"Demented" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me over, and settle everything for me, as if I was not a living soul, but a plant in a pot. Perhaps they were not unsupported by experience. I suppose too many of us would have thought it so; there are flunkeys in all ranks, and to spare. Perhaps the true absurdity was the way in which I sat, demented, inarticulate, staring at Lillian, and only caring for any word which seemed to augur a chance of seeing her again; instead of saying, as I felt, that I had no wish whatever to rise above my station; no intention whatever of being sent to training schools or colleges, or anywhere ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... clearly demented and must be humoured. "Well, you must wait till the morn's morning. It's very near dark now, and those are two ugly customers wandering about yonder. You'd better sleep the night ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... this no longer, he feared the girl's mind would become demented if allowed to continue in such a strain; he stole over, and putting his arms gently around her, he drew her away from the figure of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... their religious frenzy. 'Smite the Prelatists!' they howled. 'Down with the friends of Antichrist! Cut them off even at the horns of the altar! Down with them!' On either side they massed, a wild, half-demented crowd, some with arms and some without, but filled to a man with the very spirit ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with a thousand memories. Had I been present to listen to him then, I should doubtless have been enabled to add considerably to my stock of early anecdotes. He seemed to have brought away from this visit a peculiarly vivid recollection of "poor crazy Joe Gibson." This demented being was sometimes easily controlled, and willing to be useful; at other times, he was perfectly furious and ungovernable. Few people knew how to manage him; but Isaac's parents acquired great influence over him by their uniform system of forbearance ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... bred up, where such remote precautions are taken against the pursuits of justice? What would my father or Reuben Butler think if I were to tell them there are sic folk in the world? And to abuse the simplicity of this demented creature! Oh, that I were but safe at hame amang mine ain leal and true people! and I'll bless God, while I have breath, that placed me amongst those who live in His fear, and under the shadow ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... studying the arrival of trains list at Paddington in order to ascertain from which platform the 1.20 p.m. started; she had assumed the slightly demented appearance that so many take when they enter a railway station. Turning from the poster distractedly, she clutched at the arm of a sailor, and was putting to him agitated inquiries concerning the Great Western service when Gertie Higham interposed, ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... for an instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... across his disordered brain, swift as lightning flashes. In a moment Canidia was forgotten, and he was Pentheus, struggling with Agave and her demented crew. They were tearing him to pieces, their fingers were at his throat. Then he was in the East, a defenceless traveller in the tropical desert, surrounded by Thugs. He pointed to one particular ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... and cigarettes and candy and books. And they all wanted us to hurry back to marry them.... Then—when the months had gone by and the novelty had worn off—when we went against the hell of real war—sick or worn out, sleepless and miserable, crippled or half demented with terror and dread and longing for home—then, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... from the archdeacon's hand upon the table, and the start he made was so great as to make his wife jump up from her chair. Not accept the deanship! If it really ended in this, there would be no longer any doubt that his father-in-law was demented. The question now was whether a clergyman with low rank and preferment amounting to less than L200 a year should accept high rank, L1,200 a year, and one of the most desirable positions which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to scurry wildly in Scraggy's head. Everett's threat to kill her had not penetrated the demented brain, and his rough handling had been her only fright. She could think of nothing but that Lem was waiting for them at ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened, grown-up eyes—exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of the contrast—"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man's ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... light-headed I think—we saw a camp of the insane in the woods—a fresh relay from Mulhaus. We talked with their guards—being in Landwehr uniform it was easy. The insane were clothed like miners. Late that night we exchanged clothes with two poor, demented creatures who retained sufficient reason, however, to realise that our uniforms meant freedom.... They crept away into the forest. We remained.... And marched at dawn—straight into the jaws of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... for his forlorn condition and apparently crazed intellect touched her womanly heart. She was a widow, and rather poor; consequently she had seen trouble enough to enable her to feel for the unfortunate. She imagined that the demented boy had wandered away from his friends or keepers; so she tried to find out whence he had come, in order that she might take measures to return him; but all her references to neighbouring towns and villages, and all her inquiries ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ants'll