"Maddening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lost her, but his loss was another's gain. The pricking of jealousy, for a while suspended, again became maddening. He had heard her say that she would die rather than be his wife; judge, then, what must be her love of the man she bud chosen. His desire now was to do her injury, and his fiercest torment was the thought that he dared not fulfil ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... start off a series of circumstances that should have had a grave alterative effect, and it would look for awhile as if a long-range change was going to be affected—and then it would straighten itself out again, with no important change occurring. It was maddening. We worked for five years trying to make even a small alteration—and brought back our data—" He pointed to the papers on the floor. "There are the calculations, applied on the Equation. Meaningless. We accomplished nothing. And the Dictator ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... cry. "O my dear infatuated brother, it is not in nature for a De Repentigny to love irrationally like that! What maddening philtre have you drank, to intoxicate you with a woman who uses you so imperiously? But you will not go, Le Gardeur!" added she, clinging to his arm. "You are safe so long as you are with your sister,—you will be safe no longer if you go to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... a more maddening letter could not have been written. Its civility seemed to him to be disagreeable suavity; its failure to particularize the points he made to be a disgraceful evasion; and the liberty it took in generalizing his case to be ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... that follows could happen only as a result of the fearful loneliness and, more especially, the maddening heat of such a place as is described in these opening paragraphs. The setting in this story causes ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... forms a rushing cataract in front of that horizon toward which we are running with such maddening speed. But before it has reached us the rain cloud parts asunder, the sea boils, and the electric fires are brought into violent action by a mighty chemical power that descends from the higher regions. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... But, of course, they would have to be the right silk stockings—the fashionable shape for the year, the correct assortment of clocks, and so forth. Then as to material—could I be sure I was getting silk, and not silkette or something inferior? How maddening if, seeing that I was an unprotected man, they palmed off Jaeger on me! Clearly this was a case for outside assistance. So I ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... away, her low voice maddening him. "Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... long and exhausting march they stopped, and the Winchester regiment and the Ohio lads concluded that they had been wrong after all. No battle would be fought that day. They were willing now, too, to postpone it, as they were almost exhausted by heat and thirst, and that stinging, burning dust was maddening. A portion of their line rested on the first creek, and they drank eagerly of the muddy water. Dick saw before him fields in which the corn stood thick and heavy. The fields were divided by hedges which cut off the view somewhat ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the clock slowly crawled to the hour of three the frenzy of the mob in the centre of the pit became maddening. I had no way of knowing from where we stood whether prices were moving up or down, but it was evident that ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... I woke, and I lay awake for hours. Every vext problem of my life and of the hereafter presented itself to me, and had to be argued out and puzzled over with maddening reiteration. The reason for this was evident and flagrant. It had woven itself into the tissue of my brief unconsciousness, and was now recognised ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... it all came to her with a rush; but the words ran together and swam in a maddening blur—the roar from the street below, dull with distance; the hum of the big building, with its faint concussions of closing doors; the air from the open window, not like the sweet prairie air of to-day, but heavy, smoky, typical breath of the town, yet pregnant with the indescribable ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... a bill must be maddening," said Betty, sympathetically, "but, after all, it is an honour to be on the Ways and Means Committee. There is compensation ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... by seeking out Miss Beverly as a fortune-hunter, he would end by being her lover. She is the most beautiful girl on earth, and—the most maddening. I think I shall go mad if I am ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... another, tell me, what sort of husband do you think I should make, eh? The boorish Nirlanger sort, or the charming Max variety. Come, tell me—you who always have seemed so—so damnably able to take care of yourself." His eyes were twinkling in the maddening ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... fill the steaming cup that clears The skin I will not have exposed to jeers, And rub this wrinkle vigorously until The maddening crow's-foot ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... of any value from the British front (the Censor is hard at work), but for the last six days our casualties have been terrible. It is maddening to see this long catalogue of brave men killed or wounded and yet to ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... "How maddening," cried Tuppence. "To think that Julius must have been actually under the same roof with her for ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... "It is maddening, Virginia," said the man, "to be constantly straining every resource of my memory in futile endeavor to catch and hold one fleeting clue to my past. Why, dear, do you realize that I may have been a fugitive from justice, as was von Horn, ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as he was gone she got up. She had to search for a wrapper. She did not know where any of her things were. How maddening it was to be without a maid! More than once, now that Nigel was back and she could not go to Baroudi, she almost wished that she had kept Marie. Would it have been very unwise to keep her? She pulled out drawer ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... ignominy. The thought flashed across him, as he tried to swallow some more of the soup, that in some respects, if he had been a murderer or a great bank defaulter with detectives on his track, the situation would at least have been more endurable. The horrible pettiness of it all, constituted the maddening sting of it. While he was thinking this the girl they called May came flying back, her blond crest bobbing, her cheeks blazing. She looked like a beautiful and exceedingly vulgar little fury. She came close to Carroll, while the other girl's voice was heard ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... polite. Nothing is so maddening to me as cheerfulness in others when I have suddenly been awakened. Her smile ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... a lover?—foreknew his devices, and at once caught the presaging stir. Safety's self was fear; to her likewise had evil Rumour borne the maddening news that they equip the fleet and prepare [300-334]for passage. Helpless at heart, she reels aflame with rage throughout the city, even as the startled Thyiad in her frenzied triennial orgies, when the holy vessels move forth and the cry of Bacchus re-echoes, and Cithaeron ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... mess-room; to sit before a marble-topped table with a bad pen, never enough paper and hardly any ink, and nothing at all to write about, while all the time the names of places, places you have not seen and never will see—Termonde, Alost, Quatrecht and Courtrai—go on sounding in your brain with a maddening, luring reiteration; to sit in a hateful inactivity, and a disgusting, an intolerable safety, and to be haunted by a vision of two figures, intensely clear on a somewhat vague background—Mrs. Torrence following her star of the greatest possible ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... but flee to her room and hide her flaming cheeks and cry her heart out, it would be relief inexpressible, but her retreat is cut off. She cannot escape. She cannot face those keen-eyed watchers in the hall-ways. Oh! it is almost maddening that she should have been so—so fooled! Every one must know she came down to meet Phil Stanley when his card was meant for another girl,—that girl of all others! All aflame with indignation as she is, she yet means to freeze him if she ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... on trigger, so to speak, waiting for the strike that will come. He is so constituted that it does not matter to him how soon or how late the strike comes. To me the wait, the suspense, grew to be maddening. Yet I stuck it out, and in this I claim a victory, of which I am prouder than I am of the record that gave me more swordfish to my credit than any other ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... maddening slowness, in the manner of all bottles. Presently he recovered his strength and addressed a screaming oath to it. He leaned over until it seemed as if he intended to try to push water into it with his hands. His ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... enter into marriage with the quicker, and the quicker with the slower, may awaken anger as well as laughter in the minds of many; for there is a difficulty in perceiving that the city ought to be well mingled like a cup, in which the maddening wine is hot and fiery, but when chastened by a soberer God, receives a fair associate and becomes an excellent and temperate drink (compare Statesman). Yet in marriage no one is able to see that the same result occurs. Wherefore also the law must let alone such matters, ...
— Laws • Plato
... reason to believe the officer had left his seat yonder, and therefore dare not drop to the ground. My heart ached for the girl, and I longed to get my hands on that cur of a Le Gaire, yet might venture to approach neither. It was a maddening situation, but I could only stand there in the dark, gripping the rail, unable to decide my duty. Perhaps she did love me—in spite of that vigorous denial, perhaps she did—and the very possibility made the blood ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... be a little lithe lad. Then it was that in every pickle of mischief where a little lad could be this elf-child, with his black eyes and curly auburn hair, was to be found. So maddening indeed were his naughty tricks that the townspeople spoke not so often of beating him, as they would have beaten a human child, but of wringing his neck like a young thing that had no right to live. Yet it was more often in word than in deed that punishment ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... of Missouri, with its loud, maddening roar, To the slopes of Pacific, an ever-green shore, To the Atlantic Ocean, with a coast sand-bound, There some of my boys are ...
— Our Little Brown House, A Poem of West Point • Maria L. Stewart
... battle in the harbor he had seen; and his own death he had described. But this was a much more startling plunge into the past. Was it possible that he had skipped half a dozen lives and was then dimly remembering some episode of a thousand years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the worst of it was that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person in the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to bed that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing that was not possible ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... thought to our improvement tend, 40 To curb the passions, to enlarge the mind, Purge the sick Weal, and humanise mankind; Rage in her eye, and malice in her breast, Redoubled Horror grining on her crest, Fiercer each snake, and sharper every dart, Quick from her cell shall maddening Envy start. Then shalt thou find, but find, alas! too late, How vain is worth! how short is glory's date! Then shalt thou find, whilst friends with foes conspire, To give more proof than virtue would desire, 50 Thy danger ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... at their worst when Grant reached the field and it seemed almost hopeless to check the panic and prevent the destruction of his entire army. But in the midst of the maddening turmoil and wild scenes of disaster he kept his head and, dashing from one end of the line to the other, ordered regiments into position with a force and energy that compelled obedience. There