"Blind alley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seeks to investigate this common origin of mythologies, and with them the possible early identity of races and of languages, that he is almost certain to soon bury himself in a hypothesis and become lost in some blind alley ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... while in Reputation (as I suppose it will be called when translated) the thesis is too incredible for belief; hence the magician, wily as he is, scrambles about aimlessly in the last two acts, sparring for wind, and seemingly anxious to escape from a blind alley of situations. That he does it so well is a ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... constable seemed to be on terms of scornful intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate. We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major remarked to me perfunctorily, had "killed another man last year." Thereupon he addressed him as "Antonio" and "Old Buck," though that bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... times in Grub Street; in the days when the art of letters, though undeniably prolific, was not productive of an income which would assure even a practised hand freedom from care and want. Within a half-mile on either side of this blind alley leading off Fleet Street, from Ludgate Hill on the east—redolent of memories of the Fleet, its Prison, and its "Marriages"—to Somerset House on the west, is that unknown land, that terra incognita, whereon so many ships of song ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Launce's presence (privately encouraged, no doubt) at Muswell Hill. "Her father shall pay me for it doubly: with his purse and with his life." With that thought in his heart, Richard Turlington wound his way through the streets by the river-side, and stopped at a blind alley called Green Anchor Lane, infamous to this day as the chosen resort of the most abandoned wretches ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... conclusion was that of one hundred trails, ten at the most would lead to any result: but you must follow each one of the hundred up until you reach proof that you are in a blind alley. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Guilford Square, but did not turn into any of the old decayed houses; her home was far less imposing. At the corner of the square there is a narrow opening which leads into a sort of blind alley paved with grim flagstones. Here, facing a high blank wall, are four or five very dreary houses. She entered one of these, put down her wet umbrella in the shabby little hall, and opened the door of a barely furnished ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... house was a rather large garden, which ended in a little grove of lime-trees, neglected and overgrown. In the middle of this thicket stood an old summer-house in the Chinese style: a wooden paling separated the garden from a blind alley. Liza would sometimes walk, for hours together, alone in this garden. Kirilla Matveitch was aware of this, and forbade her being disturbed or followed; let her grief wear itself out, he said. When ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... want me around there!" was the whimsical thought foremost in his mind. "Don't want to damage me, either. But they leave me in a blind alley of the jungle to ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth, which were of such a type that they could not change to meet a change in the flora upon which the creature fed. Of course we shall never know what narrow escapes our race had from extinction in the remote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley, like the sea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have continued to evolve and have reached their high-water mark of intelligence in bees and ants. The vertebrates went forward and have culminated in man. Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... see newspapers you will read about Mrs. Clarke. The sensation in London about this nonsensical business is marvellous. I remember nothing in my life like it. Thousands of ballads, caricatures, lives, of Mrs. Clarke, in every blind alley. Yet in the midst of this stir, a sublime abstracted dancing-master, who attends a family we know in Kensington, being asked a question about the progress of the examination in the House, inquired who Mrs. Clarke was? He had heard nothing of it. He had evaded this ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... good purpose that they discovered, at the rear of the building, opening into a blind alley, a narrow wooden stairway. It ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... that matter? Instead of following him, let him return to you, as he did to-night. You've driven him up a blind alley on this Last Chance River; he can only go to the blank wall of the Bay, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... implements culminating at last in the blowing out of a tube of one of the boilers. It was this misfortune that had held the work up for several days until a spare boiler could be installed. Peter tried to find out how these accidents had happened, but each line of investigation led up a blind alley. Jesse Brown, his foreman, seemed to be loyal, but he was easy-going and weak. With many of his own friends among the workers both at the camp and mills he tried to hold his job by carrying water on both shoulders and the ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... he dismissed whatever it was that was worrying him from his mind. I could have told him from the beginning that this obsession of his over the coffee was bound to end in a blind alley, but I restrained my tongue. After all, though he was old, Poirot had been a great man in ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... by Sainte-Croix was in the rue des Bernardins, and the place near at hand where he was to wait for Belleguise was the room he leased from the widow Brunet, in the blind alley out of the Place Maubert. It was in this room and at the apothecary Glazer's that Sainte-Croix made his experiments; but in accordance with poetical justice, the manipulation of the poisons proved fatal to the workers themselves. The apothecary ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... turned his gharry and was driving back. Then, for a man afflicted with varicose veins the Babu displayed amazing agility. He ran through the silent and deserted street until he came to a turning. The lane which ran into the main road was a blind alley. Mean hovels and shuttered booths flanked it, but at the end a tall house stood. The Babu looked about him and perceived a cart standing in the lane. He advanced to it ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... over a piece of anatomy or a book, a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,—take both of them, breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones in conflict ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... nothing but lies to be expected: I'll even go lose myself in some blind alley, and try if any courteous damsel will think me worth the finding. [Aside, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... and found themselves in a sort of blind alley, a dark, gloomy spot where not a ray of light ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... young man—son of one of the city's plunging millionaire wheat speculators—was found dead in a little blind alley back of a resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... friendly, gregarious man. He liked to go to conventions and discuss his work with his colleagues. He was, in addition, a man who would never let anything go once he had got hold of it, unless he was convinced that he was up a blind alley. And, as far as Dr. Ch'ien was concerned, that took a devil of a ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... divisions of theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always closely related to theoretical morality, it can never ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... which we have no plan and about which we know nothing. The first rule is this: If a maze has no parts of its hedges detached from the rest, then if we always keep in touch with the hedge with the right hand (or always touch it with the left), going down to the stop in every blind alley and coming back on the other side, we shall pass through every part of the maze and make our exit where we went in. Therefore we must at one time or another enter the centre, and every ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... whole business than the idea that because a woman marries she therefore must give up her work. That's what is the reason the boarding house and every boarding house and every home and street and city swarms with derelicts—with derelict women—just because their lives are all planned as blind alley occupations, marriage at the end of the alley, no need to do anything, no need to be anything because it's only a blind alley you're in. When you reach the end—you reach the end! That's it, Keggo. You reach the end. You're a woman, therefore ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... characters. As this is not the case, there remains no alternative but to assume divergent evolution from an indifferent form. The lower Eastern monkeys are carrying on the evolution in one direction—I might almost say towards a blind alley—while anthropoids and men have struck out a progressive path, at first in common, which explains the many points of resemblance between them, without regarding man as derived directly from the anthropoids. Their many striking points of agreement indicate ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... like a blind alley; but in the end the duke yielded. His heart was set on carrying through this scheme for regaining his duchess. His mind was so rarely guilty of ingenuity that he could not bear to discourage it. They set ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... country town. At first I watched the charming expression of the girl's face and her graceful attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked about me, seeking to understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of Paris, and saw that the street was a blind alley and but little frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened hopes of a cheap lodging, and ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... knowledge, knowledge in potentia. To invert the order is to destroy Philosophy not to serve it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An intuitive Philosophy so- called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind alley. Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful effort. It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur la Violence takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at least, leans on him. There are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise man knows, as William James once ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... afternoons Richard and I, unattended but not wholly unalarmed, would set forth from our home on this thrilling weekly adventure. Having joined our father at his office, he would invariably take us to a chop-house situated at the end of a blind alley which lay concealed somewhere in the neighborhood of Walnut and Third Streets, and where we ate a most wonderful luncheon of English chops and apple pie. As the luncheon drew to its close I remember how Richard and I used to fret and fume while my father in a most leisurely manner used ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... and ran, and ran. She ran up Fore Street, and down High Street, and through the Market-place, and down to the left, and over the bridge, and up the blind alley, and back again, and round by the Castle, and so along by the Haberdasher's on the right, opposite the lamp-post, and round the square, and she came—she came to the EXECUTION PLACE, where she saw Bulbo laying his head on the block!!! The executioner ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and planned, only to find that each road they launched out upon full of hope, terminated in the blind alley of the old man's ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... young people, but the girl who had spoken was the only one who looked at all familiar. Patsy's mind groped out of the present into the past; it was all a blind alley, however, ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love beautifully. The implicit demand ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... discussion with his wife began to dawn on Lord Ashbridge, as it dawned on everybody who had the privilege of conversing with her. Her mind was a blind alley that led nowhere; it was clear that she had no idea to contribute to the subject except slightly pessimistic forebodings with which, unfortunately, he found himself secretly disposed to agree. He had always felt that Michael was an uncomfortable sort of boy; in ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... close to the ground and followed along the path. At the entrance to the little gallery of the broken column it diverged, one part leading into the gallery, and the other into a sort of blind alley at one side. Terry paused ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... eminent for his feats upon holidays at foot-ball, and other gymnastic exercises; scarce rivalled in the broad-sword play, though hitherto only exercised in the form of single-stick. He knew every lane, blind alley, and sequestered court of the ward, better than his catechism; was alike active in his master's affairs, and in his own adventures of fun and mischief; and so managed matters, that the credit he acquired by the former bore him out, or at least ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... of smoke and grime, I start in some blind alley, And race each night against Old ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... the glorious beauty of the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal in their rich adornment, was the universal decoration of the poorest quarters, which were all flagged and festooned so thickly that little could be seen of the stones of Venice. One poor cobbler, however, living at the end of a blind alley, had no flag, no garland to deck his abode: he had therefore pasted three strips of coloured paper, red, white and green, over his door, inscribing on the middle strip these words, which in their sublime simplicity merit to be rescued from oblivion: 'O mia cara Italia, voglio ma non posso ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... itself in planting apple seed. What variety shall I choose? Some pedigrees may be like a blind alley, they will lead us nowhere. The commercial apples of the East and of the Pacific Coast are the survivors of millions of apple seedlings raised by immigrants from Western Europe during the past three centuries. They survived because they ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... explanation of the extraordinary situation in which he would find himself, a situation truly calculated to create any amount of misunderstanding. To all appearances the adventure on which he had started out had brought him to an impasse, a blind alley, from which there was no ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... the wooden floors and pictures and mirrors for the walls; and in each of them there was the jolliest little stove with a removable lid. We discovered one of these underground palaces at the end of a blind alley leading off from the main trench. It was at least fifteen feet underground, with two stairways leading down to it, so that if escape was cut off in one direction, it was still possible to get out on the other side. We immediately took possession, built a roaring ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... according to caprice, here each lane and court is so built, without reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. The lanes run now in this direction, now in that, while every two minutes the wanderer gets into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds himself back where he started from; certainly no one who has not lived a considerable time in this labyrinth can find his way ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... through the streets to the mouth of a blind alley, at the bottom of which rose a high garden wall, and over the wall the smoking chimneys of a house among the tops of many trees freshly green, which shivered in the breeze and shook the sunlight from their leaves. ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... in the River Ward of Hammersmith in that blind alley known to the police and the inhabitants as ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant |
