"Quicksand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aversion for Fouche strangely blinded him with respect to the capabilities of his successor. Besides, how could the administration of justice, which rests on fixed, rigid, and unchangeable bases, proceed hand in hand with another administration placed on the quicksand of instantaneous decisions, and surrounded by stratagems and deceptions? Justice should never have anything to do with secret police, unless it ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
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... the most inconvenient person to talk to!" said Mr. Motley with a glance at the handsome face. "Like a quicksand—closing around one. Mrs. Linden, do you not find it so? Ah George!—talking to Miss Pet as usual. Permit me—Mrs. Linden, Mr. Alcott. George, you cannot have forgotten Mrs. Linden?" That George had not was ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
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... at her companion. Was she indeed so unsuspicious of the quicksand on which stood the fair temple of her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
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... predictions to be true. The stream, a full foot in depth, flowed between banks higher than usual, and its waters, cold and sweet, were entirely devoid of alkali. Following it some distance, they found sloping banks free from the danger of quicksand, and crossed to the other side, where they made ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
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... feet between the sands we call the Twin Brothers. Of these, that to the south, and inside the bay, is motionless, and bears the name of the 'Dead-Boy;' but the 'Quick-Boy,' to the north, shifts continually. It is a quicksand, in short; and will swallow ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
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... followed this non-committal remark was most discomfiting. I had a feeling that the moments were critical, and—they were slipping away. Should I leap into the tide of explanation? That way, perhaps, lay safety. Always the quicksand of Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, made me draw back. I became extremely nervous.... Feverishly I tried to think of a remark which would be natural and more or less relevant, and would pilot us into a channel of conversation down which we could swim with confidence. Of all the legion ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
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... ordinary accounts, but to cover the interest of the war-loans which he was obliged to contract? How far did his cheerful manifestoes deceive himself? What might he not really have accomplished if the royal support had been anything more solid than a shifting quicksand? These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. Neither Necker, nor anybody else, knew exactly what the government owed, or what it borrowed. The loans contracted by Necker himself are believed to have amounted to five hundred ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
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... jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
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... sea in much smaller and quite different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of science and some of its applications to navigation, which was worse. The presence of the god or fairy can only be deduced from the fact that they never definitely ran into anything, either a boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a man-of-war. Apart from this negative description, their voyage would be difficult to describe. It took at least a fortnight, and MacIan, who was certainly the shrewder sailor of the two, realized that they were sailing west into the Atlantic ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
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... are more treacherous than a quicksand. Try him with more questions," suggested Hopkins, the other men murmuring assent, while the Indian glancing with his opaque, black eyes from one to another showed not how much he understood of what went on ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
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... in Walt Whitman. One will look long before one finds a more consistent or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is chanted in Leaves of Grass. It is based upon individualism; the strong body and the possessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of the "quicksand years"; but it sets these strong persons upon the "open road" in comradeship; it is the sentiment of comradeship which creates the indissoluble union of "these States"; and the States, in turn, in spite ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
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... our accounts,' he thought—'looking things in the face. Something must be done; and here she is laughing and making everyone stare!' Done! But what could be done, when it was all like quicksand? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
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... Auster, and Boreas, and cast them together in one verse. Add to these of rain, lightning, and of thunder (the loudest you can,) quantum sufficit. Mix your clouds and billows well together until they foam, and thicken your description here and there with a quicksand. Brew your tempest well in your head before ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
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... the goats would go down to lick the salt. They had more sense than D'Aulnay de Charnisay, for they knew where to venture. I thought D'Aulnay de Charnisay was one of our goats by his bleat, until I looked down and saw him part sunk in a quicksand at the bottom of the channel. The tide was already frothing in like yeast upon him. How gloriously the tide shoots up that tide-creek! It hisses. It comes like thousands of horses galloping one behind the other and tumbling over each other,—fierce and snorting spray, and climbing the banks, and ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
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... turning-point of King John's fortunes, for, in his savage and murderous course, he had now taken some towns and met with some successes. But, happily for England and humanity, his death was near. Crossing a dangerous quicksand, called the Wash, not very far from Wisbeach, the tide came up and nearly drowned his army. He and his soldiers escaped; but, looking back from the shore when he was safe, he saw the roaring water sweep down in a torrent, overturn ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
