"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were premature, did not at first take them up and standardize them but left them entirely in the hands of local, county, and state Granges. These thereupon proceeded to "gang their ain gait" through the unfamiliar paths of business operations and too frequently brought up in a quagmire. "This purchasing business," said Kelley in 1867, "commenced with buying jackasses; the prospects are that many will be SOLD." But the Grangers went on with their plans for business cooperation with ardor undampened by such ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... almost dark when we arrived, and hardly were we under shelter when rain came down in torrents. It poured all night, and when we started off on foot at sunrise the next morning we found the track in the forest a regular quagmire; in places we waded through mud up to our knees. As we scrambled and floundered through the mud at our best pace we heard a great crashing noise just in front of us, and the air resounded with cries of "Gajah, gajah!" (elephant). I was just in time to see a large elephant tear ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... quagmire, the worst upon all Exmoor, John had heard from his grandfather, and even from his mother, when they wanted to keep him quiet; but his father had feared to speak of it to him, being a man of piety, and up to the tricks of the evil one. This made John the more desirous to have a good ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... persistently in San Francisco during the first week of January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost his portmanteau, and was fain ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... woman must accept her husband's opinion, at all events about men.' He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. 'A man may know with impunity what is injurious if ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... are a pack of City lubbers!" returned Stephen. "Don't we know a quagmire when we see ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... appeared her existence now! With a lump in her throat and a pang in her heart, she recklessly wiped her eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... illusions about people. In spite of his filth, this youth interested me. His stupid father refused him all instruction, and beat him unmercifully; he appeared intelligent; he made me think of a fresh-water fish condemned to live in a quagmire. He was called Samuel Brohl: remember the name. I pitied him and I saw no other way of saving him than to buy him of his father. This horrid little man demanded an exorbitant price. I assure you his pretensions were absurd. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Miss Panney immediately began to congratulate Dora on her return to her senses. She was in high good humor, "You ought to know, my dear, that if the loveliest woman in the world found herself stuck in a quagmire, it would be quite foolish for her to expect that the right sort of man would come and pull her out. In all probability it would be precisely the wrong sort of man who would do it. Consequently, it would ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... over the Public Garden, across the southern portion of the parade-ground, to the foot of the hill, upon which stands the Soldiers' Monument. A son of H.G. Otis was drowned, about seventy years ago, in a quagmire which existed at that spot. It also flowed across the westerly portion of Boylston Street and Tremont Street, and Shawmut Avenue, to the corner of Washington Street and Groton Street, where stood the fortifications during the American Revolution, across the Neck, which was only two hundred and fifty ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... marsh, swamp, morass, marish^, moss, fen, bog, quagmire, slough, sump, wash; mud, squash, slush; baygall [U.S.], cienaga^, jhil^, vlei^. Adj. marsh, marshy; swampy, boggy, plashy^, poachy^, quaggy^, soft; muddy, sloppy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... drowned out the words, and immediately Ben's company found itself all but surrounded. To go into this quagmire had certainly been a grave error, but all leaders make mistakes sometimes; and Major Morris was suffering as greatly ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... guessed that she was in monetary difficulties on her own account. Denry, as a chivalrous lover, had assisted her out of the fearful quagmire of her rent; but she owed much beyond rent. Yet, when some of her quarterly fees had come in, her thoughts had instantly run to Llandudno, joy, and frocks. She did not know what money was, and she never would. This was, perhaps, part of her superior splendour. The gentle, timid, silent ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Was Sir Launfal's long quest entirely without avail? Compare the last lines of Tennyson's Holy Grail, where Arthur complains that his knights who went upon the Holy Quest have followed "wandering fires, lost in the quagmire," and "leaving ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... curiosity to walk a little way along the right-hand path which they were about to take. Only a few yards further on I found myself sinking in a floating quagmire, from which I extricated myself with much difficulty but just in time for as I discovered afterwards by probing with a pole, the water beneath the matted reeds was deep. That night I questioned the guides upon the subject, but without result, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... district on account of the hills and hollows, but one of the most dreadful pieces of road at that time and for long afterwards, was {12} that between Chipping and Buntingford, the foundations of which were often little else but fagots thrown into a quagmire! ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... being unpaved, the rain of the night before had converted them into a perfect quagmire, which the splashing water- spouts from the gables, and the filth and offal cast from the different houses, swelled in no small degree. These odious matters being left to putrefy in the close and heavy air, emitted an insupportable stench, to which every court and passage poured forth ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... his father would not consent to a sea life, he made the river near him represent the ocean: he lived on the water, and was the daring Columbus of a schoolboy's boat. A part where he and his mates stood to angle, in time became a quagmire: in the course of one day, the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a house. With that sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which marked his mature ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... gravel surface, now a neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated. Here the soaked earth became little less than a quagmire. ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... other servants that had been at labour with him, and after diligent enquiry no news could be heard of him, until at length (near half an hour after) he was heard singing and whistling in a bog or quagmire, where they found him in a kind of trance or extatick fit, to which he hath sometimes been accustomed (but whether before the affliction he met with from this spirit I am not certain). He was affected much after such sort, as at the time of those fits, so that ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... beads of a rosary when the string is snapped. Perhaps you haven't noticed how serious this letter is. I'm frowning as I write—a habit most bad on the eyebrows—surest of signs that I am sinking again into the quagmire of love. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... him a little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... covered with blood and mud and were in great fear of exhausting our mounts. For a long distance we had to get down and lead them. At last we entered a broad meadow covered with bushes and bordered with rocks. Not only horses but riders also began to sink to their middle in a quagmire with apparently no bottom. The whole surface of the meadow was but a thin layer of turf, covering a lake with black putrefying water. When we finally learned to open our column and proceed at big intervals, we found we could keep on this surface that undulated like rubber ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... none have found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature permits ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... by the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of the long log. Stepping down, she found that the quagmire was not so deep. But for some minutes they continued to plow through it, but walking as softly ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... for a long time she had wandered in a darkness so thick that she could not see her hand before her. She had lost her way and knew not whither she had strayed, and with every step she had been afraid of sinking into a quagmire or stumbling headlong into an abyss. Now some one had called to her not to go any farther, but to sit down and wait for the break of day. She was glad that she would not have to continue her perilous wanderings; now she sat quietly waiting for ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... the reed beds breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... occasional leaps are necessary over pools of dark water full of vegetation. These alternate with places where the ground, being higher, yawns with wide cracks crumbling at the edge, the heat causing the clay to split and open. In winter it must be an impassable quagmire; now it ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... boys called the quagmire, was a low place in the pathway, where it was almost always muddy. This pathway was made by the cows, going up and down to drink; and it was a good, dry, and hard path in all places but one. This, in the spring of the year, was very wet and miry; and, during the whole ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... cart and plough. When he was out of humour, he would kick and plunge as if the devil was in him. He once thrust Crabshaw into the middle of a quick-set hedge, where he was terribly torn; another time he canted him over his head into a quagmire, where he stuck with his heels up, and must have perished, if people had not been passing that way; a third time he seized him in the stable with his teeth by the rim of the belly, and swung him off the ground, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... begun. I seed 'im lay hold of 'er wrists an' look 'er spank, dab in the eyes, an' 'en he begun to rant. Purty soon I seed her back limberin' up an' I knowed, as the sayin' is, that she was our meat. All at once, still a-hold o' 'er hands, he turned to me, an' sez he: 'Go ax Brother Quagmire to sing "How firm a foundation" three times, with the second an' last verse left out, an' tell 'im to foller that up with "Jesus, Lover." Git 'im to walk up an' down this aisle—this un, remember. ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... quagmire, quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... our trench The Cecil. There's a brass-plate and a dome, And a quagmire where the doormat used to be, If you're calling, second Tuesday is our reg'- lar day at home, So delighted if you'll toddle in ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... blazed with hatred. "My lady, the lads of the village drove her there, and the poor hunted beast floundered into a quagmire. I cursed them well for it, but that does not bring back the good cow. And Howel will do nothing for me because the child is so weazened and ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... the disheartened, blue, and beaten men on that dusty train that dusty day, Dr. Warren Slavens, late of Missouri, was without question the deepest down in the quagmire of failure. He hated himself for the fizzle that he had made of it, and he hated the world that would not open the gates and give him one straight dash for the goal among men of ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... through a thick wood, the bottom of which was a mere quagmire, most part of it up to our knees, and often to our middle, and every now and then we had a large tree to get over, for they often lay directly in our road. Besides this, we were continually treading upon the stumps of trees, which were not to be avoided, as they were covered ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... Mallet, had set up house. I remember to this day owning to my brother that though I had intended my review of Gulliver's Travels to be epoch-making, it had turned out a horrible fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder deeper into the quagmire of my own creation if I rewrote the two reviews. Accordingly, they were sent off in the usual way. Knowing my father's experience in such matters, I did not expect to get them back in type for many weeks. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been or hoped to be would taste of bitter ignominy ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... back by the shore, a good deal longer; now over rough, rocky stretches where he stumbled in the darkness, now through marshy, sodden ground where he sank as in a quagmire time and again over his ankles. It was even longer than he had counted on, and time, with the Weasel on one hand and the return of the police on the other, was a factor to be reckoned with again, as, a half hour later, Jimmie Dale stole across the lawn of Mittel's ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... sooty coots, and speckled teals; Ye fisher herons, watching eels; Ye duck and drake, wi' airy wheels Circling the lake; Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels, Rair for ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... "cracker" always gave hopes to one that if he had the advantage of common schools, and could be made to understand that laziness was dishonorable, he might develop into something. There was little foundation for such hope in the average low South Carolinian. His mind was a shaking quagmire, which did not admit of the erection of any superstructure of education upon it. The South Carolina guards about us did not know the name of the next town, though they had been raised in that section. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... They were men whose manhood had been tried by four awful years of the supreme test, men such as had charged with Pickett up the bloody ridge at Gettysburg, and disputed with the soldiers of Grant every inch of tangled quagmire in the Wilderness. They ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... We noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation of General Putnam's famous ride—over rocks, too, made wondrously slippery by a pitiless rain, but which our unshod Indian horses descended ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of the country sinking in this administrative quagmire was not conducive to the maintenance of confidence in its ruling classes can well be imagined. On all sides voices were uplifted, not merely against the Cabinet, whose members were assumed to be actuated ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... down his pickets and branches and hurried through the birch grove into the dense fir woods, where he had not gone far before he discovered what was amiss. Up there was a big, treacherous marsh. A cow belonging to the Falla folk had gone down in a quagmire and Jan saw at once that it was the best cow they had on the farm, one for which Lars Gunnarson had been offered two hundred rix-dollars. She had sunk deep in the mire and was now so terrified ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... recklessness. But it was unreasoning; it was the instinct begotten of long training and, now, of the absence of all nervousness. Each taut toe touched each point of bearing just as was required above the quagmire, and, all unperceiving and uncaring, he fled over dirty death as easily as he might have run upon some hardened woodland pathway. He did not think nor know nor care about what he was doing. He was only running ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey—he was the man I found there as night watchman—before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... was long and Uncle Terry's old horse slow, and the road in the hollows a quagmire of half-frozen mud. Gone were all the leaves of the scrub oaks, and beneath the thickets of spruce still remained a white pall of snow. A half gale was blowing over the island, and when they reached the hilltop ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... terrible and the ground simply quagmire, whilst the rain, cold, and the awful mud of the holding soil paralysed any energetic attempt to drive the enemy back. A desultory fire was kept up at all points along the line; but no great activity appeared to be possible. ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... that she had, at any rate. So she quite declined the part, which he had hoped she would have taken, of respondent, and possible questioner; and his work became more and more like that of a man walking in a quagmire. Once the squire roused himself to speak to the butler; he felt the need of outward stimulus—of a ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to be covered was about two hundred and thirty miles. Under favorable circumstances, the trip could have been made in five or six days and with little hardship. The rainy season, however, was now at its height, and the country was one vast quagmire, overrun by swollen streams which could be crossed only at great risk. Ten days of wearisome marching brought the expedition to the forks of the Little Wabash. The entire region between the two channels was under water, and for a little time it looked as if the whole enterprise would have ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... every new consideration of the tantalizing subject, deeper and deeper in the quagmire of doubt and uncertainty, I sought enlightenment by making a memorandum of the special points which must have influenced the jury in their verdict, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... heard the man's invitation, and having made up his mind that it was an opportunity to teach one ruffian to mind his own business he took a course favorable for the exhibition, and started to go across an open lot; the men followed, and just as our hero arrived near a quagmire the man who was to give the exhibition ran forward and ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey
... is very witty," Miss Newville remarked. "He asked the selectmen several times to give their attention to a quagmire in the road near his house. After long delay, they stepped into a chaise and rode to the spot. Suddenly they found themselves stuck in the mud. Mr. Byles opened his window and remarked that he was glad they were stirring in the matter ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... one of our friends[1032], 'He is ruining himself without pleasure. A man who loses at play, or who runs out his fortune at court, makes his estate less, in hopes of making it bigger: (I am sure of this word, which was often used by him:) but it is a sad thing to pass through the quagmire of parsimony, to the gulph of ruin. To pass over the flowery path of extravagance ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... listened. What! In order that this malignant growth in Society's breast should be able to say "I know," had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night had called—yes, stilled called—by the gentle name of Romance? Yes, so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... are. The lair of such a monster would not have been disturbed for hundreds—or thousands—of years. Moreover, these creatures must have occupied places quite inaccessible to man. A snake who could make himself comfortable in a quagmire, a hundred feet deep, would be protected on the outskirts by such stupendous morasses as now no longer exist, or which, if they exist anywhere at all, can be on very few places on the earth's surface. Far be it from me to say that in more elemental ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... rebel, who was fortunately about his own size. Rolling up his own clothing in as small a bundle as possible, he concealed it in the bog, at some distance from the place where the picket had fallen. Dragging the corpse to a quagmire, he sunk it beneath the muddy waters, and it passed from his view. After taking the precaution to straighten up the long grass, which might have betrayed his movements, he advanced towards ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... at the due rate, fiery men both of them; sweep poor Baronay away, MINUS the meal; who finds even his road blocked (bridge bursting into cannon-shot upon him, at one point), instead of bridge, a stream, or slow current of quagmire for him,—and is in imminent hazard. Ziethen's behavior was superlative (details of it unintelligible off the ground); and Baronay fled totally in wreck;—his own horse shot, and at the moment no other to be had; swam the quagmire, or swashed through ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... moat. The enemy have been shelling us this morning too, very closely, but I am tired, and my nerves, as you know, are not very jumpy! I was up just after 3 o'clock this morning, and went to various places, nearly being lost in a quagmire! Two of my men were hit, one by a spent bullet in the stomach. We can see the bullet, so I expect he will not die. The other was shot through the thigh, and the bullet stuck in his hand! We have got it out, and I am forwarding it to the authorities, as it has taken such a queer shape that one ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Governor did not like to be bawled at. He was sufficiently embarrassed already by the quagmire into which ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... ill words must have returned to the bosoms which vented them, and have flown no further, no Board could ever have been so terribly curse-laden. To find oneself at last utterly stopped, after proceeding with great strain to one's horse for half a mile through an artificial quagmire of slush up to the wheelbox, is harassing to the customary traveller; and men at that crisis did not bethink themselves quite so frequently as they should have done, that a people perishing from famine ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... for performance of the whole duty of man, it is not the less important that, if he do care to know aught about them, his knowledge should be exact, for there is no knowing beforehand how luxuriantly the minutest germ of theoretical error may ramify in practice, or into what substantive quagmire trust in deceitful shadows may lead. These respectable aphorisms may be beneficially borne in mind during perusal of what ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... and seated in the rude chariot, were in despair, and much frightened as well—wet and weary too, poor things. This most welcome re-enforcement inspired all with fresh courage, and, guided by Pierre's suggestions, they soon succeeded in getting the unwieldy vehicle out of the quagmire and into the road leading to the chateau, which was speedily reached, and the huge equipage safely piloted through the grand portico into the interior court. The oxen were at once taken from before it and led into the stable, while the actresses followed de Sigognac up to the ancient banqueting ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... woman had drawn near, and she now spoke to the lad. "I have nothing to promise you," said she, "save that which you shall win with your own strength. The road upon which I would lead you is uneven and hard, and climbs many a hill, and descends into many a valley and quagmire. The views which you will sometimes get from the hilltops are grand and glorious, but the deep valleys are dark, and the ascent from them is toilsome. Nevertheless, the road leads to the blue mountains of endless fame, which ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... was the simple fare of those aborigines, such the home whence they fled. As I looked at it in the presence of my sable guides, I could not but reflect that the white man's cattle would soon trample these holes into a quagmire of mud, and destroy the surrounding verdure and pleasant freshness for ever. I feared that my good-natured but acute guides thought as much, and I blushed inwardly ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... probably fell to its lowest depth of ingratitude and sin when poor Judas changed sides and sold his Lord. What a change it was! Alas, alas, what a quagmire of uncertainties and shifting sand unsanctified human ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... to oppose pride with pride, and before the eyes of Evelyn demonstrate his indifference to that lady's choice of Mr. Lee for the minuet and Mr. Lightfoot for the country dance. This last thought had far to travel from some unused, deep-down quagmire of the heart, but it came. For the rest, the image of Audrey decked in silk and lace, turned by her apparel into a dark Court lady, a damsel in waiting to Queen Titania, caught his fancy in both hands. He wished to ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... oversight of British interests in the Empire. A gifted poet, and an enthusiastic advocate of universal peace, he was a man who might be counted on, if in [Page 163] the power of man, to hold the dogs of war in leash. But he, too, had been consul at Canton and he knew by experience the quagmire in which the best intentions were ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... deplorable condition, he found every day his dangers increase, and his pursuers making nearer advances. In this distress he concealed himself in the marshes of Mintur'nae, where he continued a night up to the chin in a quagmire. 3. At break of day he left this dismal place, and made towards the seaside, in hopes of finding a ship to facilitate his escape; but being known and discovered by some of the inhabitants, he was conducted to a neighbouring town, with a halter round his neck, without clothes, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... miles away. The task was burthened with innumerable difficulties. There was no firm foundation on which to work, and no trees to assist in forming hurdles. All we could do was to bind together large quantities of swamp weeds and lay them across the quagmire. It was but the semblance of a road, without firmness ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... they, unless they be pirates or barbarians as well as sailors, point out the spots for the placing of buoys and of lights, in order that others may not be exposed to the danger which they have so narrowly escaped. What man of common humanity, having, by good luck, missed being engulfed in a quagmire or quicksand, will withhold from his neighbours a knowledge of the peril without which the dangerous spots are not to ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... assist the credulous in getting up for them some strange new thing, dancing them about with a Will-o'-the-wisp—now alarming them by a shriek of laughter! and now like a grinning Pigwigging sinking them chin-deep into a quagmire! Once he presented them with a fictitious portrait of Shakspeare, and when the brotherhood were sufficiently divided in their opinions, he pounced upon them with a demonstration, that every portrait of Shakspeare partook of the same doubtful ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... wet yet for either," decreed Geraldine. "How could we tramp over the fells when everything's a quagmire? And if you think you can light a bonfire with damp wood, you're jolly well mistaken. We'll collect sticks, and have one when they're dry. I plump for a flag-hunt. There must be some in ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... debt and look to a revolution to absolve them; of the veterans of the Sullan army, settled in colonies such as Faesulae, who had rushed into debt in order to live luxurious lives; of old debtors of the city, getting deeper and deeper into the quagmire, who joined the conspiracy as a last desperate venture. There was in fact in that famous year a real social fermentation going on, caused by economic disturbance of the most serious kind; the germs of the disease can be traced back to the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... wilderness of low leafless oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Mackintosh ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Crow, "one time there was an old woman that lived near a well. For a long time nobody thought she was a witch, but after a while people began to have their suspicions. There was a quagmire in the road right in front of the old woman's house, and every traveler passing that way was sure to get mud on his feet. No matter whether he was riding horseback or in a buggy, it was all the same. He was sure to get his feet muddy. And the mud was ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... exercises and translations were poor affairs, and her ill-trained memory found it difficult to marshal the enormous number of facts that were daily forced upon it. Miss Huntley at first was patient, but as the weeks wore on, and Winona still wallowed in a quagmire of amazing mistakes, she grew sarcastic. The girl winced under some of her cutting remarks. Apparently the mistress imagined her failure to be due to laziness and inattention, and sooner than confess that she could ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... with mockery and contempt. Bunyan justly says, "The text calls for sharpness, so do the times." "With those whose religion lieth in some circumstantials, the kingdom swarms at this day." When they stand at the gate, they will "shake like a quagmire—their feigned faith, pretended love, shows of gravity, and holiday words, will stand them in little stead; some professors do with religion just as people do with their best apparel—hang it on the wall all the week, and put it on on Sundays; they save it till they go to a meeting, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... pioneer roofs. The shifting sand-dunes on the outskirts were beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought the saline breath of the outlying Pacific even to the busy haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed on elastic bogs; Battery Street ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... fruit of care when men travel the road to distinction without finding it. They are well dressed, and would be modest, if modesty were worth its having in such an atmosphere. Indeed, they might have been taken for men with other motives than those of gaining office by wallowing in a political quagmire reeking with democratic filth. Courteous to each other, they sit at a large table containing long slips of paper, each candidate's sentiments printed thereon. As each voter—good fellow that he is—enters the room, one or the other candidate reaches out ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... territory. In summer it seems a vast moor carpeted by glowing purple heather, which one can traverse up to a certain point, but woe betide him who would advance farther, for, surrounded by what seems solid ground, lies a treacherous quagmire declared by the people of the neighbourhood to be unfathomable. This part of the bog, whose victims have been many, is known as the Youdic. As one leans over it its waters may sometimes be seen to simmer and boil, and the peasants of the country-side devoutly believe that when this occurs ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... ourselves to find reasons for the poor girl's opposition? Here are the tracks of our friends, broader and deeper than ever: here they wind down into the hollow; and there, you may see where they have floundered through that vile pool, that is still turbid, where they crossed it. A horrible quagmire! But courage, my fair cousin: it is only such difficulties as these which the road ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... man had ventured on a sort of quagmire, and had disappeared half-way in the sticky mud. They stretched out their hands, and he rose, covered with slime, but quite satisfied at not having injured his precious entomologist's box. Acteon went beside him, and made ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... ground so extremely soft and boggy, that we found it impossible to proceed above three-quarters of a mile on our eastern course. We therefore returned, resolving to keep close to the river's edge, until we should be enabled to sound the vein of quagmire, with which we appeared to be hemmed in. In this attempt we were equally unfortunate, the horses falling repeatedly: one rolled into the river, and it was with difficulty we saved him: my baggage was on him, and was entirely spoiled; the chart case and charts were materially ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... sank. A moment later only one of his iron gauntlets was to be seen convulsively quivering above the sand. Presently nothing was to be seen—nothing except some bubbles of air on the surface of the quagmire. ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... accursed habit, which that gifted American, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, has, in words of fiery eloquence, called 'the treacherous, insidious murderer of home and happiness; the Will-o'-the-Wisp that draws honour, genius, and all that is good into its fatal, deadly quagmire.' To the assertion that our valued contemporary is 'the possessor of one of the brightest intellects of the present century' (as he so modestly informs us) we do not cavil at for one moment. But even the patients under the Jordan (American quack) system may ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... does or what she has in view. I leave the interpretation of this performance to others, more venturesome than I. Plenty of theories are based on equally shaky foundations. Blow on them and they sink into the quagmire of oblivion. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... a fine field for conjecture and snipe-shooting, and a good sportsman and an ingenious scholar may exercise their feet and faculties to great advantage upon the spot;—or, if they prefer riding, lose their way (as I did) in a cursed quagmire of the Scamander, who wriggles about as if the Dardan virgins still offered their wonted tribute. The only vestige of Troy, or her destroyers, are the barrows supposed to contain the carcasses of Achilles, Antilochus, Ajax, etc.;—but Mount Ida is still in high feather, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... just as truly where it is as a body at rest. Motion consists merely in the fact that bodies are sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, and that they are at intermediate places at intermediate times. Only those who have waded through the quagmire of philosophic speculation on this subject can realise what a liberation from antique prejudices is involved in this simple ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles across a hilly and wooded country. We had some difficulty in reaching the point, owing to the intolerably bad paths; for everywhere in the shade the ground soon becomes a perfect quagmire. The point itself is a bold rocky hill. It is covered by a plant allied, I believe, to Bromelia, and called by the inhabitants Chepones. In scrambling through the beds, our hands were very much scratched. I was amused by observing the precaution our Indian guide took, in turning up his ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... primarily not the absurdity of its subject-matter, but the delicate playfulness of Irving's humor and the lightness and grace of his exuberant style? Has there ever been a final "Don Quixote"? Certainly not in the recent monumental editions with their quagmire of footnotes. Moreover, if we had a final edition of the great romance it would not remain final for our children's children. Every age will make its own interpretations of the classics and will demand that they be embodied in contemporary design. Thus every ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... and psalm now ascend daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, my Raymond, it will remain a blessing to all who come ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally, in this supreme ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... of the latter are aimlessness and impatience; and their misfortune—which is largely responsible for those faults—is that they are too soon allowed to plunge into the quagmire called by euphemism "society," and often whelmed in its sorry pleasures and petty ambitions—too soon, also, invested with the right to manage their own affairs and to choose their own associates, advisers, and even instructors; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent man; and it is notorious how ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... already in the effort to get breath, and his head was singing like a tea-urn. The gold boxes were there, and if they were not brought to the surface, and carried honestly to Suez, the matter would have to be fought out above in God's open air, and not in that horrible choking quagmire of slime and cruel water. And so, still guarding himself cannily, he got back again to the boat, and almost had it in him to shake hands with the men who eased him of ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Salisubulus' rites with solemn function are sacred, As thou (Colony!) grant me boon of mightiest laughter. Certain a townsman mine I'd lief see thrown from thy gangway Hurled head over heels precipitous whelmed in the quagmire, Where the lake and the boglands are most rotten and stinking, 10 Deepest and lividest lie, the swallow of hollow voracious. Witless surely the wight whose sense is less than of boy-babe Two-year-old and a-sleep on trembling forearm ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... your situation had not made me grave. Till the campaign is ended, I shall be in no humour to smile. For the war, when it will be over, I have no idea. The peace is a jack o' lanthorn that dances before one's eyes, is never approached, and at best seems ready to lead some follies into a woful quagmire. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... towns to send bodies of footmen to fight beside us; had they been there, they might have faced those terrible archers of yours, for they at least would have been free to fight when we were all but helpless in that quagmire. I see that you have knightly spurs on, and ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty |
