"Rot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whites are as poor as rot, and the rich are very rich. There is no substantial well-to-do middle class. The slaves are, in fact, the middle class here. They are not considered so good, of course, as their masters, but a great deal better than ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... of the lessons that we should take to heart. Up to the time of the war and since, we have been a prodigal people, confusing extravagance with generosity, thrift with meanness. The Indians in the old days killed off the buffalo for the sport of killing, and left the carcases to rot, never thinking of a time of want; and so, too, the natives in the North Country kill the caribou for the sake of their tongues, which are considered a real "company dish," letting the remainder of the animal ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... THE MAN. Oh, rot! do you think I read novelettes? And do you suppose I believe such superstitions as heaven? I go to church because the boss told me I'd get the sack if I didnt. Free England! Ha! [Lina appears at the pavilion door, and comes ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... woman to marry me for love of me, and not out of romantic admiration because I was lucky enough to drill a hole in a man's shoulder with smokeless powder. I tell you I am disgusted with this adventure tomfoolery and rot. I don't like it. Tudor is a sample of the adventure- kind—picking a quarrel with me and behaving like a monkey, insisting on fighting with me—'to the death,' he said. It was ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... some new agency or force, don't you know, and tries to prove by a lot of double-exposed photographs that he has broken down the fundamental laws of physics, neutralizing the force of gravity, or annihilating space by the polarization of light, or some such rot. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... encroach on the plantation, the rural nobility give place to the higher nobility of intelligence; social culture based on mudsills must make way for the mudsills themselves—for lo! the sills which they buried are not dead timber, neither do they sleep or rot—they were fresh saplings, and with the reviving breath of spring and at the gleam of the sun of freedom, they will shoot ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 'consolidating Revolutions.' Thousand wagon-loads of this Pamphleteering and Newspaper matter, lie rotting slowly in the Public Libraries of our Europe. Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by bibliomaniac pearl-divers, there must they first rot, then what was pearl, in Camille or others, may be seen as such, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... to Cummings? He used to be aces up, but now comes this tripe of his called "The Exile of Time"; especially the current installment with its long-winded rot about mysticism and theosophy and the Lord knows what. Where was the Editor when this blew in? Surely there are plenty of Swami sheets for that truck; it has no place in ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... don't know what these girls are used to; I do. There were no fit quarters for them at Hodge's. I had gone and written my wife a lot of rot, pretending his place was much better than ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... intelligent and best educated workmen, receiving incomes often higher than a gentleman's son whose education has cost L1000, and if they can't fight their own battles, no men in England can, and the people are not ripe for association, and we must hark back into the competitive rot heap again. All, then, that we can do is, to give advice when asked—to see that they have, as far as we can get at them, a clear stage and no favour, but not by public, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... to talk of some cider he'd got in the cellar; but Barrett interrupted with, "Look here, Jake, just drop that rot; I know all about you." He tipped a half wink at the rest of us, but laid his fingers across his lips. "Come, old man," he wheedled like a girl, "you don't know what it is to be dragged away from college and buried alive in this Indian bush. The governor's good enough, you know—treats ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... experience of most of us. Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our failure. We are like little lost dogs searching for a master. We seek without ceasing some pilot passion to which we can surrender our heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot destruction of this individualistic age has worm-eaten into marriage; we have sought to drown pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure, to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty, to ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... act, and freely gives them up; but as nobody knows what to do with them, as, if they were sold, they would not yield a farthing each to the host of members, they remain rolled up in his garret, and are likely to remain till they rot, the sole ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... bobbing up and down. The rocking of my cradle on the waves had helped me to sleep, and I felt as well as I ever did in my life. I was confident that I could last another twenty-four hours if my boat would only hold out and not rot under the sun's rays. I could not help laughing at my position, standing hour after hour waving my shirt at those barren and lonely cliffs; but I can honestly say that from first to last not a single sensation of fear crossed ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... little stripes and stars. I heerd a feller onct, down to the store,— a dressy mister, span-new from the city— layin' the law down: "All this stars and stripes," says he, "and red and white and blue is rubbish, mere sentimental rot, spread-eagleism!" "I wan't' know!" says I. "In sixty-three, I knowed a lad, named Link. Onct, after sundown I met him stumblin'—with two dead men's muskets for crutches—towards a bucket, full ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... to the devil, her picture along! Let both rot where I suppose I must have dropped them—in the mud, or among the palmettoes. No matter where. But it does matter, my being under the magnolia at the right time, to meet her. Then shall I learn my fate—know it, for better, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... a coracle, if he has two, a punt. This last is a really useful boat; one in which very great distances of river may be descended with safety, and much luggage taken. Hide boats are very light, since the weight of a bullock's skin only averages 45 lbs.; but, unless well greased, they soon rot. When taken out of the water, they should be laid bottom upwards to dry. To make a proper and substantial coracle, a dozen or more oxier or other wands must be cut; these are to be bent, and have ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... answered Captain Blossom. "She is here to stay until her timbers rot. But if we wish, we can move some of the provisions ashore. There are the parts of a rowboat below, and I reckon I am carpenter enough to put the parts together in a day ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot—that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... "Fancy! Rot!" burst out Shafto. "I can't stand these cheeky Burmese girls. I only hope I may never set ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... away the snow, and with the strength of their shoulders lifted the logs one upon another. With his ax Bill cunningly cut the saddles, carving them down so that the rainfall would drain down the corners rather than lie in the cavities and thus rot the timbers. Planks were cut for the roof, and tree boughs laid down ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... cow-dung; Keep your vegetables dried; Cook your rice in winter evenings; And be sure your meat is fried. Then let 'em shtand, and they will not Bothershomely shmell and rot. 51 ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... fall out. The bones may ulcerate and rot. The organs of procreation usually participate in the degenerative process. Virility is destroyed, and impotence is quite common ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... a scientist, entirely nonpolitical. The Honorable Brarnend is a business man; he doesn't meddle with politics as long as the politicians leave him alone. And I'm a planter on Venus; I have enough troubles, with the natives, and the weather, and blue-rot in the zerfa plants, and poison roaches, and javelin bugs, without getting into politics. But psychic science is inextricably mixed with politics, and the Lady Dallona's work had evidently tended to discredit the theory of ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... alive, did neither fortify the avenues out of Ethiopia into it, although they had great advantages for doing it, nor did get their other forces ready for their defense! but that he followed them over the sandy desert, and slew them as far as Syria; while yet it is rot an easy thing for an army to pass over that ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... I'll be hanged! Can't take a girl out and give her a good time! I knew these Japs were fools, but their laws are plain rot." ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... up in a car the bodies of the slain, and let the attendant quickly bear out the carcases. Justly shall they lack the last rites; they are unworthy to be covered with a mound; let no funeral procession or pyre suffer them the holy honour of a barrow; let them be scattered to rot in the fields, to be consumed by the beaks of birds; let them taint the country all ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the question. It meaneth only that this young gentleman hath not enjoyed the pleasure of your company before. Will it amaze you to learn, my friends, that Christian is like to be immortal only because you talk him out of the grave? One brief epitaph, gentlemen, would let him rot." ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak- trees, "leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its digestive processes," is "a scrap of intestine which eats its way as ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... rot—Ambition's honoured fools! Yes, Honour decks the turf that wraps their clay! Vain Sophistry! in these behold the tools, The broken tools, that tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... wherein you meane to propagate it, to tumble it in vpon it againe. In like manner your superfluous Siens, or little Plants must be cut close by the earth, when as they grow about some small Impe, which we meane to propagate, for they would doe nothing but rot. For to propagate, you must digge the earth round about the tree, that so your rootes may be laid in a manner halfe bare. Afterward draw into length the pit on that side where you meane to propagate, and according as you perceiue that the roots will be best able to yeeld, and be gouerned ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... not, however, as cabinet wood that the Jarra is so highly valuable. It has been found to be some of the best ship-timber in the world. It is so extremely durable, that when it is cut in a healthy state, it is never found to rot, even though it be buried in the ground for years. For seventeen years it has been constantly used in the colony for a variety of purposes. As it resists the white-ant, an insect that destroys oak and every other kind of wood, and is never subject to the dry-rot, it is invaluable for building purposes. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... to paint you out," said Harringay. "I don't want to hear all that Tommy Rot. If you think just because I'm an artist by trade I'm going to talk studio to you, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal representation of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the funding system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and foreign trade prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the hands of the farmer. The taxes will all fall on the landed interest, all the churches will be overturned, none but Frenchmen employed by government, and the monstrous system of liberty and equality, with all its horrid consequences, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... now it's finished. I'm as indifferent to him as if he were a stranger. I should like him to die miserable, poor, and starving, without a friend. I hope he'll rot with some loathsome disease. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... payments; the latter is complained of by the former, who says that the occasion of the accusation had been furnished by him, the accuser. The judge, instead of granting redress, dismisses the complaints against Mr. Markham with reprehension, and sends the complainant to rot in prison, without making one inquiry, or giving himself the trouble of stating to Mr. Markham the complaints against him, and desiring him to clear himself from them. My Lords, if there were nothing but this to mark the treacherous and perfidious nature of his conduct, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... nothin' at all to do with the cussed business, now, I do; I knowed it was boun' to go a mucker, from the very fust! But you and that bloomin' skowbank of a Turnbull would drag me into it, temptin' me with your yarns of treasure, and bein' as rich as a Jew, and a lot more rot o' the same sort, and now, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the latest thing, and it may be jade,' said Bruce rather sarcastically, 'but I'm not a slave to fashion. I never was. And I don't see any use whatever in an opera glass that makes everything look smaller instead of larger, and at a greater distance instead of nearer. I call it rot. I always say what I think. And you can tell your mother what I said ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... "May they rot there!" cried the Spaniard. "But we are not fighting only for to-day and tomorrow. New generations will again fill churches and chapels. We will shed the last drops of our blood to accomplish it, and every true Castilian thinks as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... In that case she could repay Lennox at once. At the thought of it, again she revised her opinion. Paliser was young and in her judgment all young men were insects. On the other hand he was serviceable. Moreover, though he looked cocky, he did not presume. He talked rot, but he did not argue. Then, too, his car was ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... came in, and I saw all those idle ships lying at anchor, just as they have lain since their crews deserted them in '49 to go to the mines—and I know why they haven't been used since, why they will continue to lie there at anchor until they rot ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the Devil came in; he always does when he thinks he is going to lose a convert; and he said in his own fine way, "Oh, what rot! Why didn't God help you before this? Don't bother about it; you have a nice suit; get out of this place and sell the duds and have a good time. I'll help you. I'll be your friend." He's sly, but I put him behind me ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do. It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more extensive it is, the more entrenched he is. It is official dry rot which is part of the price the people pay for having themselves governed. It is national graft. But while our American forms of graft at least stimulate individual cleverness among our compatriots, this German form tends to ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... good coffin: "In our establishment," he readily suggested, "we have a lot of timber of some kind or other called Ch'iang wood, which comes from the T'ieh Wang Mount, in Huang Hai; and which made into coffins will not rot, not for ten thousand years. This lot was, in fact, brought down, some years back, by my late father; and had at one time been required by His Highness I Chung, a Prince of the royal blood; but as he became guilty ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... nor to attempt to remove the stains from his teeth with oriental powders: he would be better employed in rubbing them with charcoal from some funeral pyre. Least of all should he wash them with common water; rather let his guilty tongue, the chosen servant of lies and bitter words, rot in the filth and ordure that it loves! Is it reasonable, wretch, that your tongue should be fresh and clean, when your voice is foul and loathsome, or that, like the viper, you should employ snow-white teeth for the emission of dark, deadly poison? ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... same time eminently law-abiding citizens. They professed a decided preference for nullifying the Stamp Act without violating it. Sitting at dinner over their wine, they swore that they would let ships lie in harbor and rot there if necessary, and would let the courts close for a year or two years, rather than employ taxed papers to collect their just debts; with a round oath they bound themselves to it, sealing the pledge, very likely, by ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... see them putrefying, running into sanies, like corpses left to rot in the open air. On the contrary, the birds have dried and hardened, without undergoing any change. What did they want for their putrefaction? simply the intervention of the Fly. The maggot, therefore, is the primary cause ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... You'd find out how sweet he is! He just pretends to be meek so he can have his own way. And me, I get the credit for being a terrible old crank, but if I didn't blow up once in a while and get something started, we'd die of dry-rot. He never wants to go any place and—Why, last evening, just because the car was out of order—and that was his fault, too, because he ought to have taken it to the service-station and had the battery looked at—and he didn't want to go down to the movies on the trolley. But we went, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... nobody can be married properly—before