"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this dream! Ye horns, shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And jump, caper, leap, prance, dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art; Love has given you no heart: Therefore shout till ye plunge into bottomless death. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 7:9,10] I heard it also proclaimed to them that attended on the man that sat on the cloud, Gather together the tares, the chaff, and stubble, and cast them into the burning lake. [Matt. 3:12; 13:30; Mal. 4:1] And with that, the bottomless pit opened, just whereabout I stood; out of the mouth of which there came, in an abundant manner, smoke and coals of fire, with hideous noises. It was also said to the same persons, "Gather my wheat into the garner." [Luke 3:17] And with that I saw many catched up and carried away into the ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... floors. The planter often has some rough check-weighing system. Thus, for example, he notes the number of standard baskets of wet cacao put into the fermentary, and he measures the fermented cacao produced with the help of a bottomless barrel. By this means he finds that on fermentation the beans lose weight by the draining away of the "sweatings," according to the amount and juiciness of the pulp round them. The beans are still very wet, and on drying lose a high percentage of their moisture by evaporation before the cacao ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... that this substance was filled at night with an icy coldness, carried away in an endless course towards a bottomless abyss, leaving nothing around them but the Unseizable, the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... wish it had tumbled down the 'Devil's Descent' into the bottomless pit!" exclaimed the frantic host, seizing his gray locks with both hands, and running away from before the face of his tormentor—and jumping from the frying-pan into the fire, when he came full upon his daughter Bessie, ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... out of that black, bottomless abyss of complete oblivion, he thought at first—as soon as he could think at all—that he was lying in his bunk back at the Shoe-Bar. What gave him the idea he could not tell. His head throbbed painfully, and his brain seemed to swim in a vague, uncertain mist. A deadly ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... he found it. He was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the Bottomless Pit—" ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... told us that the cave was not known to white men until 1802, though he did not acknowledge that the natives were ignorant of its existence. For many years no one could advance beyond three miles from the entrance, further progress being stopped by a deep chasm called the "Bottomless Pit." At length, however, a daring guide threw a ladder over it, and thus getting across, he explored six more miles of this underground region. A bridge has now been constructed, by which people can pass over in perfect ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... my peace. A single question more would have been a plunge into a bottomless sea, and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down to the bottomless pit." ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... old man became morose, and looked gloomily on the ground. Meir stood before him as though petrified, but in his eyes, looking into space, there was reflected a bottomless precipice of sad and ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... a dogged sort of devil," he went on almost in a monotone. "The fact did not manifest itself to me until I came to the time when—all the rest of me dropped into a bottomless gulf. That perhaps describes it. I found myself suddenly standing on the edge of it. And youth, and future, and belief in the use of hoping and real enjoyment of things dropped into the blackness and were gone while I looked ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of this march far exceeded those of any previous campaigns by the cavalry. Almost incessant rains had drenched us for sixteen days and nights, and the swollen streams and well-nigh bottomless roads east of Staunton presented grave difficulties on every hand, but surmounting them all, we destroyed the enemy's means of subsistence, in quantities beyond computation, and permanently crippled the Virginia Central railroad, as well as the James River canal, and as each ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... lifeless so far as outward physical movement was concerned. She saw nothing and felt nothing of the night, the wind, the cold, the falling dew. For the moment or hour she was crushed by despair, and seemed to see herself sinking down and down into a black, bottomless pit, into an abyss where murky tides of blood and furious gusts of passion contended between her body and her soul. Into the stormy blast of hell! In her despair she longed, she ached for death. Born of infidelity, cursed by a taint of evil blood, further cursed by higher instinct for good and ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... his eyes he would have a faint view of the night-hawks, flapping their ominous wings over his devoted head, visible only from the glimmering light of the fire-flies, which he would naturally conclude were sparks from the bottomless pit. Nothing would be wanting at this moment to complete the illusion, but one of those dreadful explosions of thunder and lightning, so extravagantly described by Lee, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... her face to the wall with a sinking of heart akin to despair. At last, from sheer exhaustion, feverish sleep ensued, from which she often started with moans and low cries. One impression haunted her—she was falling, ever falling into a dark, bottomless abyss. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... for rest. This time a myriad of hostile pygmies were dragging him down into a bottomless pit. They tugged, and pushed, and danced upon his helpless body, and laughed in spiteful glee as he descended further and further into ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked. Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... understand what was so carefully left unsaid! But the day when I was reft of your sweet company, I became a true Carmelite, such as they appeared to us, a modern Danaid, who, instead of trying to fill a bottomless barrel, draws every day, from Heaven knows what deep, an empty pitcher, thinking to find ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to the morrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... the thirteenth chapter of the Revelation, is, according to him, Rome pagan; the power, which is given to it for forty-two months, signifies Domitian's persecution, which lasted three years and a half. The beast that ascended out of the bottomless pit, mentioned chap. xi. ver. 7. is magic, and Apollonius Thyanaeus: in fine, he finds the famous number 666, mentioned in the last verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse, in Trajan's name, who was called Ulpius, of which the numeral ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... the beginning. When luncheon was over, I sat before the fire and tried to find out how much I did know of the things I should. I found myself staring into bottomless depths of ignorance. I tried to draw up a list of State Governors. I knew there must be between forty and fifty, but I could remember only three Governors, including our own; and later I recalled that one of the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless Perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire, Who durst defy ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... had pictured as bottomless, proved to be not more than a hundred feet in depth; but as its walls were smoothly polished it might as well have been a thousand feet, for I could never hope ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tender-hearted, as a matter of fact, and I like you immensely and would enjoy having you as a friend, but—" Here he pressed a button on the arm of his throne chair and the section of the floor where Rinkitink stood suddenly opened and disclosed a black pit beneath, which was a part of the terrible Bottomless Gulf. ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... he runs, also, far worse; from the denizens of notorious Corinthian haunts in the vicinity of the docks, which in depravity are not to be matched by any thing this side of the pit that is bottomless. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... time in twenty-four hours the color returned to Dixon's face. His eyes flashed, his teeth were set, as he sprang to his feet. In that instant he set his face against the power that would fling him into bottomless abysses of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... 'tween the Atlantic and the Rockies. He's a true man, is Gough, every inch of him, and men and women that's bin used chiefly to cursin' in time past have heaped more blessin's on that man's head than would sink you, Crux,—if put by mistake on your head—right through the lowest end o' the bottomless pit." ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... Shakspeare or Bacon, or Goethe's self, no doubt, though in his tremendous pride he would not confess it even to himself,—each and all of them have this one fact in common—that once in their lives, at least, they have gone down into the bottomless pit, and "stato all' inferno"—as the children used truly to say of Dante; and there, out of the utter darkness, have asked the question of all questions—"Is there a God? And if there be, what is ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... not risen, there is no Son of God; and the world is desolate, and the heaven is empty, and the grave is dark, and sin abides, and death is eternal. If Christ be dead, then that awful vision is true, 'As I looked up into the immeasurable heavens for the Divine Eye, it froze me with an empty, bottomless eye-socket.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... creative smile, yon heaven, 'In all the pomp of beauty, life, and light, 'Rose from the abyss; when dark Confusion, driven 'Down down the bottomless profound of night, 'Fled, where he ever flies thy piercing sight! 'O glance on these sad shades one pitying ray, 'To blast the fury of oppressive might, 'Melt the hard heart to love and mercy's sway, 'And cheer the wandering soul, and light him on ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... uncommonly incredulous. It was a little row of houses, with little squalid patches of ground before them, fenced off with old doors, barrel staves, scraps of tarpaulin, and dead bushes; with bottomless tin kettles and exhausted iron fenders, thrust into the gaps. Here, the Staggs's Gardeners trained scarlet beans, kept fowls and rabbits, erected rotten summer-houses (one was an old boat), dried clothes, and smoked pipes. Some were of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... time, my progress was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such a one I seemed now to have arrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and downward, ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... suspected he was merely doing a good turn for the chum he left behind him, he, like the Home Secretary himself, without the right kind of inducement would have left his friend to stop where he was until the bottomless pit was frozen over hard enough to hold a barbecue on it. Barton, by my directions, told Smith of his good fortune, and that he hoped on his father's return to be liberated. Smith then did exactly what I expected and wanted him to do. He said there was no need to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... fearful with interminable slides and sudden falls into bottomless crevasses. Avalanches rolled him down, icy aretes caught his body on the descent; and long after his waking and the chocolate he always took in bed, the agony and the oppression of that nightmare clung to him. But all this did not hinder him, once afoot, from devoting his whole morning to the most ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... this world of shadows. A false theory, therefore, respecting God, can no more protect a man from the reality, the actual matter of fact, than a false theory of gravitation will preserve a man from falling from a precipice into a bottomless abyss. Do you come to us with the theory that every human creature will be happy in another life, and that the doctrine of future misery is false? We tell you, in reply, that God is holy, beyond dispute or ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... breath convulsively once or twice, and his voice dragged out words again, as though he were dragging them from bottomless depths. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... peasants! Disport yourselves bravely!" 'Twas gay beyond measure. In each breast awakens A wondrous new feeling, As though from the depths Of a bottomless gulf On the crest of a wave, 180 They've been borne to the surface To find there awaits them A ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... Tresidder, Jasper; they are all as deep as the bottomless pit, and as cruel as the fiend ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... mysteries," her visitor went on. She asked him what mysteries he meant, and he said: "Oh peculiarities of his work, inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity." ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... said in a low voice. "I can touch the bottom—or a ledge, at all events; I will feel my way, and take care not to slip down into a bottomless pit." ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... at this flower-bed of human nature, and the reward of happy daring paid by Beauty, has vivid images of Princess Amelia and her Vice-regency of Hanover; bright Princess and Vice-regency, divided from him by bottomless gulfs, which need such a swim as that of Leander across the material Hellespont was but a trifle to!—In which of the villages Hotham and Dickens lodged, I did not learn or inquire; nor are their copious Despatches, chronicling ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... o'clock, the hour of dinner, drew near, you might observe columns of blue smoke curling up from a row of chimneys, some made of wicker creels plastered over with a rich coat of mud; some, of old, narrow, bottomless tubs; and others, with a greater appearance of taste, ornamented with thick, circular ropes of straw, sewed together like bees' skeps, with a peel of a briar; and many having nothing but the open vent above. But the smoke by no means escaped by its legitimate aperture, for ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... orders and injunctions; And all their precious Gifts and Graces On outlawries and scire facias; 50 At Michael's term had many a trial, Worse than the Dragon and St. Michael, Where thousands fell, in shape of fees, Into the bottomless abyss. For when like brethren, and like friends, 55 They came to share their dividends, And ev'ry partner to possess His Church and State Joint-Purchases, In which the ablest Saint, and best, Was nam'd in trust by all the rest, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... years of warfare, passing as I did from family to family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry like other old wells, but that death would come and fill me up with a good wholesome shovelful of earth, and I and my skeletons would lie quiet together. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of my own, or dared, if I had that will, to give it expression. But when they would take the one thing from me, the one thing that is still mine after all these years of humiliation, my own inalienable possession, my heart's free choice—then indeed the bottomless depths of my obedience will be found exhausted. I feel that my brother was justified in throwing off such a yoke—and I will show the world that I am indeed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... dust which thou magnifiedst above thy soul, Gen. iii. 17. But the end of it is suitable to the beginning. The beginning had all the evil of sin in it, and the end hath all the evil of punishment in it. These streams of this life's misery, they run into an infinite, boundless, and bottomless ocean of eternal wrath. If thou live according to the flesh, thou shalt die, it is not only death here, but eternal death after this. The miseries then of this present life are not a proportionable punishment of sin, they are but an earnest given of that great sum which is to be paid in the day of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Scotchman, "we gae doon an' doon till we come on what we ma ca' the primary rock, and under that there is nothin'—except," with a touch of religious enthusiasm, "maybe 'tis the bottomless pit, where auld Hornie dwells, as we are tauld in the Screepture; noo let us gae up again, an' I'll show ye the ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that 'an Archbishop ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... the world of the bottomless resource of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly have proceeded to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not be done with any common color without being compensated out of this grand confiscation of landed property. They have thrown upon this fund, which was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pick any particular spot to jump for. When he did jump he might have been directly over a picket fence, or a bottomless pit—he did not know. Nor did ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the stars were gone out, and she could see no further over her head than round about. The darkness was terrifying. And from it, Dr Porhoet's voice had a ghastly effect. It seemed to come, wonderfully changed, from the void of bottomless chaos. Susie clenched her hands so ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... they have in them an element of the "black kitten," which must frolic and play, but has no desire to get into danger. "Do you not think it a little hard," she added, "that men should have dug by the side of her foolish dancing feet a bottomless pit, and that she cannot have her jump and fun in safety, and put on her fine feathers like the silly bird-witted thing she is, without a single false step dashing her over the brink, and leaving her with the very womanhood ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then on earth was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... These superstitious Mexicans had known vaguely of a woman haunting this castle by the sea. Sometimes they had seen a gray, creeping figure at the end of the hall or heard a piercing cry ring out at midnight, and now this creature was about to spring upon them and curse them to the bottomless pit. There was a cry of fright, and in leaping back, the man near the top of the ladder knocked over the one below, and he in turn the next, so that it was like when a ball hits the King Pin and the others are ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... and Allies' trenches almost touched each other. The first two weeks at the Aisne were one continual downpour, and the foundation of that ground is chalk. On the sides of the plateau of Craonne, after two weeks' rain, the chalky mud seemed bottomless. "It filled the ears and eyes and throats of our men," wrote John Buchan, "it plastered their clothing and mingled generously with their diet. Their grandfathers, who had been at Sebastopol, could have told them something about mud; but even after India and South ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... assumed formerly to be bottomless, but thousands of fathoms are now measured. Our elders little thought of a submarine telegraph across ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... over the rushing wheel, which threatens to seize our clothes and whirl us away into the circle. The steps on which we stand are slippery: the stone walls drip with water, and only a step beyond the depth appears bottomless! O, thou wilt love this mill as I love it! Again having reached the light of day, and under free heaven, one only perceives the quiet, friendly little house. Dost thou know, Otto, often as thou hast sat quiet and dreaming, silent as a statue, have I thought of my mill, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make—a twig crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... Here are the Lucrine Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus. This entrance to the infernal regions was frozen over the day I saw it; so that the profane prophecy of skating on the bottomless pit might have been realized. The islands of Procida and Ischia continue and complete this side of the bay, which is about twenty miles ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... on wine that cost twenty-five dollars a bottle—remember that I spent three hundred and fifty thousand on this banquet which lasted eight hours and that I will see you and your daughter dead and in the bottomless pit before I will give you one penny. Enjoy yourself, it's ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... weight," he said, looking doubtfully at the frail bridge, and at the blue gulf, which appeared to be a bottomless pit. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Christ-like sympathy when we contemplate those dark and desperate faiths which are but nightmares of the soul, which see in all the universe only malevolent spirits to be appeased, which, looking heavenward for a father's face, see, as Richter expressed it, "only a death's head with bottomless, empty sockets" instead ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... beasts when the sun arises, because the light has shaken them out of the world. All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless depth. If any horrid deed was doing now, how much more horrid in the awful still light of this first hour of a summer morn! How many evil passions now lay sunk under the holy waves of sleep! How many heartaches were gnawing only in dreams, to wake with the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... would have failed. This goddess was named Lu-o. She had been idly watching the growth of the planet, when, to her horror, she saw the newly made ball slipping slowly from its place. In another second it would have shot down into the bottomless pit. Quick as a flash Lu-o stopped it with her magic wand and held it firmly until the chief god came dashing up to ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... had to be restrained. He had told them that I was comparatively harmless, but he had no doubt that the conductor had whispered it to our fellow-passengers in the car, which explained their prolonged absence in the smoker. Then they all laughed, and it seemed to me that the cover to the bottomless pit was open and that ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... stormy sunset, with masses of clouds in the sky, and a low sun very fiery and dazzling, which no doubt to a hasty glance must have looked, with its dark shadows and high lurid lights, like the fires of the bottomless pit. But when you looked down you saw the reality what it was. The country that lay beneath was full of tropical foliage, but with many stretches of sand and dry plains, and in the foreground was a town, that looked very prosperous ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... said; but he was too earnest for an answer to forget his question, so that he repeated it in the very same broken words as above. By this time I had recovered myself a little, and I said, "God will at last punish him severely; he is reserved for the judgment, and is to be cast into the bottomless pit, to dwell with everlasting fire." This did not satisfy Friday; but he returns upon me, repeating my words, "'RESERVE AT LAST!' me no understand - but why not kill the devil now; not kill great ago?" "You may as well ask me," said I, "why God does not kill you or me, when we ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... crowded them out of sight,—storms where, out of the wilderness of waves that far and wide wasted white around, a single one came ploughing on straight to the mark, gathering its grinding masses mast-high, poising, plunging, and swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction,—storms where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... a hollow tone. "The Queen, too, still clings to this fine word. When I saw her at work yesterday, it seemed as if I beheld her drawing water with the bottomless vessel of the Danaides. True, today, when I left her, her arms had fallen—and in this attitude she now stands before me with her tearful eyes. And besides, I can't get my nephew Dion out of my mind. Cares—nothing but cares concerning him! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... energy necessary to transport the gold, silver and precious stones from the New World to the bottomless treasury of Spain was stupendous. Yet not less stupendous was the amount of treasure transported. From the distant mines of Potosi, from the Pilcomayo, from the almost inaccessible fastnesses of what are now Bolivia and Ecuador, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... once induced to sacrifice her virtue she is treated as a slave and outcast by the very man who brought her ruin upon her. Her self-respect is gone. Her life becomes valueless to her, and she is swept downward, ever downward, into the bottomless pit of prostitution, and becomes an outcast from ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... two of his comrades—Bibi-the-Smoker and My-Boots. No doubt My-Boots was a boozer; but then he had such a fantastic appetite that he was always asked to join those sort of gatherings, just for the sight of the caterer's mug when he beheld that bottomless pit swallowing his twelve pounds of bread. The young woman on her side, promised to bring her employer Madame Fauconnier and the Boches, some very agreeable people. On counting, they found there would be fifteen to sit down to table, which was quite enough. When there ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... frightful of all the forms of tyranny. Shall we call this liberty? Shall we seek the secure enjoyment of natural rights in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seek the pure light of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more diabolical massacres of St. Domingo. If such were freedom, it would, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... spirits reserved under chains to eternal darkness.... I boldly challenge thee with thy six-foot God and all the host of Luciferian spirits, with all your commissions, curses, and sentences, to touch and hurt me. And this know, O Muggleton: on you I trample, and to the bottomless pit are you sentenced, from whence you came, and where the endless worm shall gnaw and torture your ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... enslaved the adjacent nations, but were not profusion, extravagance, dissipation, the necessary consequences of conquest? was not Roman idleness the inevitable result of the filling of Italy with slaves? Every hour rendered wider that bottomless gulf which separates immense riches from abject poverty. Did not the middle class, in which reside the virtue and strength of a nation, disappear, and aristocratic families remain in Rome, whose estates in Syria or Spain, Gaul or Africa, equalled, nay, even ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... authority of Christ Himself and of Scripture; that it is inconsistent with the laws of human nature may be asserted, but never can be proved. Theories manifold have been invented in order to make it plain. I do not know that any of them have gone to the bottom of the bottomless. But Christ in His perfect manhood, wedded, as I believe it is, to true divinity, is capable of entering into—not merely by sympathy, though that has much to do with it—such closeness of relation with human kind, and with every man, as that on Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... so absorbed in her theory of reincarnation that she had forgotten the paint, but the bottomless ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... was not strong enough to keep to it. His jealousy was a devouring fire, and he could not conceal it. Domini, he described to me minutely the effect of jealousy in a human heart. I had never imagined what it was, and, when he described it, I felt as if I looked down into a bottomless pit lined with the flames of hell. By the depth of that pit I measured the depth of his passion for this woman, and I gained an idea of what human love—not the best sort of human love, but still genuine, intense love of some kind—could be. Of this human love I thought at night, putting ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... cannot help his mind constantly turning upon women; and if his thoughts of them are often cruelly false, it is not Hamlet but his mother who is to blame: her conduct has hurled him from the peak of optimism into the bottomless pool of pessimistic doubt, above the foul waters of which he keeps ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... quarry near Ocean View, on the 3rd of November 1895. Yet he takes his misfortune cheerfully. He is chatty and witty and somewhat of a poet and is the author of a highly imaginative story about a "Bottomless Lake" and a "Haunted Cavern" in which that strange character, Joaquin Murietta, well known in all California mining camps fifty years ago, figures. This Joaquin Murietta has also been the theme of the "Poet of the Sierras," Joaquin Miller. Indeed it was from this "Joaquin" that Miller ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... was evident, and the result was an expedition was formed at once for Downey's Dump, a little town five miles away, where the railroad crossed a long bog on the Skagbog River. Here Downey, the contractor, had carried the railroad dump across a supposed bottomless morass and by good luck had soon made a bottom and in consequence a small fortune, with which he built a hotel, and was now the great man of the town for which he ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... finger he could find no bottom; for it was stopped by a dense stratum of MS.; below which, you know, other strata might lie ad infinitum. For anything proved to the contrary, the trunk might be bottomless. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... nature as indifferent as anything can be, yet they are not indifferent to be used and practised by us; and whosoever swalloweth this scandal of Christ's little ones, and repenteth not, the heavy millstone of God's dreadful wrath shall be hanged about his neck, to sink him down in the bottomless lake; and then shall he feel that which before he ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... the book, swung his arm, and Pope crashed into a lilac bush. "There," he said, "goes meekness, patience, and the eighteenth century. This is the nineteenth. Time is no endless draught, no bottomless cup. Waste of life is the cankered rose. You know that you ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... mountain's very womb. There were times when the stench was so horrible we nearly fainted. We stumbled on men's bones. We collided with sharp projections in the gloom—fell down holes that might have been bottomless for aught we knew in advance—and scrambled over ledges that in places were smooth with the wear of feet for ages. Everlastingly to right, or left of us, or up above, or down below we could hear the inhabitants scampering away. Now and then an arrow would flitter between us; but their supply ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... water. The leader of one party suddenly saw a very dark spot just before him; he jumped over, instead of stepping on it, and told the others to halt. Examination proved the dark patch to be a pit that seemed bottomless. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... accused, faced each other for a moment; while, incessant, dull, mighty, the thunders of the giant cataract mingled with the trembling diapason of the stupendous turbines in the rock-hewn caverns where old Niagara now toiled in fetters, to swell their power and fling gold into their bottomless coffers. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... apparently beyond the brow of the cliff below, so that, as I involuntarily glanced downward, I seemed to be hanging in free space, while the steep mountain-side, looking ten times steeper than it really was, resembled the vertical wall of an absolutely bottomless abyss, as if I were suspended over ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... go further? This woman in the darkest hour of her bottomless and unhorizoned despair, with conscience gnawing at her heart, with present misery pressing on her breast, and shame to come hanging over her like a thunder cloud, could yet feel thankful that she had won this barren love, the spring of all her woe. Or was her folly deep wisdom in disguise?—is ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... it'll be all right in two seconds," answered Larry, from some bottomless abyss. "Tare an' ages; what'll I do at all," I heard him continuing, as he made his way into the hall. Oh what a clatter he made upon the pavement,—for it was all stone! And how the drops of perspiration stood upon my brow as ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... The few that were undertaken sprang from absolute necessity. The town got through the summer season fairly well, but, as the winter that year proved to be an unusually rainy time, it soon became evident that something must be done. The streets became bottomless pits of mud. It is stated, as plain and sober fact, that in some of the main thoroughfares teams of mules and horses sank actually out of sight and were suffocated. Foot travel was almost impossible unless across some sort of causeway. Lumber was so expensive that it was impossible ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... though people might not see how, all that had happened on the Earth since then. But this last Monarchy was tottering, and a Fifth Universal Monarchy was at hand. It was that foreshadowed in Rev. xx.: "And I saw an Angel come down from Heaven, having the key of the Bottomless Pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the Dragon, that great serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... could strike forward confidently. But again there are other places in the Slough region where one has to walk for half a mile to pass a miserable little trickle only just too wide to step across. The watercress grows thick against either oozy bank, leaving a clear of only a foot. Yet it is bottomless. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with. Vouchsafe to see ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... descended by the ladders in the pumpshaft. Pretty work to descend with the huge pump-rods (garnished with large iron bolts) working violently, making strokes of 12 feet, close to our elbows; and with a nearly bottomless pit at the foot of every ladder, where we had to turn round the foot of the ladder walking on only a narrow board. However we got down to the bottom of the mine with great safety and credit, seeing ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... which the City was famous then as now; and afterwards showed Mr. Warrington the Virginian walk upon 'Change, through which Harry passed rather shamefacedly. What would a certain lady in Virginia say, he thought, if she knew that he was carrying off in that bottomless gambler's pocket a great portion of his father's patrimony? Those are all Virginia merchants, thinks he, and they are all talking to one another about me, and all saying, "That is young Esmond, of Castlewood, on the Potomac, Madam Esmond's ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that in the vast tundra regions of Northern Siberia the frozen soil had dissolved into a bottomless slough, from whose depths uprose prehistoric mammoths, their long hair matted with mud, and their curved tusks of ivory gleaming like trumpets over the field of their resurrection. The dispatch concluded with a heart-rending ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... he possesses: by what is in his purse: and, that failing, the honour and esteem of the world instantly fail also. O our Lord; Supreme Power, Supreme Goodness, Supreme Truth; Thy perfections are without beginning and without end. They are infinite and incomprehensible. They are a bottomless ocean of beauty. O my God, that I had the eloquence of an angel's speech to set forth Thy goodness and Thy truth, and to win ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... will heal thy wound, stop the waste-hole in thy bag of tricks. Woman is thy wealth; have but one woman, dress, undress, and fondle that women, make use of the woman—woman is everything—woman has an inkstand of her own; dip thy pen in that bottomless inkpot. Women like love; make love to her with the pen only, tickle her phantasies, and sketch merrily for her a thousand pictures of love in a thousand pretty ways. Woman is generous, and all for one, or one for all, must pay the painter, and furnish the hairs of ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... wolves, that wait and think long till they devour Thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into Thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their damned designs that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett |
