"Half-crazed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Joe, pitilessly, pointing to the stretcher. Thinking in her half-crazed manner that he was sleeping through it all, she ran to the stretcher, and tore away the sheet that covered the face she loved. It was not till she had caught the dear head to her bosom and pressed her face to his, that the truth broke upon her clouded mind. They had been drawing near her; but ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... words of encouragement and sympathy. He hid his face in his hands, and while he strove to calm himself, he ejaculated, "For a few months, yet for a few months more, let not, O God, my heart fail, or my courage be bowed down; let not sights of intolerable misery madden this half-crazed brain, or cause this frail heart to beat against its prison-bound, so that it burst. I have believed it to be my destiny to guide and rule the last of the race of man, till death extinguish my government; and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... senses was as incapable of stealing a horse as any white man in the valley. Farrar knew it; everybody knew it. Everybody knew, also, about his strange fits of wandering mind; and that when these half-crazed fits came on him, he was wholly irresponsible. Farrar knew this. The only explanation of Farrar's deed was, that on seeing his horse spent and exhausted from having been forced up that terrible trail, he was seized by ungovernable rage, and fired on the ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... saw the powers of government about to be transferred to the leader of their defeated adversaries, and that transfer effected by the act of an assassin. Many of them could not instantly accept the truth that it was the act solely of a half-crazed and disappointed seeker for office; many of them questioned whether the men who were to profit by the act were not the instigators of it."—From address of Elihu Root, delivered at the unveiling of President Arthur's statue in Madison ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... as we were pulling onto the road. It was a big covered affair, filled to overflowing with bedding and household utensils—and even the top was loaded with huge boxes and baskets of provisions. Behind it walked, or rather trotted, three stout women and a man, the former half-crazed with heat and anxiety, mopping their brows and their tears as the ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... was in mortal terror" of the restoration of James II (S491). The Solicitor-General said, in seconding the motion for repeal, that these lwas were "a disgrace to humanity." Parliament agreed with him in this matter. Because these unjust acts were stricken from the Statute Book, Lord George Gordon, a half-crazed fanatic,[1] who was in Parliament, led an attack ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Alexandrowski without a qualm; he who had to fortify himself to face an American dentist (his fees for missed appointments would have kept the average middle-class family in comfort for a year), was ruthless in his dealings with the half-crazed men and women who strayed across the frontier which ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... utterly weak and worn, all but voiceless, able only to smile at her husband, who never moved from the bedside day or night. He, too,' said the landlady, 'would soon break down: he looked like a ghost, and seemed "half-crazed."' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... cradle and went off to help Madame Vaurois, who had come to herself and was crying out, while Madame d'Imbleval had fainted in her turn. And, when Mlle. Boussignol, having settled the two mothers, but half-crazed with fatigue, her brain in a whirl, returned to the new-born children, she realized with horror that she had wrapped them in similar binders, thrust their feet into similar woolen socks and laid them both, side ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... to Sara, and took the poor, unstrung little bundle of nerves into her arms, her very touch, both firm and gentle, bringing comfort to the half-crazed girl. She did not say much of anything, only kissed her and wept with her; but soon the violence of Sara's grief was subdued, and her heart-rending moans sank into long, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... hands. In some bivouacs three hundred died overnight; there are statements in the papers of officials which seem to indicate that in the struggle for life the weaker often perished at the hands of their own comrades. The half-crazed, frost-bitten, disorderly soldiers of the French van reached Smolensk on the ninth, and on the thirteenth the remnants of the rear, with many stragglers, came up and encamped. The heroes of the hour were Eugene and Ney. Ney's division had well-nigh ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... from the doorway leading to the secret places of the temple as Cuxson, covered with blood and dust, half-crazed with horror, paused for a moment as he took in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... is it that ye twasome are saying between ye? Is there ony light thrown upon the awd story; or, is it only the half-crazed randy—(forgie me for ca'ing the poor afflicted creature by ony sic name)—but, I say, is it only some o' the same nonsense that Babby Moor has been cramming into Anne's ear wi' which she has filled thine, lad? Upon my word, if I had my will o' the awd witch, I would douk her in the Reed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... escape; its embroidered carpets muffling the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trapdoors; its arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the wretch is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below, in the cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... says: 'Bryn, the heroine, is a charming creature, and some of the scenes with her half-crazed dying ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... his duty, and think yerself a fightin' man, bekass ye can lick a man that doesn't want to fight. This isn't any Forest Service scrap, mind ye, and I'm saying nothing about logs. I'm talking about your hittin' a weak, half-crazed boy. Ye're a liar and a coward, Peavey Jo, and a ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... long look with Alma Marston when he came up the steps. Love, pity, and greeting were in his eyes. Her countenance revealed her vivid emotions; she was overwrought, unstrung, half-crazed after a night spent with her fears. When he came within her reach caution was torn from her as gossamer is flicked away by a gale. Impulse had always governed her; she gave way ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... philosopher, not of Bacon the lawyer and politician,—there was a singular union of audacity and sobriety. The promises which he made to mankind might, to a superficial reader, seem to resemble the rants which a great dramatist has put into the mouth of ail Oriental conqueror half-crazed by good fortune and by ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quarter a woman whom Pascal was attending informed him that Valentin had just died. Two of the neighbors were obliged to take away La Guiraude, who, half-crazed, clung, shrieking, to her son's body. The doctor entered the house, leaving Clotilde outside. At last, they again took their way to La Souleiade in silence. Since Pascal had resumed his visits he seemed to make them only through professional ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... some kept A long stern silence, and some wept. Many half-crazed looked on in wonder As the strong timbers rent asunder; Friends forgot friends, foes fled to foes;— And still the water ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... to be typical of the half-crazed human poetess, in usual sublime dishabille. Venerable shades of the Dull greet him. As in Virgil's Elysian fields a glimpse is afforded into the dark philosophy of human existence, and we see the Lethean bank crowded with spirits, who taste and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... sorry, Lieutenant. Sears is a rough fellow, but he is half-crazed with worry. He's really not a ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... various servitudes to which they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all mankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to all reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of the world went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in control of every wire in the huge network ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... screaming visionaries of those early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene, low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the effects of his carouse. Waking up late in the morning with a raging headache, a burning tongue, and bloodshot eyes, he had become infuriated at his poor, little girl, that cowered tremblingly in a corner, because she would not go out and get him some more drink. Half-crazed, and utterly reckless, he had sprung at the child, and might have inflicted mortal injury upon her had not the mother interposed, and kept him at bay for a moment, while she joined her shrieks to those ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... beholding again his once darling child, and the shame at receiving such filial kindness from her whom he had cast off for so small a fault in his displeasure; both these passions struggling with the remains of his malady, which in his half-crazed brain sometimes made him that he scarce remembered where he was or who it was tb at so kindly kissed him and spoke to him. And then he would beg the standers-by not to laugh at him if he were mistaken in thinking this lady to be his ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Murphy spurred forward, his companion pressing steadily after. They were but two flitting shadows amid that vast desolation of plain and mountain, their horses' hoofs barely audible. What imaginings of evil, what visions of the past, may have filled the half-crazed brain of the leading horseman is unknowable. He rode steadily against the black night wall, as though unconscious of his actions, yet forgetting no trick, no skill of the plains. But the equally silent man behind clung to him like a shadow of ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... trouble in rounding them up, giving them food and preventing them from shocking communities by their parades. The Police used great tact and in the end succeeded in impressing these strange people with some sense of responsibility. In the midst of the difficulty a half-crazed man named Sharpe crossed from the States with some others. He said he was "Christ" going to "God's people, the Doukhobors," but as he was heavily armed and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... liked it, amidst the chattering of parrots and the squalling of kittens. I longed for the days of the Spectator, when I might have laid my penny on the bar, and retired without ceremony—But no—this blessed decoction was circulated under the auspices of some half-crazed blue-stocking or other, and we were saddled with all the formality of an entertainment, for this miserable allowance of a cockle-shell full of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... fluttered, and the dim, almost lifeless eyes looked pathetically up into those of the young commander. There was a moment of almost breathless silence, broken only by a faint moan from Wren's tortured lips and the childish whimpering of that other—the half-crazed, terror-stricken soldier. ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... sea I gazed, and then I turned Stricken toward the shore, Praying half-crazed to a moon ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... open window, rushed out sword in hand, dispersed the crowd in a moment, and all the danger was over. The military patrolled the streets, and the sergeant who had made all this disturbance was put under arrest. He was a poor, half-crazed fanatic. ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the misleading possibilities of a theory preconceived, he was not prepared even now to decide that inventor Scott was necessarily guilty. He found himself obliged to admit that the indications pointed to the half-crazed man, to whom a machine had become a god, but nothing as ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... night, the unhappy young nun lay expiring in her room. She had taken poison, although the report was spread in the capital that failure of the heart had caused her death. How she came into possession of the poison no one ever discovered. While she was writhing in terrible agony her half-crazed mother put a cup of milk to her lips as an antidote. She dashed it passionately aside and the spilt milk left stains ...
— The Gray Nun • Nataly Von Eschstruth
... and Sir Philip, pulling up the ladder and closing the gangway, saw the little skiff flying over the water like a bird in the direction of the Gueldmar's landing-place. He wondered again and again what relationship, if any, this half-crazed being bore to the bonde and his daughter. That he knew all about them was pretty evident; but how? Catching sight of the pansies left on the deck bench, Errington took them, and, descending to the saloon, set them on the table in a ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the true story of a little East Side tailor who could not earn enough to support himself and his wife. He became half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit suicide. Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple of cartridges. The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... half-crazed monarch, with his obdurate court, a Declaratory Act, as it was called, was passed, which affirmed the absolute supremacy of Parliament ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... both startled by the chef's face. Above the unkempt beard his eyes shone with a half-crazed lustre, and his ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... have been here I have been thinking—thinking," she sobbed. "Oh, it was cruel of me to try to avoid my duty to poor father. I must go back and—and marry Jasper Wilde, to save poor papa, who must now be half-crazed by my disappearance." ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... mind—one of the safe piled full of gold, and the other of the half-crazed old skipper with his dying granddaughter. After all, it was only a matter of months before Henshaw would be dead, for certainly he would not long survive the death of Beatrice. Even a small portion of that ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... the King pass the same censure on the dying speech of Lord Chatham. The one fatal error of a long and conscientious reign should be laid to the account less of George III. than of those who betrayed Pitt's counsels and played upon the conscientious vagaries of a half-crazed brain. ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... half their fleet behind it, with part still emerging from the water-tunnel. Rala boats rose before them, but nothing could stop them now, their force-shells raining ahead to clear a path for their meteor-flight. They shot down toward the block-structure, and Norman, half-crazed by now, saw that to descend and enter was suicide in the face of the frog-forces rising now over all the city. He cried to Fellows, and with two of the guns as they swooped lower they sprayed force-shells along ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire of the Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold lying hidden in the hard white spar of El Dorado? We do not know, and his own latest efforts at explanation only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really a little mad at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement on land and sea of the triumphant ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was erected in the main temple court before the eastern altar where Jad-ben-Otho might sit in person and behold the sacrifices that were offered up to him there each day at sunset. So much did the cruel, half-crazed mind enjoy these spectacles that at times he even insisted upon wielding the sacrificial knife himself and upon such occasions the priests and the people fell upon their faces in ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her passion for rank, delighted in the society of this half-crazed old creature, and while the two women sat in the dark shop, with the names of dukes and marquises gliding lightly from their tongues, a workman would come in to buy a paper for a sou, or some woman, impatient for the conclusion ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... whether in place here or not, was to proceed no further. The audience pressed closer, as eager to look on at a fight as it was to keep out of one. There was a new and surprising development in this one. The two men had closed with each other, and it was not the half-crazed boy who had made the attack, but the ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... woe-begone men were pulling a hand-sleigh down from the summit. On it was lashed a man. He was in a high fever, raving, delirious. Half-crazed with suffering themselves, his partners plodded on unheedingly. I recognised in them the Bank clerk and the Professor, and I hailed them. From black hollows their eyes stared at me unrememberingly, and I saw how emaciated were ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... with the most blinding flashes, the air about their faces seemed to jump; crazy little vortexes scurried past the dug-out opening, or flew in across the floor, like phantom kittens seized by some curious madness. To Jeb's highly imaginative, and now half-crazed, mind these represented newly liberated souls, in anguish seeking refuge from the hurricane of death and its drenching rain of fire. He had not then found out how many hundreds of shells must be fired to ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... half-crazed girl, brought from the alms-house, now did the drudgery of the family. Abner Dimock had grown penurious, and not one cent of money was given for comfort in that house, scarce for need. The girl was stupid and rude, but she worked for her board,—recommendation enough in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... say sometimes, "See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black event,—they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing? True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... wake—a dead body lay upon the table, and the relations and friends of the deceased were howling their lamentations over it. An awful stench emanating from the corpse, indicated that the process of decomposition had already commenced. In one corner, several half-crazed, drunken, naked wretches were fighting with the ferocity of tigers, and the mourners soon joining in the fray, a general combat ensued, in the fury of which, the table on which lay the body was overturned, and the corpse was crushed beneath ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... that the half-crazed woman meditated harm to her favorite grandchild, and she consented readily to her removal to the cottage, which by her orders was made comparatively comfortable. For several weeks, when she came, as she did each day, to the house, Madam Conway kept Maggie ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... in a desire to escape from the payment of his debts, or in a whimsical ambition to have his name sounded all over Maine and Massachusetts as the heroic tradesman who had parted with his money only when overpowered by superior force. It is impossible to say what motives may impel men who are half-crazed by vanity, or half-demonized by malice. Coleridge describes Iago's hatred of Othello as the hatred which a base nature instinctively feels for a noble one, and his assignment of motives for his acts as the mere "motive-hunting of a ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... great sincerity and a great compassion. It touched Baree's head and patted it in a brotherly fashion, and then—slowly and with a bit more caution—it went to the trap fastened to Baree's forepaw. In his half-crazed brain Baree was fighting to understand things, and the truth came finally when he felt the steel jaws of the trap open, and he drew forth his maimed foot. He did then what he had done to no other creature but Nepeese. Just once his hot tongue ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... and their loved ones lay buried. I came upon solitary refugees high up on the scarred mountain slopes, with nothing but a staff to lean upon and a deer-skin to keep them warm. I saw more than one twisted form lying motionless at the foot of a precipice. I witnessed a battle between two half-crazed, ravenous bands, with murder, and cannibalism, and horrors too grisly to report. I observed brave men resolutely trying to till the soil, whose productive powers had been ruined by a poison spray from ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... found themselves accused and threatened with the penalties, if they happened to be persons of a bad and malicious disposition, wished they had the power imputed to them, that they might be revenged upon their persecutors. Numerous instances are upon record of half-crazed persons being found muttering the spells which were supposed to raise the evil one. When religion and law alike recognised the crime, it is no wonder that the weak in reason and the strong in imagination, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... be delayed a moment longer. The hour has already passed when my daughter should be before the altar. For God's sake, name your price. I will pay, I will pay," sobbed the half-crazed woman ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... he found the assemblage was listening to the exhortations of an enthusiast, whom he instantly recognised from a description he had heard of him from Blaize. The name of this half-crazed being was Solomon Eagle. Originally a Quaker, upon the outbreak of the plague he had abandoned his home and friends, and roamed the streets at night, denouncing doom to the city. He was a tall gaunt man, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of laughter. To most of those onlookers this seemed a part, a delightfully arranged part, of the entertainment. Only those nearest, and the farrier was one of them, realized that the strange old man with the croaking voice was an alien to that scene. A half-crazed old man who felt called upon to deliver his "message" of warning to a sinful world, at all times, seasons, and places. He had stumbled upon this as a fine field and, unbalanced though his mind was, ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... a backward look. In her thankful heart she could now spare a glance of pity for the half-crazed man; but it did not carry her to the length of stopping to see what ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Rock, and he that one bush at the throat of the peak—neither of us talking over the matter again. It was uncanny, that rivalry—sun and wind in one spot, sun and wind in another—Nature herself casting the fate of a half-crazed fool with a flower. It was utterly absurd, but I got ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr. |
