"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light trap through the black slush of the highroad. One day, I remember, was particularly unlucky: three times we got 'stuck' in the mud up to the axles of the wheels; my driver was continually giving up one rut and with moans and grunts trudging across to the other, and finding things no better with that. In fact, towards evening I was so exhausted that on reaching the posting-station I decided to spend the night ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... driving his wagon along a miry country road after a heavy rain. The horses could hardly drag the load through the deep mud, and at last came to a standstill when one of the wheels sank to the hub in a rut. ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... follow in the rut. Go by some path untraveled before, over land or sea, and tell the world of your ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... it sticks in the mud, but Try soon drags the wagon out of the rut. The fox said Try, and he got away from the hounds when they almost snapped at him. The bees said Try, and turned flowers into honey. The squirrel said Try, and up he went to the top of the beech-tree. The snow-drop said Try, and bloomed in the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... silence. As well as we could tell from her back, she was not so much indignant as she was determined. Thus we do not believe that she willfully drove over every rut and thank-you-ma'am on the road, scattering us generously over the tonneau, and finally, when Aggie, who was the lighter, was tossed against the top and sprained her neck, eliciting a protest from us. She replied in an abstracted tone, which ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... you put it?" demanded Elliot mercilessly. He was so furious that he forgot to hold the umbrella over Miss Daggett, and the rain drove in her hard, unhappy face. She did not seem to notice. She had led a poisoned life, in a narrow rut of existence, and toxic emotions had become as her native atmosphere of mind. Now she seemed to be about to breathe in a better air of humanity, and she ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... here from his little mid-western community in the first place. Year by year, however, as custom calloused him to the only part in life he seemed fit to play, he forgot about the waste of time in the Interborough cars. Destiny, he said to himself, had hollowed out the subway as the rut in which his life was ordained to travel; destiny had condemned him inescapably to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was! He didn't fall into the right rut somehow. He was about as fitted to be a revolutionist as I am! Do you know what he really was? The idealist of realism. ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... arch-piece, gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by the rear of the chateau and the walls of two low wings devoted to the stables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark- green myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoretical limits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of the wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts, cartridge-boxes, gas-mask ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... a woman after their kind, and the look on their faces had its grand multiple in the look on hers. She had not only stepped out of her rut, but she was going out of ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bounded forward. The buggy leapt high at a rut. For a frantic minute perhaps everything seemed to be going in leaps ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... wept like a woman. It was the first time he had encountered an open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with that scorn hurrying like venom through his system, there was no sensibility left to consolations. Rut the relief of weeping had to be checked. His wife and daughters soon came home from hearing the address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret that papa had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which they tried ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Rut whether the Elephant is wanted as a beast of burden, or it is only his great tusks that are desired, it is no joke to hunt him. He will not attack a man without provocation (except in very rare cases); when he does get in a passion ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... wish they 'd all ben som'eres, Long 'z U. S. Texes are sech reg'lar comers. But, O my patience! must we wriggle back Into th' ole crooked, pettyfoggin' track, When our artil'ry-wheels a road hev cut Stret to our purpose ef we keep the rut? War 's jes' dead waste excep' to wipe the slate Clean for the cyph'rin' of some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... one of considerable length, dated March, is an exceedingly titillating divagation on the gulma (oustraation of animals), called forth, we are told, "by the rut of the d——d cats in the yard." Poor Khalid can not sleep. One night he jumps out of bed and chases them away with his skillet, saying, "Why don't I make such a row, ye wantons?" They come again the following ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... whole prairie catches fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... given shelter at a farmer's house, and were on their journey again by the rising of the sun, but shortly afterward the cart ran into a rut and one of the wheels was broken. Margaret petulantly wondered if the Lord were trying to keep her from reaching Nashville, ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... whose curiosity concerning her possessions had been aroused by the physical evidence of the same, balanced on a rut and surveyed her ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... do. How strong the instinct is! I told you that woman had a secret. Well, it is only one form—the squalid peasant's form—of the same instinct which sends the young fellows of our class ruffling it and chancing it all over the world. It is the instinct to take one's fling, to get out of the rut, to claim one's innings against the powers that be—Nature, or the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... young pair came in, flushed with exercise and animation; Arthur talking fast about the covers and the game, and Violet in such high spirits, that she volunteered a history of their trouble with Skylark, and 'some dear little partridges that could not get out of a cart rut.' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not get them but with great difficulty and loss of time, of which my master demanded a severe account. A calf once broke from me and foolishly tumbled into a water-pit, from which I delivered it at the hazard of my life. Another time, when the roads were heavy, my waggon was set fast in a clay rut, where I was detained above an hour; two drivers refusing to give me a pull because they had both lived with my malicious master; and a third being only prevailed on, for this master of mine was generally hated, by my prayers and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... into a rut and reads light, frothy literature all the time—the kind that is pleasing to the imagination, the kind that leaves no permanent impression—does ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... city the next morning. It seemed that the city would never be permitted to resume its old careless indolence. Swift as the wind the news flew that the old king was alive, that he had been held prisoner all these months by Durga Ram and the now deposed council of three. No more the old rut of dulness. Never had they known such fetes. Since the arrival of the white goddess not a day had passed without some thrilling excitement, which had ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... out of college for three years now, but the routine of Mrs. Upton's life was unchanged. The rut had been made too deep for her to climb out of it. It had become impossible to think of reentering her husband's home as a permanent part of it. Eddy was constantly with her in England in the intervals of his undergraduate life; but how urge upon Imogen more frequent meetings when her absence ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the companions of my school-days. What strange irony of fate is that which sends some of us out into the restless world to grow away from our old ideals and make others, and restrains some in the monotonous rut of village life, to drone peacefully their little span! But happy he, who, knowing nothing, misses nothing. If there were any village Hampdens, or mute, inglorious Miltons among my playmates, they gave no present indications. ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... ascended, or a bad spot passed, they had not to alight and trudge ankle deep through the mud. The rate at which it was possible to travel in stage coaches depended on the elements. In spring, when the roads were water-choked and rut- gullied, the rate might be reduced to two miles an hour for several miles on the worst sections. The coaches were liable to be embedded in the mud, and the passengers had to dismount and assist in prying them out by means of rails ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... hundreds of grown-ups who were thrilled with such a magnificent spectacle, had determined that this would only be a beginning; and that Chester must, under no conditions, be allowed to fall back into that old dead rut. Why, they had just begun to discover what living meant, and learn what the right sort of a spirit of sport will bring ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... attempts smacked so decidedly of the older manner that we cannot censure the critic for failing to foresee that Wordsworth was destined to glorify the "poetry of nature," and to rescue it from the rut of listless and soporific topographical description. Both poems, in the definitive text, are readable, and exhibit here and there a glimmer of the poet's future greatness; yet it must be borne in mind that Wordsworth was continually ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... accomplished love disappears. It is only in the higher animals that we see a more or less durable sympathy develop between the two sexes. However, here also and even in man the sexual passion intoxicates for the moment all the senses. In his sexual rut even man is dominated as by a magic influence, and for the time he sees the world only under the aspect inspired by this influence. The object loved appears to him under celestial colors, which veil all the defects and miseries of reality. Each moment ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... sometimes the sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodic in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of what they have just discovered to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is God's part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary's ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... dozen times. In a wet time it rains to-day because it rained yesterday, and will rain to-morrow because it rained to-day. Are the crops in any part of the country drowning? They shall continue to drown. Are they burning up? They shall continue to burn. The elements get in a rut and can't get out without a shock. I know a farmer who, in a dry time, when the clouds gather and look threatening, gets out his watering-pot at once, because, he says, "it won't rain, and 'tis an excellent ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... picked out a dark spot, that looked like a yawning hole. Jerry stamped on the brake, skidded slightly. But there was only a shallow rut, deformed by shadows. He pressed the accelerator ... and the motor died. Hurriedly, he jabbed the starter button, pumped the gas pedal. Again he pushed it, and again, as the lights faded from the drain ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease, flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are among ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... but I never got no chanst to meet men folks. I wuz raised here, and folks allers hed it all cut out fer me to be an old maid. When a woman onct gets that name fixt on her, it's all off with her chances. No man ever comes nigh her, and she can't git out of her single rut. I never could get to go nowhars, and I wa'n't that bold kind that makes up to a man fust, afore he gives ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... day deadens the brain and even, in certain cases, produces insanity. It also kills ambition and creates hopeless, indifferent persons. Therefore, made wiser by psychology we realize the importance of stirring the mind out of a fixed rut, or rather a stupidity that verges on somnambulism, and keeping it alert and active. Sheep growers, for example, try in every way to divert the minds of their shepherds lest the continual watching of a slowly moving flock paralyze their minds ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... scrub-grown valley. And then it was that Ram Nath proved his mettle. Hardened himself, he showed no mercy to his passenger, and never once drew rein, though the tonga danced from rock to ridge and ridge to rut and back again, like a tin can on the tail of an astonished dog. As for Amber, he wedged his feet and held on with both hands, grimly, groaning in spirit when he did not in the flesh, foreseeing as he did nine hours more of this ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... hooked thorns that overhung the broken path; I rode in advance, my face and arms bleeding with countless scratches, while at each rip of a thorn I gave a warning shout— "Thorn!" for those behind, and a cry of "Hole!" for any deep rut that lay in the path. It was fortunately moonlight, but the jungle was so thick that the narrow track was barely perceptible; thus both camels and donkeys ran against the trunks of trees, smashing the luggage, and breaking ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... fact," replied his chum, seriously. "For all we know they may have run across some sign of the rustlers, and thought it best to get out of the beaten rut here before they ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is reported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music be performed in street-cars, while people get out and get in." For he finds his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... we can't fetch it. According to the Professor, we have got into the habit of thinking in terms of rock, soil, and water, and we can't get over it. There are some few of us who stand for better things; but the majority keep thinking in the old rut, and we can't sway them. The Professor says that all we need is to get together and agree and then concentrate. But agreement doesn't seem to be necessary. You know that there was a time when everybody, after much concentration, agreed ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... too, only not so badly. Of course, that was because he was stronger. The weaker one is, the more stubbornly bicycles behave. Every one knows that. And they are so narrow minded. They needs must stick to the travelled road, and they behave viciously when they get in a rut. Imagine hunting antelope across sage-brush country on a bicycle! I know a surveyor who tried it once. They brought him home with sixteen broken bones and really quite a few pieces of the wheel, improved to Rococo. Bah! Away with it and its limitations, and those ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... all-important. All signs fail in a drought, because the predisposition, the diathesis, is so strongly toward fair weather; and the opposite signs fail during a wet spell, because nature is caught in the other rut. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... right," said a grocer. "Arbuckle has made an immense business in coffee, and made it by his brains. It's encouraging to see a concern get out of the rut and show folks that the end of everything hasn't ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... burrow under a stump where he had dug out a luckless rabbit. But soon even the remembrance of the pleasant voices, that in some strange way suggested something dim and distant, was forgotten, the man-scent on the bars of his cage was obliterated, and Black Bruin was back in the old rut, bumping and thumping over paving-stones and seeing his van continually being rolled on or off the flat ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... Elephant' in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried man. Well, where it 'ain't got me it's going to get my son. I'm missing a chance, to-day that, mark my word, would make me a rich man but for ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... and seizing her son's hand, "Give him a cut with the whip!" she exclaimed. The young man did not do that, but he urged on his horse and then, just as they were passing the Abbe, suddenly let the wheel of the gig drop into a deep rut. There was a splash, and, in an instant, the priest was covered with mud from head to foot. Rosalie laughed all over her face, and turning round, she shook her fist at the abbe as he stood wiping himself down ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... prepared to be depraved; the former would provoke only curiosity and amusement to see bearded men such mere babes, and the latter would breed infinitely more disgust than desire. The man must be prurient and lecherous as a dog-faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either. And most inept is the conclusion, "So long as Mr. Payne's translation remains defiled by words, sentences, and whole paragraphs descriptive of coarse and often horribly depraved sensuality, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... stood was the top of a little mound, with thick shrubs on the land side, which clothed a steep, almost precipitous descent. Just within these shrubs, as it were under the brow of the hill, Nunaga observed a small natural rut or hollow. The other, or sea, side of the mound, was quite free from underwood, and also very steep. On the top there was a low ledge of rock, on which the fierce robber laid his bundle down, while the ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... stamped his foot every time the cutter took a fresh whirl, and called his favourite Odin to witness his dilemma; but Odin paid as much deference to his prayers as Hercules did, of yore, to the waggoner who got the wheel of his cart in the rut. The cutter wearied not in her waltz; but, whether she felt the want of a partner, or the power of the wind, I know not; for when the pilot had lighted his pipe, and given his soul to its soporific ward, she darted unexpectedly ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... a purpose; to accomplish something; to get ahead in the world; to make a new start; perhaps to live down something, or to get out of the rut cut by ancestors; some may only want to drink, and shout, and shoot, but even these do it with a ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... them, unattainable. Many, indeed, have hoped to pass through by the way of religion, and instead they have formed a place of thought and feeling so marked and fixed that it seems as though long ages would be insufficient to enable them to get out of the rut! Some have believed that by the aid of pure intellect a way was to be found; and to such men we owe the philosophy and metaphysics which have prevented the race from sinking into utter sensuousness. ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... day to a City merchant who lives at Sydenham, and who has never seen Hampstead Heath. He had been travelling from Sydenham to the City for a quarter of a century, and has worn the rut so deep that he cannot get out of it, and has hardly more likelihood of seeing the Northern Heights than of visiting the mountains of the moon. Yet Hampstead Heath, which he could see in a morning ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... takes place every time he attempts to speak, so that with each successive failure, his power to speak correctly becomes steadily lessened. The case of a stammerer might be compared to a road in which a deep rut has been worn. Each time a wagon passes through this rut, it becomes deeper. The stammerer has no more chance of outgrowing his trouble than the road has of ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... a task, just hunt for the obsolete features. Above all things, we must not try to follow another's work. We too often follow unwittingly and to our misfortune even when we try to keep out of the rut. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... declared, without hesitation. "I take my friend Maraton somewhere. As we sit here, Mr. Foley, we have spoken of politics. You are a great man. If any one can lift your country from the rut along which she is travelling, you will do it. A Unionist Prime Minister and you hold out the hand to Maraton! But what foresight! What acumen! You see beyond the thunder-clouds the things that we have seen. Not only do you see them, but you have the courage ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eighth of the time it has taken me to tell it. But as I shook off my dream of the woods, I realized that, while Thornton still talked, he had got out of his uninteresting rut into his interesting one. Without hearing what he said I knew that from the look of the men's faces. Each man's eyes were bright, through a manner of mistiness, and there was a sudden silence which was perhaps ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... something to interest her, only to come home and find it here upon the upper step of her own front porch. She stepped from the doorway and sat down in one of the wicker rockers. She had plenty of time to be interested; there was really no haste for unpacking and settling back into her little country rut. ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... When any one was ill a sentinel was placed at the gate to hail the doctor, who was as sure to pass as the passenger-train. It was a familiar joke in Clayton that the buggy had a regular track, and that the wheels always ran in the same rut. Once, when Carter Nelson had taken too much egg-nog and his aunt thought he had spinal meningitis, the usual route had been reversed, and again when the blacksmith's triplets were born. But these were especial occasions. It was a matter for investigation when the doctor's ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... like a thief in fear. The text was senseless, I have beaten my head with my fist like a wild man, to try and knock some comprehension into it. For my life had worked itself out along one set groove, deep and narrow. I was in the rut. I had done those things which came to my hand and done them well; but the time was past; I could not turn my hand anew. I, who am strong and dominant, who have played large with destiny, who could buy body and soul ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... might punish her until she was afraid to do any of these things, but you could never enlighten her on the subject. The rudest savage can, in a measure, be enlightened, he can be taught the reason why of things, but an animal cannot. We can make its impulses follow a rut, so to speak, but we cannot make them free and self-directing. Animals are the victims of habits inherited ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... we were travelling, and the wheels rung against its frozen surface as they spun round with a velocity that seemed to add to the excitement of our flying steeds. Ever and anon we bounded and bumped over some rut or inequality that was deeper than usual. Twice we were within an inch of the ditch; once, for an awful hundred yards, we were balancing on two wheels; and still we went faster and faster than ever. The ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... of Duryodhana, and proud of the strength of his arms, and conscious also of Krishna looking at him, Vrikodara began to swell in vigour. And fried with anger, Bhima seized the Rakshasa with his arms, as one elephant in rut seizeth another. And the powerful Rakshasa also in his turn seized his adversary, but Bhimasena that foremost of all men endued with strength, threw the cannibal down with violence. The sounds that in consequence of those mighty combatants pressing each other's hands, were frightful ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... selection and promotion of the fittest was at variance with free choice of the best men, and that it was calculated, if carried out, to strike at the root of the chief source of our prosperity. If every workman of the same class went in the same rut, and were paid the same uniform rate of wages, irrespective of his natural or acquired ability, such a system would destroy the emulative spirit which forms the chief basis of manipulative efficiency and practical skill, and on which, in my opinion, the prosperity of our manufacturing establishments ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... into the cart; and they proceeded on their journey to the other side of the forest, the verderers eating what Humphrey had brought for them as they walked along. It was a tedious and painful journey for the wounded man, who shrieked out when the cart was jolted by the wheel getting into a rut or hole; but there was no help for it, and he was very much exhausted when they arrived, which was not till past midnight. Corbould was then taken to his cottage and put on the bed, and another verderer sent for a surgeon; those who had been with Oswald were glad to go to bed, for it had been ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... through whist to a hot supper. Joanna would have failed in her duty to "poor father" if she had not maintained this custom, and she would have failed in consistency with herself if she had not improved upon it—embellished it with one or two ornate touches, which lifted it out of its prosaic rut of similarity to a dozen entertainments given at a dozen farms, and made it a rather wonderful and terrible occasion to ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... I did, however, feel in need of a change. I had been running in a rut, and wanted to get out of it, so I left my lodgings in New York and bought a ticket to St. Louis; arrived there, I determined to come farther. So here I have been, living in communion with nature, seeing scarcely anybody, enjoying myself, on the whole, but sometimes ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... death of those who have passed away in the latter part of the period under study the power of initiative has gone. New proposals are hushed. Variation is discouraged; the rut of custom and convention is preferred. And a subtle stifling air of the impossibility of all active purposes pervades social and religious and business activity on ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... These facts impressed the young country lad far more than the tall buildings and fine streets. His own active nature bounded with admiration at the life and dash on every hand. He had been reared among sleepy people—people in a rut, whose blood flowed as slowly as the sluggish current upon which they floated towards their ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... epoch in American church history was the treatise of "Christian Nurture" (1847). This, with the protracted controversy that followed upon the publication of it, was a powerful influence in lifting the American church out of the rut of mere individualism that had been wearing deeper and deeper from the days ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... familiar with the Northern Continent, and its many interests, in a way which a personal study on the spot can alone bring about; and he declared his conviction that the impression made upon the mind of the Prince was so deep and grateful, that in anything great and out of the ordinary rut of our rule at home, he would always find an earnest advocate and helper in the Prince, to whom he said he "felt endeared with the affection of a father to a son." I called the Duke's special attention to the position and attitude of the Hudson's Bay authorities. ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... and fenced their claims, such pioneer roads were blocked at intervals. To meet this difficulty new trails were made around the gradually increasing obstacles and in the end roads along section lines were laid out, with grading and bridging. But the wagon and cattle trails of the early days, rut-cut, storm-washed, and polished by sun and wind and sand to a shining smoothness, still stretch across country, truncate and deserted. Under their weather-beaten silence lies the story of other days and ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... have been seven years before, when he first arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were. He could not have believed it! Had he not at one time longed with all his heart to establish a republic in Russia; then himself to be ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... duties punctiliously in a manner reflecting credit on himself and his position, but, comparing the mind of a philanthropist to the Murrumbidgee in breadth, his, in comparison, might be likened to the flow of a bucket of water in a dray-rut. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... his recent prosperity Kettle had assumed a hatred for risks, and bred a strong dislike for all those commercial adventures which lay beyond the ordinary rut and routine of trade, he took up his duties on the salvage steamer with a stout heart and cheerful estimate for the future. Ahead of him he had pleasant dreams of the big boat that was "building," and the increased ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... convinced that the matter is taken up in rather a spasmodic way; that is, so long as you are on hand and can give the matter personal attention, it is followed, but when you cease to give personal attention to it or are away, matters go back to the old rut, or nearly so. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... The Frost, the son of Puhuri; a synonym of Tiera. Puh-hu'ri. The North-wind; the father of Pokkanen. Rem'men. The father of the hop-vine. Re'mu. The same as Remmen. Ru-o'tus. A persecutor of the Virgin Mariatta. Rut'ya (Rut'ja). A waterfall of Northland. Sah'ri (Saari). The home of Kyllikki. Sam'po. The jewel that Ilmarinen forges from the magic metals; a talisman of success to the possessor; a continual source of strife between the tribes of the North. Samp'sa. ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... fired, and though I felt certain I had not missed, the smoke hung and the air was too thick to see, and, after a long search, I left the wood and was going home when our old spaniel, Flush, turned his head to examine something in a deep cart rut. Following the direction of his eyes, I saw my woodcock; it must have flown 100 yards or more after I fired. I was still more pleased with the last shot I fired in our old Surrey covers at a woodcock going like an express train—and faster, for they ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Scriptures inspired. We do not blame them much, for they knew no better. But, if you follow in their footsteps, the world will never give you any credit for originality; your slow chariot will move on in the old rut; you will never accomplish anything; your generation will be in advance of you. Be a man! The field of usefulness, prominence, and honor, opens before you. Think for yourself! The Bible is a book of the past, and you should have ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... throats and flapping with their wings, which startled my horse and sent him off at full speed. I lost the rein on one side, and, in attempting to pull him up with the other, I brought his foot into a rut, and down he came, sending me head-foremost into a wet ditch! When I got on my legs, and shook myself a little, I saw each particular hen galloping across the field, screeching with all its might, while the horse was off in a different ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... blue flower was growing in the red clay wheel-rut at her feet, and, stooping, she caressed it ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... which he has succeeded in impressing his heart. We are almost driven to fear that in the case of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut? Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself the circle of humanity, that circle which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... difficult expression. Apparently it refers to the harsh grating of the wheel against the side of the rut. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... flood that I had let loose. Heaven only knows how hard I tried, for when I pleaded that a moderate track be taken, the mob insisted that I sought a place to dominate, and put me in the rut. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... prophecy, in our past experience, you will as clearly prove that you know but a very little more. But after all you have said and done, you are following hard on in the track—the same old deep-cut rut, made by your predecessors. Pharaoh's host like, the ruts so deep you can neither back nor turn out; but on you drive after them, thinking, no doubt, that you are going to accomplish something for God and his cause. ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... was conscious of a wish that he had studied harder at college and was now in a position to be doing something better than hack work for a soulless publishing company. Never before had he been so completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the ride before them it seemed as if the time would be almost interminable. He curled himself up on one corner of the seat, and tried very hard to go to sleep; but just as his eyes began to grow heavy the wagon would jolt over some rock or sink deep in some rut, till Toby, the breath very nearly shaken out of his body, and his neck almost dislocated, would sit bolt upright, clinging to the seat with both hands, as if he expected each moment to be pitched out ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... things about clergymen, for whom I have the highest respect; nevertheless, there are times when respect for Christ's church, duty to country, love for the children and anxiety for their eternal welfare, compels you to step out of the beaten rut to expose, though with pain, wrong-doing. In a day and Sunday school-yard connected with the Church of England, not one hundred miles from London, there are to be seen—and I am informed by them, except during the hop-picking season, that it is their camping-ground, and has been for years—one ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... cynically. Would she have refused Rodney's offer of help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and give her a fresh start whenever she was ready to attempt it, were gone into the pockets ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Tamburlaine," thus indicating the height which Greene was striving to reach, if not surpass. In fact, both pieces have plenty of Marlowe's thunder, but none of his lightning. Even the blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... was often placed on the edge, and when the weight came on it, down it slumped into the mud, half-way up the calves; it was difficult to draw it out, and very fatiguing. To avoid these ruts we encroached on the grass at the sides of the paths, but often stepping on the unseen edge of a rut, we floundered in with both feet to keep the balance, and this was usually followed by a rush of bubbles to the surface, which, bursting, discharged foul air of frightful faecal odour. In parts, the black ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... but there was another which wanted a change. They had been in a rut long enough, and they laughed at the Colonel's formula, which nearly every child knew by heart. The Colonel was too old to run things,—they must have something up to date, and when the president of Mayville Normal School applied for a situation ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... choice in outside looks, but saw considerable inducement in the home place. Plenty of other women for Usial! Yes! But I can't help thinking that I might be keeping bach hall in my law office if I hadn't got hold of Xoa in my young days. So there's Usial! Right in his rut because he's the kind that stays in a rut. Pegs shoes days and reads books nights. No telling how the legislature may develop ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... cut through the shrubbery and reached the road at the point whither the loud voices of the two men led him. He came upon the wagon with one hind wheel stuck in a muddy rut and the other one smashed at the hub. From the shelter of a handy bush Frank surveyed the situation and listened to what the recent captors ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... for a wide expansion of the paper's interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new "Herald" should be placed in the trembling hands of the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... think I've tried to make it easy for myself you are mistaken. Is it easy to pull out of the rut and habit of years? Easy to know my friends will jeer and say I've sold out? Easy to have you misunderstand? (Goes to her.) Hilda, I'm doing this for their good. I'm doing it—just as Wallace ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... finally it dropped entirely out. And herein lies the danger. Habit once formed has no way of being modified unless in some way attention is called to it, for a habit left to itself becomes more and more firmly fixed. The rut grows deeper. In very few, if any, of our actions can we afford to have this the case. Our habits need to be progressive, they need to grow, to be modified, to be improved. Otherwise they will become an incrusting shell, fixed and unyielding, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... raised to a higher plane or has won a better reputation in the world at large than it possessed before the nations assembled at Paris to make peace. This failure to lift the necessary agency of international relations out of the rut worn deep by centuries of practice is one of the deplorable consequences of the peace negotiations. So much might have been ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... Lucy. "He made me an offer and I refused him." This she said very sharply;—more so undoubtedly than the circumstances required; and with a brusqueness that was injudicious as well as uncourteous. Rut at the moment, she was thinking of her own position with reference to Lady Lufton—not to Lord Lufton; and of her feelings with reference to the lady—not to ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... for some of them. I thus heard him conduct some classical works, such as a Mozart symphony, and was amazed to find a conductor, who was so energetic in the interpretation of his own compositions, sink into the commonest rut of the vulgar time-beater. Certain of his own compositions, such as the more effective fragments from the Romeo and Juliet Symphony, again made a particular impression on me, it is true; but I was now more consciously awake to the curious weaknesses which disfigure ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... On the Volga he was respected as a rich and clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but now and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from gain—the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were three Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's body. One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and when Ignat lived according to its commands, he was merely ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... predisposed to sprains of the fetlock. It generally happens from a misstep, stumbling, or slipping, which results in the joint being extended or flexed to excess. The same result may happen where the foot is caught in a rut, a hole in a bridge, or in a car track, and the animal falls or struggles violently. Direct blows and punctured wounds may also set ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... sea-coast in July and August, rut in October on the verge of the barren grounds and shelter themselves in the woods during the winter. They are often induced by a few fine days in winter to pay a transitory visit to their favourite pastures in the barren country, but their principal ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... in a rut At Ctesiphon; Turks made things hum. We found that we had got to Kut, Whilst Russians found a way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... the Sims couple, lowering their heads, side by side, resolutely regained the smooth rut of their placid existence. Everything in this world is easier than is imagined. Much easier. In the case of the Sims' household, it was just a matter of adding each morning, to the daily shave of Charles-Norton, another ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... meant heart. I can shut my eyes and hear him read his report now: "Infant-class, Mrs. Sarah M. Boggs, one dolla thutty-eight cents; Miss Dan'ells's class, fawty-six cents; Miss Goldrick's class, twenty-faw cents; Mr. Pahnker's class, ninety-three cents; Miss Rut's class, naw repawt." ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... picturesque mud-village which ought to have pleased everybody, it blew into our noses smells which Lady Biddell knew would give us plague. As if this were not enough, the sandcart nearly turned over in a rut, and Miss Hassett-Bean said that she must go home or be left to die in the desert. I had to lead the little stallion before she would consent to go on, and realized when I had ploughed through fifty yards of sand, that the manicured snob of a leader was a thin brown hero. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... should enter the enclosure of a "bad" deer, or any buck deer in the rut, without a stout and tough club or pitchfork for defense. Of the two weapons, the former is ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the human female, being represented in the higher animals by what is familiarly termed the "rut." This is not usually a bloody discharge, however, as in the human female, though such a discharge has been observed in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... through one of the mutations of the great corporation, he suspected that the old hardware merchant, who was a close friend of the chief men in the road, had spoken the needed word to lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the generous, ugly Victorian house,—built when the hardware business ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they pumped away ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... and therefore he wondered who could be riding it at a gallop in this blistering midday heat. A few rods farther on and his quick eye detected something else—something that brought him from his saddle. Out of the rut he picked a cigarette butt, the fire of which was cold but the paper of which was still wet from the smoker's lips. He examined it carefully; then he remounted and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... borne the loss of two harvests, and the disaster which followed in the wake of the blizzard that killed off his stock; but it seemed unfair that he should endure cold and hunger too, and when one wheel sank into a rut and the jolt shook him in every stiffened limb, he broke out with a hoarse expletive. It was his first protest against the fate that was too strong for him, and almost as he made ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... seemed, in jeopardy of overthrow. For a mile and a half from the farm the road, or, rather, cart-track, may be described as a kind of steeplechase on wheels, every step of the way showing either a stone- heap or a ditch, the word 'rut' being quite an inadequate definition. Now I saw the hood of the carriage nod to the right, now to the left, as some stone-heap impeded the way; now it curtseyed forward, almost disappearing altogether as some gully was plunged into, horses, driver, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... made a night of noon. High banks of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet above. The track, what with pack-horses' feet, and what with the wear and tear of five hundred years' rain-fall, was a rut three feet deep and two feet broad, in which no horse could turn. Any other day Hereward would have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein. Today he turned to Martin ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... "Mademoiselle Mori": chapters 1 and 2; and "The Life and Love of the Insect", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters 1 to 4.—Translator's Note.) calling on his comrades to lend a helping hand in dragging his pellet out of a rut; the Sphex (A species of Hunting Wasp. Cf. "Insect Life": chapters 6 to 12.—Translator's Note.) cutting up her Fly so as to be able to carry him despite the obstacle of the wind; and all the other fallacies which are the stock-in-trade of those who wish to ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... continues his course with a prolonged crash, as though the fate of empires reposed in his mail-bags. You come to a ditch; you go in with a plunge, and come out with a jerk. Your head hits the back of the hood when you go in, your nose hits the back of the driver when you come out. A rut in the road causes one wheel to descend suddenly about eighteen inches; or an unavoidable lump of that height produces the same effect; the hood gives you a deliberate punch on the head. Before you have quite recovered, it gives you another. A miniature precipice appears. This was caused ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... a thousand dangers ahead. A mere breath of wind may carry this atom away, and cast it on that inaccessible rock in the midst of a rut in the road which still contains a little water; or on the sand, the region of famine where nothing grows; or upon a soil of clay, too tenacious to be tunnelled. These mortal accidents are frequent, for gusts of wind are frequent in the windy and already ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... man, just as they were passing the priest, made the wheel of the wagon, which was going at full speed, sink into a rut, splashing the abbe with ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... said Lottie, put upon her mettle. "If you all will only sustain me and not awaken his suspicions with your by-play and giggling, I will deceive the ingenuous youth in a way that will surprise you as well as him. Good acting must have proper support. This is something new,—out of the rut; and I am bound to make it a brilliant jest that we can laugh over all our lives. So remember, Julian, you will disconcert ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... must in no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects—for the themes of Pamela and Clarissa to a very large extent, of Pamela and Grandison to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are practically the same. He gave it altogether a ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... spent quietly and systematically drinking whisky. This he did partly because he had a notion that it was an appropriate thing to do under the circumstances, and partly because he had a genuine need for something to jolt his mind out of its rut of misery. He was not sociable in his cups, and did not seek company of either sex, inviting a man to drink with him or accepting such an invitation only when he had to do so. His favourite resort was the Silver Dollar Saloon, which was furnished with ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... and Ping Wang walked up to the cart, and putting forth all their strength moved it, at the first attempt, out of the rut in which it had stuck. The Chinaman thanked them profusely for their help. His wife said nothing, but stared at Charlie in a way that made him feel quite uncomfortable. He was much relieved when, in obedience to her husband's ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... were affected in the same way. Once Mr. Stewart asked me if I did not think it a "gey duir trip." I told him he could call it gay if he wanted to, but it didn't seem very hilarious to me. Every time the stage struck a rock or a rut Mr. Stewart would "hoot," until I began to wish we would come to a hollow tree or a hole in the ground so he could go in with the rest ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... excellent soil; but it needs crop rotation and more thorough cultivation to bring it back into a high state of fertility. The farmers are slow to take up advanced methods here in the East. We have told them what they ought to do, but they keep right on in the same old rut." ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... little Jean is like anybody else once more. Yes, he has left off being beautiful. But he is still a sturdy young scamp. He soon has his whip in hand again and now he is hauling his team of six, the six big carthorses of his dreams, out of that rut. Catherine is still playing with her flowers. But some of them are dying. Others are closing in sleep. For the flowers go to sleep like the animals, and look! the campanulas, plucked a few hours ago, are shutting their purple ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... a rut! I've got to figure out some way to ship a pirate crew without having to kidnap them. This is ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... fire, endeavored to push it against the house with long poles. They had ingeniously constructed upon the cart a barricade of planks, which protected those who pushed it against the fire of the house. When they had got within pistol shot, one wheel became clogged in a rut, and the other wheel going, whirled the cart around, so as to expose the whole party to a fatal fire. Six men almost instantly fell dead, and before the rest could escape, fifteen of them were wounded. Disheartened by this ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... neck of a horse affected with farcy dissipates the disease; that water evaporated in a close room will not be deposited on the walls, if a vessel of water be placed in the room; that venison pies smell strongly at those periods in which the 'beasts which are of the same nature and kind are in rut'; that wine in the cellar undergoes a fermentation when the vines in the field are in flower; that a table-cloth spotted with mulberries or red wine is more easily whitened at the season in which the plants are flowering ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... much reason there was to fear that treachery might be exercised towards Maitland, he would surely not have suffered him thus to risk his valuable life. Rut he was ignorant of all the peculiar circumstances that had occurred to show that he was a special mark for the vengeance of Coubitant: and the confidence he felt in his courage and ability led him—on this ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... great deal that is good and new. Then, in some unguarded moment, he asks himself: "But what the devil has all this to do with me?" In the meantime he has grown old and has become accustomed to it all; and therefore he continues in his rut—just as in the ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... till the Duchess of Winstoun speaks intelligibly would be a waste of her time and my