"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to benefit everyone else in the world than those Jesus Christ wished to be used for the conversion of the nations? And I would fain ask with regard to the great number of those who believe, and who thereby have withdrawn themselves from the quagmire of vices wherein before they were plunged, which would be the better: to have thus changed one's morals and reformed one's life, believing without examination that there are punishments for sin and rewards for good actions; or to have waited for ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to every one when he sees bodies of British troops moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a "Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the enthusiasm ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... might have been, but fortunately circumstances combined to render it merely ridiculous, as reflected in the mirror of memory. The rain still fell heavily, lying in places to the depth of nearly a foot, and converting all the ground that was not rocky into a slippery quagmire. So profound was the darkness, that it was literally impossible to see any object six inches from one's eyes, and it was only by the occasional flashes from the firelocks of the persevering enemy and the forked lightning that we could ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought the saline breath of the outlying Pacific even to the busy haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... with ships full of huts, clothing, and fuel, the men at the front were dying in hundreds from wet, cold, and insufficient food. Between them and abundance extended an almost impassable quagmire, in which horses and bullocks sank and died in thousands, although laden only with weights which a donkey in ordinary times could carry. Had the strength of the regiments in front been sufficient, the soldiers might have been marched down, when off duty, to Balaklava, to carry up the necessaries ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... personal God, many have hunted but none have found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... drowned out the words, and immediately Ben's company found itself all but surrounded. To go into this quagmire had certainly been a grave error, but all leaders make mistakes sometimes; and Major Morris was suffering as ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... that the council were wrong when they refused all the offers of the towns to send bodies of footmen to fight beside us; had they been there, they might have faced those terrible archers of yours, for they at least would have been free to fight when we were all but helpless in that quagmire. I see that you have knightly spurs on, ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... carried into the air; he was quickly missed by his master and the workmen, and a great enquiry was made for Francis Fry, but no hearing of him; but about half-an-hour after Fry was heard whistling and singing in a kind of a quagmire. He was now affected as he was wont to be in his fits, so that none regarded what he said; but coming to himself an hour after, he solemnly protested, that the daemon carried him so high that he saw his master's house underneath him no bigger than a hay-cock, that he was in perfect ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... so persistently in San Francisco during the first week of January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had to be carried on pony-back, or in a few ponderous carts drawn by gaunt, over-worked ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... the sheet of water subsided from evaporation, leaving in many places merely an expanse of shifting mud, often concealed under the sand which the wind brought up from the desert. Travellers ran imminent risk of sinking in this quagmire, and the Greek historians tell of large armies being almost entirely swallowed up in it. About halfway along the length of the lake rose the solitary hill of Mount Casios; beyond this the sea-coast widened till it became a vast slightly undulating ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... for the key to this mysterious thing we call life? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital force—that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four principal elements—oxygen, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... party. He was in the overwrought mood in which a man damns everything. Quagmire and bramble and the derision of Olympus-that was the end of his vanity of an existence. Suppose he was elected—what then? He would be a failure-the high gods in their mirth would see to that—a puppet in Frank Ayres' hands until the next general election, when he would have ignominiously ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... far without muddying their boots. Now, our garden abuts almost on the railway-platform, so I propose sweeping a path straight across from the road, putting up a gate at each end, and saving people five hundred yards of quagmire, and a good five minutes in time, and a lot of swear-words, and my charge for all these improvements ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... bewitchments, Sesphra, I confess that through love men win to sick disgust and self-despising, and for that reason I will not love any more. Now breathlessly the tall lads run to clutch at stars, above the brink of a drab quagmire, and presently time trips them—Oh, Sesphra, wicked Sesphra of the Dreams, you have laid upon me a magic so strong that, horrified, I hear the truth come babbling from long-guarded lips which no longer obey me, because of ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... harassed, and yet more resolved, it would have been difficult to find. For six weeks now he had been wading deeper and deeper into a moral quagmire from which he saw no issue at all—except indeed by the death of Edmund Melrose! That ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the poor man had ventured on a sort of quagmire, and had disappeared half-way in the sticky mud. They stretched out their hands, and he rose, covered with slime, but quite satisfied at not having injured his precious entomologist's box. Acteon went beside him, and made it ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... rest. Motion consists merely in the fact that bodies are sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, and that they are at intermediate places at intermediate times. Only those who have