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More "Maniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deadly pale; her lips bloodless and compressed; her eyes contracted and glittering with a cold, black, baleful light; her hair unloosed in her agitation, streamed down each side, and fell upon her bosom like the ends of a long black scarf. At times she muttered to herself like any maniac: ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... at that moment the face of a maniac. He literally hurled his fury at the money-lender, who ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... ignorant folk who came to visit his temple of science, and to inspect its curiosities, felt themselves insulted—not always without reason. He kept a tame maniac in the house, named Lep, and he used to regard the sayings of this personage as oracular, presaging future events, and far better worth listening to than ordinary conversation. Consequently he used to have him at his banquets and feed him himself; ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... as we reached the inn and ordered a trap to carry our valuable bargain home in—"I wonder what on earth made Isaacs run off like a maniac." ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Caligula was more faithful, though from the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he first loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there is in these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love—a passion which deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore, that in regard to women he may have been guilty ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... purple-faced and trembling in a transport of maniac fury with which an inexplicable fear ran cross-odds as warp and woof. The other had totally deluded him until the climax brought its accusation, and now the unmasked plotter took refuge in bluster, fencing for ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... us in passing along; And public misfortunes, in all their variety, Need not be told in a holyday song. The troubles of Wall-street, I'm sure that you all meet, And they're not at all sweet—but look at their pranks: Usurious cravings, and discounts and shavings, With maniac ravings ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... you have taken me for some other person. I will no longer listen to one who is either a maniac or ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was compelled to go, his movements squirming and noiseless. Within a yard of the peacefully slumbering man he rose up, crouching on his toes and bending stealthily forward to gloat over his victim. Hampton stirred uneasily, possibly feeling the close proximity of that horrible presence. Then the maniac took one more stealthy, slouching step nearer, and flung himself at the exposed throat, uttering a fierce snarl as his fingers clutched the soft flesh. Hampton awoke, gasping and choking, to find those mad eyes glaring into his own, those murderous ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... and even stones at him, notwithstanding all his prayers and exclamations. They declared that they wished to see if he were in truth of glass, as he affirmed; but the lamentations and outcries of the poor maniac induced the grown persons who were near to reprove and even beat the boys, whom they drove away for the moment, but who did not fail to return ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... laugh, the laugh of a maniac, or of a man possessed, whilst one long thin finger pointed tremblingly to the card still held by Richard Lambert, and then to its counterpart in the midst of the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... as furious tyrants, who were declared the arbiters of man's destiny; the models of his conduct: when he was willing to imitate them, when he was willing to conform himself to the lessons of their interpreters, he became wicked, was an unsociable creature, an useless being or else a turbulent maniac—a zealous fanatic. It was these alone who profited by superstition, who advantaged themselves by the darkness in which they contrived to involve the human mind; nations were ignorant of nature; they knew nothing of reason; they understood not truth; ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... hat of one blew off, and fell at Mary's feet. She picked it up, and flew to the inn, told her story, and then, producing the hat, found it was Richard's. Her senses gave way, and she became a confirmed maniac for life.—R. Southey, Mary, the Maid of the Inn (from Dr. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... some other English inventions—as of Rogers' teeth, Rowland's macassar, &c.; and were continuing to do so, when a fierce-looking demagogue, seeing how things were going, and what concessions were being made, roused himself angrily; and, to show us that he at least was no Anglo-maniac, shot at us a look fierce as any bonassus; while he asked, abruptly, what we thought in England of one whom he styled the "Demosthenes of Ireland"—looked at us for an answer. As it would have been unsafe to have answered him in the downright, offhand manner, in which we like ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... "were cramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;" that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor old woman, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the official letter, cast his eyes over it, and then, forgetting his gout, caught hold of Syd's hands and began to caper about the room like a maniac. ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... father and lover were burned to death before her eyes, suffered such poignant anguish that her reason gave way, and she was borne inside the temple a raving maniac. ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... friend he expressed the opinion that the man was a maniac afflicted with a paranoia on the subject of the third term. He showed no curiosity about him and did not discuss him, although he ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... warned, the rustic crew Abandoned in the fields pick, scythe, and plough, And to the roof of house and temple flew, (For ill secure was elm or willow's bough,) From hence the maniac's horrid rage they view; Who, dealing kick, and bite, and scratch, and blow, Horses and oxen slew, his helpless prey; And well the courser ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... themselves in walls and terrorised families, to be a trifle ridiculous. To him all such things seemed to be nursery tales, exaggerated by religious and political passion. And so it was with amazement that he examined Don Vigilio, suddenly fearing that he might have to deal with a maniac. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and bold, that Harson had not heard him, but sat reading a newspaper, and was not a little startled in looking over it to see a man seated within a few feet of him, and gazing at him with eyes as wild and bright as those of a maniac. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in the right ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... possessed by a much stubborner spirit than this interesting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented—the only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject of dirt, mad to wash things, ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... had fallen upon the prisoners, and with an exultant shout he was dashing towards them, his broad-bladed sword gleaming above his head. Miss Adams was the nearest to him, but at the sight of the rushing figure and the maniac face she threw herself off the camel upon the far side. The Arab bounded on to a rock and aimed a thrust at Mrs. Belmont, but before the point could reach her the Colonel leaned forward with his pistol and blew the man's head in. Yet with a concentrated rage, which was superior even to the ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... restored to liberty. I had seen this young and comely looking woman, who was endowed with more than common good sense, driven to the depths of despair by the intensity of her sufferings. I had seen her a raving maniac. Now, I saw her 'sitting and clothed in her right mind.' I was a thousand times more than compensated for all the pains I had taken. I had sympathized deeply with her sufferings, and I now ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... I remember, that showed his poise and courage as nothing else could. He was Sheriff of Somerset County, N.J., and we lived in the court house, attached to which was the County Jail. During my father's absence one day a prisoner got playing the maniac, dashing things to pieces, vociferating horribly, and flourishing a knife with which he had threatened to carve any one who came near the wicket of his prison, Constables were called in to quell this real or dramatised maniac, but they fell back in terror ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... strikes, and some people said he had used dynamite upon uncompleted buildings, and made a joke of it. Anyhow, the business men of the city wanted to put him where he could no longer trouble them; and when some maniac unknown had flung a dynamite bomb into the path of the Preparedness parade, the big fellows of the city had decided that now was the opportunity they were seeking. Guffey, the man who had taken charge of Peter, was head of the secret service of the Traction Trust, and the big fellows ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... not above an hour, when he awoke, with a well-conditioned skin, no extraordinary degree of fever, but with the exact state he was in before, with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise, in imitation of the howling of a dog; in this situation he was this morning at one o'clock, when we came to bed. The Duke of York, who has been twice in my room in the course of the night, immediately ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... mischief had been done during the night, aroused him. He glanced upon his enemy, who pale and trembling, stood gazing on the wreck that he had made. Revenge at last was in his hands—not a moment was to be lost—with the yell of a maniac he sprang upon the powerless and conscious-stricken man—seized him in his arms rushed to the river—and ere any could interpose, both had found a grave where but a few minutes before the bodies of Mary and her infant ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... ignorant—so vile that, for the sake of his secret hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent! Surely they shall not thus find the way of understanding! Surely there is a maniac thirst for knowledge, as a maniac thirst for wine or for blood! He who loves knowledge the most genuinely, will with the most patience wait for it until it ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... Sarah was an old German artist, painter and musician both, of rare genius, but a maniac, as they called him. At all events, he was ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... and she felt herself sinking into a bottomless abyss. With maniac energy she tore his hands from her throat and the warm blood streamed from the gash his ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... not told thee," answered Don Quixote, "that I mean to imitate Amadis here, playing the victim of despair, the madman, the maniac, so as at the same time to imitate the valiant Don Roland, when at the fountain he had evidence of the fair Angelica having disgraced herself with Medoro and through grief thereat went mad, and plucked up trees, troubled the waters of the clear springs, slew destroyed flocks, burned ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... little more. I can feel its clutch tightening on me. And I can't resist. I can't escape. The little mental balance I have is being dragged away from me. In a few years—if I let myself live to it—I shall be a babbling maniac. Nothing can save me. I knew it when I was a boy—before that thing there completely lost its reason. I knew I was born a madman for my father's sins. It crept on me gradually—one sign after another—one horrible secret impulse after another. The slow, sure ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... didn't oughter - And we Anglo-Saxons know a trick worth two of that, I think! Then came rather risky dances (under certain circumstances) Which would shock that worthy gentleman, the Licenser of Plays, Corybantian maniAC kick - Dionysiac or Bacchic - And the Dithyrambic revels of those ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... storms within That heave the struggling heart with wilder din, And there is power and love The maniac's rushing frenzy to reprove, And when he takes his seat, Clothed and in calmness, at his Savour's feet, Is not the power as strange, the love as blest, As when He said, "Be still," and ocean ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... he faltered. Then he whirled like a maniac upon his little coterie of followers. "Vile traitor!" he shrieked, "I will ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... kind sisters sometimes can assist their brothers when they fall victims to the tender passion. Whom should I ask to help me in my strait? I could not go round everywhere, asking everybody after two ladies dressed in half-mourning, could I? Not exactly. People might take me for a maniac at large; and, even should I be one, still, I would naturally wish to keep my mental derangement to myself. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... no nuisance. "You will be frightfully bored," said Agnes, observing the cloud on her lover's face. "And Gerald walks like a maniac." ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... to say," said Sloane stolidly, "that 'cause you had some sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last night, you're never coming on ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is enthusiastic over his poisons, so much is he engrossed in the science that it takes with him the post of a besetting. Like a maniac which always speaks of his strange fancies, so this poor savage speaks all day long of his poisons, and studies ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... begins chronologically with Yusuf and Zulaykha (Potiphar's wife) sung by Jami (nat. A.H. 8171414); the next in date is Khusraw and Shirin (also by Nizami); Farhad and Shirin; and Layla and Majnun (the Night-black maid and the Maniac-man) are the last. We are obliged to compare the lovers with "Romeo and Juliet," having no corresponding instances in modern days: the classics of Europe supply a host as Hero and Leander, Theagenes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... sent them up to the nursery, and then, my dears, with what solid satisfaction you cannot possibly guess, I told my mistress exactly what I thought of her. She was aghast and scared; she thought I was a maniac, a desperate fanatic. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... praying: he heard him—he could but just hear him—murmuring over and over, all but inaudibly, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!" It seemed as if no other word dared mingle itself with that cry. Maniac or not—the mood of the man was supremely sane, and altogether too sacred to disturb. Malcolm retreated a little way, sat down in the sand and watched beside him. It was a solemn time—the full tide lapping up ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a tobacco maniac," growled Trendon, feeling in his breast pocket. "The devil," he cried, bringing ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mother with babe at her breast, has brought her sick daughter; husband has carried a crippled wife; a woman 'that was lost' bends at the Saviour's feet in an agony of repentance; an aged, blind man is led by his daughter; a maniac, whose tortured soul looks out of haggard eyes, frames a ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... the hall, While she stood sobbing in a flood of tears, And he stood choked with anger and amazed. But as I passed the ivied porch he came With bated breath and muttered in my ear— 'Beggar!'—It stung me like a serpent's fang. Pride-pricked and muttering like a maniac, I almost flew the street and hurried home To vent my anger to the silent elms. 'Beggar!'—an hundred times that long, mad night I muttered with hot lips and burning breath; I paced the walk with hurried tread, and raved; I threw ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her father and her brother, out of the world—maniac, spy, and traitor. Instead of according him such 'poetic justice,' the Poet gives Hamlet the only true success of doing his duty to the end—for it was as much his duty not to act before, as it was his duty to act at last—then ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... shouted the maniac, still advancing with a menacing air, and so near the wagon by this time that he might almost have hit Percival with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... reasons can justify such an extraordinary breach of all the—the decencies. Reasons? the reasons of a maniac. Not to say more, sir. Fraudulent detention—fraudulent, I say, sir! What ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... lunacy. Indeed all his neighbours and acquaintances had long considered him as a madman; and a certain noble lord declared in the house of peers, when the bill of separation was on the carpet, that he looked upon him in the light of a maniac, and that if some effectual step was not taken to divest him of the power of doing mischief, he did not doubt but that one day they should have occasion to try him for murder. The lawyers, who managed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... first individual tragedy was enacted before every eye. With a yell the drunken maniac rushed to the rail. The nigger was at his heels—he was too late. Uttering another and more piercing shriek, the madman was overboard at a bound; one of his bundles preceded him; the other dropped like a cannon-ball ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... hundred miles in heavy trails," explained George wearily, as the cries of the maniac dimmed behind ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Isolda from the now frenzied ravings of her brother; and it was only with the utmost difficulty that he at length drew from Don Hermoso the dreadful tidings that his daughter, who had been brought on board the ship a raving maniac, had that very morning contrived to elude the guard, and, rushing on deck, had thrown herself overboard and ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... moment a shrill cry sounded over the water. It was the scream of some wild creature, ending in a strange laugh, like the laugh of a maniac! ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... consolation not the seed of another, greater sorrow, may be gathered together and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which if wholly divorced would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... half an hour I had staggered to my feet again, shivering in every limb, my teeth chattering, and there I stood staring with the eyes of a maniac into that room ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he fell to counting his gold; and for a long, long time he counted, until his hands shook, and his eyes gleamed as if he were mad. When he had counted all, he jumped from his seat, shouting like a maniac, 'Sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars!' Again and again he shouted this ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... that the man had become little short of a maniac, stooped to pick up the garments Krylovensky dove forward and struck the mayor's face with open hand. "Now throw me to your dogs! I'll die a martyr to ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... the cloud—profound as the gloom it illumines—that it shone and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity.—The grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent intermediate lour of grave-like stillness, begins to gleam fitfully with lightning like a maniac's ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... charge.— Hence, brain-sick fool!'—He raised his bow:— 'Now, if thou strik'st her but one blow, I'll pitch thee from the cliff as far As ever peasant pitched a bar!' 'Thanks, champion, thanks' the Maniac cried, And pressed her to Fitz-James's side. 'See the gray pennons I prepare, To seek my true love through the air! I will not lend that savage groom, To break his fall, one downy plume! No!—deep ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... snake! I heard his boast that he was the reincarnated spirit of Porfias del Norte, whom he would avenge. The man talked like a maniac, for at the last moment he even asserted that ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... slipped back he sprang forward, something shining in his hand, and flung himself desperately against the door ere it could be closed. The moment's delay he caused was our chance, and rushing forward we too added our weight to that of the maniac. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... we listened with a breathless interest, "he wasn't exactly a maniac, but I think I can safely say ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the magnolias burn the perfect alban lucence of their lamps; white are their ivory cups like priestly linen, and fragrant with the tang of foreign citrons. An esoteric, mirrored swan slides by like Cleopatra's barge, while drums of color beaten by a maniac blend with old tints of Leonardo's dreams, colors that God might see if his own ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... is but too true, she became a confirmed maniac, and had to be confined for the rest of her life in the tapestried chamber before mentioned, and in which she died. A strange legend was at once invented to account for this calamity: it tells how the horseman proved such an agreeable acquisition that he was invited to ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... humour had passed from the situation. The man was a lunatic, a religious maniac. Again he addressed Barney Bill. "As I can't convince Mr. Finn of the absurdity of his request, I must ask you to do so ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... a sight; it was fearfully contorted; it was the countenance of a maniac. His words were loud and uncannily distinct, and the sound of them had brought a breathless hush over the place. At the moment of Doret's entrance the occupants of the saloon seemed petrified; they stood rooted in their tracks as if the anger in that menacing voice had halted them in mid-action. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes in ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... The maniac proved to be a son of the old beldame. At times, the cloud unhappily clearing from his mental vision had left him for a short space fearfully cognisant of the transactions he was then doomed to witness. On that night to which our history refers a sudden providential ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... mother and sisters suffered more and more seriously from the gloom and horror of their isolation, and in the course of years utterly succumbed to it. First the mother died, then the elder sister; and then the younger sister, left alone with her recluse father in that awful house, became a maniac. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... was like a single intense point of light in the middle of a darkness it could do nothing to illuminate. She knew nothing but that her brother lay in that horrible empty house, and that, if his words were not the ravings of a maniac, the law, whether it yet suspected him or not, was certainly after him, and if it had not yet struck upon his trail, was every moment on the point of finding it, and must sooner or later come up with him. She MUST save him—all that ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... stay-at-homes, the people who think that they know what music really is, and what its limits are, and all about it, what would they say to these queer efforts of mine? They would not even dignify them by the word 'distorted.' They would call them unmitigated bosh, and set me down as a virulent maniac. No, signori, I am not ambitious, and so I shall not lay myself open to that sort of snubbing. Come across to the other room ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... national estimate of horses and of wine: so that a man might always give any price to furnish choicely his stable, or his cellar; and receive public approval therefor: but if he gave the same sum to furnish his library, he was called mad or a biblio-maniac. And although he might lose his fortune by his horses, and his health or life by his cellar, and rarely lost either by his books, he was yet never called a Hippo-maniac nor an Oino-maniac; but only Biblio-maniac, because the current worth of money was understood to be legitimately ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was struggling like a maniac between two officers, who were trying to snap a pair of handcuffs on ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... But it was doubly unfortunate under the circumstances, for already Nelson was carrying a load equal to his strength, and he told himself that he could not afford to be distracted, even temporarily, by the irresponsible actions of a maniac. One never could tell what a madman would do. And Gray had confessed himself a madman—a fanatic of the most dangerous type. There was but one course of action open—viz., to eliminate him, destroy him ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... so that the quartermaster had been unable to fit him with any of the uniforms, and the man, put into a soiled canvas suit, had been permanently assigned to stable duty. The third of this interesting trio was something of an idiot, hailing from the Polish districts. He grinned like a maniac, and he was entirely unfit for drill or any other kind of service that required even the faintest degree of intelligence; but, having been laborer with a Polish peasant, he knew how to handle horses and to clean the stable. He addressed, in his broken German, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... that perfume is the art of arts?" she demanded. He rushed from the room and was shaking the grilled gate in the hallway like a caged maniac, when with a pitying smile she released him. He reached the street ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... glimmer by night in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie; some, shrieking with agony, ran furiously about, like tigers wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along, more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other, and though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... know not what is rest; my one only thought is how soon the devil will come to claim his wretched victim and carry me to the place of torment." The poor creature had a belief that a Roman Catholic priest had the power of exorcism. The priest was most kind to the poor maniac, and tried to convince him of the power and goodness of God, and his love to his creatures. It need not be said that this was talking to the wind. In fine, he said, "Well, I will rid you of your tormentor. He shall have to do with me, and not with you, in future." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... and flung her to the ground, demanding the knife which he protested he had seen gleam in her hand. It was no longer safe to live with him; he was put under restraint, and never again knew freedom. In less than a year he died, a moping maniac. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... chance—medly of disaster! Sophistry, the fiend's sworn aid, Never better served its master Than in calling such hell-birth A new gospel, holy, human,— Blasting as with maniac mirth ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... among freight of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had jolted forward on ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the trip, and had time permitted, we would gladly have broken the journey at one of the quaint towns along the way. At many points of vantage we stopped to contemplate the beauty of the scene—one would have to be a speed maniac indeed to "scorch" ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Monopostiac had resumed the sombre aspect that usually distinguished them, with that mournful tranquillity that habitually reigned over the spot—interrupted only by the cry of the coyote, or the shrill maniac scream of the eagle preparing to descend to the banquet ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... which I have here translated 'mad,' has often, as I knew, a complimentary value; and I gathered from Suleyman's way of speaking that the cook was not a raving maniac, but rather what in English country-places we ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... moment that Scout Harris really recovered his voice. He recovered it in the moment of having an "inspiration." He jumped upon a barrel, released his teeth from the apple into which he had plunged them, and dancing like a maniac, sang at the top ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... coin was flying from his hand through the air. The beggar, with a livid face and clinched cane, confronted the Congressman like a maniac. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish husband and his shrewish ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... of the weary subsequent days in which he himself had toiled hour after hour in the traces, ahead of his one dog, with a maniac wrapped in rugs and lashed on the sled-pack. But Jim Willis needed no telling. He saw the trace-marks all across the chest and shoulders of Dick's coat, and he knew without any telling all about the corresponding mark that must be showing on Dick's ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... that everyday world of which he was so hardy a connoisseur; but in this fog, where all was gloomy and unreal, where nothing had that matter-of-fact value associated by Forsytes with earth, he was a victim to strange qualms, and as he tried to stare back into the eyes of this maniac, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... place and leaped a good twenty feet to the ground. When he raised himself the look of a maniac had settled on his face. Tearing his garments from him as he went, he entered a narrow street that made its ascent toward Zion by steps and cobbled slants. Here he came upon great crowds of terror-stricken ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... interests by the wretched tenure of the will of any seceding State? No line but one of blood, of military despotisms, and perpetual war, can ever separate this great valley. The idea is sacrilege. It is the raving of a maniac. Separation is death. Disunion is suicide. If the South presents the issue that the Union or slavery must perish, the result is not doubtful. Slavery will die. It will meet a traitor's doom, wherever it selects a traitor's position. The Union will still live. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... entirely without that feminine quality—it all disappeared at this plain announcement. Fury, rage, mortified pride, and a volcano of wrath burst out, at one explosion, converting her into a sort of maniac, as it might beat the touch of a magician's wand. Without deigning a reply in words, she made the arches of the forest ring with screams, and then flew forward at her victim, seizing him by the hair, which she appeared resolute to draw out ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... sooty waters of the Susta were waiting in terrible suspense and in an ominous calm. Suddenly land, water, and sky shivered, and a wild tempest-blast rushed howling through the distant pathless woods, showing its lightning-teeth like a raving maniac who had broken his chains. The desolate halls of the palace banged their doors, and moaned in the bitterness ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... and would like to take passage with him. I said this partly through young Z, who spoke German very well, and partly through Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly. I can UNDERSTAND German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I TALK it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... presence of Bar seemed to madden Vidocq immediately. From the time the former entered the house, Vidocq cursed him with every vile oath his drunken lips could frame, and, when Bar attempted remonstrance and command, the infuriated maniac suddenly caught up a table knife, and plunged it in his opponent's side. Then with a yell Vidocq rushed from the house, leaving the door thrown back for the deadly cold to enter and complete his work. John Bar said that ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... days ago the scourge struck her down; she is very ill, the worst symptoms have appeared, and she is almost frantic with terror. Last night, at 12 o'clock, I was going the rounds of the sick wards, and found her wringing her hands, and running up and down the cell like a maniac. I tried to quiet and encourage her, but she paid no more attention than if stone deaf; and when I started to leave her, she seized my arm, and begged me to ask you to come and stay with her. She thinks if you ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that he could no longer see the stars shining; beneath him moved a shrouded form; and sliding with involuntary haste down the steep descent, he stood near the groaning figure; it ceased its lamentations, and began to laugh like a maniac from beneath its long, folded, ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... he, on this day, came leaning on his staff and with considerable strain, as far as the street for a little relaxation, he suddenly caught sight, approaching from the off side, of a Taoist priest with a crippled foot; his maniac appearance so repulsive, his shoes of straw, his dress all in tatters, muttering several sentiments to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... fiercely with his knife. The friends of both parties started at once to their feet, to interpose and tear them apart; but before they could reach them, one of the combatants dropped bleeding and dying on the floor, and the other fled like a maniac from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... own case: a month ago, See me a maniac, rushing forth to find A wife who loved me not; my heart all swollen With rage against the man to whom I owed Exposure of her falsehood; ah, how blind! To chase a form from which the soul had fled! If I grew sane at length, you, Percival, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... developed in "Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned with flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac, and it comes back to her in its awful lines and lights when she finds herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to trample ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... earliest youth, was quite noted as a declaimer; his "youth but gave promise of the man," Mr. B., at the present time, standing without a peer in his peculiar line of declamation and oratory. In 1845, he traveled with Professor De Bonneville, giving his wonderful rendition of "The Maniac," so as to attract the attention of the ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... repressed emotions and desires. He had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... combatants were driven from the courtyard. The vanquished, of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighboring wood. The victors, assembling in large bands, gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, upon the flames, in which their own ranks and arms glanced dusky red. The maniac figure of the Saxon Ulrica was for a long time visible on the lofty stand she had chosen, tossing her arms abroad with wild exultation, as if she reigned empress of the conflagration which she had raised. At length, with a terrific crash, the whole turret ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... always possible that a man or woman may wish to take the matrimonial plunge again. Chesterton seems to think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who snores, or keeps cats, or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Tutmosis, "everything seems to show this, that the unfortunate Bakura was a drunkard or a maniac, and, above all, a man of foreign blood. If a genuine Egyptian in his senses were to go without pay for a year, and be clubbed twice as much as this man, would he dare to break into the palace of the nomarch and appeal to ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... cannot be in earnest," she exclaimed, dreadfully alarmed at being in the power of a maniac, far from assistance, "you do not mean so. Oh," she said throwing herself into his arms, "I do not believe my father means ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... were these records, so eccentric the vagaries of the soul during its nocturnal wanderings, that I was induced to abandon the task, lest some friend hereafter, might examine, the mystic scroll, and conclude that it was written by a maniac. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, "No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which I was equally ignorant—Mivart, Topinard, and more,—but at last that of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... despair came over me, when I thought it might have been her death groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash of lightning, that glanced over the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... tongues that hardly can frame the words that must tell the dreadful truth. Ivan only understands that something is wrong. His one thought is for Anethe; he flies to Ingebertsen's cottage, she may be there; he rushes in like a maniac, crying, "Anethe, Anethe! Where is Anethe?" and broken-hearted Maren answers her brother, "Anethe is—at home." He does not wait for another word, but seizes the little boat and lands at the same time with John on Smutty-Nose; with headlong haste they reach the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... anxiety, Mrs. Judson was prostrated by sickness soon after her return to Ava. Reason fled away; insanity took the place of calm and deliberate action; and for seventeen days she was a raving maniac. Absent from her husband, and dependent on the cold mercy of heathen women, she was indeed an object of pity. But from the borders of the grave she was raised up when all around thought her beyond the reach of hope. The hand of God reached down to the borders of the grave and rescued her from ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... tramp into the village at one and two o'clock in the morning are men who have for two weeks been under a strain that two years of experience has robbed of its tensity. But strain it is, nevertheless, as the occasional carrying of a maniac reveals. They know very well why they are fighting; even the most ignorant French laborer has some idea as to what the affair is all about. The Boches attacked France who was peacefully minding her own business; it was the duty of all Frenchmen to ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... was not his friend nor the world's law. It was expedient, if anyway possible, that such a man should not have been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his cage;—but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, the preferability of the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... digestion, and it became his wretched pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... which follow when victory, brutality, and licentiousness are linked together. Every evil passion was allowed to revel with impunity, and revenge, lust, and avarice,—each had its hundreds of victims in unhappy Semlin. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out. Peter the Hermit had blown the popular fury into a flame, but to cool it again was beyond his power. His followers rioted unrestrained, until the fear of retaliation warned them to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... full of incoherent nonsense; and from which, if it had been read, the person of the petitioner would probably have been secured. The idea of prosecution was of course abandoned, and she was consigned to Bethlehem Hospital for life. But though it was evident that the woman was a maniac, her attempt led to a display of the affection which the nation entertained towards his majesty. A public thanksgiving was ordered, and addresses of congratulation flowed in from all parts of the kingdom. His majesty felt this so deeply that he distributed the honour of knighthood, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Englishman a dangerous maniac, whom the slightest untoward accident might turn upon him with rending fangs. Not for a moment did Werper attempt to delude himself into the belief that he could defend himself successfully against an attack by the ape-man. His one hope lay in eluding him, and making for the far distant ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... chaos of contending demons. All stocks were caught in the upheaval; Melville's plans to limit the explosion were blown skyward, feeble as straws in a cyclone. Amid shrieks and howls and frantic tossings of arms and mad rushes and maniac contortions of faces, National Woolens and all the Dumont stocks bent, broke, went smashing down, down, down, every one ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... second Judith, trusting to her charms to win admittance to the hostile camp. She wins her reward, but Araquil, who is brought in from a battle mortally wounded, knowing the price at which it was won, thrusts her from him, and she sinks a gibbering maniac upon his corpse. There is little in Massenet's score but firing of cannons and beating of drums. The musical interest centres in a charming duet in the opening scene, and a delicious instrumental nocturne. The action of the piece is breathless and vivid, and the music ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... in order to return to Pisa, a good number of figures wrought with diligence, among which is the portrait of Count Gaddo, who died ten years before, and that of Neri, his uncle, once Lord of Pisa. Among the said figures, also, that of a maniac is very notable, for, with the features of madness, with the person writhing in distorted gestures, the eyes blazing, and the mouth gnashing and showing the teeth, it resembles a real maniac so greatly that it is not possible to imagine either a more lifelike picture ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... from his bended knees, By the pale spectre pushed, And, wild as one whom demons seize, Up the hall-staircase rushed; Entered his chamber—near the bed Sheathed steel and fire-arms hung— Impelled by maniac purpose dread ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... government. How shall he ever know well that he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... commands, or the further development of events. He saw in her face that her anger was not subsiding, and he wondered less at it after hearing Kafka's insulting speech. It was a pity, he thought, that any one should take so seriously a maniac's words, but he was nevertheless resolved that they should not be repeated. After all, it would be an easy matter, if the man again overstepped the bounds of gentle speech, to take him ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... "Ya jhil," lit. O ignorant. The popular word is Ahmak which, however, in the West means a maniac, a madman, a Santon; "Bohl" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... hairs with sorrow to the grave. That hair of hers never could be gray, you know, it's too self-opinionated in its sandiness. Now come along, Rorie, do. Titmouse will be stamping about his box like a maniac if he ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... such a person should be called. Whether revolutionist, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words, "A malignant maniac!" ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and cheese, and bidding him eat, for many a merry meal he had eaten in that house. The poor woman, returning and beholding this dreadful sight, shrieked aloud and fled into the woods, where, as described in the romance, she roamed a raving maniac, and for some time secreted herself from all living society. Some remaining instinctive feeling brought her at length to steal a glance from a distance at the maidens while they milked the cows, which being observed, her husband, Ardvoirlich, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... father, who in looking over a lofty balcony with his only child in his arms, by accident dropped it. The disaster drove the unhappy parent mad. Garrick had visited him in his cell; where the miserable maniac was accustomed, several times in the course of the day, to exhibit all those looks and attitudes which he had displayed at the balcony[9]. On a sudden he would bend himself forward, as if looking from a window into the street, with his arms ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... physical exclusively, and you have an athlete or a savage; the moral only, and you have an enthusiast or a maniac; the intellectual only, and you have a diseased oddity—it may be a monster. It is only by wisely training all three together that the complete man ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I knew he was a madman when he did it—a raving maniac through sheer fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I knew it could make no difference whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thou judgest, Couthon! He is one, Who flies from silent solitary anguish, Seeking forgetful peace amid the jar Of elements. The howl of maniac uproar Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself. A calm is fatal to him—then he feels The dire upboilings of the storm within him. A tiger mad with inward wounds!—I dread The fierce ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... The lovely maniac hid her face under the clothes, and continued silent during the remainder of the night. At this moment Lawton entered. Inured as he was to danger in all its forms, and accustomed to the horrors of a partisan war, the trooper ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... tell of days passing without their having a crumb of bread to satisfy the cravings of hunger, or seen them in that last stage of destitution, when hunger brings on despair, until the mind wanders from its seat, and madness takes its place; heard the raving of the maniac, his frenzied call for bread, and his abject desolation, until death came kindly to relieve his sufferings, and felt not that the hand of God had never worked so much ill for his people? Is it profanity to say that the eye of God had wandered from them? ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... witnessing the unceasing destruction of them by goldbeaters; my search for charters or deeds by their destruction in the shops of glue-makers and tailors. As I advanced the ardour of the pursuit increased, until at last I became a perfect vello-maniac (if I may coin a word), and I gave any price that was asked. Nor do I regret it, for my object was not only to secure good manuscripts for myself, but also to raise the public estimation of them, so that their value might be more generally known, and consequently more manuscripts ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... from a heavy slumber, descended like a maniac from his chamber, and, mounting in hot haste, bounded away into the mazes of the forest. An occurrence so common attracted no particular attention, but his return was looked for with intense anxiety on the part of his domestics, when, after ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... game was won. I could not resist the temptation, but put my trump on her spade, led my small card, and the game was lost. Mrs. O'Toole gave a scream and sank back in her chair almost fainting, and when she recovered her breath and her voice went on like a maniac, and had a desperate quarrel with my aunts. I made my escape, and three days later, to my huge delight, was sent off to Dublin and entered the university. I only stayed there about six months, when a friend of my father's got me a commission; but that six months ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... Wanderer folded his arms and left Unorna free to move, awaiting her commands, or the further development of events. He saw in her face that her anger was not subsiding, and he wondered less at it after hearing Kafka's insulting speech. It was a pity, he thought, that any one should take so seriously a maniac's words, but he was nevertheless resolved that they should not be repeated. After all, it would be an easy matter, if the man again overstepped the bounds of gentle speech, to take him bodily ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... floor and stretched him out near the door sill. Springing up then I attacked the bars at the window. Hours and hours I labored, impelled to greater effort by the dread of spending another night in that room of murder. I was patient, too, patient with the cunning of a maniac. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... before he died, my grandfather had put the property on a firm and secure basis, my father, in spite of himself, let a great deal of it slip out of his hands. Disappointed in life, he drifted away into sin, and died with his mouth full of curses, a raving maniac. After his death I of course succeeded him. True, I do not need money, but a great part of the estate is gone, while the whole of the Morton estate has passed from ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass! little dolt! little maniac! fit only for a madhouse! talking to iron figures and taking them for real men!—What have I done, O Heaven, that I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... see just how it happened. Pat angered Jarvis with the words that Klein heard. Jarvis rushed upon him, knocked him down with the spade, and then beat him like a maniac in his rage." ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... was once more coming up behind. As a last hope he pulled off his heavy fur-coat and dropped it. This seemed to be a subject of great interest to the bear, for it was longer in inspecting it than the other things. And now poor Butts went tearing along like a maniac, in his flannel shirt and trousers. He was a miserable and curious object, for his body, besides being very long, was uncommonly lanky, and his legs and arms seemed to go like the wings of a windmill. Never, since the day of his birth, had Davy Butts run ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia; and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril of those men who looked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms, their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac. The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentiment for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many Moslems feel for the minister of any religion. Once at least the trembling ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... on this fool's errand. As we were sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble towards the patch of green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I perceived that usually very dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... up my horse beside him, a blood-curdling chorus of strange barking screams, as from the throats of maniac women, rose at the farther side of the ravine, drowning the shouts of our men, the ping-g-g of the whistling bullets, and even the sharp crack of the muskets. It was the Indian war-whoop! A swarm of savages were leaping from the ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... his remorse for the officer's death, his burning thirst for vengeance, and his own sense of self-abasement—all conspired to add to the fever of his brain; and when Walter and his daughter were admitted to his cell, it was a gibbering maniac that rushed forward to meet them. Walter removed his fainting daughter from the appalling spectacle, and returned with a sickening heart and terrible forebodings. The shades of evening had given place to bright moonlight ere they reached ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... at usurpations must abstain from discussing the principles and policies of your Federal government, or receive the kicks of crossroad sputterers and press reporters; must either lie or be silent. They know only how to brawl and scrawl 'hot-head' and 'impolitic maniac.' Why, my free negroes know more than all your bosses. Now, damn it, put that in ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... says our speed maniac, and does a carom skid into a cross street that showed he didn't need ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... understand that I do not allude to the amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... morning when he was called upon to go to work. Mag Robertson's attack the night before had sent him to the drink, and being a heavy drinker he was in a bad state the following morning. Mr. Rundell found him swearing and raving in a great passion, sacking men and behaving like a maniac. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... with a devil, whom Jesus cast out by His word.(909) One "possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb;"(910) a youth who had a dumb spirit, that ofttimes "cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him;"(911) the maniac who, tormented by "a spirit of an unclean devil,"(912) disturbed the Sabbath quiet of the synagogue at Capernaum,—all were healed by the compassionate Saviour. In nearly every instance, Christ addressed ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... Bullers of Buchan, where the sea has forced its way through the solid rock, leaving an arch of triumph to commemorate the passage, and formed a huge round pot where its waters, in the time of storm, rage and fret and foam like a newly imprisoned maniac—a pot which Dr Johnson proposes to substitute for the Red Sea, in the future incarceration ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... other fish to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you say ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... "Like a maniac I rushed to my door and hallooed lustily for Jack, who, roused by my shouts, came hurrying up in scanty attire, with a revolver in one hand and a ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... affright ran through the room; people forgot that a maniac stood before them, and only saw the district-attorney, who, like a second Brutus, delivered over his own son to the law. Like the judgment day the words rang through the room, "I move that he be condemned to death." As soon as the echo of the words died away, Villefort arose, and leaning on ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... maniac loose in this fleet? Don't sit there like a fool, man! Get in touch with the Saratoga; tell 'em what you received; tell 'em to send some men up to that dirigible, wherever she is. We ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... asleep, the rain went on raining just the same, and the wind blowing across the marsh with the fury of a maniac who has been transformed into a blacksmith's bellows. And through the night, and the wind, and the rain, our dreadful destiny drew nearer and nearer. I wish this to sound as if something was going to happen, and I hope it does. I hope the reader's heart is now standing still with ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... through all time and all eternity; nothing shall tear you from my arms, not even your own wish, your own prayers. Oh, Amelia! do you see that I am a madman, insane from rapture and despair! Should you not flee from a maniac? Perhaps his arm, imbued with giant strength, seeking to hold you ever to his heart, might crush you. Fly, then; spurn me from you; go to your room; go, and say to this mocking courtier, to whom nothing is holy, not even our love, who is surprised, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Flambeau, with decision, "I mean that we've only found out one thing about Lord Glengyle. He was a maniac." ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also to ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... a bored look; his very manner of carrying the magazine under his arm said that he had selected it in a last hopeless effort against the monotony of Pedro. Such a trick of fate, to take a man of important affairs, and immure him at the mercy of a maniac in a God-forsaken coal-town! What did people do in such a hole? Pay a nickel to look at moving pictures of cow-boys ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in Saint Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... Two interesting types of maniac are known respectively as the bibliotaph and the biblioclast. A biblioclast is one who indulges himself in the questionable pleasure of mutilating books in order more sumptuously to fit out a particular volume. The disease is English in origin, though some of the worst cases have been ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... only an envelope. And the more tightly it is fastened together, the more it stifles the spirit. I would like to catch hold of some men's bodies and tear them in pieces to get at their souls.' Val, as he made that cheerful remark, he looked more like a homicidal maniac than ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... most skilled in physic of the brethren were immediately summoned, and they lost not a moment in accompanying me to the cavern. All that evening, until midnight, the frenzy of the maniac seemed rather to increase than abate. But at that hour, exactly indeed as the clock struck twelve, he fell all at ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he whirled like a maniac upon his little coterie of followers. "Vile traitor!" he shrieked, "I will drink ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... woman can go to no office. She must remain up stairs and cultivate patience on hunger and thirst and a general mortification of the senses. "Victory, or destruction to the bell!" I said at last, and pulled the rope with the desperation of a maniac. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... Indeed all his neighbours and acquaintances had long considered him as a madman; and a certain noble lord declared in the house of peers, when the bill of separation was on the carpet, that he looked upon him in the light of a maniac, and that if some effectual step was not taken to divest him of the power of doing mischief, he did not doubt but that one day they should have occasion to try him for murder. The lawyers, who managed the prosecution in behalf of the crown, endeavoured to invalidate the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... in the hope that their mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of the community to do another portion of it to death and to rob ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of Beethoven's powerful conception, I read in sounds far more expressive than words, the almost despairing agony of the strong-hearted, but still tender and womanly Fidelio—the ecstatic joy of the wasted prisoner, when he rose from his hard couch in the dungeon, seeming to fuel, in his maniac brain, the presentiment of a bright being who would come to unbind his chains—and. the sobbing and wailing, almost-human, which came from the orchestra, when they dug his grave, by the dim lantern's light. When it was done, the murderer stole into the dungeon, to gloat on the agonies of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... mankind in general has one of the features of madness. In the ordinary current of our existence we are to a considerable degree rational and tractable. But we are not altogether safe. I may converse with a maniac for hours; he shall talk as soberly, and conduct himself with as much propriety, as any other of the species who has never been afflicted with his disease; but touch upon a particular string, and, before you are aware of it, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... where art thou, dearest?" Thus I cry, while yet afar; Ah! what scent invades my nostrils?— 'Tis the smoke of a cigar! Instantly into the parlour Like a maniac, I haste, And I find a young Life-Guardsman, With his arm round ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... property in selling it by representing it as having been for years a declining business: this was to hide his pilferings. When charged with it, the man became raving mad. Lawyers knew not how to recover property from a maniac who could not defend himself: and my sister was in such grief for the man's wife, that she knew not whether to wish to recover a farthing. How the matter stood she either did not know or did not like to tell me-to the last; but the mysterious ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... time. It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life. Since then news had come to him from home—stray gleams from the Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest of them all was the thought ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the moonlight lay on his bed. The mystic influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides, apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth which he ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tolled twelve very methodically and stopped for an hour's rest. Cateye was still sleeping soundly but for some unaccountable reason he was bothered with bad dreams. It seemed now as if Judd had turned into a raving maniac, had grasped him by the throat and was slowly, cruelly, choking him to death. Try as he might Cateye could not shake that death grip off. Judd was grinning crazily and saying: "That's one of my failin's; I always do grip too hard!" Cateye's ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... name in English, and which I can only liken to the wiggling of a green thing under leafy covert. The coiling and circling and winding of the dancers became bewildering, and in the centre, laughing, shouting, tossing up his arms and gesticulating like a maniac, was the white man with the pointed beard. Then the performers broke from their places and gave themselves with utter abandon to the wild impulses of wild natures in a wild world; and there was such a scene of uncurbed, animal ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... doing there. I replied, 'Endeavouring to prevent some of his evil designs from succeeding'. He tried to answer me, but his utterance was literally choked by passion; and turning away, he strode up and down the room gnashing and grinding his teeth like a maniac. Having in some degree recovered his self-control, he again approached me, drew himself up to his full height, and, pointing to the door, desired me to ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... beam. Both Ostuta and Monopostiac had resumed the sombre aspect that usually distinguished them, with that mournful tranquillity that habitually reigned over the spot—interrupted only by the cry of the coyote, or the shrill maniac scream of the eagle preparing to descend to the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... desires. He had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... of a miserable maniac he leapt upon me, tripped and threw me flat upon the flags. I remember the stunning shock of my fall, but remember no more. I learned afterwards that he had pitched me out on to the stairs, and that ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... of a man. Even under the circumstances, it could be nothing else, but of a man who had taken leave of his senses. It was the wild cry of a maniac! ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... clamouring at the kitchen door. He grabbed his trousers, and they waved out behind as he dashed forward. He could hear the voice of the Swede, screaming and blubbering. He pushed the wooden button, and, as the door flew open, the Swede, a maniac, stumbled inward, chattering, weeping, still screaming: "De barn fire! Fire! Fire! De barn fire! ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... went to Edinburgh, to sir Haco Macintosh, and with his assistance brought me to my right mind. If it were not for Kirsty, I should be in my grave, or wandering the earth a maniac. Even alive and well as I am, I should not be with you now had she not shown me ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying to cast off ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... volunteered to entertain a roomful of patients of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and made up a very successful little monologue show, entirely humorous. The audience in the main gave symptoms of being slightly bored, but one highly intelligent maniac saw the whole thing in the proper light, and, clapping the talented actor on the shoulder, said: "Glad you've come, old fellow. You and I will get along fine. The other dippies here are so dashed dignified. What I say is if a man is mad, he needn't put ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... For how can we even keep company with Khalid, who has become such a maniac on flounces? And was this fantastic, phantasmagoric rhapsody all inspired by Najma's simple remark on his hair? Fruitful is thy ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... who exercised the strictest economy. M. de Turenne possessed perhaps a little too much of what his predecessor lacked, but it was exactly this that pleased the Emperor. M. de Turenne was quite a pretty man, thinking perhaps a little too much of himself, a great talker and Anglo-maniac, which led the Emperor to give him the name of my lord Kinsester (who cannot be silent); but he told a story well, and sometimes his Majesty took pleasure in making him relate the chronicles ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... rising sun. The laughing jackass, perched upon a bare limb, was awaking the forest echoes with his insane fits of laughter, alternating from a good-humoured chuckle to the frenzied ravings of a despairing maniac. Suddenly ceasing, he would dart down upon some hapless lizard, too early astir for its own safety, and, with his writhing prey in his bill, would fly to some other branch, and after swallowing his captive, burst forth into a yell of self-gratulation ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... though he joined in the hysterics of the crowd, had not compromised his dignity by pursuit; when, just as the hat touched the foam of perdition, Molly Trick, the fat bathing woman, interposed the bulwark of her body; she stooped; she spread her wide skirts, and the maniac leapt into them as ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... put into his hands the most sentimental exotics of the publishing firms. There was the 'Elegant Maniac; or, the Snuff-coloured Rose and the Field of Silver,' a beautiful romance. Then there was the 'Sentimental Footpad; or, Honour among Thieves.' And 'Syngenesia,' the last of the melancholies; with the 'Knight ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... she be introduced as a disaster?" asked Kew, with a sigh of relief. "Is she a maniac, or a suffragette, or a Mormon, or just some one who has never read ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... beggar he became rich; it was possible for him to live out his days in peace, have a splendid funeral, and a tomb: but, no! All at once he preferred to lose everything and destroy himself; he must, in truth, be a maniac." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... feelings on finding themselves, at that lone hour of the night, immediately under a spot rendered fearfully memorable by the tragic occurrences of the morning. The terrible pursuit of the fugitive, the execution of the soldier, the curse and prophecy of his maniac wife, and, above all, the forcible abduction and threatened espousal of that unhappy woman by the formidable being who seemed to have identified himself with the evils with which they stood menaced,—all rushed with rapid tracery on the mind, and excited the imagination, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... day, according to the invoice. I made my obeisance, and was pleased within myself that under this pretext I should have to come again the next day. When I took my leave and came out, I was speaking and uttering words like those of a maniac. In this state I came to the serai, but my senses were not right; all my friends began to ask what was the matter with me; I replied, that from going and returning so far, the heat ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... divine Mind, must prove abortive. Committing the 459:15 bare process of mental healing to frail mor- tals, untaught and unrestrained by Christian Science, is like putting a sharp knife into the hands of a blind 459:18 man or a raging maniac, and turning him loose in the crowded streets of a city. Whether animated by malice or ignorance, a false practitioner will work mis- 459:21 chief, and ignorance is more harmful than wilful wicked- ness, when the latter is distrusted and thwarted ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... for the affair on the seventh of September," he introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with that maniac's bullet ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... there was a loud cry from a man who looked like a maniac. He had followed the people in, and the words of Jesus had disturbed the evil spirit that ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... of my line to be named Hector," he said presently—and Andrew Daney with difficulty repressed a roar of maniac laughter. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... I am a maniac. I have for some years been the victim of a peculiar insanity, which has greatly distressed several of my friends and relatives. They generally soften it in their talk by the name monomania; but they do not hesitate to aver, when speaking their minds, that it has in truth infected my whole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... one or two of the harder as well. Given this form on the day of their appearance in public, and Henfrey might be disappointed when he came to watch and smile sarcastically. A batting fiasco is not one half so ridiculous as maniac fielding. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... turn of a cycle had made: from Augustus bequeathing the Empire to Tiberius, ablest man to ablest man, and all with senatoral ratification; to the jocular appointment by undisciplined soldiery of a sad old laughingstock to succeed a raging maniac. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... inventions—as of Rogers' teeth, Rowland's macassar, &c.; and were continuing to do so, when a fierce-looking demagogue, seeing how things were going, and what concessions were being made, roused himself angrily; and, to show us that he at least was no Anglo-maniac, shot at us a look fierce as any bonassus; while he asked, abruptly, what we thought in England of one whom he styled the "Demosthenes of Ireland"—looked at us for an answer. As it would have been unsafe to have answered ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Tom said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... could it avail me in the end? Those words—"He will make you dead!" rang in my ears, and seemed written on the wall. They confronted me everywhere. It was so easy to do this—so easy to repeat what the papers had already told the world—so easy to confine me in a maniac's cell under an assumed name, and by the aid of my own gold, and say, "She ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... crime we're working with—the kind we expect future laws to apply to—is strictly limited. It must be a crime of violence against a human being, or a crime of destruction in which there is a grave danger that human lives may be lost. The sex maniac, the firebug, or the goon who gets a thrill out of beating people. Or the reckless driver who has proven that he can't be trusted behind ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... as he was gone the miserable woman started up from her seat, clasped her hands above her head, and walked wildly up and down the room, muttering to herself like any maniac: ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is offered up. A human jungle, untamed ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... immediately started by rail for London. On this journey I found that what I had heard concerning the rescue of my Bertha had had a greater effect upon me than I had supposed. Trains could not go fast enough for me. I was as restless as a maniac; I may have ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... violence, and flung her to the ground, demanding the knife which he protested he had seen gleam in her hand. It was no longer safe to live with him; he was put under restraint, and never again knew freedom. In less than a year he died, a moping maniac. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... counting his gold; and for a long, long time he counted, until his hands shook, and his eyes gleamed as if he were mad. When he had counted all, he jumped from his seat, shouting like a maniac, 'Sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars!' Again and again he shouted this ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... night. We therefore had in old Davidson, the landlord of the Inn, and my companions submitted him to an interrogatory of three long hours' duration. One little anecdote of fresh occurrence struck me as possessing some interest. I will record it. About a month before, a poor maniac presented herself at the gates of Abbotsford. She desired to see Sir Walter. The servant denied her admittance, but such was the earnestness of the poor creature, that auld Saunders, on her pressing application, went ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... remember even now their endless heartache. The Izelins were kind; Madame Izelin, a refined Hungarian lady, became my staunch friend as well as my instructress in manners; my life teemed with interests, and I worked like a little maniac; but all the time I longed for Paragot. Had it not been for his letters I should have scented my way back to him like a dog, across Europe. Ah those letters of Paragot—I have them still—what a treasury they are of grotesque fantasy and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... look of a maniac as he pressed his fingers into her throat and glared down into her ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... dexterity the old woman suspended this hideous object to a beam of the shed, then descended rapidly to the courtyard to contemplate it. A burst of sardonic laughter escaped from her lips; she remounted, then descended again like a maniac, and each time uttered new cries and new ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... inspiring dance and song, Clorinda is admired of all. The sun with his enlivening light Brings out the viper and the rose, And joy that cheers will oft excite Dark Mania from her long repose. Amidst the dance and music there— The dance which she so proudly led— A maniac shriek has rent the air— Clorinda ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... made arrangements for a celebration, and I was invited to be present and address them. As I looked upon the audience, the first countenance that met my eye was that of this very man, at the head of his Sunday-school class. The sight almost overwhelmed me. Instead of a loathsome, drunken maniac—a terror to his family and a curse to society, whose very presence was odious, and his example pestilential—he was then, in the expressive language of Scripture, "clothed, and in his right mind;" ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and his companion. But it was soon known that he was there, and known also that he had a companion. For months he resided thus, and no one saw him but the domestics who waited upon him. But rumours got abroad as to his conduct, and people through the county declared that Earl Lovel was a maniac. Still his property was in his own control, and he did what ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... air The maniac bells of War. There will be little of sleeping to-night; There will be wailing and weeping to-night; Death's red sickle is reaping to-night: ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria shrieked—once only—and grew still. She dropped her hands and looked at him, her face as white as a dead girl's, her eyes as unfathomable as a maniac's. She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess—to be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... nothing, what is?" They were growing incoherent. "What d'you mean, screeching like a maniac? Like a wild woman? The neighbours'll think I've killed ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Flat-Dweller The Advantage of a Good Thing The Common Carrier The Heir and the Heiress The Undecided Bachelors The Wonderful Meal of Vittles The Galloping Pilgrim The Progressive Maniac Cognizant of our Shortcomings The Divine Spark Two Philanthropic Sons The Juvenile and Mankind The Honeymoon That Tried to Come Back The Local Pierpont The Life of the Party The Galumptious Girl Everybody's Friend and the Line-Bucker The Through Train The Long and Lonesome ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... blind belief to unreasoning skepticism, from intellectual slavery to liberty degenerated into license. Instead of judging the Bible by God they judge God by the Bible, and finding by this ridiculous formula that he is little better than a brutal maniac, they reject him altogether and try to account for the creature without the Creator, to explain an effect without an efficient cause. If we could but muzzle the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... rend the cloud, though the latter be near Jove's throne, so the frenzied father, regardless, nay, forgetful, of the place, the time, the occasion, of himself and natural ties, assailed the scared Narcisse, clutching him by the throat with the strength of a maniac, and pushing him backwards against the balustrade, and holding him there transfixed, while, with eyes seething with wrath beneath the blanched, and big, umbrageous brows, and showing like a sudden opening of the infernal pit, he cried: "Demon, degenerate dog, where hast thou been walking ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... "A maniac is in charge of the train. He is crazed with drink, and armed. Who of you will join me in trying ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... told how Dal and Jim had persuaded me, and how I had weakened and found it was too late, and how Bella had come in that night, when she had no business to come, and had sat down in the basement kitchen on my hands and almost turned me into a raving maniac. As I went on I became fluent; my sense of injury grew on me. I made it perfectly clear that I hated them all, and that when people got divorces they ought to know their own minds and stay divorced. And at that a great light broke ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hurt him," muttered Jack, compassionately. "He's a maniac, poor chap, or he'd never have done such a thing as try to condemn us all, himself included, to death in the depths ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... to one so young and guileless? Could you be the Mentor to this Telemachus? Think of the temptations of a metropolis. Look at the question well, and let me know speedily; for I've got him as far as this place, and he's kicking up an awful row in the hotel-yard, and rattling his chain like a maniac. Let me know by telegraph ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... promise of the man," Mr. B., at the present time, standing without a peer in his peculiar line of declamation and oratory. In 1845, he traveled with Professor De Bonneville, giving his wonderful rendition of "The Maniac," so as to attract the attention of the literati throughout ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... the region of Middletown, proved a cumbered path. From stone fence to stone fence, in the middle trough of dust, and on the bordering of what had been, that morning, dew-gemmed grass and flower, War the maniac had left marks. Overturned wagons formed barriers around which the column must wind. Some were afire; the smoke of burning straw and clothing and foodstuffs mingling with the yet low-lying powder smoke and with the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... letter moves the princess. At the grave of her unhappy lover, she recalls the words of an old friend of her father's: "Perhaps he was an abnormal man or a maniac.... Perhaps,—who knows?—your life was illumined by a love of which women often dream, a kind of love that ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... stood up and faced the man, and remained so. As we reached the wood that borders the grassy clearing and jumped into its shelter, two or three of us glanced back to see if Benoist was gaining on us, and that is what we saw—Joan standing, and the maniac gliding stealthily toward her with his ax lifted. The sight was sickening. We stood where we were, trembling and not able to move. I did not want to see the murder done, and yet I could not take my eyes away. Now I saw Joan step forward to meet ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... a stone and Captain Anthony went down with her, the finest man's soul that ever left a sailor's body. I raved like a maniac, like a devil, with a lot of fools crowding round me and asking, "Aren't you ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... softened down into expressions of grief and lamentation. Count Pisani approached the bed, and, in a mild tone of voice, asked the patient what he had been doing to render it necessary to place him under such restraint. "They have taken away my Angelica," replied the maniac; "they have torn her from me, and I am resolved to be avenged on Medora!" The unfortunate man imagined himself to be Orlando Furioso, and, as may readily be supposed, his madness was of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R. came up last evening like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, looking like death, because the letters of the World were published in yesterday's paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable. But yet, my dear good Lizzie, was it not to protect myself and help others—and was not my motive and ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... I said, 'though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove 45 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning East assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!' And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 50 When France her front deep-scarr'd and gory Concealed with clustering wreaths ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... intuitive by the uplifted hand and finger of the apostle in the centre, who, without hesitation, undismayed by the obstinacy of the demon, unmoved by the clamour of the crowd, and the pusillanimous scepticism of some of his companions, refers the father of the maniac, in an authoritative manner, for certain and speedy help to his Master on the mountain above, whom, though unseen, his attitude at once connects with all that passes below. Here is the point of contact; here is that union of the two parts of the fact ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... Buttons, "we had better leave. The Sorrentonians will be around here soon to see the maniac. They will find out all about him, and make us ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... "Oh, you clever maniac!" Stalky resumed. "We mayn't be aware you were followin' us this afternoon, mayn't we? 'Thought you were stalkin' us, eh? Why, we led you bung into it, of course. Colonel Dabney—don't you think he's a nice man, Foxy?—Colonel Dabney's our pet ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he said, and thought how the simple words carried ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knew to be the forerunner of a concussion, without more ado sprang upon the two persons sitting opposite to him, and dragged them with him to the bottom of the carriage; the astonished persons at first imagined that they had been set upon by a maniac, and commenced struggling for their liberty, but in a few seconds they but too well understood the nature of the case; the concussion came, and the upper part of the carriage in which Lord Guillamore and the other two persons were was shattered to pieces, while the ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... privilege of wheeling it herself. Maria had a small sum every week for her pocket-money, and a large part of it went to Josephine in the shape of chocolates, of which she was inordinately fond; in fact, Josephine, who came of the poor whites, like Gladys Mann, might have been said to be a chocolate maniac. Maria used to arrange with Josephine to meet her on a certain corner on Saturdays, and there the transfer was made: Josephine became the possessor of half a pound of chocolates, and Maria of the baby. Josephine had sworn almost a ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... product of a fastidious generation and class, and as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not, and can never be, saying much. Kay would do the same. They would read and discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene maniac and a liar. They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each other, and fathers and sons—but they both all the same took seriously things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities. Gerda and Kay didn't, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first—but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... sprang forward, something shining in his hand, and flung himself desperately against the door ere it could be closed. The moment's delay he caused was our chance, and rushing forward we too added our weight to that of the maniac. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... misfortunes, in all their variety, Need not be told in a holyday song. The troubles of Wall-street, I'm sure that you all meet, And they're not at all sweet—but look at their pranks: Usurious cravings, and discounts and shavings, With maniac ravings and ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... on his head, seated before him. Ridgeway, who was "bon Catholique," trembled in every joint—it might be a ghost, it might be a warning, he knew not what to think—he imagined the lips moved, and so overcome with terror was he at last, that he absolutely shouted like a maniac, and never cased till the hut was filled with officers and men, who hearing the uproar ran to his aid—the surprise of the poor quarter-master at the apparition, was scarcely greater than that of the beholders—no one was able to afford any explanation ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... at once that he made no such futile effort. With a single glance at the frenzied party on the farther side, already galloping distractedly for a possible pass lower down the glen, Larry released his feelings in a maniac howl to the fleeting pack, and let Joker—who had already stood up on his hind legs twice, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... avail was it all? Even while working with the others at the boat I never for an instant lost sight of the maniac swimmer. I noted the splash of his plunge into the water, and saw the white swirl raised by the startled sharks as he precipitated himself into their midst; I saw, too, the vigour with which he swam, and my ears tingled with the wild, horrible cry he uttered at every stroke. For ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... also therewith inspired declareth and manifesteth it unto others. The learned lawyer Julian, being asked on a time if that slave might be truly esteemed to be healthful and in a good plight who had not only conversed with some furious, maniac, and enraged people, but in their company had also prophesied, yet without a noddle-shaking concussion, answered that, seeing there was no head-wagging at the time of his predictions, he might be held for sound and compotent enough. Is it not daily seen how schoolmasters, teachers, tutors, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... story, which she told rapidly in German, he became excited at once, and his manner was that of a maniac, as he turned fiercely upon Tom, denouncing him as a coward and a liar, and threatening to turn him out of the house if he dared harbor such a ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... not until a patient died on the operating table under his hands, and the young doctor went to pieces, that it became known that he was a victim of the paper pipes. But then he had gone too far. He was a wreck in mind as well as in body, and he ended his days in a maniac's cell." ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... begged and swore, and wept and prayed, With maniac laughter joined; How fearful were these signs displayed By pangs that killed ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... a year after his first marriage, Dr. McAlister had bought the place, going far out of the town for the purpose. At that time, he was regarded as little short of a maniac, to prefer land on the ridge to the smooth, conventional little lawns of the middle of the town, where one house was so like another that the inhabitants might have followed the example of the Mad Tea Party and moved up a place, without suffering any inconvenience from the change. It was years ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her clear away in a motor car. I said so, more because Dudley was glaring at Macartney like a maniac than anything else. And Dudley caught me up short. "I won't have either of you say one more word about Valenka in my house. She was as good as she was pretty; and if some one helped her ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... against thirty deputies, Brissot's papers were rummaged, Roland's house was surrounded, while Duport, seized in a neighboring department, is deposed in the slaughterhouse. The latter is saved with the utmost difficulty; many a blow is necessary before he can be wrested from the maniac who had seized him. With a surgeon like Marat, and medics like the four or five hundred leaders of the Commune and of the sections, it is not essential to guide the knife; it is a foregone conclusion that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mate may meet with an accident and 'they can snatch at the work he had.' Why, to talk of individual freedom and equality of opportunity under a system of cannibalistic competition like this is like the mocking laughter of a raving maniac gloating over the torture of the victim it holds in its murderous grip."[45] In another popular pamphlet the worker is told: "After all, John, does it not strike you that there is some foul iniquity in a system which allows one part of the community to do another ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... fright and alarm there was upon the face of each a look of incredulity at rashness of the cadet. Had his adventures and narrow escapes turned his brain, and were they now at the mercy of a maniac? was ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings. Madge and Mimsey looked ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... thought it might have been her death groans which had struck my ears. I threw myself into the midst of the carnage, and, armed with a firebrand, snatched from my burning nuptial chamber, I made my way through the combatants, more like a maniac at the height of his frenzy, than a bridegroom on his wedding-night. Getting into the skirts of the village again, I thought I heard the shrieks of my beloved. I ran towards the direction, and a flash of lightning, that ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... nervous system was in a condition of acute excitement. His brain felt like a burning ball, and the palms of his hands were hot with fever. For the spirit of prophecy was upon him once more, and he was bound fast in the golden magic of the stars. Like the morphia maniac who, after valiant fasting, returning to his drug, feels its influence the stronger for his abstinence from it, the Prophet was conscious that the heavens held more power, more meaning for him because, for a while, he had intended to neglect them. He was ravaged by their mystery, their ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... an Apache's: left to himself he would strike always from behind, and run like a cur to cover. But cornered, or exasperated by opposition to his vast powers—something which he seemed quite unable to understand—he could fight like a maniac. He was hardly better now, when he found himself thrown off and attacked in turn at a time when he believed his antagonist to be pinned down, helpless, at the mercy of the weapon for which he was fumbling. And the murderous ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Such terror was inspired by this emperor, that at the sight of their father-Tsar his subjects at last began to scamper in all directions like a troop of mice at the sight of a cat. For half a decade Russia was thus held in terror, until the rule of the maniac could no longer be endured. At last Panin originates, Pahlen organizes, and Benigsen executes a plan, the accomplishment of which finds Paul on the morrow lying in state with a purple face, and the marks of the shawl which strangled him carefully hid by a high collar. "His Majesty died of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... on the seventh of September," he introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with that maniac's bullet ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... not realizing that the man had become little short of a maniac, stooped to pick up the garments Krylovensky dove forward and struck the mayor's face with open hand. "Now throw me to your dogs! I'll die a martyr to ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... first time I had seen him; and I was much struck by the mingled expression of suffering and ferocity that sat, like a mask, on his worn dark face. I have seen its like but once—in a dangerous maniac's. He walked straight up to Guy's couch without noticing me, and stood there silent, glaring down on the sick man with his fiery ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... one; never destructive. It was piteous to see how in these intervals his delusions were always shaped by the bitterest experiences of his life. Sometimes he fancied that the Americans were pursuing him, or that they were carrying off Ramona, and he was pursuing them. At such times he would run with maniac swiftness for hours, till he fell exhausted on the ground, and slowly regained true consciousness by exhaustion. At other times he believed he owned vast flocks and herds; would enter any enclosure he saw, where there were sheep ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Malays seem to be peculiarly liable, during the paroxysms of which those affected by it rush in blind fury among their fellows, slaying right and left. From the terrified appearance of some of the approaching crowd and the maniac shouts in rear, it was evident that a man thus possessed of the spirit of amok was venting ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... someding to murter him mit!" shrieked Hans, like a maniac. "Gif me a gun! I vill shot him on der spot, or somevere near id! ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... me with iron heel, into the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear, for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful condition, I should have become a maniac. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to Woolwich, inspecting the artillery, to whom he gave a dinner, with toasts and hip, hip, hurrahing and three times three, himself giving the time. I tremble for him; at present he is only a mountebank, but he bids fair to be a maniac. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... that of a man. Even under the circumstances, it could be nothing else, but of a man who had taken leave of his senses. It was the wild cry of a maniac! ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... and, though he seemed harmless enough, it was of course possible that he might be dangerous. He was almost sorry that he had sought shelter here. Better have encountered the storm in its full fury than place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided at any rate to remain a while longer. He knew that it would not be well to dispute the old man, and ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... a wonder itself, you'd best be hasty, for them lads caught a maniac one time and pelted the poor creature till he ran out, raving and foaming, and was ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away his senses, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the gravity of the situation, lost all hope whatever for any restoration and, acting under the advice of the old family physician, had her committed to the State Hospital for the Insane as an incurable narco-maniac. Here she was rudely but promptly deprived of all narcotics, nor by any hook nor crook, cunning though she was, could she secure a quieting, solacing grain. The wise superintendent, believing that there was little chance for her true regeneration in the surroundings of even his best wards, advised ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... witnessed that morning. She remembered being startled by the face of the woman who found her way into the court. She had seen the look of madness in her eyes as she looked first at Paul and then at her father. After which she uttered the scream of a maniac and then fell ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... discharging my piece at the blue heron or the egret, the summer duck or the snake-bird, the slender ibis or the stately crane. Even the king of winged creatures, the white-headed eagle, was more than once within range of my gun, screaming his maniac note among the tops of the ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... I answered fiercely, and ran madly from the room, along the gallery and down the stairs, shouting and raging like a maniac, Cavalcanti following me. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... his companions understood a single word of that which he uttered, would have earned for him a beating that would have landed him within an inch of his life. However, they attributed all that he said to the irrational gibbering of a maniac. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... eternal grief for his father weighing him down to the abyss; with his mother's sin blackening for him all womankind, and blasting the face of both heaven and earth; and with the knowledge in his heart that he had sent the woman he loved, with her father and her brother, out of the world—maniac, spy, and traitor. Instead of according him such 'poetic justice,' the Poet gives Hamlet the only true success of doing his duty to the end—for it was as much his duty not to act before, as it was his duty to act at last—then sends him after ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... him drily. "A man who isn't a hopeless maniac depressive can't consciously create a test for himself that he knows he will fail. You proved you could stay alone on an island, buster. You didn't prove you could stay alone in a spaceship out in the middle of infinity for three years. Why didn't ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate arrangements ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... whole moral constitution of the devoted creature, and realized the poetical creation of despair. I felt inclined to soften the sternness of her grief, by quickening her disbelief of the raving thoughts of a fever-maniac; but I paused as I thought of the probable necessity of her suspicion for her future safety from the schemes of a murderer, whose evil desires might be resuscitated by the return of health. I could do nothing more at that time for the dreadful condition of the wretched husband, and less for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the grief or rage. He went about with an aspect of calm insouciance, and therefore with a feeling of calm and ease within. Yet he was like one who walks with a madman, knowing that if his own courage should for one instant seem to waver, the maniac will be upon him. In his journey to town he had been alone, and between one station and another he had opened his portmanteau and taken therefrom a small breech-loading revolver and a stiletto. He laid his hand upon these now and again, ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... (qu. by Goer.) lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum. Wakefield on Lucr. III. 1013 puts a stop at auratum, and goes on with Luna innixans. Taber strangely explains luna as arcu ipso lunato, Dav. says we ought not to expect the passage to make sense, as it is the utterance of a maniac. For my part, I do not see why the poet should not regard luna ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... time. The maniac came nearer, and then again suddenly retreated. He stood at a short distance from Caecilius, as if afraid to come on, and cried out, tossing his hands wildly, "Away, black hypocrite, come not near me! Away! hound of a priest, cross not my path, lest I tear you to shreds!" Such ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... as if our Lord had meant to say to the bystanders,—ay and to us, and to all people in all times and in all countries, 'This poor possessed maniac's notion was a true one. There were other persons in him besides himself, tormenting him, body and soul: and, behold, I can drive these out of him and send them into something else, and leave the man uninjured, HIMSELF, and only himself, again in an instant, without any need ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... No mental disease introduces elements which do not occur in the sphere of health. A degenerated brain cell looks differently under the microscope from a normal one, but the ideas of a paranoiac, the emotion of a maniac, the volition of a hysteric, the memory idea of a paralytic is each in its own structure not different from such elements in any one of us. The total change lies thus only in the proportion; there ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... developed, where he who would most help the others, and the race, was permitted to live. Is it not natural that our race will not fight among themselves? We are careful to suppress tendencies toward criminality and struggle. The criminal and the maniac, or those who are permanently incurable as determined by careful examination, are 'removed' as the Leaders put ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of instability that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... been arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot. But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained, uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and—laughed! It was a foolish cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I knew he was a madman when he did it—a raving maniac through sheer fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I knew it could make no difference whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew round steadily enough, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... evil, too, increases greatly with the protraction of the session, and I apprehend, in case of war, their session would have a tendency to become permanent. It is much, therefore, to be desired that war may be avoided, if circumstances will admit. Nor in the present maniac state of Europe, should I estimate the point of honor by the ordinary scale. I believe we shall, on the contrary, have credit with the world, for having made the avoidance of being engaged in the present unexampled war, our first object. War, however, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the old woman suspended this hideous object to a beam of the shed, then descended rapidly to the courtyard to contemplate it. A burst of sardonic laughter escaped from her lips; she remounted, then descended again like a maniac, and each time uttered new cries and new bursts ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the cortical, and meningeal, (covering) blood and lymph vessels, presenting characteristic symptoms, with progressive course and fatal termination usually within three years." There are three stages:—1. The period of incubation (the prodromal stage). 2. A stage of pronounced mono-maniac activity with symptoms of paralysis. 3. Stage of extreme enfeeblement with diminution and final loss of power. These stages run into each other. First stage in a typical case:—There are tremblings and slight trouble in speech ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... throw various missiles and even stones at him, notwithstanding all his prayers and exclamations. They declared that they wished to see if he were in truth of glass, as he affirmed; but the lamentations and outcries of the poor maniac induced the grown persons who were near to reprove and even beat the boys, whom they drove away for the moment, but who did not fail to ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... in the act of plunging into the boiling fluid, but succeeded only in grasping one of her shoes, which came off in his hand. The father was frantic, and had to be kept by force from following her example; he was taken home a raving maniac. The prediction of the astrologer was fulfilled, for, on uncovering the bell after it had cooled, it was found to be perfect, but not a vestige of Ko-ai was to be seen; the blood of a maiden had indeed been ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... had been a traitor. It may appear more to his credit as a courtier than as a Jew that the enemy of his people was friendly towards him. But his position must have been perilous during the black reign of the tyrant, who rivaled Nero for maniac cruelty. His chief patron was one Epaphroditus, by his name a Greek, perhaps to be identified with a celebrated librarian and scholar, to whom he dedicated his Antiquities and the books Against Apion. He lived on probably[1] till the beginning of the second century, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... seated before him. Ridgeway, who was "bon Catholique," trembled in every joint—it might be a ghost, it might be a warning, he knew not what to think—he imagined the lips moved, and so overcome with terror was he at last, that he absolutely shouted like a maniac, and never cased till the hut was filled with officers and men, who hearing the uproar ran to his aid—the surprise of the poor quarter-master at the apparition, was scarcely greater than that of the beholders—no one was able to afford any explanation of the circumstance, though all were ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... as "Dodd" said this that Mr. Bright opened the door and entered the room. "Dodd" was seated near one corner, and his father, having just heard from the boy's own lips a full confession of his wholesale lying, began raving like a maniac. He swung his arms wildly, weeping and shouting as ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... is. Why, child, I have frizzed and burnt my hair so that I look like an old maniac with it in its natural state, and have to repair damages as well as I can. Now put the flowers just here," and Fanny laid a pink camellia in a nest of fuzz, and stuck a spray of daphne straight up at the back of ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... at war with himself. He was the incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... necessary to search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... disuse of language, the rejection of all ordinary human food, and sometimes in the loss of the erect posture and a preference for walking on all fours. Within a year of the time that he received the warning, Nebuchadnezzar was smitten. The great king became a wretched maniac. Allowed to indulge in his distempered fancy, he eschewed human habitations, lived in the open air night and day, fed on herbs, disused clothing, and became covered with a rough coat of hair. His subjects generally, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... public misfortunes, in all their variety, Need not be told in a holyday song. The troubles of Wall-street, I'm sure that you all meet, And they're not at all sweet—but look at their pranks: Usurious cravings, and discounts and shavings, With maniac ravings and Lombardy ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... in their separate duties, a loud exclamation from Basil drew the attention of his brothers. It was a shout of joy, followed by a wild laugh, like the laugh of a maniac! ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... to accelerate his speed when he found he was being pursued. I became more and more convinced that he had recognised me, because he always looked back anxiously when he reached a corner; but seeing that I was hunting him like a maniac, he started off again each time with renewed energy. Thus I followed him through a labyrinth of streets, hardly distinguishable in the thick mist, until I eventually lost sight of him altogether, never ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... words—"He will make you dead!" rang in my ears, and seemed written on the wall. They confronted me everywhere. It was so easy to do this—so easy to repeat what the papers had already told the world—so easy to confine me in a maniac's cell under an assumed name, and by the aid of my own gold, and say, "She ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a remorseful sigh; "I fear I'm bringing her sandy hairs with sorrow to the grave. That hair of hers never could be gray, you know, it's too self-opinionated in its sandiness. Now come along, Rorie, do. Titmouse will be stamping about his box like a maniac if he ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... country never to have peace? While on Friday we recorded the pretensions of a maniac to the great throne of France; while on Saturday we were compelled to register the culpable attempts of one whom we regard as a ruffian, murderer, swindler, forger, burglar, and common pickpocket, to gain over the allegiance of Frenchmen—it is to-day our painful duty to announce a ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... roaring, snarling pack of angry beasts. Bertha Kircher held her breath. What maniac was this who dared approach these frightful creatures in their own haunts, alone against fifty? She saw the brown-skinned figure bathed in moonlight walk straight toward the snarling pack. She saw the symmetry and the beauty of that perfect ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "I'm no speed maniac," she told Gerald, in response to his query as to whether she cared to ride as fast as a railroad train. "I'm well satisfied at the present pace. I feel that it is as fast as we can go in perfect safety, and I have ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... when he started to build this castle," said Alec, drily. "They felt dead sure after it happened; for hold your breath now, fellows, because to be honest with you there was a terrible tragedy, and after the poor young wife was buried the judge lived as much as ten years in an asylum. He had become a maniac, you see, from jealousy ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... hour I had staggered to my feet again, shivering in every limb, my teeth chattering, and there I stood staring with the eyes of a maniac into that room ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seemed to madden Vidocq immediately. From the time the former entered the house, Vidocq cursed him with every vile oath his drunken lips could frame, and, when Bar attempted remonstrance and command, the infuriated maniac suddenly caught up a table knife, and plunged it in his opponent's side. Then with a yell Vidocq rushed from the house, leaving the door thrown back for the deadly cold to enter and complete his work. John Bar said that he fell when ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... sports in the world. He sports in the soul."[434] He is supposed to dance in the Golden Hall of the temple at Chidambaram and something of the old legends of the Satarudriya hangs about such popular titles as the Deceiver and the Maniac (Kalvar) and the stories of his going about disguised and visiting his worshippers in the form of a mendicant. The idea of sport and playfulness is also prominent in Vishnuism. It is a striking feature in the cultus of both the infant and the youthful Krishna, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... embittering his life, he became introverted and melancholy, until finally the humble, patient worker, who had sent forth so much melody into the world, was strapped to the wooden bench of his cottage at Absam, a heart-broken maniac. The merciful messenger Death released him after several years, but the bench and the hole in the wood by means of which he was bound may ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the great ones, pitied the poor maniac, (as they called him,) and sent in quest of him to every direction, lest peradventure, he might be found starving in some cavern, or floating in the sea, or dashed in pieces at the bottom of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... sees Jesus from afar, and, with the disordered haste and preternatural agility which marked all his movements, he runs towards Him. Such is the introduction to the narrative of the cure. It paints for us not merely a maniac, but a demoniac. He is not a man at war with himself, but a man at war with other beings, who have forced themselves into his house of life. At least, so says Mark, and so said Jesus; and if the story before us is true, its subsequent incidents compel the acceptance of that explanation. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... life was my own to make or mar after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also to help me, as your brother, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... muttered; "no, my mother,—not even for thee!" And, dashing the money to the ground, he fled, like a maniac, from ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!" ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... half concealed, and by so doing made more impressive. It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. Above this hideous effigy was carved the legend: 'MIDDLESEX ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... upon him and saw that he was deadly pale, and that the perspiration stood out in great drops upon his forehead. The explanation was plain enough—he took me for a maniac. I would have protested and moved the previous question, but taking a small phial from his pocket he broke off the head and threw the contents in my face. Ten seconds later I was totally oblivious, and upon recovering found myself in this place, where such strange ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... man to. If the enthusiasm and mad exaltation of Don Quixote could have been combined with a little of the vulgar self-love of Sancho, one extreme might have corrected the other, and we might have had a wise gentleman instead of a maniac and a brute. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... white arms, and stood like a maniac before him," said the sexton, rising, in the excitement of the moment, and assuming the attitude he described; "and then," continued he, in a hollow voice, "at that moment came the thunder and the flash, and ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... a Richardson to light up a pan of red fire, as that old showman once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in The School for Scandal. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all sorts and varieties ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... have thought me a maniac; or it may be that the desperation of the moment sounded in my voice. He frowned intently up at me. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... plunge again. Chesterton seems to think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who snores, or keeps ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... trains thunder over the trestles while I was attending my patient. Fifth, I should judge the place to be more of a retreat for alcoholics or the insane, than for those suffering from accident, or any form of physical injury. A patient in some remote part of the house was undoubtedly a maniac or in the throes of an attack of delirium tremens. I heard his cries at intervals as I worked, until ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of unions between persons ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... them as the solid earth. They would have fought with the fury of madmen to retain their places in that half-swamped shell. They were still capable of experiencing a keener fear than that of the flood. They were as terrified by the presence of this maniac as they would have been on encountering him in ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... trigger Virginia Maxon sprang between them and grasping von Horn's wrist deflected the muzzle of the gun just as the cartridge exploded. Simultaneously Professor Maxon sprang from his grasp and hurled him back with the superhuman strength of a maniac. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... young man, looking at her with admiration; 'I hadn't thought of that. I have dismissed my chauffeur,' he went on, 'because he was always wanting things. I said to him, "My good man, get anything you want if you can get tick for it." He was a maniac about ready money. I got on all right for the first forty miles or so after leaving London, and I was going on splendidly when my motor, to gain some private end, went mad. How do these things happen? Thank 'e, Jane,' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... his place and leaped a good twenty feet to the ground. When he raised himself the look of a maniac had settled on his face. Tearing his garments from him as he went, he entered a narrow street that made its ascent toward Zion by steps and cobbled slants. Here he came upon great crowds of terror-stricken citizens who had rushed together as the news spread abroad over ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... said gruffly, "this maniac—he would not remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour ago. But for once ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... English inventions—as of Rogers' teeth, Rowland's macassar, &c.; and were continuing to do so, when a fierce-looking demagogue, seeing how things were going, and what concessions were being made, roused himself angrily; and, to show us that he at least was no Anglo-maniac, shot at us a look fierce as any bonassus; while he asked, abruptly, what we thought in England of one whom he styled the "Demosthenes of Ireland"—looked at us for an answer. As it would have been unsafe to have answered him ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to understand. She laid her head back in its ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... becomes a maniac," thought he to himself, "the end as regards us will be the same for Norbert will break off the match ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... simple,'t is rather an Encyclopaedia torn into a million million fragments by kittens and pasted together again by infants, so that all possible things are inextricably interfused, every one with every other; 't is a Bradshaw edited by a maniac, where the trains that start but don't arrive are not even distinguished from the trains that arrive but don't start. Wherever persons are conscious of the infinite complexities of things, they will be found ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! If you could have seen the necks of bottles—distracting in their immense varieties of shape—peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters. If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... yields no light to himself. Ask me touching what concerns the weal of Christendom, and of this Crusade, and I will speak with thee as the wisest counsellor on whose tongue persuasion ever sat. Speak to me of my own wretched being, and my words shall be those of the maniac ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... I am to-day! You'll think me a maniac," she said. But he only took her hand as if she had been a child and led her out ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... heard that her father was for many years in the hospital, and at last died there a raving maniac?" asked Mrs. ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... I do not allude to the amiable old gentleman who controls our Accounts Department, who is the mirror of tenderness. The person I would impale is a creation of my own wrath, a mere official type struck in frenzied fancy, [at a moment when Time seems a maniac scattering dust, and Life a ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... to make a few remarks founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... in the country at least—unless he be a criminal maniac in for a serious offence, and therefore a real danger to society—we all honestly hope that they won't catch him, and we don't hide it. And, if put in a corner, most of us would help them ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... child and there's no wrong!" The sardonic laugh that followed was that of a raging maniac. "You've fooled ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... yard of the peacefully slumbering man he rose up, crouching on his toes and bending stealthily forward to gloat over his victim. Hampton stirred uneasily, possibly feeling the close proximity of that horrible presence. Then the maniac took one more stealthy, slouching step nearer, and flung himself at the exposed throat, uttering a fierce snarl as his fingers clutched the soft flesh. Hampton awoke, gasping and choking, to find those mad eyes glaring into his own, those murderous hands throttling ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the scourge struck her down; she is very ill, the worst symptoms have appeared, and she is almost frantic with terror. Last night, at 12 o'clock, I was going the rounds of the sick wards, and found her wringing her hands, and running up and down the cell like a maniac. I tried to quiet and encourage her, but she paid no more attention than if stone deaf; and when I started to leave her, she seized my arm, and begged me to ask you to come and stay with her. She thinks if you ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... While she stood sobbing in a flood of tears, And he stood choked with anger and amazed. But as I passed the ivied porch he came With bated breath and muttered in my ear— 'Beggar!'—It stung me like a serpent's fang. Pride-pricked and muttering like a maniac, I almost flew the street and hurried home To vent my anger to the silent elms. 'Beggar!'—an hundred times that long, mad night I muttered with hot lips and burning breath; I paced the walk with hurried tread, and raved; I threw myself beneath the willow-tree, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... alone presently developes some of the recognised eccentricities of the recluse, which, on his return to society, cause him to be regarded as a maniac; and the man who lives entirely in the present cannot argue that the characteristics which he has developed are less maniacal because they are shared by his associates. Rapidly he, too, has become eccentric; and just as the solitary ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... his. Let me say tae ye if ony ill cames tae her, by the leevin' God above us he wull answer tae me." Hoarse, panting, his face that of a maniac, he stood glaring wild-eyed at the young man before him. To say that Vic was shaken by this sudden and violent onslaught would be much within the truth. Nevertheless he boldly faced the ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... advent of the Weggs, however, a strong friendship seemed to spring up between the retired sea captain and the bluff, erratic old farmer, which lasted until the fatal day when one died and the other became a paralytic and a maniac. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... female patients to have become deranged from love; whilst, with the majority of the males, the hallucination proceeded from disappointments of ambition. Surprised, I could make out no case of a religious maniac; glad, I could discover none of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... clear aim, and an idea possesses him. It may be either the fixed idea of the madman, or the fixed idea which makes the hero or the saint; but in any case he is possessed by the idea. The quality of the idea, its truth or falsehood, makes the difference between the maniac ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... ill-using him. And as Robert furthermore insisted on having these two deplorable animals under his easy-chair in the drawing-room, much to the annoyance of my lady, who, as we know, hated all dogs, the visitors at Audley Court looked upon the baronet's nephew as an inoffensive species of maniac. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the chief, he turned to go the way he had come. In the stokehold the plump donkeyman toiled with his shovel mutely, as if his tongue had been cut out; but the second was carrying on like a noisy, undaunted maniac, who had preserved his skill in the art of stoking ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... began in 1811, when in a review of Weber's edition of Ford Lamb was described as a "poor maniac." It was renewed in 1814, when his article on Wordsworth's Excursion was mutilated. It broke out again in 1822, as Lamb says here, when a reviewer of Reid's treatise on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... fire again, as in the first attack, until the foe was almost upon us. With Forsyth's order, "Now! now!" our part of the drama began. I marvel yet at the power of that return charge. Steady, constant, true to the last shot, we swept back each advancing wave of warriors, maddened now to maniac fury. In the very moment of victory, defeat was breaking the forces, mowing down the strongest, and spreading confusion everywhere. A thousand wild beasts on the hills, frenzied with torture, could not have raged more than those frantic Indian women and shrieking ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... raised the instrument above her, and with a maniac's force hurled it full at the head ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... What matters that? you are inspired. I must take off your head." And in a moment she was at work with her pencil. "Come out, hussy," she screamed to Reicht, "more in front of him, and keep the fool inspired and beautiful. Oh, why had I not this maniac for my good centurion? They went and brought me a brute with a low ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a cab slowly returning to town, at the corner of the lane, sprang into it, directed the man to drive to the church of ——, and promised him anything and everything for despatch. The man seemed amazed; doubtful, perhaps, whether he carried a maniac or a malefactor. Still he took his chance for the promised reward, and galloped his horse, while I, tortured with suspense, yelled my frantic ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... be observed. The lake no longer glittered under the silvery beam. Both Ostuta and Monopostiac had resumed the sombre aspect that usually distinguished them, with that mournful tranquillity that habitually reigned over the spot—interrupted only by the cry of the coyote, or the shrill maniac scream of the eagle preparing to descend to ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... errand. As we were sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble towards the patch of green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I perceived that usually very dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... revolution. The purest type of Epicureanism may have refined a few of the better sort, but the prevailing influence, doubtless, undermined society. The god of the reason was allied with the god of the sense, and the maniac soul of the lying prophet entered the schools. Education, as directed by them, served only to make youth worldly and frivolous. Teachers sought to amuse and not to instruct, to make royal roads to knowledge, to exalt the omnipotence of money, to set a high value on ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... fatherly he ruled! Such terror was inspired by this emperor, that at the sight of their father-Tsar his subjects at last began to scamper in all directions like a troop of mice at the sight of a cat. For half a decade Russia was thus held in terror, until the rule of the maniac could no longer be endured. At last Panin originates, Pahlen organizes, and Benigsen executes a plan, the accomplishment of which finds Paul on the morrow lying in state with a purple face, and the marks of the shawl which strangled him ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... chess at night and make excuses to play it in the day. For a month chess will be even more to me than golf or billiards—games which I adore because I am so bad at them. For a month, starting from yesterday when I was inveigled into a game, you must regard me, please, as a chess maniac. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... American mills, factories, mines, and railway systems go in part to Englishmen or Belgians or Germans who never set foot in America, and who obviously can have no share in even the mental labor of direction. A certificate of stock may belong to a child, to a maniac, to an imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and it draws profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds may lie for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, while an estate is being disputed, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... our possession into that of an utter alien, against whom I harbored a prejudice which was some excuse in itself. He had enlarged and altered the dear old place out of knowledge; nothing had been good enough for him as it stood in our day. The man was a hunting maniac, and where my dear father used to grow prize peaches under glass, this vandal was soon stabling his hothouse thoroughbreds, which took prizes in their turn at all the country shows. It was a southern county, and I never ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... strings, 8 A maid, a beauteous maniac, wildly sings: They laid him in the ground so cold,[30] Upon his breast the earth is thrown; High is heaped the grassy mould, Oh! he is dead and gone. The winds of the winter blow o'er his cold breast, But ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... As the maniac finished the last words, before they could be aware of his intention, he made a spring from the deck over the bulwark, and disappeared under the wave. The boatswain, who had been diverted from his fanatical ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... malice. Vengeance, as a mission for me, as a task for my hands in particular, is no longer possible; the thunderbolts of retribution have been long since launched by other hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do—I must—I shall perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or two upon what ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... outmatched. The odds were such as no man in his senses could have hoped to combat with anything approaching success. Almost before his bonds began to loosen, his enemies were upon him again. They hoisted him up, fighting like a maniac. They tightened his bonds unconcernedly, and prepared for a ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... so he started to do foul murder. He committed several acts of frightfulness on Ben with his crutch, seeming quite active for a cripple. Ben finally got out of range and went and had some stitches took in his own scalp. He swore, by doggie, he was through with that maniac forever! But he wasn't ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... glanced at me with that expressionless look upon his face which he could summon at will, and which is at the bottom of the superstition about his iron nerve. 'I was worried, and not well. Besides, one doesn't care to be burgled, even by a maniac.' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... 'Alas! poor maniac,' thought Mary, 'you have lost all count of time. Fifty years to you in the confusion of your distraught brain, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... You'll think me a maniac," she said. But he only took her hand as if she had been a child and led her out of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... flesh, and all so inextricably bent and tangled together that I could not withdraw them for some time; and when I did, from my lacerated fingers the bloody fibres would stretch out all quivering with life. After a frightful paroxysm of this kind I would start like a maniac from my bed, and beg for life, life! What I of late thought so worthless seemed now to be of unappreciable value. I dreaded to die, and clung to existence with a feeling that my soul's salvation depended on a little more ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... the other people had seen him then they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see him, and they went on making a clatter with their forks, and a murmur with their conversation. But the man's face was the face of a maniac. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... errors of fact. The evil, too, increases greatly with the protraction of the session, and I apprehend, in case of war, their session would have a tendency to become permanent. It is much, therefore, to be desired that war may be avoided, if circumstances will admit. Nor in the present maniac state of Europe, should I estimate the point of honor by the ordinary scale. I believe we shall, on the contrary, have credit with the world, for having made the avoidance of being engaged in the present unexampled war, our first object. War, however, may become ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... find the name of the Archbishop of Dublin, who, while in England, narrowly escaped martyrdom from the hands of a maniac, while celebrating Mass at the tomb of St. Thomas. Four years afterwards, this celebrated ecclesiastic attended at Rome, with Catholicus of Tuam, and the Prelates of Lismore, Limerick, Waterford, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the keeper and his myrmidons! The abandoned and wandering mother never clasped her child more fondly to her bosom, nor gazed upon his features with more passionate visions for the future. And what had so enchanted the poor prisoner, so deluded the poor maniac? A large nail! He had found it accidentally in the garden; he had hoarded it for weeks,—it had inspired him with the hope of liberty. Often, in the days far gone, he had read of the wonders that had been effected, of the stones removed, and the bars filed, by the self-same kind of implement. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not necessary to search the cabin," Senator Warfield answered stiffly. "Unless she is in a stupor we'd have heard her yelling long ago. The girl was a raving maniac when she appeared at the Sawtooth. It's for her ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... maddening myriads press around, What power divine thy soul befriends That thou should'st dash it to the ground?— No, thou shalt drink, and thou shalt know 50 Her transient bliss, her lasting woe, Her maniac joys, that know no measure, And Riot rude and painted Pleasure;— Till (sad reverse!) the Enchantress vile To frowns converts her magic smile; 55 Her train impatient to destroy, Observe her frown with gloomy joy; On thee with harpy fangs they seize The hideous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hour of the night, immediately under a spot rendered fearfully memorable by the tragic occurrences of the morning. The terrible pursuit of the fugitive, the execution of the soldier, the curse and prophecy of his maniac wife, and, above all, the forcible abduction and threatened espousal of that unhappy woman by the formidable being who seemed to have identified himself with the evils with which they stood menaced,—all rushed with rapid tracery on the mind, and excited the imagination, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,—half maniac, half demon,—I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,—his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so little accustomed. His faults were sufficiently ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... appreciate Aura's virtues; but whenever one of these vultures is visible from the patio, she shrieks like a maniac, flaps her large wings angrily, and turns ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... nothing; all these books seemed to her to hold a policy of despair that indicated lunacy or suicide as Louis's only possible end. E.F. Benson's "House of Defence" was the most hopeful book she read. In the tormented morphia-maniac she saw Louis vividly. But she knew that he was too innately untrustful, unloving, to be saved by an act of faith. She had put that book down an hour ago, and turned again to the real pessimism of Zola, longing for the cool of the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... nation. He had been taken in battle, and was brought in chains for sale to the Rio Pongas, where he was exhibited in the market-place, his ankles still adorned with massy rings of gold which he wore when captured. The refusal of his captors to listen to his offers of ransom drove him mad, and he died a maniac. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... children are starving, he feels it not. He feels better. If his affairs are going to ruin, or are already plunged into ruin, he is not sensible to his condition. If his house is on fire, he sings the maniac's song, and regards it ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... Prussia, was an extravagant fop who spent a year's income on the ceremony of coronation. On the contrary, his successor, "Fat William" (1713-1740), the Sergeant-King, was a miser, who on his coronation only spent 2,227 thalers and ninepence, where his father had squandered over six millions, a maniac who collected tall grenadiers as other Kings have collected pictures, who tortured his children, and who wanted to punish with a death sentence a juvenile escapade of the heir to the throne. Frederick the Great (1740-1786), ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... struggling like a maniac between two officers, who were trying to snap a pair of handcuffs ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... hideous thing growing in me, hour by hour—a little more—a little more. I can feel its clutch tightening on me. And I can't resist. I can't escape. The little mental balance I have is being dragged away from me. In a few years—if I let myself live to it—I shall be a babbling maniac. Nothing can save me. I knew it when I was a boy—before that thing there completely lost its reason. I knew I was born a madman for my father's sins. It crept on me gradually—one sign after another—one horrible secret impulse after another. The slow, sure growth ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop—a people drunk with vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first—but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man—kindling ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... (40 grains) of solid opium at a dose, and twenty grains four hours afterwards; which restored the patient. Dr. Brandreth gave 400 drops of laudanum to a maniac in the greatest possible furor, and in a few hours he became calm and rational. Med. Comment ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... from his pocket, he actually began to measure it! Miss Du Page saw no more. Hurriedly closing her door, she locked and bolted it, firmly convinced that Gabriel Lane was harboring in the guise of Uncle Sylvester a somnambulist, a maniac, or an impostor. ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Lecoq hastened to effect the arrest of the count. He arrived too late. Realising that he was hopelessly in the toils, the count was bereft of his senses and become a hopeless maniac. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... could have taken one or two trifles at least. He wanted a respectable English telescope, I remember, to see the stars with—a bit of an astronomer, you know. Chutney, too—devilish fond of chutney, the old boy was; quite a gastro-maniac. What a nuisance! Now he will be thinking I forgot all about it. And he needed a clothes-press; I was on no account to forget that clothes-press. Rather fussy about his trousers, he was. And a type-writer; just an ordinary one. But I doubt ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... as stated above in the First Part (Q. 84, A. 8, ad 2). Wherefore what a man does while he sleeps and is deprived of reason's judgment, is not imputed to him as a sin, as neither are the actions of a maniac or an imbecile. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... with her look of sweet trustfulness; it froze to mortal horror. She clasped the child. I saw his cap come off from his yellow curls, and one little hand tossed out as the landau went over. The mare, now mad as any maniac, ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... her story, which she told rapidly in German, he became excited at once, and his manner was that of a maniac, as he turned fiercely upon Tom, denouncing him as a coward and a liar, and threatening to turn him out of the house if he dared harbor such a suspicion against ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... fire-light, Morton had no difficulty in recognising several of those zealots who had most distinguished themselves by their intemperate opposition to all moderate measures, together with their noted pastor, the fanatical Ephraim Macbriar, and the maniac, Habakkuk Mucklewrath. The Cameronians neither stirred tongue nor hand to welcome their brethren in misfortune, but continued to listen to the low murmured exercise of Macbriar, as he prayed that the Almighty would lift up his hand from his people, and not make an end in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... searched the country, house by house, with the obstinacy and the patience of a maniac hunting for a ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... However, these hopes continued not above an hour, when he awoke, with a well-conditioned skin, no extraordinary degree of fever, but with the exact state he was in before, with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise, in imitation of the howling of a dog; in this situation he was this morning at one o'clock, when we came to bed. The Duke of York, who has been twice in my room in the course ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... voice broke in, coming from the top of a tall cypress standing near. Strange and wild, it was enough not only to startle, but awe the stoutest heart. A shrill, continued cachinnation, which, though human-like, could scarce be ascribed to aught human, save the laughter of a maniac. ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... is one of the men who cannot use wine or spirits in moderation. In consequence of some diseased action of the nutritive organs brought on by drink, he has lost the power of self-control when under the influence of alcoholic stimulation. He is a dypso-maniac. A glass of wine or brandy to him is like the match to a train of powder. I don't wonder, knowing what I do about General Abercrombie, that his wife grew deadly pale to-night when she saw him raise ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... space, made of it a chaos of contending demons. All stocks were caught in the upheaval; Melville's plans to limit the explosion were blown skyward, feeble as straws in a cyclone. Amid shrieks and howls and frantic tossings of arms and mad rushes and maniac contortions of faces, National Woolens and all the Dumont stocks bent, broke, went smashing down, down, down, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... one I wished heartily that we had never started on this fool's errand. As we were sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble towards the patch of green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I perceived that usually very dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... I, If Wentworth comes to rule her. I am sick To think her wretched masters, Hamilton, The muckworm Cottington, the maniac Laud, May yet be longed-for back again. I ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... region of Middletown, proved a cumbered path. From stone fence to stone fence, in the middle trough of dust, and on the bordering of what had been, that morning, dew-gemmed grass and flower, War the maniac had left marks. Overturned wagons formed barriers around which the column must wind. Some were afire; the smoke of burning straw and clothing and foodstuffs mingling with the yet low-lying powder smoke and with the pall of Valley dust. Horses lay stark across the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... me to leave my father?" said Agatha, appealing to Santerre. "You will not deliver a poor unprotected girl into the hands of such a maniac ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... brain, Sorrow, pestilence, and pain, Moans of anguish, maniac laughter, All the evils that hereafter Shall afflict and vex mankind, All into the air have risen From the chambers of their prison; Only Hope ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... knowing, as if it were a vile thing to be ignorant—so vile that, for the sake of his secret hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with torture into the house of the innocent! Surely they shall not thus find the way of understanding! Surely there is a maniac thirst for knowledge, as a maniac thirst for wine or for blood! He who loves knowledge the most genuinely, will with the most patience wait for it until it can be ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... exclaimed Belinda. 'You little know him. Jealous and revengeful; ferocious in his revenge—a maniac in his jealousy! Would you be assassinated before my eyes?' Mr. Cymon Tuggs, in a voice broken by emotion, expressed his disinclination to undergo the process of assassination before the eyes ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... pagan of a father—was he not ashamed of himself to see the results of his own cold-blooded theories? Was this the glory of art? Was this the reward of the sacrifice of a life? That a sensitive girl should be publicly insulted by a tipsy maniac, and jeered at by a brutal crowd? Macleod laid down the letter for a minute or two, and the look on his face ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... break and an overnight fortune—a common occurrence these days. But it was doubly unfortunate under the circumstances, for already Nelson was carrying a load equal to his strength, and he told himself that he could not afford to be distracted, even temporarily, by the irresponsible actions of a maniac. One never could tell what a madman would do. And Gray had confessed himself a madman—a fanatic of the most dangerous type. There was but one course of action open—viz., to eliminate him, destroy him without delay. That was ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... proper deliberation, "Celestine," Miss Hugonin commanded, "get out that little yellow dress with the little red bandanna handkerchiefs on it; and for heaven's sake, stop pulling my hair out by the roots, unless you want a raving maniac ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... robe and a skull cap drawn close over his head; a vague, contorted, writhing and gibbering horror, of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and grotesque sight, more weird and more grotesque seen through a muddled childish fancy and through the haze of years, has remained associated in my mind with that particular corner of Rome, where, with windows looking down upon that street, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... for, learn 'tis in vain, Thus, thou maniac Tyrant, to boast; As soon shall her base be remov'd by the main, As her empire ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... the said Ranieri when he is embarking in order to return to Pisa, a good number of figures wrought with diligence, among which is the portrait of Count Gaddo, who died ten years before, and that of Neri, his uncle, once Lord of Pisa. Among the said figures, also, that of a maniac is very notable, for, with the features of madness, with the person writhing in distorted gestures, the eyes blazing, and the mouth gnashing and showing the teeth, it resembles a real maniac so greatly that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... yours—why, you at most admire my fingers. No doubt you are a connoisseur of fingers and such-like trifles; but, then, a woman does not wish to be admired by a connoisseur so much as she hungers to be adored by a maniac. And accordingly, I prefer my ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... betrothed, The law would call him madman, and the care Of him and of his goods would pass elsewhere. You offer up your daughter for a lamb; And are you rational? Don't say, I am. No; when a man's a fool, he's then insane: The man that's guilty, he's a maniac plain: The dupe of bubble glory, war's grim queen Has dinned away ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... speed maniac," she told Gerald, in response to his query as to whether she cared to ride as fast as a railroad train. "I'm well satisfied at the present pace. I feel that it is as fast as we can go in perfect safety, and I ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... at the feet of her apparently murdered son. Even the heart of Clavers was somewhat moved at this scene; and he was in the act of giving orders for an immediate retreat, when there rushed into the circle, in all the frantic wildness of a maniac, at once the father and the husband. He had observed from his retreat the doings of that fearful hour: and, having every reason to conclude that he was purchasing his own safety at the expense of the lives of his whole ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... too true, she became a confirmed maniac, and had to be confined for the rest of her life in the tapestried chamber before mentioned, and in which she died. A strange legend was at once invented to account for this calamity: it tells how the horseman proved such an agreeable acquisition that he was invited to remain ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... Henry's voice conveyed the proper amount of professional superiority—"you speak as though you thought a victim of furor epilepticus was a rational being. He is nothing of the kind. While the attack lasts he is an uncontrollable maniac, not responsible for his actions in the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection. With nerves twittering and muscles tensely set, I was ready to become a homicidal maniac at the snapping of a twig or the rolling of ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... my own to make or mar after that; what I chose to do with it was my own concern. But here I do not live. I want the means to get away; to make a fresh start in different surroundings. Sooner or later I must go, or I shall become a raving maniac. You can help me in this, even as I can help you in the cause in which you are now spending and wasting a lot of money. Get mother to give me fifteen thousand dollars, not only as the price of my information, but also to help me, as your brother, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... a man so irrevocably as Walton's mania. Travelling by night in the north lately, I looked out into the dusk from the carriage window and beheld a bright flash of lightning, and by the gleam thereof saw a midnight maniac with his rod silhouetted against the vast inane. How few fishers nowadays, except perhaps Mr. Andrew Lang, can write their experiences ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... streaming towel, and almost brained myself against—the Mail! which was standing there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put on my bonnet, and came back 'a sadder and a ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... I told him drily. "A man who isn't a hopeless maniac depressive can't consciously create a test for himself that he knows he will fail. You proved you could stay alone on an island, buster. You didn't prove you could stay alone in a spaceship out in the middle of infinity for three years. Why didn't you ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to understand. She laid her head back in its little ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of it among his clothing; ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... some of them Terrible, until she was nearly ninety years of age. But her first state was worse than death; she lying for many days in a kind of trance or lethargy, and then waking up to raving madness. For the best part of that year, she was a perfect maniac, from whom nothing could be got but gibberings and plungings, and ceaseless cries of "Blood for Blood!" The heir-at-law to the estate, now that the Esquire's son was dead, watched her madness with a cautelous avaricious ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... too great to be borne. What should I do: run to the nearest town or village, and request the assistance of my fellow-men? No! that I was ashamed to do; notwithstanding the horror was upon me, I was ashamed to do that. I knew they would consider me a maniac if I went screaming amongst them; and I did not wish to be considered a maniac. Moreover, I knew that I was not a maniac for I possessed all my reasoning powers, only the horror was upon me—the screaming horror! But how were ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... magazine, containing a mixture of debased Cabalism and vulgar blasphemies, interspersed with panegyrics on haschish—for Crowley combined with sexual perversion an addiction to drugs—which might appear to express only the ravings of a maniac. But eccentricity has often provided the best cloak for dark designs, and the outbreak of war proved that there was a method in the madness of the man whom the authorities persisted in regarding merely as an irresponsible degenerate of a non-political kind. To quote ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Tigellinus; from a beggar he became rich; it was possible for him to live out his days in peace, have a splendid funeral, and a tomb: but, no! All at once he preferred to lose everything and destroy himself; he must, in truth, be a maniac." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... all these great intelligences touched? Was the world piloted by unbalanced minds? It seemed incredible, impossible it should be so, but two such similar experiences in so short a time apparently supported this gloomy view. Horrible, I thought as I preceded Gootes out of the maniac's office, unbelievably horrible. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... then fixed his gaze on something that stood just above—something which the dusk half concealed, and by so doing made more impressive. It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair struggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. Above this hideous effigy was carved the legend: 'MIDDLESEX HOUSE ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... of Brougham's witnesses (May 11, 1812), when a shot was heard in the lobby, and Perceval was found to have been murdered by Bellingham. Stephen had just before been in Perceval's company, and it was thought, probably enough, that he would have been an equally welcome victim to the maniac. He was made ill by the shock, but visited the wretched criminal to pray for ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... was it all? Even while working with the others at the boat I never for an instant lost sight of the maniac swimmer. I noted the splash of his plunge into the water, and saw the white swirl raised by the startled sharks as he precipitated himself into their midst; I saw, too, the vigour with which he swam, and my ears tingled with the wild, horrible cry he uttered at every stroke. ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... his head. Everything was about as far from all right as it well could be. The cook was a violent maniac who required peas to be picked so young that they weren't worth the picking. Tomes and his footman were a band of malicious pirates who took pleasure in cutting for the table the very buds which McKellar was cherishing for the horticultural show. And as for ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... able paper, but it contained a passage, the publication of which occasioned Gifford the deepest regret. Towards the conclusion of the article these words occurred: The Editor "has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, who, it seems, once published some detached scenes of the 'Broken Heart.'" This referred to Charles Lamb, who likened the "transcendent scene [of the Spartan boy and Calantha] in imagination to Calvary and the Cross." Now Gifford had never heard of the personal history of Lamb, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the boatswain, spurning him with his foot. "I have you where I swore I'd bring you. And, remember, 'tis I that laid you low—I—I—" He shrieked like a maniac. "When you suffer in that living death for which they design you, remember with every lingering breath of anguish that it was I who brought you there! You trifled with me—mocked me—betrayed me. You denied my request. I grovelled at your feet ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... now, especially, the dark side of everything seemed to be presented to him. What if she died, just when he knew the treasure, the untold treasure he possessed in her love! What if (worse than death) she remained a poor gibbering maniac all her life long (and mad people do live to be old sometimes, even under all the pressure of their burden), terror-distracted as she was now, and no one ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... countenance, as if she meant to whisper in his ear, she suddenly plucked St. Louis' dagger from his girdle and struck it into his breast. He caught the hand which grasped the hilt. Her eyes glared with the fury of a maniac, and, with a horrid laugh, she exclaimed: "I have slain thee, insolent triumpher in my love and agonies! Thou shalt not now deride me in the arms of thy minion; for, I know that it is not for the dead Marion you have trampled on my heart but ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... [Transcriber's note: original reads 'apportunity'] of ascertaining how far that disease may be removed by moral management alone, which it is believed, will, in many instances, be more effectual in controlling the maniac, than medical treatment especially, in those cases where the disease has proceeded from causes ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... my own part I stood silent with horror. The cries of the women enraged the overseer, he dropped his gun, and snatching the whip from my hand, with horrid oaths, and imprecations fell to whipping them, laying about him like a maniac. Upon Harry's sister he bestowed his blows without mercy, commanding her to quit her screaming and go to work. The poor girl, whose brother had thus been murdered before her eyes, could not wrestle down the awful agony of her feelings, and the brutal tormentor left her without effecting his object. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... yell, which was echoed by Yorke and Dailey, but nothing happened; the dynamite simply went to the bottom, the force of the shock not being sufficient to explode it. When Jerry comprehended what had happened, however, he was changed instantly from a mild, gentle-appearing old man into a raging maniac. He ran forward, his face terrible to see, and leaping into the crowd of Kanakas began striking right and left ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... predestination—gliding into such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin, preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... an awful instance of the dangers of constitutional royalty. We have had the case of a meddling maniac. During great part of his life George III.'s reason was half upset by every crisis. Throughout his life he had an obstinacy akin to that of insanity. He was an obstinate and an evil influence; he could not be turned from what was inexpedient; by ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... made in such a wild, fantastical manner, that the greatest part of the company mistook him for some savage monster or maniac, and consulted their safety by starting up from table, and drawing their swords. The Englishman, seeing such a martial apparatus produced against him, recoiled two or three steps, saying, "Waunds! a believe the people are all bewitched. What, do ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... are people at the back gate already, and the house door won't hold much longer. The smith's battering at it like a maniac with a ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... in which it was contained. It was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece. It was rather too large for ordinary smoking. But then, of course, one doesn't smoke a pipe like that. There are pipes in my collection which I should as soon think of smoking as I should of eating. Ask a china maniac to let you have afternoon tea out of his Old Chelsea, and you will learn some home truths as to the durability of human friendships. The glory of the pipe, as Tress had suggested, lay in its carving. Not that I claim that it was beautiful, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the whole Anarchist doctrine founders upon its own logic. If any maniac may, because he "wants" to, kill as many men as he likes, society, composed of an immense number of individuals, may certainly bring him to his senses, not because it is its caprice, but because it is its duty, because such is the conditio sine ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... to Thompson and me to get out of his reach, for we should see him play the devil with a vengeance. We did not think fit to disregard his caution, and accordingly got up on the poop, whence we beheld the maniac (as soon as he was released) fly at the captain like a fury, crying, "I'll let you know, you scoundrel, that I am commander of this vessel," and pummel him without mercy. The surgeon, who went to the assistance of his patron, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... the Chief Hermano, under strict promise to reveal it to the Sovereign: but his intense anxiety had evidently prevented the attainment of his desire, by producing fever; and thence arose his wild and almost maniac cravings to make confession, and bind some holy monk, by a solemn vow, to convey ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... progression which is so dear to me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed in "Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned with flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac, and it comes back to her in its awful lines and lights when she finds herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to trample out her ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... In the impeachment of Judge Pickering, of New Hampshire, a habitual and maniac drunkard, no defence was made. Had there been, the party vote of more than one third of the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Roussillon and Beziers, holding the bridge, saw him come. 'He has snatched his Sabine woman,' said Beziers. 'Humph,' said Roussillon; 'now for beastly war.' Richard rode straight between them at a hand-gallop; Gaston followed close, cheering his beast like a maniac. Then the iron pair turned inwards and rode out together, taking the way he led them, the ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... expect ever to get back, were dashing headlong into the arms of still other lunatics, kissing and hugging them, and exchanging farewells and sacre-bleuing with them in the maddest fashion imaginable. From time to time I laid violent hands on a flying, flitting maniac and detained him against his will, and asked him for some directions; but the persons to whom I spoke could not understand me, and when they answered I could not understand them; so we did not make much headway by that. I could not get out of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... no need to steal, and yet apparently cannot help doing so. I am sure that no attempt has been made to pass those notes. They are doubtless resting securely in his house at Kensington. He is, in fact, a kleptomaniac, or a maniac of some sort. And now, monsieur, was my hint regarding the silver spoons ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... neighbours and acquaintances had long considered him as a madman; and a certain noble lord declared in the house of peers, when the bill of separation was on the carpet, that he looked upon him in the light of a maniac, and that if some effectual step was not taken to divest him of the power of doing mischief, he did not doubt but that one day they should have occasion to try him for murder. The lawyers, who managed the prosecution in behalf of the crown, endeavoured ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... had declared him "King of Europe," so that England was only a province to him, is noted in our "General History of England." This was the first serious blow which alarmed the Puritanic party. Doubtless, this man was a mere maniac, and his ferocious passions broke out early in life; but, in that day, they permitted no lunacy as a plea for any politician. Cartwright held an intercourse with that party, as he had with Barrow, said to have been a debauched youth; yet we had a sect of Barrowists; and Robert Brown, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... till their fair land became a sty Stygian with moral darkness. Heart and mind Debased—dark passions rose, and with red eye, Rushed to their revel; until Freedom, blind And maniac, sought the rest the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... Blades The Flat-Dweller The Advantage of a Good Thing The Common Carrier The Heir and the Heiress The Undecided Bachelors The Wonderful Meal of Vittles The Galloping Pilgrim The Progressive Maniac Cognizant of our Shortcomings The Divine Spark Two Philanthropic Sons The Juvenile and Mankind The Honeymoon That Tried to Come Back The Local Pierpont The Life of the Party The Galumptious Girl Everybody's Friend and the Line-Bucker The Through Train The Long and Lonesome Ride ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... conception, I read in sounds far more expressive than words, the almost despairing agony of the strong-hearted, but still tender and womanly Fidelio—the ecstatic joy of the wasted prisoner, when he rose from his hard couch in the dungeon, seeming to fuel, in his maniac brain, the presentiment of a bright being who would come to unbind his chains—and. the sobbing and wailing, almost-human, which came from the orchestra, when they dug his grave, by the dim lantern's light. When it was done, the murderer ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... follow when victory, brutality, and licentiousness are linked together. Every evil passion was allowed to revel with impunity, and revenge, lust, and avarice,—each had its hundreds of victims in unhappy Semlin. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out. Peter the Hermit had blown the popular fury into a flame, but to cool it again was beyond his power. His followers rioted unrestrained, until the fear of retaliation warned them to desist. When the king of Hungary ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... doesn't know the meaning of the word. Hatchments! To commemorate that sniveling tramp and his, fraternal duplicate. And he is going to send me the remains. The late Claimant was a fool, but plainly this new one's a maniac. What a name! Mulberry Sellers—there's music for you, Simon Lathers—Mulberry Sellers—Mulberry Sellers—Simon Lathers. Sounds like machinery working and churning. Simon Lathers, Mulberry Sel—Are ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by him. And Bainbridge, startled perhaps at what he had done—for the skipper had always behaved like a father to him—lost the last vestige of his self-control, and became in a moment the very personification of a raving, bloodthirsty maniac. Levelling his still smoking revolver at Bligh, he commanded the latter, with a very tornado of curses, instantly to place the body of the captain in the longboat and shove off from the ship's side forthwith, unless he wished to ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... Blandford (loc. cit.), "than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, also, it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... enough?" cried his father, with natural impatience, ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for a son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for a madhouse, talking to iron figures and taking them for real men! What have I done, O heaven, that I should ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... spoken at the Queen's Hall meeting I had been quite self-possessed. I pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. I was about to continue, when a red brick suddenly landed neatly on my breakfast table, ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... Ishmael's evidence because Mr. Worth had declined to give it under oath; to Judge Merlin's, because, he said, that ancient man was so well stricken with years as to be falling into his dotage; to old Katie's, because most decidedly he declared she was totally unreliable, being half monkey, half maniac, and whole knave; to Jim's, because he averred him to be wholly under the influence of others; to Sally's, for the same reason. It would be monstrous, he said, to send a nobleman and a lady to trial upon such evidence as had been given ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... from the house, a hoarse, screeching cry in a voice which might have been either man's or woman's, but was as mad and as desperate and as horrible in that still night as the screech of a tortured animal—or of a maniac. It came again and again, and ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... a much stubborner spirit than this interesting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented—the only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject of dirt, mad to wash ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... awkward wit; All thy good thoughts (thou hat'st them) to restrain, And give a wicked pleasure to the vain; Thy long, lean frame by fashion to attire, That lads may laugh and wantons may admire; To raise the mirth of boys, and not to see, Unhappy maniac! that they laugh at thee "These boyish follies, which alone the boy Can idly act, or gracefully enjoy, Add new reproaches to thy fallen state, And make men scorn what they would only hate. "What pains, my brother, dost thou take to prove A taste for follies which thou ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... entered upon business. I said we were on a pedestrian tour to Heidelberg, and would like to take passage with him. I said this partly through young Z, who spoke German very well, and partly through Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly. I can UNDERSTAND German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I TALK ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs, instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac, which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin, with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an original character of verisimilitude ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... prison-solitude—the anxious watching for the pale morning after sleepless nights—the horrible nights when fantastic shapes are alone visible, mocking at and jeering me—when the only sounds I hear are the ravings of some wretched maniac, confined, like myself, because we have made for ourselves a world, and our imaginations have created a presiding divinity; and, should a laugh disturb the silence, it is the outbreak of a maddened spirit seeking relief from thought—a laugh frightful, because a mockery—sad in its boisterousness—"the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... be dreaming about?" she said to herself: and sighing she prayed for her again. Then she laid her head upon her pillow and tried in vain to sleep. In the morning, when her daughter was dressing, she said: "Well, my dear, you were dreaming again last night, and laughing like a maniac." ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... a great crony of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year may be caught burrowing in the ground. For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees as a mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his big person a stout trowel, some choice ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... continued to visit, as they had seen, and that he had, with a madman's acuteness, purposely misled the hutkeeper about his going to England. Smith and his companion feared to mention their suspicions to the hutkeeper, believing that he would not remain alone on the station if he thought that a maniac was about. Seeing Jones a second time, apparently in his usual health, had divested their minds of any suspicion that the hutkeeper had deceived them, or was in any way responsible, and the real facts as they subsequently turned out ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... simpler catches were held, and one or two of the harder as well. Given this form on the day of their appearance in public, and Henfrey might be disappointed when he came to watch and smile sarcastically. A batting fiasco is not one half so ridiculous as maniac fielding. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... I'm bringing her sandy hairs with sorrow to the grave. That hair of hers never could be gray, you know, it's too self-opinionated in its sandiness. Now come along, Rorie, do. Titmouse will be stamping about his box like a maniac if he ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... fish to fry than listening to the empty babble of a maniac. By the bye, what did you say ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
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