"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as his observations carried him. Suddenly a suffocating cloud was thrown over his head from behind and drawn ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... well down into his neck to save his jaw, but his right cheek was pounded, one eye closing. It was only a matter of moments before he must relax and then Russell would pin him down with one arm and send in the final smashing blow. He felt himself suffocating, sinking—the noise of roaring waters ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and sultry, not a cloud in the sky, and not a breath of wind stirring; and I confess I felt sick with a suffocating sense of horror when I reflected on the terrible sight I was about ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... of my cousin, I saw him fall, wounded, but could not go to his help. Peleton's nerves had broken down, and without me to lean on he must have stumbled. The flames took a firmer hold, the heat became intense, the smoke was suffocating. I called Raoul by name; he answered cheerily, bidding me not to ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... rock by which he stood. It was as though it had been bared for his inspection, which was not, indeed, the case. If that arm could save Sisily, it was at her service. But what was the good of that? What was the good of his own efforts to help her? Charles had a suffocating feeling of the futility of human effort when opposed by the malignity of Fate. He asked himself with aching heart what was to be the outcome of it all? He had failed. What then? It was not until that moment that he realized ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the greatest horror—those terrible 'Crimean winters.' But those who went through it all have often assured me that the miseries of the summers—of some part of them at least—were in their way quite as great, or worse. What could be much worse? The suffocating heat; the absence, or almost total absence, of shade; the dust and the dirt, and the poisonous flies; the foul water and half-putrid food? Bad for the sound ones, or those as yet so—and oh, how intolerably dreadful ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... confesses all these ladies, and, with angelic devotion, remains shut up for hours in this dark, narrow, suffocating box, through the grating of which two penitents are continually ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and the fire swept north. The head of the triangle became a death-trap. All through the night the southern sky was filled with a lurid glow, and by morning the heat and smoke and ash were suffocating. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... more numerous and lucrative than ever before. They need specialisation of training and knowledge, tempting education to yield its spiritual freedom to the claims of utilitarian ambitions. But man's deeper nature is hurt; his smothered life seeks to be liberated from the suffocating folds and sensual ties of prosperity. And this is why we find almost everywhere in the world a growing dissatisfaction with the prevalent system of teaching, which betrays the encroachment of senility and ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... unmistakable symptoms of improvement already, due doubtless to the large quantities of fruit which they had consumed on the preceding day. The wounded, too, were doing exceedingly well, the coolness of the large tent in which they had passed the night, as compared with the suffocating atmosphere of their confined quarters aboard ship, being all in their favour, to say nothing of the assiduous care which Phil bestowed ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Lind, discontentedly. "May the devil fly away with this town of Venice! I never come here but it is either freezing or suffocating." ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... of their future unknown destination, of which they can augur nothing but misery from all that they have yet seen? How shall I make known their situation, while labouring, under painful disease, or while struggling in the suffocating holds of their prisons, like animals enclosed in an exhausted receiver? How shall I describe their feelings as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless appetite or brutal passion may suggest? How shall I exhibit their sufferings as determining to refuse sustenance ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise, What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain; All that the proud can feel of pain; The agony they do not show; The suffocating sense ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... out on the beach a mile or two to get the salt water breeze, and leave the stinking malaria for those who chose to stay in the hot, suffocating village, and here we would stay until nearly night. Across a small neck of water was what was called a fort. It could hardly be seen it was so covered with moss and vines, but near the top could be seen something that looked like old ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Alaska ever had, the Biological Survey, and backing with all their power the ruinous legislation to put Alaska in the control of a group of five men that an aggrandizement even more deadly than a suffocating policy of conservation might be more easily accomplished. Instead, they spread the optimism of men possessed of inextinguishable faith. The blackest days were gone. Rifts were breaking in the clouds. Intelligence was creeping through, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... The room was an oven, but her rubicund face and suffocating costume made it seem ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... and were soon heard descending through the capacious flue of the chimney. The wife still stood with the axe to guard the door. The father, bleeding and fainting, called upon one of the little children to roll the feather bed upon the fire. The burning feathers emitted such a suffocating smoke and smell that the Indians were almost smothered, and they tumbled down upon the embers. At the same moment, another one attempted to enter the door. The wounded husband and father had sufficient strength left to seize ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... and I was cosily and thoroughly tucked in by my faithful comrades. It was hard at first to sleep with the head completely covered; there was such a sense of smothering, that I often ran the risk of the freezing rather than the smothering. One night, perhaps because of this suffocating sensation, I unconsciously uncovered my head. After a time I awoke suddenly to consciousness, to find that I was trying to pull off my now frozen nose which I thought was the end ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... a feather bed with her, which she pushed out. It was instantly extended below, and Alice fetched one of the children and threw it most carefully down. It was saved, and two other children also were saved by her in the same way. By this time it was evident that the suffocating fumes were beginning to affect her, for her aim with the last two was not steady. The crowd implored her to leap, but it was too late. She could not make a proper spring and fell on the ground. Five minutes afterwards the engines and fire-escape appeared. She was ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... themselves do much to elevate the taste and refine the habits. They would bring to the enlightenment of the world an "educational mode," because the time-honored artistic feeling of a people with a very ancient civilization would breathe new life into those moderns who seemed to be suffocating under the obsession of physical hygiene, and to be actuated solely by a despairing ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... air. Being thrust back and striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down upon them. Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them flock, and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating and clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... passed before this new principle began to work off the putrid carcass of mediaeval religion which lay stretched over the stifled and suffocating Church of Christ. There were yet many steps and stages in the preparation for what was to come. But from that time forward everything moved toward general regeneration by means of that marrow doctrine of the Gospel: Salvation by loving faith ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... worked away at every moment when he thought he could do so unseen. One day, however, when he had reached some distance, he dislodged a large stone which blocked up the opening toward his cell. His terror was frightful. Not only was the air suffocating, and the darkness dreadful, but he knew that if any of the guards were unexpectedly to come into his cell, the opening must be discovered, and all his toil again lost. For eight hours he stayed in the tunnel paralyzed by fear. Then he roused himself, and by dint of ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... after a sharp fit as though a demon were going out of him, as he rolled on the turf of the cloister to which he had fled alone from the suffocating church, where the crowd still awaited the Procession of the relics and the Mass De reliquiis quae continentur in Ecclesiis, seemed indeed to have cured the madness of Denys, but certainly did not restore his gaiety. He was left a subdued, silent, melancholy ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... upon the deck with his head resting upon a pillow formed out of a doubled-up coat. He had tried going below, but the little cabin was suffocating. It was as if the bulkheads and deck had imbibed the sun's heat all day and were now slowly giving it out. To sleep there would have been impossible, and he had returned on deck bathed in perspiration to try and ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... thought, and imagine that, turned hermits, we have opened the two old caves at Hornsey, or dug new ones; and in each of our cells set up a death's head, and an hour-glass, for objects of contemplation—I have seen such a picture: but then, Jack, had not the old penitent fornicator a suffocating long grey beard? What figures would a couple of brocaded or laced-waistcoated toupets make with their sour screw'd up half-cock'd faces, and more than half shut eyes, in a kneeling attitude, recapitulating their respective rogueries? This scheme, were we only to make trial of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... Arctic hurricane it seems incredible that strong men have died within call of cozy cabins or have frozen with the lashings of their sleds but half untied. Yet it is true. The sudden awful cold, the shouting wind, the boiling, blinding, suffocating rush of snow; the sweaty clothes that harden into jointless armor; the stiff mittens and the clumsy hands inside—these tell a tale to ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... stumbled against, hurls itself as quick as lightning upon the unhappy offender, encircling and suffocating him with its coils and biting him with its sharp fangs even when they are not poisoned. Like all other animals it becomes ferocious and seeks to kill from fear. He who disturbs it is a foe ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... at some distance from the excessively offensive stench of the dung, they have built their wretched habitations on the main, in a most hideous situation, and still even too near the guana, the vapours from which are even there very bad, yet not quite so suffocating as on the island. The sea here affords abundance of excellent fish, some kinds of which I had never before seen; one of them resembling a large silver eel, but much thicker in proportion. The inhabitants of this desolate and forbidding ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... masses of tropic trees. And again the press of the throng hemmed him in among the palms and fountains and hedges of crimson hibiscus; again the dusk grew gay with voices and the singing overtone of violins; again the suffocating scent of blossoms, too sweet and penetrating for the unacclimated, filtered through and through him, till his breath came unevenly, and the thick odours stirred in him strange senses of expectation, quickening with his pulses ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... turned automatically at the pump; and we silently awaited the last suffocating moment of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... heat increasing momentarily. Presently, far over the eastern desert could be seen a gauzy cloud of immense size travelling towards us at a tremendous pace. In a few moments we were in the midst of an inferno of swirling sand and suffocating heat. It was ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the sound of an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, a suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started to one side, raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several officers ran up to him. From the right side of his abdomen, blood was welling out making a large ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the Carnival of 18—, that I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of the company contributed not a little to the ruffling of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking (let me not say with what ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... McMurray having gone a mile away to fell trees for sawing into boards. Mrs. McM. had stuffed both the stoves full of light wood; the wind blowing steadily from the northwest, produced a powerful draught, and in a few moments the roaring and crackling of the fire and the suffocating smell of burning soot attracted Mrs. Dalton's attention. To her dismay, both the stoves were red hot from the front plates to the topmost pipes which passed through the plank-ceiling and projected three feet above the roof. Through these pipes the flames were roaring as if through the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and Richard the delicious, secret game of hide-and- go-seek made everything else in the world insignificant. Harriet opened the boxes of flowers he sent her with a heart suffocating with joy. Richard consented to be absent from the dinner table over which she presided with an agony of renunciation that almost made him feel ill. When he chanced one day to meet her with Nina, in a breezy, awninged summer restaurant, the sight of the slender figure thrilled him as he had ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Lord Lyttelton, and at Pit Place he died, leaving behind him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him, changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words were few: "Lord Lyttelton, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... five weeks on our journey—the flatboat was floating slowly along, as if it were tired of going, between the narrow banks of a bayou marked in red ink on Carlo's map, "Bayou Sorrel." It was about six in the afternoon. There had been a suffocating heat all day. It was with joy that we came up on deck. My father, as he made his appearance, showed us his flute. It was a signal: Carlo ran for his violin, Suzanne for Alix's guitar, and presently Carpentier appeared with his wife's harp. Ah! I see them ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... issued from the tank and breathed hard for some moments. Despite his ingenious contrivance for feeding his lungs he was not far from suffocating. ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... this example, his men worked with a will at this cheerless task, and in spite of darkness, heat, thirst, and the suffocating atmosphere, never was a well sunk more quickly. At the same time it was not half completed when so serious a fire broke out on the roof that the entire remaining stock of water was exhausted in ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... time spent at Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... moment. "The trees sometimes swept back, leaving an opening, and at other places," stretched—stretched, yes it was, "stretched their branches over,"—over —but how the wind roared in the trees, and what a pity that someone should have had a bonfire just there, the smell was suffocating—and the heat! How could she bear it! And, oh, dear! How dazzling the sun was— or the bonfire; the whole wood would be on fire if they did not take care! Oh, the ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... possible that the thousands of armed Americans by whom he was threatened and encircled, could fire upon the flag of their own native Country. He and his garrison of seventy men, were soon to learn the bitter truth, amid a tempest of bursting shot and shell, the furnace-heat of crackling walls, and suffocating volumes of dense smoke produced by ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... a lapse of time scarcely appreciable, I felt something like a shock. The raft had not struck a hard body, but had suddenly been checked in its course. A waterspout, a liquid column of water, fell upon us. I felt suffocating. I was ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... insufferable heat. It was the middle of August in an exceptionally warm summer, and after passing Genoa the heat became almost tropical. There was no relief even at night, for the warm air hung stagnant and suffocating, and the inside of my travelling coach was ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... and closely. The gourd was filled, and the old woman was hurrying back, her hand still grasping the wrist of the girl, when she was suddenly seized so violently by the throat as to cause her to release her captive, and to prevent her making any other sound than a sort of gurgling, suffocating noise. The Serpent passed his arm round the waist of his mistress and dashed through the bushes with her, on the north side of the point. Here he immediately turned along the beach and ran towards the canoe. A more direct course could have been taken, but ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... together on the clay floor like a litter of young puppies, and breathe the foulest air until morning, at which time they are released from the suffocating oven, to be suddenly exposed to the chilly daybreak. Their naked little bodies shiver round a fire until the sun warms them, but the seeds of diarrhoea and dysentery ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... power of her lungs. And then Slade savagely brought a big hand over her mouth and held it there. She fought to escape the clutch, kicking, squirming—trying to bite the hand. But to no avail. The terrible pressure on her mouth was suffocating her, and the room went dark as she continued to fight. She thought Slade had extinguished the light, and she was conscious of a dull curiosity over how he had done it. And then sound seem to cease. She felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. She ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now—now, after years—I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere, all vapid with the suffocating death—ah, it was terror too deep, nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted at the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and voluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of our ancient Father—I half expected it was coming, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... laugh, a shrill, discouraging laugh. Deslauriers felt himself suffocating with anger. He restrained his feelings, and, with the look of a ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... One of the pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it occurred ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the attic, but the staircase, he found, was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture below the next floor. He took her into a long dormitory, shut the door on those pungent and pervasive fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling with excitement as an immensely ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... conversation, or even of thought, and the next instant I was aware that masses of falling brick and masonry were pushing me out of my chair, and that heavy substances were falling on my head; then all was darkness and suffocating dust. I remember distinctly putting my hands clasped above my head to shelter it, and then my feeling of relief when, in another instant or two, the bricks ceased to fall. The intense stillness of my companions next dawned upon me, and a sickening dread supervened, that one of them ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... once advise. One part for peace, and one for war contends; Some would exclude their foes, and some admit their friends. The helpless king is hurried in the throng, And, whate'er tide prevails, is borne along. Thus, when the swain, within a hollow rock, Invades the bees with suffocating smoke, They run around, or labor on their wings, Disus'd to flight, and shoot their sleepy stings; To shun the bitter fumes in vain they try; Black vapors, issuing from the ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... energy, it is true, but the simoom has all this and much else besides. It comes not without warning, but the warning and the wind are not far apart. The approach of the simoom is a dense black cloud of whirling and seething fine dust. As it strikes one, the choking, suffocating blast of hot air and dust overcomes everything that has life. The caravan men and the animals as well turn their backs to the wind and lie down with faces close to the ground. In a minute or two the full ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the odd dozen of fed-up ones who sailed that day on the suffocating mule transport in quest of something they needed but could not find in America—something that lay somewhere amid flaming obscurity in that hell of murder beyond the Somme—their souls' ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... toward afternoon, a heat rather of July than June. After a visit to his camp Lestrange reappeared without the suffocating mask and cap, driving bareheaded, with only the narrow goggles crossing his face. The change left visible the drawn pallor of exhaustion under stains of dust and oil, his rolled-back sleeves disclosed the crimson bandage on his right arm and the fact ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... continued in this state of awful alarm, vainly endeavouring to extricate himself from the toils of an imaginary monster, that was suffocating him, until he sank exhausted to ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... mother: "Then, everywhere, everywhere throughout the South, there are hundreds of dark mothers who live in fear, terrible, suffocating fear, ... whose joy in their babies ... is three parts pain.... The South is full of ... thousands of little boys who one day may be, and some of whom will be lynched." "And the babies, the dear, little, helpless babies ... have that ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... were the only words I heard farther: and with tears in my eyes, and a suffocating feeling in my throat, for the matrimonial situation of my unfortunate friend, I descended into the drawing-room. The only one yet there, was the pale nephew; he was bending painfully over a book; I took it from him, it was "Bentley upon Phalaris." I could scarcely refrain from throwing ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he should never see her again, and became oppressed by an almost suffocating agony. And could two beings, who had formerly considered the universe concentrated in their persons, thus easily be separated forever? . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... had grown suffocating—she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's countenance detached itself ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... following day was dark and gloomy, and as every one knew that the promenade was down in the royal programme, every one's gaze, as his eyes were opened, was directed towards the sky. Just above the tops of the trees a thick, suffocating vapor seemed to remain suspended, with barely sufficient power to rise thirty feet above the ground under the influence of the sun's rays, which was scarcely visible as a faint spot of lesser darkness through the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seemed to stop beating, was suffocating her now, the way it raced along. Frederick did love her then—he must love her, or why had he come? Something, perhaps her absence, had made him turn to her, want her . . . and now the understanding she had made up her mind to have with him ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... to use the language of the advertisement, began by being terribly tiresome. There was an audience present who were accustomed to grand Parisian soirees, a blase and satiated public, who, upon this warm evening in the suffocating theatre, were more fatigued and satiated than ever. The sleepy journalists collapsed in their chairs, and in the back part of the stage-boxes, ladies' faces, almost green under paint, showed the excessive lassitude of a long winter of pleasure. The Parisians had all ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Venetians of that time, who in many other respects had been our teachers. We learnt many useful as well as perilous things from them, but we did not learn their art of poisoning kings, of torturing them, suffocating them, making them blind, cutting out their tongues, etc. It is only in modern times that we committed the great sins of the Middle Ages, namely, killing our kings and making civil wars. During the last hundred years we killed ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... o'clock on an intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot, withering, and powerful wind was abroad. The thermometer stood nearly a hundred in the shade, and the wind, so far from being a relief, was suffocating because of its heat and the dust it swept along ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... place that had now grown so vivid to us. "Ah, this is how it looks in sunlight!" I would think to myself, having seen it always in the early morning and cold. Behind me the long white house, the hunters, the dogs.... No, they were not here in the burning suffocating sunlight, but they would ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... They have never seen a rose-bush nor a dew-drop in the sun. They will dream of the vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta, Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of a wild-rose thicket nor the singing of a cricket, But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, And their tired lids will flutter with the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... she got off the train in the dark wetness of the valley, and was met by a rush of cool and fragrant air. It was too late to see the mountain, lights were twinkling everywhere in the dark trees. Cherry got a driver, rattled and jerked up to the house in a surrey, and jumped out, her heart almost suffocating her. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... one pounded on the desk inside. The suffocating but lively crowd turned with painful adjustment toward the desk, from whence Deacon Bensen's ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... sepulchral incense-laden dusk of the uncouth Church, in the religious gloom punctuated by the pervasive twinkle of a thousand hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating mass of palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females, toned down by the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... possession of me—with hands and nails I tore and scratched at the accursed boards—with all the force of my shoulders and arms I toiled to wrench open the closed lid! My efforts were fruitless! I grew more ferociously mad with rage and terror. How easy were all deaths compared to one like this! I was suffocating—I felt my eyes start from their sockets—blood sprung from my mouth and nostrils—and icy drops of sweat trickled from my forehead. I paused, gasping for breath. Then, suddenly nerving myself for one more wild effort, I hurled my limbs with all the force of agony and desperation ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no sarcastic shaft could pierce. Roderick admitted that in thinking over the tribulations ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... lack of anything better to keep him from going mad. Then, suddenly, the pulling ceased altogether. Silence and hell heat shut down on him like a coffin lid. Even the lamp flame close beside him seemed to grow dim; the weight of black night that was suffocating him seemed to crush light out of the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... such a strong protest in their native tongue, that he smilingly handed his hatchet to Coffee; while Chicory collected some tolerably dry peaty growth, struck a light and set it on fire, causing a dense cloud of smoke to rise up round the tree that contained the wild honey, and stupefying and suffocating the bees that flew to ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... house of Mr. Hopkinson he was taken suddenly ill, and, chancing to be close by the residence of his physician, Dr. Meigs, he stopped there and rang the bell. As the door opened, he said in husky tones, "I am suffocating." He walked in and ascended the stairs without assistance. Then he said, "Take me to a window." As this was being done, he fell back insensible into the arms of the attendants, and, a few ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... her, without upbraiding her murderers, or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the earth reaches her lips—covers her head. The rest of the earth is then hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave, and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow—the mother!" ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... in the winter for me, thank you," said I; "with the wind drawing through the open cracks in your country built house half freezing you, and when you try to keep warm your air-tight stove half suffocating you; with the roads outside blocked up with great drifts, and the trains delayed just on the days when I have a ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... distance of a quarter of a mile, with the assistance of the branches of trees and projecting roots. In consequence of the heavy rain that had fallen in the night, this was rendered more difficult, and occasioned much fatigue. When a few yards from the valley, a strong nauseous and suffocating smell was experienced, but on approaching the margin the inconvenience was no longer found. The scene that now presented itself is described as of the most appalling nature. The valley is about half a mile in circumference, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the heat they had ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... are never put to death; but the punishments inflicted on them are abundantly severe. The most common is the cutting off their noses. Even those of considerable rank are tortured, by being smoked in a small chamber with the suffocating fumes of burning capsicum, and by having their private parts stuffed with this ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... also form a striking feature, which utterly eluded the wisdom of our ancestors. There are here, bearing all colours, from all the Rhenish towns, smoking and suffocating the Dutch, flying past their hard-working, slow-moving craft; and bringing down, and carrying away, cargoes of every species of mankind. The increase of Holland in wealth and activity since the separation from Belgium, the Marquis regards as remarkable; and evidently having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... one of the sliding doors a suffocating burst of gas rushed into his face. He pushed both doors open wide, and with a hand over his mouth and nose hurried through the heavily-charged atmosphere to shut off the motor. The fresh air rushing in, began clearing away the fumes, and he seized Georgina and carried ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... suffered five suffocating minutes in the public sitting-room of the Beau Soleil. It was a hideous room, with abominable flowers sprawling over the wall paper and carpet, and all the windows were shut, but he did not notice these things; nor did he recognise the heavy scent that hung in the air as ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... by, trailing a suffocating stench of cattle and hogs from its slatted stock-cars; and Ailsa was almost stifled before her train at last moved heavily southward, saluted by good-natured witticisms from the soldiers at the windows of ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... was fortunate for him, for there is nothing more repulsive than the sight of that crowd of living and dead objects, of seal's bodies and Esquimaux-flesh, decayed fish and unclean clothing, which fill a Greenland hut; there is no window to renew that suffocating air; there is only a hole at the top of the cabin which lets the smoke out, but gives no relief ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... pink breast with black head and wings. But already this springtide splendor was beginning to disappear beneath the glare of approaching summer. The long wagon-trains of lumber, and the occasional traveler's tarantass rumbling along to the discord of its duga bells, were enveloped in a cloud of suffocating dust. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... shutter flung open in the street behind me. I saw a glitter near the curb, a flash of steel, a shine of mother-of-pearl, and that was the pistol he had flung away. I felt suffocating, and my feet seemed weighted with lead as if I were running in a dream. And, strange enough, what filled me with the wildest terror was not the sight of the thing that lay still on the pavement under the drifting smoke, but the ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... to describe the horrors of that night, or rather morning, before the day broke—the ship rolling and pitching on before a heavy sea (whither she went no one considered, provided she was kept before the wind)—the suffocating smoke which rose from the depths of the hold—the cries of despair heard on every side—the scenes of cowardly fear and intense selfishness which were exhibited. Still we floated; but I expected every instant to see the ship plunge head-foremost down into the depths of the ocean; for I thought ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... As if suffocating, she pressed her hand upon her heart, and bowed her head till it rested on the table. And then he heard her murmur in ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... difficult headway in the teeth of a gale which flapped her long cloak with impeding force, soaked her to the skin, dashed masses of water in her face, plastered streaming locks to her forehead, taking her breath with its suffocating rush. Shielding her mouth with her hand, ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... room, occasionally resting on the tops of the iron partitions, and when they halt, continuing to chirp for a while like hoarse sparrows. Occasionally there will come out of the darkness of the river a disagreeable sound as if some huge animal were gasping for its last breath before suffocating in the mud. The sound has its effect, even upon animals, coming as it does out of the black mysterious night, warning them not to venture far for fear some uncanny force may drag them to death in the dismal waters. It is the night call of ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!" said the host. "Start a movement for that room across the passage; that's mine, too, for the occasion; and save some of these people's lives. It's suffocating in here." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in haste, she was lured aside by the clang of bells and the glare of a fire. No child ever resisted that combination, and Nan was still a good deal of a child. Almost before she knew, it she was wedged fast in a crowd. The pressure was suffocating; and, to her alarm, she found herself surrounded by a rough-looking set of men. They were probably harmless workingmen, but Nan did not know that. She became frightened, and tried to escape, but her strength was not equal to it. Near the verge of panic, she was fairly on the ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... flanked by rough, ramshackle frame structures, two-thirds of these apparently saloons, with dirty, flapping tents sandwiched between, and huge piles of tin cans and other rubbish stored away behind. The street was rutted and dusty, and the ceaseless wind swirled the dirt about in continuous, suffocating clouds. The hotel itself, a little, squatty, two-storied affair, groaned to the blast, threatening to collapse. Nothing moved except a wagon down the long ribbon of road, and a dog digging for a bone ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... hands hard and whispered to myself: 'Will it come, good God, will it come, the thing he listens for?' When with a wild bound, as if every nerve and muscle had been rent by an electric shock, he was upon his feet; and I was answered even before that suffocating cry of terror—'The bells! the bells!'—and under cover of the applause that followed I said: 'Haunted! Innocent or guilty, this man is haunted!' And Mr. Daly, I bowed my head to a great actor, for though fine things followed, you know the old saying, that 'no chain is stronger than its ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... imagine for a moment that I am by myself. I want to be sure all the while that some living human being is near at hand. I have such frightful dreams! I awake always with the impression that I am drowning or suffocating, or floating away into ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Loo Loo was conveyed was a wretched place. The walls were dingy, the floor covered with puddles of tobacco-juice, the air almost suffocating with the smell of pent-up tobacco-smoke, unwashed negroes, and dirty garments. She had never seen any place so loathsome. Mr. Jackson's log-house was a palace in comparison. The prison was crowded with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and wondered at the people. Hot? and suffocating? she had no recollection of any such thing all day. How delicious it had been in that green dell under the walnut tree, ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... recalesce^; thaw, give. Adj. hot, warm, mild, genial, tepid, lukewarm, unfrozen; thermal, thermic; calorific; fervent, fervid; ardent; aglow. sunny, torrid, tropical, estival^, canicular^, steamy; close, sultry, stifling, stuffy, suffocating, oppressive; reeking &c v.; baking &c 384. red hot, white hot, smoking hot, burning &c v.. hot, piping hot; like a furnace, like an oven; burning, hot as fire, hot as pepper; hot enough to roast an ox, hot enough to boil an egg. fiery; incandescent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that he had gone, and silence, deep and complete, had fallen on the house, Hollyhock took down an old cloak from where it hung in a certain part of the hall, and wrapping it firmly round her shoulders, went out into the night. It was better out of doors—less suffocating, less lonely—and the girl's terribly low spirits began to rise. She was in for an adventure, and what Scots lassie ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... though one could walk half a mile or so across the valley and then go straight up to the summit, but it is full thirty miles off. The air is heated as by a furnace, and as we jolt along the road the clouds of dust are suffocating. We go full gallop along such road as there is, banging into holes, and across the trenches left by last year's watercourses, until we begin to think that it must end in a general smash. We came to understand ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... left, mourned always for the hearing and speaking senses that were gone—he marked all these things in an instant, and felt that his heart was sinking as he looked. A dimness stole over his sight; a suffocating sensation oppressed his breathing; the lights in the circus danced and mingled together; he bent down over the child's hand, and took it in his own; twice kissed it fervently; then, to the utter amazement of the laughing crowd about him, rose up suddenly, and forced his way out ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins |
