"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wasn't my courage that failed. But having a raisin in my mouth I could not on the instant respond to the lash. And as Corkran would have said, it takes more than one swallow to make a speech. Ruthlessly he rapped, seizing what I wished might be his dying chance to indulge a mania for puns ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... down-stairs on a tea-tray the first day he arrived; the second day he passed me in the hall and asked, with a grin, "if I was one of the mummies in this old mausoleum?" the third day he left, saying that the place was "too jolly beastly slow" for him. The second event was the sudden extraordinary mania that Aunt (did I tell you she was rich?) took for the singing lady. I discovered, much to my chagrin, I must say, that often, instead of going to bed at nine, as I believed she did, she used to ensconce herself in the drawing-room, and there sit and listen to indifferent music till all hours. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... plot was already organized against him. The Sunday after on his return from Etiolles he found his mother so completely absorbed in her book that she did not even hear him come in. He would not have noticed this, knowing her mania for romances, had not Ida made an attempt ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... more than she could bear. This young woman had been confined in the State Hospital for the Insane, and had been treated by specialists for many years, without any benefit at all. There was some homicidal mania, much depression, and attempts at suicide. She could not be left alone in her room for a moment. But the day after the transplantation of the glands this young woman embraced her mother, and talked so rationally to her that she called in ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... to it by untoward circumstances. He is desirous that we shall sympathize with her, to the point of tears, in the last act. It is very kind of him to do such charitable deeds in history's name, and we realize how exceedingly unselfish he is. Just the same, this mania for resurrecting defunct courtesans seems a trifle neurasthenic. It appears to indicate a hysterical sympathy, on the part of the playwright, with dead characters whom, in life, he would hesitate at ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... 231. De furore, mania melancholia scribo, ut sciam quo pacto in hominibus gignatur, fiat, crescat, cumuletur, minuatur; haec inquit animalia quae vides propterea seco, non Dei opera perosus, sed fellis bilisque ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to the new scientific doctrines which are flourishing now in England. This sensational zeal reminds me of what I experienced as a young man in Germany, when the physio-philosophy of Oken had invaded every centre of scientific activity; and yet, what is there left of it? I trust to outlive this mania also. As usual, I do not ask beforehand what you think of it, and I may have put my hand into a hornet's nest; but you know your old friend Agass, and will forgive him if he hits a ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... general resume of what follows in detail, but this vigorous speech to the priests was clearly among the new king's first acts. No doubt his purpose had slowly grown while his father was affronting Heaven with his mania for idols. Such decisive, swift action does not come without protracted, previous brooding. The hidden fires gather slowly in the silent crater, however rapidly they burst out ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent peg to the crupper bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens." A well known missionary to the East during the last generation was subjected to this gross insult by one of the Persian Prince- governors, whom he had infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by mentioning his "dishonoured person;" but English readers cannot comprehend the full significance of the confession. About the same time Shaykh Nasr, Governor of Bushire, a man famed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... announces their ineffable idioms, but at other times he recurs to them from images, and discovers in them the primary causes of wholes. For in the Phaedrus being evidently inspired, and having exchanged human intelligence for a better possession, divine mania, he unfolds many arcane dogmas concerning the intellectual, liberated, and mundane gods. But in the Sophista dialectically contending about being, and the subsistence of the one above beings, and doubting ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... sisters, and one day they had a quarrel, which goes to show that sisters in Bible times were much the same as now. Mary and Martha had a different attitude toward life. Martha was a housekeeper—she reveled in housecleaning—she had a perfect mania for sweeping and dusting. Mary was a thinker. She looked beyond the work, and saw something better and more important, something ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... this play is important. Its two features are first, the love of argument, a weakness of all the Athenians who frequented the Law Courts and the Assembly; this mania for discussing pros and cons spoils one or two later plays. Next, the self-sacrificing girl appears for the first time. To Euripides the worthier sex was not the male, possessed of political power and therefore tyrannous, but the female. He first ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... pastured when the bayou supplied them with water enough. Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was the form of her only mania. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... to repel no idea, no fact, under the pretext that abler men than ourselves lived in former days, who did not notice the same phenomena, nor grasp the same analogies. Why do we not preserve a like attitude towards political and philosophical questions? Why this ridiculous mania for affirming that every thing has been said, which means that we know all about mental and moral science? Why is the proverb, THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, applied ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... for the whole unhappy business is on Sir Henry's hypothesis that Penreath is mad. In acute epileptic mania there are cases in which there is a seeming calmness of conduct, and these are the most dangerous of all. The patient walks about like a man in a dream, impelled by a force which he cannot resist, and does all sorts of things without ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... personally to enforce it. The old man lay dead in his house in Water Street. While the public out of doors were curious enough to learn what he had done with his money, there was a smaller number within the house, the kindred of the deceased, in whom this curiosity raged like a mania. They invaded the cellars of the house, and, bringing up bottles of the old man's choice wine, kept up a continual carouse. Surrounding Mr. Duane, who had been present at Mr. Girard's death, and remained to direct his funeral, they demanded to ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... I know nothing whatever about the subject," responded the young man, observing with no little annoyance the canon's mania of supposing him to be learned in ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... consideration of the circumstances under which the "gem of art, old master, Cremona, real Strad," or whatever title the wooden structure may have been sailing under. Those who have suffered much from the Italian fiddle-hunting mania—a condition mostly chronic or quite incurable—but who may have kept their "considerating cap" well poised on their head, will know that the worm-eaten fiddles are often devoid of evidence of usage, sometimes even in the absolute ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... eastern city, the measure most likely to make them useless and unhappy at home. I earnestly hope that, ere long, the existence of good schools near themselves, planned by persons of sufficient thought to meet the wants of the place and time, instead of copying New York or Boston, will correct this mania. Instruction the children want to enable them to profit by the great natural advantages of their position; but methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta, are as ill suited ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... The present mania for dragging voices up, and out of their legitimate tessitura, has become a very grave evil, the consequences of which, in many instances, have been most disastrous. Tolerable baritones have been transformed into very mediocre tenors, capable mezzo-soprani into very indifferent dramatic soprani, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... reproach them directly or indirectly on the subject of the lottery-ticket, which neither of them felt willing to dispose of at any price. Offers for the ticket continued to pour in from every corner of the globe. A positive mania seemed to have seized certain brains. Such a ticket must certainly be predestined to win the prize of one hundred thousand marks—there could be no doubt of it, so said every one. A person would have supposed there was but one ticket in the lottery, and that the number of it ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... soil in which collective mania can grow is that of unhappiness. Famine, unjust taxation, unemployment, persecution by local authorities, and so on, frequently lead to a dull hatred for the existing social, moral and religious order, which the simple-minded peasant ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... weep over each other's absence in uncontrollable agony, the conditions are serious enough for the consultation of a physician. It is an abnormal state of affairs, and if probed thoroughly might be found to be a sort of perversion, a sex mania, needing immediate and ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... I had a dream that kept such trifling thoughts away. I wanted to endear myself to some one. I wanted to make some one so utterly dependent on me, that a separation should be almost death to him. Where I got this crazy longing I could not tell exactly, but it seized me like a mania. I felt that such must be my fate, or a lifelong of misery instead. While I was in the heat of this emotion my father told me to prepare myself, that I was to appear with him at the grand military ball of the season. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... mad; nothing else but mania could account for such words and such actions; and yet, if mad, why was he allowed to enter my presence? The man who brought me here, the woman who received me at the door, had ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... inside of stone walls, without crying babies and scolding wives clattering around. This heat every summer costs us thousands of dollars in delays, from wear and tear and extra strain—tempers and nerves giving out, men getting frantic and jerking things. I believe it breeds a form of acute mania when it ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... campaign there had been much wild talk about internal improvements. The mania which had taken possession of the people in most Western States had affected the grangers of Illinois. It amounted to an obsession. The State was called upon to use its resources and unlimited credit to provide a market for their produce, by supplying transportation facilities ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the celestium. At other times, I have seen him come out and deliberately roll in the creek, head under. Once he explained that the medium he worked in caused a kind of uncontrollable longing for water; something having none of the qualities of burning or thirst, but an irresistible temporary mania. It worried him a good deal; he didn't understand it. That, then, was what ailed Pulz. When he opened the chest there was, as I surmise, a trifling quantity of this stuff lying in the inner lid. It wasn't the celestium itself, as I imagine, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mania for living abroad is an elaborate one, and one needing more time for its creation. No country retains the hearty affection of its educated class which does not feed its imagination. The more we ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... of extreme brutality. Here they hold the prisoner to the letter of the law, and the more abhorrent the crime (even where its nature might indicate to a physician that the accused was the victim of some sort of mania) the less likely they are to acquit. The writer has prosecuted perhaps a dozen homicide and other cases where the defence was insanity. In his own experience he has known of no acquittal. In several instances the defendants were undoubtedly insane, but, strictly speaking, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... house, and of his mother's passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean brightness. Everything was always in its place, and no where could you see a speck of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her. I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks like apples, toiling away from morning to night, through the long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father was a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime, silent and upright; ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... XIV., society passed under the rule of the regent, the Duke of Orleans—the personification of gallantry and affability, of depravity which was a mania, and of licentiousness which was a disease. From this atmosphere the salon of Mme. de Lambert became a refuge to those who still cherished the ideals of the good old times of Mme. de Rambouillet; it was distinguished by its refined sentiment and polished ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... hints, as to the cost of books and writing materials in those times. As may be supposed, the monkish librarians often became great bibliophiles, for being in constant communication with choice manuscripts, they soon acquired a great mania for them. Posterity are also particularly indebted to the pens of these book conservators of the middle ages; for some of the best chroniclers and writers of those times were humble librarians to ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... "What a mania you have for telegraphing," he retorted. "A special delivery postage-stamp will serve every purpose. He isn't likely to do the piece again for a week, at the earliest." He thought for awhile, and then he said: "In a ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying, "Yes; but I want you to tell me the PARTICULAR GO of it!" Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have told ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... now—even to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, even if my better judgment ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania. Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... It is cruel to think, dear Julia, that this amusement of yours should deprive me of the few moments during which I could speak to you of my love, and last night I wrote on the subject some verses that I cannot help repeating to you, so true is it that the mania of reciting one's verses is inseparable from the ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... and soundness make them pioneers. It is note-worthy, however, that insanity is as frequent in the Pacific States as in New England, the explanation being that vice and indulgence prevail to an exceptional extent among the population drawn to the Pacific by the mania for gold. The average in Massachusetts, for instance, is 1 to 348; in California 1 to 345. It is also remarkable that the ratio of insanity decreases as we go west and south of New England, as these averages will show: New England, 1 to 359; Middle ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... garden tools, patent medicines, &c., and who had lately increased her importance, in the eyes of the young gentlemen, by the announcement that various pyrotechnical wonders were to be obtained at her shop. There are few boys who have not at some time of their boyhood had a mania for pyrotechnics—in plain English, fire-works—and there are few parents, and parents' neighbours, who can say that they relish the smell of ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would you mind telling ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description. The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginaeta. The Black Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever. The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest of England. Small-pox, when the blessed protection ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... longer than usual, filled with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you—dear you, every letter ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Egyptian and Greek doctors of old as the most effectual remedy for the diseases of mania, epilepsy, apoplexy, dropsy, and gout. The tincture is very useful in mental stupor, with functional impairment of the hearing and sight; likewise for strumous ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday post really ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... ordinance of secession. There was scarcely a ripple of opposition to this measure. One or two members still pleaded for delay, to secure the cooeperation of Georgia, but dared not record a vote against the prevailing mania. The chairman of the proper committee on November 10 reported an act calling a convention "for the purpose of taking into consideration the dangers incident to the position of the State in the Federal Union," which unanimously became a law November 13, and the extra session adjourned to meet ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... party asked the meaning of certain tall buildings, he was told that they were pawnbrokers' offices; for the Chinese have a mania for pawning their clothes, or whatever they have, even if not in need of the money, to save the trouble of taking care of the articles. Before the third day of the stay in Canton was over, some of the party had seen enough, and preferred to remain at the hotel while others were ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... the end of the mania for getting rid of goods to lighten loads, the abandonment of wagons continued, as the teams became weaker and the ravages of cholera among the emigrants began to tell. It was then that many lost their heads and ruined their teams by furious ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... that one of the influences of his childhood was his grandmother Field, housekeeper of Blakesware House, in Hertfordshire, at which mansion he sometimes spent his holidays. You will know that he was a bachelor, living with his sister Mary, who was subject to homicidal mania. And you will see in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression of the increasing loneliness of his life. He constructed all that preliminary tableau of paternal pleasure in order to bring home to you in the most poignant way his feeling of the solitude ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... Bingo, with his big baptizing tongue and his momentary rainbow as he emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider, with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face and form but so true blue ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... its profits) of any one of his novels. And to expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, a steady back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the very delightful, and to the novelist not useless, but very expensive mania for the collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and thought himself a genuine connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds, old and new; and though prices in his day were not what they ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... morning was bitterly cold but fine. Physical "jerks" was not a dress parade; in fact, some of the early risers on the surrounding transports and ocean mail boats must have wondered what particular form of mania the crowd of running, leaping and arm-swinging men, in all stages of undress on the quayside, really ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... man's mania—the craze for founding a family. So everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable who'll use his name and his money to advertise nature's contempt for family pride ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... and he was very sorry to see his son going to the devil; so he improved the occasion by taking his case very seriously, and lecturing him upon the danger of his ways. He shook his head and talked about the possibility of delirium tremens, or even of mania, if he continued to lead such a life. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Most of us have hobbies; I knew a man once who carried his handkerchief up his sleeve and had a mania for old colored prints cut out of ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... has an influence on the mental character and health of the offspring, of which even few parents have any adequate conception. "It is often in the maternal womb that we are to look for the true cause not only of imbecility, but of the different kinds of mania. During the agitated periods of the French Revolution, many ladies then pregnant, and whose minds were kept constantly on the stretch by the anxiety and alarm inseparable from the epoch in which they lived, and whose nervous systems were thereby rendered irritable in the highest degree compatible ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... re-invigorated when he parted from her. He tried, too the effect of work upon the nervous depression from which he suffered. He was a man of a very methodical temperament, and sometimes carried out his plans for the allotment of his time with a strictness that bordered on mania. He shut himself up two evenings a week in order to write an exhaustive work on Cayenne. His modest bedroom was excellently adapted, he thought, to calm his mind and incline him to work. He lighted his fire, saw that the pomegranate at the foot of the bed was looking all right, and then ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... cities of the Continent that have large English and American colonies they attend the English church in preference to their own. I believe it is considered more exclusive to do so, and better form. In this mania for all things English we are not alone. John Bull happens to be the fashion of the day quite as much on the continent of Europe as in America, and has quite as many devoted worshippers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... discontinuing his medical practice, he limits himself to serious cases—when other doctors are puzzled, you know, and want him to help them. With this exception, he has certainly sacrificed his professional interests to his mania for experiments in chemistry. What those experiments are, nobody knows but himself. He keeps the key of his laboratory about him by day and by night. When the place wants cleaning, he does the cleaning with ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... on Hayden an alarmed face. "I never would have come to-day—never, if I had fancied she would be present. She will be sure to launch out on Marcia Oldham before luncheon is over. She never misses an opportunity. She has a mania on the subject." ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Ursus, with his mania for Latin names, had christened her Dea. He had taken his wolf into consultation. He had said to him, "You represent man, I represent the beasts. We are of the lower world; this little one shall represent the world on high. Such feebleness is all-powerful. In this ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the ancients that anger is a short madness. When we reflect in cold blood on the things we have said in hot, how impossible they seem! how out of character with our real selves! And this is one of the recognized symptoms of mania. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... in his "Life of the Bee" has an eloquent and profound chapter on the "Spirit of the Hive." In the domestic and international policy of the Prussian State, in the Hohenzollern dynastic tradition, we discover such a collective spirit, the "Spirit of the Prussian Hive," the evil spirit of war mania and megalomania, the treachery, the brutality, the greed, and, above all, the predatory instinct dignified into the name of Real Politik. And Europe will only enjoy permanent peace and security if she succeeds in destroying that Hohenzollern tradition, ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... I no longer know what I wish. If she came to-morrow, should I be glad or not? I cannot tell. I can no longer tell. Those who do not suffer from this absurd mania for action escape those painful moments when we are at the mercy of a distracted will that no longer knows exactly what it ought to want. In absence, our feelings pass through so many contradictory phases! When ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... an iron fighter with a mania for personal valour, standing where he had been standing for an hour, in a pleasantly exposed spot, clapped on his hat and beckoned for his horse. The ground about him showed furrowed as for planting, and a neighbouring ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... been weak enough to yield her heart unasked, and was it not almost thrown back into her own bosom? She, who had believed herself above the silly romance of her sex, to have sunk below even Miss Nugent. But she would rouse herself from such a mania, and show Colonel Vaughan ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... said George, while reason fought with his mania. "Whose goin' to save 'em? He needs killin'. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... before the ladies between every course in a tourney, or acting as pilot on board ship, blowing a whistle as loud as a trumpet, and arrayed in trousers of cloth of gold. Gradually, as time wore on, the athletic mania wore off, and pursuits, such as architecture, took the place of physical sports. A generation later, a writer describes Henry as "the only Phoenix of his time for fine and curious masonry".[680] From his own original ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... squire. He ever longed for the day when he should be able to fulfil his promise to his poor stricken father, who, albeit somewhat relieved of his incubus, since the night when father and son watched together, was not yet quite free from his ghostly visitant; moderns would say "from his mania." ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... entirely, in condemning the mania of giving names to objects of any kind after persons still living. Death alone can seal the title of any man to this honor, by putting it out of his power to forfeit it. There is one other mode of recording merit, which I have often thought might ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... cause earthquakes, spread diseases or cure them, release souls out of purgatory, to influence the passions of the mind, procure the reconciliation of friends or foes, engender discord, and induce mania and melancholy. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the Lord, as Saint Paul was, and who think they can consummate a veritable sacrifice just like a real priest. Absurd! But even in default of real masses with ordained celebrants, the people possessed by the mania of sacrilege do none the less realize the sacred stupration ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... or out. There's a model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will be nice to ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... mail and that I had no other place to deposit it. Nevertheless he said he would not have them left at the postoffice and told me do anything I wanted to with them, saying at the time that people all around there had a mania for ordering those books, but never intended to take them when they ordered them. I took the books around to the stage station and discovered four wagonloads ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... sane; for the gold mania has gone. That vale was grand with its mighty trees, but it was the work of a generation to clear that forest. Through me, that place was swept clean ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... This mania for assassination completed the depression of spirits which for some time past had been noticeable in the French emperor. Severely wounded in the great toe at Ratisbon, he had there been compelled to exercise enormous self-control to prevent a panic in the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... seized with a poetic mania, and is now rhyming away at the rate of three lines per hour—so ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... picking at the bedclothes. It is not necessarily attended by fever or by muscular tremors. The patient may show hysterical symptoms. This condition is probably to be regarded as a form of insanity, as it is liable to merge into mania ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... intimidation. He also suggested the keeping a close watch on the importation of arms, and levying a Militia if it were practicable.[126] In reply Westmorland stated (1st December) that the manifesto of a meeting of United Irishmen in Dublin was most threatening, and that the "French mania" was spreading everywhere. He added: "Belfast is, as always, noisy and republican; but not above 200 or 300 Volunteers are there."[127] It seems probable that the embodying of the Militia in Great Britain was partly with the view of enabling ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... you find me. But do you wonder that I shrink with horror from the gaming-table and those who frequent it, or that I could not respect your mother when I heard of her so often at Monte Carlo, where Charlie died and where your grandfather ruined himself for he, too, was possessed with a mania for play?" ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... the poet's use of vulgar slang upbraid, But, when I'm speaking by the card, I call a spade a spade; And I, who have been touched of that same mania, myself, Am well aware that, when it comes to parting with his pelf, The curio collector is so blindly lost in sin That he doesn't spend his money—he simply blows ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude—especially to Nancy's family—but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her "grand news" to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious the longer she looked ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... almost miserly abstemiousness this sum would suffice for his meals, unless he developed a mania for Delmonico's, and for his carfare, provided he did not venture outside ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... the park and high enough to make the noise of the traffic endurable. A Swedish maid, prepossessingly white and clean, ushered her into the little drawing-room, which was furnished with more simplicity and individual taste than is usual anywhere in New York, cursed of the mania for useless and tasteless showiness. There were no messy draperies, no fussy statuettes, vases, gilt boxes, and the like. Mildred awaited the entrance of Mrs. ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... he says: "Which of my friends was it who lately observed to you that I had a picture mania? You made, I understand, a most excellent reply, 'You wished I would come to town, then, and bite a dozen.' Indeed, my very good sir, was it in my power to excite in them a just admiration of your talents, I would readily come to town ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... catholic. He writes with delight, but without pretending to be a connoisseur, of an antique statuette which he had purchased out of a legacy. Some rich men in Rome had the mania for antiques—Corinthian bronzes were the rage in Pliny's day—as badly as those who haunt our modern sale-rooms. Pliny's hobby, if he had been living in our time, would probably have been books. He is one of the most bookish men of antiquity. ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... third, quite reasonable theory. The whole business might have sprung from the unbalanced mind of a lunatic—some person who believed himself appointed to right the wrongs of the world—the victim of religious mania. That would account for the choice of a monastic costume in which to masquerade—and it would also account for the queer language of the letter, savoring as it did of the Bible. Again, the type of person most likely to suffer from that form of ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... costliness and beauty; for it is to secure him a double end: the indulgence of his own tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives, which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument; and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as for dear life, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing, and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter—I can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S—saw one of her sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... The Acropolis. He believed he could find magazine publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him to the book-publishing houses. "Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden's prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission. His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... had been made the more insulting by the note of exclamation at the end implying derisive laughter. It had, as Birnier had calculated that it would, struck zu Pfeiffer upon the most tender spot in his mental anatomy, evoking a homicidal mania which dominated his consciousness. To be cheated, to be swindled, to be sworn at, cursed, even to be beaten was sufferable to a degree, but to be laughed at—zu Pfeiffer's haughty soul exploded like a bomb at an impact. For a time he had been absolutely incoherent with rage. His one impulse ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.—Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say good ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... tried the Keeley Cure twice. After each course of treatment, he had "beaten it," although he must gargle whisky, through a deadly sickness, in order to get back into the habit again. His was that variety of drunkenness which is not only an unnatural thirst, but also a mania to forget. There on the Santa Lucia tract, Billy Gray, sure of a living, might tilt at happiness and success with that independent writing which is the chimera of all newspaper men until the end of their days; and Eleanor might ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... absolutely true in modern society with its crushing heritage of indolent habits handed down through generations. It is especially difficult for those people, those nations who are possessed by an indiscreet mania for letting their hearts speak—for making them speak—unceasingly, when most generally it had much better ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... whiney-piney wife as Mrs. Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of her internal organs? Recumbency was a mania with her and she had a disconcerting habit of wanting to lie down on the most inconveniently unsuitable occasions.—To mitigate his over-flowing energies, which cried aloud for work, Mr. Binning took pupils. He had two exceptionably nice boys with him ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... he saw devils. These fits grew upon him, until at last he became raving mad, and had to be seized and bound with ropes to prevent him doing injury to himself or to others. At times he suffered from violent spasms of mania, while at others, again, though undoubtedly insane, he was quiet and subdued. He would then talk incessantly to himself, and bemoan the sad fact that the dread God of the City was sending evil spirits ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... case between them, Trent and the inspector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak. 'This mystery is all wrong,' he observed. 'It is insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night, many hours after ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Calderona had unjust and envious Critics, and He modestly conceives himself to be exactly in their predicament. But I am conscious that all these sage observations are thrown away upon you. Authorship is a mania to conquer which no reasons are sufficiently strong; and you might as easily persuade me not to love, as I persuade you not to write. However, if you cannot help being occasionally seized with a poetical paroxysm, ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis |
