrown on the nearest bonfire. Cezanne was a butcher, Gauguin a farceur, Van Gogh a particularly disagreeable lunatic: that is what the critics said, and the public said "Hee-haw." They reminded one of a pack of Victorian curates to whom the theory of natural selection had been too suddenly broken. Two years later Roger Fry and I collected and arranged at the Grafton Galleries an exhibition of contemporary ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell



Words linked to "Lunatic" :   diseased person, madman, adventurer, colloquialism, hothead, insane, harum-scarum, swashbuckler, madwoman, nutcase, tearaway, madcap, sufferer, loony, weirdo, looney, lunacy, bedlamite, pyromaniac, maniac, daredevil, crazy, lunatic fringe, sick person



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