"Madhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given His followers power to expel demons "In My name," and this power of exorcism was one upon which the early Christians specially prided themselves. It is with unconscious sarcasm that Dean Trench puts the question, If one of the disciples "were to enter a madhouse now, how many of the sufferers there he might recognise as 'possessed'?"[42] One may safely say that he would regard all as under the dominion of evil spirits. No other cause of insanity appears to have ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a demoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... my sexual condition. It was a frightful blow to them. My father had the circumstances explained to him; he never understood the matter and never discussed it with me. Had I told him earlier I feel quite certain that, with his despotic nature, he would have put me in a madhouse. My mother and sister have treated me very kindly always. My brother has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sleeping in the porches. A patrol of soldiers passes, and hails you. There is a light yet in one mosque, where some devotees are at prayers all night; and you hear the queerest nasal music proceeding from those pious believers. As you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow still talking to the moon—no sleep for him. He howls and sings there all the night—quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity with his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the bars ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was a madhouse worse than any carnival Charley had ever seen. He made his way, harness and suitcase on his back, through the station crowds and out into the taxi ramp. A line of the new cabs stood there, and Charley managed to grab one inches ahead of a woman with a small, crying child in ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... in that gruesome madhouse. Close beside the fellow on the rocking stone there hung two ropes from rings in the roof. There were iron hooks on their lower ends, and these were passed through the back muscles of another naked man, who kept himself swinging by touching the floor with one ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... gone"—continues Bill—"gone home. I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick. I'm sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse." ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will, into which we may peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in it, attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town; then it was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de la Sante and Sainte Anne's madhouse, and on the left by convents. Light and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black; it was a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... absolutely precluded from the common use of doors. I am afraid Mr. T. P. VANEWORD'S primary conception has been too much for him: he lacks the nice imagination of a WELLS to carry it off. Also he fails to deal with the humour of the position, whether in the madhouse, the court of justice, the manager's office or the palace, an elementary mistake which the most amateur conjurer will always avoid. It is rather the author's misfortune than his fault that his incidental picture of war, introduced ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... wo, wo! the wrath of God, the wrath of God!" When arrested, they obstinately refused to put on clothing. "We are," they observed, "the naked truth." In a day or two, these furious lunatics, who certainly deserved a madhouse rather than the scaffold, were all executed. The numbers of the sect increased with the martyrdom to which they were exposed, and the disorder spread to every part of the Netherlands. Many were put to death in lingering torments, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... disappointment and horror when, upon the conclusion of my narrative, certain papers were signed by my uncle, and, without warning, I found myself arrested and hurried away to dismal and fearful confinement in a madhouse, where I remained for twenty-eight years—long, tedious, frightful ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Arranmore answered, lightly, "outside the madhouse. For the realization of life comes only hand in hand with insanity. The people who have come nearest to it carry the mark with them all their life. For the fever of knowledge will scorch even those who peer over the sides of ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... languages, and had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seem to have been written in a madhouse, and, though filled with proofs of his immense reading, degrade him to the level of James Naylor and Ludowick Muggleton. He began a dissertation intended to prove that the law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family which was preserved in the ark. He published ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shadows. A mass of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some of these new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may still possess, it has lost at any ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... cast a glance at Eugene, a cold and fascinating glance; men gifted with this magnetic power can quell furious lunatics in a madhouse by such a glance, it is said. Eugene shook in every limb. There was the sound of wheels in the street, and in another moment a man with a scared face rushed into the room. It was one of M. Taillefer's servants; Mme. Couture recognized the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... tamper with the old astronomer, sir?" roared Sir Tiglath. "Am I in a madhouse? Who are all these crazy Janes! ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... The man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... a madhouse the first day at sea, but the Golden Bough—God! she was madhouse and purgatory rolled into one! My own agility and knowledge saved me from ill usage for the moment, since the mates had plenty of ignorant, clumsy material to work upon. Such material! I never before ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... nothing for it but a madhouse. The sufferer was consigned to the private asylum of Dr. Cotton, at St. Alban's. An ill-chosen physician Dr. Cotton would have been, if the malady had really had its source in religion; for he was himself a pious man, a writer of ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... painfully slow in a department where discharges are unheard of and resignations rare. When I started clerking for this madhouse I was assistant to the assistant Chief Clerk's assistant. Now, ten years later, by dint of mighty effort and a cultivated facility for avoiding Senatorial investigations, I've succeeded in losing only one ...
— Lighter Than You Think • Nelson Bond
... of correction, in case the things that are done in your house, sir, are done with your knowledge and consent; and in a madhouse if they are done without ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... some sort does over Schandau, is the Sonnenstein: Sonnenstein too was a Fortress in those days of Friedrich, but not impregnable, if judged worth taking. The Austrians took it, a year or two hence; Friedrich retook it, dismantled it: 'the Sonnenstein is now a Madhouse,' say the Guide-books. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... few clothes in a little bag that I could carry with me, and I kept my mind on the watch. My father's silence—his letting drop that subject of the Count's offer—made me feel sure that there was a plan against me. I felt as if it had been a plan to take me to a madhouse. I once saw a picture of a madhouse, that I could never forget; it seemed to me very much like some of the life I had seen—the people strutting, quarreling, leering—the faces with cunning and malice in them. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... surprised that the feeling in the whole Wupper Valley is becoming more and more discontented, and the military are now hatching new measures of violence in order to be able to master this discontent. One would think that such things came from the madhouse. In reality they represent conditions under martial law, and this case is ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... right; but he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he said, "I call it the late Republican party," it was with a chuckle so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a pretty stiff partisan could have ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... fact, there have been some labels that would never come off! The public is amused by it, you know; there were only you fellows to believe in the genius of that big ridiculous lunatic, who will be locked up in a madhouse one of these ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... today that our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be effected by violence pure and simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If you resist the selling ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... "Alexander the Great," whilst confined in a madhouse, was visited by Sir Roger L'Estrange, of whose political abilities Lee entertained no very high opinion. Upon the knight inquiring whether the poet knew ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss —— sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... folks, unseen 'tis true, but still real to me, they shook their gray heads ominously, and whispering to my mother said, "Mark our words, that girl will one day be crazy. In ten years more she will be an inmate of the madhouse!" ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... and then, giving way to the maddening desire, he and his comrade-in-debauchery went in, as they said, for a regular spree. It lasted for more than a week, and when it came to an end, the two men, with cracked lips, bloodshot eyes, and haggard faces, looked as if they had just escaped from a madhouse. ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... lowest order of reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells of a madhouse.[3146] From the 19th of August he excites people to attack the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... noiselessly out the back door. With hands clenched tight she forced herself to walk slowly across the foot-bridge, but when the bushes hid her, she broke into a run as though she were crazed and escaping a madhouse. At the foot of the spur she turned swiftly up the mountain and climbed madly, with one hand tight against the little cross at her throat. He was going away and she must tell him—she must tell him—what? Behind her a voice was calling, ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it may convince you of my ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... l'escalier?' As we went through the coffee-room, the loungers looked at her with surprise. She followed me without more words, ran by me on the stairs, and in a moment beat fiercely on the door, crying, 'Ouvrez! open! quick!' Then there was that madhouse scene." ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... that the man was crazy, released his wife, and sent the husband to the madhouse; where he remained some days, till the wife, pitying his condition, contrived to get him released by the following stratagem. She visited her husband, and desired him when any one inquired of him if he had seen it rain flesh and fish, to answer, "No: who ever saw it ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... treatises contemplating guarantee and competition between associates at the same time, without any mention of social capital and without any designation of purpose, would pass for a work of transcendental charlatanism, whose author could readily be sent to a madhouse, provided the magistrates would consent to regard ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... through the "delouser" at Camp Dix, Battery D was moved to another section of barracks, near the discharge center. Clerical details were sent to the discharge center, known as the "madhouse," each day, to assist in getting out the paper work for official discharge of the outfits scheduled for muster ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an English traveller in Spain, about 1676. The document relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions. After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait. He is visited by a sinister form, who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... out into the streets with half-a-crown in his pocket, and a fixed determination to know the truth, sooner or later, about himself. At the same time he had a great fear of letting any one know the extent of the blanks in his memory. He thought that people might shut him up in a madhouse if he told them that he could not recollect his own name. A certain amount of intellectual force and knowledge remained to him. He could read, and understand what he read. But of his own history he had absolutely no idea; and the only clue to it that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... give this young savage arbitrary power, let him inherit the empire of the world, remove all restraints on his will, and allow him to riot in the mad caprices of sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... center of the column, surrounded by troopers. For a time they were both silent. Barney was wondering if he had accidentally tumbled into the private grounds of Lutha's largest madhouse, or if, in reality, these people mistook him for the ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... husband's horrible death deprived my mother of reason. She lived a few months after his execution; but never recovered her faculties. I was their only child; and was left penniless to begin life as the son of a father who had been hanged, and of a mother who had died in a public madhouse. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... What has become of your pipe? I saw you put your pipe in your coat pocket. You did it when you set me down among the trees where she could see me! You are in league with her—she is coming to meet you here—you know she does not like tobacco-smoke. Are you two going to put me in the madhouse?" ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Leonie Hetth that Jan Cuxson was straight and thoroughbred, and that his love was pure, else might it have gone badly with her, bringing her perchance to the door of the madhouse; for there is but a hair's breadth between those who are wakened roughly from the sleep in which they walk, and act, and speak, and those ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... to plunge and turn and back and snarl. Before you could say 'Craps! you lose,' them shave-tails was giving the grandest exhibition of animal idiocy in the Territory, barring the teamster. He follered their trail to the madhouse, yanking the mouths out of ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... arrived to find the home of Judge Norman L. Carter an upset madhouse. He was stopped at the front door by a secretary at a small desk whose purpose was to screen the visitors and to log them in and out in addition to being decorative. Above her left breast was a large enamelled button, red on top, white in the middle as a broad ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... had of her. I can tell you, it was something to remember. Of course, I got off scot free myself—as you can see. She did her best to break up my pluck for me tho'. She jolly near drove as fine a fellow as ever lived into a madhouse. What ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... The numbers massacred are, in Historical fantasy, 'between two and three thousand;' or indeed they are 'upwards of six thousand,' for Peltier (in vision) saw them massacring the very patients of the Bicetre Madhouse 'with grape-shot;' nay finally they are 'twelve thousand' and odd hundreds,—not more than that. (See Hist. Parl. xvii. 421, 422.) In Arithmetical ciphers, and Lists drawn up by accurate Advocate Maton, the number, including two hundred and two priests, three ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the garden is good, and house and the prospect admirable; the other my Lord Brooke's [Robert Lord Brooke, ob. 1676. Evelyn mentions this garden as Lady Brooke's. Brooke House at Clapton, was lately occupied as a private madhouse.] where the gardens are much better, but the house not so good, nor the prospect good at all. But the gardens are excellent; and here I first saw oranges grow: some green, some half, some a quarter, and some full ripe, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... her," he thought, "the canal, the madhouse, or... at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that you're such a stupid ass as to hang round here when there's no occasion for it?" roared the engineer, furiously. "You ought to be shut up in a madhouse." ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... road at our first interview, Mac Fane recollected that an intimate of his had just set up what was to him a new trade, in the neighbourhood; that of being the keeper of a madhouse. He determined to go and propose the business to him; and as the fellow was preparing to advertise for lunatics, but had not yet got a single patient, there was a complete opening for such ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... lady, this is a delusion; you really must not give way to this kind of thing," murmured the doctor, rather complacently. He had a son-in-law who kept a private madhouse at Wimbledon, and began to think Mrs. Granger was drifting that way. It was sad, of course, a sweet young woman like that; but patients are patients, and Daniel Granger's ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... dragged before a criminal tribunal, on so horrible and degrading a charge. They applied, therefore, to the Regent, to intervene his power; to treat the Count as having acted under an access of his mental malady; and to shut him up in a madhouse. The Regent was deaf to their solicitations. He replied, coldly, that if the Count was a madman, one could not get rid too quickly of madmen who were furious in their insanity. The crime was too public and atrocious to be hushed up or slurred ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... and knowledge, and, repenting of his bargain, tries again and again to persuade some desperate human to change places with him— penetrates to the refuge of misery, the death chamber, even the madhouse, seeking one in such utter agony as to accept his help, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... may be believed, when the hero of it was well known to be fully qualified for one of the deepest dungeons of a madhouse. I hope, for the sake of society, and the repose of the world, that the rest of Madame R——'s admirers have not united to their passion the bewildered imagination, which fatally distinguished, and finally closed the career ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... musicale. She had thought a great deal about him and particularly about his problem. She felt a great desire to know everything—all the details of the unfortunate circumstance that had driven his wife into a madhouse, and yet whenever her mother broached the subject Claire changed the topic with curious panic. She seemed to dread the hard, almost triumphant manner that her mother assumed in tracking misfortune to its lair and gloating over it. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... that you were his child and mine. I fought like a wild beast for my dead child's rights; but even I was mastered in the end. They threatened me—yes, James Colquhoun, in my husband's name, threatened me—with a madhouse, if I did not put away from me the suspicion that I had conceived. They assured me that Brian was not dead; that it was Vincenza's child that had died; that I was incapable of distinguishing one baby from another—and so on. They said that I should be separated ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse? ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... and useful book might be made out of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their glory. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... wild animals, rats do the greatest number of "impossible" things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning until a madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my traps and poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly asking: Are rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer to that was furnished by an old he-one who left his tail in my steel trap, but a little later caught ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them across a mile of open country, under a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon forget ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... published his "Lettres Philosophiques," in which it must be confessed there were passages which justified Voltaire's assertion that Maupertius was at one time insane, and was confined for some years in a madhouse at Montpellier. Maupertius proposed in these letters that a Latin city should be built, and this majestic and beautiful tongue brought to life again. He proposed, also, that a hole should be dug to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... agreeable party. We are now thinking of making our escape from this hotel, and of taking a horseback journey into Michoacn, which shall occupy a month or six weeks. Meantime I am visiting, with the Seorita ——-, every hospital, jail, college, and madhouse in Mexico! ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... dissolve in a moral anarchy. But with regard to the works of man, or that part of them which is supposed to aim at beauty, we are in a state of aesthetic anarchy, because there is a whole vast conspiracy, itself unconscious for the most part, to persuade us that we like what no human being out of a madhouse could like. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... all?' said the custom-house people, thinking that they were a few simpletons escaped out of a madhouse. On went the custom-house people. After a little time they came back. The smugglers had just got out their last tub. Some clouds meantime had come over the moon. 'Well, my men, have you got the moon at ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... spread out over the forest, roll through the night, unbroken and ceaseless, near and far, as if the whole land had been one immense drum booming out steadily an appeal to heaven. And through the deep and tremendous noise sudden yells that resembled snatches of songs from a madhouse darted shrill and high in discordant jets of sound which seemed to rush far above the earth and drive all peace from under ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... special invitation—the sanctuary, the mystery, the hallowed ground: here it was, crammed with men, clubs, sticks, torches, pistols; filled with a deafening noise, oaths, shouts, screams, hootings; changed all at once into a bear-garden, a madhouse, an infernal temple: men darting in and out, by door and window, smashing the glass, turning the taps, drinking liquor out of China punchbowls, sitting astride of casks, smoking private and personal ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Blount; and while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman. The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... misapplied to the stoical. Karlov was a stoic, not a philosopher, or he would not have been the victim of his present obsession. The idea of live and let live has never been the propaganda of the anarch. To the anarch the death of some body or the destruction of some thing is the cornerstone to his madhouse. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... expression to her passion, and out of them she must construct the vocal accompaniment to the instrumental song, which reaches its culmination in the scene which, instead of receiving a tonal beatification, as it does, ought to be relegated to the silence and darkness of the deepest dungeon of a madhouse or ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Chaudey under the chin, laughingly said to him, "Tomorrow, little one, we shall shoot papa;" in spite of all the madmen and fools that constituted the Commune de Paris, who after being guilty of more extravagances than are necessary to get a man sent to the Madhouse of Charenton, and more crimes than are sufficient to shut him up in prison at Sainte-Pelagie, had managed, by means of every form, of wickedness and excess, to make our beloved Paris a frightened slave, crouching to earth under their abominable tyranny; in spite of everything, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the panic-stricken, the dazed, the hilarious, the indignant and the guilty wretches like myself, who were wondering how in thunder there was going to be any explaining done, that chapel was just as coherent as a madhouse. And then Hogboom himself burst in a side door, and it took seven of us to prevent him from reducing Perkins to a paste and frescoing him all over the chapel walls. Everybody was rattled but Prexy. I think Prexy's ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... he believed had been written to drive him to suicide. He went away and tried to hang himself; the garter breaking, he then resolved to drown himself; but, being hindered by some occurrence, repented for the moment. He was soon after sent to a madhouse ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... in an age of paradoxes, and have heard several notions seriously defended, of which some would, not many years ago, have condemned their abetter to a prison or a madhouse, and would have been heard by the wisest of our ancestors with laughter or detestation; but I did not expect that the most hardy innovator would have shocked my understanding with a position like this, or have asserted that a law ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... upon no ceremony with me. It is true I was only a madhouse warder, and they probably did not consider it necessary to do so; but I question very much whether Simon Hart, the engineer, would have received any more ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... clusters on the pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up and down the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way, constantly. In the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse; a low, contracted, miserable building, looking straight upon the street, without the smallest screen or court-yard; where chattering mad-men and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... bony figure and a masculine voice, was, in right of these qualities, what is commonly called a strong-minded woman; and who, if she could, would have established her claim to the title, and have shown herself, mentally speaking, a perfect Samson, by shutting up her brother-in-law in a private madhouse, until he proved his complete sanity by loving her very much. Beside her sat her spinster daughters, three in number, and of gentlemanly deportment, who had so mortified themselves with tight stays, that their tempers were reduced ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... the constabulary officer said dryly. "The chap who suggested the scheme tried to forget it in drink, was cashiered from the army and died of delirium tremens. As for the husband, he is still living—in a madhouse." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... a madhouse, a monstrous pandemonium of prostitutes and maniacs. Now, while the choir boys gave themselves to the men, and while the woman who owned the chapel, mounted the altar caught hold of the phallus of the Christ with one ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... exhilarating manner. The rain ceasing, Caper walked out to see the town, when his arm was suddenly seized, and, turning round, who should it be but Pepe the rash, Pepe the personification of Figaro: a character impossible for northern people to place outside of a madhouse, yet daily to be found in southern Europe. Rash, headstrong, full of deviltry, splendid appetite, and not much conscience—volatile, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... signed to the man not to notice, so he contented himself after looking the place over and making up his mind as to what kind of place he had got to by saying, 'Lor' bless yer, sir, I wouldn't mind what was said to me in a bloomin' madhouse. I pity ye and the guv'nor for havin' to live in the house with a wild ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... disapprove of the republican principles and features of our constitution, and would, I believe, welcome any public calamity (war with England excepted) which might lessen the confidence of our country in those principles and forms. I have generally considered them rather as subjects for a madhouse. But they are now playing a game of the most mischievous tendency, without perhaps being themselves aware of it. They are endeavoring to convince England, that we suffer more by the embargo than they do, and that, if they will but hold ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... congenital epilepsy, of a hundred terrible maladies, which from birth have lurked in the child, biding the opportunity of attack, suddenly spring from their lairs, and hurry her to the grave or the madhouse. If we ask why so many fair girls of eighteen or twenty are followed by weeping friends to an early tomb, the answer is, chiefly from diseases which had their origin at the period ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, "If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... talking of what I ought never to have heard, and it seemed as if the walls were closing me in so that I could not move to let them know I was there. I said to myself, 'I shall go mad after this,' and I thought of you all coming to see me in the madhouse, your kind face, Morris, coming up distinctly before me, just as it would look at me if I were really crazed. But all this was swept away like a hurricane when I heard the rest, the part ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... indeed, who wrought the murder? Was she living or dead? Had my father put upon her some grievous wrong? Had he pretended to get her out of the way? Had he buried her alive, so to speak, in some prison or madhouse? Had she returned in disguise from the asylum or the living grave to avenge herself and murder him? In my present frame of mind, no idea was too wild or too strange for me to entertain. If this strain continued ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... him, he never afterwards troubled his Royal Self in the slightest Manner to put a stop to the Hellish Torments inflicted on a Poor Wretch, who had, at the most, but scratched his Flesh, and for whom the most fitting Punishment would have been a Cell in a Madhouse. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... that first night after Molly Brownwell's note came to him, he saw his life as it was, with things squarely in their relations. Of course this light did not stay with him always; at times in his loneliness the old cloud of wild yearning would come over him, and he would rattle the bars of his madhouse until he could fight his way out to the clean air of Heaven under the stars. And at such times he would elude Dolan, and walk far away from the town in fields and meadows and woods struggling back to sanity—sometimes ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... called insane, he can only be termed delirious. If every one, who possesses mistaken ideas, or who puts false estimates on things, was liable to confinement, I know not who of my readers might not tremble at the sight of a madhouse! ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the Countess gravely, seeing me smile, "for this, you must know, is a mixture of the courts of Italy and Russia among the Alps. It is to my brother a very serious matter. To me it is the Fair of Asnieres and the madhouse at Charenton ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... in theirs. It was true that there was another side to this truly patriarchal picture. In a city of the Far West, wrote an eloquent paragraph writer, a pale face, once divinely beautiful, was often seen at the barred window of a madhouse, and eyes that had once looked too tenderly into those of the Nickelville Solomon stared wildly at the palm-trees in the asylum grounds. This ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and clowns, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... amusing, and it is sometimes politically profitable, to picture the City of Washington as a madhouse, with the Congress and the Administration disrupted with confusion and indecision and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... who sets Heaven at defiance? Once, who could compete with me at school or college? and what might I not have been had you not, when I was struck down by illness, taken advantage of my weakness, and by sending me to a madhouse, confirmed my malady; but fool as you called me, I can see that Heaven's retributive justice has chastised you through life. Me you got into your power on the ground that I was insane, and the mind of the daughter, in whom you took such pride, often totters on its throne; ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... her. "Francis Ledsam has been a tremendous worker. It is work which keeps a man sane. Brilliancy without the capacity for work drives people to the madhouse." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in his madhouse, he persists in his delusion; insists that it still remains for him to sacrifice his sister Clara; and twice breaks away in wild efforts to find and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Frank, suddenly stopping and planting himself against a tree. "It would be suicide to advance another step. And she is your niece, you say. Pray intercede for me, or in less than a month I shall be making faces through the iron grating of some madhouse." ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... they rush to and fro, like maniacs let out of a madhouse. Giving to the dead bodies only a passing glance, then going on in fear of finding others by which they will surely stay; all the time talking, interrogating, wildly gesticulating, now questioning Oris ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... the Zebra was more like a madhouse than one of his Majesty's ships. What authority there was was maintained at the end of the cat-o'-nine-tails. As for the enthusiasm and patriotic ardour which are usually supposed to hail the prospect of close-quarters with the enemy, one would have had to listen long and hard ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... what he liked with impunity. The disorder was increased by a rumour, that the Duke of Wellington was retreating towards Brussels, in a sort of running fight, closely pursued by the enemy; the terror of the fugitives now almost amounted to frenzy, and they flew like maniacs escaping from a madhouse. It is scarcely possible to imagine a more distressing scene. A great deal of rain had fallen during the night, and the unhappy fugitives were obliged literally to wade through mud. I had, from the first, determined to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... Dunwold, and that he could be quietly captured here. But, in spite of the utmost vigilance, he was not found or traced; and this very morning I received a letter from Doctor Bent, the proprietor of the madhouse, stating that he had furnished the London police with a description of his ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the "Rake's Progress" and it was a warning to all young men against leading too gay a life. It showed the "Rake" at the beginning of his misfortunes, gambling, and in the last reaping the reward of his follies in a debtor's prison and the madhouse. There are eight pictures in ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... discontent to bed. After being in bed, my people come and say there is a great stinke of burning, but no smoake. We called up Sir J. Minnes's and Sir W. Batten's people, and Griffin, and the people at the madhouse, but nothing could be found to give occasion to it. At this trouble we were till past three o'clock, and then the stinke ceasing, I to sleep, and my people to bed, and lay very long ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to the station was a crisp little affair. Fogerty and myself rose at five and went forth to the shuttle. The subway was a madhouse. We shuttled ourselves to death. At 5.30 we were at the Times Square end of the shuttle, at 5.45 we were at Williams, at 6 o'clock we had somehow managed to get ourselves on the east side end of the shuttle, five minutes later we were back at Times Square, ten minutes later we were ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... of his most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the true home of reason is the madhouse. "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he is unable to conduct a logical ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman |
