"Madhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inclined to think that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them across a mile of open country, under a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon forget the picture of that straggling procession ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... seems to have considered that his duty—which was merely to keep intruders out of the park—was dictated by necessity. He thought that if Lady Coverly's real condition became known she would be removed to a madhouse! He also thought that a nurse ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... me to persuade Jane to beg pardon," said Mrs. Pullet. "Her temper's beyond everything; it's well if it doesn't carry her off her mind, though there never was any of our family went to a madhouse." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... threatened her with bread and water; and how they have been living ever since as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire,—till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket." This is quite as much as anybody ought to want to know previous to the unravelling of the tragedy of ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... intercourse with his housekeeper. This woman's name was Blount; and while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman. The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New Atalantis'—the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... and would, I believe, welcome any public calamity (war with England excepted) which might lessen the confidence of our country in those principles and forms. I have generally considered them rather as subjects for a madhouse. But they are now playing a game of the most mischievous tendency, without perhaps being themselves aware of it. They are endeavoring to convince England, that we suffer more by the embargo than they do, and that, if they will but hold out ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... discoveries. Imagine my disappointment and horror when, upon the conclusion of my narrative, certain papers were signed by my uncle, and, without warning, I found myself arrested and hurried away to dismal and fearful confinement in a madhouse, where I remained for twenty-eight years—long, ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... at a premium in that gruesome madhouse. Close beside the fellow on the rocking stone there hung two ropes from rings in the roof. There were iron hooks on their lower ends, and these were passed through the back muscles of another naked man, who kept himself swinging by touching the floor with one ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... communes; we might have co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enough to feel how much it has ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... to a news-agency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids, and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private madhouse; and then I'd tell the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some of these new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may still possess, it has lost at any rate ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... impression on a man to know that God will visit his iniquities upon him, he cannot blind himself to the fact that Nature will. Do we not all know what it is to be punished by Nature for disobeying her? We have looked round the wards of a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse, and seen there Nature at work squaring her accounts with sin. And we knew as we looked that if no Judge sat on the throne of heaven at all there was a Judgment there, where an inexorable Nature was crying aloud for justice, and carrying out ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... him again. I have a great deal of compassionate admiration for poor Knowles, who, with his undeniable dramatic genius, his bright fancy, and poetical imagination, will, I fear, end his days either in a madhouse or a poorhouse. The characters beside Sir Thomas Clifford and Modus (which you know are taken by Henry Greville and ——) are filled by a pack of young Guardsmen, with whom I dined, in order to make acquaintance, at Lady Francis's t'other day. Two of them, Captain Seymour and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... her funeral conclaves, and build monuments to another fellow as high as a church-steeple, and expects me to swallow the dose, but just let me kind o' look about a little, and I'm a fit subject for a madhouse." ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... madhouse worse than any carnival Charley had ever seen. He made his way, harness and suitcase on his back, through the station crowds and out into the taxi ramp. A line of the new cabs stood there, and Charley ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... and affectionate imitation reflected his face in theirs. It was true that there was another side to this truly patriarchal picture. In a city of the Far West, wrote an eloquent paragraph writer, a pale face, once divinely beautiful, was often seen at the barred window of a madhouse, and eyes that had once looked too tenderly into those of the Nickelville Solomon stared wildly at the palm-trees in the asylum grounds. This paragraph was rich ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... half man, half devil, who has bartered away his soul for the glory of power and knowledge, and, repenting of his bargain, tries again and again to persuade some desperate human to change places with him— penetrates to the refuge of misery, the death chamber, even the madhouse, seeking one in such utter agony as to accept his help, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... was subsequently found out, as it