waded through the quagmire of philosophic speculation on this subject can realise what a liberation from antique prejudices is involved in this simple and ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... a light glimmered in a second window. Entering the courtyard, the britchka halted before a moderate-sized mansion. The darkness did not permit of very accurate observation being made, but, apparently, the windows only of one-half of the building were illuminated, while a quagmire in front of the door reflected the beams from the same. Meanwhile the rain continued to beat sonorously down upon the wooden roof, and could be heard trickling into a water butt; nor for a single moment did the dogs cease to bark with all the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... extremely soft and boggy, that we found it impossible to proceed above three-quarters of a mile on our eastern course. We therefore returned, resolving to keep close to the river's edge, until we should be enabled to sound the vein of quagmire, with which we appeared to be hemmed in. In this attempt we were equally unfortunate, the horses falling repeatedly: one rolled into the river, and it was with difficulty we saved him: my baggage was on him, and ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... slipped out of my hand, and when I awoke, the horse had nearly torn itself loose, the harness was gone, the strap which fastened the horse to the shafts was gone, and so were the collar, the bridle and bit. Some one had come by, who had carried all off. Besides this, the cart had got into a quagmire and stuck fast. I left it standing, and stretched myself on the straw again. At last the master came himself, and pushed the cart out, and if he had not come I should not be lying here but there, and sleeping ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... the trouble? Into what quagmire have your little feet slipped? When you invite me so solemnly to a private conference in this distractingly pretty room, the inference is inevitable that some disaster threatens. Have you overdrawn your ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... it is true, but as for rest, I might as well, or better, have been awake. I fell from one dream into another; found myself wandering through impossible places; started in an agony of fear, and then dozed again, only to plunge into some deeper quagmire of trouble; and through all there was a vague feeling I was pursuing a person who eluded all my efforts to find him; playing a terrible game of hide-and-seek with a man who always slipped away from my touch, panting up mountains and running down declivities ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... burthened with innumerable difficulties. There was no firm foundation on which to work, and no trees to assist in forming hurdles. All we could do was to bind together large quantities of swamp weeds and lay them across the quagmire. It was but the semblance of a road, without ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... quarters. We were all experienced in handling bogged cattle, though this quicksand was the most deceptive that I, at least, had ever witnessed. The bottom of the river as we waded through it was solid under our feet, and as long as we kept moving it felt so, but the moment we stopped we sank as in a quagmire. The "pull" of this quicksand was so strong that four of us were unable to lift a steer's tail out, once it was imbedded in the sand. And when we had released a tail by burrowing around it to arm's length and freed it, it would sink of ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... between the roots of trees, it almost decided to stay and be a pond, and it dallied so long before it found a tiny opening and straggled out, that if it did not result in a pond, it did accomplish a treacherous quagmire. In fact that undecided, feeble-minded streamlet totally "demoralized" the whole hillside, and with its vagaries I had to contend at every ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... we stuck in a quagmire. We hitched the mules to the tail of the cart, pulled it out, then dug a new road in the side of the ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... today is Boone County, Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... considered that he had ample time to reduce Knodsenburg before Prince Maurice could return to its assistance. Two great rivers barred the prince's return, and he would have to traverse the dangerous district called the Foul Meadow, and the great quagmire known as the Rouvenian Morass. But Prince Maurice had now an opportunity of showing the excellence of the army he had raised and trained. He received the news of Parma's advance on the 15th of July; two days later he was on the march south, and in five days had thrown bridges of boats ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... to err with the slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that your hand, held before ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately and intently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone's laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? It is the helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or the mountain-top. Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of God which corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One would ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... discovery would result in a pecuniary loss to the town, and that consideration induces the officials, the good citizens, and soul reformers, to stifle the voice of truth. He finds them all a compact majority, unscrupulous enough to be willing to build up the prosperity of the town on a quagmire of lies and fraud. He is accused of trying to ruin the community. But to his mind "it does not matter if a lying community is ruined. It must be levelled to the ground. All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You'll bring it to such a pass that the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... was through a thick wood, the bottom of which was a mere quagmire, most part of it up to our knees, and often to our middle, and every now and then we had a large tree to get over, for they often lay directly in our road. Besides this, we were continually treading upon ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... my pain and disappointment to God," said he, "but thou hast deceived the Saviour also, for thou hast gone as it were to a quagmire which has poisoned thy soul with its miasma. Thou mightst have offered it to Christ as a costly vessel, and said to Him, 'Fill it with grace, O Lord!' but thou hast preferred to offer it to the servant of the evil ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... SERBONIAN BOG, a quagmire in Egypt in which armies were fabled to be swallowed up and lost; applied to any situation in which one is entangled from which extrication ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that they had a constant struggle to make their way. He had often assisted them as far as his own hitherto humble means would allow; and now, he had resolved that before leaving the neighbourhood, he would make them such a present as would lift them, once for all, out of the quagmire of adversity in which ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... army, in the mean time, was indeed deplorable. Those who occupied the lower level were up to their knees in mud and water; for the excessive rains, and the inundation of the Garigliano, had converted the whole country into a mere quagmire, or rather standing pool. The only way in which the men could secure themselves was by covering the earth as far as possible with boughs and bundles of twigs; and it was altogether uncertain how long even this expedient would serve against the encroaching ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... human dress are known. He himself, like some of our great poets, was externally well acquainted with the elements. The sun and he were particularly intimate; wind and rain were his brothers, and frost also distantly related to him. With mud he was hand and glove, and not a bog in the parish, or a quagmire in the neighborhood, but sprung up under Phelim's tread, and threw him forward with the brisk vibration of an old acquaintance. Touching his dress, however, in the early part of his life, if he was clothed with nothing else, he was ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... some half-dozen questions are necessary before we wade deeper into this quagmire. Where shall we go to ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... had nearly reached her waist, She called aloud in frantic haste: "I sink, I sink in quagmire sable, To free ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... How weary, flat and stale appeared her existence now! With a lump in her throat and a pang in her heart, she recklessly wiped her eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like an ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... oversight of British interests in the Empire. A gifted poet, and an enthusiastic advocate of universal peace, he was a man who might be counted on, if in [Page 163] the power of man, to hold the dogs of war in leash. But he, too, had been consul at Canton and he knew by experience the quagmire in which the best intentions were liable ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... stand, as he did, under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby voiced opinions more vigorous ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... standing in this uninviting quagmire for four solid hours. The interpreters were pestered unmercifully to secure us something to eat and to drink, but they were as helpless as ourselves. They were well-nigh distracted at the ugly turn which things were ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... more and more deficient in the knowledge of even the simplest Christian truths and facts. And bishops and priests, unconcerned about the ancient canons, stolidly looked on while Christendom was sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of total religious ignorance and indifference. Without fearing contradiction, Melanchthon declared in his Apology: "Among the adversaries there is no catechization of the children whatever, concerning which even ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge; made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inched bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor.—Bless thy ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sort of attempt to gain educational power, by obtaining separate sums for their own schools, and swamping the members of the Church of England, under the honourable but much abused appellation of Protestants, in the general quagmire of heresy and schism. However, this second effort, which was made with the sanction of the Government, was defeated chiefly (under Providence) by the zeal and ability of the Bishop; and whoever is desirous of seeing a noble specimen of clear reasoning and manly eloquence, will be gratified ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... when all the servants, and the butler at head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young heir of the old Hall in the old port wine! Happy had he been then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:—to look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... probably a phenomenon without equal in past or present times. I fear when the French news reaches America, it will damp the ardour of his friends there, and make them more than ever resolved to 'stand upon their own ground' rather than venture into the quagmire of European politics. It has confirmed me in my non-intervention policy. It is evident that we know nothing about the political state of even our next neighbours, and how are we likely to be better informed about Germany or Italy? ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... wielded the sceptre of the Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization. It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, pure and radiant from the foul and fetid quagmire. What could have produced them? The widely accepted rule that religions are the products of their environments is surely at fault here. Neither in the natural impulses of a dozen Judean fishermen and peasants, nor in the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... years of his life, and in a time of dreadful national trial, his great voice became the true voice of America to lead his countrymen out of a quagmire ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... it, a railroad conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock is so satisfactorily ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... rejection had come from the gentleman's hands,—so Miss Altifiorla was taught to believe,—she could not boast that Cecilia had accomplished it. But some mysterious agency had been at work which would not permit so exceptional a young lady as Miss Holt to fall into the common quagmire of marriage. She had escaped,—thanks to the mysterious agency, and must be doubly, trebly, armed with resolution lest she should stumble again. "I think," she said one day to Cecilia, "I think that you have great cause to be thankful ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much trampling, we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a wharf there fit for us to stand upon, and I showed my comrades a large heap of stones, which were intended for a new house near the marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the evening, when the workmen were gone, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... near Grinfield-Street, but discontinued. These arches seem to have given way and presented a curiously ruined aspect. In the lower range of vaults there was a run of water and what Williamson called "a quagmire." In several places there are deep wells, whence the houses in Mason-Street seem to be supplied with water. Sections of arches commenced, but left unfinished, were visible at one time in various places. The lowest range of arches opening from ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... some recruits, and also some hundred pounds for our military chest, for it was a well-to-do place, with a thriving coast trade carried on down the River Parret. After a night in snug quarters we set off again in even worse weather than before. The country in these parts is a quagmire in the driest season, but the heavy rains had caused the fens to overflow, and turned them into broad lakes on either side of the road. This may have been to some degree in our favour, as shielding us from the raids of the King's cavalry, but it made our march very slow. All day it was splashing ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... came unfastened, or in the regular kicking match which ensued some mischief would have been done. I expected every minute that the little carriage would have been broken to pieces, and that we should have been landed at the bottom of the quagmire over which the road ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... teach them; and if any scoffers Still weltered in the quagmire of their sin, If when I overhauled the monthly coffers I found the business part ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... which Morison wrote, made only from ten to fifteen miles in a long summer's day; that is, supposing them not to have broken down by pitching over the boulders laid along the road, or stuck fast in a quagmire, when they had to wait for the arrival of the next team of horses to help to drag them out. The waggon, however, continued to be adopted as a popular mode of travelling until late in the eighteenth century; and Hogarth's ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... there he meant to wait the attack of the French. That this attack had commenced we needed not to be informed, as the roar of the cannon became every instant more distinct, till we even fancied that it shook the town. The wounded represented the field of battle as a perfect quagmire, and their appearance testified the truth of their assertions. About two o'clock a fresh alarm was excited by the horses, which had been put in requisition to draw the baggage-wagons, being suddenly galloped through the town. We fancied this a proof of defeat, but the fact was simply thus: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... out upon the road, and took with him twenty knights. And as he went he did great good, and gave alms, feeding the poor and needy. And upon the way they found a leper, struggling in a quagmire, who cried out to them with a loud voice to help him for the love of God; and when Rodrigo heard this, he alighted from his beast and helped him, and placed him upon the beast before him, and carried him with him in this manner to the inn where he took up his lodging that night. ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... the ground simply quagmire, whilst the rain, cold, and the awful mud of the holding soil paralysed any energetic attempt to drive the enemy back. A desultory fire was kept up at all points along the line; but no great activity appeared ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the chateau there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained in the mud, like a great ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... From out this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... building. There was a dead silence. Was it going to rain? Was it going to pour? Was the storm confined to the metropolis? Would it reach Epsom? A deluge, and the course would be a quagmire, and strength might ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... and he could feel it touching the under side of the band of his dress. He then realized that he was in one of the dreaded mud sucks that are numerous on the Missouri. They are something in the nature of quicksand or quagmire and it is seldom anything escapes from their slimy embrace. Seeing no way out, he grew exceedingly nervous. He beat around in every direction without success. Now and then he put his hand down and could feel the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles; often the mud lay deep on the right and on the left, and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. It happened almost every day that coaches stuck fast until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighboring farm to tug them out of the slough. But to the honor of England, this condition of her roads was not allowed to continue very long. Although her progress in trade and prosperity ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... the hero, the patriot, and the lover of his race and time. Amid the political idiocy of the times, the corruption in high places, the dilettante culture, the vaporings of wild and helpless theorists, in this swamp of political quagmire, O Lincoln, it is refreshing to think ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... much knowledge, or indulging in much thought, but he can't play such tricks upon Agriculture. She is very much like a donkey: unless you are thoroughly acquainted with her playful ways, she will upset you in a quagmire. Perhaps it is due to my readers that I should say here that I have read a great many valuable treatises upon this subject, among which may be named, "Cometh up as a Flour," "Anatomy of Melon-cholly," "Sowing and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... second charge led by himself bearing the standard; and, in a third disastrous rush, Bonaparte, who had caught up the standard and planted it on the bridge with his own hand, was himself swept back into a quagmire, where he would have perished but for a fourth return of the grenadiers, who drove back the pursuing Austrians, and pulled their commander from the swamp. Fired by his undaunted courage, the gallant lines were formed once more. At that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... accompanied you on the thorny and bloody path to victory, will forsake you, and you will not be aware of it, for conquerors and tyrants are always blind. You will conquer and dominate. And you will plunge into injustice, and you will not feel the quagmire under your feet.... Every tyrant thinks he stands on firm ground so long as he ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... nature. Self-pity, he answered. Self-pity, pure and simple. He, Paul Armstrong, furnished with heart and brains and social powers, with fortune at hand, and fame to be had for the beckoning, had slid into this sickening quagmire thus early in his life's pilgrimage, and had ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... The gold boxes were there, and if they were not brought to the surface, and carried honestly to Suez, the matter would have to be fought out above in God's open air, and not in that horrible choking quagmire of slime and cruel water. And so, still guarding himself cannily, he got back again to the boat, and almost had it in him to shake hands with the men who eased ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey—he was the man I found there as night watchman—before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... on the 22nd was not practicable. The losses on the 21st had been heavy, the ground was still a quagmire and the troops exhausted. A six hours' armistice was arranged in order to bury the dead and remove the ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... way back by the shore, a good deal longer; now over rough, rocky stretches where he stumbled in the darkness, now through marshy, sodden ground where he sank as in a quagmire time and again over his ankles. It was even longer than he had counted on, and time, with the Weasel on one hand and the return of the police on the other, was a factor to be reckoned with again, as, a ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was about as appropriately ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... fast in a new quagmire of thought," Reade confessed humbly. "What I was about to say is that the first thing to do is to write to Mr. William Howgate, secretary of the Gridley High School Athletic Council of the Alumni Association. ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... Station. The first months of working this Turkish line, still in its narrow gauge condition as captured, did not afford a promising outlook. These were months of torrential and persistent rain. The country became a quagmire. Landslips along the permanent way, and the washing away of culverts, became of such frequent occurrence, that it was decided to abandon this portion of this line altogether. Committed, therefore, to no predetermined route, the engineers were left with the whole country open to them to ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... he owed it to himself to view it. But his plans were upset by the weather. On the following day it began to rain, and it continued to rain day and night thereafter until Colon became a sodden, dripping horror. The soil melted into a quagmire, the streets became sluices, the heavens closed down like a leaden pall, and the very air became saturated. It was hot also, and sticky. Indoors a mould began to form, rust grew like a fungus; outdoors the waving palm tops spilled a deluge ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... at first take them up and standardize them but left them entirely in the hands of local, county, and state Granges. These thereupon proceeded to "gang their ain gait" through the unfamiliar paths of business operations and too frequently brought up in a quagmire. "This purchasing business," said Kelley in 1867, "commenced with buying jackasses; the prospects are that many will be SOLD." But the Grangers went on with their plans for business cooperation with ardor undampened by ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... the different saints in the Gregorian calendar formerly adorned the walls, and bright colored tiles embellished the approach to the altar. Nothing is distinguishable these days but the crumbling and half-obliterated evidences of past glories; both priests and people seem hopelessly sunk in the quagmire of avariciousness and low cunning on the one hand, and of blind ignorance and superstition on the other. Clad in greasy and seedy-looking cowls, the priests go through a few nonsensical manosuvres, consisting chiefly of an ostentatious affectation of reverence ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Scarcely halting for a drink, Toiling through the sticky quagmire, They attain the farther brink. Here the trail leads to the westward,— Once the redman's wild domain; Now the shallow rutted highway Of the settler's wagon train. Here and there along the edges, ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... long and Uncle Terry's old horse slow, and the road in the hollows a quagmire of half-frozen mud. Gone were all the leaves of the scrub oaks, and beneath the thickets of spruce still remained a white pall of snow. A half gale was blowing over the island, and when they reached the hilltop that overlooked ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... accompanied, at a respectful distance, on these solitary expeditions, by a stranger, who, with eyes and ears both on the alert, watched over him like a providence. The most peculiar part of the affair was that this providence would gladly have caused him to take a misstep, or thrust him into some quagmire, in order to have the pleasure of drawing him out, and bearing him in his arms to the Hotel Badrutt. "If only he could fall into a hole and break his leg!" Such was the daily wish of Count Abel Larinski; but savants have great license allowed them. Although M. Moriaz was ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Quackery cxarlatanismo. Quadrangle kvarangulajxo. Quadrant kvadranto. Quadrate kvadrato. Quadrate kvadrata. Quadratic kvadrata. Quadrature kvadrato. Quadrille kvadrilo. Quadruped kvarpieda. Quadruple kvarobla. Quaff glutegi. Quaggy marcxa. Quagmire marcxejo. Quail (bird) koturno. Quail tremi. Quaint stranga. Quake tremi—egi. Qualification eco, kvaliteco. Qualify kvalitigi, ecigi. Quality eco, kvalito. Qualm konscidubo. Quandary embaraso. Quantity ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... most exquisitely picturesque, but difficult, route up the course of the Kinugawa, which seems almost as unknown to Japanese as to foreigners." There was a pure lemon-coloured sky above, and slush a foot deep below. A road, at this time a quagmire, intersected by a rapid stream, crossed in many places by planks, runs through the village. This stream is at once "lavatory" and "drinking fountain." People come back from their work, sit on the planks, take off their muddy clothes and wring them out, and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... wilderness of low leafless oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... and turned out promptly to feed the wretched horses; the poor, woe-begone looking creatures, hardly one of which was properly picketed, were standing expectantly amid a perfect cobweb of muddy, tangled picketing ropes in the quagmire, which represented their lines. One of the fellows, who had passed the night under our ox waggon, on lifting his rain-sodden blanket, found to his surprise and disgust a fine iguana, about four feet long, nestling against his ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... at this place which the horse can see, but which the rider fails to detect. They are in the midst of a swamp where one false step would mean a horrible death in the quagmire on the verge of which the horse has pulled up. The man uses whip and spur, but the horse refuses to move. Finally the rider leaves the horse to himself to find a way round which brings ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel
... earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do nothing with them but look at them and ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... as it was first called, must have been a mere quagmire, or cart-track, in the reign of Edward I., for Strype tells us that at that period it had become so impassable to knight, monk, and citizen, that John Breton, Custos of London, had it barred up, to "hinder ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... long,—where he understands the Saxons are. Miller lad guides us, over height and hollow, with his best skill, at a brisk pace;—through one hollow, where he has known the cattle pasture in summer time; but which proves impassable, and mere quagmire, at this season. No getting through it, you unfortunate miller lad (GARCON DE MEUNIER). Nevertheless, we did find passage through the skirts of it: nay this quagmire proved the luck of us; for the enemy, trusting to it, had no outguard ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lost. Many persons, mostly engineers or prospecting adventurers, had passed here, each taking his own way, and the sum of their selections served only to make bad very much worse. In the level places the trail was a quagmire, on some of the steeper slopes simply a zigzag of ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... much delayed by this unfortunate rain, which had converted a good road into a quagmire. We detected a rattlesnake crawling along this morning but there are not nearly so many of them in this country ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find the troubled one ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... do with a secret which I am pledged to keep. I will not allow your father to lead me into any quagmire of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... abdomen? I have no idea what she does or what she has in view. I leave the interpretation of this performance to others, more venturesome than I. Plenty of theories are based on equally shaky foundations. Blow on them and they sink into the quagmire ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... long, taut cable through fog, rain, and the blackness of the night, till every gun had been towed into one of the batteries before the walls. The triumph was all the greater because the work grew, not easier, but harder as it progressed. The same route used twice became an impassable quagmire. So, when the last two hundred men had wallowed through, the whole ensnaring bog was seamed with a perfect maze of decoying death-trails snaking in and out of the forbidding scrub ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... Panney immediately began to congratulate Dora on her return to her senses. She was in high good humor, "You ought to know, my dear, that if the loveliest woman in the world found herself stuck in a quagmire, it would be quite foolish for her to expect that the right sort of man would come and pull her out. In all probability it would be precisely the wrong sort of man who would do it. Consequently, it would be wise in her if she saw the right sort of man going by, not only to let him know that ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... indulging in foul jokes, making indecent allusions, and subjecting to lewd criticism every passing female, is a most abominable sin. Such habits crush out pure thoughts; they annihilate respect for virtue; they make the mind a quagmire of obscenity; they lead to ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... fare a little better, from being forewarned, and proceeding with greater caution. But for all it is a troublesome march, calling for agility. Now a quick rush, as if over thin ice or a treacherous quagmire; anon, a trip-up and tumble, with a spell of floundering before feet can ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... covered with blood and mud and were in great fear of exhausting our mounts. For a long distance we had to get down and lead them. At last we entered a broad meadow covered with bushes and bordered with rocks. Not only horses but riders also began to sink to their middle in a quagmire with apparently no bottom. The whole surface of the meadow was but a thin layer of turf, covering a lake with black putrefying water. When we finally learned to open our column and proceed at big intervals, we found ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... made up his mind that it was an opportunity to teach one ruffian to mind his own business he took a course favorable for the exhibition, and started to go across an open lot; the men followed, and just as our hero arrived near a quagmire the man who was to give the exhibition ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey |
