"Maniacal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Girls!" she chuckled with maniacal delight. "Everybody, all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... doubts whether the Turks were not in the right, and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... united action of sitting, spurred him on to restless desire. It is not only the soldier who has a bizarre love of peril. Many of those who sit at home in apparent calmness of safety seek perils with a maniacal persistence, perils to the intricate scheme of bodily health, perils to the mind. More human mules than the men of the banner and the sword delight in journeying at the extreme edge of the precipice. And ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of Jane—all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction. It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action. It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so vivid, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... often, was to quit the city—to engage in active pursuits of enterprise, of ambition, or of science. But he heard me as a somnambulist might have heard me—dreaming with his eyes open. Sometimes he had fits of reverie, starting, fearful, agitated; sometimes he broke out into maniacal movements of wrath, invoking some absent person, praying, beseeching, menacing some air-wove phantom; sometimes he slunk into solitary corners, muttering to himself, and with gestures sorrowfully significant, or with tones and fragments of expostulation that moved the most callous to compassion. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... advantage of the moment to stop crying and make furtive gestures towards Owgooste, signing him to pull down his coat. But Owgooste gave no heed; his eyes were starting from their sockets, his chin had dropped upon his lace collar, and his head turned vaguely from side to side with a continued and maniacal motion. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Paul listlessly moved about the room. Spying in a small mirror his dirty, blood-besmeared face and matted hair, Paul starts backward, grasps the new weapon, stabs at that mirrored reflection, stares about wildly, and with maniacal yell ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... moment the man was speechless. An almost maniacal fear seemed to hold him in its grip. With an impatient oath Chauvelin ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... to the dose of opium, one grain is generally sufficient, and often too large a one; maniacal persons, and those who have been long accustomed to take it, require three or more grains to have the due effect. Among the eastern nations, who are habituated to opium, a dram is but a moderate dose: Garcias relates, that he knew one who every day took ten drams. Those who ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... darkened chamber. In this horrible strain she continued chattering to herself and menacing Bijou, until suddenly she stopped short and bent over in a listening attitude. A sound had caught her ear. Something had broken the frightful silence besides her rambling maniacal chatter. Some other animate thing was within her hearing. She was breathless for many moments as she glared, eyes and mouth open, in the direction from which the sound had proceeded. She listened devouringly and could now distinctly hear a slow regular breathing, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... camp. But he had waited only until he saw Ray kick the helpless form before him,—that of the god that Fenris, for all the wild had claimed him, still worshipped in his inmost heart. With fiendish, maniacal fury he had sprung ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... who cannot rest; who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work. To this fairly numerous class belonged Mr. J. Preston Peters, father of Freddie's Aline. And to this merit—or defect—is to be attributed his almost maniacal devotion to that rather unattractive species of curio, the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... as she was now—believed her lover dead, for her father had given her good proofs of this, and she believed him; nevertheless she refused to marry another, and seized upon the convent life as a blessed relief from the tyranny of her maniacal father. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... of inability to concentrate the mind, of incapacity to think and of a sort of feeling of being wholly at sea, accompanied by vertigo and other nervous manifestations, while on the other hand the physical despair, the obstinacy of the prisoner, now increase to pathological maniacal attacks, now again are changed to stubbornness, mutism, with refusal of food. At the same time the more or less constant wish to be considered sick, and in consequence to be freed from imprisonment (and in this we see perhaps the hysterical component), may influence ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... hand across his brow, then rose unsteadily to his feet, looking around the cabin. Habit called for a drink at this juncture and he saw nothing to drink. Anger awoke in him; he grew maniacal, dangerous, and the late ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... swings between the dead calm and passionless on the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in its serpentine stillness and ancient unforgotten craft, and its weakness in that absence of ideals and ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... to his keen ears, which the brothers failed to catch, but as they bent their heads in listening, another noise came, which proved startling enough, in all conscience,—a shrill, maniacal screech, which sent cold chills ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... contemporaries, to demonstrate his physical superiority. He has a cypress shingle on either shoulder and is trailing his star-spangled cutaway down the plank turnpike. While a few mugwumps, like Josef Phewlitzer and Apollyon Halicarnassus Below, and tearful Miss Nancys of the Anglo- maniacal school, are protesting that this country wants peace, Congress, that faithful mirror of public opinion, if not always the repository of wisdom, proves that it is eager for war. And just so sure ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... general and his staff a group, composed of a bugler, two or three orderlies, and the bearer of the corps standard, all upon maniacal horses, were working like slaves to hold their ground, preserve, their respectful interval, while the shells boomed in the air about them, and caused their chargers to make furious ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... confidence, since you have devised a new torture after I thought I had exhausted them all, then, Count of Monte Cristo my pretended benefactor—then, Count of Monte Cristo, the universal guardian, be satisfied, you shall witness the death of your friend;" and Morrel, with a maniacal laugh, again rushed ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a pitch of maniacal rage; the teeth compressed—if they broke the skin it was the end; the first taste of blood would be enough!—and drew away her arm. If she had started then, all the devil in the creature would be loosed, for her terror taught her that. And by some mysterious power that entered her at that moment ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... horror of hope deferred; hurt by lance blades and sword blades and bayonet blades breaking into the bloody house of life. But Mr. Price (I think that's his name) is still anxious that they should not be hurt by cigarettes. That is the sort of maniacal isolation that can be found in the deserts of Bromley. That cigarettes are bad for the health is a very tenable opinion to which the minister is quite entitled. If he happens to think that the youth of Bromley smoke too many cigarettes, ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... stories of his doings are very likely to be spread about. Even in these days of advanced medical science, it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a patient is insane or not, and it is quite possible to suffer from very severe fits of depression without being the subject of maniacal melancholia, or from very violent fits of passion ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... teeth against the bloodless horror of that maniacal voice. It chilled my veins. Again I felt the hair rise on my scalp. Brice bowed quietly; and his eyes, serene ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the uneasy vacillations ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States, where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton industry. He went on to tell me that about a year before a maniacal cobbler named William Lloyd Garrison had started a little paper called The Liberator in which he advocated slave insurrections and the overthrow of the laws sustaining slavery; and that a movement was now on foot in New England to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... occasionally reproached and even bantered the duke in some of his letters to his friends, all of which, doubtless, were opened; but still he entreated, flattered, adored, all to no purpose, for seven long years and upwards. In time he became subject to maniacal illusions; so that if he was not actually mad before, he was now considered so. He was not only visited with sights and sounds, such as many people have experienced whose brains have been over-excited, but he fancied himself haunted by a sprite, and become ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... to a madman after a crime of this sort? Does he get off with it and wander over Europe as a free man for a year? Granted the resources of maniacal cunning and all the rest of it, was it ever heard that a lunatic went at large as this man did, and laughed at Scotland Yard's attempt to run him down and capture him? Is it reasonable that he runs away with a corpse, disposes of it safely, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... clutched me by the throat, and a struggle ensued, during which I suppose I must at length have fainted or become insensible; for the contest was long, and while consciousness remained, terrible and appalling. My fainting, I presume, saved my life, for the felon was in that state of maniacal desperation which nothing but a perfect unresistingness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... disease was in its infancy, and judges, including those of England, probably knew even less about the subject than they do now. In 1843 it was supposed that insanity, save of the sort that was obviously maniacal, necessitated "delusions," and unless a man had these delusions no one regarded him as insane. In the words ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... Medical Journal, July, 1882), he records the case of "an insane gentleman, aged 49, who, for the past twenty-six years, has been subject to the most regularly occurring brain-exaltation every four weeks, almost to a day. It sometimes passes off without becoming acutely maniacal, or even showing itself in outward acts; at other times it becomes so, and lasts for periods of from one to four weeks. It is always preceded by an uncomfortable feeling in the head, and pain in the back, mental hebetude, and slight depression. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