was no time to formulate any plan of battle. Each officer had to do whatever ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... what was killing him— loneliness, a maddening desolation, a lifeless world that reached for hundreds of miles farther than his eyes could see. To the north and east there was nothing but ice, piled-up masses and grinning mountains of it, white at first, of a somber ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... of F's experiment. Not a sign of vegetation left. In the face of this, simply maddening that she doesnt get into action directly against the Grass. Got no satisfaction from her by direct questioning. Can her whole attitude be motivated by some sort ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... kneeling figure, the sound of that piteous imploring voice, was well-nigh maddening to Daniel Granger. He caught his wife by the arm, and dragged her up from her knees with no ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the confidence that had been fully hers; she tried in her own letters to prepare the way, to make confession easy, but she received no response. In such circumstances letters are at best unsatisfactory, and it was maddening to Mrs. Moss that she was at such a distance that her warm words must grow cold in the five or six days that elapsed between the ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice over—through my inner and outward sense—would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... It was maddening to realize that we might be too late to thwart him, but we had to risk this, or risk losing something dearer than the jewels of a Queen Candace. Anthony was staking the happiness of his future on the events of the following night. Now that the small cloud of misunderstanding ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... I threatened violence and all kinds of things, but it was no good. I said that unless I had money in forty-eight hours I should be in jail, but it was all to no effect. Did you ever hear anything so maddening ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... everywhere prevalent among the citizens. We were now ourselves tortured by suspense. Could we escape, or should we again have to seek refuge from the flames? Surely the work of destruction would stop before it reached India Street? The hot breath of the maddening fire, and its lurid glare, were the only response. O, if the wind would only change! But a vane, glistening like gold in the firelight, steadfastly pointed to the southeast. For one moment it veered, and our hearts almost stood still with hope; but it swung back, and a feeling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... one of our number was suffering tortures of mind, little inferior to the physical pain undergone by the object of her devotion, the fiends would give vent to derisive cries and jeers that were maddening to the poor creature. ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... and hold and have him entirely hers. He had always eluded her; although he had once certainly loved her with, at any rate, a semblance of earthly passion, his spiritual life had always come between them, holding him from her, helping him to escape when he pleased, tantalising, sometimes maddening too. She was certainly now not so ready to dismiss that spiritual life as once she had been. She was herself an old heathen; for herself she believed in nothing but her earthly appetites and desires, but for him and for others ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... night. But the bride objected with great vehemence to such precipitation, being desirous of her mother's presence at the ceremony; and she was seconded in her opinion by her brother's wife. Peregrine, maddening with desire, assaulted her with the most earnest entreaties, representing, that, as her mother's consent was already obtained, there was surely no necessity for delay, that must infallibly make a dangerous impression upon ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... another engraving; a new source of wonder—a low sandy beach on which the furious sea was breaking in mountain-like billows; cloud and rack deformed the firmament, which wore a dull and leaden-like hue; gulls and other aquatic fowls were toppling upon the blast, or skimming over the tops of the maddening waves—"Mercy upon him! he must be drowned!" I exclaimed, as my eyes fell upon a poor wretch who appeared to be striving to reach the shore; he was upon his legs but was evidently half-smothered with the brine; high above his head curled a horrible ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... maddening business, this watering the horses. Poor brutes! They would come in after a long day's trek, on short rations, with often a twenty-four hours' thirst to quench, and then have to stand round a well and wait ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... and from the acts no less than the words of that conspirator. True it is—and this is the one thing to be feared—that the agitation, though extinct for the ends of its author, may propagate itself through the maddening passions of the people, now perhaps uncontrollably excited. Tumults may arise, at the moment when further excitement is impossible, simply through that which is already in operation. But that stage of rebellion is open at every turn to the coercion of the law: and it is not such a phasis ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Muller had fallen into the habit of reading to her while she did so. But to-day the Reformatory rose before her a prison, the gates of which were about to close on her. The heap of stockings, the touch of the darning cotton, the sound of Mr. Muller's droning voice, were maddening to her: every moment she made a tangle in her thread, looking down at Maria under the Bourbon rose, and the attentive face bent over her. Where should she go? What should she do? Had the world nothing in it for her but this? Yesterday she had made up her mind to go to Delaware to find ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... fast growing among the people at large, and police protection was more needed than ever before. At the same time there came upon the lower classes, the terrible scourge of gin. Violent and ignorant as these classes were, the effects upon them of so cheap and maddening a drink were incalculably debasing. "The drunkenness of the common people," says an eye-witness, "was so universal by the retailing of a liquor called gin, with which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many towns ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to him: its expression, its individuality, all that made it hers, was as if wiped out. Involuntarily he straightened himself, and his own movements grew stiffer, in his effort to impart to her some of his own restraint. But it was useless. And, as they turned and turned, to the maddening music, cold spots broke out on his forehead: in this manner she had danced with all her previous partners, and would dance with those to come. Such a pang of jealousy shot through him at the thought that, without knowing what he was doing, he pulled her sharply to him. And she yielded to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... words the troop gathered round the two girls. But Alizon only clasped her hands more tightly round Dorothy; while the latter, on whose brain the maddening potion still worked, laughed frantically at them. It was at this moment that Elizabeth Device, who had conceived a project of revenge, put it into execution. While near Dorothy, she stamped, spat on the ground, and then cast a little mould over her, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that seemed maddening, to two at least of the group that was watching, the old Krooman announced that all ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... no fiction that I am relating, but a reality that happened to myself, and which it would be impossible to exaggerate. Never shall I forget the last tremendous wave that came down upon me, impelled by a maddening gust which whirled tearing along through the wild air, and scooping its deep passage through the waters. In vain was the jib-sheet let fly; in vain did I luff into the wind. I could not quit the helm, and therefore was unable to lower the sail which in that hurricane could not have ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... a wet night which had made his poor, ulcerated ankles as bad as they could be, and the pain in his eyes was maddening. Suffering from the murrain, too, it was far too dangerous to take him among other elephants, and so the end of Rataplan, the Rogue, was that, in spite of his grand physique, his unbreakable spirit, and his ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... having performed some blunder, whilst the doctor held you to public scorn before the class, and cracked his great clumsy jokes upon you—helpless, and a prisoner! Better the block itself, and the lictors, with their fasces of birch-twigs, than the maddening ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Fear is a maddening maze Of paths that wind on without exit or end, From nowhere to nowhere lead all of its ways, And shadows with shadows in more shadows blend. Each guide-post is lettered, 'This way to Despair,' And the River of Death in the darkness ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... lost sons, nor shut her eyes to her husband's worthlessness. But the passive resistance her daughter always opposed to her efforts, her dogged adherence to a resolution never to discuss religious questions or give a reason for her unbelief, had a powerfully irritating, almost a maddening, effect on her, and made her at times denunciatory and violent. Her daughter's motive for keeping her lips closed was a noble one, only Mrs. Churton did not know what it was. But she was conscious of her own failings, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Keyse, below his breath. His face was radiant as he read. Her spelling was a bit off, it was impossible to deny. But—Cripps!—to be called a brave man by the owner of the maddening blue eyes, and that great thick golden pigtail. The letter ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... whenever it came too close shooed it away, till at last it slunk off altogether. Well, about nine o'clock, when I was settling down to write by the open window of my sitting-room—still daylight, and very quiet and warm—there began that most maddening sound, the barking of an unhappy dog. I could do nothing with that continual 'Yap yap!' going on, and it was too hot to shut the window; so I went out to see if I could stop it. The men were all at the pub, and the women ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... feast, Than claims the boor from scythe released, On these scorched fields were known! Death hovered o'er the maddening rout, And, in the thrilling battle-shout, Sent for the bloody banquet out A summons of his own. Through rolling smoke the Demon's eye Could well each destined guest espy, Well could his ear in ecstasy Distinguish ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... Almamen, in atone of deep anguish. "I, then, at last regain my child? Do I press her to my heart? and is it only for that brief moment, when I stand upon the brink of death? Leila, my child, look up! smile upon thy father; let him feel, on his maddening and burning brow, the sweet breath of the last of his race, and bear with him, at least, one holy and gentle thought to the ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... said the other with a calm which Jernyngham found maddening. "It would be unwise to infer ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's maddening to think what duffers ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... These were maddening seconds. We had left the business of cutting my bonds almost too late. In the darkness of the bush the strips of hide could only be felt for, and my Kaffir had a woefully blunt knife. Reims are always tough to ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... evasiveness made me feel that, for some reason, she did not wish to hear what she knew I meant to say. Could it be that she was, after all, more conventional, less genuine, than I had thought? I went again and again over the whole maddening round of conjecture; but the only conclusion I could rest in was that, if she loved me as I loved her, she would be as determined as I was to let no obstacle come between us during the days ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... the latter was a canteen of sorts, which ultimately improved considerably. The sanitary arrangements were most primitive, the breezes constantly reminding one of their inefficiency. For the first month the weather was glorious, and during the evening stroll round it was maddening to watch the red sun slowly sinking behind the distant woods to the westward, showing us the way to Holland and freedom. The journey by train would have been accomplished in a few hours under ordinary circumstances. It was almost incredible to think, though it was only too true, that a few strands ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... one day when steaming into St. John's harbour to find the city devastated by fire, which in some parts was still smouldering! It appeared that the fire had broken out a day or two previous to our arrival, and that it swept through the city in a maddening rush, accelerated by the high winds, and the dearth of water whereby to extinguish it. The heat, whilst the fire was raging, was so intense that all craft in the harbour had to put to sea in order to escape their sails ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... was solemnizing, then it was saddening. After a time it became exasperating, and then maddening. He tried to sleep, but he only tossed. He tried to meditate, but he only wandered—not "in dreams", however. He tried to laugh, but the laugh degenerated into a growl. Then he sighed, and the sigh ended in a groan. Finally, he got up and walked up and down the floor till his legs were cold, ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... answering him she looked full in his face, and he thought that her eyes were as colourless as those of a watersprite, and there lay hidden in them a maddening riddle. From below in the bushes there came the sound of a shot. Vera rose immediately from the bench, and ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... satisfy. Her hands clutched my buttocks convulsively, and seemed to wish to force my whole body into her wildly excited cunt. With such vigour was the action carried on that the grand crisis soon arrived, most rapturous to both, and almost maddening to Miss Frankland. The heavings of her body and gaspings for breath were quite hysterical, while, with one of those real vice-like pressures, I felt as if she were nipping my prick in two. It was not a mere throbbing ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... or what you don't do. One will perch on each side of you, and join the maddening chorus, driving every bird in the neighborhood either to join in the hue and cry (as do some of the sparrows), or to hide himself from the monster ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... been shocking," whispered the Indian. "I have been driven away, while those foreign men did what they pleased in there. It was maddening. Ah!" ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... those steeds of the squadrons light, Did they flinch from the battle's roar, When they burst on the guns of the Muscovite, By the echoing Black Sea shore? On! on! to the cannon's mouth they stride, With never a swerve nor a shy, Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening ride, Long ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the paper. And as he looked at the picture the hot blood in his veins ran cold. He stared—stared as if some wild and maddening joke was being played upon his faculties. A cry rose to his lips and broke in a gasping breath, and about him the floor, the world itself, seemed slipping away from ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... he hasn't got the one that plays the tune yet. Does this smell like 'The Last Rose of Summer'? Why, you can hear those fish of yours humming! What with hardly any fish, the stink of the whole boat, and that maddening mouth-organ, I feel almost inclined to jump overboard and marry ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... who borrows from his friend, loses him. Observe how I am placed! It is maddening. I have had a dozen opportunities to marry riches. This millstone is eternally round my neck. I have gone through my part of the fortune which was left us independently. She has all of hers, and that is why she is so strong. I am ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... deafening roar of those tumbling waters penned in the rocky, subterranean vault! Had the fall not entirely blocked my further passage and shown me that I had followed the wrong course I believe that I should have fled anyway before the maddening tumult. ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tantalizing outbursts of temper were not to be taken seriously, that his power over her was irresistible. There were times when he felt uncomfortably dubious as to his hold upon her affections. She was whimsical, perverse, maddening in her sudden transitions of mood. And she had threatened more than once to have nothing more to do with him unless he mended his ways! Now he smiled triumphantly as he gazed upon her. All that pother about nothing! Henceforth he would pay no attention to her whims; let her rail and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... method of story-telling which was the legacy of Richardson's popularity—and this device is again employed in the second volume (Part VII). Wilhelmine Arend is one of those whom sentimentalism seized like a maddening pestiferous disease. We read of her that she melted into tears when her canary bird lost a feather, that she turned white and trembled when Dr. Braun hacked worms to pieces in conducting a biological experiment. On one occasion she refused ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... mounted by taxidermy, not one was without those ridiculous little spears (cut from large rushes, or from paper) growing from the bottom of the case, each one, or each bunch of them, erect as possible, and almost always arranged at equal distances apart, with maddening precision. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... went on Thornton with maddening deliberation, "hit was in ther moonlight thet us two stud hyar, an' when ye told me ye war befriendin' me I war fool enough ter b'lieve ye. Don't ye recollict how we turned and looked down, an' ye p'inted out thet big tree—in ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... he perceived two jaguars, which followed his movements with glaring eyes. A single glance satisfied him they were cubs; but a maddening thought shot across his brain: the mother was out, probably not far; she might return in a moment, and he had no arms, except his knife and the barrel of his broken rifle. While musing upon his perilous situation, he heard ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... "It is maddening," said Bristol, "to know that Hassan and Company are snugly located somewhere under our very noses, and that all Scotland Yard can find no trace of them. Then to think that Hassan of Aleppo, apparently by means of some mystical light, has knowledge of the whereabouts of the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... see you, Harry—and you look so well. It has been nearly three years, hasn't it?" Her calmness was maddening; she spoke as if she was reciting a part in which she had no ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... when victory glances, The bloody laurels on the brow he bindeth! Whom, after rapid, maddening dances, In clasping maiden-arms he findeth! O would that I, before that spirit-power, Ravished and ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... then God knows what will become of him and whether we shall ever see his august old body over here again. He was in a ricketty state of body; brought on wholly by neglect, etc., but in fair spirits; and one had the comfort of seeing the Great Man. Carlyle goes on fretting and maddening as usual. Have you read his Cromwell? Are you converted, or did you ever need conversion? I believe I remain pretty much where I was. I think Milton, who is the best evidence Cromwell has in his favour, warns him somewhat prophetically at the end of his Second Defence ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... was the awful thought that all those million men, including the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then stood, were "still alive". Alive! And where were they, and what were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic hell, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in which they were the moment they were engulfed in ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Then she was a murderess—or in sympathy with murderers. My arms fell from her. I drew back shuddering. I dared not look in her lying eyes, which cried pity when her base heart knew no mercy. Surely now I had solved the maddening puzzle which the character of this girl had, so far, presented to me. Yet the true solution was as far from me as ever. Indeed, I could not well have been further from it than at ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... soaped up and have to stand there and feel it crackle and dry in my ears and burn me blind. Pretty soon those people who read my paper, say the prosperity of the United States will slow down into a quiet trickle, then a dribble shading off into a blast of air and a maddening gurgle, while folks stick their heads out the window and swear at the government for not ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... thirty yards down the river bank away from the maddening smell of the others' pipes. He sat down upon a stone. He was thinking he would set out for the Bronx. At least he could earn tobacco there. What if the books did say he owed Corrigan? Any man's work was worth his keep. But then he hated ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... him, a glorious bird of paradise. The wanton display of a maddening curve of slender ankle, through the slash of the clinging gown imparted just the needed allurement to stamp her as a Vestal of the temple of Madness. The cunning simplicity of the draping over her shoulders—luminous with the iridiscent gleam ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed, our inclination has always been to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble spirits are sometimes hurried by the excitement of conflict, by the maddening influence of sympathy, and by ill-regulated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impulse to murder them strikes his brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic effrontery ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... not dangerous, they injured neither men nor crops, but they were harder to endure than a major disaster. One was aware of them everywhere, on the chair one sat in, on the food one ate, on one's body. They were a crawling, maddening nightmare. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... however, it was a world of gloom. Upstairs Huldah was singing— singing!—and it was Thanksgiving. He could hear her feet patter, patter on the floor above, and the sound had a cheery self-reliance that was maddening. Huldah was happy, evidently—and it was Thanksgiving! Twice he had walked resolutely to the back stairs with a brown-paper parcel in his arms; and twice a quavering song of triumph from the room above had sent him back in defeat. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... not leave the lamp burning, so within a short distance of the table she drew a long breath and blew toward the smoking light. The flame flared thrice like a torch, then spat out, leaving the shivering girl to feel her way around the room. To the sensitive young soul the dark was almost maddening. She only wanted to get back to Milly Ann, and she closed the door with no thought for what might become of the man inside. He was dead! A greater danger menaced her. He had warned her and she would heed. As she stumbled down the stairs, her memories came too swiftly to be ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... labor that destroyed their minds, but the uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvy rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... that war, three armies which had been fighting on the Southern side, and which numbered probably forty thousand men, were disbanded. These men had for four years been subjected to the unfamiliar and galling restrictions of military discipline, and to the most maddening privations. . . . At the same time four millions of slaves, without provisions and without prospect of labor in a land where employers were impoverished, were liberated. . . . The reign of law at this thrilling time was ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it epochally shut after me. But modern life never ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... and Carnaby would either have laid aside his activities for ever or be within hope of recovery, and while Deringham dare not ask himself just then whether he desired the death of his kinsman, the suspense was maddening. If the flame of vitality that was flickering so feebly went out Carnaby would be his daughter's, and the burden which almost crushed him lifted. If it burned on there was at the best a long struggle with adversity before him, and at the worst disgrace, and possibly ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... to invisibility would have seemed to Susy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many characteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now she felt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, and the search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal or individual, was as exciting to her as the development ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... again the evidence is unanimous—at that moment came sudden, absolute darkness, followed immediately by the maddening din of all the bells and all the gongs, from top to bottom of the house, in every room and at ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... relief. The diction was plain, clear and definite. No chance to escape. No fond smiles from Hope's cheering presence. Hope had fled, with agonizing gaze, as Lady Rosamond once more read that letter. Every word was stamped upon her heart in characters of bold and maddening outline. Heaving a deep sigh she folded the letter, placed it within her desk, and mechanically stood gazing upon the quiet river, peaceful and calm, save the little ripple on the surface. Lady Rosamond ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... you to task about? My mother and I have been surrounded for years with every indulgence everything that would make a display. But we have never had any money, Miss Innes; that must have been why mother rented this house. My stepfather pays out bills. It's the most maddening, humiliating existence in the world. I would love ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... last, and there joined Sir Colin Campbell's force. The sight of this house of murder was simply maddening to the men. They left the place next morning with a sort of shudder, and set their faces towards Lucknow. It was not till we were well on the march that I had leisure to look about me and notice how ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... alone, on her own shoulders, the full weight of her trouble. When Macinnery's second letter appeared, Lady Kelsey gave it to her without a word. It was awful. The whole thing was preposterous, but it hung together in a way that was maddening, and there was an air of truth about it which terrified her. And why should Alec insist on this impenetrable silence? She had offered herself the suggestion that political exigencies with regard to the states whose spheres of influence bordered upon the territory which Alec had conquered, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... Maupassant came near to it in his own time. Never before have men had such opportunities for knowing the world, never before has it been so easy to cover space, our means of communication have never been so rapid; yet there is an almost maddening contradiction in the fact that every man who writes is content in describing but a single facet of the great adventure of life. Our age is an age of specialization, and many a man spends a life ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... tell me instantly. I will not stand here and listen to such paralyzing insinuations. If you have any thing to tell me, say it at once, and do not keep me in this maddening suspense!" Virgie commanded grasping the woman by the wrist, and transfixing her with her ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... shed hot and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of the raging gun-fire ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... It is maddening to read all this ignoble clap-trap, written by European wiseacres concerning this country. Not one knows the people, not one knows the accidental agencies which neutralize what is grand and devoted ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... of Lynn, Massachusetts, rose, and said: I ask permission to pay a few words. I have never before addressed a promiscuous assembly; nor is it now the maddening rush of those voices, which is the indication of a moral whirlwind; nor is it the crashing of those windows, which is the indication of a moral earthquake, that calls me before you. No, these pass unheeded by me. But it is the "still small voice within," which may not be withstood, that bids ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and sweet May breath—and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly, and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Lunardi. Tytler's ascent, however, was almost a failure, by his employing the dangerous and unmanageable Montgolfier principle. After several ineffectual attempts, Tytler, finding that he could not carry up his fire-stove with him, determined, in the maddening desperation of disappointment, to go without this his sole sustaining power. Jumping into his car, which was no other than a common crate used for packing earthenware, he and the balloon ascended from Comely Garden, and immediately afterwards fell in the Restalrig Road. ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... of hell! 430 Forth from the pass in tumult driven, Like chaff before the wind of heaven, The archery appear; For life! for life! their flight they ply— And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry, 435 And plaids and bonnets waving high, And broadswords flashing to the sky, Are maddening in the rear. Onward they drive, in dreadful race, Pursuers and pursued; 440 Before that tide of flight and chase, How shall it keep its rooted place, The spearmen's twilight wood? 'Down, down,' cried Mar, 'your lances down! Bear back both friend and foe!' 445 Like reeds before the tempest's ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... That buzz was maddening. For three long hours I had to sit there and listen to the children as they droned over and over their lessons. Yet this was my life's work. To my care Six Stars had intrusted her young, and I should be proud of that trust and earnest ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... other sadly, and pass on without speaking. Why did not the women come out? They never did. They were practising on her, and persuading her to try and forget me. Oh, the weary, weary days! Oh, the maddening time! At last a doctor's chariot used to draw up before the General's house every day. Was she ill? I fear I was rather glad she was ill. My own suffering was so infernal, that I greedily wanted her to share my ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I was born when I was very young and have been desperately tidy about my morals ever since, but for fear of stumbling just because I'm so bored I have entrenched myself behind a maddening routine. Six months here ought to put ballast into the brain of ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... of southern suns, Where's life's warm current maddening runs, In one quick circling stream; But dearer far's the mellow light Which trembling shines, reflected bright In ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... atmosphere of almost hilarious enjoyment that the distinguished Commission arrived a few minutes before noon, just as Jasper's barbecue-pits were beginning to send forth absolutely maddening aromas. ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... who were paddling felt no fatigue. They knew that at night they were to have a feast. Already the fires of the maddening drink had made the blood in their dull veins course quickly. They anticipated the excitement that would make them forget they had ever been cold or hungry; and bring to them bright dreams of that ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... three formed together one of the most perplexing, maddening triangles that ever disturbed the society ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... that Henry would come over to her, and hold her in his arms while Mr. Archer, with maddening deliberation, glanced through the long typewritten document—but Henry had turned his back, and was ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... excitement. What practical effect would hereafter be given to the opinion of six out of the nine judges in that Court might depend on many things. But to the Republicans, who appealed much to antiquity, it was maddening to be thus assured that their whole "platform" was unconstitutional. In the long run, there seems to be no doubt that Taney helped the cause of freedom. He had tried to make evident the personal sense of compassion for "these unfortunate people" with which he contemplated ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the poison of jealousy in Warden's veins; the recollection of it had caused him to doubt Della's story of what had happened at the line cabin during the blizzard of the preceding winter; it had filled him with the maddening conviction that Lawler had deliberately tried to alienate Della's affections—that Lawler, knowing Della to be vain and frivolous, had intentionally planned the girl's visit ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... all the time the Seer was—" She could not continue. It was maddening to think that while she had been dreaming and planning with the Seer, her father had foreseen that their dreams would come ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... you let yourself have a good time?" she had asked, and the question repeated itself now with maddening insistence. Was he, who had always had everything, now missing ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... one says, "how can healthy organs misbehave in this way? Something must be wrong. There must be some cause. If 'nerves' are not physical, what are they? They surely can't be imaginary." Most emphatically, they are real; nothing could be more maddening than to have some one suggest that our troubles are "mere imagination." No wonder such theories have been more popular with the patient's family than with the patient himself. Many years ago a physician put the whole truth into a few words: "The patient says, 'I cannot'; ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... of the people or purple of kings sway not, not maddening discord among treacherous brethren, nor the Dacians swarming down from the leagued Danube, not the Roman State, or realms ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... before we heard the sound of firing, and shots came in quick succession, maddening us beyond control, for we thought of our men, few in number and scattered over the fort, opposed to some five or ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... maddening, there in the dim darkness under the stairs, with glimmering points of distant earthly light from Lancilly on the opposite hill. One of them might be Helene's window, where she sat ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... among those waving lily-fields and vine-clad slopes. Or the clarion of rebellion rings high and shrill through the complicated debate, and Belshazzar, the story of whose ghastly banquet is told with all the additions of maddening horror, is doing service for Nero the bloody; or Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian tyrant, and all his hosts, are cursed with a yelling curse—a propos of some utterly inappropriate legal point, while to the initiated he stands for Titus the—at last exploded—'Delight ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... swift rush to Dartford through the night; bareheaded he bent forward beside the chauffeur, teeth set, every nerve tense and straining as though his very will power was driving the machine forward. Then there came a maddening slowing down through Dartford streets, a nerve-racking delay until Sam Ogilvy's giant brother had stowed away himself and his satchel in the tonneau; then slow speed to the town limits; a swift hurling forward into space that whirled blackly around them as the great acetylenes split the darkness ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the roundness of the whole universe. He began to find himself continually oppressed by the protuberant nearness and corresponding magnitude of his mother's face, which grafted itself upon his infant psychology by looming with maddening regularity over his cot and consciousness. The peculiar rotundity of this good woman's countenance seemed to illustrate to the rising sun of his genius the ethics of that science at which—had he but lived seventy years later—he might ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... of Paris, Sunday of the toilers and the humble, often have I cursed thee without reason, I have poured whole streams of abusive ink over thy noisy and extravagant joys, over the dust of railway stations filled by thy uproar and the maddening omnibuses that thou takest by assault, over thy tavern songs bawled everywhere from carts adorned with green and pink dresses, on thy barrel-organs grinding out their tunes beneath the balconies ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