ought to have been discovered before, that both Mr. and Mrs. Mumbles had driven themselves mad by novel and romance reading, and they were both obliged to be sent to a madhouse for some time before they could be cured of their egregious folly. But as they were cured, it may be said that the circumstances which I have related were ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... it my mother, indeed, who wrought the murder? Was she living or dead? Had my father put upon her some grievous wrong? Had he pretended to get her out of the way? Had he buried her alive, so to speak, in some prison or madhouse? Had she returned in disguise from the asylum or the living grave to avenge herself and murder him? In my present frame of mind, no idea was too wild or too strange for me to entertain. If this strain continued much longer, I should go mad myself ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick. I'm sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse." ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... was not guilty," she declared. "His hands may have killed those three women—but he was not guilty. Nor was that poor innocent woman, his mother, who died in the madhouse. They were both clean of sin. It was on his wicked father that the guilt lay. It was Oscar Winslowe who was responsible for the lives that have fallen to his sins. Oscar Winslowe, and no ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... argues Dan, 'don't they up an' hive her in one of their madhouse camps? She goes chargin' about as free ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... made it very disagreeable to me to oppose him, and has even gone so far as to threaten me with imprisonment in a madhouse if I do not ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... sentenced Roulet to death. He, however, appealed to the Parliament at Paris; and this decided that as there was more folly in the poor idiot than malice and witchcraft, his sentence of death should be commuted to two years' imprisonment in a madhouse, that he might be instructed in the knowledge of God, whom he had forgotten in ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... maintained to the very last that you were his child and mine. I fought like a wild beast for my dead child's rights; but even I was mastered in the end. They threatened me—yes, James Colquhoun, in my husband's name, threatened me—with a madhouse, if I did not put away from me the suspicion that I had conceived. They assured me that Brian was not dead; that it was Vincenza's child that had died; that I was incapable of distinguishing one baby from another—and so on. They said that I ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... confidential clerk was impervious to surprise or shock. This was fortunate, for otherwise, his employment as practical aide to Average Jones would probably have driven him into a madhouse. He now ran his long, thin, clerkly hands through ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with the obscene cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the madhouse. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... an age of paradoxes, and have heard several notions seriously defended, of which some would, not many years ago, have condemned their abetter to a prison or a madhouse, and would have been heard by the wisest of our ancestors with laughter or detestation; but I did not expect that the most hardy innovator would have shocked my understanding with a position like this, or have asserted that a law may operate before it is made, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... the constabulary officer said dryly. "The chap who suggested the scheme tried to forget it in drink, was cashiered from the army and died of delirium tremens. As for the husband, he is still living—in a madhouse." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... might be rid of him, your mother wanted him because I didn't want him, the governess wanted him because he reads his Bible, and old Margret because she had known his grandmother from childhood. That's why he was taken, and if he hadn't been taken, I'd be in a madhouse by now or lying in my grave. However, here is the housekeeping money and your pin money. You may give ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... yet thirty, but apparently much older. The features were drawn and haggard, and his dark hair was plentifully streaked with gray. He looked like a man who had lived two lives in one. To-night his face frightened him. His eyes had a fixed stare like those of a man he had once seen in a madhouse. He wondered if men looked like that when they were about to be executed. Was not his own hour close at hand? He wondered why the clock was so noisy; it seemed to him that the ticks were louder than usual. He started suddenly and looked around fearfully. He thought he had ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... were they not to be found in the official records of the tribunals, it would be almost impossible to believe that mankind could ever have been so maddened and deluded. To use the words of the learned and indefatigable Horst,[35] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be at every body's call to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning, blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse the limbs of man. This ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... for Leonie Hetth that Jan Cuxson was straight and thoroughbred, and that his love was pure, else might it have gone badly with her, bringing her perchance to the door of the madhouse; for there is but a hair's breadth between those who are wakened roughly from the sleep in which they walk, and act, and speak, and those who rave ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Place. Before he reached it some of insanity's cunning returned to him. He must not let people know he had done it; they would find out he was mad; they would shut him up in a madhouse; they would shrink from him in loathing and horror. How he managed it, he told me with his dying breath, he never knew—he did somehow. No one suspected him, only Inez Catheron, returning to the nursery, had seen all—had seen the deadly blow struck, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse? ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Lanier exposures must abide safe public interests. It now seems criminally imbecile longer to permit this madman to jeopardize lives of so many. Even Paul Lanier's own existence demands his detention in a madhouse." ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... a lie, O my mad mother, do do not die, Whose eyes turn all ways but within, Whose sin is innocence of sin, Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon, Can see the motes upon the moon, You shall your lover still pursue. To what last madhouse shelters you I will uphold you, even I. You that are dead. You shall ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... comrade-in-debauchery went in, as they said, for a regular spree. It lasted for more than a week, and when it came to an end, the two men, with cracked lips, bloodshot eyes, and haggard faces, looked as if they had just escaped from a madhouse. ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... pipe to his pocket. "I ask you to put yourself in my place. Even if were a man sick for adventures, how could I listen seriously to such an insane proposition as this? What do I know about you, or your past record? You may be a practical joker, or you may have come out of a madhouse—I know nothing about it. If you claim to be an exceptional man, and want my cooperation, you must ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... savage!" said one of the lairds, a justice of the peace. "He ought to be shut up in a madhouse." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... perused innumerable volumes in various languages, and had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seem to have been written in a madhouse, and, though filled with proofs of his immense reading, degrade him to the level of James Naylor and Ludowick Muggleton. He began a dissertation intended to prove that the law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family which was preserved in the ark. He published ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal. (All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him out of the madhouse, and then every ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... that the man was crazy, released his wife, and sent the husband to the madhouse; where he remained some days, till the wife, pitying his condition, contrived to get him released by the following stratagem. She visited her husband, and desired him when any one inquired of him if he had seen it rain flesh and fish, to answer, "No: who ever saw it rain any thing ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Sonnenstein: Sonnenstein too was a Fortress in those days of Friedrich, but not impregnable, if judged worth taking. The Austrians took it, a year or two hence; Friedrich retook it, dismantled it: 'the Sonnenstein is now a Madhouse,' say ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned atheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half frantic with delusions—as that his father and uncle were plotting to shut him up in a madhouse, and that his boy William would be snatched from him by the law. Ghosts were more familiar to him than flesh and blood. Convinced that he was wasting with a fatal disease, he would often make his certainty of early death the pretext for abandoning some ill-considered ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... hinder him if he were to swing for it. I opened the window and signed to the man not to notice, so he contented himself after looking the place over and making up his mind as to what kind of place he had got to by saying, 'Lor' bless yer, sir, I wouldn't mind what was said to me in a bloomin' madhouse. I pity ye and the guv'nor for havin' to live in the house with a wild ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... not have described the sin of Nekhludov in Resurrection. His passions are such as come before the criminal rather than the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as the people in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This is a madhouse," cries some one in The Idiot. The cry is, I fancy, repeated in others of Dostoevsky's novels. His ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... cried Margaret vehemently and feeling as if she were in a madhouse. 'He has told me again and again that you are still the ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... the house of correction, in case the things that are done in your house, sir, are done with your knowledge and consent; and in a madhouse if they are done ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... name," and this power of exorcism was one upon which the early Christians specially prided themselves. It is with unconscious sarcasm that Dean Trench puts the question, If one of the disciples "were to enter a madhouse now, how many of the sufferers there he might recognise as 'possessed'?"[42] One may safely say that he would regard all as under the dominion of evil spirits. No other cause of insanity appears to have been recognised, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... knight of Malta—Knight of Roads—"Rhodes"—he should have been—we are sorry to state that the career of the Ruffler terminated in a madhouse, and thus the poor knight became in reality a Hospitaller! According to the custom observed in those establishments, the knight was deprived of his luxuriant locks, and the loss of his beard rendered his case incurable; but, in the mean time, the barber of the place ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bigger boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime. Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... precluded from the common use of doors. I am afraid Mr. T. P. VANEWORD'S primary conception has been too much for him: he lacks the nice imagination of a WELLS to carry it off. Also he fails to deal with the humour of the position, whether in the madhouse, the court of justice, the manager's office or the palace, an elementary mistake which the most amateur conjurer will always avoid. It is rather the author's misfortune than his fault that his incidental ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... palmiest days had the 'Dobe Dollar's mirrors reflected a costume more gaudy than the one she was wearing. The men too were painted and dolled up extravagantly in vaqueros' costumes that were the limit of absurdity. Had they all escaped from a madhouse? Or was he, Steve ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... of the time he died, which I did not hear of till long after it happened. When his health and faculties began to decline, he went to France, and after to Bath, in hope his health might be restored, but without success. I never saw him after his sister removed him from M'Donald's madhouse at Chelsea to Chichester, where he soon sunk into a deplorable state of idiotism, which, when I was told, shocked me exceedingly; and, even now, the remembrance of a man for whom I had a particular friendship, and in whose company I have ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... and house and the prospect admirable; the other my Lord Brooke's [Robert Lord Brooke, ob. 1676. Evelyn mentions this garden as Lady Brooke's. Brooke House at Clapton, was lately occupied as a private madhouse.] where the gardens are much better, but the house not so good, nor the prospect good at all. But the gardens are excellent; and here I first saw oranges grow: some green, some half, some a quarter, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... echoing street. Mysterious people are curled up and sleeping in the porches. A patrol of soldiers passes, and hails you. There is a light yet in one mosque, where some devotees are at prayers all night; and you hear the queerest nasal music proceeding from those pious believers. As you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow still talking to the moon—no sleep for him. He howls and sings there all the night—quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity with his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... east side of the street bearing the date 1695, and the motto "Memento Mori," with the initials N.C., but more interesting than this is one on the same side but at the southern end of the village, and standing back more than the rest. This was used as a madhouse at a time well remembered by some of the villagers. People from Pickering and the surrounding district were sent here for treatment, and I am told that the proprietor possessed a prescription for a very remarkable medicine which was supposed ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... like a charlatan would have been abhorrent to his masculine character; and to give them full and frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would have been to imperil his sanity. If he had gone through the excitement of a Methodist conversion, he would probably have ended his days in a madhouse. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... before her," he thought, "the canal, the madhouse, or... at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... are now thinking of making our escape from this hotel, and of taking a horseback journey into Michoacn, which shall occupy a month or six weeks. Meantime I am visiting, with the Seorita ——-, every hospital, jail, college, and madhouse in Mexico! ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... said the custom-house people, thinking that they were a few simpletons escaped out of a madhouse. On went the custom-house people. After a little time they came back. The smugglers had just got out their last tub. Some clouds meantime had come over the moon. 'Well, my men, have you got the moon at last?' ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... clouded her last years in tragedy, he survived for twenty years more to enjoy his honours and his ill-gotten gold; while William Austin, who had masqueraded as a Prince and called Caroline "mother," ended his days, while still a young man, in a madhouse. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... occasion to bury the wife next to her husband, and the mother next to her child. There are husbands who, when sitting lonely, dependent, in the circle of their motherless, weeping children, find the good old Book the only comforter; take it from them and you drive them to the madhouse or to suicide. There are maidens grieving, pining, their hearts broken, their lives blighted, their career irretrievably blasted; take the solace from them which this book breathes into their withered hearts, the solace that suffering innocence will be recompensed, that ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... will dot my i's, if you are so anxious for my humiliation. I have no right, it's impossible for me to be authorised; Lizaveta Nikolaevna knows nothing about it and her betrothed has finally lost his senses and is only fit for a madhouse, and, to crown everything, has come to tell you so himself. You are the only man in the world who can make her happy, and I am the one to make her unhappy. You are trying to get her, you are pursuing her, but—I don't ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... day's experience, to make it my mistress. The bare possibility of being yoked to such a woman as in fancy I have wooed and won to-day makes me shiver with inexpressible dread. Her obtuseness, combined with her microscopic surveillance, would drive me to the nearest madhouse I could find. The whole business of love-making and marriage involves too much risk to a man who, like myself, must use his wits as a sword to carve his fortunes. I've fought my way up alone so far, and may as well remain a free lance. The wealthy, ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... the town, when his arm was suddenly seized, and, turning round, who should it be but Pepe the rash, Pepe the personification of Figaro: a character impossible for northern people to place outside of a madhouse, yet daily to be found in southern Europe. Rash, headstrong, full of deviltry, splendid appetite, and not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... poet, sometimes called the "rural Burns," is now in the Lunatic Asylum at Northampton. There is much sweetness in some of poor Clare's verses, of which four volumes appeared many years ago. We believe he was among the proteges of Southey. His complaints to visitors of the madhouse are commonly of the injustice done to him by the public in not recognizing him, instead of Scott and Byron, as the author of "Marmion" and "Don Juan," and in refusing him the honor of having gained the battle of Waterloo. Clare was the writer, though not generally known as such, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... at the foot of the throne, the Caliph thus addressed him: "Halechalbe, I have been informed that you have been confined in a madhouse, by a series of the most extraordinary adventures: recover your spirits, and be assured that I am anxious to do justice to all my subjects. But in the relation I demand from you, omit no circumstance, and consider the ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... examination she denied having accomplices, and she expired on the rack without telling even her name. The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once famous Andre Dumont, was ordered to disseminate a report that she was shut up as insane in a madhouse. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison. ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... been mad for a long time," replied Mrs Forster; "the conduct of my husband and my son has been too much for my nerves; but I don't like the idea of actually going to a madhouse.—Could not—" ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... mentioned the Knightsbridge road at our first interview, Mac Fane recollected that an intimate of his had just set up what was to him a new trade, in the neighbourhood; that of being the keeper of a madhouse. He determined to go and propose the business to him; and as the fellow was preparing to advertise for lunatics, but had not yet got a single patient, there was a complete opening ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... chucking the son of Chaudey under the chin, laughingly said to him, "Tomorrow, little one, we shall shoot papa;" in spite of all the madmen and fools that constituted the Commune de Paris, who after being guilty of more extravagances than are necessary to get a man sent to the Madhouse of Charenton, and more crimes than are sufficient to shut him up in prison at Sainte-Pelagie, had managed, by means of every form, of wickedness and excess, to make our beloved Paris a frightened slave, crouching to earth under their abominable tyranny; in spite of everything, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... to the loco patch instanter. They began to plunge and turn and back and snarl. Before you could say 'Craps! you lose,' them shave-tails was giving the grandest exhibition of animal idiocy in the Territory, barring the teamster. He follered their trail to the madhouse, yanking the mouths out of ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... as sane as any one you know. It's the job of KEEPING sane in this madhouse of the tropics ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... convoys, is lying in one of the caravanserais. There are about a hundred children (boys and girls) among them, from five to seven years old. Most of them are suffering from typhoid and dysentery. When one enters the yard, one has the impression of entering a madhouse. If one brings food, one notices that they have forgotten how to eat.... If one gives them bread, they put it aside indifferently. They just lie there quietly waiting ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... who fancied he was St. Paul, was told by another patient that he was an impostor; the first maniac lodged a complaint against the second for calling St. Paul an impostor, which, he argued, with much appearance of sanity, ought not to be permitted in a well regulated madhouse. Nothing could persuade him that he had missed the question, which was whether he was St. Paul. The same thing takes place in the world at large. And especially must be noted the refusal to permit to the profane the millionth ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... not laugh," said the Countess gravely, seeing me smile, "for this, you must know, is a mixture of the courts of Italy and Russia among the Alps. It is to my brother a very serious matter. To me it is the Fair of Asnieres and the madhouse at Charenton rolled ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... you—you have touched it—and you know the penalty! You raise forces of evil that have lain dormant for ages and dare to wield them. Beware! I know of some whom you have murdered; I cannot know how many you have sent to the madhouse. But I swear that in future your victims shall be few. There is a way to ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... these meetings of the Council. I have always the feeling that something terrible will happen. I knew Lord Ronald very well, and his mother was one of my dearest friends. I am sure that he was perfectly innocent. And to-day he is in a madhouse. They say that ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... outlaw she forsakes all and follows him to his hut in the forest. Peer deserts her and roams the world, where he finds his theory of Self upset by one adventure after another and at last reduced to absurdity in the madhouse at Cairo. But though his own theory is discredited, he has not yet found the true one. To find this he must be brought face to face in the last scene with his deserted wife. There, for the first time, he asks the question and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be a madhouse," returned the porter in the same strain. "Now that the madmen are gone, a mole lives here. I kept the door open for the lunatics, and they all got out. I keep it shut for the mole, when he ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... his imagining of heathen gods and died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of the room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see the statues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their high head-dresses like those of dancers, you ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... years old. Thus early did he show both aptitude for this form and excellence in it, for each of these pieces is a work of genius. They were meant to be studies in abnormal psychology, for they were printed together in the Dramatic Lyrics under the caption Madhouse Cells. Browning was very young then, and naturally thought a man who believed in predestination and a man who killed the woman he loved were both insane; but after a longer experience of life, and ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... is not a court in all this country that would believe your wild tale. Try it, and see how quickly they would lock you up in a madhouse." ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... Between the panic-stricken, the dazed, the hilarious, the indignant and the guilty wretches like myself, who were wondering how in thunder there was going to be any explaining done, that chapel was just as coherent as a madhouse. And then Hogboom himself burst in a side door, and it took seven of us to prevent him from reducing Perkins to a paste and frescoing him all over the chapel walls. Everybody was rattled but Prexy. I think Prexy's circulation was principally ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the true home of reason is the madhouse. "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he is unable to conduct a logical argument. On the contrary, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... while the other quarter-watches were given liberty, the Neversink presented a sad scene. She was more like a madhouse than a frigate; the gun-deck resounded with frantic fights, shouts, and songs. All visitors from shore were kept at ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much may be made ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... d'Egmont, however, was not so sure that her secret was safe, and she lost not an instant in repairing to the house of M. de Sartines, to obtain from him a against the aspiring shopman, who, seized in the street, was conveyed away, and confined as a maniac in a madhouse, where, but for a circumstance you shall hear, he would doubtless be still. I happened to be with the king when the lieutenant of police arrived upon matters connected with his employment. According to custom, Louis inquired ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... he stays in arrest," added another rookie. "This squad room was a good deal like a madhouse when ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... brood, my mother saw us carried away from her for hours at a time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes approached her and sometimes receded, as they swept through the black hole in which we found ourselves when the hatches were nailed down. No madhouse, I am sure, could throw more hideous pictures on the screen of life than those which met our childish eyes during the appalling three days of the storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother was not afraid. She was desperately ill, but ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... made an understatement when he talked about "those people" dying. Europe was a madhouse. In selfdefense all strangers were instantly put to death and in retaliation the invading throngs spared no native. Peasants feared to stay their ground in terror of the oncoming Orientals and equally ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... yes. A record. As I was saying, the brown-haired child, he took to drink. It is most painful. Died in a madhouse. My uncle, head of the family, reeled beneath the stigma—reeled. Vowed from that day that he would never let a brown-haired person ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... is a much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of childishness. I would not arrest such tyrants, because I think that even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny turning the state into a madhouse. I would not segregate them, because I respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be tried by his peers. But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists no more than by house-breakers, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... madhouse, a monstrous pandemonium of prostitutes and maniacs. Now, while the choir boys gave themselves to the men, and while the woman who owned the chapel, mounted the altar caught hold of the phallus of the Christ with one hand and with the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... appointed not by himself but by the court, lends colour to the statement that he was not his own master at the time; for in later kindred deeds, now at Namur, he appoints his own trustee. I suppose, then, that Tabachetti was shut up in a madhouse at Varallo for a considerable time, during which I can find no trace of him, but that eventually he ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... was saying. "She is a peach—The husband"—and he looked extremely wise. "Oh! she made some frightful mesalliance out West, and they say he's shut in a madhouse or home for inebriates. Her entrance among us dates from when she first appeared in Paris, about three years ago, with Princess Torniloni. She is awfully rich and awfully good, and it is a real pity she does not divorce the ruffian ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... think that I have been a tyrant to you—but, I tell you, Rattlin, there is a tyrant in the ship greater than I—it is that horrible Dr Thompson. He is plotting to take away my commission, and to get me into a madhouse!— oh, my God!—my God! remove from me this agony. Hath Thine awful storm no thunderbolt—Thy wave no tomb! Must I die on the straw, like a beast of burden worn to death by loathsome toil?—and so many swords to have flashed harmlessly over my head, so many balls ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... may be added that, after the reversal of the sentence, David, the judge who had first condemned Calas, went insane, and died in a madhouse.] ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... husband; and lastly, the other humours of a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it, admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason for preferring ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Grave of Dibdin A Sketch from Life On the Portrait of the Son of J.G. Lambton, Esq. Written in the Album of the Lady of Counsellor D. Pollock The Heliotrope Sonnet On seeing a Young Lady I had previously known, confined in a Madhouse Prometheus Rosa's Grave The Sibyl. A Sketch Love On a delightful Drawing in my Album Stanzas Shakspeare Impromptu. To Oriana, on attending with her, as Sponsors, at a Christening To my Spaniel Fanny Widowed Love Written to the Lady ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... his son, Frederic William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transacting of business; and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent and population, by means of a strong military ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have consigned him to a madhouse. He said that the patient was suffering from the visits of a vampire! The punctures which she described as having occurred near the throat, were, he insisted, the insertion of those two long, thin, and sharp teeth which, it is well known, are peculiar to vampires; ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... has prospered beyond the dreams of its author; but this means no more to the country through which it runs than the success of the canals of Mars. De Lesseps died in a madhouse and practically a pauper, while Ismail spent his last years a prisoner in a gilded palace on the Bosporus, and was permitted to return to his beloved country only after death. These are but some of the tragic side-lights of the great story ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for months together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God alone knows the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived. She was locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the time her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816, the grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went after making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the grenadier that she ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... Meyrueis, which lies sweetly in the valley of the Jonte, at its confluence with the Butezon, long leagues remote from railroads and the world they stitch together—that world of unrest, uncertainty and intrigue which in those days seemed no better than a madhouse. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... supposed to aim at beauty, we are in a state of aesthetic anarchy, because there is a whole vast conspiracy, itself unconscious for the most part, to persuade us that we like what no human being out of a madhouse could like. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... not at a madhouse. You are not mad. Only suffering from a nervous fit. It would be to stay for a time at some doctor's, and I think it would be the best thing. It would get you away from the dull, gloomy chambers, where you hardly ever see the sun. They are bad enough to ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... of the two—the man who obeys, or he who sets Heaven at defiance? Once, who could compete with me at school or college? and what might I not have been had you not, when I was struck down by illness, taken advantage of my weakness, and by sending me to a madhouse, confirmed my malady; but fool as you called me, I can see that Heaven's retributive justice has chastised you through life. Me you got into your power on the ground that I was insane, and the mind of the daughter, in whom you took such pride, often totters on its ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... for a long time," replied Mrs Forster; "the conduct of my husband and my son has been too much for my nerves; but I don't like the idea of actually going to a madhouse. Could not—" ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... you hate or strike back at a blind man who stumbled and fell against you on the street? Would you retaliate at a maniac who gnashed his teeth and shook his fist at you on his way past you to the madhouse? Or at a corpse being carried past you that had been too long without burial? And shall you retaliate on a miserable man driven mad with diabolical passion? Or at a poor sinner whose heart is as rotten as the grave? Ill-will is abroad ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... myself, and to wonder what the count meant to do with me. I felt certain he would never let me see her again if he could help it, and that alone was a heartbreaking grief to me; and then it came into my head that perhaps he would confine me somewhere for life—shut me up in a convent, perhaps, or a madhouse! As soon as this idea possessed me, it grew and grew till I felt as if I really was going mad with the horror of it; and I resolved, though it was at the risk of breaking my neck, to try and make my escape by the window during the night. It looked ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... diseases, of hereditary insanity, of congenital epilepsy, of a hundred terrible maladies, which from birth have lurked in the child, biding the opportunity of attack, suddenly spring from their lairs, and hurry her to the grave or the madhouse. If we ask why so many fair girls of eighteen or twenty are followed by weeping friends to an early tomb, the answer is, chiefly from diseases which had their origin at the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... anything about that dark scandal. They knew that there had been a dreadful scene at the castle seven years before, and that Lady Littimer and her son had left never to return. Lady Littimer was in a madhouse somewhere, they said, and the son was a wanderer on the face of the earth. And when Lord Littimer died every penny of the property, the castle included, would go to her ladyship's nephew, Mr. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the keeper of the madhouse. "What whimsical ideas these lunatics have! He imagines that one can propel ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... mother: why, You would not wonder surely if I knew, By nothing but my own heart's help, he lied, Would you? No reason's wanted in the case. So with you! In they burnt on me, his tales, Much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, Make captive any visitor and scream All sorts of stories of their keeper—he's Both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, Serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; Sane people soon see through the ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... explain no more. Later—many months later—he died patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things considered, was almost as pathetic as ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... brought before the recorder for wearing boy's clothes. Now, I'm sure that it was upon that occasion that I went suddenly mad with trouble, and all the rest is a lunatic's fancy! This fine old country seat of which I vainly think myself the mistress, is just the pauper madhouse to which the magistrates have sent me. This fine old military officer whom I call uncle is the head doctor. The servants who come at my ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... daily in all points of literature and science; nay, we in the same manner venture to call some persons mad, and on the strength of our conviction we deprive them of their property, and shut them up in a madhouse: yet if madmen wore to insist that they were sane, and that we were mad, I know not to what infallible authority we could appeal; and, after all, what are we to do with those who deny that authority to be infallible? we must then go to another infallible authority to guarantee ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... dog in Smithfield. The circumstances were as follow: Collins happened to be in church when the priest elevated the host; and Collins, in derision of the sacrifice of the Mass, lifted up his dog above his head. For this crime Collins, who ought to have been sent to a madhouse, or whipped at the cart's tail, was brought before the bishop of London; and although he was really mad, yet such was the force of popish power, such the corruption in church and state, that the poor madman, and his dog, were both ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... in several days, in a week perhaps. He used to come, like the master of a madhouse visiting his patients, to see that I was comfortable, he said. At first I used to appeal to him to set me free—kneeling at his feet, promising any sacrifice of my fortune for him or for my father, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... It was a frightful blow to them. My father had the circumstances explained to him; he never understood the matter and never discussed it with me. Had I told him earlier I feel quite certain that, with his despotic nature, he would have put me in a madhouse. My mother and sister have treated me very kindly always. My brother ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark door-step of the Home Club at midnight. But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew dithyrambic over the charming, lonely men with whom she played—a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse; a clever, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... gentlemen, whose crime was that they importunately presented a petition from the nobles of their province. The apartments which they were to occupy were filled with other prisoners, so room was made by removing these unhappy occupants to the madhouse at Charenton, whence they were released only in the following year by order of a committee of the National Assembly.[Footnote: Barere, i. 281. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Bastille was that ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell |
