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Amuck   /əmˈək/   Listen
Amuck

adjective
1.
Frenzied as if possessed by a demon.  Synonyms: amok, berserk, demoniac, demoniacal, possessed.  "Berserk with grief" , "A berserk worker smashing windows"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Amuck" Quotes from Famous Books



... into England through returned Anglo-Indians and spread by their own merit. One of these is Loot. The dictionary says that it means "to plunder," but it holds more than that or any equivalent English word. Perhaps it has scarcely risen above the level of slang yet, but the phrase "to run amuck" is classical, having been used by both Pope and Dryden. The pedantic attempt made by some writers to change the common way of writing it because the original Malay term is a single word, "amok," comes too late in view of ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... the conservation of wild life has changed the mental attitude of very many people. The old Chinese-Malay spirit which cries "Kill! Kill!" and at once runs amuck among suddenly discovered wild animals, is slowly being replaced by a more humane and intelligent sentiment. This is one of the hopeful and encouraging signs ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... a pig fwhrom me, that has my heart bruck, so she has, if ever any body's heart was bruck wit the likes of her; an' sure so there was, no doubt, or I wouldn't be as I am wid her. I'll give her a dead bargain, sir; for it's only to get her aff av my hands I'm wanting plase yer haner—husth amuck—husth, a veehone!** Be asy, an' me in conwersation wid ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton

... volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house [Slang]; riot, storm; wreak, bear down, ride roughshod, out Herod, Herod; spread like wildfire (person). [shout or act ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... annoyed Mr. Tower, while every bird in range flew from a badly aimed stone. They tried chasing a flock of sheep, which chased beautifully for a short distance, then a ram declined to run farther and butted the breath from Malcolm's small body until it had to be shaken in again. They ran amuck and on finding they were not pursued, gave up, stopping on the bank of a creek. There they espied tiny shining fish swimming through the water and plunged in to try to capture them. When Mr. Tower and William came up, both boys were busy chasing ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter

... quarter close to us about a bird, and both boys ran away. The Arab boy is missing still I suppose, but Mabrook was brought back by force, swelling with passion, and with his clothes most scripturally 'rent.' He had regularly 'run amuck.' Sheykh Yussuf lectured him on his insolence to the people of the quarter, and I wound up by saying, 'Oh my son! whither dost thou wish to go? I cannot let thee wander about like a beggar, with torn clothes and no money, that the police may take thee ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... broke—over a woman, I fancy. He's knocked about th' wurrld quite a piece since thin. Eyah! he talks av some quare parts he's been in. Fwhat doin'? Lord knows. Been up an' down the ladder some in this outfit—sarjint one week—full buck private next. Yen know th' way these ginthlemin-rankers run amuck?" ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck whenever he likes,—so it be not down our street. I confess to a good deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in Number 21, have plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23. Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about Statues. We must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... Said he would preach about it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from—not one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck." ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... often enough," he resumed presently in a low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... around it is invariably a portent of trouble; the man forgets his important engagement, and runs amuck, knocking over people, principles and principalities. If Aspasia had not observed Pericles that memorable day; if there had not been an oblique slant to Calypso's eyes as Ulysses passed her way; if the eager Delilah had not offered ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... said Watson, putting down the ukulele. 'All I know is that Germany runs amuck and gives a mighty good imitation of hell let loose. I am not discounting the wonderful bravery of France and Belgium, but you know that the hope of everything lies right in this country here. Well, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... it runs amuck up and down the whole play and makes everybody sit up all round. It asks eminently respectable old maids if they wouldn't like to have a baby; and it wants to know why bald-headed old men have left off wearing hair, and why other old gentlemen have red ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome

... committed any overt act, had retired to a camp near by with his high explosives. But Constable Wight got an information sworn out against him for having an explosive in his possession with intent to endanger life, which was putting it mildly enough when he was in fact dealing with a man running amuck with dynamite playthings. However, this served the purpose of Constable Wight, who rode out to the camp and arrested the man, explosives and all. It was not a very pleasant undertaking, but that did not count for anything with a wearer of the scarlet ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... snorted the civil administrator. "Keeping his men in hand is what he has to do! They're running amuck all over Panama, getting into fights with the Spiggoty police, bringing the uniform into contempt. As for the climate, it's the same climate for all of us. Look at Butler's marines and Barber's Zone police. The climate hasn't hurt them. They're ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis

... he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... and extravagance, Ransome had never seen anything to beat the Poly. There was no end to it, no end to the privileges you enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his privileges—those, that is to say, offered him by the Poly. Swimming Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he said, he "fair abused 'em." But he considered that the Poly. "got home again" on his ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... and, as a Philadelphia paper very wittily said the other day, they can't commit economic murder without committing economic suicide. Do you suppose, therefore, that half of the population of the United States is going about to destroy the very foundations of our economic life by simply running amuck amidst the schedules of the tariff? Some of the schedules are so tough that they wouldn't be hurt, if it did. But that isn't the program, and anybody who says that it is simply doesn't understand the situation at all. All that the tariff-reformers claim is this: that the partnership ought ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... the case were lavish, the traditional law of the Great Supper ordaining that not fewer than seven different sweets shall be served. Mise Fougueiroun, however, was not the person to stand upon the parsimonious letter of any eating law. Here had been her opportunity, and she had run amuck through all ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... younger man groaned, his gaze turned sullenly downward. "Even granting that I have, that's no sign I'd ever—run amuck ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... breath-stopping and hair-raising noises that the myriads of flying and crawling animals of that war-ridden country produces. There was the "vantriloquest" bird, gifted with a voice that is the essence of all that is frightful and hideous in sounds—forty demons running amuck and coming your direction. ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves

... poor gentleman, in buying me an old-established practice: fine house, carriage and pair, white-haired butler—everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to tell her ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... the proprietor of the show recognized us, for we saw him regarding us suspiciously; and we moved on to the cage in which the Wild Man sat, with a big brass chain attached to his leg—ostensibly to prevent him from running amuck among the spectators. Two of his keepers were guarding him, with axes in their hands. He was loosely arrayed in a tiger's skin, and his limbs appeared to be very hairy. His skin was dark brown and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... I think." In Religion—obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, in a becoming spirit, of religious matters," and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... and doing. Every thought and every act has in it something of all three elements. An emotion is not an isolated phenomenon; it is bound up on the one hand with ideas and on the other with bodily states and conduct. Whoever runs amuck in his emotions runs amuck in his whole being. The nervous invalid with his exhausted and sensitive body, his upset mind and irrational conduct is a living illustration of the central place of the emotions in the realm of ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... literature does except the stories in the Old Testament. The best of all children's books—"Grimm's Fairy Tales" itself—takes no deeper hold upon the youthful mind. Mr. Kipling's genius which in his other work is constantly "dropping bricks" as the expressive phrase has it, and running amuck through strenuous banalities, rises in the Jungle-Book to heights of poetic and imaginative suggestion which will give him an undying position among the great writers ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys

... young Englishman who had been drawn into some altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his own part by saying: 'Now a French cook running amuck with a carving knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.' There were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. Stevenson says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were out in the rain, and I was cursing before the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... With a yelp of mischievous glee he proved his daring to his comrades by snatching at the starting-lever. He was quick as a flash of summer lightning, but if I hadn't been quicker, the big car might have leaped into life, and run amuck through the most crowded street in busy Marseilles. I felt myself go cold and hot, horribly uncertain whether my interference might work harm or good, but before I quite knew what I did, I had sent the boy flying with a sounding box ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... slip When Father carves the duck, And how it makes the dishes skip— Potatoes fly amuck. The squash and cabbage leap in space, We get some gravy in our face, And Father mutters Hindoo grace Whene'er he carves ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... buffalo grazed along the foothills of the western mountains, two hardy prospectors fell in with a bull bison that seemed to have been separated from his kind and run amuck. One of the prospectors took to the branches of a tree and the other dived into a cave. The buffalo bellowed at the entrance to the cavern and then turned toward the tree. Out came the man from the cave, and the buffalo took after him again. The man made another dive for the hole. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... but the better class among the tribe look upon it with disfavour, as its use often leads to madness and death. The effect of the poison is cumulative, and the Indians under its influence, like the Malays, run amuck and try to kill everybody ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... of 1812. Others, again, scorned superstition, and entertained merely practical misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the earth in some confusion touching the right of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... wrapped in the chain and his wrists encased in steel, and this time it was as if Don Pablo's head had been caught between a hammer and an anvil. The negro's strength, exceptional at all times, was multiplied tenfold; he had run amuck. When he arose the machete was in his grasp and Don Pablo's brains were ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... is to show that they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class. The greater part of them are at a miserable discount (horse-racing excepted, which has been already sufficiently done in H. W.), and there is no reason for running amuck at them at all. I have endeavoured to remove much of my objection (and I think have done so), but, both in purpose and in any general address, it is as wide of a first article as anything can well be. It would do best in the opening of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... down by sheer weight of numbers and the might of their bone-crushing jaws the mightiest of the monsters which fled before them. Here and there a mammoth cow, maddened by the slaughter of her calf, or an old rhinoceros bull, indignant at being hunted by such vermin, would turn and run amuck through the mass, stamping them out by the hundred. But this made no impression at all, either upon their numbers or the rage of their hunger, and in a few minutes the colossus, its feet half eaten off, would come crashing down, to be swarmed over ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... it. The fellow came down to Nettleton and ran amuck, the way they sometimes do. After they've done a wood-cutting job they come down and blow the money in; and this man ended up with manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a queer thing happened. The fellow sent for ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... as a civilized and Christian people, and yet we tolerate on every corner places where men are transformed into incarnate devils, and sent forth to run amuck in our streets, and outrage the helpless women and children in their own homes. The naked inhabitants of Dahomey could do no ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... indeed, "malefactors of great wealth"; at least we may guess the latter, and the animus of a more intelligent precedent may some day hopefully be directed to such definite evils, of which our ancestors were well aware, rather than blindly running amuck at all. The coal-dealers in Boston, by the way, made the same argument that is always made, and was made at Athens in the grain combination of the third century B.C.—to wit, that they put up the prices in order to prevent other people buying all the coal and speculating ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... America with spies, plotting constantly against her peace and her honour. She had run amuck upon the seas, and by her submarine warfare endangered the lives and welfare of all mankind. She had become a menace to the world's freedom. The President loves peace even as the soul of America loves peace. But both President and people became at length convinced that ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... came, or died fighting for it—as Scotchmen and Irishmen and Englishmen and Americans have fought and bled for freedom wherever they have lived. A people unused to freedom suddenly plunged in freedom need not surprise us if they run amuck. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... "It's mad! It's run amuck!" some one cried, and in an instant there was an uproar of terror as the people left their seats and surged back to higher tiers where they hoped the elephant ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell

... meant a word I said!" he began, with exaggerated trepidation. "Why the dickens didn't you murder the whole yapping bunch of us, Grant?" He clapped his hand affectionately upon the other's shoulder. "We kinda run amuck yesterday afternoon," he confessed cheerfully, "but it sure was fun while ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... with a sound like a pistol-shot, and a great stone swung to a boom and weighing tons should begin running amuck through piles of cement, machinery, and men, and some one of the working gang, seeing the danger, should, with the quickness and sureness of a mountain-goat, spring straight for the stone, clutching the end of the guy and bounding off again, twisting the bight round ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... at once brutish, terrible, Homeric; the fellow's reserves of strength seemed immense; sheer animal rage drove him; he ran amuck with lust to kill. He beat, rushed, strove to close. His opponent's lithe body evaded a clutch that might have ended the contest. John Steele fought without sign of anger, like a machine, wonderfully trained; missing no point, regardless of punishment. He knew that if he went down once, all ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... lithographers had a fit in the dining room of the contract hotel this morning (I don't blame him, do you?) and they hauled him out by the feet. We run amuck with another advance car, the other day, but nobody got into a fight. I thought rival cars always—excuse the typewriter, it doesn't know any better— got into ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... them! And I know their father, a brute, a sort of brute beast with an intolerant loud voice, a creature who has ran amuck in our all too merciful world for the last thirty years and more. An engineer! To him all that we hold dear and sacred is nothing. Nothing! The splendid traditions of our race and land, the noble institutions, the venerable ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... blaspheming in a way that made their flesh creep. Even Tim blanched; for in the voice he recognized the timbre of insanity. He had seen this happen in the trenches, when men driven mad by concussion or gas or horrors ran amuck among their fellows. The one who now swam toward them was evidently a stoker—a powerful creature. His face was grimed with coal dirt, his eyes were red, and his blasphemies were interspersed with hilarity at the prospect of cutting their throats. When thirty yards off he stopped swimming, reached ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... politics are a game played in strict accordance with a set of rules. For several centuries nobody in these islands had broken the rules. It had come to be regarded as impossible that any one could break them. No one expects his opponent at the bridge table to draw a knife from his pocket and run amuck when the cards go against him. Nobody expected that the north of Ireland Protestants would actually fight. To threaten fighting is, of course, well within the rules of the game, a piece of bluff which any one is entitled ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... stunning in its entire unexpectedness. The landscape went off in protest, exploded in pyrotechnic marvels; the earth spun and cavorted; the solar system was disrupted and planets ran amuck with din unbelievable. But he was used to these cataclysms now, and out of the roar of breakage he heard a voice much like ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... nothing to be believed; nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for; but every thing to be hated, in the wide world. He was a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... "I've no mind to run amuck of Pegasus! I'll get out of your way. Faith, 'tis the first time I've seen poetry in buckskin of this particular binding," and he wheeled his broncho out, leaving me abreast of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... is so well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk's smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag's desecration and his lady's grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over the railing, ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... from that point to say that "We came to a difficult passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs"—pretty gestures they were!—"gave way to a panic violence. He ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance of these beings that on my recapture I was not instantly slain. We made our way to the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... I'd as lief her throat were cut! She almost ripped my bowels up, I vow, Running amuck with horns well set to butt: Nathless I've locked her in the stall below: She's blown with grass, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... prize bull belonging to Alton Shepard, a Keegan cattle breeder, has created considerable sensation by running amuck in a most peculiar manner. While seemingly more intelligent than heretofore, it has developed characteristics known to be utterly alien to this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... not presume to argue with you. We are here, I suppose, for some purpose or other. Whether we fulfil it or not may well be a matter of opinion. But that purpose is certainly not to look after any young idiot—you must excuse my speaking plainly—who runs amuck in this most fascinating city. In your case the Chief has gone out of his way to help you. He has interviewed the chief of police himself, brought his influence to bear in various quarters, and I can tell you conscientiously that everything which possibly can be done is being ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... heap of the weaknesses, vanities, and miserablenesses of actors and actresses dead and gone. After life's fitful fever they sleep (I trust) well; and in common candour, it ought never to be forgotten that whilst it has always been the fashion—until one memorable day Mr. Froude ran amuck of it—for biographers to shroud their biographees (the American Minister must bear the brunt of this word on his broad shoulders) in a crape veil of respectability, the records of the stage have been written in another ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... Ralston. "The woman's friendly and means no more than she says or looks. But these fellows don't understand such friendship. Shere Ali is here dreaming of a woman he knows he can never marry—because of his race. And so he's ready to run amuck. That's what it ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... him early never forsook him, and the ladies of Naapu liked him. Even good Madame Mauer, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... following modern sciences: geology, astronomy, zoology, biology, geography, chemistry, physics, anatomy, philology, archaeology, history, ethics, religion, etc. There is not one chance in a million that a writer of a fictitious account would not have run amuck among many of these sciences, if, like Moses, he had ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... it was true that matters—always according to Mr. Greyne's letters home—slightly improved. While walking near the quay, in active search for nautical outrage, he saw an Arab dock labourer, who had been over-smoking kief, run amuck, and knock down a couple of respectable snake-charmers who were on the point of embarkation for Tunis with their reptiles. This incident had filed up a half-score of pages in exercise-book number one, and had flooded Mr. Greyne with hope and aspiration. But it was followed ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... some days in the neighbourhood what is called "a rogue elephant"—an elephant which, for some reason known only in elephant councils has been driven out of the herd, and is so enraged by his expulsion that he is ready to run amuck at every person and animal he sees. This was not pleasant intelligence. We found native carts at the place, ready to proceed in the morning to a market to be held at the foot of the hills; and after ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... brown beard, a face that would have looked well under a lifted helmet—such a face as the scared Saxons must have seen among the bold followers of William the Norman, when those hardy Norse warriors ran amuck in Dover town. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... every side, had broken up the battle formation the aliens had had; the flaming death from the horrible weapons of the invaders, the fearless courage of the foot soldiers, and the steel-clad monsters that were running amuck among them shattered the little discipline they had. Panicky, they lost their anger, which had taken them several hours to build up. They scattered, ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett

... not congenial to Germans. Had Germany won she hoped to impose her type of civilization everywhere, and she saw little harm in the fact of imposition. Inferior nations ought to be raised to Germany's cultural level by force, and they ought to be prevented from running amuck internationally, also by force. The German mind viewed complacently the bondage of the small nations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not think that Czechs or Poles lost anything by being governed from Vienna. Its only reservation was that it might be still ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... absorbed." But while his friends look at his pictures, the painter looks at their faces, and must make many sad discoveries. Like other artists, he does not care nearly so much for the praise as he is dashed and discomfited by the slightest hint of blame. It is a wonder that irascible painters do not run amuck among their own canvases and their visitors on Show Sunday. That, at least, in Mr. Browning's phrase, is "how it strikes a contemporary." Were the artists to yield to the promptings of their lower nature, were they to hearken to the Old Man within them, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... for the night. There was so much to talk over, and when they did finally lay themselves down to rest, it was with the conviction that Captain Forest was not quite so mad as they had supposed. He was at least a harmless lunatic and in no danger of running amuck. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... particularly if the piece be read and not seen, Schiller's first play is very apt to produce the impression of a boyish extravaganza. The sentimental bandit who nourishes his mighty soul on the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... immediately added the hasty hanging of men to the nearest trees, and Guilford Duncan was powerless to prevent that. The negroes, loyal to the mistresses whom they had served from infancy, had gone wild in their enthusiasm of defense. They ran amuck, and when the morning came there was not one man of all those marauders left alive to tell the ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... of cattle and flocks of sheep from western Virginia were driven through the streets and gathered at Drovers' Rest, two miles west of town. Some days many thousands filled West (P) Street from morn to eve, and, occasionally, a wild steer ran amuck and then there was great excitement. Also, large flocks of turkeys, hundreds of them, were driven up from lower Maryland and passed through the streets to pens on the outskirts of town, where one could go and pick out his ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... deteriorating, morally and intellectually. I had a desire to beat the Precious Ones (who were certainly well behaved for children shut up in two stuffy rooms) or better still to set the house afire, and run amuck killing and slaying down four flights of stairs—to do something very terrible in fact—something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday stews and ghoulish boarders with the torturing ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... was no easy task. The lead they had gained put their opponents on their mettle, and they fairly ran amuck in the second quarter. By successive rushes, they worked the ball down the field. At the ten-yard line, the Rally Hall boys braced, and the enemy lost the ball on downs. A fake forward pass, splendidly engineered by Billy and Fred, would ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport

... resemblance to the legitimate farce of our civilization was deceptive. Another brocaded actor, who represented the hero of the play, turned three somersaults, and not only upset my theory and his fellow actors at the same time, but apparently ran amuck behind the scenes for some time afterward. I looked around at the glinting white teeth to observe the effect of these two palpable hits. They were received with equal acclamation, and apparently equal facial spasms. One or two beheadings which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... any means of coercion, and depending solely upon them for protection and support, and at the same time to introduce the benefits of civilisation and check all crime and semi-barbarous practices. Under his government, "running amuck," so frequent in all other Malay countries, has never taken place, and with a population of 30,000 Malays, all of whom carry their "creese" and revenge an insult by a stab, murders do not occur more than once in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... is it Christian England cheers The bruiser, not the bruised? And must she run, despite the tears And prayers of eighteen hundred years, Amuck ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... soldier, "that man will some day drive me amuck. What do you think? One night, on a tiger hunt, he got me into an argument like this. A brute of a beast jumped into the middle of it. Courtlandt shot him on the second bound, and turned to me with—'Well, as I was saying!' I don't know to this day whether it was nerve ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... draft of the material sciences upon the thought and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them. No trifling resources have been left for mere abstract investigation. If meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel, Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward on crutches ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... to draw guns, no time to prepare a defense. His brain on fire from the liquor he had drunk and his overpowering terror, Beaudry was a berserk gone mad with the lust of battle. He ran amuck like a maniac, using the stool as a weapon to hammer down the heads of his foes. It crashed first ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... with a pail, is the helpless Araminta. Among the impedimenta are the Reverend Austin Thorpe and the step-ladder, the Reverend Thorpe being, dismissed at the door and allowed to run amuck for the day. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed



Words linked to "Amuck" :   insane



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