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Rut   /rət/   Listen
Rut

noun
1.
A groove or furrow (especially one in soft earth caused by wheels).
2.
A settled and monotonous routine that is hard to escape.  Synonym: groove.
3.
Applies to nonhuman mammals: a state or period of heightened sexual arousal and activity.  Synonyms: estrus, heat, oestrus.



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"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books



... would provoke only curiosity and amusement to see bearded men such mere babes, and the latter would breed infinitely more disgust than desire. The man must be prurient and lecherous as a dog-faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either. And most inept is the conclusion, "So long as Mr. Payne's translation remains defiled by words, sentences, and whole paragraphs descriptive of coarse and often horribly depraved sensuality, it can never stand beside ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... soil and climate than Ulster, with better harbours and a better trading position. But instead of working they stand with folded hands complaining. Instead of putting their own shoulders to the wheel they wait for somebody to lift them out of the rut. Instead of modern methods of agriculture, fishing, or what not, they cling to the ancient ways, and resent advice. The women will not take service; the men will not dig, chop, hammer. They are essentially bone-idle—laziness is in their blood. They will not exert ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... 1 and 2; and "The Life and Love of the Insect", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters 1 to 4.—Translator's Note.) calling on his comrades to lend a helping hand in dragging his pellet out of a rut; the Sphex (A species of Hunting Wasp. Cf. "Insect Life": chapters 6 to 12.—Translator's Note.) cutting up her Fly so as to be able to carry him despite the obstacle of the wind; and all the other fallacies which are the stock-in-trade of those who wish to see ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants' nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. All of a sudden there ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... was, perhaps, the secret! There would be days, no doubt, of gloom and heaviness; days when life would run, like the stream which he could hear murmuring below him, through dark coverts, dripping with rain; days of frost, when nature was leafless and benumbed, and when the rut was barred with icy spikes. But one could live in hope and faith, waiting for the summer days, when life ran swift and bright; under a pale sunset sky, till the streaks of crimson light died into a transparent green; and the stream ran ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... mind, and he was afraid. At that moment, when his fate was being decided, he hesitated to go deeper into the rut where he had already been walking too long. He stood silent and undecided. Confused thoughts crowded his brain; his temples throbbed, and a buzzing noise sounded in his ears. But the thought of giving up his liberty, and again ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... to the success of any effort toward creating moments of amusement and happiness. Her presence acts as a deterrent and repeated failures to overcome this domestic cloud finally result in a complete cessation of all effort. Things fall into a rut and each member of the family seek their various forms of ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... and quoted it in one of her great speeches. It made the reporter bug out his eyes. He said he had observed of late quite a vein of poetry running through Miss Wilbur's speeches, which lifted them out of the common rut." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... Scott makes one of his characters declare that "the penny siller slew more souls than the naked sword slew bodies." It is one of the defects of business too exclusively followed, that it insensibly tends to a mechanism of character. The business man gets into a rut, and often does not look beyond it. If he lives for himself only, he becomes apt to regard other human beings only in so far as they minister to his ends. Take a leaf from such men's ledger and you ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... until she was afraid to do any of these things, but you could never enlighten her on the subject. The rudest savage can, in a measure, be enlightened, he can be taught the reason why of things, but an animal cannot. We can make its impulses follow a rut, so to speak, but we cannot make them free and self-directing. Animals are the victims of habits ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... stride of his horse. And down the road they raced, till they saw by the loom of the open bush where the boundary fences ceased. The leader turned his horse in his stride, and the four behind turned theirs. A fallen log; a rut; a snag; and one rider's race would be done; for the pace they were going left no escape if once a horse came down. Through the low-grown brush they crashed. A rider ducked to miss a branch that was level with his head; a horse swerved sharp to the right to dodge an old and charred tree-stump; another ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... vibrating at a tremendous speed. It has to be just so high for the eye to pick it up. A great deal we do not get. For instance, we can only catch one-twelfth of the solar spectrum. Until recently we have believed only what we could see. Science has pulled us out of the rut. It may pull us through the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... 'Uncas House.' Their university is the unpainted school-house on the hill. Their literature is the weekly newspaper from the county town. But take the majority of educated men even. What a rusty, small kind of existence they lead! They are in a rut, just the same as the others, only the rut is a trifle wider. If I had my way I would never do the same work or talk with the same people—hardly live in the same place for two days running. Life is too short to do a thing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... all the better feelings of their nature in such a service, are appealed to entirely through the medium of their tails, and the operation occasionally results in the whole creaking mass being safely deposited in some capacious rut, there to remain until "the Fates" — assuming, perhaps, the appearance of three additional bullocks — arrive to draw it out again. Occasionally, too, the institution comes to a halt for the night, comfortably drawn up in ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... much benefit to the one who wins it. It does not satisfy for long, but it is valuable in other ways. For instance, success, based on service, is a benefit to the community. If, it were not for successful people of this type the ordinary man in the rut would have a bad time. Also, the winning of success builds up character. One who would be successful in the battle of life, must be prepared to be tested and tried in every possible way. One who survives them all is built up in character in almost every direction. ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin

... there was a Czar Who freed five times as many serfs. Sins breed The means of punishment, and tyrants are Hurled headlong out of the triumphal car If faster than the law allows they speed. Lincoln and Alexander struck a rut; You ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... never have done what he did; how he did it he could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, firing away as stoutly as ever and defending the flag, which ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... instinct is! I told you that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form—the squalid peasant's form—of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's innings against the powers that be—Nature, or the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as my job," continued Robb. "There's no difference between one post and another—except in the amount of work done, of energy wasted. It's all a matter of getting into a rut and plugging along there, like a plowman. A fellow needs certain qualifications like accuracy, speed, and a rhinoceros' constitution; but what is there to it, from the standpoint of prospects? Nothing—except work. I began in this very office twenty-five years ago. In two ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... children, And with the yelping of dogs was mingled the lowing of cattle, Cries of distress from the aged and sick, who aloft on the wagon, Heavy and thus overpacked, upon beds were sitting and swaying. Pressed at last from the rut and out to the edge of the highway, Slipped the creaking wheel; the cart lost its balance, and over Fell in the ditch. In the swing the people were flung to a distance, Far off into the field, with horrible screams; by good fortune Later the boxes were thrown and fell more near to the wagon. ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... the reins a better direction herself they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand they neither fell into a rut, nor ran foul of a dung-cart; and Anne, with some amusement at their style of driving, which she imagined no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs, found herself safely deposited ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... force fell in a rut At Ctesiphon; Turks made things hum. We found that we had got to Kut, Whilst Russians found ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various

... quite true what old Mangan had said: "When all comes to all, a man must stick to his own Church!" All these others, these St. Georges, and Westropps, and old Ardmore, and the rest of them, had only been waiting to jump on him as soon as he put a foot out of the rut they all walked in. They had waited for the chance to make him a pariah. Now they had it. All right! He could face that. They should soon see how ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... travelling, and the wheels rung against its frozen surface as they spun round with a velocity that seemed to add to the excitement of our flying steeds. Ever and anon we bounded and bumped over some rut or inequality that was deeper than usual. Twice we were within an inch of the ditch; once, for an awful hundred yards, we were balancing on two wheels; and still we went faster and faster than ever. The trees and hedges wheeled by us; the gravel road streamed away behind us. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... of those who have passed away in the latter part of the period under study the power of initiative has gone. New proposals are hushed. Variation is discouraged; the rut of custom and convention is preferred. And a subtle stifling air of the impossibility of all active purposes pervades social and religious and business ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... naturalism done to clear up life's really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of the soul—or indeed the most benign little pimple—is to be probed, naturalism can do nothing. 'Appetite and instinct' seem to be its sole motivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of naturalism is the region below the umbilicus. Oh, it's a hernia clinic and it offers ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... comparatively recent, such a sight was rarely witnessed in this section, as a deep-rooted hostility existed between the settlers and Indians, and an undertaking like the present was attended with too great danger for it to be often repeated. The rut of a single wagon, half obliterated by accumulated leaves and rankly-growing grass, showed that this route had been traveled over but once before, and that on the preceding season. At regular intervals, trees were passed with chips hacked from their sides, ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis

... met. The world would probably pronounce him an idler, and it is certain he would never have accumulated money; but he was not really idle. On the contrary, he was full of activity, and of simple, kindly enthusiasms. Rut his chosen forms of activity rarely led him to the production of what is marketable, and he very quickly wearied of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... oats and a portion of the hay, could do with some additional dainty bits, perhaps, but on the whole he has his stomach filled and can live. He is yoked to his load, and being a spirited animal, he goes at it very hard, succeeds for a time; at last he sticks in a rut, puts on a "spurt," and breaks down. He can't do the work. He is put down at six marks a day, or no remission. He is spoiled for ever, and as a racer his ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous

... lowest, funereal tones. Of a sudden, though the speed is the same, the pace changes with a certain terror as of a cavalry attack. Presently amid the clattering tramp sounds the big hymn,—in the ancient rhythm that moves strangely out of the rut of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... better not to stick entirely to one teacher, for it is easy to get into a rut in this way, and someone else may have a quite different and more enlightening way of setting ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini

... saw such a girl as you are!" exclaimed Winn, impatiently. "You are always making objections to my plans, and telling me that I'm only a boy. You'd rather any time travel in a rut that some one else had made than mark out a track for yourself. For my part, I'd much rather think out my own plans and try ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe

... when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... follow in the rut. Go by some path untraveled before, over land or sea, and tell the world of ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... given a most unwieldy lurch, wedged a tire in a rut, bounced a couple of times, and stopped—providentially—on the edge of the deep gully that fringed ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs. Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... and as Toby thought of the ride before them it seemed as if the time would be almost interminable. He curled himself up on one corner of the seat, and tried very hard to go to sleep; but just as his eyes began to grow heavy the wagon would jolt over some rock or sink deep in some rut, till Toby, the breath very nearly shaken out of his body, and his neck almost dislocated, would sit bolt upright, clinging to the seat with both hands, as if he expected each moment to be pitched ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis

... the more beautiful it was to Jean-Christophe. Every stone had a meaning for him; he knew them all. The shape of a rut seemed to him to be a geographical accident almost of the same kind as the great mass of the Taunus. In his head he had the map of all the ditches and hillocks of the region extending two kilometers round about the house, and when he made any change in the fixed ordering ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... down the rut-rifted lane Where the wild roses hang and the woodbines entwine, And the shrill squeaking bat makes his circles again Round the side of the tavern close by the sign. The sun is gone down like a wearisome queen, In curtains the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... perpetuate it are (relatively), by a law of physiology, those least likely to do so?"[27] The answer to Mr. Greg's inquiry is obvious. If the culture of the race moves on into the future in the same rut and by the same methods that limit and direct it now; if the education of the sexes remains identical, instead of being appropriate and special; and especially if the intense and passionate stimulus of the ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... the first to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was Anna Markovna herself. However, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement—people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... dangerous, what else could you expect at a hunt? No sooner thought than done. Dreda deliberately slackened pace until Hereward and Gurth had passed on ahead, then turned in at the opened gate, and after a few minutes' painful wobbling to and fro found a deep rut along which her wheels could make a fairly easy progress. The sound of agitated puffings and pantings from behind made her aware that another rider had been rash enough to follow her lead; but she dared not turn her head to see who it might be. The road grew ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... pines. Carley saw deep, still green pools eddying under huge massed jumble of cliffs, and stretches of white water, and then, high above the treetops, a wild line of canyon rim, cold against the sky. She felt shut in from the world, lost in an unscalable rut of the earth. Again the sunlight had failed, and the gray gloom of the canyon oppressed her. It struck Carley as singular that she could not help being affected by mere weather, mere heights and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... Sha'abn"collecting," dispersing, ruining, because the tribal wars recommenced: Ramazan (intensely hot) has been explained and Shawwl (No. 10) derives from Shaul (elevating) when the he-camels raise their tails in rut. Z'l-Ka'adah, the sedentary, is the rest time of the year, when fighting is forbidden and Zu'l-Hijjah explains itself as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... is only in the higher animals that we see a more or less durable sympathy develop between the two sexes. However, here also and even in man the sexual passion intoxicates for the moment all the senses. In his sexual rut even man is dominated as by a magic influence, and for the time he sees the world only under the aspect inspired by this influence. The object loved appears to him under celestial colors, which veil all the defects and miseries of reality. Each moment of his ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... three whips of differing lengths. The drivers were both jet black—not Kafirs, but Cape blacks—descendants of the old slaves taken by the Dutch. They appeared to be great friends, these two, and took earnest counsel together at every rut and drain and steep pinch of the road, which stretched away, over hill and dale, before us, a broad red track, with high green hedges on either hand. Although the rain had not yet fallen long or heavily, the ditches were all running freely with red, muddy water, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... Let us unyoke it from tradition, which claims to be superior, or even equal. Let us divorce it from councils, from creeds, from sects and denominations; let us lift it up out of the ecclesiastical rut of ages. Let us with a commendable pride count ourselves worthy and able to formulate our own creeds, make our own prayers and confessions, accounting that the liberties of our fathers have been bequeathed ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... great gift that their excess of passion will bestow on this race: it will give them romance. It will teach them what little they ever will learn about love. Other animals have little romance: there is none in the rut: that seasonal madness that drives them to mate with perhaps the first comer. But the simians will attain to a fine discrimination in love, and this will be their path to the only spiritual heights they can reach. For, in love, their inmost selves will draw ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... These three types of colonization..., though they tended on different directions, ... were hardly distinguishable in the earlier phases of their history. Perhaps a fourth type should be added, but this fourth type was what naturalists call an aberrant type, and only comprised two colonizers, Rut and Hore, whose aims were indistinct, and who had no clear idea where they meant to go, or what they meant to do ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... scholastics and mystics, popes and opponents of the papal supremacy, have seen their champion. He was the fulcrum on which Luther rested the thoughts by which be sought to lift the past of the Church out of the rut; yet the judgment of Catholics still proclaims the ideals of Augustine as the only sound ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... an invariable rule by any means. Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs

... sun falls warm: the southern winds awake: The air seethes upward with a steamy shiver: Each dip of the road is now a crystal lake, And every rut a little dancing river. Through great soft clouds that sunder overhead The deep sky breaks as pearly blue as summer: Out of a cleft beside the river's bed Flaps the black crow, the first demure newcomer. The last seared drifts are eating fast away With glassy tinkle into glittering ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman

... establishment of Christianity, and we find phallic rites masquerading in the garb of Christian observances as late as the sixteenth century in parts of Russia and Hungary. Westermarck, in his chapter on the human rut season in primitive times, says: "Writers of the sixteenth century speak of the existence of certain festivals in Russia, at which great license prevailed. According to Pamphil, these annual gatherings took place, as a rule, at the end ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... for almost two years for his health. He came back to school looking better but before his diploma was handed to him announcing to the world that he was a full-fledged Bachelor of Arts, he had fallen apparently permanently into the rut of ill-health. In fact I wondered, when we all sang Auld Lang Syne in the fraternity house at the close of college, if I'd ever ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat

... car skidded. It was terrifyingly out of control. It began majestically to turn toward the ditch. She fought the steering wheel as though she were shadow-boxing, but the car kept contemptuously staggering till it was sideways, straight across the road. Somehow, it was back again, eating into a rut, going ahead. She didn't know how she had done it, but she had got it back. She longed to take time to retrace her own cleverness in steering. She ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... in impressing his heart. We are almost driven to fear that in the case of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut? Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... concerning her possessions had been aroused by the physical evidence of the same, balanced on a rut and ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... dinner-party had been an expedition into the artistic fakery of London, and he would have dismissed the whole affair as a stimulating and amusing diversion from the ultra-aristocratic rut if the personality of Elise Durwent had not remained with him ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... kind they kill one another: but especially cocks, [4665] lions, and harts, which are so fierce that you may hear them fight half a mile off, saith [4666]Turberville, and many times kill each other, or compel them to abandon the rut, that they may remain masters in their places; "and when one hath driven his co-rival away, he raiseth his nose up into the air, and looks aloft, as though he gave thanks to nature," which affords him such great delight. How birds are affected in this kind, appears ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... out into the following soliloquy.—Surely, surely mortal man is a chaise: now trailing through the heavy sand of indolence, anon jolted to death upon the rough road of discontent; and shortly after sunk in the deep rut of low spirits; now galloping on the post-road of expectation, and immediately after, trotting on the stony one of disappointment; but the days of our driving soon cease, our shafts break, our leather rots, and we ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... and brother had been left in camp as guards. They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool, and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water running out of their mouths, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... by the gray dawn of the morning of yesterday, and after an early but excellent breakfast, crossed the river from St. Cloud, in order to meet the stage at Sauk Rapids. As we came up on the main road, the sight of a freshly made rut, of stage-wheel size, caused rather a disquieting apprehension that the stage had passed. But my nerves were soon quieted by the assurance from an early hunter, who was near by shooting prairie chickens while they were yet on the roost, that the stage had not yet ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews

... where new ideas don't take hold. We live as our fathers lived, we amuse ourselves with four meals a day, and we cultivate our vineyards and sell our wines to the best advantage. Our business principle is to sell things for more than they cost us; we shall stick in that rut, and neither God nor the devil can get us out of it. I will, however, give you some advice, and good advice is an egg in the hand. There is in this town a retired banker in whose wisdom I have—I, particularly—the greatest confidence. If you can obtain his support, I will add ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... were, in sight of port, while he crossed the road, his horse happened to plunge into a cart-rut with such violence, that he was thrown several yards over his head; and, the beast's shoulder being slipped by the fall, he found himself disabled from plucking the fruit, which was almost within his reach; for he had left his servants at ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... clout, She is quite shut out! She might call and shout, But no one about Would ever call back, "Who's there?" There is never a hut, Not a door to shut, Not a footpath or rut, Long road or ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald

... water without mishap, save when the wheel struck a hidden stone or fell suddenly into a rut; but when they neared the body of the river MacLure halted, to give Jess ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various

... cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... a basket of eggs with one foot, keeping a tin can of something from upsetting with the other, and both arms stretched around a very big and very square picture-frame that knocks against my nose or my chin every time the cart goes over a stone or drops into a rut, and the wind threatening to blow my hat off, and blowing it off, and my "back-hair" tumbling down,—and the old house is at last despoiled. The rooms stand bare and brown and desolate. The sun, a hand-breadth above the horizon, pours ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the crest of the Downs at a lurching gallop; down the ragged rut-worn lane, the dusty convolvuluses glimmering up at him in the dusk; past the squat-spired Church in the high Churchyard among the sycamores; down the rough and twisted Highstreet of Newhaven in the chill of that August evening, as no ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... difficulties, and when there, hauls him so that he cannot see, or exert himself to get out of them, and expecting chastisement, the horse springs and struggles to avoid it before he has recovered his feet, and goes down with a tremendous impetus. If he has to cross a rut to the right he probably forces his horse across it when the right foot is on the ground. In this case, unless the horse collects himself and jumps—if he attempts to step across it, the probability is that in crossing his legs he knocks one against the other and falls. The reverse ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... downpour, it sang its mournful song through poplar and shrub. Soon the grey tiled roof of the cottage poured its libation into spouting gutters, and every rut of the road became a miniature ditch. But, with dogged persistency, the five watchers ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... buck was both a browser and grazer. There were also seeds, but no berries or nuts such as I have sometimes found in deer's stomachs. This species, which is abundant in this neighborhood, is solitary in its habits, not going in herds. At this time the rut was past, the bucks no longer sought the does, the fawns had not been born, and the yearlings had left their mothers; so that each animal usually went by itself. When chased they were very apt to take to the water. This instinct of taking to the water, by the way, is ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... the cathedral, dwelt the Snawdor family, a social unit of somewhat complex character. The complication came about by the paterfamilias having missed his calling. Mr. Snawdor was by instinct and inclination a bachelor. He had early in life found a modest rut in which he planned to run undisturbed into eternity, but he had been discovered by a widow, who was possessed of an initiative which, to a man of Snawdor's retiring ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... Furrow. — N. furrow, groove, rut, sulcus[Anat], scratch, streak, striae, crack, score, incision, slit; chamfer, fluting; corduroy road, cradle hole. channel, gutter, trench, ditch, dike, dyke; moat, fosse[obs3], trough, kennel; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the influence of Zola has transformed novel writing in Italy, and that its effect in Germany has been not less pronounced. The virtue of this influence on German letters was undoubtedly great. It made an end of sentimentality, it shook literature out of the sleepy rut into which it had fallen and forced it to face ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... hoof-prints leading toward the river. Now he knew this road to be seldom used, and therefore he wondered who could be riding it at a gallop in this blistering midday heat. A few rods farther on and his quick eye detected something else—something that brought him from his saddle. Out of the rut he picked a cigarette butt, the fire of which was cold but the paper of which was still wet from the smoker's lips. He examined it carefully; then he remounted and rode ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... Gaspar, they get upon the edge of the stream itself. Then, turning up it, and pressing on for another hundred yards, they arrive at the cavern's mouth, just as the first puff of the chilly wind sweeps down the deep rut-like valley through ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... to him, one or two merely glancing at his trousers. The road was deep with slush and mud-ploughed and torn by wheels and hoofs. A soldier in front of him wrenched his foot in an icy rut and dragged himself to the edge of the embankment groaning. The plain on either side of them was grey with melting snow. Here and there behind dismantled hedge-rows stood wagons, bearing white flags with ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... common law, was, that every freeman, or freeborn male Englishman, of adult age, &c;., was eligible to sit in juries, by virtue of his civil freedom, or his being a member of the state, or body politic. Rut the principle of the present English statutes is, that a man shall have a right to sit in juries because he owns lands in fee-simple. At the common law a man was born to the right to sit in juries. By the present statutes he buys that right when he buys his land. And thus this, the greatest of all ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... quality of their habits in the field in which they show power. As the little child differs from the adult in the number and quality of his habits, so the ordinary layman differs from the expert. It is scarcity, not abundance, of habits that forces a man into a rut and keeps him mediocre. Just as the three year old, having taken four or five times as long as the adult to dress himself, is tired out at the end of the task, so the amateur in literature or music or morals as compared with the expert. The more habits any one has in any ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... little child—and also to the hard working man—is more serious than work. When work begins to be perfunctory, play is the only remedy. In such a case a man is in a dangerous rut and must adopt a ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry

... chief upholder and champion. "We did need waking up, 't was a fact, Miss Leicester; now, wa'n't it? It seemed just like old times, that night of the tea-party. Trouble is, we've all got to bein' too master comfortable, and thought we couldn't step one foot out o' the beaten rut. 'T is the misfortune o' ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett

... is not improved. I foolishly tried to eat a little snow yesterday morning, and the consequence is that my lips are sore and bloody. On Monday afternoon the dogs and sledge went head over heels into a deep rut in the ice, and it cost us two hours to get them out again. Luckily no damage was done, although the captain was on the sledge ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne

... contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is God's part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary's redeeming love. I laid hold of the great themes, and I found a half ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... sideways. Presently we reached a ledge, narrow enough at first, but which widened as we followed it, and moreover sloped inwards like the petal of a flower, so that as we followed it we gradually got into a kind of rut or fold of rock, that grew deeper and deeper, till at last it resembled a Devonshire lane in stone, and hid us perfectly from the gaze of anybody on the slope below, if there had been anybody to gaze. This lane (which appeared to be a natural ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... still lighted, would give the impression of vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would rely upon us for quartering. [Footnote: "Quartering":—This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle.] All this, and if the separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... that he had studied harder at college and was now in a position to be doing something better than hack work for a soulless publishing company. Never before had he been so completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into which he ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... at the Day homestead was very different now from what it had been when Janice first came there to live. Like many people of the town, the Day family had got into a rut. Uncle Jason was frankly shiftless, although he was a good farmer and able to earn a fair wage at carpenter's ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects—for the themes of Pamela and Clarissa to a very large extent, of Pamela and Grandison to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... developed express train speed now and it rocked from side to side like a ship in a gale as it tore down the rough country road! Bruce clutched the big steering wheel with deathlike grip and tried his mightiest to keep the cumbersome vehicle straight! He realized that a loose stone or a deep rut meant death to him and destruction to the motor car! His teeth were clenched and his face was white! The wind had whisked away his ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump

... I approach, I shuffle with my feet for a secure footing, I waggle my club in an airy manner. Then I take it up and whack it down. A variety of things may occur. I may smite the top of the hall, when it runs on for twenty yards and lies in a rut on the road. I may hit her on the heel of the club, when she spins, with much "cut" on, into the sea. I may hit her with the toe of the club, when she soars to square leg, and perhaps breaks a window. I used to try running ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various

... is apt to do one of two things," saith Father: "either to fall into a rut, or to leave the road altogether. Either his charity contracteth, and he can see none right that walk not in his rut; or else his charity breaketh all bounds, and he would have all to be right, which way ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... me in terror, and nearly swooned in my arms. "Never mind," said the guide; "they are disappointed, and no wonder. It was a near thing; but, poor creatures, they have no initiative; their life is not a fortifying one; and besides, they will have forgotten all about it to-morrow. Rut we had better not stop here. There is no use in facing disagreeable things, unless one is obliged." And he led ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... coming in rut. Ha! I am exceedingly afraid of you. But yet you are only tracking your wife. Her footprints can be seen there directed upward toward the heavens. I have pointed them out for you. Let your paths stretch out along the tree tops (?) on the lofty mountains (and) you shall have them (the paths) lying ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney

... animation; Arthur talking fast about the covers and the game, and Violet in such high spirits, that she volunteered a history of their trouble with Skylark, and 'some dear little partridges that could not get out of a cart rut.' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... something to interest her, only to come home and find it here upon the upper step of her own front porch. She stepped from the doorway and sat down in one of the wicker rockers. She had plenty of time to be interested; there was really no haste for unpacking and settling back into her little country rut. ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... was speaking of the endeavor of certain Londoners to raise the theater out of the rut into which it had fallen, and to make of it something worthy to claim the attention of those who did not use it merely for digestive purposes. She related a story of a disastrous theater-party which she had once joined, and which had been arranged by an aspiring woman ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... say so," continued the wise woman, "but you see, my girl, when you go back, you get right in the same rut again, and all those mill girls would just make life miserable for you. I am not encouraging you to stay away from home, but as Molly says, she is a leader in the scout girls you know—she always says when a thing goes ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... for a purpose; to accomplish something; to get ahead in the world; to make a new start; perhaps to live down something, or to get out of the rut cut by ancestors; some may only want to drink, and shout, and shoot, but even these do it with a vim—they ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... over, examining something on the ground. When I reached him he grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed to two barely discernible tracks paralleling each other for almost a hundred yards. Between them ran a shallow, jagged rut, where the spade of an aeroplane ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... pushing or driving he likes to express the emotions of the moment. If a piece of transport were stalled there would be a chorus of exclamations and running disputes as to the method of getting it out of the rut, with the result that at the juncture when an outsider might think that utter confusion was to ensue, every Frenchman in sight had swarmed to the task under the direction of somebody who seemed to have made the suggestion which won the favor ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... believed the old Confessions, imagined Christ to be divine, and the Scriptures inspired. We do not blame them much, for they knew no better. But, if you follow in their footsteps, the world will never give you any credit for originality; your slow chariot will move on in the old rut; you will never accomplish anything; your generation will be in advance of you. Be a man! The field of usefulness, prominence, and honor, opens before you. Think for yourself! The Bible is a book of the past, and ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... judiciously, "I suppose you will all be satisfied now that you are back in your old rut wretchedly doing ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston

... male, only periodic in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of what they have just discovered to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Rut whether the Elephant is wanted as a beast of burden, or it is only his great tusks that are desired, it is no joke to hunt him. He will not attack a man without provocation (except in very rare cases); when he does get in a passion it is time for the hunter to look out for ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... to him, was only a decoy! One must be content not to know!... Then what was left to do since truth was unapproachable? Possibly fortune and honours would console him for it. But he was far enough from them too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate step. He was sick of where he was and of those ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... put into the cart, and they proceeded on their journey to the other side of the forest, the verderers eating what Humphrey had brought for them as they walked along. It was a tedious and painful journey for the wounded man, who shrieked out when the cart was jolted by the wheel getting into a rut or hole; but there was no help for it, and he was very much exhausted when they arrived, which was not till past midnight. Corbould was then taken to his cottage and put on the bed, and another verderer sent for a surgeon: those who had been with Oswald were glad to ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... quite agitated by this frank and unexpected avowal, for she pressed the child to her with still greater fervor, kissing her time and again more affectionately, after which she immediately slipped into the religious rut again ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... signs of love sickness as I had occasionally observed in other people, I only succeeded for two days (and that at intervals, and mostly towards evening) in reminding myself of the fact that I was in love, and finally, when I had settled down into the new rut of country life and pursuits, I forgot about my affection for ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... an' real brother, An' I, for one, shall wish they 'd all ben som'eres, Long 'z U. S. Texes are sech reg'lar comers. But, O my patience! must we wriggle back Into th' ole crooked, pettyfoggin' track, When our artil'ry-wheels a road hev cut Stret to our purpose ef we keep the rut? War 's jes' dead waste excep' to wipe the slate Clean for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... however, he had shaken down into the new rut, and a favorable opportunity presenting itself in a sunny Sunday afternoon, he donned his black coat and high hat and repaired to the mansion of Barney Ryan, on ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... you wouldn't mind just settin' here an' readin', while I go an' c'nsult with my foreman," Dan said, and went away and presently returned with a big thick book, which was very heavy, and gave it to Whitey. "This here's my fav'rut book," Dan continued, "an' is very absorbin'. Set in my chair there, an' read y'self t' death, 'f you feel like it," ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... truth, become so fat that he waddled like a penguin when he walked; and when he rode, the springs of his French victoria gave up in despair. They glued themselves together, face to face, and Don Mario felt every rut and every rock in the road. Nor was the merchant any less heavy in mind than in body, for he was both very rich and very serious, and nothing is more ponderous than a rich, fat man who takes his riches and his fatness seriously. In disposition ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... failing rapidly, largely from overwork. He worries about conditions here which really do not exist. I have been trying to take the load off his shoulders so that he could ease up a bit, but he has got into a rut from which he cannot ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs



Words linked to "Rut" :   physiological condition, heat, routine, turn over, channel, physical condition, modus operandi, oestrus, physiological state, anestrus, cut into, dig, delve, be



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