"Ruck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the Pickwickians to draw the inn out from the ruck of the commonplace, and to spread its fame to all corners of the globe; and the fact that it once had royal patronage is nothing in comparison to the other fact that it was the headquarters of the Pickwickians on a certain memorable occasion. That is the ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... on my part. I acknowledged frankly that it was a presumption. I was a young doctor, with nothing to distinguish me from the ruck of young doctors. And she was—well, she was one of those rare and radiant beings to whom even monarchs bow, and the whole earth offers the incense of ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... through the town that day on their way to prison, and a fleering rabble surged to and fro about the streets of London in gala dress, boisterous, jovial, pitiless. From high to low by common consent the town made holiday. Above the common ruck, in windows hired for the occasion, the fashionable world, exuding patronage and perfume, sat waiting for the dreary procession to pass. In the windows opposite where I found standing room a party from the West End made much talk and laughter. In the group I recognized Antoinette ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Kay had worked her mount easily up through the ruck to contend with Peep-sight. The half-thoroughbred was three years old and his muscles had been hardened by many a wild scramble up and down the hills of El Palomar; he was game, he was willing, and for half a mile he was marvelously fast, as Farrel ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... two crouching, snarling animals, the raw, primeval passions of their hearts released, each seeing through a mist of red; a mist that had risen up to roll across a mighty land and plunge its noblest sons into a bloody ruck of war. ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... music the head and shoulders of the real Wagner emerge boldly from the ruck of commonplace which constitutes the bulk of the operatic music of the time. How any one could have failed to see the strength and beauty of much of the Dutchman is one of those things almost impossible ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Out of the ruck and the roar of life He stepped aside to rest one day, And the flowers that grew along the way Lifted him out of the wearisome strife That had claimed his every waking thought For years ... and a miracle ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... was crushed with a sense of her own terrible impotency. A failure! She must write herself down a failure! At her age, with her ambitions, with her artistic temperament and creative instincts, she was yet to be denied all coherent means of expression. She was to fall back amongst the ruck, a young woman of talent, content perhaps to earn a scanty living by painting Christmas cards, or teaching at a kindergarten. Her finger-nails dug into her flesh. It was the bitterest moment of her ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as {PostScript}, NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many {marketroid} types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th time they ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... lifted now and then, he could see naked forms swaying, bending forward, plying their weapons. Somewhere in the midst of it, out in the ruck of hoof and horn, his friend was riding, forgetting all else but the excitement of the chase. What if accident had befallen either of them? Lewis could not ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... Raffles; "and if I may say so, Mr. Levy, I respect you for it. You don't call yourself MacGregor or Montgomery. You don't sail under false colours at all. You fly the skull and crossbones of Daniel Levy, and it's one of the points that distinguish you from the ruck of money-lenders and put you in a class by yourself. Unfortunately, the other points are not so creditable. If you are more brazen than most you are also more unscrupulous; if you fly at higher game, you descend to lower dodges. You may be the biggest man alive at your job; you ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... never struck them that we should want to sleep in a place like De Aar. Disgusted, we tried the hotel. Here they loosed dogs on us and turned out the guard. Still more disgusted, we returned to our bedding, and sardined in with the ruck and rubbish on ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... who passed with his hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and sag of waist—all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile; the result was an idiotic simper. The ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... that, if I didn't land a dollar," said Porter. "Andy, it hurt me more to see the filly banged about there in the ruck than it did ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... ruck, for the ninety and nine, who, after all, ought to find it impossible, not merely hard. But it's different for you and me, Jimmy Grierson, because we're not in the ruck. Of course you'll write, for it's in you, and you would be a fool to try anything ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... into mid-stream to see that strange prince go by, little thinking in a few minutes I should be shaking hands with him, a wet and dripping hero. The crowd came up, and having the advantage of the wind, it did not take me long to get a front place in the ruck, whence I set to work, with republican interest in royalty, to stare at the man who An said was the head of Martian society. He did not make me desire to renounce my democratic principles. The royal fellow was sitting in the centre of the barge under a canopy and on a throne which was a mass ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... nearer. Behind him came four or five supporters, in cloth white as his. Behind them came a ruck of Syrian youths, effeminate, vicious. Came a croud of donkey-boys, impish, black. The wrestler walked more slowly as he approached to pass the iron doors. And Shane was startled into a sudden smile at the sight of his face—a girl's face, with a girl's eyes. And in ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... street with a noise like a thousand smithies. The houses hung above him till they almost hid the sky, and seemed to be reeling and ready to fall upon his head when he looked up; so that he urged the little roan with his uneasy heels, and wished himself out of this monstrous ruck where the walls were so close together that there was not elbow-room to live, and the air seemed only heat, thick and stifling, full of dust ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head, Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on persons of genius, gave us Zastrozzi ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... upbringing. If he could not, he would still be something of an outsider though all the world should acclaim him. Dick's careless speech—she called it stupid—affected her strangely. It lifted her suitor out of the ruck, and made ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... upward swing of my body I was safely aboard, knife still in hand, peering eagerly forward. Through the gloom concealing the deck, I could perceive only dim figures, a riot of men, battling furiously hand to hand, yet out of the ruck loomed through the darkness in larger outline than the others—-Cochose, the negro. I leaped at the fellow, and struck with the keen knife, missing the heart, but plunging the blade deep into the flesh of ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... volumes by Henry St. George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame—the shame he bore so bravely—in the ruck of his 'output.' He is the only one of those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said that he was 'generous and delicate and pursued the prize.' He is a more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... hounds meet within easy reach of the University City, six days in the week, hunting over a country where you may usually be with them at the finish without doing anything desperate, if content to come in with the ruck, the ponies, and the old farmers; or where, if so inclined, you may have more than an average number of fast and furious runs, and study the admirable style of some of the best horsemen in the world among the Oxfordshire ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... turkeys formed a small part. The others were men and women of the most extravagant attire and behaviour it is possible to imagine. I saw a punchinello on stilts wading among the rest; there were women flaunting feathers on their tousled heads, and moustachioed bullies who might have come from the ruck of some army on the march; pages, minions, magicians, astrologers, women's ruffians, castrati—it was as if one of the wildest hours of the Piazzetta of Venice had been transported by witchcraft to this quiet place. As I approached, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... automobile its owner stopped talking and stared at the tall stranger with some apprehension. Then the big man beckoned unobtrusively to a policeman. It was evident that Farr was not of the same sort as the ruck of men from among whom he had just emerged, nevertheless he had come from among them. The lordly man in the car had observed him moving in the group, for Farr had loomed above the heads of the others; what he had been saying to the malcontents the big man ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... of flesh meat. It was to come one way or the other—you couldn't put up much longer with such a puke-stocking as my precious brother-in-law. (That's one of the great points of Shakespeare, Davy, my lad—perhaps you haven't noticed it—you get such a ruck of bad names out of him for the asking! Puke-stocking is good—real good. If it wasn't made for a sanctimonious hypocrite of a Baptist like Purcell it ought to have been.) And "Spanish-pouch" too! Oh, I love "Spanish-pouch"! When I've called a man "Spanish-pouch", I'm the better ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The horses disappear in the distance.—They are off,—not yet distinguishable, at least to me. A little waiting time, and they swim into our ken, but in what order of precedence it is as yet not easy to say. Here they come! Two horses have emerged from the ruck, and are sweeping, rushing, storming, towards us, almost side by side. One slides by the other, half a length, a length, a length and a half. Those are Archer's colors, and the beautiful bay Ormonde ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... impulse to empty an ink-bottle over the young calf? Fauntleroy kids are a reproach to our civilization. Men, women and children, all of us, crowd around the grimy Deignan of the Merrimac crew, and shout and cheer for Bill Smith, the Rough Rider, who carried his mate out of the ruck at San Juan and twirls his hat awkwardly and explains: "Ef I hadn't a saw him fall he would 'a' laid thar yit!"—and go straight home and pretend to be proud of a snug little poodle of a man who doesn't play for fear of soiling his picture-clothes, and who says: "Yes, sir, thank ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... man to the core, exhibited quite a feudal loyalty to the paper which had raised him from the ruck and placed him on the ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... frequently urge me, it is impossible! My house is a basilica rather than a villa, owing to the crowds of visitors from Formiae. But (you'll say) do I really compare the AEmilian tribe to the crowd in a basilica?[232] Well, I say nothing about the common ruck—the rest of them don't bother me after ten o'clock: but C. Arrius is my next door neighbour, or rather, he almost lives in my house, and even declares that the reason for his not going to Rome is that he may spend whole days with me here philosophizing! ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... loveliest of the women of the Bible—my wife says so. She knows all about them. And the best painters in the world have shown her standing among the field of oats. By the Lord, sir, it's sheer blasphemy! and worse than that, it's making people—good, religious people, mind, not the ruck—it's making them ask why the blazes I gave you ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... caught a jumbled jargon of Spanish shouts, mingled with Mexican and American words, and then out of the ruck of riders a solitary ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... bloodthirsty savages, not nervous when he gets a child on his knee all by himself and tells her delightful stories,—but nervous as a boy on his first day at school when he finds himself being lionised in a drawing-room, or picked out of the ruck of guests for any particular notice. And so when he joined the 13th, behind the ebullient spirits was this innate bashfulness, which, added to the natural modesty of a gentleman, kept his animal spirits in a delightful simmer, and found favour for him in the ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... all those men come to discover who live before God as Earlston lived, a provision that secures to such men's souls a depth, and an inwardness, and an increasing exercise that carries them on to reaches of inward sanctification that the ruck and run of so-called Christians know nothing about, and are ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... you out, you have the sat isfaction at any rate of keeping them to yourself, though you lose the pleasures which arise from being sought after, and made much of for their sakes, and feeling raised above the ruck of your neighbors. On the other hand, if they are all like this, you might as well try to keep the sunshine and air to yourself. Universal human nature rises up against you; and besides, they will not stand it themselves. And, indeed, why should they? Women, to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... slept, The woman huddled and quaked. And now was the peep of day. High and long on their left the mountainous island lay; And over the peaks of Taiarapu arrows of sunlight struck. On shore the birds were beginning to sing: the ghostly ruck Of the buried had long ago returned to the covered grave; And here on the sea, the woman, waxing suddenly brave, Turned her swiftly about and looked in the face of the man. And sure he was none that she knew, none of her country or clan: A stranger, mother-naked, and marred with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kind of break to the persistent monotony of the regular treadmill round, should be, they think, sufficient for any sane, well-balanced, self-respecting creature,—and if a man or woman elects to stand out of the common ruck and say: "I refuse to live in a chaos of uncertainties—I will endeavour to know why my particular atom of self is considered a necessary, if infinitesimal, part of the Universe,"—such an one is looked upon with either distrust or ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... streets, they were intently watched by crowds of men, women, and children; the men were principally rebel soldiers, mixed with a smattering of insurgent townspeople, the women and children—creatures of all sorts—from the village folk to the common ruck which follows a native army. Many were picturesque, but others looked like the drainings of the slums of larger cities. There was no doubt as to the sentiments they entertained for the white people, for, as they caught sight of Helmar's face, under escort of rebel soldiers, unmistakable ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... right and left with his huge sword, and cut down the nearest of his assailants; but his horse, mortally wounded, dragged him down as it fell; he was up again in an instant, and, standing beside his horse, he laid low two more Spaniards who were pressing him closely; the ruck of the soldiers crowded about him; they did not know him, but his stature, his strength, his bravery, his coat of mail studded with golden lilies, and his helmet overshadowed by a thick plume of feathers pointed him out to all as the finest capture to make; his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Out of the ruck of the defenders of the Moon, a single Aircar, whose gleaming gray side was marked with queer crimson splashes, broke ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... my power," she answered slowly. "Until he has fallen back again to the ruck. Until he has tasted a little of the misery from which at least he might have ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... taken rank but slightly lower than officers of the navy, and much ahead of ordinary commercial people and mariners. When off duty in Calcutta the pilot goes to his club and drives on the Maidan with other Anglo-Indians of quality, and never is seen about hotel bars and cafes like the ruck of seafaring men having ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... way to the mean streets and wooden warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old cities of Europe. Nob Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the mess and ruck of common life that denned and laired at ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... had pressed so close about Stabber and the opposing orator seemed all in an instant to split asunder, and with trailing war bonnet and followed by only two or three of his braves, the former lashed his way westward and swept angrily out of the ruck and went circling away toward the crest, while, with loud acclamation, brandishing shield and lance and rifle in superb barbaric tableau, the warriors lined up in front of the victorious young leader who, sitting high in his stirrups, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... swansdown, or the new cotton flannel, may, any of them, be used to make it. For the winter season it will be found to supply a great increase in warmth, and, to the invalid, a great comfort, as it fits closely, will not form creases, nor "ruck up," as the ordinary nightgown always does, to the discomfort ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various |