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... ubiquitous Chinaman, proof against every ill that flesh is heir to in Java, was deputed to superintend the solution of abstruse professional problems, between the short and hasty visits of Dutch and English engineers. Quagmire and quicksand, stagnant pool and sluggish stream, succeed in weary iteration. Bleached skeletons of dead trees writhe in weird contortions against the dark background of jungle, as though some wizard's curse had blighted life and growth amid the rank vegetation rising from this dismal Slough ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
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... comfort gathers, From schemes designed to save Brave fellows, who have dared the deep, Near home to find a grave. See how o'er rock and quicksand fell, The Electric ray doth glow, And sweep o'er the deep, While the stormy winds do blow; While the tempest rages loud and long, And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
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... he jumped from a height of 30 ft., with 14 ft. to clear, into one of the dry docks, which had about 6 ft. to 8 ft. of water in it. In saving the lives of the men he was of great assistance to me by diving under the water and lifting the feet of the second officer out of the quicksand. Throughout the whole affair he displayed great intelligence. I forgot to mention that the collar he is wearing was presented by the brother of the captain who, unfortunately, was drowned; and on the plate are engraved these words: 'Presented to "Prince" for his gallant ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
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... glass and watched Dalrymple as the latter did likewise, with that deliberate intention which few but Scotchmen can maintain on such occasions. The wine might have been poured into a quicksand, for any effect it had ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
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... river tunnels, complete plans for rapid transit subways for New York City, very much on the line of the present rapid transit subways, were also prepared for Mr. Corbin by the writer. These plans provided a system of deep tunnels in rock, entirely below the plane of quicksand, and at the Battery the lines were to connect directly into the tunnels to Long Island and New Jersey, respectively, and the stations throughout, where the rock was at a deep level, were to be fitted with elevators, grouped ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
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... a vein of coarse sand, eight inches in thickness, through which the water entered so fast, as to almost prevent them from going deeper. They, however, proceeded through another bed of blue clay, twenty or twenty-two feet, and came to a fine yellow sand, resembling quicksand, into which they dug three feet and stopped, having found sufficient water. The whole depth of the well was ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
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... voice now shrill with the strain of this new crisis rushing so unexpectedly upon him: "I heard Jake give a holler. 'What the hell's the trouble?' I yells. Then he lets out a beller, 'Save me!' he screeches, 'I'm into a sink-hole! The quicksand's got me,' sez he. So I drop my rifle, I did, — there she stands against that birch sapling! — and I run down into ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
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... before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late, the sand ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
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... a certain Greek author says: a woman's head is like a quicksand; for pray, mark well this argument, which is most weighty: As the head is the chief of the body, and as the body without a chief is worse than a beast, unless the chief has a good understanding with ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
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... to get one foot up t' other goes down three inches further, because I have to bear all my weight on it. This is no laughing matter, boys. I'll be swallowed up before your eyes soon if you don't get busy. Max, you ought to know how to extricate a fellow from the quicksand!" ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
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... men there is talent, faculty to work; and they will do it: working and shaping, not without effect, though alas not in marble, only in quicksand!—But the highest faculty of them all remains yet to be mentioned; or indeed has yet to unfold itself for mention: Captain Hippolyte Carnot, sent hither from the Pas de Calais; with his cold mathematical head, and silent stubbornness ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
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... marquis to himself, left as he supposed alone. 'My boy, thou hast built on a quicksand, and thy house goeth down to the deep. I am wroth with myself that ever I dreamed of moving such a bag of chaff to return to the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
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... underneath: generations after generations of mosses and watery plants succeed one another; and in time the prostrate trunk is entirely buried under a bright-green bed, soft as down, but treacherous to the foot as a quicksand. Often may the wanderer amid these wild glades think to throw himself on one of these inviting couches; and, bounding on to it, he sinks five or six feet through moss and weed and dirty peat, till his descent is stopped by the skeleton ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
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... and nurtured like herself, but seldom tread. He spoke of persons with whom she was well acquainted also, and whose names arrested her attention with pathetic significance, offering, for the moment, secure standing ground amid the shifting quicksand of his but half-comprehended words. He spoke of Morabita, the famous prima donna, and of gentle Mrs. Chifney down at the Brockhurst racing-stables. He grew heated in discussion with Lord Fallowfeild. He petted little Lady Constance ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
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... hair seemed all a-bristle. Her black eyes flamed. Her dark face worked like a quicksand. Her skirts were wet to the waist. Her jacket was open at the top, as though she had wrenched at it in a fit of choking. Her strong bare throat throbbed convulsively. Her hands, half closed at her side, looked as though ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
