"Cesspool" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This forces them in storm time to such extremities, that no wonder fevers and plagues are the result. We had not been at sea one week, when to hold your head down the fore hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Penguinia had freely given itself was called by such names as cesspool and drain in several eloquent speeches. But President Formose was spared and no mention was made ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, the part the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapine that has made this heavenly body the cesspool of the Universe. In ...
— Mars Confidential • Jack Lait
... kin in England, and was therefore as free as air—or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... masonry, similar to some of those of the Old London Bridge. There had been in the centre of the floor an excavation, which might have been formerly used as a bath, but which was now arched over and converted into a cesspool. Proceeding towards Cheapside, there appears to be a continuation of the vaulting beneath the houses Nos. 4 and 3. The arch of the vault here is plain and more pointed. The masonry appears, from an aperture ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... tipsy one night, and that we went to see the Sistine Chapel the day the eclipse made it as dark as a pocket. Yes,' continued Lavinia, with an air of decision, 'I am glad to have seen this classical cesspool, and still more glad to have got out of it alive,' she added, sniffing the air from the mountains, as if the odour of sanctity which pervaded the holy ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... yard of the Home of the Scholars, we gathered the glass vials, the pieces of metal, the dried bones which they had discarded. We wished to keep these things and to study them, but we had no place to hide them. So we carried them to the City Cesspool. And then we ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... Miranda from the very Andes, were flocking or had flocked! Walloon Pereyra might boast of the strangest parentage: him, they say, Prince Kaunitz the Diplomatist heedlessly dropped;' like ostrich-egg, to be hatched of Chance—into an ostrich-eater! Jewish or German Freys do business in the great Cesspool of Agio; which Cesspool this Assignat-fiat has quickened, into a Mother of dead dogs. Swiss Claviere could found no Socinian Genevese Colony in Ireland; but he paused, years ago, prophetic before the Minister's Hotel at Paris; and said, it was borne on his mind that he one day was to be Minister, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, "the common dumping-ground and cesspool of the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... bloody, and more desolating than ever, by our posterity, if not even in our own time. Fought over again, not once, but again and again, as often as the revolving wheel of human progress and enlightenment shall bring to the surface the black waters of the steaming cesspool below. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... am in this vile cesspool of humanity again, and I feel like a drowning gnat. I did not go to the club, as you told me to, because I thought I could live more economically if I took a room somewhere and 'ate around,' I left my bag at the station, ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... devoting our lives to bailing out the sea of that evil. The prince of this world will take fright, he will succumb more promptly than did the spirit of the sea; but this social evil is not the sea, but a foul cesspool, which we assiduously fill with our own uncleanness. All that is required is for us to come to our senses, and to comprehend what we are doing; to fall out of love with our own uncleanness,—in order that that imaginary sea should dry away, and that we ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy as when passionately wrangling with a tenant on some question of drains. The words "cesspool" and "wet-trap"—words to which I don't pretend to attach any meaning—seemed to be particular favourites of his. In fact, an hour seldom passed without their falling from his lips. But Mr. Smith's great opportunity was a gale. For ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... damnation of whuskie and every kind of strong drink." In this strain the thin and weird looking old Iconoclast went on for an hour until he wound up with declaring, "England has joost gane clear doon into an abominable cesspool of lies, shoddies and shams—down to a bottomless damnation. Ye may gie whatever meaning to that word that ye like." He could not refrain from laughing heartily himself at the conclusion of this eulogy on his countrymen. If we ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... drain full of filth ran right under the floor. A cesspool was close to a fourth cottage. In several the floors were clean; but all sorts of filth had dropped through and stayed there, and when it rained the water ran under the floor. "Just lift up a plank," said ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... Bogs than that, when the meadows and the ground begin to reek in summer, it is the old woman below who is brewing. Into her brewery it was that Inger sank, and no one could hold out very long there. A cesspool is a charming apartment compared with the old Bog-woman's brewery. Every vessel is redolent of horrible smells, which would make any human being faint, and they are packed closely together and over each other; but even if there were a small space among ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... crap[vulgar], shit[vulgar]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies[obs3], mixen[obs3], midden, bog, laystall[obs3], sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess[obs3], cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable[obs3], sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c. Adj.; rot, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... saints, and are lost there as in a well. Thus it is that the souls of the just are polluted with more filth than is ever found in the soul of the sinner. And, for that reason, I praise Thee, O my God, for having made me the cesspool of the world." ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... not only the two stores, but a cellar both large and deep, to which one obtained access by a staircase pitch dark, crooked, and everlastingly covered with moisture, owing to the proximity of the river. The floor of the cellar was a kind of noisome cesspool: one slipped on the greasy mud—floundered about in it: for all that, this cellar was almost entirely filled with cases of all kinds, with queer-looking bundles, with objects of various shapes and sizes. Evidently the jumble store of Mother Toulouche did ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... what it means! Think what the homes must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better, perhaps, than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the water supply and the hen-house vermin invades the home, but surely intolerable beside our comforts! Give but a moment again to the significance of the figures I have italicized in the table that follows, a summarized return for the year 1906 of the "Ringworm" Nurses ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... for him. The King's beseeching fears were also added to an already difficult situation, which, he persuaded himself, could not be ignored without damaging the interests he was sent to protect; so his stay in the reeking cesspool of Neapolitanism was prolonged, but there is no reason for supposing that his "constant prayer" for the extinction of the French was any the less ardent. The fatal day of their catastrophe was only postponed. The praying went on all the same, with more or less belief in ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine? And how difficult to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immortal growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into this cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I beheld the scene, it affected me with surprise and loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I used to turn over a plank or an old log that ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lit his lanthorn. Its pale rays fled out on either hand; beautiful but grim was the vision they disclosed. Tall houses, fair court-yards, and a palm grown garden; in front of the Prince's horse a deep cesspool, on whose jagged edges the good beast's hoofs were planted; and, as far as the glimmer of the lanthorn stretched, both ways down the rutted street, paving stones displaced, and smooth tesselated marble; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... churchyard. Every tissue in the living bodies which had absorbed this water was inflamed, and ready to yield to the first epidemic; and cholera was the natural outcome of such conditions. Knowledge should guard against any such chances. See to it that no open cesspool poisons either air or water about your home. Sunk at a proper distance from the house, and connected with it by a drain so tightly put together that none of the contents can escape, the cesspool, which may be an elaborate, brick-lined cistern, or ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell |
