"Cesspool" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am in this vile cesspool of humanity again, and I feel like a drowning gnat. I did not go to the club, as you told me to, because I thought I could live more economically if I took a room somewhere and 'ate around,' I left my bag at the station, ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... habit of accompanying Mr. Jones, when visiting the miserable garrets, obscure yards, and wretched alleys in Hull, and was considered his 'right hand man,' in helping to hold open-air services. They often went in company to such wretched localities as 'Leadenhall Square,' then the greatest cesspool of vice in the Port, and, well supplied with tracts, visited every house. During the intervals of public worship, on the Sabbath day, when he might have been enjoying himself in the circle of his family, on a clean hearth, before a ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... lienteria[obs3]; faeces, feces, , excrement, ordure, dung, crap[vulgar], shit[vulgar]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies[obs3], mixen[obs3], midden, bog, laystall[obs3], sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess[obs3], cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable[obs3], sink of corruption; slum, rookery. V. be unclean, become unclean &c. Adj.; rot, putrefy, ferment, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Louisiana. The river was low; there was an ominous quality in the heat which had its effect, indeed, upon me, and made the old Creoles shake their heads and mutter a word with a terrible meaning. New Orleans was a cesspool, said the enlightened. The Baron de Carondelet, indefatigable man, aimed at digging a canal to relieve the city of its filth, but this would be the year when it was most needed, and it was not dug. Yes, Monsieur le Baron was energy itself. That other fever—the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... greatest sins committed by children and young people is disobedience to parents. It is one of the greatest, because it is one of the first, and because if cultivated it becomes a cesspool of iniquity. It is a pandora box, out of which ten thousand troubles, trials, difficulties, sins and crimes will come. I claim that the love of dancing is the most fruitful source of disobedience to parents to be found beneath the sun, because it becomes a ruling passion. If anything will ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... impure and the notions of religion imperfect, is higher than mere anger at pecuniary loss. How much of the opposition since and to-day comes from the same mean source! Lust and appetite organise profitable trades, in which 'the money has no smell,' however foul the cesspool from which it has been brought. And when Christian people set themselves against these abominations, capital takes the command of the mob of drink-sellers and consumers, or of those from haunts of fleshly sin, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... life-boat to rescue the Gipsy and bring him to land. Scents and perfumes in a death-bed chamber only last for a short time. A bottle of rose-water thrown into a room where decomposition is at work upon a body will not restore life. Scattering flowers upon a cesspool of iniquity will not purify it. A fictitious rope composed of beautiful ideas is not the thing to save drowning Gipsy children. To put artificially-coloured feathers upon the head of a Gipsy child dressed in rags and shreds, with his body literally teeming with vermin ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air—or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a drain full of filth ran right under the floor. A cesspool was close to a fourth cottage. In several the floors were clean; but all sorts of filth had dropped through and stayed there, and when it rained the water ran under the floor. "Just lift up a plank," said Farmer Grey; it was done, and he stuck his stick ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... evenings, while the would-be householder himself is the hod-bearer and mixes the mortar. Nine times out of ten the site for the cottage is chosen so as to have a ditch at the back. This ditch acts at once as the cesspool and the sewer, and, unless it happens to have a good fall, speedily becomes a nuisance to the neighbourhood. A certain quantity of wood is of course required in building even this humble edifice. This is either given by the farmers or is purchased ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... only the two stores, but a cellar both large and deep, to which one obtained access by a staircase pitch dark, crooked, and everlastingly covered with moisture, owing to the proximity of the river. The floor of the cellar was a kind of noisome cesspool: one slipped on the greasy mud—floundered about in it: for all that, this cellar was almost entirely filled with cases of all kinds, with queer-looking bundles, with objects of various shapes and sizes. Evidently the jumble store of Mother Toulouche did not confine ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... such dangers, in which the odds were all against them. Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... man laboriously lit his lanthorn. Its pale rays fled out on either hand; beautiful but grim was the vision they disclosed. Tall houses, fair court-yards, and a palm grown garden; in front of the Prince's horse a deep cesspool, on whose jagged edges the good beast's hoofs were planted; and, as far as the glimmer of the lanthorn stretched, both ways down the rutted street, paving stones displaced, and smooth tesselated marble; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lefkosia from the hills at some miles' distance, and is of excellent quality; but the wells of the town must be contaminated by sewage, as there is no means of effective drainage upon the dead level of the town, unless the original ditch is turned into a pestilential cesspool. The filth of centuries must have been imbibed by the soil, and during the process of infiltration must in successive rainy seasons have found its way to the wells. In case of invasion, Lefkosia could never have resisted a prolonged siege, as in the absence of the aqueduct a garrison would ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... give their lives for the land in which they had known nothing save cruelty and oppression. I shall never give up my fight for freedom, but I shall never prove false to the flag. I may fight to keep her from floating over cesspools of corruption by removing the cesspool; but I shall never fight to restrict the territory in which she is to float. ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... wish to remind you that the lower end of the main drain must be protected from the iniquity of the sewer or cesspool to which it runs by another trap, or dam, just below the open pipe that admits fresh air from outside the house (Fig. 5), and also, as I have before remarked, that the system is wrong. The rising tide of civilization will some time wash it ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this city—men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn't know of my boy, Lilly; you were too young ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... man Romeo got very tipsy one night, and that we went to see the Sistine Chapel the day the eclipse made it as dark as a pocket. Yes,' continued Lavinia, with an air of decision, 'I am glad to have seen this classical cesspool, and still more glad to have got out of it alive,' she added, sniffing the air from the mountains, as if the odour of sanctity which pervaded the holy city ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... subterranean connection between cesspools and wells is often traced in the following way: A small amount of lithium, which gives a distinct flame reaction, and a minute trace of which can be detected with the spectroscope, is placed in the cesspool, and after a short time a lithium reaction is secured from the ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... but six months since Polish Patriotism, so effulgent to its own eyes in Orthodoxy, in Love of glorious Liberty, confederated at Bar, and got into that extraordinary whirlpool, or cesspool, of miseries and deliriums we have been looking at; and now it has issued on a broad highway of progress,—broad and precipitous,—and will rapidly arrive at the goal set before it. All was so rapid, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... disgusted the two friends was that jumping-jack of an Arthur Papillon. Universal suffrage, with its accustomed intelligence, had not failed to elect this nonentity and bombastic fool, and to-day he flounders about like a fish out of water in the midst of this political cesspool. Having been enriched by a large dowry, he has been by turns deputy, secretary, vice-president, president, head of committees, under secretary of State, in one word, everything that it was possible to be. For the time being he rants against the clergy, and his wife, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... will be because mediocrities were at the helm. Concessions, compromises, any patched-up peace, will for a century degrade the name of America. Of course, I cannot prevent it; but events have often broken but not bent me. I may be burned, but I cannot be melted; so if secesh succeeds, I throw in a cesspool my document of naturalization, and shall return to Europe, even if working ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Cholera kept along the sea-shore, now it goes far inland, and will spread all over Africa; this we get from Mecca filth, for nothing was done to prevent the place being made a perfect cesspool of animals' guts and ordure of men.[11] A piece of skin bound round the chest of a man, and half of it hanging down, prevents waste of strength, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... then that pearl which we have lost is equivalent to devoting our lives to bailing out the sea of that evil. The prince of this world will take fright, he will succumb more promptly than did the spirit of the sea; but this social evil is not the sea, but a foul cesspool, which we assiduously fill with our own uncleanness. All that is required is for us to come to our senses, and to comprehend what we are doing; to fall out of love with our own uncleanness,—in order that that imaginary sea should dry away, and that ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Clean out the human cesspool by frequent use of the "Cascade," thus preventing any further deposition of these impure substances in the blood, and keep it clean by more or less constant use. In acute cases, take frequent Turkish ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... the Mohammedan dominion and civilization in East Africa. Professor Drummond, in giving his impressions of Zanzibar, says: "Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, a cesspool of wickedness, it is a fit capital to the Dark Continent." And it is the great emporium—not an obscure settlement, but the consummate flower of East African civilization and boasting in the late Sultan Bargash, an unusually enlightened ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the hospital that he had built with faith and love and prayer! In the same city, the fine Y. M. C. A. building was almost deserted by the Chinese because it was so situated that to reach it they would have to pass through the Taku Road in the Foreign Settlement, a street which was a cesspool of vice, lined with saloons, dance halls and gambling hells, and its sidewalks so crowded with fast women—French, German, American and Japanese—and with drunken, quarrelling foreign soldiers, that no respectable Chinese, or for that matter ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... was a very bad character) was Missees Christmas. She had begun to get into great difficulties with a gentleman of the name of Meestair Cornhill, when we were obliged to leave, at the end of the first act, by the intolerable stench of the place. The whole theatre must be standing over some vast cesspool. It was so alarming that I instantly rushed into a cafe and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... had freely given itself was called by such names as cesspool and drain in several eloquent speeches. But President Formose was spared and no mention was made of Crucho or ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Hamilton and those of the Neapolitan Queen proved too strong for him. The King's beseeching fears were also added to an already difficult situation, which, he persuaded himself, could not be ignored without damaging the interests he was sent to protect; so his stay in the reeking cesspool of Neapolitanism was prolonged, but there is no reason for supposing that his "constant prayer" for the extinction of the French was any the less ardent. The fatal day of their catastrophe was only postponed. The praying went on all the same, with more or less belief in the Almighty's ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... not frightened—not for my personal safety, at any rate—but a sensation of sickening horror went through me as I looked into his tired face and understood that at last he had fallen into the cesspool which had tormented him since early years. The words of the coroner came back into my ears: "He is a madman of uncanny intelligence," and I knew that he knew I recognized him for what ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... conveniences of a civilized dwelling. This forces them in storm time to such extremities, that no wonder fevers and plagues are the result. We had not been at sea one week, when to hold your head down the fore hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... was already down, having gone voluntarily. Only one of each couple had been ordered below; and, much as he disliked the dwarf, he had no wish to see him drowned or suffocated, which the diminutive creature would well-nigh have been in the horrible cesspool. Tall as the Texan was, the stuff reached up to his thighs, the surface of the street itself being on a level with his arm-pits, while only the heads of the others could be seen above ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great and noble man's name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool. You ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... front can testify. Over and over again on my rambles in the dark, nothing has saved me from being stuck by a sentry but the white gleam of my clerical (p. 038) collar, which on this account I had frequently thought of painting with luminous paint. One night I stepped into a cesspool and had to sit on a chair while my batman pumped water over me almost as ill-savoured as the pool itself. On another occasion, when, against orders, I was going into the trenches in Ploegsteert, I saw the General and his staff coming down the road. Quick as thought, I cantered my horse into ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... however, she also felt, from time to time, in that cesspool of mire and darkness, something cold passing over her foot or ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... his father. "A verra appropriate name! Yours stinks like a cesspool! What have you been doing till't? I'm afraid ye aren't in very good health, after a-all.... Eh?... Mrs. Gourla', Mrs. Gourla'! He's in very bad case, this son of yours, Mrs. Gourla'! Fine I ken what he needs, though.—Set ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... curious story, HISTOIRE FORT CRIEUSE,—about one of Prince Fred's amourettes." Story which this Editor, in the name of the whole human species, will totally suppress, and sweep into the cesspool, to herald Reichenbach thither. Except only that this corollary by the Duchess of Kendal may be ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... nerve from the divine brain, yea, perhaps a ganglion as we call it, whence power anew goes forth upon his fellows. He is a redistributor, as it were, of the divine blessing; not in the exercise of his own will—that is the cesspool towards which all notions of priestly mediation naturally sink—but as the self- forgetting, God-loving brother of his kind, who would be in the world as Christ was in the world. When a man prays for his fellow-man, for wife or child, mother or father, ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... profaning the name of Christ because they had bet heavily on their boat crew and lost. In the midst of all their oaths the name of Carlisle came in for heavy scoring. From the heights of the most extravagant hero-worship he had suddenly tumbled into this cesspool of profane unpopularity. All of which goes to prove any number of useful things, among them the necessity, if you are going to be stroke oar of a boat crew, it is best if you would retain your popularity to keep in training until the season is over, and even then it is not ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... when the time was—when the Back Bay was a beautiful sheet of water, filled at high tide, carrying the healthful air through the whole city. But then the necessity of population called for its filling up, and it is now piled in upon, and we have there now what Dr. CLARKE called "a natural cesspool." ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy as when passionately wrangling with a tenant on some question of drains. The words "cesspool" and "wet-trap"—words to which I don't pretend to attach any meaning—seemed to be particular favourites of his. In fact, an hour seldom passed without their falling from his lips. But Mr. Smith's great opportunity was a gale. For that always meant an exciting harvest of dislodged chimney-pots, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... of whuskie and every kind of strong drink." In this strain the thin and weird looking old Iconoclast went on for an hour until he wound up with declaring, "England has joost gane clear doon into an abominable cesspool of lies, shoddies and shams—down to a bottomless damnation. Ye may gie whatever meaning to that word that ye like." He could not refrain from laughing heartily himself at the conclusion of this eulogy on his countrymen. If we had not known that Mr. Carlyle had a habit ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... was the second line—the first line consisting of "listening posts" somewhere in that watery waste beyond, where the men wore waders reaching well above their knees. We squelched along a narrow strip of plank with the trenches on one side and a sort of cesspool on the other—no wonder they got typhoid, and I prayed ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... it to my room, saying that I might be in need of some cash. This, of course, embarrassed me, but as she was so insistent I consented to borrow it. I confess I was really glad of the money. I put it in a bag, and carried it in my pocket. While about the house, I happened to drop the bag into a cesspool. Helpless, I told Kiyo how I had lost the money, and at once she fetched a bamboo stick, and said she will get it for me. After a while I heard a splashing sound of water about our family well, and going there, saw Kiyo washing the bag strung on the end of the stick. I opened ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri |