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... gunshot of an entrance to the river. We succeeded in getting all the animals out of the water before dark, with the exception of one bunch, where the exit would require the use of a mattock before the cattle could climb it, and a few head that had bogged in the quicksand below Horsehead Crossing. There was little danger of a rise in the river, the loose contingent had a dry sand-bar on which to rest, and as the Indians had no use for them there was little danger of their being molested ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
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... ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; "ah that deceit should steal such gentle shapes" [Richard III]; "a quicksand of deceit" [Henry VI]; decipimur specie recti [Lat][Horace]; falsi crimen[Lat]; fraus est celare fraudem[Lat]; lupus in fabula[Lat]; "so smooth, he daubed his vice with show of virtue" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
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... the creek, which was boggy, we again ascended a low table land of the same description. At ten miles came upon a few low sand rises, about a mile in breadth. We then struck a creek, another tributary, spread over a large plain, very boggy, with here and there patches of quicksand. We had great difficulty in getting over it, but at last succeeded without any mishap. We then entered a thick scrubby country of mulga and other shrubs; the soil now changed to a dark red, covered splendidly with grass. After the first mile the scrub became much thinner; ground ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
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... in the Bride of Lammermoor, where [Edgar] Ravenswood is swallowed up by a quicksand, is singularly grand in romance, but would be inadmissible in a drama.—Encyc. Brit., ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
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... as we rode on, on the bosom of the flood beneath us, twinkling lights, which were probably lighthouses, and black dots, which we took for boats. After a five miles' run through scenery of this novel character, the train stopped, and we found that we had arrived, not in a cloud or in a quicksand, as there seemed some reason to fear, but in a spacious and elegant station, brilliantly lighted with gas, and reminding one, from its sudden apparition and its strange site, of the fabled palace of the Sicilian ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
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... charged with death covers the face of the earth for a season with shame and anguish and destruction. A sane world, an orderly world, a peaceful world, can never be founded on materialism. That foundation is a quicksand in which all that is dearest to man ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
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... that he might not be able to breast it. Even had he thought enough about the matter to admit that certain untoward conditions might have to be met, he would have failed to realize that the shore towards which he was struggling might prove in the end a quicksand. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
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... type of character; in view of the well-attested scientific doctrine of heredity—a doctrine which easily accounts for and explains every semblance of truth in transmigration—it seems incredible that any soul in India could, through transmigration, finally emerge out of the quicksand of sin and corruption which surround and overwhelm it, especially when it is assumed that it has already passed through ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
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... yes; in the present case, no. You could tell the age of a trail in that way if the ground around it had not been disturbed. This country about here is all quicksand, and you can take your stand almost anywhere along the banks of this stream, and by jumping up and down shake the ground for ten feet on all sides of you. When our heavy column crossed the ford and climbed this bank, it shook the earth, and that was what set the sand ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
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... before they came to any visible water. It may be interesting to some of our readers to know that there are many of these curious rivers in western America, which, for miles disappear from the surface of the earth, and, probably, run through the quicksand beneath, as they reappear again. The outline of the river usually exists between the place of its disappearance and the place where the water again comes to the surface of the earth. By digging a few feet into the sand within the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
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... at the mouth of the river Neath. "Terrible hard country this," said one of the monks next day in the castle at Swansea. "Some people are never satisfied," retorted his companion; "you were complaining of its being too soft in the quicksand yesterday." The mountains were trying to men no longer in their youth; after toiling up one the archbishop sank exhausted on a fallen tree and said to his panting companions, "Can any one enliven the company by whistling a tune?" "Which," ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
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... when they were charged with it, they probably became insane, and in their insanity they confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted, charged with a crime they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand, every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at the mercy of the devotees of superstition, hope fled and nothing remained but the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
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... what the Inquiries are-and this wise nation is gaping to see the chick which their old brood-hen the House of Commons will produce from an egg laid in November, neglected till April, and then hatched in a quicksand! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
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... you has a fancy for stirrin' incident an' lively scenes, thar's a time when the rains has raised the old Canadian ontil that quicksand ford at Tascosa—which has done eat a hundred teams if ever it swallows one!—is torn up complete an' the bottom of the river nothin' save b'ilin' sand with a shallow yere an' a hole deep enough to drown a house scooped out jest beyond. An' how ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
