"Monomaniacal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thick upon his bosom and upon the amulet. The truth was clear enough now. The appalling death of his first wife, his love for her, and his remorse for not having jumped down the cliff and died with her, had affected his brain. He was a monomaniac, and all his thoughts were in some way clustered round the dominant one. He had studied amulets because the 'Moonlight Cross' had been cherished by her; he came to Switzerland every year because it was associated with her; he had joined the spiritualist body in the mad ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... crews for such an expedition. The sovereigns issued an order authorizing Columbus to press men into the service, but still the numbers were incomplete, for the mariners of Palos held aloof, unwilling to risk their lives in what seemed to them the crazy project of a monomaniac. But Juan Perez was active in persuading men to embark. The Pinzons, rich men and skilful mariners of Palos, joined in the undertaking personally, and aided it with their money, and, by these united exertions, three vessels were manned with ninety mariners, and provisioned for ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... false; and I believe it was in mere pity that Mrs. Higgs came to my rescue with a welcome proposition. If the gentleman was really interested in stamps, she said, probably supposing me a monomaniac on the point, he should see Mr. Denman's album. Mr. Denman had been collecting forty years, and his collection was said to be worth a mint of money. "Agnes," she went on, "if you were a kind little girl, you would run over to the 'All, tell Mr. Denman ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the heart is assured, and the future is radiantly beckoning to them,—that any man should choose such victims for such crimes was too preposterous an idea long to be entertained. Unless the man were mad, the idea was inconceivable; and even a monomaniac must betray himself in such a course, because he would necessarily conceive himself to be accomplishing some ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the ridicule of the emotion into which he had been betrayed, as the old man's wildness of demeanor made him feel that he was talking with a monomaniac. "We are talking idly. I do but go, in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English residence which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy, among a thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is likely to come of it. My foot is not ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... mighty, vicious: I can understand them," said Olivier. "I like them or dislike them: even when I dislike them I still love them: I am in love with them. More than once, with Patroclus, I have kissed the lovely feet of Achilles as he lay bleeding. But the God of the Bible is an old Jew, a maniac, a monomaniac, a raging madman, who spends his time in growling and hurling threats, and howling like an angry wolf, raving to himself in the confinement of that cloud of his. I don't understand him. I don't love him; his perpetual curses ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... that the strange tales of the American poet seemed to them to belong to "a new literature, the literature of the twentieth century, scientifically miraculous story-telling by A B, a literature at once monomaniac and mathematical, Zadig as district-attorney, Cyrano de Bergerac as a pupil ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... antipathy we might revive from our recollections of Coleridge, had we a sufficient motive. But in compensation, and by way of redressing the balance, he had many strange likings—equally monomaniac—and, unaccountably, he chose to exhibit his whimsical partialities by dressing up, as it were, in his own clothes, such a set of scarecrows as eye has not beheld. Heavens! what an ark of unclean beasts would have been Coleridge's private menagerie of departed philosophers, could ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... expedition that made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac." ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... mind "the useless torture to which thousands of students have been subjected," he characterizes "breaks" and "registers" as "paraphernalia supplied by credulity to charlatanism"; and adds: "How many a poor pupil has become a practical monomaniac on the subject of that break in my voice between D ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... courage that, for truth's sake, and for love's sake, looks death firmly in the face, and then wheels into line ready to be slain. Affection, friendship, philanthropy, will be but the wild fancies of the monomaniac, fit subjects for smiles or laughter or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... at me reproachfully, ordered a fresh cigar, and suggested turning in for the night. I walked home with him and tried to get him interested in a farce I was at work on, but it was of no use. He had become a monomaniac, and his monomania was his rebellious heroine. ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... hated in two worlds, Hradzka dreamed of a monomaniac's glory, stranded in the past with his knowledge of the future. But he didn't know the past quite ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... some hospitality in return—and I did. He supped with me once or twice in my lodgings, lost money to me at cards and so had some grounds for believing himself "my friend." Presuming upon this, he was not long in discovering himself to me for the monomaniac he was, one of those miserable men devoured by a passion which may lift us to the stars or souse us in the deepest slime of the pit. He made proposals to me, tentatively at first, then with increasing fervency, at last with importunity which would have wearied ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... divided into three sorts—malicious, fraudulent, and monomaniac. Of the former there has been very little in London for many years. The second, however, is rather prevalent. The insurance offices, which are the victims, protect themselves as well as they can, but an inquest on each fire is the true mode of lessening the evil. This is much more the interest ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... carrying out of her orders. The portrait of Mr. Chadwick Champneys, painted the year before his death hung over the library mantel and seemed to watch her thoughtfully, critically, with its fine brown eyes. The girl he had snatched from obscure slavery liked to study the visage of the old monomaniac who had been the god in the machine of her existence. Her judgment of him now was clear-eyed but cold. He had been liberal because it fell in with his plans. He had ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it. Sleep, whether I rose to it, or fell to it—only brought me dreams of her. Desperate nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac. Fate had thwarted me, and distorted me. I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly reviling my hurt, but violently ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... recovery of consciousness. There was the passing of a single expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake. I had gone to bed with no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular direction; I sat up a monomaniac. It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... than to have taxes too high; that it is better to pay exorbitant rates for franchises, than to be made unwilling partners in transportation experiments. Such men come to regard political reformers as a sort of monomaniac, who are not reasonable enough to see the necessity of the present arrangement which has slowly been evolved and developed, and upon which business is safely conducted. A reformer who really knew the people and their great human needs, who believed that it was the business of government ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... the most objectless, futile, idiotic business that ever I heard of. It can only be the work of a monomaniac." ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... about her theory, and would have been much more so, had I desired it; but, being conscious within myself of a sturdy unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw her out upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac; these overmastering ideas about the authorship of Shakspeare's plays, and the deep political philosophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had completely thrown her off her balance; but at the same time they had wonderfully developed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... saluting, without a word. Doubtless he had liefer far that Captain Arnutt had hit him in the face. But, when all is said, no words could hurt this curious monomaniac now, after that which he had seen with his own eyes and that which ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... all the broad land there was but one man who had the slightest hope of accomplishing any thing with India-rubber, and that one was Charles Goodyear. His friends regarded him as a monomaniac. He not only manufactured his cloth, but even dressed in clothes made of it, wearing it for the purpose of testing its durability, as well as of advertising it. He was certainly an odd figure, and in his appearance justified ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... manifestation. I was entirely too much taken up by the smell to observe the occult. Say, what's eating you, anyway, Court? Such foolishness isn't like you. You ought to cut it out. You know a thing like this can get on your nerves if you let it, just like anything else, and make you a monomaniac. You ought to go in for more athletics and cut out some of your psychology and philosophy. Suppose we go and take a ride in the park this afternoon. It's a ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... they would. As for the inhabitants venturing any distance from town, except under military escort, such a thing was unknown, and all communication with Naples was for some time virtually intercepted. I was regarded as a sort of monomaniac of recklessness, because I ventured on a solitary walk of a mile or two in search of a sketch,—an act of no great audacity on my part, for I had walked through various parts of the country without seeing a brigand, ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... of monomaniac antipathy we might revive from our recollections of Coleridge, had we a sufficient motive. But in compensation, and by way of redressing the balance, he had many strange likings—equally monomaniac—and, unaccountably, he chose to exhibit his whimsical partialities by dressing ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... get no one about this place to believe you! They have taken my brother-in-law's false story, indorsed as it is by the doctor-proprietor, for granted. And just so long as I persist in telling my true story, they will consider me a monomaniac, and so often as the thought of my many wrongs and sorrows combines with the nervous irritability to which every woman is occasionally subject, and makes me rave with impatience and excitement, they will report me a dangerous lunatic, subject to periodical ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... do, my dear Watson," said Holmes, shaking his head; "for no amount of 'idee fixe' would enable your interesting monomaniac to find out where ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he thought. "Has she baffled me by some piece of womanly jugglery? Am I never to get any nearer to the truth, but am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts, and wretched suspicions, which may grow upon me till I become a monomaniac? Why did she come ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... watched, is, if my view of the matter be correct, only a further development of the nervous excitement which has played you all sort of fantastic tricks since you came to this house. If anyone does wander through the gardens, I should set him down as a monomaniac or an intending burglar, and in any case the very best thing you can do is to pack up your traps and leave River Hall to ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... chair with the firelight flickering over his haggard but still handsome face, looked across at his father with a puzzled expression. He had never yet been able to determine whether the old man was a consummate hypocrite or a religious monomaniac. Burt lay with his feet in the light of the fire and his head sunk back across the arm of the chair, fast asleep ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... monomaniac, who thought fit to reprint a thing in dramatic or quasi-dramatic form to which I have already referred in passing—"Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt"—thought likewise fit to attribute to John Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old English merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more civilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play dominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has the romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a love-affair ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... during those years is eloquent. Wherever there was a man, who had either a grain of faith in rubber or a little charity for a frail and penniless monomaniac, thither Goodyear made his way. The goal might be an attic room or shed to live in rent free, or a few dollars for a barrel of flour for the family and a barrel of rubber for himself, or permission to use a factory's ovens after hours and to ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... exact moment of their passing my door. Who was this visitor that came and went so mysteriously? To discover this, without being myself discovered, was a matter that required both tact and courage, but it was one on which I was almost as much a monomaniac as a child well can be. To have opened my door when the landing was perfectly dark would have been to see nothing. To have opened the door with a candle in my hand would have been to betray myself. I must wait for a moonlight night, which would light up the landing sufficiently for my purpose. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various |