they're one and twenty. I knew it was rot," said ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... "Oh, rot!" said Barkley. "I'll tell you, once for all, I'm not interested in dreams or foolishness. Now, if you want to go in with us, that's one thing. If you don't, we want to ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... cot, where no dry rot Had ever been by tenant seen, Where ivy clung and wopses stung, Where beeses hummed and drummed and strummed, Where treeses grew and breezes blew— A thatchy roof, quite waterproof, Where countless herds of dicky-birds Built twiggy beds to lay their heads (My ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... the shooters of the chute, or that got on the very latest of this sort of engine of human amusement called the "Hully-Gee-Whizz," a pleasure of the ignorant, metaphorically, a kind of innocents' rot-gut whiskey. The way a journey is gone, which is walking, is a wine, a mellow claret, stimulating to observation, to thought, to speculation, to the flow of talk, gradually, decently warming the blood. Rightly taken (which manner this paper attempts ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... British officers, to annihilate the army of the Khalifa; and in South Africa Kitchener wound up with success a war that had been horribly bungled by others. Military critics had long been aware that the army of India was antiquated, honeycombed with dry-rot, and largely ruled by favorites sitting in high places at Whitehall. Consequently, Kitchener was sent to India with instructions conferring almost plenary power to reorganize the forces, British as well as native. He prefers work to participating ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... virtuous life and tragic death; but not one ever asked me the name of his assassin. So true to nature and the orderings of Providence is the proverb of Solomon: "The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rot." ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away? Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... confronted with the debris of the projected Suakin-Berber Railway. Two or three locomotives that have neither felt the pressure of steam nor tasted oil for a decade lie rusting in the ruined workshops. Huge piles of railway material rot, unguarded and neglected, on the shore. Rolling stock of all kinds—carriages, trucks, vans, and ballast waggons—are strewn or heaped near the sheds. The Christian cemetery alone shows a decided progress, and the long lines of white crosses which ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... "Rot!" Bivens cried. "We've got two tenders. Send your guide ashore with one of the sailors to run his engine. The other man can tow ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... leave my house, and go your way, And search for altars where you may. You're like those natures, dull and gross, From, which comes nothing but by blows; The more I gave, the less I got; I'll now be rich, and you may rot.' ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... be enjoyment, where no envious rule prevents; Sink the steamboats! cuss the railways! rot, O ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... It was rot, anyhow, to be taking a girl's affairs so seriously. I looked at my dream girl's clear eyes, and thought that if she knew what Marcia and I were thinking about her she might have good reason to be angry. Also that Dudley probably ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... rather not of course; but it's the proper thing to do for a sprained ankle. Sylvia Courtney told me so and she attended a course of Ambulance lectures last term and learnt all about first aid on the battle-field. I wanted to go to those lectures frightfully, but Aunt Juliet wouldn't let me. Rather rot I thought it at the time, but I saw afterwards that she couldn't possibly ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... avidity; both paper and bindings becoming mildewed, and often covered with blue mould. If long left in this perilous condition, sure destruction follows; the glue or paste which fastens the cover softens, the leather loses its tenacity, and the leaves slowly rot, until the worthless volumes smell to heaven. Books thus injured may be partially recovered, before the advanced stage of decomposition, by removal to a dry atmosphere, and by taking the volumes apart, drying the sheets, and rebinding—a very expensive, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... florists who grow this profitably as a greenery for cut flowers, and when grown in partial shade is quite dainty and pretty enough for this purpose. The Curled Lettuce is best for this purpose, but if kept damp is almost sure to rot.—Laura Jones. ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... it is an article of commerce. It must first be soaked for some months in a pit on the slimy bank of the backwater, until all the stuff that holds it together in a stiff and obdurate mass has rotted away and set free those hard and smooth fibres which nothing can rot. These, when thoroughly purged of the foul black pollution in which they have sweltered so long, will go out to all quarters of the world under the name of "coir" to make indestructible door mats and other indispensable ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... and where, on the upper platform, a single joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights richly carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously tended. No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other foot of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... characteristics, extravagance of dress, of manners, of living; venality and immorality unblushing and unrestrained. The period of the Directoire is that during which the political men of the Revolution, with no principles left to guide them, gradually rot away; while the men of the sword become more and more their support, and finally oust them ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... in that loud voice which, with all due deference, usually marks the Harrovian, "how many have you got for me? No rot now! I want my ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... cried. "Damn your soul, Neal Ward, but you're a sly one. To think of a true blue Presbyterian like you, a minister's son, God rot you, lying and cuddling a girl in a field. A vixen, by God. Strip her, sergeant, till we see ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... when he too is so near his end. They will let me rot and disappear, and there will be no future for me, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... danger is that about three-fourths of the people of this country should move on in a comfortable manner into an easy life, which, with all its ups and downs, is not uncheered by fortune, while the remainder of the people shall be left to rot and fester in the slums of our cities, or wither in the deserted and abandoned ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... think, who snapped his fingers at me in my misery, lying, as he believed, at his feet, and left me without even this poor sign of remembrance; well satisfied that I should be sent abroad, beyond the reach of farther trouble to him, and should die, and rot there? Who ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... inherited traditions derived from centuries of free government, will save us from such extreme manifestations of democratic tyranny as those to which allusion has been made above. The special danger in England would appear rather to arise from the probability of gradual dry rot, due to prolonged offence against the infallible and relentless laws of economic science. Both British employers of labour and British workmen are insular in their habits of thought, and insular in the range of their acquired ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... sky, more of the infinite possibilities of the region of truth which is the matrix of fact; we should go marching down the hill of life like a battered but still bannered army on its way home. But alas! how often we rot, instead of march, towards the grave! "If he be not rotten before he die," said Hamlet's absolute grave digger.—If the year was dying around Lady Florimel, as she looked, like a deathless sun from a window of the skies, it was dying ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... in my face. Ah, you remember that, do you? Dog, you shall remember it every day of your life! I will not kill you now, as I might, but I will kill you by inches, and you shall die at last at your bench and lie there to rot. That is the fate of the dog who spits in the ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... sayin', Briggs? No, suh, not by a damn-sight you won't! Not while I'm sheriff o' this county an' upholdin' law an' order in it, you won't drag no dead nigger behind my hawse—nor yet in front of him, neither! Let the nigger lay where he is and rot—what's ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the candleshades and shakes his head. "You print any such rot as that about me," says he, "and I'll come down and wreck the office. I'm out of all that now, and into something that has opened my eyes to what sort of useless individual I am. Behold, ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... But it's different me going and you going. I've got nothing to live for. Don't think I'm maudlin, or any rot of that sort; but you know all about the past. I've never mentioned it to you, and, of course, you haven't to me; and I never should have. But I will now. I loved Mary with all my heart and soul, Tom. She didn't know how much, and probably I didn't either. But that's done, and no man on earth ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... of the Southwest all things change slowly. Growth is slow and decay is even slower. The body of a dead horse in the desert does not rot but dessicates, the hide remaining intact for months, the bones perhaps for years. Men and beasts often live to great age. The pinon trees on the red hills were there when the conquerors came, and they are not much larger now—only ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... Jack's an ass. There's enough brass on this to load a mule—and, if the Americans know anything about anything, it can be cut down to a bit only. 'Don't want the watering-bridle, either. Humbug!—Half a dozen sets of chains and pulleys for one horse! Rot! (Scratching his head.) Now, let's consider it all over from the beginning. By Jove, I've forgotten the scale of weights! Ne'er mind. 'Keep the bit only, and eliminate every boss from the crupper to breastplate. No breastplate at all. Simple leather strap ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... seedlings were used with an average spacing of about 28 by 32 feet. The grove was cultivated for about 8 years after planting. The trees are now in fairly good condition but many are affected with heart-rot. They are quite spreading and bushy in form and are not suitable for lumber. There is now about 30 cords of wood per acre. The average diameter is 20 inches with an average height of 60 feet. The ground is sodded over ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... art belongs! —But when they list their lean and flashy songs, Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;— The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed! But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly—and foul contagion spread." ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... Capt'n's making the money fly. Bowls and beer, and cards and betting—it's ter'ble, ma'm, ter'ble. Somebody should hould him. He's distracted like. Giving to everybody as free as free. Parsons and preachers and the like—they're all at him, same as flies at a sheep with the rot." ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... What recks it them? what need they? they are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said; But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past, That ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... your own cowardly heart, man alive," replied Anthony; "for my part, I'm afeared o' nothin'. Put round the glass, and don't be nursin' it there all night. Sure we're not so bad as the rot among the sheep, nor the black leg among the bullocks, nor the staggers among the horses, any how; an' yet they'd hang us up only for bein' fond of a bit ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Richet, Lodge, Barrett, Lombroso, Generals Drayson and Turner, Sergeant Ballantyne, W. T. Stead, Judge Edmunds, Admiral Usborne Moore, the late Archdeacon Wilberforce, and such a cloud of other witnesses, can be dismissed with the empty "All rot" or "Nauseating drivel" formulae. As Mr. Arthur Hill has well said, we have reached a point where further proof is superfluous, and where the weight of disproof lies upon those who deny. The very people ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exclaimed Melville, drawing back a step or two. "I couldn't, Kip. Don't put me in such a hole. I wouldn't dare. Straight goods, I wouldn't. You don't know my dad. Why, he wouldn't even hear me out. He'd say at the outset that it was all rot and that he couldn't be ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... verse and in four books, descriptive of English wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, "cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and plants, which are also regarded as residences of spirits, has to be placated with offerings of food and other sacrifices. You will see in the Fetish huts above mentioned dishes of plantain and fish left till they rot. Dr. Nassau says the life or essence of the food only is eaten by the spirit, the form of the vegetable or flesh being left to be removed when its life is ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in every room in the house. REGGIE said it was awful. He had to lock his bedroom door, shove the chest-of-drawers against it, and smoke with his head stuck right up the chimney. He got a peck of soot, one night, right on the top of his nut. Now I call that simple rot. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... bygone loves or pin'st For dear ones that have gone and left thee but their trace, Or if thou'st lost thy love, like me, ah, then, indeed, Severance long-felt desire discovereth apace. God guard a lover true! Though my bones rot, nor time Nor absence from my heart her image ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... milk for living babes; the earth for living hosts; The clean flame for the un-souled dead.' (Oh, strange the words of Ghosts.) 'If we had owned this little spot In life, we need not lie and rot ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... carried it eighty years as easy as eight," declared Arizona. "I been waiting all this time, and now I got you, Sinclair. You'll rot behind the bars the best part of the life that's left to you. And when you come out—I'll meet ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... murmur or reply, but reflected, nevertheless, on the consequences. There was a large quantity of valuable lumber ready for the carpenters; it was procured at great expense and labor, but must, in consequence of the interdict, become a total loss, and rot on the ground. Human prudence would have regarded the event as a misfortune, and Sister Bourgeois, obedient as she was, sighed bitterly in secret. But God, who knows how to draw good out of evil, turned the contradiction into a work ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... sample of Rossiter,' he said. 'You'd think from the fuss he's made that the business of the place was at a standstill till we got to work. Perfect rot! There's never anything to do here till after lunch, except checking the stamps and petty cash, and I've done that ages ago. There are three letters. You may as well enter them. It all looks like work. But you'll ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... her bird mope or her apple rot, I shall know has not kept her faith," said the wise emperor; then mounting his steed he wished them "Good-health" and set off with his brave soldiers ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... example of 'em. The only two lawyers in town is Windy and Mart, which has been in the poker game theirselves, the same as always. The doctor says the hull thing is a put-up job, and he can't get the money, and he wouldn't if he could, and he'll lay in that town calaboose and rot the rest of his life and eat the town poor before he'll stand it. And the squire says he'll jest take their hosses and wagon fur c'latteral till they make up the rest of the two hundred and fifty dollars. And the ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... quit thee then," quoth he, "devil fetch Myself, although thou starve for it, and rot." "Alas!" quoth she, "the pence I have 'em not." "Pay me," quoth he, "or by the sweet Saint Anne, I'll bear away thy staff and thy new pan For the old debt thou ow'st me for that fee, Which out of pocket I ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... old shanty go to rot, the white people's clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Baptist Church ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... gets ahead here." (Loud applause from the small boys, who look meaningly at Flashman and other boys at the tables.) "Then there's fuddling about in the public-house, and drinking bad spirits, and punch, and such rot-gut stuff. That won't make good drop-kicks or chargers of you, take my word for it. You get plenty of good beer here, and that's enough for you; and drinking isn't fine or manly, whatever some of you may ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... The seeds rot under their clods: The garners are laid desolate, The barns are broken down; For the corn ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... reasonable for Congress to order the compulsory purchase of two million dollars' worth of eggs per month," in order to sustain the hen products of the United States, "than it is to buy two million dollars' worth of silver; because the eggs could be used, or else would rot, while the silver cannot be used, and is expensive to store ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... be buried, and those solemn words Give "dust to dust," leaving the soul no home On this vain earth, O hear me! Or if still There be a something sentient in the body, Through all corruption's stages, till our frames Rot, rot, and seem no more,—and thus the soul Is cag'd in bones through which the north wind rattles, Or haunts the black skull wash'd up by the waves Upon the moaning shore—poor weeping skull, From whose deep-blotted, eyeless socket-holes ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... an expression in which there was incredulity and astonishment, as if he believed and yet doubted what his eyes beheld. Mutely he pointed to the tree growing before the door, and to the reddish, crumbling rot into which the logs had been turned by ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... men. When a dash of speed is called for, when to be fleet of foot is to elude vengeance-seeking Indians, they must travel as swiftly as the deer. The Zanes were all sprinters. I could do something of the kind; Betty was fast on her feet, as that old fort will testify until the logs rot; Isaac was fleet, too, and Jonathan can get over the ground like a scared buck. But, even ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... no time for charity,' said the Alderman. 'I heartily begrudge the subscriptions we have to give from time to time in the City, yet one is compelled to assist some of those for the sake of business; but as for any outside charity, pooh! it's all rot, it's been proved long ago they are all frauds. I shall always decline absolutely to give anything or do anything for any outside ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... that," returned the girl, with heat. "It is terrible to leave men lying out who have got wounded. It is all rot to say the open air does them good. If the wound was clean from a bullet, and the air pure, and the soil fresh as in a new country, that would be true in some of the cases. The wound would heal itself. But a lot of the wounds are from jagged ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... all right then," burst out Denver, wrathfully, "but I can tell you one thing—you won't get no quit-claim for your mine. I'll lay in jail and rot before I'll come through with it, so you can go as far as you like. But ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Graham? Eh, mother?' said George lazily. 'There are worse sounding names. But Gladys herself affects to have no pride in her long descent; that very day she was quoting to me that rot of Burns about rank being only the guinea stamp, and all that sort of thing. All very well for a fellow like Burns, who was only a ploughman. It has done Gladys a lot of harm living in the slums; it won't be easy eradicating her queer notions, I ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... at one time, years and years ago," Charley said, "see, there is an ironwood stump there that still shows the signs of an axe. It takes generations and generations for one of those stumps to rot." ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in hundreds to these rocks and cast into dungeons to perish. I have seen such places; they are vast caverns artificially excavated below the surface of the earth; into these the unfortunates were lowered and left to crawl about and rot, the living mingled with the dead. To this day they find mouldering skeletons, loaded with heavy iron ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... it, you fool—for we are the stream. The old are stagnant mudpools, you don't need to check them, but don't let them rot away or dry up; give them an outlet, and they'll flow with ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Pasha, Murad V. reigned shadow-like for three months, and during the same year Abdul Hamid was finally selected to fill the throne, and stand forth as the Shadow of God. It was a disturbed and tottering inheritance to which he succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of corruption, but the inheritor proved ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... is one to go?" "Don't ask me," the Englishman protested. "And above all, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Since I've been on this job, I've learned to believe in telepathy and mind reading and witchcraft and all manner of unholy rot. And I don't want you to come to a sudden end through somebody's establishing illicit intercourse ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... very sorrowful, strange spectralities bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the respective net results. France lies down to rot into grand Spontaneous-Combustion, Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else; which still lasts, to her own great peril, and the great affliction of neighbors. Poor England, after such enormous stumbling ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... or stone bridge a beam affected by dry rot or a stone weakened by the effects of frost may lie hidden from the inspection of even the most vigilant observer until, when the process has gone far enough, the bridge suddenly gives way under a not unusual strain, and death and disaster shock the community into a sense of the inherent defects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... dare say. The "unclean cult of the sunflower," eh? You saw that piece in the "Daily Post"? I hate all that rot myself. It isn't healthy, you know, and I don't believe the English people will stand it. But talking of curiosities, I've got something here that's worth ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... for nations!—Search the page Of many thousand years—the daily scene, The flow and ebb of each recurring age, The everlasting to be which hath been, Hath taught us nought or little: still we lean 60 On things that rot beneath our weight, and wear Our strength away in wrestling with the air; For't is our nature strikes us down: the beasts Slaughtered in hourly hecatombs for feasts Are of as high an order—they must go ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron |