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... not the great money; and the little money also has escaped from a quicksand in the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
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... pleasant country roads, and afterwards along a succession of bays of a fairylike prettiness, to our destination—Cramond on the Almond—a little hamlet on a little river, embowered in woods, and looking forth over a great flat of quicksand to where a little islet stood planted in the sea. It was miniature scenery, but charming of its kind. The air of this good winter afternoon was bracing, but not cold. All the way my companions were skylarking, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
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... bad job of the crossing. The river was high, and his mules quickly mired down in the quicksand. The more they ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
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... cheating Death in quicksand fords, of day-long battles with naked Apaches in the malapi, of fighting off bandits from the stage while the driver kept the horses on a run up Dragoon Pass, of grim old ranchmen stalking cattle-thieves by night, of frontier sheriffs ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
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... became the Little Sunbeam of the Home, or if Cabinet Ministers struck for a decrease of wages. I feel no security in facts, precedent seems no protection to me. The wisdom you can find in an Encyclopedia, or in Selfridge's Information Bureau, seems to me just a transitory adaptation to quicksand circumstances. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
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... walking on the sea-shore with his brother and the duke and a train of nobles, when several of the knights became caught in a quicksand and would have been lost had not Harold rushed forward, and with his unaided strength dragged each one of them into safety ...
— Stories from English History • Hilda T. Skae
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... of me," he wrote, "but greater ruin. I am like a horse in a quicksand: every effort I ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
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... said Nigel, edging his chair somewhat closer to the Quicksand, "although I cannot conceive what business I have either with mine host ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
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... it would come in handy," remarked Eben, quickly and proudly, "and if you stop to think of the many uses we've put that same rope to, from yanking a fellow out of a quicksand, to tying up a bad man who had escaped from the penitentiary, you'll all agree with me that it's been one of the best ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
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... proceeded; they had no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages, in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the first necessity was to misrepresent the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
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... What he had had to fear in the descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap—the rock is slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. It is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure, through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
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... questions they were preparing. I had to arrange my defence without knowing in what way they would try to trip me, and I had to think faster than I ever have thought before. I had no more time to be scared, or to regret my past sins, than has a man in a quicksand. So far as I could make out, they were divided in opinion concerning me. Rupert of Hentzau, who was the adjutant or the chief of staff, had only one simple thought, which was to shoot me. Others considered ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
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... for the second advent of the Messiah. All about them was the prairie, its long grass gently billowed by the spring breeze. On the far right, blue in the haze, was a continuous range of lofty bluffs. On the left the waters of the Platte, muddied by the spring freshets, flowed over beds of quicksand between groves of cottonwood that pleasantly fringed its banks. The hard labour and the constant care demanded by the dangers that surrounded them prevented any from feeling the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
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... of the college man to lead the half-tamed boy into the stronger places of life; nor shove him to the dangerous ground where his feet must sink in the quicksand or ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
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... invented by M. Triger to keep the water expelled from the sheet-iron cylinders which he sunk through quick-sands in reaching the coal-measures in the vicinity of the river Loire in France. The seams of coal in this district lie under a stratum of quicksand from fifty-eight to sixty-six feet in thickness, and they had been inaccessible by all the ordinary modes of mining previously practised. The system has been much amplified and improved since, especially in sinking the foundations of the St. Louis and the New York East River ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
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... young woman to be rescued by her lover from quicksand, she will possess a worthy and faithful husband, who ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
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... good for man to know which could not be deduced from facts. This was the only sound basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand. ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
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... called the one or the other. Now this controversy and tangle into which psychologists have fallen might be avoided if the primary division of feelings were a logical division. A and Not-A—that is the only true and logical division. Patanjali is absolutely logical and right. In order to avoid the quicksand into which the modern psychologists have fallen, he divides all vrittis, modes of mind, into painful ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
