"Ransacking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reign of anarchy began. Knowing that, for a few hours, the city was destitute of a head, the rude Turkish soldiery took the law into their own hands, and indulged in every excess of riot, entering the houses of Jews and Moors by force, and ransacking them for hidden treasure. Of course, Sidi Hamet attempted to fulfil his engagement with Bacri, by placing guards over the houses of the more wealthy Jews, as well as giving orders to the troops not to molest them. But, like many other reckless men, he found himself incapable of controlling the ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... among the pines, worked in the little garden behind the house, fished, played upon the beach, or explored the neighborhood. When it rained, which was seldom, they cleaned up the house, read books and old letters, ransacking trunks and drawers trying to discover the secret of the departed owner. But in vain. The departed owner had been careful to leave no clew to his identity or of his reason for abiding there. They did find, however, between the leaves of ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... while the unsated fever was running through every vein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city, and far down in the caverns of the body the poison was ransacking every palpitating corner, the poor immigrant fell into a moment's sleep. But what of that? The enemy that moment had mounted to the brain. And then there happened to Joseph an experience rare to the sufferer by this disease, but not entirely unknown,—a delirium of mingled pleasures ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... found in the cellars several jars filled with a dark-coloured ponderous matter. Upon the strength of the rumour, a believer in all the wondrous tales told of Nicholas Flamel bought the house, and nearly pulled it to pieces in ransacking the walls and wainscoting for hidden gold. He got nothing for his pains, however, and had a heavy bill to pay to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... between finer and coarser, more and less elegant, may not be sufficient to feed a reasonable share of vanity, or support all proper distinctions? And whether all these may not be procured by domestic industry out of the four elements, without ransacking the four quarters ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... seemed to be chained to the spot where they stood, fascinated, as it were, by the anguished cries of agony and death that were borne to their revolting senses by the airs of that summer morning. The savages were at that moment busy in ransacking and plundering the house, but Fanny realized that she might be the next victim; that the tomahawk of the terrible Lean Bear might be glaring above her head in a few moments more. She trembled like an aspen leaf in the extremity ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... resolution, he set to work ransacking the tumbled papers. Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion. The very hopelessness of his accounts proved a relief. Working at high tension, Rudolph wrestled through disorder, mistakes, falsification; and little by little, as the sorted piles grew and his pen traveled faster, the old absorbing ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared for some ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... more ceremony than was shown in making the arrest, do the sheriff and party explore the paternal mansion of him arrested, rudely ransacking it from cellar to garret; the outbuildings as well, even to the ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... his bridle reins lay slack on the neck of the drowsy beast; his hands were piled on the pommel of the saddle as over his familiar pulpit; his dreamy moss-agate eyes were on the tree-tops far ahead. In truth he was preparing a sermon on the affection of one man for another and ransacking Scripture for illustrations; and he meant to preach this the following Sunday when there would be some one sadly missed among his hearers. Nevertheless he enjoyed great peace of spirit this day: it was ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... woman was that she was telling the exact truth. After long ransacking of her memory and comparing of events, she fixed the time so nearly to the true date, that it was to Felipe's mind a terrible corroboration of his fears. It was, he thought, about a week after Ramona's ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... to be quarrelling as to whether the occupied Serbian territory should eventually belong to the Monarchy or the Kingdom, and the jurists on either side are ransacking the history of the past for arguments to support their respective cases. Here we have another instance of the fondness of learned men for disputing about purely academic questions. Serbia ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... failed to return, and we were compelled for the time being to assume that at least part of the stories were true. The Cossacks immediately went into deep mourning for the loss of their valiant leader and affected great grief and sorrow. This, however, did not prevent them from ransacking the Colonel's headquarters and carrying off all his money and jewelry and, in fact, about everything that he owned. Four days later, however, in the midst of all this mourning and demonstrations, we were again treated to a still greater surprise, for that afternoon who should come riding into ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... duke's agents were ransacking the chief cities in Europe in search of rare paintings, statues, vases, and other works of art or articles of virtu to decorate the halls and chambers of Lone; for which also the most famous manufacturers in France and Germany were elaborating ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... at Eldon's, and spent twelve francs at that restaurant. During the dinner Daniel admitted Lucien into the secret of his hopes and studies. Daniel d'Arthez would not allow that any writer could attain to a pre-eminent rank without a profound knowledge of metaphysics. He was engaged in ransacking the spoils of ancient and modern philosophy, and in the assimilation of it all; he would be like Moliere, a profound philosopher first, and a writer of comedies afterwards. He was studying the world of books and the living world ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... mental exploration, and distinguished from purely motor exploration of the trial and error variety. Suppose you need the hammer, and go to the place where it is kept, only to find it gone. Now if you simply proceed to look here and there, ransacking the house without any plan, that would be motor exploration. But if, finding this trial and error procedure to be laborious and almost hopeless, you sit down and think, "Where can that hammer be? Probably where I used it last!" ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of Udolpho," and Isabella Thorpe is ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... The ransacking of the canoe and appropriating of its contents occupied the savages but a short time, after which they packed everything up in small bundles, which they strapped upon their backs. Then, making signs to their prisoners to rise, they all marched away into the forest. Just as they were departing, ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the caravan, jabbering wildly in Chinese. It required fifteen minutes of questioning before we finally learned that bandits had attacked a big caravan less than a mile ahead of us and were even then ransacking the loads. ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... now sent an expedition to the north to obtain possession of the Province of Maranhao. They captured and plundered the capital, pillaging churches and ransacking the sugar factories. The Governor, Maciel, appears to have behaved very badly, and with no little treachery towards his fellow-countrymen. Nassau, when Maciel surrendered, treated him with contempt, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... together on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember that Anglo-Saxon verse—now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked among the strictest prosodic kinds—was long thought to be as formless as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which almost all mediaeval literature has had during the last century, it is certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if it exists, should not have been discovered, or should have been discovered only by such an Alexandrine cutting of the knot as the supposition ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... made ourselves at home in the building, and the comforts that awaited us there made us feel almost glad that they had turned out to be spies. Among the rations we found that they had taken stuff that had been purloined from other units as far back as three months before. After a thorough ransacking and a feed that filled us to our heart's content, we made for the battery, being greeted with a fresh outburst on our arrival, and under the fire we pulled our remaining guns away to another hedge 200 yards off, and waited for ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... as long as he could. One satisfactory result to the discussion; I practically ordered Wilson to hand over the means of ending our troubles to us, so that anyone of us may know how to do so. Wilson had no choice between doing so and our ransacking the medicine case. We have 30 opium tabloids apiece and he is left with a tube of morphine. So far the tragical side of our story. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... cultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results of mental welfare. Accordingly, science has a thousand resolute votaries where theology has one unshackled disciple. At this moment, a countless multitude, furnished with complex apparatus, are ransacking every nook of nature, and plucking trophies, and the world with honoring attention reads their reports. But how few with competent preparation and equipment, with fearless consecration to truth, unhampered, with fresh free vigor, are scrutinizing the problems of theology, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... gentlewoman, named Fabry, with her aged mother and other females of the family, had taken refuge in the cellar of her mansion. As the day was drawing to a close, a band of plunderers entered, who, after ransacking the house, descended to the cellarage. Finding the door barred, they forced it open with gunpowder. The mother, who was nearest the entrance, fell dead on the threshold. Stepping across her mangled body, the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... other, been concerned in that line; for no small period in the great city of Cincinnati, too; and though, as you hint, within that long interval, I must have had more or less favorable opportunity for studying mankind—in a business way, scanning not only the faces, but ransacking the lives of several thousands of human beings, male and female, of various nations, both employers and employed, genteel and ungenteel, educated and uneducated; yet—of course, I candidly admit, with some random exceptions, I have, so far as my small observation goes, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith |
