"Maniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only too well. She was not only housed with a murderer; she was housed with a maniac. She sensed, also, why he had come to this mountain shack so boldly. In his dementia he knew no better. And she was alone ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... he became rich; it was possible for him to live out his days in peace, have a splendid funeral, and a tomb: but, no! All at once he preferred to lose everything and destroy himself; he must, in truth, be a maniac." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Vandrift!" the rogue cried. "No, no, sir, you are a madman!" He looked round at the police. "Take care what you do!" he cried. "This is a raving maniac. I had business just now with Sir Charles Vandrift, who quitted the room as these gentlemen entered. This person is mad, and you, monsieur, I doubt not," bowing to me, "you are, ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... I persisted, "all British prejudices will be against you. Here is a father, the fools will say, trying to protect his young son. If he has made a mistake, it is only through excess of laudable zeal; you would have to prove yourself a religious maniac in order to have any ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... in such a wild, fantastical manner, that the greatest part of the company mistook him for some savage monster or maniac, and consulted their safety by starting up from table, and drawing their swords. The Englishman, seeing such a martial apparatus produced against him, recoiled two or three steps, saying, "Waunds! a believe the people are all bewitched. What, do they take me for a beast of prey? ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... were driven from the courtyard. The vanquished of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighboring wood. The victors, assembling in large bands, gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, upon the flames, in which their own ranks and arms glanced dusky red. The maniac figure of the Saxon Ulrica was for a long time visible on the lofty stand she had chosen, tossing her arms abroad with wild exaltation as if she reigned empress of the conflagration which she had raised. At length, with a terrific ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... personal behaviour seemed to indicate lunacy. Indeed all his neighbours and acquaintances had long considered him as a madman; and a certain noble lord declared in the house of peers, when the bill of separation was on the carpet, that he looked upon him in the light of a maniac, and that if some effectual step was not taken to divest him of the power of doing mischief, he did not doubt but that one day they should have occasion to try him for murder. The lawyers, who managed the prosecution in behalf of the crown, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... And with what tear-drenched eyes did Christine gaze at him! At first she thought of leaving him to that mad work, as a maniac is left to the pleasures of his craziness. He would never finish that picture, that was quite certain now. The more desperately he worked at it, the more incoherent did it become; the colouring had grown heavy and pasty, the drawing was losing shape and showing signs of ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief to his mind). From his point of view, which would be that of the average householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, and not that of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does not lie that way. It would be ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... man's arms grow limp, and he called to Paula to bring him a sheet—a rope—what not—to bind the raving man. She flew into the next room, quite collected; fetched her handkerchief, snatched off the silken girdle that bound her waist, rushed back and helped the leech to tie the maniac's hands. She understood her friend's least word, or a movement of his finger; and when the slaves whom the nun had fetched came into the room, they found Rustem with his hands firmly bound, and had only to prevent him from leaping ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her good ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... most cases to stern and decided resolution. Yet, recollecting where he was, it was with some feelings of fear that he saw the dying flame leap up and spread a flash of light on the visage of Eachin, which seemed pale as the grave, while his eye rolled like that of a maniac in his fever fit. The light instantly sunk down and died, and Simon felt a momentary terror lest he should have to dispute for his life with the youth, whom he knew to be capable of violent actions when highly excited, however short a period his nature could support the measures which his ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... young man standing in front of us, mounted upon the ruins of the shrine? Three flames burn beneath him, his face shines from the midst of fire and smoke, his voice rings like the shriek of a maniac; and his gestures ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the person of the petitioner would probably have been secured. The idea of prosecution was of course abandoned, and she was consigned to Bethlehem Hospital for life. But though it was evident that the woman was a maniac, her attempt led to a display of the affection which the nation entertained towards his majesty. A public thanksgiving was ordered, and addresses of congratulation flowed in from all parts of the kingdom. His majesty felt this so deeply that he distributed the honour of knighthood, on the presentation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... III. 1013 puts a stop at auratum, and goes on with Luna innixans. Taber strangely explains luna as arcu ipso lunato, Dav. says we ought not to expect the passage to make sense, as it is the utterance of a maniac. For my part, I do not see why the poet should not regard luna ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in a few hours. The elopement of his daughter,—the death of his son. O my father! Most loved and most venerable of men! To see thee changed into a maniac! Haggard and wild! Deterred from outrage on thyself and those around thee by fetters and stripes! What was it that saved me from a like fate? To view this hideous ruin, and to think by whom it was occasioned! Yet not to become frantic like thee, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... said, "for Heaven's sake never let Christina or your mother hear that dreadful story. It was a madman's act! Never think of it again. You have wiped out the crime in blood; there let it end. And leave these awful scenes, or you will become a maniac." ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... have fought with the fury of madmen to retain their places in that half-swamped shell. They were still capable of experiencing a keener fear than that of the flood. They were as terrified by the presence of this maniac as they would have been on encountering ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... and painting heroes, and his hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king. What the classic heroes ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... pike, in the region of Middletown, proved a cumbered path. From stone fence to stone fence, in the middle trough of dust, and on the bordering of what had been, that morning, dew-gemmed grass and flower, War the maniac had left marks. Overturned wagons formed barriers around which the column must wind. Some were afire; the smoke of burning straw and clothing and foodstuffs mingling with the yet low-lying powder smoke and with the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... have here translated 'mad,' has often, as I knew, a complimentary value; and I gathered from Suleyman's way of speaking that the cook was not a raving maniac, but rather what in English country-places we should ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... left him to settle matters with the apparition as he could, and had proceeded a few paces on his way homeward. Earnscliff, however, turned and followed Hobbie, after looking back towards the supposed maniac, who, as if raised to frenzy by the interview, roamed wildly around the great stone, exhausting his voice in shrieks and imprecations, that thrilled wildly ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... he raised his glaive, but wilder, sterner, still, without, Swelled the tempest, burst the thunder, yelled the winds with maniac shout; While the lightning, red and vivid, quivered through the skies in ire, Till the chamber with its flashes seemed a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... high chair. Also she had room for Elite, the coloured girl who put herself at the Bradleys' disposal for three dollars a week. Elite knew nothing whatever, but she had willing hands and willing feet. She had the sudden laugh of a maniac, but she held some strange power over the Bradley babies and they ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... into his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight of the Snorting Palfrey; or, the Silken Fetlock.' These works she ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... fierce gaze had fallen upon the prisoners, and with an exultant shout he was dashing towards them, his broad-bladed sword gleaming above his head. Miss Adams was the nearest to him, but at the sight of the rushing figure and the maniac face she threw herself off the camel upon the far side. The Arab bounded on to a rock and aimed a thrust at Mrs. Belmont, but before the point could reach her the Colonel leaned forward with his pistol ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... watchfires throughout their host and deem that nothing can now prevent them from falling on our fleet. Jove, moreover, has sent his lightnings on their right; Hector, in all his glory, rages like a maniac; confident that Jove is with him he fears neither god nor man, but is gone raving mad, and prays for the approach of day. He vows that he will hew the high sterns of our ships in pieces, set fire to their hulls, and make havoc of the Achaeans while they are dazed and smothered ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Then he whirled like a maniac upon his little coterie of followers. "Vile traitor!" he shrieked, "I will drink your ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... went down like a stone and Captain Anthony went down with her, the finest man's soul that ever left a sailor's body. I raved like a maniac, like a devil, with a lot of fools crowding round me and ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... anger. He went without a word toward this hopeless encounter, as a drunkard to his bottle. First Perion killed Ruggiero of the Lamberti and after that Perion raged as a wolf harrying sheep. Six other stalwart men he cut down, like a dumb maniac among tapestries. His horse was slain and lay blocking the road, making a barrier behind which Perion fought. Then Perion encountered Giacomo di Forio, and while the two contended Gulio the Red very warily cast his sword like a spear so that it penetrated Perion's left ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... looked upon me I was mad with rage and desire for vengeance. I longed to get to a place where I could meet the whole Tresidder brood face to face. But now a new feeling came to me. Had I not after all been a brute, and had I not acted like a maniac? For the look on her face made me love goodness and beauty. I could do nothing, however; my hands were numb, and my tongue was dry and parched. All I was capable of at this moment was to listen and to look into the fair maid's face, and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... company with the said Ranieri when he is embarking in order to return to Pisa, a good number of figures wrought with diligence, among which is the portrait of Count Gaddo, who died ten years before, and that of Neri, his uncle, once Lord of Pisa. Among the said figures, also, that of a maniac is very notable, for, with the features of madness, with the person writhing in distorted gestures, the eyes blazing, and the mouth gnashing and showing the teeth, it resembles a real maniac so ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... we find the name of the Archbishop of Dublin, who, while in England, narrowly escaped martyrdom from the hands of a maniac, while celebrating Mass at the tomb of St. Thomas. Four years afterwards, this celebrated ecclesiastic attended at Rome, with Catholicus of Tuam, and the Prelates of Lismore, Limerick, Waterford, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... expression of grief or rage, allays the grief or rage. He went about with an aspect of calm insouciance, and therefore with a feeling of calm and ease within. Yet he was like one who walks with a madman, knowing that if his own courage should for one instant seem to waver, the maniac will be upon him. In his journey to town he had been alone, and between one station and another he had opened his portmanteau and taken therefrom a small breech-loading revolver and a stiletto. He laid his hand upon these now and again, and ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... meteors that glimmer by night in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie; some, shrieking with agony, ran furiously about, like tigers wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along, more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other, and though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert which no ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, "No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which I was equally ignorant—Mivart, Topinard, and more,—but at last that of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... of my line to be named Hector," he said presently—and Andrew Daney with difficulty repressed a roar of maniac laughter. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a monomaniac, and, though he seemed harmless enough, it was of course possible that he might be dangerous. He was almost sorry that he had sought shelter here. Better have encountered the storm in its full fury than place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided at any rate to remain a while longer. He knew that it would not be well to dispute the old man, and ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... experts agree that diseases of the mind, whatever their brain seat may be, all involve impairment of the Attention. This, at any rate, is a general mark of a deranged or defective mind. The idiot lacks power of attention. The maniac lacks control of his attention. The deluded lacks grasp and flexibility of attention. The crank can only attend to one thing. The old man is feeble in the attention, having lost his hold. So it goes. The attention is the instrument of ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... was heard; the dawn had come, and Polou unlocked the porch-door for Father Augustin just in time to hear the last agonized cry. The maniac turned in the very act of leaping on his victim, and sprang for the two men, who stopped in dumb amazement. Poor old Pierre Polou went down at a blow; but Father Augustin was young and fearless, and he grappled the mad animal with ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... day. There is nothing perhaps precisely identical in our own day with those gifts of the early Church; but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a somewhat analogous relation—in a closer one certainly—than more ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, appear like maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same spiritual level. Now these are perfectly compatible with mis-use, abuse, and moral disorder. The most gifted of our countrymen has left this behind him as his epitaph, "The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind." The most glorious gift of poetic insight—itself ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... different also in character. The larger was placid, and even sullen in its course, wheeling in deep eddies, or sleeping in dark blue pools; but the motions of the lesser brook were rapid and furious, issuing from between precipices, like a maniac from his confinement, all ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Albanian. Sultan Mahomet, the 'Grand Seignior' of the whole Turkish Empire, was no strong, powerful man, but a mere stripling who had been scarred and branded for life, some say even deformed, by an attack made upon him in earliest infancy by his own unnatural father, the Sultan Ibrahim. This cruel maniac (whose only excuse was that he was not in possession of more than half his wits at the time) had been seized with a fit of ungovernable rage against the ladies of his harem, and in his fury had done his best to slay his own son and heir. Happily ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... breathing heavily, I dropped the concussor into the big pocket of my apron and pounced on him. He uttered a yell of terror and began to struggle like a maniac to free himself from my grip, while I edged him away from the dangerous vicinity of the revolver. At first he was disposed to show a good deal of fight, and, as we gyrated round the cellar, tugging, thrusting, wrenching and kicking, I found the strenuous muscular ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am. . . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but, then, I, too, love him in spite ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... must keep the impounded hand back from the knife sheath or he was done. Thus close, he could make no escape. He fought fast and furiously, striving to throw, to bend, to beat back the body of a man almost as strong as himself, and now a maniac in rage ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... gaunt and blood-stained man, clad in tattered yellow, who carried on his back an axe and a bundle. When the sailors came within sight of him, he made signs to them to approach, and, opening his bundle with much ceremony, offered them some of its contents. Filled with horror at what the maniac displayed, they seized and bound him. At Hobart Town he was recognized as the only survivor of the nine desperadoes who had escaped from Colonel Arthur's ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... things, and the street minstrels sing "He sports in the world. He sports in the soul."[434] He is supposed to dance in the Golden Hall of the temple at Chidambaram and something of the old legends of the Satarudriya hangs about such popular titles as the Deceiver and the Maniac (Kalvar) and the stories of his going about disguised and visiting his worshippers in the form of a mendicant. The idea of sport and playfulness is also prominent in Vishnuism. It is a striking feature in the cultus of both the infant and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... load at that. I thought it was between us, so I jerked off my big mittens to be ready; but the mules' turn was to come first, it seems. He didn't wait for anything, just simply went at them, like a maniac, like a demon. I won't tell you about it—it was too horribly brutal—or about what followed. I simply saw red. For the first time and the last time in my life, I hope, I fought a man—fought like a beast, tooth and nail. When it was over he ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... no uneasiness," pursued Jonathan; "Mrs. Sheppard, as I told you, is in Bedlam, an incurable maniac; while her son is in the New Prison, whence he will only be removed ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... know why. I tried to thank him, but couldn't. I could only point to my boots - or wherever I supposed my boots to be - and say in a plaintive voice, 'Cork soles:' at the same time endeavouring, I am told, to sit down in the pool. Finding that I was quite insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely conducted ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... met with misfortune. My life was my own to make or mar after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... marble; the entrance is by a large archway, and round the circle are several recesses in the stone, one above another, where the dead had evidently been deposited. They illustrate the history of the maniac dwelling among the tombs (Mark v. 3.), for these caves formed a perfect sort of house ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... formed his life-long study, and which had been the expression of a life not unlike the agricultural life amid which he now found himself living. So as his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had gradually transformed, with a maniac's cunning, the Christian services, and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back toward their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he had thrown away all disguise, and ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... the state, maybe the nation. But before he goes, he swears he is coming over here and kill the only man that ever beat him to the draw—that ever knocked him down. So be on your guard, my friend. He's a fiend, a maniac, and ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... lunge at Frank, and there was a terrific struggle before he was overpowered by the guards. He fought with the strength of a maniac, which indeed he was, for the wild rage under which he labored had reached its climax in the overturning of his reason. He was dragged away, struggling, fighting, and ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time, seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a maniac! ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he drove before him a throng of twenty, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, who allowed themselves to be knocked down with the obedience of ninepins. A Frenchman stopped the maniac after he had killed one Jew and wounded several, none of them making any ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... three were engaged in their separate duties, a loud exclamation from Basil drew the attention of his brothers. It was a shout of joy, followed by a wild laugh, like the laugh of a maniac! ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... followers and departs for the abode of Layla's family, and presenting himself before the maiden's father, proposes in haughty terms the union of his son with Layla; but the offer is declined, on the ground that Syd Omri's son is a maniac, and he will not give his daughter to a man bereft of his senses; but should he be restored to his right mind he will consent to their union. Indignant at this answer, Syd Omri returns home, and after his friends had in vain tried the effect of love-philtres ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the war maniac his opportunity. They will not lock the gun away from him, they will not put a reasonable limit to the disputes into which he can ultimately thrust his violent substitute for a solution. They are like the people who dread and detest yellow fever, but oppose that putting of petrol on the ponds ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... comes somewhat late in the day. It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?" ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... crowded out of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, overturning, crashing—annihilating the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... his face flushed with shame or anger, and he gave a very short, obscure reply. So he invited the doctor to dinner, and elicited the information that David's life indeed was saved, but he was a maniac; and his sister, a sensible, resolute woman, had signed the certificate, and he was now in a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... black, that I did not expiate then. If suffering can wash out sins, I washed out mine. I, who thought I had so many enemies, have no enemy. No one has ever injured me. But if I had the cruellest in the world, I would not condemn him, if he were a morphia maniac, to sudden enforced abstinence and prison life. And I could not die. I am very strong by nature. I could neither die nor live. It was months before I saw light, months of hell, consumed in the flame of hell which is thirst. And slowly the power to live came back to me. I was saved in ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... was for us out of the question. It was quite possible for him to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door. As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac would have been mere folly. There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter. No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... murders, infanticide, licentiousness of the most debased and debasing character, burying their infirm and aged parents alive, desertion of the sick, revolting cruelties to the unfortunate maniac, cannibalism and drunkenness, form a list of some of the traits in social life among the Hawaiians ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... a tobacco maniac," growled Trendon, feeling in his breast pocket. "The devil," he cried, bringing forth an ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... myself from being turned into a gibbering maniac," said the Major, "by making sure that you'll never have the chance of composing music in my house again. Since eight o'clock this morning you've been at it. I could hear you whenever I went, mixing up hymns and waltzes and things with 'God Save the King.' I tried ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair, and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... studiis adsecutus—Labeonem Antistium, iisdem artibus praecellentem ... namque illa aetas duo pacis decora simul tulit; sed Labeo incorrupta libertate ... celebratior" (An. III. 75). Horace, who was a contemporary of Labeo's, says that he was a maniac, or, at any rate—"considered very crazy in ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the Court of Versailles, on the Regency, on the French Revolution, he showed even more virulence than in conducting the impeachment. Indeed it may be remarked that the very persons who called him a mischievous maniac, for condemning in burning words the Rohilla war and the spoliation of the Begums, exalted him into a prophet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater vehemence, and not with greater reason, against the taking of the Bastile ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ran through the room; people forgot that a maniac stood before them, and only saw the district-attorney, who, like a second Brutus, delivered over his own son to the law. Like the judgment day the words rang through the room, "I move that he be condemned to death." As soon as the echo of the words died away, Villefort arose, and leaning ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... drink, his remorse for the officer's death, his burning thirst for vengeance, and his own sense of self-abasement—all conspired to add to the fever of his brain; and when Walter and his daughter were admitted to his cell, it was a gibbering maniac that rushed forward to meet them. Walter removed his fainting daughter from the appalling spectacle, and returned with a sickening heart and terrible forebodings. The shades of evening had given place to bright ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... touched? Was the world piloted by unbalanced minds? It seemed incredible, impossible it should be so, but two such similar experiences in so short a time apparently supported this gloomy view. Horrible, I thought as I preceded Gootes out of the maniac's office, unbelievably horrible. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in Saint Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of superior numbers, it was given up to all the horrors which follow when victory, brutality, and licentiousness are linked together. Every evil passion was allowed to revel with impunity, and revenge, lust, and avarice,—each had its hundreds of victims in unhappy Semlin. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out. Peter the Hermit had blown the popular fury into a flame, but to cool it again was beyond his power. His followers rioted unrestrained, until the fear of retaliation warned them to desist. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... thirty deputies, Brissot's papers were rummaged, Roland's house was surrounded, while Duport, seized in a neighboring department, is deposed in the slaughterhouse. The latter is saved with the utmost difficulty; many a blow is necessary before he can be wrested from the maniac who had seized him. With a surgeon like Marat, and medics like the four or five hundred leaders of the Commune and of the sections, it is not essential to guide the knife; it is a foregone conclusion that the amputation will be extensive. Their names speak for ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a mistake. I regard Lucrezia Borgia as a homicidal maniac, and Torquemada as a religious maniac. I do not blame such men and women. But I should not allow them ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... of the Cavalier, it is still more curious to note that nineteenth-century New England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties, suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the warriors ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... ridden another hundred yards when a yell echoed in the canyon. He turned again and saw Banker leaping and shrieking on the rock, waving hands to the heavens and carrying on like a maniac. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... present with the most vindictive looks: he thrust out his tongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with inconceivable strength, and became an object of terror to all by-standers. To the lividness of a corpse he united the desperate force of a maniac; they hardly were able to fasten him, so as to guard themselves from his attacks; when in the space of two hours death relieved the poor wretch from his struggles, and the spectators from their ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... with a thirty-six bust and a waist you could ha' put into her wedding ring—and her husband, he crep' up behind her that way jest for a joke, and frightened her into a fit, and when she come to she was a raving maniac, and had to be taken to Bloomingdale with two doctors and a nurse to hold her in the carriage, and a lovely baby on'y six weeks old—and there she is to this ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... that when Kess Denton, the yellow man, stood at the open gate and uttered a loud and piercing yell of defiance, not one among us could lilt a rifle, not one thought of plan or action. There the fellow was, laughing like a maniac. Why he came, whence he came, no man could tell. But he leaped into the seas and the night engulfed him, and only his mocking laugh told ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how the simple words carried ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... patient died on the operating table under his hands, and the young doctor went to pieces, that it became known that he was a victim of the paper pipes. But then he had gone too far. He was a wreck in mind as well as in body, and he ended his days in a maniac's cell." ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... went to Edinburgh, to sir Haco Macintosh, and with his assistance brought me to my right mind. If it were not for Kirsty, I should be in my grave, or wandering the earth a maniac. Even alive and well as I am, I should not be with you now had she not ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... piece from which the lines are taken, will perceive that the whole performance is in a vein of playful phantasy, and that the particular verses are placed dramatically in the mouth of a proclaimed Eleutheromane, or maniac for liberty.[203] Diderot was not likely to foresee that what he designed for an illustration of the frenzy of the Pindaric dithyramb, would so soon be mistaken for a short formula of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... threat was unnecessary, for Henry and his men were close at hand; and before the natives could make up their minds what to do, the whole band came pouring over the hill, with Jo Bumpus far ahead of the rest, leaping and howling like a maniac with excitement. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... strange were these records, so eccentric the vagaries of the soul during its nocturnal wanderings, that I was induced to abandon the task, lest some friend hereafter, might examine, the mystic scroll, and conclude that it was written by a maniac. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... answered Don Quixote, "that I mean to imitate Amadis here, playing the victim of despair, the madman, the maniac, so as at the same time to imitate the valiant Don Roland, when at the fountain he had evidence of the fair Angelica having disgraced herself with Medoro and through grief thereat went mad, and plucked up trees, troubled the waters of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... they sometimes get glimpses of their prodigal relative, who has settled down into a confirmed gambling maniac, living on such salvage of income as obliging moneylenders have ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... comparison. The advantage of Mrs. Green's ale was that the very first half-pint gave conscience its bemuddling sop; for a penny you forgot all the cares of existence; for threepence you became a yelling maniac. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... LIZZIE:—I am writing this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, was it not to protect ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... enveloped in a shapeless cylindrical tube of pale Macintosh—impossible for taste—incapable of pockets—indefinite and indefinable—we question whether he would have regarded him in the light of a maniac, an incendiary, or a foreign spy—whether he would not have handed him immediately over to the exterminators of the law, as a being too depraved, too degraded for human sympathy. And yet—for our prolixity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the night, and presently succeeded beyond my hopes; for when he heard who the lady was whom I proposed to carry off, and that she was lying that evening at the Chateau de Chize, his surprise swept away the last trace of resentment. He stared at me, as at a maniac. ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... For my own part I stood silent with horror. The cries of the women enraged the overseer, he dropped his gun, and snatching the whip from my hand, with horrid oaths, and imprecations fell to whipping them, laying about him like a maniac. Upon Harry's sister he bestowed his blows without mercy, commanding her to quit her screaming and go to work. The poor girl, whose brother had thus been murdered before her eyes, could not wrestle down the awful agony of her feelings, and the brutal tormentor left her without effecting ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... very breath of life seemed beaten away. The floods fell in streams, hot, then suddenly cold. And then a fusillade of hail bombarded the flat prairies, defenseless beneath the munitions of the heavens. But in all the wild, mad blackness, in the shriek and crash of maniac winds, in the swirl of many waters, and chill and fury of the threshing hail, the law of the trail failed not: "Hold fast." And with our hands gripped in one another's, we children kept ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... When the maniac, Thom, or Courtenay, was shot, in the spring of 1838, the relic-hunters were immediately in motion to obtain a memento of so extraordinary an individual. His long, black beard and hair, which were cut off by the surgeons, fell into the hands of his disciples, by whom they are treasured ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... to entertain a roomful of patients of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and made up a very successful little monologue show, entirely humorous. The audience in the main gave symptoms of being slightly bored, but one highly intelligent maniac saw the whole thing in the proper light, and, clapping the talented actor on the shoulder, said: "Glad you've come, old fellow. You and I will get along fine. The other dippies here are so dashed dignified. What I say is if a man is ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... That do I, If Wentworth comes to rule her. I am sick To think her wretched masters, Hamilton, The muckworm Cottington, the maniac Laud, May yet be longed-for back again. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Dreissiger, there are people at the back gate already, and the house door won't hold much longer. The smith's battering at it like a maniac with a ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... mischief had been done during the night, aroused him. He glanced upon his enemy, who pale and trembling, stood gazing on the wreck that he had made. Revenge at last was in his hands—not a moment was to be lost—with the yell of a maniac he sprang upon the powerless and conscious-stricken man—seized him in his arms rushed to the river—and ere any could interpose, both had found a grave where but a few minutes before the bodies of Mary and her ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... upon him and saw that he was deadly pale, and that the perspiration stood out in great drops upon his forehead. The explanation was plain enough—he took me for a maniac. I would have protested and moved the previous question, but taking a small phial from his pocket he broke off the head and threw the contents in my face. Ten seconds later I was totally oblivious, and upon recovering found myself in this place, where such strange things are going on that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... position was very great. Must I kill the man? must I die myself in this miserable and senseless manner? I tried to shout, "Drag this maniac off me." ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... in the East begins chronologically with Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar's wife) sung by Jami (nat. A.H. 8171414); the next in date is Khusraw and Shirin (also by Nizami); Farhad and Shirin; and Layla and Majnun (the Night-black maid and the Maniac-man) are the last. We are obliged to compare the lovers with "Romeo and Juliet," having no corresponding instances in modern days: the classics of Europe supply a host as Hero and Leander, Theagenes and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... that it is a worse and yet more shameful thing for a man to break his wife's heart by systematic neglect, than to strike her and be sorry for it, such readers give out that you approve of wife-beating, and perhaps write to expostulate with you on your brutality. If you express pleasure that a poor maniac should have succeeded in escaping through the door of death from his haunting demon, they accuse you of advocating suicide. But Mercy was not yet afloat on the sea of essential LIE whereon ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... rode, no kind words could His mad resolve o'erturn; He plunged into the foaming flood, But never cross'd the burn! And now though ten long years have pass'd Since that wild storm blew by— Oh! still the maniac hears the blast, And still her crazy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... cry came from the house, a hoarse, screeching cry in a voice which might have been either man's or woman's, but was as mad and as desperate and as horrible in that still night as the screech of a tortured animal—or of a maniac. It came again and ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... animalculae it reveals. Very curious that little world; but we take no part in any of its proceedings, violent as they evidently are. And here lies the reason, we apprehend, why dramatic representations of insanity are so generally unsuccessful. We cannot participate in the capricious delusions of the maniac, who becomes, therefore, a mere object of wonder or curiosity. The moment when the lunatic affects us most deeply is, when he approaches nearest to the ordinary current of human thought—it is the moment when he comes back to reason, and its too frequent companion, the sense ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... crime we're working with—the kind we expect future laws to apply to—is strictly limited. It must be a crime of violence against a human being, or a crime of destruction in which there is a grave danger that human lives may be lost. The sex maniac, the firebug, or the goon who gets a thrill out of beating people. Or the reckless driver who has proven that he can't be trusted behind the wheel of ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... he is no worse; but as ill-used as ever—mewed up, kept in solitary confinement. They mean to make either an idiot or a maniac of him, and take out a commission of lunacy. Horsfall starves him; you saw how thin ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... woman. "But this I have heard, that when he told her of the death of Stanley Carew, she fell down like one dead, and presently, being delivered of a son, the infant died after a few hours. Yonder," she looked menacingly towards Fairburn Hall, "the mother lives—a maniac. What else could keep me here in a place that tortures me with memories of my youth, and of loving faces that have crumbled into dust? What else but the hope of one day seeing my little sister yet, and the vengeance of Heaven upon him who has worked her ruin? If Massingberd ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... astrologer-doctor, clapping an old book under his arm, fumbling a rosary of beads, enlarging his turband, lengthening his sleeves and blackening his eyelids with antimony. Here, however, it would be out of place. Very comical also is the way in which he pretends to cure the maniac by "muttering unknown words, blowing in her face, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth which ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Judith, trusting to her charms to win admittance to the hostile camp. She wins her reward, but Araquil, who is brought in from a battle mortally wounded, knowing the price at which it was won, thrusts her from him, and she sinks a gibbering maniac upon his corpse. There is little in Massenet's score but firing of cannons and beating of drums. The musical interest centres in a charming duet in the opening scene, and a delicious instrumental nocturne. The action of the piece is breathless and vivid, and the music scarcely pretends ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... to the amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... to charity, Until I find peace again, My curse upon the fiend or god That will not let me hear A bird in song upon the bough But, hovering about the notes, There chimes the maniac beating Of ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... not place much stock in Professor Cortoran's theory, though I admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to believe that the object of his greatest affection is descended from a gibbering idiot and a raving maniac. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... innocence, knew that it was wise as well as right to be perfectly ingenuous, and resolved that there should be no concealment. His friends stood manfully by him, and his enemies struck at him with such blind fury that their blows injured only themselves. Howe raved like a maniac. "What is to become of the country, plundered by land, plundered by sea? Our rulers have laid hold on our lands, our woods, our mines, our money. And all this is not enough. We cannot send a cargo to the farthest ends of the earth, but they must send a gang of thieves after it." Harley and Seymour ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was strangely lit with ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... servants who came to attend him, "Tak aff the ghaist!" They took off accordingly a female in white, and the poor farmer himself was conveyed to bed, where he lay struggling for weeks with a strong nervous fever. The female was found to be a maniac, who had been left a widow very suddenly by an affectionate husband, and the nature and cause of her malady induced her, when she could make her escape, to wander to the churchyard, where she sometimes wildly wept over his grave, and sometimes, standing on the corner of the churchyard wall, looked ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... of no long continuance. I soon perceived that it was impossible for a maniac to be suffered to proceed to so horrid extremities. I perceived in every thing that related to the count, a spirit very different from that of frenzy. It is thus that I have plunged from uncertainty to uncertainty. From adopting a solution ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... her distraught friend with a loving hand, drew back in real fear that she was confronted by a maniac. The utter outrageousness of this new infliction brought tears to her eyes. Yet she choked back her grief for the sake ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... most splendid with splendor, endowed with beauty, strong with strength. Strong is your strength, steadfast your powers, and thus by the Maruts is this clan mighty. Resplendent is your breath, furious are the minds of the wild host, like a shouting maniac. Keep from us entirely your flame, let not your hatred reach us here. I call on the dear names of your swift ones, so that the greedy should be satisfied, O Maruts, the well-armed, the swift, decked with beautiful chains, who ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... times wrung with compassion for her husband as a helpless maniac, and fearful that all may end in suicide, yet compelled to leave him, she writes on the road the much-quoted letter, beginning 'Dear Duck.' This is an exaggerated and unnatural letter, it is true, but of precisely the character that might be expected from an inexperienced young wife ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... daily brought to my consideration, and I tell you again men are often in no condition to act wisely or well because the wear and tear of their life is greater after business hours than during them. Business maniac as Madge thinks me to be, little Jack is of more consequence than a transcontinental railway. I must face the music—the discord, rather—of Wall Street to-morrow. There is no use in protesting or coaxing; ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... sinking of her heart. She was afraid of her father, who no longer seemed her father, created to protect and cherish her, but some maniac stranger. She felt an impulse like that of a terrified child to run away, far away to some one who should stand before her and bear the brunt. She started up from her chair with panic haste, but the familiar room, saturated with recollections of her mother's ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... has been to Woolwich, inspecting the artillery, to whom he gave a dinner, with toasts and hip, hip, hurrahing and three times three, himself giving the time. I tremble for him; at present he is only a mountebank, but he bids fair to be a maniac. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... it herself. Maria had a small sum every week for her pocket-money, and a large part of it went to Josephine in the shape of chocolates, of which she was inordinately fond; in fact, Josephine, who came of the poor whites, like Gladys Mann, might have been said to be a chocolate maniac. Maria used to arrange with Josephine to meet her on a certain corner on Saturdays, and there the transfer was made: Josephine became the possessor of half a pound of chocolates, and Maria of the baby. Josephine had sworn almost a solemn oath to never tell. She at once repaired ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... recollection of the mad woman struck me, like a blow in the chest. Many other people had perhaps died in the wood during that disastrous year, but I do not know why, yet I was sure, sure, I tell you, that I should see the head of that wretched maniac. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... repeat, you have taken me for some other person. I will no longer listen to one who is either a maniac or an ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Why himself. His brain gave way. He was demented. His conduct at Jerusalem was that of a maniac. His very language showed a loss of balance. Whipping the dove-sellers and moneychangers, not out of the Temple, but out of its unsanctified precincts, was lunatic violence. Those merchants were fulfilling ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... against the overpowering numbers. They seized him in their arms, carried him to the roof, and hurled him over into the street below, while a dozen of the ruffians attacked the unfortunate girl. When sympathizing friends visited the house next day, they found the child dead, and Pelikoff a hopeless maniac. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in the right to ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... came on with the birth of Nina, and from that day to her death she was a raving, disgusting maniac, as her mother and grandmother had been before her. This was exceedingly mortifying to the proud Bernards, negroes and all, and the utmost care was taken of Nina, who, nevertheless, was too much like her mother to hope for escape. There was the ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash of lightning, that glanced over ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... expressing intense emotion, especially when it is associated with the darker passions of the soul. "Never had any writer," says Macaulay, "so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy and despair.... From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation, there is not a single note of human anguish of ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... was a constant shifting of scenes, citizens, soldiers, Jews and battering rams, yells, groans and cheers, it looked as if the audience, including King Henry, was doing the most of the acting, and all the cheering! A maniac would be thoroughly at ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... thrilled every nerve came from a far point in the dark background. It was the scalp yell, the most terrible of all Indian cries, long, high-pitched, and quavering, having in it something of the barking howl of the wolf and the fiendish shriek of a murderous maniac. The warriors instantly took it up, and gave it ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in fact—and this is his reward! A pettifogger, by Heaven!—a pettifogger! Seizing the Dalton estates, the scoundrel, and then putting Miss Dalton under lock and key! Why, the man's mad—mad! yes, a raving maniac! He is, ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... with another peal of half-maniac laughter, she snatched her pannier from the log, flung it over her shoulder, and hurried away from the spot! Her words, though ill understood, were full of fearful significance, and acted upon me like a shock—for a moment paralysing my powers both of speech and action. In my anxiety to ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... evergreen trees seemed to hunch their backs and crowd closer together in patient misery. Not a bird had the heart to sing; only the loon—storm-lover—laughed his crazy challenge to the elements, and mocked us with his long-drawn maniac scream. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... legal claim a legal claim. Had he been all his life agent to the Hap House property instead of to that of Castle Richmond, a thought so romantic would never have entered his head. He would have scouted a man as nearly a maniac who should suggest to him that his client ought to surrender an undoubted inheritance of twelve thousand a year on a point of feeling. He would have rejected it as a proposed crime, and talked much of the indefeasible rights of the coming heirs of the new ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... chaos of contending demons. All stocks were caught in the upheaval; Melville's plans to limit the explosion were blown skyward, feeble as straws in a cyclone. Amid shrieks and howls and frantic tossings of arms and mad rushes and maniac contortions of faces, National Woolens and all the Dumont stocks bent, broke, went smashing down, down, down, every ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... we modern Saxons know a trick worth two of that, I think! Then came rather risky dances (under certain circumstances) Which would shock that worthy gentleman, the Licenser of Plays, Corybantian maniac kick—Dionysiac or Bacchic— And the Dithyrambic revels of ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... this while, Joe struggled with only one man. It was a horrible struggle, because the man had a bomb and he might manage to set it off or it might go off of itself. It was a ghastly struggle, because the man had the strength and desperation of a maniac—and practiced the tactics. Joe pounded the hand that held the gun upon the floor, and it hit something and exploded smokily and fell clear. But that made things worse. While struggling to kill Joe with the revolver, his antagonist had had only five fingers with which to gouge out Joe's eyes or ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... manifesteth it unto others. The learned lawyer Julian, being asked on a time if that slave might be truly esteemed to be healthful and in a good plight who had not only conversed with some furious, maniac, and enraged people, but in their company had also prophesied, yet without a noddle-shaking concussion, answered that, seeing there was no head-wagging at the time of his predictions, he might be held for sound and compotent enough. Is it ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the bed with his head on his arm, or perhaps sitting astride a chair with his hands crossed on the back support, he would smile with childlike innocence and sent his barbs in gayly. And Irwin, murder in his dull brain, would glare at him like a maniac. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... disagreement what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... slipped back he sprang forward, something shining in his hand, and flung himself desperately against the door ere it could be closed. The moment's delay he caused was our chance, and rushing forward we too added our weight to that of the maniac. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... what," I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye Storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceas'd, and all seem'd calm and bright; When France her front deep-scarr'd ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... present and address them. As I looked upon the audience, the first countenance that met my eye was that of this very man, at the head of his Sunday-school class. The sight almost overwhelmed me. Instead of a loathsome, drunken maniac—a terror to his family and a curse to society, whose very presence was odious, and his example pestilential—he was then, in the expressive language of Scripture, "clothed, and in his right mind;" and was devoted to the heavenly work of guiding children to Christ and salvation. He had made ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... vague blur upon his memory. He was conscious only of the fact that he had traveled at a speed which, in saner moments, he would have considered suicidal. Urging the big black over the rougher ground of the higher levels, he rode like a maniac, without regard for his own life and without mercy for the magnificent horse beneath him. Time and again the gelding stumbled on the rocky footing and almost fell, only to be urged to further ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... allowed to make a few remarks founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so little accustomed. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... at first sight as if the young man had been the victim of a homicidal maniac, so brutal had been the way in which he had been assassinated. The head and body were battered and bruised by some heavy stick or poker, almost past human shape, as if the murderer had wished to wreak some awful vengeance upon the body of his victim. ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... that the longer she engaged this maniac in conversation, the more hope there was of Sam coming back in time to save her, she ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... different parts of the hall, as well as upstairs, was heard, "It's a long way to Tipperary." Tommy began to behave like a maniac. He rushed about more wildly than before. He stopped his ears. He tried to hide. Then he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... influences, paralyzed the whole moral constitution of the devoted creature, and realized the poetical creation of despair. I felt inclined to soften the sternness of her grief, by quickening her disbelief of the raving thoughts of a fever-maniac; but I paused as I thought of the probable necessity of her suspicion for her future safety from the schemes of a murderer, whose evil desires might be resuscitated by the return of health. I could do nothing more at ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... temptation, but put my trump on her spade, led my small card, and the game was lost. Mrs. O'Toole gave a scream and sank back in her chair almost fainting, and when she recovered her breath and her voice went on like a maniac, and had a desperate quarrel with my aunts. I made my escape, and three days later, to my huge delight, was sent off to Dublin and entered the university. I only stayed there about six months, when a friend of ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty |