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... he has the misfortune to differ in opinion. Very carefully has he gone over the whole of the line surveyed. He is sorry to say that the gradients are utterly impossible, and the curves approaching to a circle. Tunnelling is out of the question. How are two miles of quicksand and two of basaltic rock to be gone through? The first is deeper than the Serbonian bog, and would swallow up the whole British army. The second could not be pierced in a shorter time than Pharaoh took to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
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... off with renewed vigour. From his feet there stretched away to the north a great dead level of quicksand, seething, bubbling, and heaving in the darkness. The sea, and yet no sea. Neither honest land ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
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... terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
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... most certainly be rifled at." He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and followed him to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
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... filled with snare and quicksand, pilgrim? Do pitfalls lie where roses seem to grow? And have you sometimes stumbled in the darkness, And are you bruised and scarred by many a blow? Pilgrim, I know, I know! ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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... without reply. I had put my foot on quicksand, and could not now withdraw it. Struggling would only send me ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
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... the sluggish stream with its flood-worn channel and its treacherous patches of quicksand, the wagon thus halted by the sheer nerve and quick-thinking of mother became a very small island in a troubled sea of weltering backs and tossing horns and staring eyeballs. Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly with their ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
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... bound to crumble. For thou hast sought support where it was not to be found, for thou hast built thy house on a quicksand...." ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
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... yielded to it, and were driven along. (16)And running under a certain small island called Clauda, we were hardly able to come by the boat; (17)which when they had taken up, they used helps, undergirding the ship; and, fearing lest they should be cast away on the quicksand, they lowered the ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
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... confounded blackguard—a living quicksand, and nothing else. Lanty, my lad, if the Mississippi was brandy grog, she'd dry the river—drinking at this hour!—well, never mind, I was drunk myself last night, and I'm half drunk yet. Here, you devil's tinder box, mix me a glass of brandy ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
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... reached our destination. If this had happened we should have drifted on some of the rocks with which the harbour abounds. When we had got the stern of the vessel into the sand we discovered that we had not accomplished much, for the said sand being very loose, almost of the character of quicksand, and the sea running high, the stern kept sinking almost as rapidly as when it had nothing but water below it. The cabins were already full of water, and the object was to land the passengers. As usual, there was the greatest ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
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... a river which Burke named the Cloncurry. A few hundred yards below the camp Billy got bogged in a quicksand bank so deeply as to be unable to stir, and they had to undermine him on the creek side and pull him into the water. About five miles farther on he bogged again, and afterwards was so weak that ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
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... at the Arlington; the hurried exposure; the frantic efforts to avoid it; the malignant gratification shown by the Marshses, "we built the foundation on which they grew; we'll hurl them from it into a quicksand from which they will never emerge;" the admissions of guilt made by the unhappy Secretary at a moment when, as it had been suggested, he was contemplating suicide; the imprisonment in his own house; ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
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... effect, when after a few years on a point, they disappear under the water. Later they will lunge up and out into the wind again, gallumphing along, some coarse gravel bars, some yellow sand, some white sand, some fine quicksand, some gritty mud, and others of mud almost fit to use ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
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... seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah's elephant, in the name of St Francis Xavier, when the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father's estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand. There was a boy who, he said, and none doubted, had helped his father to beat off with rifles from the veranda a rush of Akas in the days when those head-hunters ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
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... rising, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds—saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then uttering her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm—these all had sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
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... good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts he brought me more interesting than his explanations, which were compounded of fag ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
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... of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
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... beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
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... sank Joukahainen Waist-deep in the swamp beneath him, Hip-deep in the marshy meadow, To his arm-pits in a quicksand. 330 Then indeed young Joukahainen Knew at last, and comprehended; And he knew his course was finished, And his journey now was ended. For in singing he was beaten, ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
