"Strangling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unclenching her fingers, as if she were strangling some living thing. There was silence ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... fell where Kemper led; A thousand died where Garnett bled: In blinding flame and strangling smoke The remnant through the batteries broke And crossed ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... apostate city whose sounds and cries came up into his cell. He had lost the fiery vision of the conqueror's welcome; it was like a tale heard long ago. Now he was beaten down by physical facts, by the gross details of the tragedy, the strangling, the blood, the smoke, the acrid smell of the crowd, and heaven was darkened ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... him for a moment, then crouched close to the fire, covered her face with her hands, and wept bitterly. The skipper groaned. The tears of Lady Harwood had not moved him in the least; but this girl's sobs brought a strangling pinch to his own throat. He told two lads to keep the fire burning, and then turned and walked away with lagging feet. Joining the men who were still tending the line that was attached to the wreck, he gazed down at ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... band of good-for-nothings who for months had spread terror and desolation throughout the country. The chief—or the one who appeared to be the chief—the biggest and strongest, hurled himself at the bars and shook them in his clenched hands. He would certainly have enjoyed strangling Mother Etienne, had he been able to do so. Since he was not able to, he displayed in a huge yawn, a terrifying set of teeth, worthy of a wild beast. They were horrid animals, I assure you, not the kind you would like to meet loose ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... strained, her beams arched upwards, by the fearful pressure; her very sides opened and closed again as she was actually bent and curved along her length, groaning like a living thing. It will be sad if such a brave little craft should be finally crushed in the remorseless, slowly strangling grip of the Weddell pack after ten months of the bravest and most gallant fight ever put up by ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... choice, and yet she had not been able to keep the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her—here was the sharpest sting—a man had tired of her after a few months—had tired of her while she was still deeply in love with him. Her humiliation, while she sat there strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little flames over her body. At the moment she was not angry with George, she was not even angry with Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering violence of her nature was aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of her own ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... he answered, "just anything. Happening's the one thing you can't bet on. If I was betting, I'd put my money on the thing I was sure couldn't happen. Look at this Temple Barholm song and dance! Look at T. T. as he was half strangling in the blizzard up at Harlem and thanking his stars little Munsberg didn't kick him out of his confectionery store less than a year ago! So long as I'm all right, you're all right. But I ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in the larynx, forced open my mouth, and gagged me. He has twice had occasion, as he supposed, to use me thus; and both times with such violence as seemingly to require the utmost effort mind could make, to recover respiration; the thrust of his thumb was so merciless, and the sensation of strangling ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... the patronizing tone of the Levantines, who called her "my dear child—my good girl," with haughty condescension not unmingled with contempt. Thereafter her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds, a complicated, savage, seraglio hatred, with strangling and secret drowning at the end, an operation rather more difficult of performance in Paris than on the shores of the Lake of El-Baheira, but she was already preparing the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... in the middle of the pavement, and, in spite of the biting weather, took off his hat and mopped his brow with a red pocket-handkerchief. But for all the hurry of his coming, these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but the moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was white, and his voice, when he spoke, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whispering of words, Now loud and soft together as the long Patter of pearls and seed-pearls on a dish Of marble; liquid now as from the bush Warbles the mango bird; meandering Now as the streamlet seawards; voiceless now As the wild torrent in the strangling arms Of her ice-lover, lying motionless, Lulled in a passion far too deep for sound. Then as the water from the broken vase Gushes, or on the mailed horseman falls The anvil din of steel, as on the silk The slash ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... a vivid imaginary picture of the scene in the saloon when Phinuit had surprised the Apache in the act of strangling Monk; a picture that Phinuit subsequently ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof, sobbing itself awake. Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing, the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... floor. Dieusy surveyed them for a moment with blank astonishment. Then, with swift intelligence, grasped the fact that the policeman was Lupin in disguise. He sprang upon them, tore them asunder, fell heavily on the policeman, and pinned him to the floor with a strangling ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... is strangling to death with a diphtheritic membrane in its throat is not permitted by the physician to be left to the benevolent being's will, nor to the prayers of the parents. The physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire and spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and was instantly grasped firmly but carefully by all. Poor Tim O'Rooney had come very near drowning. A man when suddenly cast into the water for the first time has been known to swim long and well; and the Irishman, by the most furious effort, had saved himself from strangling and sinking, although he had swallowed a good deal of the nauseating sea-water, and ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... Pitman," he said, "that is the body of Jennie Brice; her husband killed her, probably by strangling her; he took the body out in the boat and dropped it into the swollen river above the ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in pitiful surmise. Silence again; and in the silence he heard her sink back into the arm chair—and knew no more until, at the sound of one strangling sob, terrible to hear, he found himself standing at the arm of her chair and ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved on the country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas lightly in the upper air. Hewet looked at his books again. The morning ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... grandeur: the gods, in some systems of religion, have been such and so monstrous by excesses of wickedness, as to insure, if annually one hour of periodical eclipse should have left them at the mercy of man, a general rush from their own worshippers for strangling them as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the cringing of sycophants, and the credulities of fear, united to conceal this misotheism; but we may be sure that it was widely diffused through the sincerities of the human heart. An intense desire for kicking Jupiter, or for hanging ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... they leaped upon him. The little group of his traders was swept aside. Landry alone, Landry who had never left his side since his rush from out Gretry's office, Landry Court, loyal to the last, his one remaining soldier, white, shaking, the sobs strangling in his throat, clung to him desperately. Another billow of wheat was preparing. They two—the beaten general and his young armour bearer—heard it coming; hissing, raging, bellowing, it swept down upon them. Landry uttered a cry. Flesh and blood could not stand this strain. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... nearly met with your reward, for when in the corner of that church-yard you pulled the key from your girdle, fully believing you to be the Evil One, I was on the point of strangling you." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... was lying four miles out of the entrance of Magdalena Bay, and as the junk and the schooner drew near seemed like a huge black boat floating bottom up. Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... moment of extreme tension occurred the famous incident of the seizure of the Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, who were passengers on the British merchant ship, the Trent. These men had run the blockade which had now drawn its strangling line along the whole coast of the Confederacy; they had boarded the Trent at Havana, and under the law of nations were safe from capture. But Captain Wilkes of the United States Navy, more zealous than discreet, overhauled ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... greater power in the highest department of the finances. The bonds of the Act of Navigation were straitened so much that America was on the point of having no trade, either contraband or legitimate. They found, under the construction and execution then used, the act no longer tying, but actually strangling them. All this coming with new enumerations of commodities, with regulations which in a manner put a stop to the mutual coasting intercourse of the colonies, with the appointment of courts of admiralty under various improper circumstances, with a sudden extinction of the paper currencies, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... threshold of the door, it came from everywhere, filling the room—the black, strangling smoke. Outside in the hall all was silence now—save for that crackle of flame that grew in volume, that came now in quick, sharp reports, like revolver shots. From out in the street swelled a cry: "Death ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... fired. But Uncle said, when he was talking to me one day, that he had heard that the Stranglers did not carry firearms, because the reports might attract attention; and that it was a matter of religion, with them, to kill their victims by strangling; but that if the Strangler failed, which he very seldom did, the other men would then despatch the victims ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... get free. "No, no! Be silent. You shall not say such things." She stamped her foot. "It is absurd, I won't have it," she said. He gave a strangling cry of rage and despair, released her and rushed towards the cupboard. Dramatically, he flung his arms towards it as if he would shake off his two hands and leave them there. "Explain that, woman," he screamed. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... moment he was strangling; Mona could see his protruding eyes and lolling tongue. She could not help. She was not athlete enough to leap to his aid. But all of a sudden, just as Fort had once come to her own rescue, ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... my lady, and falling on her knees began caressing and fondling the little creature whiles I secured the dam, and mighty joyful. The goat, for all its strangling, strove mightily, but lashing its fore and hind legs I contrived to get it upon my shoulders and thus burdened set off homewards, my lady carrying the kid clasped to her bosom, and it very content there ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... old-time faith, the redoubtable faith that had opened wide Auburn Prison, that had restored to her arms this same adored father. She had helped him then—and oh, to help him now! His great cry, "God, Tessibel, let me be goin'!" rang in her ears. Her gaze was glued to his face. Terror and pain were strangling his throat until his eyes grew death-dark in the struggle. Tessibel lifted her ashen face, wildly working in entreaty. Oh, for a little faith! Faith the size of a grain of mustard seed! And Daddy Skinner would be gone to that place beyond the clouds and the ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... The straight Door-bar of oak, it bent beneath his weight, Shook from its sockets free, and in he burst To the dark chamber. There we saw her first Hanged, swinging from a noose, like a dead bird. He fell back when he saw her. Then we heard A miserable groan, and straight he found And loosed the strangling knot, and on the ground Laid her.—Ah, then the sight of horror came! The pin of gold, broad-beaten like a flame, He tore from off her breast, and, left and right, Down on the shuddering orbits of his sight Dashed it: "Out! Out! Ye never more shall see Me nor the ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... of Babylon sent hither a pretty satrap in the name of King Moabdar, to have me strangled. This man arrived with his orders: I was apprised of all; I caused to be strangled in his presence the four persons he had brought with him to draw the noose; after which I asked him how much his commission of strangling me might be worth. He replied, that his fees would amount to above three hundred pieces of gold. I then convinced him that he might gain more by staying with me. I made him an inferior robber; and he is ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the moment her nerve deserted her. With a strangling sob she ran towards the beach-head, and began to clamber up the low cliff leading to ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it might seem as though this reduction of the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water, of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. To such a temperament it might seem as though to be jostled ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... a strange sensation in Lady Winsleigh's throat as though a very tight string were suddenly drawn round it to almost strangling point—and it is certain that she feels as though she must scream, hit somebody with her fan, and rush from the room in an undignified rage. But she chokes back these purely feminine emotions—she smiles and extends her ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... he; "you only think of hanging and strangling. It certainly suits you well to play the hero. Already you have one foot in the grave, and you want to kill others. Have you not ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... beginnings. In vain did I try to divert his thoughts to the magnificent endings that would come from the paltry ten thousand the College asked. He stopped his ears, like Ulysses, and kept his eyes fixed on the necessity of strangling vipers in their cradle. In vain were my efforts seconded by General Joe Wheeler, also a representative from Alabama, and strongly sympathetic with military thought. No help could be expected from the Secretary, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... on the point of passing from words to deeds, and strangling his unarmed prisoner with his hands. Already he had sprung upon him, and was shaking him with fury, when a sudden reflection stopped him. He remembered that he was going to kill his victim, that all would be over, and that this ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... were upon him, but though we lifted him clear off the ground we could not loosen that two-handed strangling grip. At we were struggling there a light hand touched my shoulder. It was ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... struggles ceased, and Chet eased him to the floor where he sat still gasping for breath; the fumes from that place of death had been strangling ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... shoot the Arab, as they proposed to do—I let them get within good fair range of my relic (she would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision), and then wafted a whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again. I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed the boys right up to my horse's tail, and then with one malarious blast emptied the saddles, almost. I never ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dawn, he awoke, a strange sensation, almost of strangling and suffocation, upon him. There, bending over, framed in a mist of blue-black waves, he saw his lady's face. Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats' they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while twisted round his ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... cold, calm look And tone of one whose formal part, Unwarmed, unsoftened of the heart, Is measured out by rule and book, With placid lip and tranquil blood, The hangman's ghostly ally stood, Blessing with solemn text and word The gallows-drop and strangling cord; Lending the sacred Gospel's awe And sanction to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... near, an' the people grew still, Young faces turned sickly, and warm hearts turned chill; An' the rope bein' ready, his neck was made bare, For the grip of the life-strangling cord to prepare; An' the good priest has left him, havin' said his last prayer. But the good priest did more, for his hands he unbound, An' with one daring spring Jim has leaped on the ground; Bang! bang! go the ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... another breast, which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of him. By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may gather comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy. Let her go? Not though he were to become a mark of public scorn in strangling her with the yoke! His concentration was marvellous. Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he nevertheless conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached. He saw none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerable woman. What logic was in him deduced her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill an old and feeble man? It was worse than a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... timid phrasing of hers Henry felt that his heart was actually strangling, as if some one were holding it back on its systolic ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... coming close to her side. "I didn't do it, Mary,—so help me, I didn't! Wait! Listen to me! I'm telling you the truth." She had fallen back against the wall of the building. Her breathing was quick, as if horror was strangling her. "They caught the murderers,—a couple of gamblers at Broadso's, I heard. I didn't hear much about it. The newsboys were shouting it over in Broadway half an hour ago. I bought a paper, but it gave no details,—except that ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... with a paroxysm of tobacco strangling, ending with a sneeze that is a public event. He is again black in the face, but ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... was like the dull roar of a savage beast the robber chief caught her by the throat and held her for a moment, her frantic, clutching hands powerless against his strong grasp, then slowly drew the long knife from the ample folds of his waist-cloth, and as slowly drove it home into the strangling woman's breast. With savage callousness, before he released his hold of her, he wiped the stained knife carefully on her clothing and replaced it, and then flung the dead body from him. It rolled over on the rug midway between ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... playing on the throat of the old woman like the keys of an organ, occasionally allowing her to breathe, and then compressing his fingers again nearly to strangling. The brief intervals for breath, however, were well improved, and the hag succeeded in letting out a screech or two that served to alarm the camp. The tramp of the warriors, as they sprang from the fire, was plainly audible, and at the next moment three or four of them ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... eyes of the boy grew eloquent with entreaty, and with a movement that called from each wound a fresh outburst, like a man strangling, he lifted ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... penitentiary, Ambroise is its arm. Ambroise is a superb negro almost six feet tall, who would have made a fine servant for a sixteenth century man of quality. Heliogobalus must have kept some such fellow to furnish amusement for himself and his guests by strangling lions and fighting gladiators single-handed. His polished skin is quite black, with steely reflections; his body is well knit and as vigorous as a tiger's, and his teeth are so white that ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Waterman. "I'm here on duty and the fellow attacked me. Pull him off, Lieutenant Penrose, he's strangling me!" ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... he shouted; but he might just as well have spared his voice, for not a word could by any possibility have been heard in the observatory, the wind sweeping breath and sound away, and nearly strangling ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... and body, and thus entangled, I was thrown three several times more to the ground. I fought with my head, teeth, legs, arms, and succeeded in regaining my legs four times. They overcame me at last by strangling me with the rope which they had thrown round my neck. Then they bound me hand, foot, and neck. When I had an opportunity to look round, I saw Chanden Sing struggling against some fifteen or twenty foes. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... horse regiment. The doctor closed his eyes and thought, "Now for the grand secret." Then came the immense pressure—the convulsive straining, the failing light, the noise in the ears. First the young man found himself crushed under some strangling incubus; then, with a shrieking gasp, he was in the upper air. But he was under a hamper of ropes that strung him down as if he were in a coop, and his dulled senses failed for a moment to tell what ailed him. At last, after seconds that seemed like ages, it dawned ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... few hours, and the time it took us to sail from them to some known points, the captain was able to form a sort of idea as to which group of islands it belonged to, and when he had reached port and got rid of his prisoners, all of whom were garroted—that's a sort of strangling, you know—by the Spaniards, a week afterward, we set out again on ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... be," said Ukridge, "considering the way you've put up that wire. You'll have them strangling themselves." ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... the hands of the old man of the sea, and are the first who ever escaped strangling by his malicious embraces. He never quitted those he had once made himself master of, till he had destroyed them, and he has made this island notorious by the number ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... freeze with Angling Reeds, And cut their legs with shels & weeds, Or treacherously poor fish beset, With strangling snares, or windowy net. ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... bitter-sweet, the white wisteria Fastens its fingers in the strangling wall, And the wide crannies quicken with bright weeds; There dumbly like a worm all day the still white orchid feeds; But never an echo of your daughters' laughter Is there, nor any sign of you at all Swells fungous from the rotten bough, grey ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... spectacular and as nicely timed, but as his nose climbed above the first row of trees his motor died as suddenly as though throttled by the strangling hands of some unseen genii. Sudden though it was, McGee had sensed that he was crowding the motor too much and had tried to ease her off and still clear the trees. It was too late to relieve the choked motor but he did clear the first ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... a rich man. I should say he'd give up a good deal to get rid of YOU." Loeb gave that mirthless and mirth-strangling smile as he accented ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... to him now—Maude with her bright black eyes and brilliant color. But she was neither crying nor strangling him with kisses. She was shaking hands with him very decorously, and telling him how pleased and glad she was. And in his hand he held her roses, which he occasionally smelled as he listened, and smiled upon ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... toward the beach, where I met the crew of a ship that had cast anchor, to take in water. They were surprised to see me, but more so at hearing the particulars of my adventures. 'You fell,' said they, 'into the hands of the Old Man of the Sea, and are the first who ever escaped strangling by his malicious tricks. He never quits those he has once made himself master of till he has destroyed them, and he has made this island notorious by the number of ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... Meandering and musical, Though the niggard pasturage Bears not on its shaven ledge Aught but weeds and waving grasses To view the river as it passes, Save here and there a scanty patch Of primroses too faint to catch A weary bee.... And scarce it pushes Its gentle way through strangling rushes Where the glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, Glad the shelving banks to shun, Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit In and ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... curses horribly. And he goes down to the edge of the hole and howls at the captain. I try to talk with him, and plan to reach the mainland in the quarterboat, but he shakes his head, and just looks, looks. I have taken his sheath knife, but I fear to wake and find him strangling me. But I will leave here, whether he will go or not. Better to die at sea, than in ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... spent its force in the tears that left the velvety cheeks and chin as dewy as rain-washed rose leaves, while not a trace of moisture dimmed the large eyes that wore a proud, defiant, and much injured look, as though resentment were strangling sorrow. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... proslavery legislation, the present season, has scarcely a parallel in history, black as history is with all kinds of perfidy. If the men who mean to be free do not now arise in their strength and shake off the incubus which is strangling and crushing them, they deserve to be slaves, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... rest. Oh what a suspected state therefore is that of a king holding his regiment with the hatred of his people, the hart grudgings of his courtiers, and the peremtorie practises of both togither? Could he confidentlie compose or setle himselfe to sleepe for feare of strangling? Durst he boldly eat and drinke without dread of poisoning? Might he aduenture to shew himselfe in great metings or solemne assemblies without mistrust of mischeefe against his person intended? What pleasure or what felicitie could he take in his princelie pompe, which he knew ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed
... effort which sustains and saves, he at last found a solid basis on which all might be reared. Was this, then, the first gleam of a new faith? But ah! what mockery! Work an uncertainty, work hopeless, work always ending in injustice! And then want ever on the watch for the toiler, strangling him as soon as slack times came round, and casting him into the streets like a dead dog ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... this, he over-estimated his own strength. It took him a longer time to reach the surface than he calculated upon, and he narrowly escaped strangling; but he resolutely held out ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... from his grasp. His sinewy fingers were across my throat. They clasped me tightly around the trachea, stopping my breath. He was strangling me. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... herb-tea as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance are many enough, and as a rule they are of this order—to wit, murders committed without any startling sign of violence, without bloodshed, bruises, marks of strangling, without any bungling of the business, in short; if there seems to be no motive for the crime, it most likely goes unpunished, especially if the death occurs among the poorer classes. Murder is almost always denounced by its advanced guards, by hatred or greed well known ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... one another, with long chains put through their belts. But as they pursued those that fled to their camp, they witnessed a most fearful tragedy; the women, standing in black clothes on their wagons, slew all that fled, some their husbands, some their brethren, others their fathers; and strangling their little children with their own hands, threw them under the wheels, and the feet of the cattle, and then killed themselves. They tell of one who hung herself from the end of the pole of a wagon, with her children ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the good laws here alluded to by Tacitus were in preventing enormities among the Romans, appears from the frequent complaints of the senators, and particularly of Minucius Felix; "I behold you, exposing your babes to the wild beasts and birds, or strangling the unhappy wretches with your own hands. Some of you, by means of drugs, extinguish the newly-formed man within your bowels, and thus commit parricide on your offspring before you bring them into the world." (Octavius, c. 30.) So familiar was this practice grown ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... then all of a sudden roused himself and pointed to Mumu, who was all the while standing beside him, innocently wagging her tail and pricking up her ears inquisitively. Then he repeated the strangling action round his neck and significantly struck himself on the breast, as though announcing he would take upon himself ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... first got eye on the Knot that had been strangling him, and straightway could unfasten it, and was free. 'A vain interminable controversy,' writes he, 'touching what is at present called Origin of Evil, or some such thing, arises in every soul, since the beginning of the world; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Sal—Volatile.—Alkalis are seldom taken or given with the view of destroying life. They may, however, be swallowed by mistake.—Symptoms produced in those who have swallowed them. There is at first a burning, acrid taste in, and a sensation of tightness round, the throat, like that of strangling; the skin touched is destroyed; retching mostly followed by actual vomiting, then sets in; the vomited matters often containing blood of a dark brown colour, with little shreds of flesh here and there, and always changing vegetable blue colours green. There is now great tenderness over ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the leopard are invariably the same, it prowls stealthily about sunset and throughout the night in search of prey. It seizes by the throat and clings with tenacious claws to the animal's neck, until it succeeds either in breaking the spine, or in strangling its victim, should the bone resist its strength. When the animal is dead, the leopard never attacks the hind-quarters first, according to the custom of the tiger, but it tears the belly open, and drags out all the viscera, ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... intentness towards the parlor door. "There is certainly something very strange about all this," he whispered a bit hectically. "I could almost have sworn that I heard a faint scuffle,—the horrid sound of a person—strangling." ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... taken Jenny to the town, and that Mrs. Rolfston seemed always near them, yet in hiding. They could not get away from her. Then came a time when she had crept up behind them and over his head had thrown a noose, and was drawing it tighter and tighter and strangling him, and he could not, somehow, raise his hands to free himself. He was suffocating! He struggled in his agony and awoke—awoke to find his dream no dream at all! to feel a hand on his throat, a knee upon his chest, and to know that he ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Chicago, I hate Americans! There's only one city in America—that is San Francisco. I was never there, but I like it because I never had a pupil from that city; that's why I like it, hein!" He laughed, Bella, and coughed himself into a strangling fit over his joke—he thought it was a joke—and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equalled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us, and on the verge of strangling, when we reached the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: "Do you think that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost opportunity? We should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but the fish ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... wringing her hands. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, that he drove her to it, that he must let her pray for him. But she could not speak. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth and she seemed strangling. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... of economic barbarism has been left behind now even by some of the South American republics. The paper pound, based on the national credit, can be multiplied as fast as our legislators think fit. If they do not multiply it fast enough, Mr Kitson will tell them that they are strangling trade, because the volume of production is limited by the amount of money available. At the same time bank credits will be multiplied indefinitely because, as was shown in the November Supplement, Mr Kitson supports a view that the average business ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... BLANCO [strangling, and trying to laugh] A little choker: thats the word for him. His choking wasn't real: wait and see mine. [He feels his neck ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... language. These are the authors, after all, whose faults it is of most consequence to point out; and criticism performs her best and boldest office,—not when she tramples down the weed, or tears up the bramble,—but when she strips the strangling ivy from the oak, or cuts out the canker from the rose. The faults of the fable we have already noticed at sufficient length. Those of the execution we shall now endeavour to ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... surface at the very edge of the grasses and disappeared again. In a few seconds it appeared again, and now Vandersee's red, strangling face emerged from the water. The launch shot towards him and picked him up, twenty yards from the spot where he had plunged in grips with Leyden. When he regained his breath, he pointed inshore beside the wreck, and the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... hawadiga[3], or whatever else they call him, is as a rule but a poor impostor. He goes about with one fangless cobra, one rock snake, and one miserable mongoose, strangling at the end of a string. My dweller in tombs was richer than all his tribe in his snakes, and in his eyes. I have never seen anybody else with real cat's eyes: eyes with exactly that greenish yellow luminous glare which you see when you look at a cat ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... maddened bull, and partly arising, endeavored to clutch the throat of the unfeeling beast at my head, but too weak to accomplish my purpose I fell back into the tub exhausted. At the same time the orderly took hold of my own throat and almost strangling me, beat my head against the tub several times cursing me under his breath in the vilest of language at the ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... and the child began to choke—he seemed to be strangling—then the phlegm that had impeded his breathing was thrown off, and his face resumed its natural colour. When the Doctor arrived an hour later, he was sleeping quietly. Aunt Ella told what they had done ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... a more pitiful story than she told me, between strangling sobs, of her hungry life. The child has been yearning for affection all the time, but has unconsciously repelled it by her manner. She said nobody on earth loved her except the baby, and now the ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... had succeeded in overcoming my heart, and I was glad of that fancied change, and—I married the first poor girl that I met! I did evil, and how cruelly was I punished for it! I loved her not, Thaddeus's poor mother, my most devoted wife and the most upright soul—but I was strangling in my heart my former love and my anger. I was like a madman; in vain I forced myself to work at farming or at business; all was of no avail. Possessed by the demon of vengeance, morose and passionate, I could find no comfort in anything in ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... the word "worry" what do we mean? The word comes from the old Saxon, and was in imitation of the sound caused by the choking or strangling of an animal when seized by the throat by another animal. We still refer to the "worrying" of sheep by dogs—the seizing by the throat with the teeth; killing or badly injuring by repeated biting, shaking, tearing, etc. From this original meaning the word has enlarged until now it means ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... processes stopped in a kind of stunned unbelief. He could not even quit now. An undercurrent of fear ran close to the surface of his confused mind. It was the end of science, the end of all his work. All of the stifling, strangling restrictions of security on his work, on his private life, came whirling back as a monstrous, formless threat, something unspeakably big and powerful and unbeatable against which he could ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... present, into which the long-ago past was then rapidly merging. But you, coming in a few moments sooner, and being far more en rapport with the spirit of the scene, saw the tall man in a red cloak—whom you call the Avenger—strangling the girl. By the way, why do you call him ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... to ungovernable rage, and cursed Shefford as a religious fanatic might have cursed the most debased sinners. Shefford heard with the blood beating, strangling the pulse in his ears. Somehow this missionary had learned his secret—most likely from the Mormons in Stonebridge. And the terms of disgrace were coals of fire upon Shefford's head. Strangely, however, he did not bow to them, as had been his humble act in the past, when his calumniators ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... such care and circumspection, that the middle seam of his breeches tallied exactly with the middle round of the chair-back, and began mincing and nibbling his apple delicately like a sheep, as if to show that he meant to profit by the lesson his fit of strangling ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... deep down in the water he heard the thud of the explosion of the damp-proof copper cartridges. His lungs were bursting, his senses reeled, only enough of them remained to tell him that he was free of that strangling grip and floating upwards. His head rose above the surface, and through the mouth of his mask he drew in the sweet air with quick gasps. Down below him in the clear water he saw the yellow head of Big Bonsa rocking and quivering like a great ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equalled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us and on the verge of strangling when we reached ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one, nearly strangling me with the bight of a line circling in the air round my unfortunate head. "By your leave!" would cry another, jamming me, most certainly without my consent, against the bulwarks, and making me feel as flat as a pancake all over. So, first pushed this way and then driven that, ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... The plant that only grows in prison soil, Whose root is hunger and whose fruit is pain. The springs of still delight and tranquil joy Were drained as dry as desert dust to feed That never-flowering vine, whose tendrils clung With strangling touch around the bloom of life And made it wither. Vera could not rest Within the limits of her silent world; Along its dumb and desolate paths she roamed A captive, looking sadly ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... but a child, and he was unhappy because he must go, and give up his snug cottage and the sheep he had learned to care for and the kind mistress who gave him sides of bacon.... There was a sudden strangling spasm in her throat, and his face swam into the sky on a mist of tears, which welled up in her eyes as without another word she ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... a dusky vapor rise from his ink-bottle, and take the form of a hideous genie, after the manner of fairy tales, and this genie had announced his intention of strangling him on the spot, he could not have been more amazed. "The devil is in you, Wohlfart," said he at last; "you want to fight a duel with Herr von Fink, a dead shot, while you are only an apprentice, and not half a ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... of bursting, and thou of miscarrying in theses things. I might here also dilate upon Job's case, and the lesson God set him, when, at one stroke, he did beat down all (Job 1:15), only spared his life, but made that also so bitter to him that his soul chose strangling rather than it (Job 7:15). O when every providence of God unto thee is like the messengers of Job, and the last to bring more heavy tidings than all that went before him (Job 1); when life, estate, wife, children, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that he knew it by heart. He had, however, not become accustomed to being 'gentled' instead of 'busted.' As Roosevelt walked toward him, the horse's fear of man overcame his dread of the rope, and he surged back until the noose was strangling him. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... might have intercepted thee, By strangling thee in her accursed womb, From all the slaughters, wretch, ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... these souls sunk down in grief. Esperance shrieked, "These arms, these arms, loosen these arms which are strangling me ... Deliver me, deliver me from these arms ... I ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... reek arises, Blotting the dome with smoky, terrible towers, Black, strangling trees, whispering obscene things Amongst their branches, clutching with maimed hands, Or oozing slowly, like blind tentacles Up to the gates; higher than that heaped brick Man piled to smite the sun. And all around Are devils. One can laugh... but that hunched shape ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the last farewell spoken; and many a hard-hearted jailer and cruel official turned aside to conceal the tears which would flow, at the thought that in a few moments that fine young man, so handsome, so talented and so noble to look upon, would be strangling and writhing with the tortures of the murderous rope, and soon after cut down, a ghastly and ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... but the wily pony side-stepped, and the loop slithered to the ground. Again the rope shot forward, dropped over the pony's head and tightened. The roper's mustang braced its forefeet, and brought the buckskin up short. Another rope swept over its head. It stood trembling, unable to move without strangling itself. ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... Boyd said simply. He jammed his head under a pillow and began to snore again. It was an awesome sound, like a man strangling to death in chicken fat. Malone sighed and poked ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... slip knot is often convenient, but should never be used around the neck of an animal, for if either end is pulled it will slip and tighten, thereby strangling ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... was above her, instead of the blue sky. The women folks were using the camp restorative—whisky—on her to such good purpose that her hands and face and hair were redolent of it, and the amount she had been forced to swallow was strangling her. ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... are her flowers; for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and that Evolution is an advance toward true salvation." Meanwhile what becomes of the "Survival of the Fittest", which is only a euphemism for the strangling of the feeble by the strong? We can understand how perfection, or permanence of type, individual and national, demands carnage, and entails all the dire catalogue of human woes, but wherein is altruism evolved? How many aeons shall we wait, to behold the leopard ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... idol; hideous factories (Why need they be hideous!); chimney- pot hats, baggy trousers, vulgar advertisements, stupid fashions for women that spoilt every line of their figure: dinginess, drabness, monotony everywhere. It was ugliness that was strangling the soul of the people; stealing from them all dignity, all self-respect, all honour for one another; robbing them of hope, of reverence, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... to herself, and playing with her dolls and ribbons—dressing them, undressing, mending, arranging—until the heart within him quivered under the misery of it, and he turned to the curtained window, hands clinching convulsively, and teeth set to force back the strangling agony in ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... to all terror and sorrow, the girl had followed her example in kneeling, but the very attempt to pray brought on a fit of weeping, and the endeavour to restrain what might disturb the Queen only rendered the sobs more choking and strangling, till at last Mary heard, and coming towards her, sat down on the floor, gathered her into her arms, and kissing her forehead, said, "Poor bairnie, and did she weep for her mother? Have the sorrows of her house come ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feint and feat that I had learned in old bathing times at home, when sporting in the summer evenings in our little river. Speed, though, and skill in swimming seemed unavailing here, as I felt the waters wreathe round me, strangling me, as it were, in a cold embrace; then seizing me to drag me here, to drag me there; dashing me against this rock, against that, and directly after sending a cold chill of horror through every nerve, as a recollection of the hideous ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... of hunting, their boys were taught this sport at an early age. According to Strabo, kings themselves boasted of having been mighty hunters in the inscriptions on their tombs. A relief has been found in the ruins of Persepolis, on which the king is strangling a lion with his right arm, but this is supposed to have a historical, not a symbolical meaning. Similar representations occur on Assyrian monuments. Izdubar strangling a lion and fighting with a lion (relief at Khorsabad) is admirably ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... say? I think I'm in good trim. Now let's have dinner. What's this, my Love, you're very sweet to-day. I wonder how it happens I'm the winner Of so much sweetness. But I think you're thinner; You're like a bag of feathers on my knee. Why, Lotta child, you're almost strangling me. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell |
