"Lunatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hamilton! Do you mean to tell me that you are sinfully wasting money on such a thing as that—on something that will never go, and will only be a heap of junk?" and Uncle Ezra, of Dankville, looked as though his nephew were a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... a lunatic!" burst from her mother. "I could not have believed you would be guilty of such supreme, ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... a popular corruption of Bethlehem, a lunatic hospital, founded in 1246. The old building, with its "carved maniacs at the gates," was taken down in 1675, and the hospital removed to Moorfields. The second building—the one to which Wordsworth refers—was ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... is insane," said Napoleon, after a pause. "I want him to be looked upon as a lunatic. I hope that the whole affair will remain a secret, and that the world will hear nothing of it; but if it should be talked about, we must insist that ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... documents, and, on reading them, I was astounded to find one was an order for my removal to a private lunatic asylum, the papers being signed by Josias Googery, J.P., and Dr. Loonem; and others contained statements of the evidences of my insanity, signed by ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... an island. But all to no purpose. Miss Mackenzie seems to like hard winters and darkness and cold; and as for that perpetual and melancholy and cruel sea, that in the winter-time I should fancy might drive anybody into a lunatic asylum—" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... celebrity or a madman. I think he inclined to the latter belief. I suppose I was mad. Every great genius is mad upon the subject in which he is greatest. The unsuccessful madman is disgraced, and called a lunatic. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... watching us—me and this figment of mine. My anger was shame. My senses are logical in their pretenses. How can I stand out against them, if they grow cleverer than I, more persuasive than I, and lead me finally into the total madness of accepting them as Mallare—the one Mallare, the lunatic who has escaped ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... guardian (tutor) for a child of certain age (sixth statute of this Table; cf. p. 7, n. 21) there is provided also a guardian (custos, later curator) for a lunatic and for a prodigal ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... all united against the beer-shop and the gin-palace, is but one development of the war between Heaven and hell. It is, in short, intoxication that fills our jails; it is intoxication that fills our lunatic asylums; it is intoxication that fills our work-houses with poor. Were it not for this one cause, pauperism would be nearly ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... But he enforces his teaching by means utterly transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest word about immortality worth—what do we care for what Socrates ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... and remarks: "These old bachelors are perfect nuisances to society." A friend marries a man of rather feeble intellect, and she comments: "Tis strange, 'tis passing strange, that a girl possessed of common sense should be willing to marry a lunatic—but ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... a very strange occurrence, which I shall relate quite frankly, although I know beforehand that you will set me down as a liar or a lunatic. I had been away from home for a fortnight, and as I returned rather late at night, I went straight to my room. Having partly undressed, I took my clothes in one hand and a candle in the other, and opened the cupboard door. I stood for a moment looking nervously at my double, standing, candle ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... back towards my bed and amused myself with jumping on to it, holding my feet together. Each time I missed I laughed like a lunatic. I then drank my chocolate, and nearly choked ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... to save Natalie Brande—for they will certainly succeed in blowing themselves up, if nobody else—consent to her marrying another man, say that young lunatic Halley, who is always dangling after her when ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... fastened in their heads by a string, and they can throw them out of their heads and draw them back again; and, at a signal, they all threw their eyes at him. He was so horrified that night, that he got insane and had to be sent to a lunatic asylum." ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... uncle's wealth, of which not more than a half had been mentioned in his will. If Clifford refused to reveal where the missing documents were placed, the judge declared he would have him confined in a public asylum as a lunatic, for there were many witnesses ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... without an interesting story such as is told here. One may perhaps fairly easily detect its inspiration in certain actual happenings. It is the story of a woman, Lucy Briarwell, clever and gifted with personality, the grass-widow of an apparently incurable lunatic who, living in Bruges, falls under the influence of a Belgian poet-dramatist. Together—for Lucy is shown as his collaborator and source of inspiration—they evolve a wonderful new form of miracle play in which she presently captivates London and Paris ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... deafness, dumbness. It makes 'the lips of those that are asleep to speak' (Cant 7:9). This is the right HOLY WATER,[18] all other is counterfeit: it will drive away devils and spirits; it will cure enchantments and witchcrafts; it will heal the mad and lunatic (Gal 3:1-3; Mark 16:17,18). It will cure the most desperate melancholy; it will dissolve doubts and mistrusts, though they are grown as hard as stone in the heart (Eze 36:26). It will make you speak well (Col 4:6). It will make ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... relieving the owners and occupiers of the soil from any burthens that unfairly press upon them, we would recommend that the expense of jails, lunatic asylums, and criminal prosecutions shall no longer remain a charge upon landed property, and that, in future, all classes who derive an income out of land shall bear their equitable proportion of the taxation which ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... by the light of madness that began to flicker in Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting like a lunatic for footroom, for space enough to turn and make ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... much more than its usual decision. It was abrupt and unhesitating. My demand had evidently taken his "lordship" by surprise. He started from the magisterial chair, in which he was yet to awe so many successions of rustic functionaries, and with a flushed cheek asked "Whether I was lunatic, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... they produced: and from which we had no means of escaping until the hour of disrobing for the night. After travelling three leagues we stopped at a village called Souza, where we took breakfast, the comfort of which meal was, however, destroyed, by the importunate absurdities of an old man, half lunatic, half simpleton. ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... quite possible," Bell said, thoughtfully. "Van Sneck had practically recovered from the flesh wounds; it was the injury to his head that was the worst part. He resembled an irresponsible lunatic more than anything else. Steel wants ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Andrew scanned his unfamiliar face, "as to that person, sire..." continued Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself, "the man who advised the Drissa camp—I see no alternative but the lunatic asylum or the gallows!" ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Mekin will be defeated when an enemy fleet submits to destruction, lying still in space? There's no sense to it! My Talents wouldn't think of anything idiotic like that! They've got better sense! But when this lunatic said it, they could precognize it too! It's so! They couldn't think of it themselves, but when this Mekinese Talent does, they know it's true. But ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the supposed lunatics were really wiser than their keepers or the doctors who attended them. It often happened that the aspirations of a superior mind were mistaken for indications of the malady, and led to the incarceration of the supposed lunatic. For instance, a poor man, who lived in the reign of my predecessor, thought, and truly thought, that electricity might be used as a motive power for the heaviest bodies, and supply the place of wood used as ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... was really of a swarthy visage, and far from being the beauty her infatuated lover conceived her to be: thus verifying the dictum of our great dramatist, in the ever-fresh passage where he makes "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" to be "of imagination all compact," the lover seeing "Helen's beauty in the brow of Egypt!"—Notwithstanding all this, the ancient legend of Layla and Majnun has proved an inspiring theme to more than one great poet of Persia, during ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social relationships which society requires of each individual. Either he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... the partners in the marriages that come to the divorce courts were joined by God, and is willing to follow the argument to its logical conclusion. Are they willing, for instance, to say that a woman or a man may not put aside the marriage if one of the two is a lunatic, or a hopeless drunkard, or an habitual criminal, or a degenerate, or the victim of a disease which can be communicated to the offspring? Are they willing to go with our ecclesiastical advisers, who seek to maintain marriages, which may ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... went on sowing, spring after spring, and never reaping in the autumn, you would say he was a fit subject for the lunatic asylum. No; he is always looking forward to the time when he will reap the reward of his toil. He never expects that the seed he has ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... delusion, he attacked the image of the Madonna della Consolazione, when borne in procession through the city to the Superga, and mutilated it with a hatchet. The mob was enraged, and would have torn him in pieces had he not been rescued by the soldiers, and he was conveyed as a madman to a lunatic asylum." These lotteries are a means of ruin and demoralization in every Italian town, the lottery offices, where the winning numbers are displayed, being only less plentiful than the cafes. I believe many of the poorer people invest their ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... them with figures; and to do addition sums from page to page; and to fill up hundreds of cards; and to write out lists of shops, and to have long interviews with printers whose proofs made him dream of lunatic asylums; and to reckon innumerable piles of small coins; and to assist his small office-boy in the great task of licking envelopes and stamps. Moreover, he was worried by shopkeepers; every shopkeeper in the district now wanted to allow him twopence in the shilling on ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... spare time and his spare money upon it, but as the hobby took possession of him, he devoted all his time and all his money to it; then he pawned his clothes, and then he raised money on the furniture; the brokers came in, and finally the poor fellow was taken to a lunatic asylum, and his wife and family were thrown on the parish. The story impressed Hubert strangely. He saw an analogy between himself and the crazy inventor, and he asked himself if he would go on re-writing The Gipsy until he went out ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... "Grace Philow lunatic!" answered the brother. "Nice thing to make a fellow miss a whole afternoon on marbles, just ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic, who had not even enough sense of humour to see the absurdity of his own request, that she should go out to the shore of this ocean of corruption, and repeat the ancient role of King Canute, or Dame Partington with her mop and her pail. What was to be ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... men, Harding would have noticed the dress with disapprobation: in Leslie it seemed to be legitimately a part of the man to dress as he liked; and neither Harding, or any one else who knew him, paid any more attention to his outward appearance than they would have bestowed upon a harmless lunatic under the same circumstances. Wherever Leslie boarded, (and his places of boarding were very numerous, taking the whole year together,) it was always noted that he filled up the hat-rack with a collection of hats of all odd and rapid styles, with a few of the more sedate and ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... only a brute of a husband would fling such a message at her head. Archie hated discord; the very thought of it was abhorrent. He had never had a care in his life beyond his health, and quarrels of every sort he left to underbred people with evil tempers. Here was a furious lunatic telegraphing his wife of the severance of the most sacred of ties and demanding the immediate transfer of one child to his possession and relinquishing only temporarily the custody of the other, presumably ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... re-incarnation, Mr. Mario, helps to people our lunatic asylums. I was assured recently by a well-known brain specialist that the claimants to the soul of Cleopatra would out-number ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... passionately admire. The place was as windy as Troy; from far on the ringing plains the breeze raced and fell upon this veil, ceaselessly kicking it here and there, in a way that would have driven a strong man lunatic in seven minutes. Sharlee, though a slim girl and no stronger than another, remained entirely unconscious of the behavior of the veil; long familiarity had bred contempt for its boisterous play; and, with her eyes a thousand miles away, she was wishing with her whole heart that she dared ask ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... prevalent as mal de mer amongst these Americans who are rushing over for a few weeks' repose. They work at such a fearful rate, slaves to that insatiable god the almighty dollar, that eventually they either have to fly to a lunatic asylum or an Atlantic liner. After a day or two on the latter the calm and repose and the vast sea around them prove too much of an antidote; the overtaxed brain gives way, and overboard they go. An Englishman ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... fiery nature. His affection seemed to turn to rage, and it was thought best to keep him in ignorance of the fact that Diane had been seen in Paris. Brain fever prostrated him, and when he recovered physically from that his mind was affected—in other words, he was a homicidal lunatic, with a fixed determination to find and ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... his arrangements. This was soon done. Every word of the story was implicitly believed, and the one-eyed boots was immediately instructed to repair to number nineteen, to act as custodian of the person of the supposed lunatic until half-past twelve o'clock. In pursuance of this direction, that somewhat eccentric gentleman armed himself with a walking-stick of gigantic dimensions, and repaired, with his usual equanimity of manner, to Mr. Trott's apartment, which he entered without any ceremony, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... would have cast his ashes to the winds. But now they worship him when his ear is dead to their praise, the great heart silent that their love would have made beat with ecstasy. Well, such is life. They treated Tasso just about the same who writ "Jerusalem Delivered," they imprisoned him for a lunatic, and now how much store they set ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... with the papal nuncio, or with noble lords and reverend bishops, was either unknown, or the character of those communications was not suspected. That a serious political conspiracy should have shaped itself round the ravings of a seeming lunatic, to all appearance had not occurred as a possibility to a single member of the council, except to those whose silence was ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... corrupting and endangering the purity and peace of community, than they would be, should she separate from him and strive to win for herself and the children she may have, comfort and respectability? The statistics of our prisons, poor-houses, and lunatic asylums, teach us a fearful lesson on this subject ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... plain I'm in a stait of Destitution. I've got no bed-clothes, think of that, I must have coins, the hole thing's a Mockry, I wont stand it, nobody would. I would have come away before, only I have no money for the railway fare. Don't be a lunatic, Morris, you don't seem to understand my dredful situation. I have to get the stamp on tick. A fact.—Ever your ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the near alliance of great wits—"the lunatic, the lover, and the poet"—there comes a point where the vagaries of temperament overlap and are confounded, and where the historian, at least, must take a line. None of Sheridan's biographers, and he has had, as I think, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... equivalent to the English word Bedlam. The first lunatic asylum of the colony of Victoria stood near Melbourne on a bend of the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of the Iliad, or the sixth book of the AEneid, or the Agamemnon. He encouraged the Eton boys to laugh at "Scientific lectures, and lessons on the diameter of the sun and moon"; but he was moved almost to tears when "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" was offered as a paraphrase of "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" He listened with amused interest to the teachers who deduced our descent from "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... are. You'll ask Manschoff and he'll deny it. And so you'll tell him about me. You'll say you met somebody in the woods today—either a lunatic or a Naturalist spy who infiltrated here under false pretenses. And Manschoff will reassure you. He'll reassure you just long enough to get his hands on me. Then he'll take care ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... well received—Marlborough House in London; that he was sure the Prince of Wales would welcome him heartily. At last, means having been obtained from his friends, I sought to forward him from St. Petersburg; but, as no steamers thence would take a lunatic, I sent my private secretary with him to Helsingfors, and thence secured his passage ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... President is severe, it is equally so on us, and I suppose the 'kickers' are those who have one knob too few in their backbones. Some, however, have got the war bee inside their skulls instead of in their hats, and will be fit subjects for a lunatic asylum if the thing doesn't end soon, one way or another. And they reiterate and reiterate that they don't want war, when they know that any determined step we can take is bound to lead to it. I have no patience with them. They either are fools or are trying to keep on ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... is the foundation of pride, the natural superstructure of it is madness. If there was an occasion for the experiment, I would not question to make a proud man a lunatic in three weeks' time, provided I had it in my power to ripen his frenzy with proper applications. It is an admirable reflection in Terence, where it is said of a parasite, "Hic homines ex stultis facit insanos." "This fellow," says he, "has an art of converting fools ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... yet when she asked me to send Some trifle of verse to remind her Of days that had come to an end, And one she was leaving behind her, It looked, as we stood on the shore, A theme so entirely delightsome That I, like a lunatic, swore (Quite ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... these Union meetings. Every one knows, that there is not a county, or a city, or a hamlet in the State of New York, that is ready to go out of the Union, but only some small bodies of fanatics. There is no man so insane in the State, not fit for a lunatic asylum, as to wish it. But that is not the point. We all know that every man and every neighborhood, and all corporations, in the State of New York, except those I have mentioned, are attached to the Union, and have no idea of withdrawing from it. But that is not, I repeat, the point. The question, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the vultures already beginning on him, some dead dogs, heaps of refuse, and a lot more vultures too gorged to fly—the usual Arab scheme of sanitation. I asked one of my bodyguard to shoot the camel and he obliged me, with the air of a keeper making concessions to a lunatic. Nobody took any notice of the rifle ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... up: as for me, Roger, you know I always wades it through the muddy shallow: well, I listens, and a chap creeps ashore—a mad chap, with never a tile to his head, nor a sole to his feet—and when I sings out to ax him his business, the lunatic sprung at me like a tiger: I didn't wish to hurt a little weak wretch like him, specially being past all sense, poor nat'ral! so I shook him off at once, and held him straight out in this here wice." [Ben's grasp could ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... village, and on his death she tried to look after the lunatics herself. But she wasn't at all successful! They kept escaping, and people didn't like it. This was my gain, for "Boo" came to look after me instead, and for the next thirty years I was her only lunatic, and she my most constant companion and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... back through the room which was now in almost lunatic confusion—forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... reason fled. In accounts of the epoch there is much mention of citizens, senators, patricians. Nominally there were such people. Actually there were but slaves. The slaves had a succession of masters. Among them was a lunatic, Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There were others. There was Terror, there was Hatred, there was Crime. These last, though several, were yet but one. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... does!" Halsey's eyes were fairly starting from his head. "I beg your pardon, Aunt Ray, but—the fellow's a lunatic." ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the decapitation was not altogether a pleasant process. "This is the 4th of August, and on the 19th it is advertised for sale. There may be one chance in a thousand of a better purchaser; though Mr. Hildreth thinks no one but a lunatic, or a woman, would put money in such an adventure," her lips curving in their bitter-sweet smile. Indeed, there was nothing she was so much like as a cluster of bright bitter-sweet berries, on a sharp ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... faith." There was a time in Lincoln's experience when his faith faltered, as there was a time when his reason tottered, but these sad experiences were temporary, and Abraham Lincoln was neither an infidel nor a lunatic. It is easy to trace in the life of this colossal character, a steady growth of faith. This grace in him increased steadily in breadth and in strength with the passing years, until it came to pass that his last public utterances ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... spelling; but make due concessions to the youth of the editorial staff and the nascent state of the periodical. So promising are the young publishers that time cannot fail to refine and mature their efforts. "An Hour with a Lunatic," by Harry B. Sadik, is a very short and very thrilling tale of the "dime novel" variety. Mr. Sadik has a commendable sense of the dramatic, which would serve him well should he choose a less sensational field of endeavour. "Our Soldiers," a Canadian mother's war song by Mrs. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... wandering the hill. She was brought home but could give no good account of herself, or would not. She said that she had followed her lover, married him, and lost him. Nothing would comfort her, nothing could keep her in the house. She was locked in, but made her way out; she was presently sent to the lunatic asylum, but escaped from that. Then she got away for good and all and never came back again. No trace of her body could be found. What are you to make of a thing of the sort? I give it for what it is worth, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... dirty pup, do you dare to intimate—are you lunatic enough to take stock in any such story ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... tell the name of his master or wife, or even his own name, and as no one was left old enough to remember him, the neighborhood having been entirely deserted after the war, he simply passed as a harmless old lunatic laboring under a delusion. He was devoted to children, and Ephraim's small brood were his chief delight. They were not at all afraid of him, and whenever they got a chance they would slip off and steal down ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... cool," said the Doctor. "You've disabled this poor fellow of yours, and made him—on that point—a lunatic for life; and now you want to disable me. But, for once, I'll do it. To save appearance, if you'll give me a bed, I'll come over after my ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... his transformation of Bottom reconciles the fairy King and Queen, while he incidentally goes near to spoiling the performance of the "crew of patches" at the nuptials of Theseus by preventing due rehearsal of their interlude. It is perhaps a permissible fancy to convert Theseus' words "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," to illustrate the triple appeal made by the three ingredients the grotesque, the sentimental, and the fantastic. Each part, of course, is coloured by the poet's genius, and the whole is devoted to the comic aspect ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... execution, and exhorting the pitying bystanders to adhere steadfastly to the truth, and like him to seal the cause of Christ with their blood, a servant of the sheriff's interrupted him, and blasphemously called his religion heresy, and the good man a lunatic. Scarcely however had the flames reached the martyr, before the fearful stroke of God fell upon this hardened wretch, in the presence of him he had so cruelly ridiculed. The man was suddenly seized with lunacy, cast off his clothes and shoes before the people, (as Abbes had done just before, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... good, and asserts the right of disposal of it as he thinks proper. A blind man may have the finest picture that ever was painted; he may call it his, that is to say, nobody else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of things, is when ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gentlemen of different nations are like brothers brought up in different schools. An Englishman who should demand satisfaction by arms, of another Englishman, for a hasty word spoken in jest, would be considered a lunatic in the clubs, and if he carried his warlike intentions into effect with the consent of his adversary, and killed his man, the law would hang him without mercy as a common murderer. On the other hand, a German who should refuse a duel, or not demand one if ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... had thought it the most harrowing story ever written. A woman had gone to sleep, young, beautiful, beloved. She had waked to find her hair grey, her hands old and veined. Twenty blank years of madness she had spent in a lunatic asylum, after being driven mad by a shock, waking to sanity at last only to ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... authorities even to make the attempt at liberating the insane from their chains, and, notwithstanding his recognized position as a leader of science, he gained but grudging assent, and was regarded as being himself little better than a lunatic for making so manifestly unwise and hopeless an attempt. Once the attempt had been made, however, and carried to a successful issue, the amelioration wrought in the condition of the insane was so patent that the fame of Pinel's ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of social capital and without any designation of purpose, would pass for a work of transcendental charlatanism, whose author could readily be sent to a madhouse, provided the magistrates would consent to regard him as only a lunatic. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... terribly. It is all right for men to be clever when they are old or even middle-aged, then allowances are made for them and they may be as odd as they please. But if any one happens to be clever when he is at Oxford, he will have to watch himself closely or he will be called either a genius or a lunatic, and the one is almost as fatal ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... reposed in you doctors!" I said. "Think what it means to condemn a man to a lunatic asylum. In the hands of the unscrupulous ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... "She was sobbing gently—not for effect this time. I went in softly, and asked her what the matter was. She said she had been out all the afternoon to see a friend who had just been obliged to place her mother in a lunatic asylum, and she was crying for sympathy. Then, as she saw me look at my rug, she said Mary had left the rug out for her to take a nap early in the afternoon, and that she had intended to, but had decided to go out instead. Now what I object to is the style of her lying. ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... keeping his distance prudently. He was saying to himself: "Look out! Some lunatic. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... no hope that his warning would be in time, but he would always feel better for having given it. As the captain debated with himself as to whether this lunatic should be confined as dangerous, the strange airplane nosed over and dived down to the sea, a hundred yards from the side of the Stellar. Just before it struck the water, its wings snapped forward and became part ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... into the hail, and while she still hesitated there at the head of the staircase, the door opened far enough to allow the huddled figure of Miss Polly to creep through the crack. Then the key turned in the lock; and O'Hara's voice was heard pacifying George as he might have pacified a child or a lunatic. After a few minutes the shrieks stopped suddenly; the door was unlocked again for a minute, and there ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... fact every man intrusted with executive power, especially in stormy times,—should be resolute, unflinching, with a will dominating over everything, with courage, pluck, backbone, be he king or prime minister, or the superintendent of a railway, or director of a lunatic asylum, or president of a college. No matter whether the sphere be large or small, the administration of power requires energy, will, promptness of action, without favor and without fear. And if such a person rules well he will be respected; but if he rules unwisely,—if capricious, unjust, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... those letters were written by the late superintendent. The poor man is now a lunatic. He was ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... tell you that while we were in the plumbing shop a fellow sauntered by. He wore a hat—like a cowboy, and otherwise looked queer. Well, when the plumber sighted him he rushed to the 'phone and called up the only officer in Dalton—Tavia's father, and told him the lunatic was just sauntering down the road. But from last accounts he was still sauntering—the squire ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... the party collected at the parsonage considered that they had proceeded far enough; but Miss Dragwell thought otherwise; she had made up her mind that Mrs Forster should pass a day or two in the Lunatic Asylum; and she felt assured that Mr Ramsden, through whose assistance her intention must be accomplished, would not venture to dispute ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and my conscience is clear, at all events [she sits down again with a vehemence that almost ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... speculators, and contractors do? Will they go out to fight each other? Then, indeed, warfare would become a blessing undisguised, and we could freely join the poet in calling carnage God's daughter. When I was a child I drew up a scheme for a vast British army recruited from our lunatic asylums. With lunatic soldiers, as I explained to my mother, the heavier our losses, the greater would be our gain. It seems to me still a promising idea. But an army recruited from kings, lords, Cabinet ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... driver has pulled the lever back and the steam goes up with less force through the chimney: working quietly. Away, away, on our iron steed through Ealing and Hanwell—across the viaduct over the River Brent, which runs to Brentford—past the pretty church and the dull lunatic asylum, and so on to Slough, which is passed in twenty-three minutes after quitting Paddington. Then we reach Taplow, and have just fifty-five miles to do within the hour. "Crimea" rushes across the Thames below Maidenhead, with a parting roar, but we ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... There was so much to talk over, and when they did finally lay themselves down to rest, it was with the conviction that Captain Forest was not quite so mad as they had supposed. He was at least a harmless lunatic and in no ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... must be soldier or no dinner. I have been told several nice things he said about that distracting dinner before leaving the garrison. But it all matters little to me now, since it was not found necessary to take me to a lunatic asylum! ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... caused the fall of a bridge over the Ouse, but the saint by a miracle saved all their lives. The shrine was destroyed at the Reformation, and the relics buried in the nave, where they were found in the last century. York Minster remained almost unchanged until 1829, when a lunatic named Martin concealed himself one night in the cathedral and set fire to the woodwork of the choir, afterwards escaping through a transept-window. The fire destroyed the timber roofs of the choir and nave and the great organ. Martin was arrested, and confined in an asylum until ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... itself into a frenzy, and, forgetting caution, had crazily exposed itself. Its owner was probably some poor lunatic, subject to fits of madness. But Helwyse was full of scorn and anger, born of that bitterest disappointment which admits not even the poor consolation of having worthily aspired. He had been duped,—and by the cobwebs of a madman's brain! He broke into a short laugh, harsh ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... her hands together. "Bessie's marriage have done that! I always told Bessie she'd send some of 'em to the lunatic asylum, ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... professor, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to give work to insane persons. His calm manner and soothing words had a quieting effect on the lunatic. The glare died ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... together paltry articles for works which I never read. Indeed, if I have not undergone the doom of almost all individuals whose situation becomes suddenly opposed to their feelings and habits, and if I am not yet a lunatic, I must thank the mechanical strength of my nerves. My nerves, however, will not withstand the threatenings of shame which I have always contemplated with terror. Time and fortune have taught me to meet all other evils with fortitude; but I grow every day more and more ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... tolerably large. Look at the roundabout circuits we took; the dreams of a patient in delirium are not more incongruous. Still, just as there is nothing absolutely unconnected in the head either of a man who dreams, or of a lunatic, so all hangs together in conversation; but it would often be extremely hard to find the imperceptible links that have brought so many disparate ideas together. A man lets fall a word which he detaches from what has gone before, and what has followed in his head; another ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... his curiosity lead him further to inquire into the after-history of this same Georgio Rhodojani, let him go on a fine summer day to the County Lunatic Asylum at Bodmin, and, with permission, enter the grounds set apart for private patients. There he may chance to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a shrill cry, she rushed toward us and embraced us both with all the might of a lunatic; wept and gasped, till finally she fainted ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... He continued to be the President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners, but he steadily refused to ameliorate a single prisoner convicted of burglary, and while he was always a lunatic in regard to other criminals, he openly maintained that a burglar was the worst of men, and that kindness was utterly thrown away upon him. He never had any more burglars in his house, though the dog now and then lunched off warm leg when some stranger to that ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... moment believe his story—he could not believe it; nobody could believe such nonsense—yet those accents of despairing truth impressed him disagreeably. They made him feel sick. And he suspected also that the man might have gone mad with fear. A lunatic is a hopeless subject. Bah! A pretence. Nothing but a pretence. He would know ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... I'm not the man to go laying myself open to anything like that. Well! Good God! The next minute the man came for me like a lunatic—clutching out at me with those great hands of his and with the most murderous expression on his face you can imagine. I backed away to the medicine cabinet and caught hold of a pestle and told him ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... requested to look for a cigarette in a certain part of the Prince of Wales' statue, in Bombay; he went and found nothing. Mrs. Coulomb now says she was Madame B——'s confederate, and that she was afraid of being taken up as a lunatic if she climbed to the unicorn's horn where the cigarette was to be placed. So she said the rain must have washed it away. Madame Blavatsky showed mental weakness in not considering the difficulties, and her fondness for cigarettes made her set them too ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... responsibility myself, but I daresay if I were lunatic enough to back him up, the powers that be ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... those terrible days of war, together with the loss of her husband and home, broke the heart and sickened the brain of Mrs. Waldron; and in the State Lunatic Asylum is an old white-haired woman, with a weary, patient look in her eyes, and this gentle old woman, who sits day after day just looking out at the sunshine and the flowers, is the once beautiful "mamma" ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... "Old lunatic!" said James Poynter, with his fat upper lip curling in disgust, as his eyes lit on the row of glass jars with their ghastly contents. "Once I get my lady home, I don't mean to see much of him. Here, boy," he said, as he reached the hall, and so suddenly ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn |
