"Quicksand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief, A divine malice, a disquieting voice: Thus I was shapen, and it is my pride To nourish all the fires that mingled me. I am not long moved, I do not mar my face, Though men have sunk in me as in a quicksand. Well, death is terrible. Was I not worth it? Does not the light change on me as I breathe? Could I not take the hearts of generations, Walking among their dreams? Oh, I have might, Although it drives ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... It was a quicksand. The pony cried again—cried to them for help. Caius next found himself with O'Shea holding the creature's head, and aiding its mad plunging, even while his own feet sank deeper and deeper. There was a moment when they all three plunged forward together, and then ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... it packs firmly; but in the Alps during a storm, the snow freezes as it falls and forms into little hard pellets. These tiny lumps of ice pile up around a traveller, and when he tries to push onward he sinks as though in a bed of quicksand. Unless help is at hand he soon is buried out of sight. The winds sweep fiercely through the passes between the mountain peaks, and send terrible, whirling clouds of snow that cut the face and blind the eyes, and many times a wanderer ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... a voice now shrill with the strain of this new crisis rushing so unexpectedly upon him: "I heard Jake give a holler. 'What the hell's the trouble?' I yells. Then he lets out a beller, 'Save me!' he screeches, 'I'm into a sink-hole! The quicksand's got me,' sez he. So I drop my rifle, I did, — there she stands against that birch sapling! — and I run down into them ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... I made one of my customary trips to White House, in the company of O'Ganlon. The latter individual, in the course of a "healthy dash" that he made down the railroad ties,—whereby two shoes shied from his mare's hoofs,—reined into a quicksand that threatened to swallow his steed. He afterward left his sword at Summit Station, and I, obligingly, rode back three miles to recover it. We dined at Daker's, where Glumley sat beside the baby-face, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the first place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... free my limbs. I could neither move them backward nor forward, to the right nor to the left; and I became sensible that I was gradually going down. Then the fearful truth flashed upon me: I was sinking in a quicksand. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... any visible water. It may be interesting to some of our readers to know that there are many of these curious rivers in western America, which, for miles disappear from the surface of the earth, and, probably, run through the quicksand beneath, as they reappear again. The outline of the river usually exists between the place of its disappearance and the place where the water again comes to the surface of the earth. By digging a few feet into the sand within the outline, the water is generally obtained. It takes but a short time, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... water suddenly to shoal from 6 to 3 to 1, where we touched the ground, however on heaving up our keel she went off into 2 fathoms, when we came to, observed the Investigator to ground, she was caught on a bank of quicksand in 11 feet at half-past 10 A.M. she floated, a little after Captain Flinders went away inshore, sounding. Several native fires in sight in ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... Coal holdings on the market in great blocks. His treachery took Roebuck completely by surprise—for Roebuck believed in this fair-weather "gentleman," foul-weather coward, and neglected to allow for that quicksand that is always under the foundation of the man who has inherited, not earned, his wealth. But for the blundering credulity of rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... that time was one of the largest of the rivers emptying into the Cumberland Basin. It was a great undertaking to dam its waters with an aboideau, and to make matters worse, the place chosen proved to have a quicksand bottom, which made it almost impossible to build a firm foundation. For nearly four years they worked at this aboideau, and finally had to abandon it. Dated Dec. 27th, 1808, there is this entry in the journal: "Working at the aboideau. ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... life made a definite assertion of fact to one of the opposite sex. When it became absolutely necessary to change a woman's preconceived notions as to what she should do—as, for instance, discouraging her riding through quicksand—he would persuade somebody else to issue the advice. And he would cower in the background blushing his absurd little blushes at his second-hand temerity. Add to this narrow, sloping shoulders, a soft voice, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; "ah that deceit should steal such gentle shapes" [Richard III]; "a quicksand of deceit" [Henry VI]; decipimur specie recti [Lat][Horace]; falsi crimen[Lat]; fraus est celare fraudem[Lat]; lupus in fabula[Lat]; "so smooth, he daubed his vice with show ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and fifty miles westward from its confluence with the Missouri. There was no road leading into the river, nor any evidence of its having been crossed by any one, at that place. We were informed that the bottom was of quicksand, and fording, therefore, dangerous. We tested it, by riding horses across. Contrary to our expectations, the bottom was found to be a surface of smooth sand, packed hard enough to bear up the wagons, when the movement was quick and continuous. ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... she cast away an artist she generally cast away his art with him. If it was first-rate she did not condemn it as bad. She contented herself with saying that she was "sick of it." And very soon a great many of her friends, and their friends, were sick of it, too. She was a quicksand because she was a singularly complete egoist. But very few people who met her failed to come under the spell of her careless charm, and many, because she had much impulse, swore that she had a large heart. Only to her husband, and occasionally, in a fit of passion, to someone who she thought had ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... sea in much smaller and quite different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of science and some of its applications to navigation, which was worse. The presence of the god or fairy can only be deduced from the fact that they never definitely ran into anything, either a boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a man-of-war. Apart from this negative description, their voyage would be difficult to describe. It took at least a fortnight, and MacIan, who was certainly the shrewder sailor of the two, realized that they were sailing west into the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... that there is some process by which matter has been brought from one state to the other. Whether, however, the nebular hypothesis lays down the road travelled to this transfiguration, we are not sure. Some of it seems like solid rock, and some like shifting quicksand. Doubtless there is a road from that chaos to this fair cosmos. The nebular hypothesis has surveyed, worked, and perfected many long reaches of this road, but the rivers are not bridged, the chasms not filled, nor ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... retreat. Ready to make roads, throw up works, tear up railroads, or hew out and build wooden bridges; or, best of all, to go for the Johnnies under hot sun or heavy rain, through swamp and mire and quicksand. They marched ten miles to storm Fort McAllister. And how the cheers broke from them when the pop pop pop of the skirmish line began after we came in sight of Savannah! No man who has seen but not shared their life may talk of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... job of the crossing. The river was high, and his mules quickly mired down in the quicksand. The more they pawed ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why do you ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... of June the Platte River was reached, about twenty-five miles below Grand Island. Captain Bonneville measured the stream at that point, found it to be twenty-two hundred yards wide, and from three to six feet deep, the bottom full of quicksand. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... by one of the horses and the doctor ordered him to stay at the Forester's for the present. Innstetten undertook to drive home in his place. Sidonie Grasenabb rode part of the way with Effi and Crampas, till a small stream with a quicksand bottom was encountered, when she left the sleigh and joined her family in their carriage. Crampas who had been sent by Innstetten to look after the ladies in his sleigh, was now alone with Effi. When she saw that the roundabout way was bringing ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the pilot cut of fifteen feet, as originally planned; the insistence of the Levee Board that levees in the back areas must be raised to elevation 30; development of unforeseen and unforeseeable quicksand conditions in the various excavations; requirements of railroads for bridges of greater capacity and strength than needed; building of a power line to the Foundation Company's plant—not a Dock Board job, but one that the ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... upon the foundation of a bridge that was then being erected across the Connecticut river at Springfield, Mass., of 1260 feet in length. It was regarded as a very difficult undertaking, as the bed of the river was composed mostly of quicksand, and a rise of 25-1/2 feet in the river had to be provided for, and floating ice, its full width, fifteen inches in thickness. Maj. George W. Whistler, the first of his profession, was chief engineer of the work, and he had as advisers Maj. McNeal, Capt. Swift, and other eminent ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... the deeper will he sink into the one, or slide the further upon the other. The best way to help men to stand fast is to give them something to stand upon. And the only standing ground that will never yield, nor collapse, nor, like the quicksand with the tide round it, melt away, we do not know how, from beneath our feet, is 'the grace of God.' Or, as Dr. Watts says, in one ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... that agriculture becomes more and more difficult, and sunshine an almost forgotten benediction!—let them go their own foolish way till they learn wisdom of themselves—no one could ever teach them what they refuse to learn, till they tumble into a bog or quicksand of dilemma and have ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... "Quicksand! It was a dry, solid stream-bed when I ran the line through here and drew the plans for Number Ten," ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... can't. Honest, Bobbie," protested Van. "I've got into a quicksand or a quagmire or something. Look at me. I'm up to my knees now, and if you don't hurry you'll see nothing of me but my collar. I saved your life yesterday; you might do the same ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... fancy for stirrin' incident an' lively scenes, thar's a time when the rains has raised the old Canadian ontil that quicksand ford at Tascosa—which has done eat a hundred teams if ever it swallows one!—is torn up complete an' the bottom of the river nothin' save b'ilin' sand with a shallow yere an' a hole deep enough to drown a house scooped out jest beyond. An' how since ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... his army plunged and sank almost out of sight. And there was no better weather on the Peninsula than at Manassas. His cavalrymen, when they had got their sea-legs off, and mounted, cut a sorry figure in the quicksand. And his artillery sunk above its boots. Indeed it was with the greatest difficulty his army could be kept on the surface. There was ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... first place, they believed in witchcraft as a fact, and when charged with it, they probably became insane. In their insanity they confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted—charged with a crime that they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand, every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at the mercy of the spiders of superstition, hope fled, and nothing remained but the insanity of confession. The whole world appeared ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... we knew to get over; it was a regular quicksand. Rainbow never got flustered if he was up to his neck in a bog, but my horse got frightened and plunged, so that I had to jump off. Jim's horse was a trifle better, but he hadn't much to spare. We weren't sorry to take the bridles out of their mouths and let them pick a bit on ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Phaeacia, as you know, is chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there are navigable seas, or ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot name a coast to which they do not resort. Every rock and every quicksand is known to them that lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight; and with such unerring certainty they make to their destination that some have said that they have no need of pilot or rudder, but that they move ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... forces in 1648, large mill-stones having been rolled down upon him from the rising grounds, so that the republican general was in considerable danger, and he only escaped with life by making his horse plunge into a quicksand. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... I. It was a black fog. Robert could have landed ten thousand men, and we none the wiser. Does he tell how we were out all day riding the marsh, and how I near perished in a quicksand, and coughed like a sick ewe for ten days after?" cried ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... and acids will never be found," she said, breathlessly; "I put everything into the swamp. It is quicksand." ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... statements! Life resents nothing so much as taking her for granted. When she hears her mariners cry: 'Clear sailing now,' she invariably tosses them a storm. When they exclaim with relief: 'a quiet port,' she laughs in her sleeve and presents them with quicksand. Now I will tell you something, prophesy, without crystal, your palm or any astrological charts. See, I am always the fortune-teller. Listen." Her voice sank into deep, rich tones. "On your throne in ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Hunting the White Rhinoceros A Leopard Hunt Life in California A Storm among the Icebergs Fall of the Rossberg The Rifleman of Chippewa Shipwreck of the Blendenhall Adventures of Sergeant Champe Adventure with Pirates Kenton, the Spy The Dying Volunteer Escape from a Mexican Quicksand Charged by a Rhinoceros Burning of the Erie Conflict with an Indian Fire on the Prairies The Captain's Story Tussle with a Wildcat Incident in Frontier Life Encounter with Robbers Shipwreck of the Monticello A Jungle Recollection Attack of Boonesborough Thrilling Incidents ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... at the end of the fourteenth century, and whenever a Chamar is asked what he is, he replies a Ravi Das. Another tradition current among them alleges that their original ancestor was the youngest of four Brahman brethren who went to bathe in a river and found a cow struggling in a quicksand. They sent the youngest brother in to rescue the animal, but before he could get to the spot it had been drowned. He was compelled, therefore, by his brothers to remove the carcase, and after he had done this they turned him out ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the sands to Liverpool every day for his lessons, and that she could see him through the telescope all the way to the first houses on the outskirt of the town. Just about midway, however, there was a spot of treacherous quicksand, and I confess I wondered at my friend's courage in watching her boy pass that point: he knew it well, and was little likely to take his pony too near it; but I confess I would rather have trusted to his caution to avoid the place, than watched him pass ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... San Gabriel, at the spot where this action was fought, is about one hundred yards wide, the current about knee-deep, flowing over a quicksand bottom. The left bank, by which the Americans approached, is level; that on the right is also level for a short distance back, but beyond this narrow plain a bank fifty feet in height commands the ford and the intervening flat, while both banks ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... said; "hair-breadth adventures—not even as wide as that, some of them. I know a fellow that got buried in a book; it was absorbing just like quicksand, and he got absorbed in it. What were you going to do, Kid? Throw the coffee-pot at him if he didn't join? You didn't intend to hack him to pieces with your scoutknife, did you? Because a scout is supposed ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... exactly what the Inquiries are-and this wise nation is gaping to see the chick which their old brood-hen the House of Commons will produce from an egg laid in November, neglected till April, and then hatched in a quicksand! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... college man to lead the half-tamed boy into the stronger places of life; nor shove him to the dangerous ground where his feet must sink in the quicksand or the mire! ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... be not yet arrived, at least we should have the patience to await it. If this generation was but destined to struggle in the quicksand of vice, into which despotism had plunged it; if the theatre of our revolution was destined but to present to the eyes of the universe a struggle between perfidy and weakness, egotism and ambition;—the rising generation would ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to government, but reformation. When ministry rests upon public opinion, it is not indeed built upon a rock of adamant; it has, however, some stability. But when it stands upon private humor, its structure is of stubble, and its foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it again,—He that supports every administration subverts all government. The reason is this: The whole business in which a court usually takes an interest goes on at present equally well, in whatever hands, whether high or low, wise or foolish, scandalous or reputable; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cover of darkness by the old woman from the mansion-house. Northmour and the young lady, sometimes together, but more often singly, would walk for an hour or two at a time on the beach beside the quicksand. I could not but conclude that this promenade was chosen with an eye to secrecy; for the spot was open only to the seaward. But it suited me not less excellently; the highest and most accidented of the sand-hills immediately adjoined; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Money—men envied the rich nowadays, he said, and the rich man had no rights in the courts or out of them; friends—they had gone up in the market, and he could not afford them; politics—he had found it a quicksand. So he jabbered to Neal Ward, his secretary, and pulled down the curtains of his car on the station side of every stop the train made ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... with the current. Suddenly, we stopped. Our usual proceeding in such cases was to leap out and push the boat off. That night, fortunately, we were chilly, and did not fancy a midnight ducking. Each taking an oar, we thrust at the bar. The oars went down to the grip in quicksand. Had we leaped out as usual, there would have been two burials that night ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... he continued, "we are working under a high air-pressure just now, some days as high as forty pounds. You see, we have struck the very worst part of the job, a stretch of quicksand in the river-bed, and if we can get through this we'll strike pebbles and rock pretty soon, and then we'll ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the most inconvenient person to talk to!" said Mr. Motley with a glance at the handsome face. "Like a quicksand—closing around one. Mrs. Linden, do you not find it so? Ah George!—talking to Miss Pet as usual. Permit me—Mrs. Linden, Mr. Alcott. George, you cannot have forgotten Mrs. Linden?" That George had not was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... him that all his dainty jeers about middle-class denseness were beside the mark; all the complacent mockery concerning the deceased wife's sister and the rest, was of no use. If you see a man walking right into a deadly quicksand, you do not content yourself with informing him that a bit of fluff has stuck to his coat. Mr. Arnold should have gone among the lower middle-class a trifle more instead of trusting to his superfine imagination, and then he might ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... their probable course and the effect, when after a few years on a point, they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others of mud almost fit to ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... hopes of reaching Castlereagh River in the course of the day; we struggled for nine miles through a line of country that baffles all description: we were literally up to the middle in water the whole way, and two of the horses were obliged to be unladen to get them over quicksand bogs. Finding a place sufficiently dry to pitch our tent on, though surrounded by water, we halted, both men and horses being too much exhausted to proceed farther. Mr. Evans thinking we could not be very far from ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... names within the heart and memory of Greece; they had ruled the West with a gentle sceptre, and in a people's grateful remembrance they had their reward. My ancestors, their descendants, held sway in Trebizond, a quicksand which gave way beneath their tread. From adversity to adversity, from country to country, we were finally driven to seclusion in the Isle of Candia, part of the quondam Minos territory. Venice had allowed Candia to fall before Mahomet's bloody sword. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... rattlesnakes, an' the alkali, an' the soap-holes, an' the quicksand, an' the cactus, an' the blisterin' sun, an' the lightnin', an' the rain, an' the snow, an' the ice, ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... (16)And running under a certain small island called Clauda, we were hardly able to come by the boat; (17)which when they had taken up, they used helps, undergirding the ship; and, fearing lest they should be cast away on the quicksand, they lowered the sail, and ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... bank of the sluggish stream with its flood-worn channel and its treacherous patches of quicksand, the wagon thus halted by the sheer nerve and quick-thinking of mother became a very small island in a troubled sea of weltering backs and tossing horns and staring eyeballs. Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly with their quirts, trying to hold back the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... were large and fair of flesh, and in proper weather they rose pretty freely, and could be taken by an angler wading from the shore. There was no boat. The wading, however, was difficult and dangerous, owing to the boggy nature of the bottom, which quaked like a quicksand in some places. The black water, never stirred by duck or moorhen, the dry rustling reeds, the noisome smell of decaying vegetable-matter when you stirred it up in wading, the occasional presence ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... the old woman staring after them with her mouth open. It could have been only a few minutes later that they reached Quicksand Creek. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... surface. This interesting work was in busy progress, when, all of a sudden, it was ascertained, that, at about 200 yards from the south end of the tunnel, there existed, overlaid by a bed of clay, forty feet thick, a hidden quicksand, which extended 400 yards into the proposed tunnel, and which the trial shafts on each side of it had almost miraculously just passed without touching. Overwhelmed at the discovery, the contractor instantly took to his bed; and though he was justly relieved by the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Greek author says: a woman's head is like a quicksand; for pray, mark well this argument, which is most weighty: As the head is the chief of the body, and as the body without a chief is worse than a beast, unless the chief has a good understanding with the body, and unless ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... village a sluggish creek flowed into the sea. At the mouth of the valley whence it issued stood two or three native huts. A man wearing a malo was up on the roof of one, thatching it with grass. Riding near, we hailed him and inquired about a quicksand which lay just ahead and which we must cross. He told us to avoid the makai side and keep to the mouka side. We followed his directions, and crossed in safety. For all practical purposes there are but two directions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... hundred feet below the level of the surrounding plain), which has been assumed as being about the limit of penetration. It is not possible to sink a shaft at present, owing to the water which has drained into the crater, and which forms, with the finely pulverized sandstone, a very troublesome quicksand encountered at about two hundred feet below the visible floor of the crater. As soon as this water is removed by pumping it will be easy to explore the depths of the crater by means of shafts and drifts. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap—the rock is slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. It is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure, through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... quicksand behind and entered the village, passing among the groups of lodges. Here they realized more fully than on the hills the great extent of the Indian town. Its inhabitants seemed a myriad to Dick and Albert, so long used to silence and the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... which I have hated, yet never a night is missed. It is at the same hour. What I hate comes to me. Whatever I fear is mine. To run away from something is for me to meet it. My estate is gone; money I have not. I sink like a man in a quicksand, down, down, down. I come ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... careful note of the following EXCEPTIONS." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... tossing, faultering, rising, clutching as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds—saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm,—these all had sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... subjected to a stress of about 25 tons each, or nearly one-half of their ultimate strength. In only one or two instances, covering stretches of 100 ft. in one case and 200 ft. in another, where there were large areas of quicksand sufficient to cause semi-aqueous pressure, or pockets of the same material causing eccentric loading, did these wall-plates show any signs of heavy pressure, and in many instances they were in such good condition ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... that anything can happen here—that the city is quicksand where a chance step would engulf one." Billy stared frowningly out on the vivid street ahead of him. A pretty English bride and her soldier husband were out exercising their dogs. Two ladies in a victoria were advertising their toilettes. A blond baby toddled past with his black nurse. It was ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... is only leaping from a ditch into a quicksand. It is quite as hard to account for her dissimulation as for her sincerity. Why should she pretend to suspect you of so black a deed, or me of such ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... little water-striders came rowing themselves along, racing for a struggling ant which had fallen into the milky quicksand. These were in my line of vision, so I watched them for a while, letting the corner of my eye keep guard for the real aristocrats of the milky sea—whoever they were. My eye was close enough, my elevation sufficiently ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... strain put upon it when the vessel heaved her stern out of water and the screw raced madly with nothing to catch. On she sped, though her bow was pointed straight for the most treacherous shoals on the Atlantic coast, bars of avid quicksand, on which thousands of vessels had gone to swift and awful destruction. On toward the Diamond Shoals the cutter pierced her way, though the gray veil of driving spray hid everything a score of ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... [FN127] Arab. "Wartah"precipice, 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... said, "that deep down below the surface of the land lies a sort of soil like a quicksand, and that when the river deepens its bed so that its waters do enter this soil it melts away, leaving a great void, into which the land above does sink, and ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... therefrom return empty handed, whilst others, Mr. Chairman, make up, we know, pretty good bags. The Son of Apollo, whilst thus hunting one gruesome, windy morning, fortunately for us, sank in a boggy, yielding quicksand. Luckily he extricated himself in time, and on reaching the margin of the swamp, there stood an old pet of his tethered as if waiting for its loved rider, a vigorous Norman or Percheron steed. Our friend bestrode him, cantered ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... alluring. Could a more perfect trap be devised by evil human ingenuity than this? Think for one instant of a bottomless pit of liquid soil, absorbing in its peculiar density. Think of all the horrors of a quicksand, which, embracing, sucks down into its cruel bosom the despairing victim of its insatiable greed. Think of a thin, solid crust, spread like icing upon a cake and concealing the soft, spongy matter beneath, covering every portion of the cruel plain; a crust which yields a crop ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... ahead of me," he wrote, "but greater ruin. I am like a horse in a quicksand: every effort I ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Joukahainen Waist-deep in the swamp beneath him, Hip-deep in the marshy meadow, To his arm-pits in a quicksand. 330 Then indeed young Joukahainen Knew at last, and comprehended; And he knew his course was finished, And his journey now was ended. For in singing he was beaten, ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... afterward two lovers were wandering by the lake's side, and the lady, seeing the strange flowers, entreated her companion to gather some. As the gallant knight reached to pluck the blossoms, he fell in a quicksand, and was drawn into the treacherous pool, flinging the flowers at the maiden's feet, and crying, "Forget me ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ubiquitous Chinaman, proof against every ill that flesh is heir to in Java, was deputed to superintend the solution of abstruse professional problems, between the short and hasty visits of Dutch and English engineers. Quagmire and quicksand, stagnant pool and sluggish stream, succeed in weary iteration. Bleached skeletons of dead trees writhe in weird contortions against the dark background of jungle, as though some wizard's curse had blighted ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of the 29th we reached the lowest ford of the Red Deer River, one hundred and sixty-eight miles, by our course, from Battleford. On the north side of the river at this ford there is quicksand. The water too, in mid-stream, was deep enough to flow over the side-boards of our waggons, and at one place the current was dangerously rapid. After repeated trials by some of the men on horseback to find the best ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory adaptation to quicksand circumstances. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... now for us, thanks to Uncle Roger; and so I want you to order all. I know you, dear—being a woman—won't object to shopping. But it will have to be wholesale. This is an enormous place, and will swallow up all you can buy—like a quicksand. Do as you like about choosing, but get all the help you can. Don't be afraid of getting too much. You can't, or of being idle when you are here. I assure you that when you come there will be so much to do and so many things to think of that you will want to get away from it all. ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... nothing is more opposed to sound policy. One act of perfidy fully established becomes the ruin of its author. The man who relinquishes confidence in his good faith gives up the best basis for future operations. Who will knowingly build on a quicksand? By his perfidious treatment of Almagro, Pizarro alienated the minds of the Spaniards. By his perfidious treatment of Atahuallpa, and subsequently of the Inca Manco, he disgusted the Peruvians. The name of Pizarro ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... all necessary arrangements with him to take the three canoes, and the stuff that went with them, across the carry in the morning. The boys were expected to walk and if necessary push at the wheels of the wagon, should it get stuck in a creek bed of soft quicksand. ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... to enable us to transport the wagon to the opposite bank; but although we found no less than four shoals in the course of our first day's search, three of them extended less than halfway across the river, while the fourth proved to be a quicksand in which we narrowly escaped losing both our horses, saving them at last only by the skin of our teeth and after nearly an hour's hard and strenuous labour. This occurred about three o'clock in the afternoon, and when at length we were all ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... stood by Sussex in the preceding summer—were given over to their enemy bound hand and foot. But Elizabeth was weary of the expense, and sick of efforts which were profitless as the cultivation of a quicksand. True it was that she was placing half Ireland in the hands of an adulterous, murdering scoundrel, but the Irish liked to have it so, and she forced herself to hope that he would restrain himself for the future within ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... was a bottomless quicksand, which no possible amount of winning could ever have satiated. Let him enter his club with five thousand pounds at his banker's and no misfortune could touch him. He being such as he is,—or, alas! for aught we know, such as he was,—the escape which the property has had cannot ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... making the fickle and unstable her strongest barricade. An example of the skill and address necessary to conquer obstacles of the latter kind was illustrated in Mobile Bay. There lay about a sunken vessel an impenetrable mail of quicksand. It became necessary to sink piles into this material. The obstacle does not lie in its fickle, unstable character, but its elastic tension. It swallows a nail or a beam by slow, serpent-like deglutition. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither, Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me, Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd soul, eludes not, One's-self must never give way—that is the final ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Table Top. She knew the trail as intimately as the mountain girl, but at dawn she had found nothing. But as the light spread over the marsh, she saw something lying on the very edge of the most dangerous quicksand in the place. ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... in a large sarcophagus—in the church itself. During the storm God had cast earth upon his coffin—heavy piles of quicksand had accumulated there, and lie there ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... river which the explorers named Quicksand River (now Sandy), they met a party of fifteen Indians who had lately been down to the mouth of the Columbia. These people told the white men that they had seen three vessels at anchor below, and, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... of the next day, when the tide suited, we were endeavouring to weigh the ship's anchors; but they were together with the cables so imbedded in the bottom, which must have been a quicksand, that this proved impossible. Had the ship been fitted with Captain Charles Phillips', R.N., capstan, there would have been a better chance of succeeding. As it was, after heaving down the ship nineteen inches ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts he brought ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... breakers! He had done his best to deliver her, but Fate had been against him. Fate had ordained that she should be the victim of this man's caprice, the slave of impulses which might or might not be her destruction. It was as if he watched her trying to walk on a quicksand. And he was powerless to help her. Saltash had defeated him, and he had no insight into his motives. Unstable, baffling, irresponsible as a monkey that swings from tree to tree, he had snatched his prize, and even Jake, who knew him ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... imagine himself great when there is not in him one single element of greatness? Let us confess ourselves that which we can not consent to remain! The confession of not being, is the sole foundation for becoming. Self is a quicksand; God is the only rock. I have ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... set off by way of Newhaven and the sea-beach; at first through pleasant country roads, and afterwards along a succession of bays of a fairylike prettiness, to our destination—Cramond on the Almond—a little hamlet on a little river, embowered in woods, and looking forth over a great flat of quicksand to where a little islet stood planted in the sea. It was miniature scenery, but charming of its kind. The air of this good winter afternoon was bracing, but not cold. All the way my companions were skylarking, jesting, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the limbs of her own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism which has been introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around him, is greater and greater. ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... me what to say or do. It seems that I but sink myself the deeper in the quicksand of thy disapproval at every struggle to escape. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... brake within gunshot of an entrance to the river. We succeeded in getting all the animals out of the water before dark, with the exception of one bunch, where the exit would require the use of a mattock before the cattle could climb it, and a few head that had bogged in the quicksand below Horsehead Crossing. There was little danger of a rise in the river, the loose contingent had a dry sand-bar on which to rest, and as the Indians had no use for them there was little danger of ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... rambles, preside over my blunders, and save me from calamitously passing into the next world. He bore it in courteous silence, except when speaking was necessary. He would show me the lower ford, which I could never find for myself, generally mistaking a quicksand for it. He would tie my horse properly. He would recommend me not to shoot my rifle at a white-tailed deer in the particular moment that the outfit wagon was passing behind the animal on the further side of the brush. There ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... questions they were preparing. I had to arrange my defence without knowing in what way they would try to trip me, and I had to think faster than I ever have thought before. I had no more time to be scared, or to regret my past sins, than has a man in a quicksand. So far as I could make out, they were divided in opinion concerning me. Rupert of Hentzau, who was the adjutant or the chief of staff, had only one simple thought, which was to shoot me. Others considered me a damn fool; I could hear them laughing and saying: "Er ist ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... night in the river. Towards morning I fell asleep and dreamed that the ship was sinking in a quicksand and that I, in trying to save myself, had stuck fast in the port-hole. I wakened cold with fright, to find it was grey dawn and they were ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Quentin Durward—utterly the Fair Maid of Perth: and culminating in Bizarro, L. x. 149. It suggested all the deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep—Kennedy, Eveline Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here—compare the dream of Gride, in Nicholas Nickleby, and Dickens's own last words, on the ground, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain, two years ago, I dreamed ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... hath, and ever will be the fate of kings, who only listen to the voice of pleasure, thrown in their way by the sirens of administration, which never fail to swallow them up like quicksand—like a serpent, who charms and fascinates, bewitches and enchants with his eye the unwary bird; witness the fatal catastrophe of Rehoboam, who rejected the counsel of the wise and experienced, and gave up all ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... commences, which is about fifty feet on each of the four sides. It is of sandstone and certainly a very singular natural formation. Altogether it is about two hundred feet high. I will mention here that the banks of the Platte are low, that the bed is of quicksand, that the river is very shallow and that it is never clear. One of our company attempted to ford it on foot. When about two-thirds over, in water up to his waist, he halted, being in doubt as to whether he should proceed or return. ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... in the school of adversity, and a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quicksand to virtue.—SCHILLER. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... still, for he mistakes the bridle for a bowline, and is ever turning his horse-tail. He can pray, but it is by rote, not faith, and when he would he dares not, for his brackish belief hath made that ominous. A rock or a quicksand plucks him before he be ripe, else he is gathered to ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... from the solid rock—were in darkness, but from the upper window of Avice's tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated from the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due position ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... tourist knows them. Very well, then; you must remember as you go past Bellinzona—revolutionary little Bellinzona with its three castled crags—you look down upon a vast mud flat by the mouth of the Ticino. Part of this mud flat is already solid land, but part is mere marsh or shifting quicksand. That is the first stage in the abolition of the lakes: ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... least five or six people about the cart, some on foot, others on horseback; the former lent assistance whenever it was in danger of upsetting, or sticking fast in the quicksand; the others rode before and acted as guides, often changing the direction of the vehicle as the precarious ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... and, not being an university woman, she could not keep her eye on the original assumption while following the series of inferences the learned doctor built so neatly, story by story, on the foundation of the quicksand ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... In Arizona," we found the pair engaged in a wholly new task—that of filling up an apparently unfillable quicksand in the desert so that a railway roadbed might be built safely over the dangerous quicksand that had justly earned the name of the "Man-killer." Here, too, adventures quickly appeared and multiplied, until even the ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... He was the only weight. He immediately undressed, and let himself overboard at the prow, retaining hold of the stem. His feet sank deep into the ooze; he felt as if, had he let go, he should have gradually gone down into this quicksand of fine mud. By rapidly moving his feet he managed, however, to push the canoe; she rose considerably so soon as he was out of her, and, although he had hold of the prow, still his body was lighter in the water. Pushing, struggling, and pressing forward, he, by sheer impact, as it were, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Creator! fair and lofty thought! It lifts and swells my heart! and as I muse, Behold a VISION gathers in my soul, Voices and shadowy shapes! In human guise I seem to see the phantom, FEAR, pass by, Hotly-pursued, and pale! From rock to rock He bounds with bleeding feet, and thro' the swamp, The quicksand and the groaning wilderness, Struggles with feebler and yet feebler flight. But lo! an altar in the wilderness, And eagerly yet feebly lo! he grasps The altar of the living God! and there With wan reverted face the trembling wretch All wildly list'ning to his Hunter-fiends ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "to return to your house. It is unhealthy to lie down here. Moreover, when the boat returns, you will most certainly be rifled at." He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and followed him to the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only that of one who dies suddenly; the tragedy of old Dombey only that of one who was dead all the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the quicksand sucks him down. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... cultivation and in addition, allow the muddy water to settle and so prevent the vast amount of silt from being washed on down, eventually to the mouth of the Colorado. The location seemed admirably suited for this stupendous project. But holes drilled beside the river failed to find bottom, as nothing but quicksand existed even at a depth of nearly three hundred feet; and without a strong foundation, such a ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... sorry that Johnson was so unfortunate as to propose carious as an emendation; but even in doing this, he had, according to my notion of the lines, the right sense in view, viz., that of letting through or swallowing up, like a rotten tub or a quicksand. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... second class, cold water or brine being used for the cooling of candles, the separation of paraffin, the crystallization of salts, and for many other purposes. In the same way cold brine has been used with great success for freezing quicksand in the sinking of shafts, the excavation being carried out and the watertight tubing or lining put in while the material is in a solid state. In a paper such as this it would be quite impracticable to enter into details of construction, and the author has therefore confined himself ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... came and hide among those shifting sand-dunes of the opposite shore. Hamlin thoroughly understood the risk involved, the treacherous nature of the Arkansas, the possibility that both might be sucked down by engulfing quicksand, yet even such a lonely death was preferable ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... mangled mass of horse and man, themselves scarcely to be disintegrated in the fall from so stupendous a height. The big white beaver hat of the child was found floating on the surface of a deep pool hard by, half quagmire, half quicksand, and would in itself have sufficed to dispel any doubts of his fate, had doubt been entertained. The burial was accomplished as best might be, and the dolorous incident seemed at an end. But throughout the dry, soft Indian summer the little boy's jaunty red coat swung ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... to soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all that harms it. It crawls forward in all weathers, like Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... yes; in the present case, no. You could tell the age of a trail in that way if the ground around it had not been disturbed. This country about here is all quicksand, and you can take your stand almost anywhere along the banks of this stream, and by jumping up and down shake the ground for ten feet on all sides of you. When our heavy column crossed the ford and climbed this bank, it shook the earth, and that was what set the sand to running ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... other, as quickly as I could, but it did not quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize the muddy bottom of my present thoughts sincerely and courageously, to question myself and to pull ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... high his head; if he at that moment looked upon his life with too conscious a pride, knew too well the difference between himself, steadfast helmsman of all his being, and that untutored nature which drove another from rock to shoal, from shoal to quicksand—yet that knowledge, detestable to all the gods, dragged at his soul but for a moment. He bent his head and prayed for the missing ships, and most heartily for John Nevil, his Admiral, whom he loved; then for Damaris Sedley that she be kept in health and joyousness ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... required as many as 21 to 25 shifts to reach rock in the others, rock being at the same elevation. In fact, the digging all the way to rock in some was the best that could be wished for, while in the others boulders and quicksand were encountered, and the progress was slower, ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... shot at him with real bullets so many times that her nervousness on this particular day was rather unaccountable to him. Jean had lassoed him and dragged him behind Pard through brush. She had pulled him from a quicksand bed,—made of cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" that was his fetish, had insisted on a panorama of ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... with snare and quicksand, pilgrim? Do pitfalls lie where roses seem to grow? And have you sometimes stumbled in the darkness, And are you bruised and scarred by many a blow? Pilgrim, I know, I know! I, ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... be found in Walt Whitman. One will look long before one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is chanted in Leaves of Grass. It is based upon individualism; the strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in spite of every "alarmist," "partialist," or "infidel," are to stretch out unsuspicious ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... earnestly he struggles after complete obedience, the more faulty does his obedience appear. The good opinion of others will not silence his own inward condemnation. He needs a higher righteousness than his own; a firmer standing-ground than the shifting quicksand of his own good deeds. "All this while," he writes, "poor wretch as I was, I was ignorant of Jesus Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had perished therein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Frenchman, "Stick-in-the-Mud" arrived alone, drenched and miserable. His load was again "stuck in the muskeg, a matter of two mile off, he guessed." If left there all night, it would sink so deep in that quicksand-like marsh that there would be little hope of ever extracting it. The poor lad said his team was too done up to be of any use, and he was so "dead tired, he hadn't a leg to stand on." Still, he didn't ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... is not enough for the free movement of the agents which reveal the mind, the soul and the life. The method must be so familiar as to seem a second nature. Woe to the orator if calculation and artifice be divined in his speech! How shun this quicksand? By labor and exercise. The instruments and the manner of using them are in your hands, student of oratory. Set about your work. Practice gymnastics, but let them be gymnastics in the service of the soul, in the service of noble thoughts and generous sentiments—divine ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a-bristle. Her black eyes flamed. Her dark face worked like a quicksand. Her skirts were wet to the waist. Her jacket was open at the top, as though she had wrenched at it in a fit of choking. Her strong bare throat throbbed convulsively. Her hands, half closed at her side, looked as though they ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... in the Bride of Lammermoor, where [Edgar] Ravenswood is swallowed up by a quicksand, is singularly grand in romance, but would be inadmissible in a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I should fall into the terrible quicksand, I knelt and kept up a continuous fire with my musket, shooting into the dense smoke whenever I saw the flash of an Arab gun. It was exciting work, not knowing from one second to another whether the ping ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux |
