"Quicksand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 of virtue" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the 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, as these must needs be American, or European, the far-voyaging explorers were naturally ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... advertised for "tenders." The various competing contractors also examined the ground minutely, and the offer of one of them to work it for 99,000 pounds was accepted. Forthwith the contractor went to work, and all went well and busily for some time, until it was suddenly discovered that a hidden quicksand extended 400 yards into the tunnel, which the trial shafts had just passed without touching. This was a more tremendous blow to the contractor than most readers may at first thought suppose, for he believed that to solidify a quicksand was impossible. The effect on him was so ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 of a dead sheep by the sullen margin of the tarn, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... was more than once visited by kings. In 1200 John was there, shaking like a quicksand. He brought a piece of our Lord's sepulchre, which had been wrested from Palestine by Richard the Lion Heart, and laid it with tremulous hands on the altar, hoping that the magnificence of the gift might close Heaven's eyes towards sins of his ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... our wagon. There was a four or five-foot jump to make, and the horses didn't know how about it, at first. But with one of us pulling, and the other slashing them over the rump, they made it, one at a time. The sand was soft and acted something like quicksand, too, and we hustled them to shore and tied them to some bushes. The bank was steep there, and we didn't know how we were going to make the climb, but we left that to worry over afterward; we still had our rig to get ashore, and ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... 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 to it, among the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... to 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
... love to Christ, but Christ's to John that made his safety. He did not say: 'I love Thee so much that I cannot betray Thee.' For all our feelings and emotions are but variable, and to build confidence upon them is to build a heavy building upon quicksand; the very weight of it drives out the foundations. But he thought to himself—or he felt rather than he thought—that all about him lay the sweet, warm, rich atmosphere of his Master's love; and to a man who was encompassed by that, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... farther glimmer of more sands beyond them challenged our advance. We had come to a "grapevine ferry." The scow was on the other side, the water too shoal for the horses to swim, and the bottom, most likely, quicksand. Out of the blackness of the opposite shore came a soft, high-pitched, quavering, long-drawn, smothered moan of woe, the call of that snivelling little sinner the screech-owl. Ferry murmured to me to answer it and I sent the same faint horror-stricken ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... tracks of Blake's party, which led up the moraine, and carried us over quicksand and through glacial streams, icy cold. Finally we came to where Blake had started up the mountain side, and with all due regard to my friend, his trail was not an easy one. About noon it began to rain, but we pushed upward, ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... men there is talent, faculty to work; and they will do it: working and shaping, not without effect, though alas not in marble, only in quicksand!—But the highest faculty of them all remains yet to be mentioned; or indeed has yet to unfold itself for mention: Captain Hippolyte Carnot, sent hither from the Pas de Calais; with his cold mathematical ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... underlying deposit was so thin that it afforded no support. While crossing, heedless of General Washburn's warning, one of these green places, my horse broke through and sank to his body as if in a bed of quicksand. I was off his back in an instant and succeeded in extricating the struggling animal, the turf being strong enough to bear his body alone, without the addition of the weight of a man. The fore legs of my horse, however, had gone through the turf into the hot, thin mud beneath. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... 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 studies of individual ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom,—a soft arenaceous mud, which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel,—the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... freely. By the time the shields had entirely cleared the rock, the material in the face had changed to a fine sand, stratified every few inches by very thin layers of chocolate-colored clayey material. This is the material elsewhere referred to as quicksand. As the shield advanced eastward, the number and thickness of the layers of clay increased until the clay formed at least 20% of the entire mass, and many of the layers were ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... water, the seamen went out upon the dry flat and found the best bower cable parted, and the anchor so far buried in the quicksand, that it could not be raised. At ten o'clock the flood tide came rolling in, and presently set the brig afloat; the anchor was then weighed with ease, by means of a hawser previously bent to it, and the vessel rode by the small bower, against a tide which ran at the strongest between four ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... "We got the three piers in—good and solid on dry bottom. Then along comes the rain—and our work melts into the quicksand. Since then we've been trying to ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... that drew him close. Never once did he push any one away. He learned what lessons were set him—not very fast, but with persistent endeavour to understand. He was greatly given to reading, but not particularly quick. He thus escaped much, fancying that he knew when he did not know—a quicksand into which fall so many clever boys and girls. Give me a slow, steady boy, who knows when he does not know a thing! To know that you do not know, is to be a small prophet. Such a boy has a glimmer of the something he does not know, or at least of ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... extensive enough 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 once more ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... differ in opinion. Very carefully has he gone over the whole of the line surveyed. He is sorry to say that the gradients are utterly impossible, and the curves approaching to a circle. Tunnelling is out of the question. How are two miles of quicksand and two of basaltic rock to be gone through? The first is deeper than the Serbonian bog, and would swallow up the whole British army. The second could not be pierced in a shorter time than Pharaoh took to construct the pyramids ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... "reasoning from analogy, and still more from what we know of the nature of the country, I have no doubt but that in very remote ages, the united Niger and Geir did roll into the sea in all the magnificence of a mighty stream, forming a grand estuary or harbour where now the quicksand is."—"The question to be solved under such a supposition is, what revolution in nature can have produced so great a change in the face of the country, as to cause a great river which once flowed into the sea, to stop short in a desart of sand." "We know from all recent, as well ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... expansion of the plans requiring a canal of maximum depth, instead of 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 conditions required it should finance ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... road the soil was comparatively firm, that is to say, one seldom sank into it above the knee, whereas on either side of it quagmires were often apparently bottomless, and what is more, partook of the nature of quicksand. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... at her companion. Was she indeed so unsuspicious of the quicksand on which stood the fair temple of her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the squadron over the inner bar was begun. It was a tremendous task. Many of the ships drew too much water for the shallow channel, and it was necessary to remove large parts of their cargoes. The bar, which is known as Buckhead Shoal, was an expanse of quicksand a mile wide, with a tortuous channel ever changing with the shifting sands. Many of the ships stranded, and the tugs were constantly busy in towing them off. Scarcely would one be safely afloat, than another would "bring up all standing" on ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... reason best for us—we must simply cease to live, though we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable than quicksand—purely provisional? ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... cover the interest of the war-loans which he was obliged to contract? How far did his cheerful manifestoes deceive himself? What might he not really have accomplished if the royal support had been anything more solid than a shifting quicksand? These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. Neither Necker, nor anybody else, knew exactly what the government owed, or what it borrowed. The loans contracted by Necker himself are believed to have amounted to five hundred and thirty million livres. Of this sum it is thought that ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a regimen is still in force at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the age-long history of penal imprisonment shows ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... mule-cart was but ill-fitted for the passage of so swift a stream. We watched it with anxiety till it seemed to be a little motionless white speck in the midst of the waters; and it WAS motionless, for it had stuck fast in a quicksand. The little mules were losing their footing, the wheels were sinking deeper and deeper, and the water began to rise through the bottom and drench the goods within. All of us who had remained on the hither ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Below lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. This quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. But, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to the right of ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the water was out of it. I loved its basin; and the goats would go down to lick the salt. They had more sense than D'Aulnay de Charnisay, for they knew where to venture. I thought D'Aulnay de Charnisay was one of our goats by his bleat, until I looked down and saw him part sunk in a quicksand at the bottom of the channel. The tide was already frothing in like yeast upon him. How gloriously the tide shoots up that tide-creek! It hisses. It comes like thousands of horses galloping one behind the other and tumbling over each other,—fierce and snorting spray, and ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... more 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 ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions. The loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our complete sympathy. He rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of Nilus, will do its kind. And yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as Browning conceives, lies the test of Strafford. A self-renouncing passion of any kind is not so common that we can afford ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... were to be brought to the 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 ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... bad job of the crossing. The river was high, and his mules quickly mired down in the quicksand. The more they pawed the deeper ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... 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
... himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late, the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... them they found all of the Little Giant's predictions to be true. The stream, a full foot in depth, flowed between banks higher than usual, and its waters, cold and sweet, were entirely devoid of alkali. Following it some distance, they found sloping banks free from the danger of quicksand, and crossed to the other side, where they made a camp among ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... non-committal remark was most discomfiting. I had a feeling that the moments were critical, and—they were slipping away. Should I leap into the tide of explanation? That way, perhaps, lay safety. Always the quicksand of Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, made me draw back. I became extremely nervous.... Feverishly I tried to think of a remark which would be natural and more or less relevant, and would pilot us into a channel ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... 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 ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... are gradually, but surely, being sucked down into the quicksand of modern life. They stretch out their grimy hands to us in vain appeal, not for charity, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... gives the following impressive description of a death in the quicksand off certain coasts of ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... that the little child's body was crushed indistinguishably in the 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 in the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... squaring our accounts,' he thought—'looking things in the face. Something must be done; and here she is laughing and making everyone stare!' Done! But what could be done, when it was all like quicksand? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... southward there was a large pollino, or swamp as L'Erba Molle, the wet grass; the grass was luxuriant, the flora was varied and beautiful; in appearance it was a field, in reality it was a morass; to all people of the Valdedera it was dreaded and avoided, as quicksand are ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... 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 for ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... loop-hole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered light. And as a prelude to action, she plunged herself into a state of such profound humility, that to accuse it of being simulated would be venturesome, though it was not positive. The tempers of the young are liquid fires in isles of quicksand; the precious metals not yet cooled in a solid earth. Her compassion for Laetitia was less forced, but really she was almost as earnest in her self-abasement, for she had not latterly been brilliant, not even adequate to the ordinary requirements ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sign of approbation. There was nothing good for man to know which could not be deduced from facts. This was the only sound basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand. ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... parted by Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood, wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel, had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston, which still ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... 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 German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... 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. It is hungry, insatiable, impenetrable. Try to force it, to drive down a pile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tell 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
... filled 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, too, have ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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, ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... 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
... 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 humour, 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; ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... sound, somewhat resembling the noise of grain when it falls from the spout of a winnowing machine into a sack. It was as if the sand were on the boil. There was no stopping now unless they wanted to be swallowed up in the quicksand. Dorothy noticed that the squaws, and even the braves, looked not a little anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... dierchesthai] (in place of the uncompounded verb), assigning as his reason, that 'If St. John had written [Greek: erchesthai], no one would ever have substituted [Greek: dierchesthai] for it.' But to construct the text of Scripture on such considerations, is to build a lighthouse on a quicksand. I could have referred the learned Critic to plenty of places where the thing he speaks of as incredible has been done. The proof that St. John used the uncompounded verb is the fact that it is found in all the copies except our two untrustworthy ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... Mills cheerfully as he slung his boots across his shoulders. "You don't think that island's a quicksand, eh?" ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... 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
... 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, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... 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 February afternoon was bracing, but not cold. All the way my companions were skylarking, jesting and making puns, and I felt as if a load had been taken ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... country where everything seems shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its position, where we have known a tree to be cut down merely because ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Triger to keep the water expelled from the sheet-iron cylinders which he sunk through quick-sands in reaching the coal-measures in the vicinity of the river Loire in France. The seams of coal in this district lie under a stratum of quicksand from fifty-eight to sixty-six feet in thickness, and they had been inaccessible by all the ordinary modes of mining previously practised. The system has been much amplified and improved since, especially in sinking the foundations of the St. Louis and the New York East ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... do," said Miriam, with a touch of bitterness. "I have always been a stranger and an alien here. Strangely enough, Celia, I have felt as if I—I have been walking on quicksand that might swallow me up at any moment. Oh, I have been as unhappy as I deserve. All the time, I have felt a sense of—of—oh, I can't explain; but it seemed to me as if my treachery to Derrick would come back on me. And it has! If you knew"—she shuddered—"but I can't tell ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... it over soberly and let your heart decide. You know where I stand, don't you, Hazel, dear? I haven't changed—not a bit—I'm the same old Bill. But I'd rather hit the trail alone than with an unwilling partner. Don't flounder about in any quicksand of duty. There is no "I ought to" ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and I would try to guess what 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 ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... underneath, and all the heavy ones on the top. Soon after the 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 object to go back if men and teams were sent with him. And after a great ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... coming up out of a deep river, a native riding about six feet from me was caught in a quicksand. He jumped off, but the horse sank half way up its body. I wanted to stay and see it extricated, for its struggles only sank it deeper, but the natives shrugged their shoulders, and said in Hawaiian, "only a horse," ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... you know very 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
... sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a little cavern deep in the hillside—a cavern made almost impregnable by smell. In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... his glass and watched Dalrymple as the latter did likewise, with that deliberate intention which few but Scotchmen can maintain on such occasions. The wine might have been poured into a quicksand, for any effect it had ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... adventures," I 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
... is to 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," ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... to her she did not stay to question. The tragic force of it overwhelmed all reasoning. She knew beyond all doubting that she had made the most ghastly mistake of her life. She had done it in blindness, but the veil had been rent away; and, horror-struck, she now beheld the accursed quicksand into which they ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... succeed now, for the worst danger was past, and Marcello had found his feet after being almost lost in the quicksand through ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... 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
... 8-hour shifts to reach bedrock in some of these, while it 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, and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... Regnier.' Bonaparte's aversion for Fouche strangely blinded him with respect to the capabilities of his successor. Besides, how could the administration of justice, which rests on fixed, rigid, and unchangeable bases, proceed hand in hand with another administration placed on the quicksand of instantaneous decisions, and surrounded by stratagems and deceptions? Justice should never have anything to do with secret police, unless ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... one verse. Add to these of rain, lightning, and of thunder (the loudest you can,) quantum sufficit. Mix your clouds and billows well together until they foam, and thicken your description here and there with a quicksand. Brew your tempest well in your head before you ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... were brought under 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 seaward. But it suited me not less excellently; the highest and most accidented of the sand hills immediately adjoined; and from these, lying flat in a hollow, I could overlook Northmour ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... 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 Love-Tiff • Moliere
... the whole 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 by the head, and splitting the hawse pipes, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... 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
... 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?" ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... belligerent." He did not intend to abandon publicly this cautious attitude—at least, not for the present. And while Slidell at Paris was completely taken in, the cooler head of A. Dudley Mann, Confederate commissioner at Brussels, saw what an international quicksand was the favor of Napoleon. It was about this time that Napoleon, having dispatched General Forey with a fresh army to Mexico, wrote the famous letter which gave notice to the world of what he was about. Mann wrote ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... direction brought a greater weight upon his rear hoofs and now they crushed down through flying gravel and sand. He faced straight in, pawing the yielding bank with his forehoofs and suspended over the roar of the torrent. It was like striving to climb a hill of quicksand. The greater his struggle the more swiftly the treacherous soil ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of the Yankee has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 dam ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... which the tunnels were to be constructed differed greatly in the two rivers. The bed of the North River, at the level of the tunnels, consists of silt composed principally of clay, sand, and water, while that of the East River is formed of a great variety of materials, such as quicksand, sand, boulders, gravel, clay, and bed-rock. When the method of construction had to be decided there were no thoroughly satisfactory precedents to follow in the case of either river, although the Gas Tunnel under ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles W. Raymond
... 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 that I ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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 here. Lower ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... bar to greatness for a man to 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 |
