"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 come ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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 body. The sun began to smile upon us, and we advanced to a better camping ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... 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, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... sought his life. 2. After having wandered for some time in this deplorable condition, he found every day his dangers increase, and his pursuers making nearer advances. In this distress he concealed himself in the marshes of Mintur'nae, where he continued a night up to the chin in a quagmire. 3. At break of day he left this dismal place, and made towards the seaside, in hopes of finding a ship to facilitate his escape; but being known and discovered by some of the inhabitants, he was ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... of the country sinking in this administrative quagmire was not conducive to the maintenance of confidence in its ruling classes can well be imagined. On all sides voices were uplifted, not merely against the Cabinet, whose members were assumed to be actuated by patriotic motives and guided by their own lights, but against the whole ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and the same afternoon Jackson, leaving Elk Run Valley, which was immediately occupied by Ewell, with 8000 men, marched up the river to Port Republic. The track, unmetalled and untended, had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rains of an ungenial spring, and the troops marched only five miles, bivouacking by the roadside. May 1 was a day of continuous rain. The great mountains loomed dimly through the dreary mist. The streams which rushed down the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... She would show that she had, at any rate. So she quite declined the part, which he had hoped she would have taken, of respondent, and possible questioner; and his work became more and more like that of a man walking in a quagmire. Once the squire roused himself to speak to the butler; he felt the need of outward stimulus—of ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut deeper channels, gnaw off the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... marsh, swamp, morass, marish^, moss, fen, bog, quagmire, slough, sump, wash; mud, squash, slush; baygall [U.S.], cienaga^, jhil^, vlei^. Adj. marsh, marshy; swampy, boggy, plashy^, poachy^, quaggy^, soft; muddy, sloppy, squashy; paludal^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... friends[1032], 'He is ruining himself without pleasure. A man who loses at play, or who runs out his fortune at court, makes his estate less, in hopes of making it bigger: (I am sure of this word, which was often used by him:) but it is a sad thing to pass through the quagmire of parsimony, to the gulph of ruin. To pass over the flowery path ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... wet yet for either," decreed Geraldine. "How could we tramp over the fells when everything's a quagmire? And if you think you can light a bonfire with damp wood, you're jolly well mistaken. We'll collect sticks, and have one when they're dry. I plump for a flag-hunt. There must be ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... winter Sidney Lanier 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 placed there as Arion ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... some blood hounds, set off towards the king's retreat; but Bruce's scouts were on the watch and brought him news of their coming. The king with his party retired until they reached a morass, through which flowed a running stream, while beyond a narrow passage led through a deep quagmire. ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... Graves's poem involved literature, and to 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
... by this letter, because I had been in that quagmire myself. A student of Doctor Witherspoon once came to him and said, "I believe everything is imaginary! I myself am only an imaginary being." The Doctor said to him, "Go down and hit your head against ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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 permits ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... 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
... looked sad and pensive. 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 ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom. Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist hovering close to ground, figures skulk—that nameless, shapeless race of many bloods and one complexion, the underground complexion of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... brief Character of the Low-countries under the States, being Three Weeks Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants, written by Owen Felltham, and printed Lond. 1659, 12mo. we find them epitomized as a general sea-land—the great bog of Europe—an universal quagmire—in short a green cheese in pickle. The sailors (in which denomination the author appears to include all the natives,) he describes as being able to "drink, rail, swear, niggle, steal, and ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... the spy who had followed Mr. Richard Bartholomew East and was engaged by Montagne Lewis to interfere with any attempt the president of the H. & P. A. might make to pull his railroad out of the financial quagmire into which it was rapidly sinking, Tom would have preferred to have the spy not suspect that he had been identified after his fiasco of the ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... was about two hundred and thirty miles. Under favorable circumstances, the trip could have been made in five or six days and with little hardship. The rainy season, however, was now at its height, and the country was one vast quagmire, overrun by swollen streams which could be crossed only at great risk. Ten days of wearisome marching brought the expedition to the forks of the Little Wabash. The entire region between the two channels was under water, and for a little ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and Ally, we heard a warning shout: "Keep to the edge of the road!" We wondered at the caution. The middle of the road was comparatively clean, while towards the edges it was ankle-deep in sticky mud, and we had been floundering around in a quagmire for the last eleven days. But we soon knew the reason; for while we hesitated up came a battery of guns at full gallop—big howitzers at that. Drivers shouted; horses plunged and tugged at their traces; the guns bounded and rattled ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... 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 Old Front Line • John Masefield
... than ever on these dulled-bright Seigneurs, and French Princes their Country's hope;—and, on the whole, put on his great-coat without ceremony, happy that he has one. They retire, all retire with convenient despatch, through a Champagne trodden into a quagmire, the wild weather pouring on them; Dumouriez through his Kellermanns and Dillons pricking them a little in the hinder parts. A little, not much; now pricking, now negotiating: for Brunswick has his eyes opened; and the Majesty of Prussia ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... again in the saddle, riding out from Mexico toward the village of Tezcuco. I had to take a by-way to avoid the Guadalupe road, which was blocked up in consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... was crushed indistinguishably in the mangled mass of horse and man, themselves scarcely to be disintegrated in the fall from so stupendous a height. The big white beaver hat of the child was found floating on the surface of a deep pool hard by, half quagmire, half quicksand, and would in itself have sufficed to dispel any doubts of his fate, had doubt been entertained. The burial was accomplished as best might be, and the dolorous incident seemed at an end. But throughout the dry, soft Indian ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... they at least are reaching blindly out after something better than their surroundings, striving after an ideal, and are in just so much the superiors of the foolish souls who mock them—better, even misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire of slouch into which we seem to ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... spot where the crumbling adobe walls of the casa had returned to the parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and going in mysterious clouds, or laboring in thick ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... realized their danger a dozen of them were struggling up to their arm-pits in the sea of fine ever-shifting sand that seemed kept in constant motion by some unknown natural cause. With each movement they sank deeper, until, fearing that the sandy quagmire would envelop and suffocate them, they cried aloud for assistance. Help was ready at hand, for the remainder of our followers ran forward, and stretching forth ropes of monkey-creeper were enabled to drag out their intrepid companions, much to ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, my Raymond, it will remain a blessing to all who ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... dear, and there's the pathetic splendour of it," Poppy declared, soft mothering tones in her voice. "All the same we must keep our heads screwed on the right way. So, tell me, will it be of any personal advantage to you to help pull these elderly plungers out of the quagmire?" ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent man; and it is notorious how heartily he laughed. ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... 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
... unable to pass it. The rain had rendered the ground so 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 was entirely spoiled; the chart case and charts were ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... 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 ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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 ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... of the latter are aimlessness and impatience; and their misfortune—which is largely responsible for those faults—is that they are too soon allowed to plunge into the quagmire called by euphemism "society," and often whelmed in its sorry pleasures and petty ambitions—too soon, also, invested with the right to manage their own affairs and to choose their own associates, advisers, and even instructors; in a word, permitted to breathe the invigorating spirit of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... worse than that. Sibley is as treacherous as a quagmire. If a woman ventured into a false position with him he would marry her only when compelled to do so. I'm savage enough to shoot them both this afternoon. I see but one way out. I must warn her promptly, and in language so ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... struck some futile vestas, which the dripping leaves at once extinguished. Two elders, swinging lanterns and calling me by name, by and by divided the night in my vicinity. Their appearance was welcome, for the torrential rain had made the track one continuous slippery quagmire. The hospitality of the Ardeonaig minister speedily banished all recollection of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... we rode on through the endless forest of palms, and waded through a quagmire at least eight miles in extent, where the green slime reached up to the saddle-flaps. On that day we came to a sluggish stream, bearing the name of "Aptikpangmakthlaingwainkyapaimpangkya" (The Place Where the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... tenet of our order, "that we do for others as we would have others do for us, and that if I find my brother in distress, I must bind up his wounds, lift him from the quagmire of despond and set him on his feet." If any lesson stands out boldly before the mind of the Odd-Fellow it is truth. He finds it on his banner wherever he goes. Friendship is ephemeral. It lasts only through life. It may die, it will ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... smiling more pleasantly than ever, answered, "I kin." Suiting the action to the word, he flung his burden into the Slough of Despond. The pond was a thin piece of canvas painted to represent the quagmire. The burden made a sound as of the house falling down. Jake wiped the perspiration from his face and, spitting a mouthful of tobacco juice to one side, he gazed on the audience and smiled. It was too much for even the staid old church members. The laughter was ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... was 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 the Cape, it was so dark that only ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... important that, if he do care to know aught about them, his knowledge should be exact, for there is no knowing beforehand how luxuriantly the minutest germ of theoretical error may ramify in practice, or into what substantive quagmire trust in deceitful shadows may lead. These respectable aphorisms may be beneficially borne in mind during perusal of what is about to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... not get within shot of the game without crossing part of the marsh which was not safe for the horses, they agreed to leave them in charge of the Hottentots, and advance on foot, thinking that if any of the buffaloes should turn upon them, it would be easy to escape by retreating across the quagmire, which, though passable for man, would not support the weight of a heavy quadruped. They advanced accordingly, and, under covert of the bushes, approached the game with such advantage, that the first volley brought down three of the fattest of the herd, and so severely ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... have hunted but which 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, darker, and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no quagmire of superstition into which we may not be easily lured if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... night sent swashy waves into my lair, which kept me in constant fear of a ducking, and gave me anything but a peaceful night. This was, however, all forgotten the next morning, when the startling discovery was made that the river had fallen during the night and left me in a quagmire, from which it seemed at first ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... 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
... reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... 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 has ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the tides, capable, when in a dry state, of bearing the weight of cattle grazing upon them; differing therein from bog or quagmire. When well drained, they form some of the best land ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 27th, the party reached the bank of the Castlereagh, after fighting their way through bog, quagmire, and all the difficulties common to virgin country during continued wet weather. As the direction they were steering was towards a range seen by Evans, and named Arbuthnot Range, their march was again interrupted by finding ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... of 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 picture illustrating ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... post himself, and will be saved much tedious and perplexing wandering along the dangerous places in the Swamp of Metaphysics, following the will-o'-the-wisp of Finite Mind masquerading as the Infinite Wisdom! Beware of the False Lights! They lead to the quagmire and quicksands of thought! ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Honest, Bobbie," protested Van. "I've got into a quicksand or a quagmire or something. Look at me. I'm up to my knees now, and if you don't hurry you'll see nothing of me but my collar. I saved your life yesterday; you might do ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... the following days converting our new trenches into a quagmire, the necessity for digging and cleaning up became all the more urgent, although it entailed a heavy strain upon the men under most uncomfortable conditions. As "B," "C" and "D" companies had each ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... day is come. The lakes are worthy of the poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock—so are the Salisbury Craigs noble craigs—and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... "one time there was an old woman that lived near a well. For a long time nobody thought she was a witch, but after a while people began to have their suspicions. There was a quagmire in the road right in front of the old woman's house, and every traveler passing that way was sure to get mud on his feet. No matter whether he was riding horseback or in a buggy, it was all the same. He was sure to get his feet muddy. And the mud was so black, and thick, and heavy, that he ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... an antique charm to the heroes of classic and romantic lore, yet they compare fairly well with those which Weems has twined about the figure of the youthful Washington. There is a tale of the rescue of a pig from a quagmire, and another of the saving of a drunken man from freezing. There are many stories of fights; others of the lifting of enormous weights; and even some of the doing of great feats of labor in a day, though for such tasks Lincoln had no love. These are not worth recounting; ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... retreated under the tiny porch, and, standing close against the door, looked at his spade left planted in the middle of the yard. The ground was so much dug up all over, that as the season advanced it turned to a quagmire. When it froze hard, he was disconsolate. What would Harry say? And as he could not have so much of Bessie's company at that time of the year, the roars of old Carvil, that came muffled through the closed windows, calling her ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... Lack of oxygen weakens the conscience. And there must be a plentiful lack of oxygen in very many houses in this town, I should think, judging from the fact that the whole compact majority can be unconscientious enough to wish to build the town's prosperity on a quagmire of falsehood and deceit. ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... accept her husband's opinion, at all events about men.' He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. 'A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... as he can get over the ground, but the links here is like a quagmire when it rains. But never mind, we'll have a good chummy afternoon. And I've got some bully gingersnaps. Do you like gingersnaps?" Joel replied in the affirmative, and West produced a box of them from ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... General Barrett paraded for the attack the bulk of his force. After a trying march through a veritable quagmire, the troops sometimes up to their waists in slush, the division at about 9 A.M. came within range of the Turkish position, and the leading brigade, the Belgaum, (Major Gen. Fry,) ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... sinking into lower depths of physical and mental degradation,—a soul utterly lost and ruined. How many thousands of young men who might have been useful members of society, lawyers, clergymen, statesmen, scientists, have thus sunk into the foul depths of the quagmire of vice, to rise no more forever! Oh, awful fate! The human eye never rests upon a sadder sight than a ruined soul, a mind ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... opposition? Here are the tracks of our friends, broader and deeper than ever: here they wind down into the hollow; and there, you may see where they have floundered through that vile pool, that is still turbid, where they crossed it. A horrible quagmire! But courage, my fair cousin: it is only such difficulties as these which the ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... spake I not too truly, O my knights? Was I too dark a prophet when I said To those who went upon the Holy Quest, That most of them would follow wandering fires, Lost in the quagmire?—lost to me and gone, And left me gazing at a barren board, And a lean Order—scarce return'd a tithe - And out of those to whom the vision came My greatest hardly will believe he saw; Another hath beheld it afar off, And leaving human ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... somehow, that for a long time she had wandered in a darkness so thick that she could not see her hand before her. She had lost her way and knew not whither she had strayed, and with every step she had been afraid of sinking into a quagmire or stumbling headlong into an abyss. Now some one had called to her not to go any farther, but to sit down and wait for the break of day. She was glad that she would not have to continue her perilous wanderings; now she sat quietly waiting ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... beaten motionless and sodden by the 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 ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... and she now spoke to the lad. "I have nothing to promise you," said she, "save that which you shall win with your own strength. The road upon which I would lead you is uneven and hard, and climbs many a hill, and descends into many a valley and quagmire. The views which you will sometimes get from the hilltops are grand and glorious, but the deep valleys are dark, and the ascent from them is toilsome. Nevertheless, the road leads to the blue mountains of endless ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... moose-calf tries his wobbly legs, and one day finds himself gazing out upon a plain where grass is. He has no use for grass—does not even know what grass is for. Only he sees no paths out there. The grass covers a quagmire, but of quagmires the moose-calf knows nothing, having ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... and become involved in an exceptionally bad spot—a spring apparently rendering the clay so soft that the entire road for about thirty yards had been worked into a perfect quagmire, into which we sank above our knees at every step, the tenacious clay holding our feet almost as though they had been in a vice—when, without the slightest warning of any kind, a withering volley of musketry was poured in upon the devoted band from the bushes ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... already in the effort to get breath, and his head was singing like a tea-urn. 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 him ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... in support of the contention that with ordinary firmness, consistency, and courage on the part of the luckless Louis XVI., the convocation of the States-General in 1789, instead of leading France, as it actually led her, through a quagmire of blood and rapine, into what George Sand felicitously called the 'merciless practical joke of the Consulate,' and the stern reality of the despotic First Empire, might easily have resulted in converting the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. into such a limited and constitutional ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... be my Pegasus shod! For my road is a rough one: flint, stubble, and clod, Blue clay, and black quagmire, brambles no few, And ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... for adventure; but as his father would not consent to a sea life, he made the river near him represent the ocean: he lived on the water, and was the daring Columbus of a schoolboy's boat. A part where he and his mates stood to angle, in time became a quagmire: in the course of one day, the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a house. With that sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which marked his mature character, Franklin raised ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... coots, and speckled teals; Ye fisher herons, watching eels; Ye duck and drake, wi' airy wheels Circling the lake; Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... but the site was situated on the stiff London clay, and, after weeks of summer rains and the traffic caused by collecting the heavy engines and machinery and the materials used in the construction of the sheds and buildings, the ground was churned into a quagmire of clay and water, so that in places it was impassable, and some of the exhibits were isolated. Thousands of wattled hurdles were purchased in Hampshire, and laid flat on the mud along the main routes to the tents and sheds, but ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... me to devise this journey, "There is a 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 ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... 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
... them, they, unless they be pirates or barbarians as well as sailors, point out the spots for the placing of buoys and of lights, in order that others may not be exposed to the danger which they have so narrowly escaped. What man of common humanity, having, by good luck, missed being engulfed in a quagmire or quicksand, will withhold from his neighbours a knowledge of the peril without which the dangerous spots are not to ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... in your island as bad as these?" he asked, after plumping up to the knees in a quagmire, out of which ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... rapacious as the dogs. The inns are such hobgoblin places, that they are infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best hotels in Paris. Here is one near Valmontone (that is Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep. There is a wild colonnade below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a great long kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form, where a party of travellers, with two priests among them, are crowding ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... presidential candidate say a few kind words for art and literature, intimate the part they play in the civilizing of a nation, and promise to further them by all means in his power, that the people should not sink deeper into the quagmire ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... they did not suit his present purpose. Being thus accoutred, or rather unaccoutred, he was now no more than Poor Mad Tom, whom the foul fiend had led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, over bog and quagmire, that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud at heart to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inch bridges, to curse his own shadow for a traitor; ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... disembarked at Ali-el-Gharbi, one hundred and eighty miles from Basrah. The ground was little better than a bog from the rain of the previous day; with very little rain the whole countryside seems to become a quagmire. The mud is about the most slippery kind to be found anywhere, so that walking is made most difficult. The first work was to unload the barges. All the kit, supplies, and tents had to be taken ashore as we were leaving the boats for good and were now in a hostile country. ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... dead rebel, who was fortunately about his own size. Rolling up his own clothing in as small a bundle as possible, he concealed it in the bog, at some distance from the place where the picket had fallen. Dragging the corpse to a quagmire, he sunk it beneath the muddy waters, and it passed from his view. After taking the precaution to straighten up the long grass, which might have betrayed his movements, he advanced towards ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... had been her challenge to fate. She had said that she would marry any honest man who would lift her out of the quagmire of poverty: but she was not prepared to accept Dr. Rylance's offer, generous as it sounded. She would rather go back to the old treadmill, and her old fights with Miss Pew, than reign supreme over the dainty cottage at Kingthorpe and the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Commissioner who didn't dote on rookeries. Lucy, can't city governments be clean? Is human nature normally and habitually corrupt when it comes to governing a city? The Mayor and all his appointees are simply wading through the vast quagmire of the common citizen's indifference, fought every step by the vile creatures who batten on the administration of the city's affairs. Do you suppose that if the schools laid tremendous stress on clean citizenship and began in the kindergarten to teach children how to govern ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... off, and itself two miles 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
... tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the worst of such ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... 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 ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... conceived ourselves in the high road to La Palud, and likely to be soon indemnified by dinner and rest, for the joltings of the day; but our driver, instead of taking the proper direction, lost himself in a series of inextricable cross roads, which terminated in a quagmire. In this slough of despond the unfortunate patache, from which we had descended, might have stuck for ever, but for the assistance of two shepherds, as wild in their attire, and as civil, as Don Quixote's friendly goatherds. By dint of their ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... tragical it 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 realise the surrounding scene. By the light ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... fell to its lowest depth of ingratitude and sin when poor Judas changed sides and sold his Lord. What a change it was! Alas, alas, what a quagmire of uncertainties and shifting sand unsanctified human nature ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... future is black—confused—a chaos. My life is like to one of these paths upon the fells. You have seen them, Monsieur Upperton. They are smooth and straight and clear where they begin; but soon they wind to left and wind to right, and so mid rocks and crags until they lose themselves in some quagmire. At Brussels my path was straight; but now, mon Dieu! who is there can tell me ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... been the hurricanes of steel which have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives. General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... words meaning practically the same thing, viz., bog, quagmire, swamp, quicksand, etc., some of them evidently obsolete, as they are not found ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... novels offered recipes by the score for the cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels. Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden earth—the barrack square—was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds; or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... after all his compositions with Barbier, he had supposed himself so familiar with French! With the woman from the loge, indeed, he could have talked at large, had she been conversational instead of rude. But here, with this little glancing creature, he felt himself plunged in a perfect quagmire of ignorance and stupidity. When he spoke of being half French, she became suddenly grave, and studied him with an intent piercing look. 'No,' she said slowly, 'no, at bottom you are not French a bit, you ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... great fox-cover; a flat 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
... can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles across a hilly and wooded country. We had some difficulty in reaching the point, owing to the intolerably bad paths; for everywhere in the shade the ground soon becomes a perfect quagmire. The point itself is a bold rocky hill. It is covered by a plant allied, I believe, to Bromelia, and called by the inhabitants Chepones. In scrambling through the beds, our hands were very much scratched. I was amused by observing ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... early-acquired knowledge of the American youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but here we get into a quagmire of mere speculation in which no individual opinion has any ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... had, at Jarvis' suggestion, left them with the automobile in its latest quagmire, to reach the shelter of the inn. So it was that, as her vassal and his vassal struggled with the luggage in the dark, she reached the portal of ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... inaccessible for any description of carriage, but as I was little likely to be encumbered in this way, it was a matter of no consideration, but it certainly annoyed me to find that every now and then I was liable to get my sermon moistened in a quagmire. ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M. |