eat folks. They re-yards sech reepasts as festivals, an' seasons of reelaxation from the sterner dooties of a ant. I recalls once how we loses Locoed Charlie, which demented party I b'lieve I mentions to you prior. This yere Charlie takes a day off from where he's workin'—at least he calls it labor- -at the stage corrals, an' goes curvin' over to Red Dog. Charlie tanks up on the whiskey ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... man must surely be demented!" thought the old farmer. "I wonder what he will do next? He will be calling the land water, and the water land; and be speaking of light where there is darkness, and of darkness where it is light." However, he kept his ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... and steeking his nieves, he would seem to threaten him wi' a leatherin'. A'thegither he was desperate impudent, and eneuch to try the patience of a saunt, no to spak o' a het-bluided Heelandman. It was gude for sair een to see how Donald behavit on this occasion. He raged like ane demented, misca'ing the monkey beyond measure, and swearing as mony Gaelic aiths as micht hae sair'd an ordinar man for a twalmonth. During this time, I never sterr'd a foot, but keepit keeking frae the back shop upon a' that was ganging on. I was highly delighted; and jealousing that Nosey was ower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... across the hedge and dropped through a mat of brambles, dragging my rug after me. The fall landed me on all-fours upon the sunken high road, along which I ran as one demented—stark naked, too—a small Jack of Bedlam under the broadening eye of day; ran past Miss Belcher's entrance gate with its sentinel masses of tall laurels, and had reached the bend of the road opening the low cottage into view, when a sudden ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the matter with you?" drawled her mother, looking through the open door-way of her adjacent room. "You act as if you were demented." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... that the plans were inferior, defective, or worthless. Not at all! Mr. Cohen swore that he had never ordered the plans and, in fact, had never seen the architect in his life! He alleged that until the suit was brought he had never even heard of him, and that either the architect was demented or a liar, or else some other Cohen had given the order. The architect and his lawyer were thunderstruck, but they had no witnesses to corroborate their contentions, since no one had ever seen Cohen in the other's office. The jury disagreed and the architect in some ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... who mourned the unhappy fate of the poor village maiden, the grief of her lover, George Merrideth, had been observed to be the wildest. For some days, he had wandered about like one demented; and all who witnessed, respected and commiserated his anguish. Latterly, however, he had disappeared entirely from the public view; and it was hinted by some, that his mind had been seriously affected by the occurrence. One morning, Mr. Manners was suddenly sent for to attend at his deathbed. When ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented with a ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Paris, Vienna, London. His immorality was notorious,—he was not faithful in love, and his children were sent to a foundling asylum. He was poverty-stricken, dishonest, discontented, and, in his last years, demented. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... I made no attempt to master these sensations. It occurred to me that fear is merely a physical reaction that cannot be avoided. If a man reacts so violently that he is overcome and rushes about as though he were demented, it is no more his fault than if he shivers with cold. A man can stop shivering by an effort of the will, but only to a certain extent. And no effort of the will can prevent him from feeling cold. In the same way, no effort of the will can prevent him from feeling ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... could. The latter uttered a sharp command which brought the crew to their feet in an instant, and, in an incredibly short space of time, the proa came around, and, scarcely losing any headway, moved back toward the spot where the demented man had sprung into the sea, which was now a ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... be," he cried. "He is some puir demented creature fitter for Bedlam than anywhere else; and we will see that he be sent thither; but molest him not till we hae spoken wi' him, and certified his condition more fully. Quit not the position ye ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... fell purpose was working in my mind, but a certain high tragedy in my aspect warned him to silence; so he only dogged me around the corners of the house, eyed me askance from the wood-shed, and peeped through the crevices of the demented little barn. But his vigilance bore no fruit. I but walked moodily "with folded arms and fixed eyes," or struck out new paths at random, so long as there were any vestiges of his creation extant. His time and patience being at length exhausted, he went into the field to immolate himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... gallant seaman and accomplished gentleman reduced to such a pass, and to think that imagination and delusion can cow a mind to which real danger was but the salt of life. Was ever a man in such a position as I, between a demented captain and a ghost-seeing mate? I sometimes think I am the only really sane man aboard the vessel—except perhaps the second engineer, who is a kind of ruminant, and would care nothing for all the fiends in ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the center of the room, and formed an oasis of roses and lilies upon a desert of shabby green drugget. Knitted curtains shaded the windows, in which hung wire baskets of horrible-looking plants of the cactus species, that grew downward, like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... and brangled his head, assevered that he was transported and in an ecstasy. Catullus after the same manner maketh mention, in his Berecynthia and Atys, of the place wherein the Menades, Bacchical women, she-priests of the Lyaean god, and demented prophetesses, carrying ivy boughs in their hands, did shake their heads. As in the like case, amongst the Galli, the gelded priests of Cybele were wont to do in the celebrating of their festivals. Whence, too, according to the sense of the ancient theologues, she herself has her ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a sledge.' Shure, we thought it was demented he was, but he was the only cool man, an' orders were orders. Dooley, he found one, an' then the captain went to the rails an' gave it a swing, an' struck the bolts crosswise like, so that the heads flew off, like they was shootin' stars. Then ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... this uncommon inscription! The meagre but sufficient identification of the deceased; the impudent candor of confession; the brutal anathema; the ludicrous change of sex and sentiment—all marked this record as the work of one who must have been at least as much demented as bereaved. I felt that any further disclosure would be a paltry anti-climax, and with an unconscious regard for dramatic effect turned squarely about and walked away. Nor did I return to that part of the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... The cult of the Demon is no more insane than that of God. One is rotten and the other resplendent, that is all. By your reckoning all people who worship any god whatever would be demented. No. The affiliates of Satanism are mystics of a vile order, but they are mystics. Now, it is highly probable that their exaltations into the extra-terrestrial of Evil coincide with the rages of their frenzied senses, for lechery is the wet nurse of Demonism. Medicine classes, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... card-houses worse than you? Then, too, the blood that's spilt by fond desires, The swords that men will use to poke their fires! When Marius killed his mistress t'other day And broke his neck, was he demented, say? Or would you call him criminal instead, And stigmatize his heart to save his head, Following the common fallacy, which founds A different ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... demented laugh of the drowning sailor, and then the two disappeared—down, down into the ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... remarked the captain. "But I cannot understand," he continued, "why that man persists in acting so strangely. He must know by this time that we have seen him and will rescue him, yet he continues to signal with his arms and that red rag as though he were demented. It would not greatly surprise me to find, when we get him on board, that his brain has given way with the horror of ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... down to their sockets. The sister lay back stone-dead in her chair, while the two brothers sat on each side of her laughing, shouting, and singing, the senses stricken clean out of them. All three of them, the dead woman and the two demented men, retained upon their faces an expression of the utmost horror—a convulsion of terror which was dreadful to look upon. There was no sign of the presence of anyone in the house, except Mrs. Porter, the old cook and housekeeper, ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bloody cutting themselves with Knives, as the Priests of Baal did, could not be a GOD, a good and beneficent Being, but must be a cruel, voracious and devouring Devil, whose End was not the Good, but the Destruction of his Creatures: But to such a Height was the blind demented World arriv'd to at that Time, that in these sordid and corrupt Ways, they went on worshiping dumb Idols, and offering human Sacrifices to them, and in a Word, committing all the most horrid and absurd Abominations that they were capable of, or that the Devil ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... the latter, in 1805, from a fall received on leaving an inn where he spent his time after becoming well-to-do. His wife, who was a very harsh aunt of Flore's. Lastly the brother and brother-in-law of this girl's guardians, the real father of "La Rabouilleuse," who died in 1799, a demented widower, in the hospital of Bourges. [A ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... in this darker dream demented to have wrestled with its pleasure and its pain: it is something to have sinned, and have repented: it is something to ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... delight, an instant later, and then began jumping straight up and down like one demented. Anderson Crow stopped so abruptly that his knees were stiff for weeks. Jackie Blake's wild dream had come true. The huge automobile had struck the washout, and it was now lying at the base of the bluff, smashed to pieces on the rocks! By the dim ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... riding hard, did she know a moment's relief. The physical exertion eased the inward tumult, but she would not slacken for an instant. She felt that to do so would be to lose her reason. Beelzebub, galloping after her, thought her demented already. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... young gentlemen a scampering along here, and up that there lane. Bees they demented? We didn't like to stop them, though somehow we thought ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... end ta By this time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry, unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious a company. And Betty—home—love—peace—how all the tribe of them suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called myself, to be thinking your half-hearted wooing of the woman had left ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... in the West Indies is up, and he and his family return to Ireland. Denham's ship visits Kilfinnan Bay, and he walks on shore, where it is possible he may have been recognised by O'Rourke and by a demented woman, who is not as mad ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... cried Rosamond Lee. "Tell me the story of this demented girl over again in all its details. I was not paying attention before. I did not half ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... elegant Mrs. Jenkins. "We have linchpins." "Have you young apple trees?" asks the nursery-man. "We have whiffletrees." If I had wanted breakfast-caps, shouldn't I have asked for breakfast-caps? Or do the Boston people take their breakfast at one o'clock in the morning? I concluded that the man was demented, and marched out of the shop. When I laid the matter before Halicarnassus, the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... was half demented. Now, I seemed to myself not handsome or rich or elegant enough to possess such a woman, now I was filled with vanity at the thought of it; then I began to fear lest Marguerite had no more than a few days' caprice for me, and I ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... instinctive mimicry and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be no division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human action. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... shower of vitriol poured on a green wound, are these distilled, dire drops of apprehension. Sir, are you guilty that you thus stand dumb? What have you done injurious towards my ward, that you so linger upon the street, and to my queries but gaze like one demented? Sir, I charge you, tell me without more reserve or hesitation, lest at last I listen to you with less of fear than of anger. You ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... sir,' said the General, turning to his Aid, 'Demented! Demented! Might be a dangerous man in camp; must be attended to,' continued the General; striking, as he spoke, vigorous blows across his saddle-bow, with his gauntlet; Tom all the while waiting for a bite, with the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... a still more maddening, "Yes, darling, I quite understand!"—which she knew perfectly well to be an untruth. Really, these good people seemed to think that she was demented, and did not know what she was saying. As a matter of fact, it was exactly the other way about; but she was too tired to argue. And then one day came a sleep when she neither dreamt nor slipped nor fell, but opened her eyes refreshed and cheerful, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... same polite tourist paid a visit to the island to see how the poor demented young man was being looked after, and on these occasions he would take Jock out for quite a long walk, and afterwards assure the family that their guest's health was benefiting greatly. But this gentleman had not visited the island ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... "Like demented wolves they are destroying each other—Pray the God of Justice," quoted she from her husband's letter, "that it may only last; in a few months, then, there will be none of them left, and the people, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... had hardly realised and understood all that was going on around her. At the time when the inner vitality of France first asserted itself and then swept away all that hindered its mad progress, she was tied to the invalid chair of her half-demented father; then, after that, the sheltering walls of the Ursuline Convent had hidden from her mental vision the true meaning of the great conflict, between the Old Era and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... same drug, or other diabolical method, had been used upon us both, and that I, the stronger of the two, had recovered, while she still remained in that half demented state? ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... her shoulders, like a cloak. She drew it, indeed, about her with trembling fingers as if her senses craved the comfort though her detestation of the man who gave it was great. But in truth she was demented now, forgetting even the bleeding lover. She gave little paces on the sand, with one of her shoes gone from her feet, and wrung ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... him this minute. That man's near demented mad at the thought of you marryin'. 'Be the hokey O!' he says whenever I go a-near him, an' then he starts laughin' an' tellin' me it's the great news altogether. 'I wish,' says he, 'the oul' lad was alive. He'd ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... exceptional case of temper, which I mention only to show to what extremities a violent burst of rage may carry a sane individual. We often hear of an uncontrollable temper, but I believe that every man can, if he likes, govern his rage, unless, of course, he is demented. If the vast majority of so-called vicious horses could write the story of their lives, what terrible tales of suffering and injustice they would relate! A horse, unlike a dog, bears punishment in silence, and any ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... from under her window, we could follow her footmarks easily across the lawn to the edge of the mere, where they vanished close to the gravel path which leads out of the grounds. The lake there is eight feet deep, and you can imagine our feelings when we saw that the trail of the poor demented girl came to an end at the edge ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... an inspiration. It was hopeless, she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his idee fixe, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... said, shrugging my shoulders, "I take that for granted." I began to think that the traveller was demented. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... deriding scorn of a superior being. Lucy lay flat on her back, watching him. Her mind worked swiftly. She would have to fight for her body and her life. Her terror had fled with her horror. She was not now afraid of this demented boy. She meant to fight, calculating like a cunning Indian, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... 'Kalifahs' at Simon's Bay. These are festivals in which Mussulman fanatics run knives into their flesh, go into convulsions, &c, to the sound of music, like the Arab described by Houdin. Of course the poor blacks go quite demented. ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... the rage and madness of prejudice and partiality that they will storm at every report of goodness and truth and prosperity in the man, or in the cause, or in the church, or in the party, they are so demented against. Jockey is not the word. There is the last triumph of pure devilry in the way that the prince of the devils turns old Prejudice's very best things—his love of his fathers, his love of the past, his love of order, his love of loyalty, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... for Civilization cries out against your savage enactments! Look at the bulwarks of defence which Asylums and Hospitals lift against the operation of your merciless decree. The maimed, the feeble, the demented, become the wards of religion and charity; the Unfittest of humanity are carefully preserved, and the race is retarded it its development. Civilized legislation and philanthropy are directly opposed to your 'Survival of the Fittest;' and since I am not a tattooed princess of the South Pacific, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of the Moorooroo plain The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, To the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Tupcombe thought his employer demented, so utterly helpless was his appearance just then, and he went out reluctantly. No sooner was he gone than the Squire, with great difficulty, stretched himself over to a cabinet by the bedside, unlocked it, and ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... of a young, half-demented lama, who was most profuse in salutations, and who remained open-mouthed, gazing at us for a considerable time. He was polite and attentive in helping to dry our things in the morning, and, whenever we asked for anything, he ran ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... something somewhere, I don't care if dinner is ready, and Brother's "safe old Secesh" downstairs! Lydia has another boy! Letter has just come, and I am demented about my new ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... be sanctified) having become demented was taken to the hospital and visited by acquaintances. He asked who they were, and they replied: "Thy friends," whereon he took up a stone and assaulted them. They all began to run away, but he exclaimed:—"O pretenders, return. Friends do not flee from friends, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... brutal violence drove a weeping woman out into the cheerless night. He deemed her the Russian's cherished mistress. With a shudder Alixe Delavigne recalled the white face of the discarded mother, whose babe slumbered in peace, while the half-demented woman fled away to the shelter of the house of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the pleasure both are mine, Mr. Renault," he said, which was stilted enough to be civil. "The business, sir, is this: Sir Henry Clinton received me like a gentleman, but as soon as Sir Peter had retired he listened to me as though I were demented when I exposed my plan to burn New York and take the field. I say he used me with scant civility, and bowed me out, like the ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... gave way—except in rare conditions—to a feeling of lofty indifference. He still wrote his impudent and careless letters, which did him considerable harm; he published particularly clever, slightly demented essays in the few journals with whose editors he didn't happen to be quarreling with; he founded both clubs which then expelled him, and periodicals in which he was attacked. Everywhere, and in other ways, he continued to make himself impossible ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... would not be caught. Never before or since have I seen anything like so passionate a revulsion from the depths of despair to exultant, triumphant, uncontrollable joy. He flashed and darted hither and thither as if fairly demented, screaming and shouting, swirling round and round in giddy loops and circles like a leaf in a whirlwind, lying down, and rolling over and over, sidewise and heels over head, and pouring forth a tumultuous flood of ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... him as though he was demented. "A hundred thousand," one said. "There are not that many literate persons on ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... it and him, asked him to wait a bit, whipped out at her back door, luckily met the policeman starting on his rounds, bade him have an eye to the customer in her shop, and came off to show it to me. That young woman is demented enough for anything, and is quite capable of doing it—for some absurd scheme. But do you think it is hers, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as I finished my walk home, whether there could not be some connection between the stroke of Providence which had driven three Cabinet Ministers demented and that gentler touch which had restored Miss Claudia Barriton to good sense and a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... congratulate him, but I found him with not a drop of blood in his face, with dazed eyes, and unable to recognise anyone. He just escaped brain fever. Instead of weeping for joy, the man has nearly died of sorrow. I fetched the doctor, but Koslov sent him away, and walked up and down the room like one demented. Now he is sleeping, so we will not disturb him. I will go, and you must stay, and see that he does not do himself some injury in a fit of melancholy. He listens to no one, and I have been tempted to smack him." Mark spit with vexation. "You can't depend ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... to see my mother, and she was as respectful and kind as though she were her own daughter. Mother has been almost demented ever since father died—she's an old woman. She sits and bows from her chair to everyone she sees. If you left her alone and didn't feed her for three days, I don't believe she would notice it. Well, I took her hand, and I said, 'Give your blessing to this lady, mother, she's going to be ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with his knife, and quickly removed the hide. The people looked upon him with horror; they thought him demented. What was he doing? What was he ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... him to do. He drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. About this time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... demented creature had taken refuge behind a clump of shrubs, and was standing there with eyes dilated with anguish fixed on the Professor and hand pointing to ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... talked. She gave us her maternal views, and incidentally betrayed infamies of her own career. I am a man of the world, but I shuddered at that woman. The suitor who could have risked making her child his wife would have been demented, or sublime. And while she maundered on, gulping from her glass, and chuckling at her jests, the ghastliness of it was that, in the gutter face before us, I could trace a likeness to Jeanne; I think Georges ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... thing," said Corentin. "Let us carry him into his own room. His daughter is half demented, and she will go quite mad when she sees that he is dead; she will fancy ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... not understand his witticisms, and their intelligence did not seem to be awakened until he sputtered obscene words, rough expressions, crippled by his accent. Then all in a chorus began to laugh as if they were demented, falling on the laps of their neighbors, repeating the words which the Baron disfigured purposely in order to make them say filthy things. They vomited at will plenty of them, intoxicated after drinking from the first bottles of wine; and relapsing into their real selves, opening the gates ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... was led to believe that Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic temper; some have said that he is garrulous; that he is demented; that he is utterly changed from the David Livingstone whom people knew as the reverend missionary; that he takes no notes or observations but such as those which no other person could read but himself, and it was reported, before I proceeded to Africa, that he was ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... lamented, thought the Christian world demented, Yet still he felt a rev'rence as he read the Bible o'er, And he thought the modern preacher, though a poor stick for a teacher, Or a broken reed, like Beecher, ought to have his claims looked o'er, And the "tyranny of science" was indeed, he felt quite sure, Our ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... present the words of Draupadi. And he spoke unto Yudhishthira sitting in the midst of the kings, these words,—Draupadi hath asked thee, Whose lord wert thou at the time thou lost me in play? Didst thou lose thyself first or me? Yudhishthira, however sat there like one demented and deprived of reason and gave no answer good or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... write every day, and at first he did so, but before long many weeks passed without his coming, and the postman came up less often to the Claverias, and at last did not come at all—it was ended, the young lieutenant found other amusements in Madrid. Your poor niece was like one demented; the colour in her face faded, she was no longer like the beautiful ripe apricot, with the soft skin that made you long to bite it. She wept like a Magdalen in every corner—and one day the foolish girl fled—and up ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Miss St. John saw him tearing like one demented along the top walk of the captain's garden, and watched for his return. He came far sooner than ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... almost threatening, he is seized with a revulsion once more against the task imposed on him. He springs from his high seat and stands among them begging that rather they will kill him. "Already I feel the night of death closing around me, and must I be forced back into life? You demented! Who shall compel me to live? Death alone it is in your power to give!" He tears open his garment and offers his breast. "Forward, heroes! Slay the sinner with his affliction! The Grail perchance will glow for you ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... matter as that no death had ever occurred in a house that he had sold? If I knew my English vocabulary at all, the tone in which he said the youngest sister "fell ill" meant that she had gone out of her mind. That might explain his change of countenance, and it was just possible that her demented influence still hung about Holmescroft; but the rest was ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... money had come to him as the very irony of Fate. It could not give him the one thing he wished, and he had no other use for it. His dream was over. He felt like an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life. He looked at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... from nowhere to nowhere, of Lydia laughing because her father made great debts and said, "I know, I know"; of Jews running down the street shouting in Yiddish, "Don't do it, don't do it," and being cut down by demented peasants—she called them "cattle"—whilst she looked on interested and even amused; of tutors and governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him. And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,—demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... set myself to tell her of Arthur's double dealing about the estate, and of how he had made Hugh's father believe he was minded to consider the ways of Friends, and at last of how he had borrowed money and had set poor Hugh's half-demented father against him. I did not spare her or him, and the half of what I said I have not set down. The Arnold business I did return to, seeing that it struck her, or seemed to, less than it did me; for to my mind it was ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... next Monday evening, after which I arranged with the Governor to see him Monday, P. M. I saw the letters referred to, which contained the grossest misrepresentations, uttering sentiments I never thought of, or, if I had, should not have expressed there, unless demented. ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... said Doyle, "but he hasn't. The tunes he whistles round the house would drive you demented if so be that you listened to them; but I needn't tell you I ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... closed and struggled. For half a minute Dick, shaking free of the embrace—and this only by striking him on the jaw and half stunning him as they rose on the crest of a swell—was able to grip him by the collar and drag him within reach of the life-belt. But here the demented man managed to wreathe his legs and arms in another and more terrible hold. The pair of them were now cursing horribly, cursing whenever a wave left choking them, and allowed them to cough and sputter for breath. They fought as two men whose lives had pent up an unmitigable hate for this moment. ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... for a single moment. He had the appearance of a man half demented by a passion which could find no outlet. Then he left the room, without salute, without a glance to the right or to the left. Out in the hall, a moment later, they heard a harsh voice of command. The hall door was opened and closed behind the ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Grimshaw is rich and proud and pitiless. Everybody is afraid of him. But Roving Kate is not afraid. Indeed, he seems to be more afraid of her. Wherever he is, she is there. She is wild and bony and ragged. She is, or pretends to be, half demented. She tells fortunes with strange antics and gesticulations, scrawling her prognostications upon stray slips of paper. But Benjamin Grimshaw is the main object of her attention. She hates him, and hates him all the more terribly because she once ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... broke into the room, tragedy in the shape of a man demented. For fifteen years Bellamy had known Arthur Dorward, but this man was surely a stranger! He was hatless, dishevelled, wild. A dull streak of color had mounted almost to his forehead, his ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those years. Teresina loved me in return, and for some two years we lived on happily till one day it was brought to my knowledge that she was unfaithful to me. I was beside myself with grief and mortification and jealous fury. For some hours I just raged up and down my room like one demented, crying like a child one minute, cursing and meditating revenge the next. I felt that I must have blood at all costs to appease my passion—Teresina's or her lover's, or somebody's. I was to meet Teresina that evening as usual towards nine o'clock, and I thought the intervening ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... of the heroes of the Mahabharata,[89] and the various fairy lovers of Europe who lured men to eternal imprisonment inside mountains, or vanished for ever when they were completely under their influence, leaving them demented. The elfin Lilu similarly wooed young women, like the Germanic Laurin of the "Wonderful Rose Garden",[90] who carried away the fair lady Kunhild to his underground dwelling amidst the Tyrolese mountains, or left them haunting the place of their meetings, searching for ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... soldier at the final downfall, swept along in the terrible and fatal storm which, from the frontier to Sedan, in sweeping away the Empire, threatened to sweep away the country; always wise, circumspect, firm in his hope, loving with fraternal affection his comrade Maurice, the demented child of the people, the holocaust doomed to expiation, weeping tears of blood when inexorable destiny chose himself to hew off this rotten limb, and after all had ended—the continual defeats, the frightful civil war, the lost provinces, the thousands of millions of francs to pay—taking ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model from which the genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet, not so painfully either when second thoughts wisely came. 'Ah! who was I, [he says] that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... contain more gold, either in the form of rough nuggets, just as they had been taken from the mine, or dust which had evidently been washed out of the sand of some river. The sight came near to driving them demented, for there were tons of the precious metal; far more of it indeed than they could possibly hope to ever carry away. But even this was not all; for at the far end of the chamber they came upon three great bronze coffers of elaborate ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... tell, gambling had lost all fascination for me from that moment. The world, in which I had moved like one demented, suddenly seemed stripped of all interest or attraction. My rage for gambling had already made me quite indifferent to the usual student's vanities, and when I was freed from this passion also, I suddenly found myself face to face with an ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large. The ultimate destiny of these poor wretches should be a penal settlement where they could be confined during ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... country the Nepaulese ambassador arrives, returning from Pekin with large escort and bound for Lhassa: the ambassador half demented: and Meares, who speaks many languages, is begged by ambassador and escort to accompany the party. He is obliged to miss ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... lost from that moment. She had Len over in a corner again, telling him how easy it was to win, and how this poor demented creature had left all hers there because Judge Ballard probably didn't want to create a scene by making her take it; and mustn't they have a lot of trouble looking after the weak-minded thing all the time! And I could hear her say if one person could do it ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... things many of the learned are more demented than the simple, for the reason that they are in a negative state, which they confirm by means of the knowledges [scientifica] which they have continually and in abundance before their sight ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Plooie! What was you doing in the war?" his jaw would drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... little Swiss girl whom some reckless people brought home and then turned adrift. It will be a real kindness to help her home, and you shall pick her up when you come up to me on your way, and see my child! Oh, didn't I tell you? We had a housemaid once who was demented enough to marry a scamp of a stoker on one of the Thames steamers. He deserted her, and I found her living, or rather dying, in an awful place at Rotherhithe, surrounded by tipsy women, raging in opposite corners. I got her into a decent room, but too late to save her life—and a good thing ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded as demented. One can only understand such a judgment as an isolated fact. But in England this monstrous stupidity is the rule. Sir A. de Rutzen was not satisfied with ordering the books to be burnt and fining the bookseller; he went on to justify ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... had been eating just pickles; when he finished his story he ate faster. By now we all knew he was demented. The men tried to coax him to go on with us so that they could turn him over to the authorities, but he said he must be digging. At last it was decided to send some one back for him. Mr. Struble was unwilling to leave him, but the man would not be persuaded. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... $1,500.00—does not seem to be regarded. Negroes are 25 per cent. higher now with cotton at ten and one half cents than they were two or three years ago when it was worth fifteen and sixteen cents. Men are demented upon the subject. A reverse will ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... demented, deranged, insane, delirious, dementate, mad, lunatic, distracted, frantic, crazed, crack-brained; rickety, decrepit, shaky, tottering, dilapidated; desirous, eager, infatuated. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... friends, and such great and honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did not realize—they could not—that beneath the meanness and the frenzy ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... on a table near by—one of those shiny metal bells with a button on the top which you press down sharply to induce the thing to ring. Eliot thumped it, and continued thumping till a half-demented waiter came flying towards him ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Constricted brows, and strain, and stress! And still, despite humanity's groan, The torturing, "tall-hat" holds its own! What proof more sure and melancholy Of the dire depths of mortal folly? Mad was the hatter who invented The demon "topper," and demented The race that, spite of pain and jeers, Has borne it—for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... the strife that was to come, and wellnigh heard the thunder of the captains and the shouting, while her eye was always eagerly pointed to that pearly streak which was to herald the one long, cool, calm, bright day of humanity. No wonder Dulcie was as demented as Will, and thought it would be a very little matter though the milk-porridge were sour on the morrow, or if the carrier did not come with the price in his pocket for these sweet pots, and bowls, and pipkins: she believed her poor babies were well at rest from the impending dust, and din, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... first clause of our illustrated lecture. Without his pockets John would be a cipher, and a decimal cipher at that. If some men were not all pocket they would never be Johns, for no Jill would be so demented as to "come tumbling after" them. I have seen a pocket marry off a hump-back, a twisted foot and sixty winters' fall of snow upon the head, while a pocketless Adonis sighed in vain for Beauty's glance. A full pocket balances an ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland |