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... hundred feet below the level of the surrounding plain), which has been assumed as being about the limit of penetration. It is not possible to sink a shaft at present, owing to the water which has drained into the crater, and which forms, with the finely pulverized sandstone, a very troublesome quicksand encountered at about two hundred feet below the visible floor of the crater. As soon as this water is removed by pumping it will be easy to explore the depths of the crater by means of shafts and drifts. The ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
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... checked his impulse. Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him. For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down. The very fact that he was his father's son had made him shoot down one man. Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted him to crime. How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
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... per signal in company with the Commodore; found when near the Investigator the water suddenly to shoal from 6 to 3 to 1, where we touched the ground, however on heaving up our keel she went off into 2 fathoms, when we came to, observed the Investigator to ground, she was caught on a bank of quicksand in 11 feet at half-past 10 A.M. she floated, a little after Captain Flinders went away inshore, sounding. Several native fires ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
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... reasoning. She knew beyond all doubting that she had made the most ghastly mistake of her life. She had done it in blindness, but the veil had been rent away; and, horror-struck, she now beheld the accursed quicksand into ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
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... women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose—that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
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... summer, her son, a lad of about twelve years old, used to ride along the sands to Liverpool every day for his lessons, and that she could see him through the telescope all the way to the first houses on the outskirt of the town. Just about midway, however, there was a spot of treacherous quicksand, and I confess I wondered at my friend's courage in watching her boy pass that point: he knew it well, and was little likely to take his pony too near it; but I confess I would rather have trusted ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
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... quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize the muddy bottom of my present thoughts sincerely and courageously, to question myself and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
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... in Red Sea fishing and the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay—the coral insect, which was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand. Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky vessel in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
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... with nervous terror as each rushing fall sounded nearer; and, when the line of white foamy crests became more plainly visible, he was impelled to hurry on towards the steeple so fast that the guide shouted to him that he would only bury himself in a quicksand. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
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... on, Mr. Bunn!" said Mr. Pertell, quickly. "I am not asking you to do much. You need not get in the bog deeper than up to your knees. That will answer very well. You can pretend it is a sort of quicksand bog and that you are sinking deeper and deeper. You call for help, and Mr. Switzer comes to get ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
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... well watered, having many streams, all of which are rapid, for the greater part flowing over beds of lava and quicksand. In some of the wider fords stakes have been set so that the traveller may not get lost in crossing them on horseback during a dense fog. In the summer the frequent rains make travelling very unpleasant unless one is suitably ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
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... find one for my horse the other day," he said. "I thought I had but it was a quicksand and I was glad enough to get out without being stuck. There's no ford now for miles up and down the Creek from here—that is, none that I know of, especially not since ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
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... my hand in, convulsively, upon her breast, until it seemed to be in the midst of tremulous warmth, close upon the throbbing heart itself. I could not think. Thought seemed slipping from me. I felt sinking deeper each minute into the quicksand of desire. Nothing seemed clear any longer. All within my brain was merged into one hot, clinging haze, in which still loomed the idea that I must not yield. It would be dishonourable to my father, disappointing to myself, destructive to my work. I ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
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... difficult, and sunshine an almost forgotten benediction!—let them go their own foolish way till they learn wisdom of themselves—no one could ever teach them what they refuse to learn, till they tumble into a bog or quicksand of dilemma and have to be ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
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... any time," replied Mills cheerfully as he slung his boots across his shoulders. "You don't think that island's a quicksand, eh?" ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
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... June the Platte River was reached, about twenty-five miles below Grand Island. Captain Bonneville measured the stream at that point, found it to be twenty-two hundred yards wide, and from three to six feet deep, the bottom full of quicksand. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
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... hundred-and-fifty foot bank of loose earth had swallowed the "crazy conthraption" to the very edge of the water, sloping steeply upward at its near side from the bridge that spanned the permanent course of the river. Everything hung now waiting only for the choking of the quicksand to commence the filling of the ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