own," said the haughty Constance, with the rudeness in which she then delighted, and for which she has since become known. Rut the duchess was not to be offended until she had completed ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the butterflies ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the shallow water without mishap, save when the wheel struck a hidden stone or fell suddenly into a rut; but when they neared the body of the river MacLure halted, to give Jess ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... The same rut or chasm across the more open road on which they had now got out, and that had nearly been so fatal to Mr. Brown, became decidedly so to unfortunate Smellpriest. The horse, as his rider spoke, stopped ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of escaping from drudgery. He had often thought of asking Eldrick & Pascoe to give him his articles—but he had a shrewd idea that his request would be refused. No—it was difficult to get out of a rut. And yet—he was a clever fellow, a good-looking fellow, a sharp, shrewd, able—and here was a chance, such a chance as scarcely ever comes to a man. He would be a fool if he did not take it, and use it to his own best and ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... to do any more. How can a man know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus tells them in effect that he means to give them a new life altogether, that he means to have from them service, perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but there may ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... into a mere field-track, which, as the moon had disappeared behind clouds, just before her final setting, could only with difficulty be recognised by an occasional deep rut, felt by my stick in the soft ground; even this track at length forked out into two others—one penetrating into a wood on my right; the other opener, and with only scattered trees by its side, to the left. The latter seemed the most promising, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... to working against time, but cannot do so just yet.... It is impossible to get out of the rut I have got into. I have nothing against going hungry, as I have done in the past, but it is not a question of myself.... I give to literature my spare time, two or three hours a day and a bit of ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... our starting-point, for we went up like a crab, sideways. Presently we reached a ledge, narrow enough at first, but which widened as we followed it, and moreover sloped inwards like the petal of a flower, so that as we followed it we gradually got into a kind of rut or fold of rock, that grew deeper and deeper, till at last it resembled a Devonshire lane in stone, and hid us perfectly from the gaze of anybody on the slope below, if there had been anybody to gaze. This lane (which appeared to be a natural formation) ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... impression of vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would rely upon us for quartering. [Footnote: "Quartering":—This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle.] All this, and if the separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... the full-blown call to arms is heard in lowest, funereal tones. Of a sudden, though the speed is the same, the pace changes with a certain terror as of a cavalry attack. Presently amid the clattering tramp sounds the big hymn,—in the ancient rhythm that moves strangely out of the rut of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... rule by any means. Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the desirability of Osborne as a husband-elect; a book full of the weird and thrilling, dealing with theosophy ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... decorous, not to say decidedly dull. TIM HEALY did something to lift it out of rut. But he was more concerned to belabour JOHN REDMOND and to dig DEVLIN in the ribs than to argue merits of measure. Taunted his much-loved fellow-patriot and countryman with facing both ways on question ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... labor, that's a fact," admitted Aunt 'Mira. "He use ter do a-many things for me, years ago. Oh, yes! Your Uncle Jason warn't allus like he is now. But we got kinder in a rut I 'xpec'. An' I ain't young and good-lookin' like I use ter be, an' that makes ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... and brother had been left in camp as guards. They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool, and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water running out of their mouths, idly lashing ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... asphaltic coals, very similar to Grahamite and Albertite in appearance and chemical composition, in Colorado and Utah, where they occur with the game associates as at Tampico. I have found at Canajoharie, New York, in cavities in the lead-veins which rut the Utica shale, a hydrocarbon solid which must have infiltrated into these cavities as petroleum, but which, since the remote period when the fissures were formed, has been distilled until it is now anthracite. Similar anthracitic asphalt or asphaltic anthracite ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... please the King do make him believe that all is safe: and so he hath heard my Lord Chancellor openly say to the King, that he was now a glorious prince, and in a glorious condition, because of some one accident that hath happened, or some one rut that hath been removed; "when," says Sir W. Coventry "they reckoned their one good meal, without considering that there was nothing left in the cupboard for to-morrow." After this discourse to my ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... the murmurs of Italy. For my part, I was in hopes, as I often used actually to say to you, that the wheel of the state chariot had made its revolution with scarcely any noise and leaving scarcely any visible rut; and it would have been so, if people could only have waited till the storm had blown over. But after sighing in secret for a long time they all began, first to groan, and at last to talk and shout. Accordingly, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... awaits the late riser, who will not masticate it properly when he finally arrives at the breakfast-table, and the best of housekeepers is discouraged and prevented from ever attempting culinary surprises, when they are not to be appreciated. In this way she is innocently driven into a rut from which it is difficult to escape when occasions present themselves for ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... Prussian shells Maurice could never have done what he did; how he did it he could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, firing away as stoutly as ever and defending the flag, which the subaltern ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the great cities in this country, the man who fell in love, and was in that city a character at least a little above the ordinary rut of men. He had talent and energy, and there had come to him a hard schooling in city ways, though he was born in the forest, and his youth had been passed upon a farm sloping downward to the shore of the St. Clair River, that wonderful strait and stretch of water which flows between broad ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo |