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... instantly, saw a human fantastic, struggling, writhing, twisting with maniacal might, the while the horrible quicksand held him by the legs, and swallowed ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
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... be hoped," he said, drearily; "it is so to be believed. Woman's love-memory is a kind of quicksand that can swallow a score or so of gallant gentlemen and show no trace of ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
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... true Californian valley, bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
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... It was a black fog. Robert could have landed ten thousand men, and we none the wiser. Does he tell how we were out all day riding the marsh, and how I near perished in a quicksand, and coughed like a sick ewe for ten days after?" cried ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
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... the small boy, "foller me, an' don't be frightened. Port your helm a bit here, there's a quicksand in the middle o' the ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
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... that there never could be another time, and he didn't want that there should. This knowledge left him rather dazed. He felt a good deal like a man who, walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds himself up to his neck in quicksand. And, like a person in such a quandary, Wade's first instinctive ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
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... greatness for a man to imagine himself great when there is not in him one single element of greatness? Let us confess ourselves that which we can not consent to remain! The confession of not being, is the sole foundation for becoming. Self is a quicksand; God is the only rock. I ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
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... efforts were mostly in grafting, then after a year or two of failure, probably largely due to the way we kept our scions, we had some results at the McCoy Nursery, with scions kept at home. The McCoy Nursery was about four miles from my place, and located in a sandy soil with a near quicksand sub-soil. At that location they were later reasonably successful in grafting, using ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
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... watchful man, never entirely free from the expectation that his father's sealed past at some instant would open and confront him with the terrible facts. For that reason he felt that the success he had gained as an engineer, a success won by relentless toil and solid ability, rested on a quicksand. For that cause he had welcomed engineering projects full of danger and by his indifference to that danger ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
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... anchor; the things which his life had been built on would not hold him. Money—men envied the rich nowadays, he said, and the rich man had no rights in the courts or out of them; friends—they had gone up in the market, and he could not afford them; politics—he had found it a quicksand. So he jabbered to Neal Ward, his secretary, and pulled down the curtains of his car on the station side of every stop the train made in ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
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... Indeed, the only difference between it and the surrounding swamp was that on the road the soil was comparatively firm, that is to say, one seldom sank into it above the knee, whereas on either side of it quagmires were often apparently bottomless, and what is more, partook of the nature of quicksand. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
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... scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
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... of the alighting of that bird upon the sinking end of the log. How free and independent that bird! How easy its escape. How impossible the escape of any mortal. To carelessly pause upon a log that was going down in quicksand and then to fly away. There was blitheness in the face of danger ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
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... hoofs and now they crushed down through flying gravel and sand. He faced straight in, pawing the yielding bank with his forehoofs and suspended over the roar of the torrent. It was like striving to climb a hill of quicksand. The greater his struggle the more swiftly the treacherous soil melted ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
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... belligerent." He did not intend to abandon publicly this cautious attitude—at least, not for the present. And while Slidell at Paris was completely taken in, the cooler head of A. Dudley Mann, Confederate commissioner at Brussels, saw what an international quicksand was the favor of Napoleon. It was about this time that Napoleon, having dispatched General Forey with a fresh army to Mexico, wrote the famous letter which gave notice to the world of what he was about. Mann wrote home in alarm that the Emperor ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
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... little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
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... done many things that were risky. Jean had shot at him with real bullets so many times that her nervousness on this particular day was rather unaccountable to him. Jean had lassoed him and dragged him behind Pard through brush. She had pulled him from a quicksand bed,—made of cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
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... considerable depth, we are pretty certain to find traces of mineral water. In some places, at the depth of six or eight feet, it has been discovered issuing from a fissure or seam in the underlying limestone, while at other places it seems to proceed from a thin stratum of quicksand which is found to alternate with the marl at distances of from ten to forty feet, below which bowlders of considerable size ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
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